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beyondthescreeni left cohost a month ago.
i didn't announce it - as they say, it's not an airport, so there's no need to declare your departure. i simply cleared my blog, set my page to private and submitted a request to staff for account deletion. (the fact that i had to wait three days and had to submit it for deletion rather than have it built in natively as an option is still weird to me.)
still, though i consider myself solidly divorced from its community, i kept up with it. even if i decided i didn't want to contribute to it anymore, i wanted to see it through to the end.
i was surprised that the end was so soon: for those who read this and may be unaware, cohost goes read-only on october 1, 2024, and intends to be fully shut down by the end of the year. i knew its finances were bad (judging by consistently inconsistent posts from staff about the state of the funding), but i thought it had more than a few months left.
i joined cohost july of 2023 in an effort to crawl out of the hermit hole i'd found myself in. i used to be more active online, but after tumblr banned NSFW content in 2018, i didn't care to find a new place to post, so i stopped posting completely. it was only in 2023, as my novel has gotten closer to the finish line, that i felt like sharing myself again. since i didn't really know what anywhere was like, i joined a variety of websites to see what culture i liked best, yearning to find a place to settle in and get cozy.
early on, cohost was... OK. aside from being kind of ugly and making it impossible to find new people to follow, i met some nice people on there! but i never thought of it as a site i loved or even really liked. in spite of my apathy towards it, i primarily held on for two reasons:
shortly after joining cohost, i rapidly learned that the community cohost fostered was not one that i actually wanted to be part of, a culture which was mired in aggression, pettiness and hostility. there was never a presumption of innocence, no consideration to politely disagree with others or even simply avoid those you didn't care for.
instead, users were combative and spiteful, whether vagueposting to avoid accusations of bullying or openly name-calling while blocking the person in question, thus preventing any self-defense or actual dictionary definition discourse from taking place. and honestly? staff pretty much never intervened, having an attitude of letting users solve their own problems unless firmly pressured otherwise.
to me, cohost was not a nice place. when i think of a lot of the users i saw on there, there were many i deemed miserable, obnoxious and, at times, sincerely and frighteningly abusive in nature. it was as if, for every one user i met who was super sweet and interesting and rewarding to engage with, ten more were major league bullies waiting for the next thing to go nuclear over.
only weeks after i began posting, i noticed i often felt on edge when posting or commenting, anxious that i'd be dragged into a site-wide conflict and made into a scapegoat just because a user decided to declare me the punching bag of the day. though i swallowed these feelings down and tried to be active anyway, i never shook that feeling of peering over my shoulder all the time.
these fears were not unfounded: i had seen quite a few people tied to the pyre and lit aflame, including a good friend of mine and others who were, frankly, undeserving of such treatment. watching the cruel and spiteful pictures painted of them was aggravating and sad, made graver by the fact that no one ever cared to determine whether anything presented was necessarily true about the person in question.
cohost's constituents seemed to believe that "take my word for it" is a reliable source, as if relying on others to tell you what to think is a virtue and not an exploitable trait others can control you with. though i don't think it was usually intended to control the narrative; i really just think a lot of the folks on there were smug wiseguys who love dunking on people, and nothing's more fun than dunking on people in a group - it makes you feel unified, justified, and vilified to know that others want bloodshed as much as you do and are happy to encourage such a malignant part of you.
another element of cohost that left me cold was that users resisted the concept of transparency and seemed resentful of all who tried to figure out what issue du jour had the site aflutter at any given time. no one seemed to understand that it wasn't about giving rubberneckers easy access to drama, but about the fact that these incidents shaped site policy, and users had a lot more control than they do on other sites no matter how much staff resented it. (yes, i remember kara hating the cohost global feed tags, which - while it began as a joke - became one of the only methods of discoverability that actually worked.)
there was a conflict that dictated whether the site permitted erotic content of children as long as it was fictional, there was a conflict that established a "broken stair" policy - and i'm not describing these as conflicts to minimize the feelings of those involved. there was genuine hurt and upset in these incidents that affected countless users and even drove others off the site.
in my time on there, i have seen at least 3 people driven off the platform - and that's not including those who may have made a silent exit like i did. cohost culture had a way of feeling inescapably nasty, and a lot of that had to do with staff's lack of intervention. users were able to evade blocks and chase you onto other platforms to keep abusing you without any meaningful punishment, they could spew shockingly bigoted things while staff openly admitted to taking no action towards them out of cowardice - there was also basically carte blanche to suicide bait people, though it was never set in stone who the acceptable targets were; just sort of seemed like something that was a privilege some users had and others didn't, to be honest.
i won't dissect every single incident i saw on there because that would take too long and this isn't some kind of cohost historical compendium. i'm also hopeful that, once severed from a community that encourages a shoot-first-ask-questions-later attitude, some of the worst offenders may change, and their behavior on cohost may not accurately reflect their behavior anymore. everyone has the ability to change, and though i follow my mama's policy of "if he hits you once, he'll hit you twice," i also think that people should be allowed to try and make for fresh starts in new places.
with that said, it's foreboding to witness the tribalism that was a scourge upon it bleed into other platforms. when i see people declare themselves cohost refugees/friends of eggbug/eggbug loyalists, etc., it discourages me from engaging with them, because cohost's community was so prone to clannish, cliquish behavior that many users got aggressive at you simply for being on other platforms and then talking about cohost on other platforms. and heavens to murgatroyd, if you didn't think cohost was god's gift to the internet, watch the fuck out.
to identify so heavily with any platform is strange to me already, but to identify with cohost in particular indicates that either you were unaware of what was going on most the time (which is reasonable, people there were allergic to context) or something i find much worse: that you may have seen the adversarial behavior displayed as not just reasonable but thoroughly justified, which means that a second hit is not a matter of if, but a matter of when.
i recognize that much of the protective energy surrounding cohost was because it was staffed by only 4 people, but i never once saw grace given to other small sites trying to eke their place on the web. in fact, the borderline worship of the staff was jarring and also very alarming. cohost wasn't a cult and it would be ridiculous to call it one, but there was certainly traits in its culture that gave me pause.
critiques of staff (including ones in which people were holding them accountable so that they'd actually do their jobs) were seen as thinly-veiled requests to have them beheaded no matter how kindly they were worded; so thoroughly is there an insistence that staff can do no wrong that people will perpetuate rumors that it is other companies bringing cohost down, such as stripe having payment processing rules that made eggbux untenable... which was openly accessible knowledge on stripe's site the entire time.
any criticism of cohost, its users, its layout, its staff, etc. got you branded with a scarlet letter, marked as a heretic - and all heretics must be punished. and this is still true, even when you aren't a cohost user yourself; despite cohost users posting about their feelings regarding other platforms and getting straight up vicious about it, speaking ill of cohost is verboten. this further promoted an air of blind patriotism as users praised staff for making the site even when they failed at their tasks and bled money ceaselessly. i'm not joking when i say that i found the place uncomfortable after a while because the atmosphere seemed borderline dogmatic.
i sense that part of what made cohost's community so defensive was because of its reputation as a place to be a weird queer furry on the internet, according to what many described themselves as. as a creative, the spaces i hang around are already weird, queer and furry, so outside of places where more conventional people exist around them like twitter or reddit, i wasn't sure why that meant cohost had to be given more leniency towards its flaws than other sites. like, i'm an artist, just about all my mutuals are LGBT+ in some sense and strange in others and often joyously both; to me, cohost wasn't more accommodating to quirky oddballs than anywhere else.
but because of the image it projected, cohost was deemed a refuge for many, some of whom said cohost even helped them come to terms with parts of themselves they didn't realize were there. they felt, for the first time, accepted, which is a wonderful feeling that i'm glad others felt during cohost's lifetime... but because of the noxious behavior that was never properly mitigated by staff or other users: i, explicitly, did not. in fact, i often felt explicitly unwelcome. the treatment i saw towards other people - some of whom asked for things like "can people stop being racist" and "there are lots of accessibility issues around here" - was, sincerely, wretched and unfair, and furthered my feelings of isolation and stress.
this reached a fever pitch for me when i realized opening the site made me preemptively frustrated rather than any kind of positive feelings. regardless of the very sweet people who followed me and the lovely people i followed back, just seeing a new notification made me fear that i was about to get roped into something that could go on for weeks. so i followed my own advice and bailed. i didn't feel the need to declare i was leaving because it struck me as something that would just raise questions, and i feel no need to justify why i didn't like the site anymore, especially in a way that was likely to get people talking.
so because of what i saw in my short time on cohost, the site will always bear a black mark in my memory. while cohost's community wasn't uniquely wicked, it definitely attracted people with chips on their shoulders who were unable to solve interpersonal problems without viciousness and dogpiling. i could work around the tedious tagging system, the inability to figure out which tags were the right tags to use and the slowness of my dashboard because it was too hard to find people to actually follow, but its culture was the number one thing that drove me out.
a lot of good people were chewed up and spat out by cohost as a community, and for that, i'll never have anything nice to say about it. i even warned people to not go on cohost because i found it was such a pit of vipers that the warm-hearted people i met were just too few and far between to make up for them.
i believe staff was well-intentioned and what i saw on the site wasn't necessarily representative of the entirety of its userbase, but in the end, i honestly see cohost's closure as, ultimately, for the best. if it continued onward, i predict that its culture would only become more toxic and insular, which would inevitably lead newcomers headfirst into the cohost corn thresher. there is no "lurk moar" on cohost due to its impenetrable discoverability so reading the room is very difficult, and cohost users were not ones to take mistakes lightly or presume good faith upon strangers. the longer the site went on, the clearer it would become that outsiders were not welcome. some may think it's a good thing for the community to never grow, but staff had made it a goal to grow the userbase, and that likely would've ended even worse. at least this way, cohost gets to slip off into the night peacefully.
for those who will mourn cohost's loss, i sympathize: it was a well loved platform by a lot of folks, and my own experiences don't mean i can't see why it made such an impression. the internet will be a little bit emptier with it gone, and those who are scrambling to find a new place to land don't deserve to feel lost at sea. many stated that after cohost, they would abstain from posting to the internet entirely, so one could consider cohost's closure as a kind of extinction event. perhaps not on the scale of a mass exodus of facebook, but even the littlest death is still a death.
on a grander scale, every small site that goes down gives more power to the tyrannical titans that refuse to die no matter how awful their sites become; though i'm not educated on the finer points of politics, i've never met a capitalist that didn't seek to consume all the competitors until seated comfortably at the top of the food chain. i despise monopolies, so the internet being further monopolized is never a good thing regardless of what i think of any particular site.
when cohost finally 404s, i wish those seeking new digital homes a quick and easy relocation, and to the staff, i'm crossing my fingers in hopes that well-paying employment with less stress is on the horizon for all of them. should another platform rise from cohost's ashes to fulfill its niche and attract the same kinds of people, i'll be watching carefully.
hopefully some bones will stay buried, but you know what they say: nothing on the internet ever truly dies.
i didn't announce it - as they say, it's not an airport, so there's no need to declare your departure. i simply cleared my blog, set my page to private and submitted a request to staff for account deletion. (the fact that i had to wait three days and had to submit it for deletion rather than have it built in natively as an option is still weird to me.)
still, though i consider myself solidly divorced from its community, i kept up with it. even if i decided i didn't want to contribute to it anymore, i wanted to see it through to the end.
i was surprised that the end was so soon: for those who read this and may be unaware, cohost goes read-only on october 1, 2024, and intends to be fully shut down by the end of the year. i knew its finances were bad (judging by consistently inconsistent posts from staff about the state of the funding), but i thought it had more than a few months left.
i joined cohost july of 2023 in an effort to crawl out of the hermit hole i'd found myself in. i used to be more active online, but after tumblr banned NSFW content in 2018, i didn't care to find a new place to post, so i stopped posting completely. it was only in 2023, as my novel has gotten closer to the finish line, that i felt like sharing myself again. since i didn't really know what anywhere was like, i joined a variety of websites to see what culture i liked best, yearning to find a place to settle in and get cozy.
early on, cohost was... OK. aside from being kind of ugly and making it impossible to find new people to follow, i met some nice people on there! but i never thought of it as a site i loved or even really liked. in spite of my apathy towards it, i primarily held on for two reasons:
- some of the people i enjoyed had chosen cohost as their permanent home and weren't on other platforms, and
- i'm interested in online communities as a whole. i like smaller websites because i feel they foster more community than colossal platforms like facebook, twitter, instagram, etc. and i love checking out new places to see what's up - i consider myself a digital deep sea diver and enjoy plunging any depths to see what's beneath them.
shortly after joining cohost, i rapidly learned that the community cohost fostered was not one that i actually wanted to be part of, a culture which was mired in aggression, pettiness and hostility. there was never a presumption of innocence, no consideration to politely disagree with others or even simply avoid those you didn't care for.
instead, users were combative and spiteful, whether vagueposting to avoid accusations of bullying or openly name-calling while blocking the person in question, thus preventing any self-defense or actual dictionary definition discourse from taking place. and honestly? staff pretty much never intervened, having an attitude of letting users solve their own problems unless firmly pressured otherwise.
to me, cohost was not a nice place. when i think of a lot of the users i saw on there, there were many i deemed miserable, obnoxious and, at times, sincerely and frighteningly abusive in nature. it was as if, for every one user i met who was super sweet and interesting and rewarding to engage with, ten more were major league bullies waiting for the next thing to go nuclear over.
only weeks after i began posting, i noticed i often felt on edge when posting or commenting, anxious that i'd be dragged into a site-wide conflict and made into a scapegoat just because a user decided to declare me the punching bag of the day. though i swallowed these feelings down and tried to be active anyway, i never shook that feeling of peering over my shoulder all the time.
these fears were not unfounded: i had seen quite a few people tied to the pyre and lit aflame, including a good friend of mine and others who were, frankly, undeserving of such treatment. watching the cruel and spiteful pictures painted of them was aggravating and sad, made graver by the fact that no one ever cared to determine whether anything presented was necessarily true about the person in question.
cohost's constituents seemed to believe that "take my word for it" is a reliable source, as if relying on others to tell you what to think is a virtue and not an exploitable trait others can control you with. though i don't think it was usually intended to control the narrative; i really just think a lot of the folks on there were smug wiseguys who love dunking on people, and nothing's more fun than dunking on people in a group - it makes you feel unified, justified, and vilified to know that others want bloodshed as much as you do and are happy to encourage such a malignant part of you.
another element of cohost that left me cold was that users resisted the concept of transparency and seemed resentful of all who tried to figure out what issue du jour had the site aflutter at any given time. no one seemed to understand that it wasn't about giving rubberneckers easy access to drama, but about the fact that these incidents shaped site policy, and users had a lot more control than they do on other sites no matter how much staff resented it. (yes, i remember kara hating the cohost global feed tags, which - while it began as a joke - became one of the only methods of discoverability that actually worked.)
there was a conflict that dictated whether the site permitted erotic content of children as long as it was fictional, there was a conflict that established a "broken stair" policy - and i'm not describing these as conflicts to minimize the feelings of those involved. there was genuine hurt and upset in these incidents that affected countless users and even drove others off the site.
in my time on there, i have seen at least 3 people driven off the platform - and that's not including those who may have made a silent exit like i did. cohost culture had a way of feeling inescapably nasty, and a lot of that had to do with staff's lack of intervention. users were able to evade blocks and chase you onto other platforms to keep abusing you without any meaningful punishment, they could spew shockingly bigoted things while staff openly admitted to taking no action towards them out of cowardice - there was also basically carte blanche to suicide bait people, though it was never set in stone who the acceptable targets were; just sort of seemed like something that was a privilege some users had and others didn't, to be honest.
i won't dissect every single incident i saw on there because that would take too long and this isn't some kind of cohost historical compendium. i'm also hopeful that, once severed from a community that encourages a shoot-first-ask-questions-later attitude, some of the worst offenders may change, and their behavior on cohost may not accurately reflect their behavior anymore. everyone has the ability to change, and though i follow my mama's policy of "if he hits you once, he'll hit you twice," i also think that people should be allowed to try and make for fresh starts in new places.
with that said, it's foreboding to witness the tribalism that was a scourge upon it bleed into other platforms. when i see people declare themselves cohost refugees/friends of eggbug/eggbug loyalists, etc., it discourages me from engaging with them, because cohost's community was so prone to clannish, cliquish behavior that many users got aggressive at you simply for being on other platforms and then talking about cohost on other platforms. and heavens to murgatroyd, if you didn't think cohost was god's gift to the internet, watch the fuck out.
to identify so heavily with any platform is strange to me already, but to identify with cohost in particular indicates that either you were unaware of what was going on most the time (which is reasonable, people there were allergic to context) or something i find much worse: that you may have seen the adversarial behavior displayed as not just reasonable but thoroughly justified, which means that a second hit is not a matter of if, but a matter of when.
i recognize that much of the protective energy surrounding cohost was because it was staffed by only 4 people, but i never once saw grace given to other small sites trying to eke their place on the web. in fact, the borderline worship of the staff was jarring and also very alarming. cohost wasn't a cult and it would be ridiculous to call it one, but there was certainly traits in its culture that gave me pause.
critiques of staff (including ones in which people were holding them accountable so that they'd actually do their jobs) were seen as thinly-veiled requests to have them beheaded no matter how kindly they were worded; so thoroughly is there an insistence that staff can do no wrong that people will perpetuate rumors that it is other companies bringing cohost down, such as stripe having payment processing rules that made eggbux untenable... which was openly accessible knowledge on stripe's site the entire time.
any criticism of cohost, its users, its layout, its staff, etc. got you branded with a scarlet letter, marked as a heretic - and all heretics must be punished. and this is still true, even when you aren't a cohost user yourself; despite cohost users posting about their feelings regarding other platforms and getting straight up vicious about it, speaking ill of cohost is verboten. this further promoted an air of blind patriotism as users praised staff for making the site even when they failed at their tasks and bled money ceaselessly. i'm not joking when i say that i found the place uncomfortable after a while because the atmosphere seemed borderline dogmatic.
i sense that part of what made cohost's community so defensive was because of its reputation as a place to be a weird queer furry on the internet, according to what many described themselves as. as a creative, the spaces i hang around are already weird, queer and furry, so outside of places where more conventional people exist around them like twitter or reddit, i wasn't sure why that meant cohost had to be given more leniency towards its flaws than other sites. like, i'm an artist, just about all my mutuals are LGBT+ in some sense and strange in others and often joyously both; to me, cohost wasn't more accommodating to quirky oddballs than anywhere else.
but because of the image it projected, cohost was deemed a refuge for many, some of whom said cohost even helped them come to terms with parts of themselves they didn't realize were there. they felt, for the first time, accepted, which is a wonderful feeling that i'm glad others felt during cohost's lifetime... but because of the noxious behavior that was never properly mitigated by staff or other users: i, explicitly, did not. in fact, i often felt explicitly unwelcome. the treatment i saw towards other people - some of whom asked for things like "can people stop being racist" and "there are lots of accessibility issues around here" - was, sincerely, wretched and unfair, and furthered my feelings of isolation and stress.
this reached a fever pitch for me when i realized opening the site made me preemptively frustrated rather than any kind of positive feelings. regardless of the very sweet people who followed me and the lovely people i followed back, just seeing a new notification made me fear that i was about to get roped into something that could go on for weeks. so i followed my own advice and bailed. i didn't feel the need to declare i was leaving because it struck me as something that would just raise questions, and i feel no need to justify why i didn't like the site anymore, especially in a way that was likely to get people talking.
so because of what i saw in my short time on cohost, the site will always bear a black mark in my memory. while cohost's community wasn't uniquely wicked, it definitely attracted people with chips on their shoulders who were unable to solve interpersonal problems without viciousness and dogpiling. i could work around the tedious tagging system, the inability to figure out which tags were the right tags to use and the slowness of my dashboard because it was too hard to find people to actually follow, but its culture was the number one thing that drove me out.
a lot of good people were chewed up and spat out by cohost as a community, and for that, i'll never have anything nice to say about it. i even warned people to not go on cohost because i found it was such a pit of vipers that the warm-hearted people i met were just too few and far between to make up for them.
i believe staff was well-intentioned and what i saw on the site wasn't necessarily representative of the entirety of its userbase, but in the end, i honestly see cohost's closure as, ultimately, for the best. if it continued onward, i predict that its culture would only become more toxic and insular, which would inevitably lead newcomers headfirst into the cohost corn thresher. there is no "lurk moar" on cohost due to its impenetrable discoverability so reading the room is very difficult, and cohost users were not ones to take mistakes lightly or presume good faith upon strangers. the longer the site went on, the clearer it would become that outsiders were not welcome. some may think it's a good thing for the community to never grow, but staff had made it a goal to grow the userbase, and that likely would've ended even worse. at least this way, cohost gets to slip off into the night peacefully.
for those who will mourn cohost's loss, i sympathize: it was a well loved platform by a lot of folks, and my own experiences don't mean i can't see why it made such an impression. the internet will be a little bit emptier with it gone, and those who are scrambling to find a new place to land don't deserve to feel lost at sea. many stated that after cohost, they would abstain from posting to the internet entirely, so one could consider cohost's closure as a kind of extinction event. perhaps not on the scale of a mass exodus of facebook, but even the littlest death is still a death.
on a grander scale, every small site that goes down gives more power to the tyrannical titans that refuse to die no matter how awful their sites become; though i'm not educated on the finer points of politics, i've never met a capitalist that didn't seek to consume all the competitors until seated comfortably at the top of the food chain. i despise monopolies, so the internet being further monopolized is never a good thing regardless of what i think of any particular site.
when cohost finally 404s, i wish those seeking new digital homes a quick and easy relocation, and to the staff, i'm crossing my fingers in hopes that well-paying employment with less stress is on the horizon for all of them. should another platform rise from cohost's ashes to fulfill its niche and attract the same kinds of people, i'll be watching carefully.
hopefully some bones will stay buried, but you know what they say: nothing on the internet ever truly dies.
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Like (paraphrased) "I can say whatever comes to mind in replies and nobody accuses me of being passive aggressive" and such.
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there was also the attempted enforcement to suggest cohost was kind and gentle and easy-going, which was definitely not accurate to what i saw. how is someone being harassed for finding a typing quirk hard to read kind, gentle or easy-going? lol
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