Social media is the middle school cafeteria

It’s mostly awful, except when it is transcendently awesome

10 days ago I received a birthday present of sorts. An email arrived in my inbox from a product manager at Substack, inviting me to participate in the beta of a new feature called Notes. I’m not sure exactly why I was selected, though I presume it had something to do with the fact that I use Substack a lot. I have 14 paid subscriptions and spend 10-15 hours a week reading Substack posts. 

I ignored the initial email and also ignored Notes. But the next day the Substack product manager followed up with an offer of a paid subscription, on the Substack house so to speak, to the Substack of my choice in exchange for a 30 minute Zoom call. I figured I’d be done with work by Friday afternoon and I definitely wanted another paid subscription, so I took the product manager up on the offer. 

The 30 minute call was more like an hour. I was instructed to interact with Notes and narrate my internal dialogue, while the product manager and an engineer looked on. I suppose somewhere in the Substack servers this video exists; I imagine it is rather embarrassing, as I recall going down the sorts of internal dialogue rabbit holes that we’re taught to keep to ourselves. 

My feedback was honestly pretty negative. Notes seemed so similar to Twitter and I wasn’t looking for a Twitter alternative. Also, there were maybe 10 people actively posting. So it seemed kinda dead in the room. 

I remember saying that I “wasn’t a reply guy” so I probably wouldn’t actually post anything. 10 minutes after the zoom ended I found a couple of interesting conversations with writers that I read and respected,

Bill Bishop

and

Judd Legum

. They were discussing what Judd termed the “one Substack costs as much as a whole magazine of writers” argument. I think they’re two of the biggest writers on Substack, so it was probably a bit ridiculous for me to get involved in the conversation, but I butted in with a response. 

To my suprise, a bunch of smart people started responding favorably to my Note. I suppose it helped that my response to Judd was a ‘yes-and,’ instead of a combative rando trying to tell two established writers how they’re actually dumb troglodytes (unnecessary SAT vocab word very intentional). The fact that there were very few people in those early days of the beta undoubtedly helped as well. But, either way, I spent most of my Friday evening on Notes. I was so caught up in the good feelings that on the same Friday night I started my own Substack and published my first post, Do You Like Newsletters That Make You Cry?  

I would venture to say that, outside of the Substack team, I have now probably posted more on Notes than anyone else in the Beta. Revealed preference smacked me right in the face it seems. 

A couple of days into my time on Notes,

Hamish McKenzie

, one of the co-founders of Substack, tagged me to ask for some feedback for the piece that he was working on to accompany the public announcement of Notes. I posted an absurdly long reply, which he succinctly summarized as “What I’m hearing, Spencer, is that Substack is the ‘90s.”

My full response was honestly pretty self-indulgent, but I hope you’ll humor me as I recreate most of it to close this essay. Because I think my self-indulgence gets at a very real feeling, a feeling I think other people have probably experienced as well. 

Social media is really just an endless digital recreation of the middle school cafeteria.

There are many facets to the middle school cafeteria. It gets a generally bad rap, for very understandable reasons, but there are also profoundly pro-social parts of this experience. Most social media experiences are digital versions of the really bad parts of the middle school cafeteria. 

Instagram is like that terrible moment when you step into the cafeteria, look at the table with all the most stylish kids, look down at your shoes, realize that your shoes are worn at the soles, then go into a doom loop about how your shitty shoes mean you are a shitty person. 

Twitter, in our digital version of the middle school cafeteria, is like when–in a panic to not sit alone for the next 30 minutes–you grab a seat next to the first person you recognize. You sit down and quickly realize that the one person you know is only kind of your friend and everyone else is just trying to do the verbal version of projecting coolness, in whatever way that is defined. (In my middle school projecting coolness meant being so into skateboarding that you broke your wrist trying to grind the library rail). 

Facebook, at this stage, is I guess like having to sit at the teacher’s table for some reason and being confused why all the grownups are so mad about stuff that makes no sense (not because you’re too young to understand, but because they are too incoherently angry to string their random points together). Also lots of stuff that they care about way more than you (how cute their grandkids are). 

But there’s also a good part to the middle school cafeteria, or at least there was for me in a very profound and lasting way. Substack is like this good cafeteria experience. 

Here is how I remember it. 

I walk into the cafeteria, I know exactly where my friends are because we sit at the same table everyday. I effortlessly take a seat at the end of the bench, right next to my best friend Tyler. We’re in a pop-punk band together. Enema of the State just came out and we take turns listening to it on Tyler’s Discman. In between tracks, I bounce in and out of conversations with the rest of my friends at the table about everything imaginable. I know everyone at the table, except wait, there’s a new kid named Andre. He just transferred to our school; he’s Armand’s cousin. I don’t really know him yet, but he’s wearing a Sting t-shirt. I’m 12 and tell myself that wrestling isn’t cool anymore, but Andre makes me realize maybe it is still cool. We become fast friends; 20 years later we go to the first ever AEW show together. 

The fact that I wrote this last paragraph with tears welling in my eyes is my own form of proof that we humans are social animals. No matter how much we may deflect our need for connection through ironic detachment, we need to feel connected to other humans. 

Substack delivers that connection for me. It is just like the feeling I had at the middle school cafeteria, hanging out with all of my friends being together, sharing the world, and figuring it out as we went along.