Say when it's working
I wrote this, about Cohost and for Cohost, in the aftermath of its cofounders’ amazing co-talk at XOXO 2024. Today I opened Cohost to learn that the platform’s future is in pretty explicit jeopardy. With the understanding that what I wrote there will likely fall into the sea and dissolve, I am reprinting it here.
So here’s something I was talking to the Cohost co-founders about a couple nights ago, because I think it’s kind of interesting: About a year ago I joined Spacehey, a revival of Myspace, because I still had all my old assets from 2007 and was excited to slap up a facsimile of my profile as it had last existed.
One of the first things I did as a Spacehey user was to take part of a day to figure out how to get music to loop and autoplay in the background. It wasn’t too hard to figure out, since pretty much all the info I needed about embedding was already well covered in Google's API documentation.
Satisfied, I posted the code snippet as a “layout” in the community blogs, where other users share their CSS and layout hacks. I wrote a little preface about the cultural importance and legacy of annoying visitors to your profile with background music they can’t turn off, then overexplained what a bunch of the different variables or class tags do.
Then came the replies.
There weren’t too many comments, but they were pretty evenly split between “it works!” and “it doesn’t work!” Which honestly was enough to be demoralizing, since I’d made sure to do plenty cross-browser testing before showing my work. I tweaked my blog’s language a few times, trying to make my instructions as clear as possible, but finally I just logged off.
But a year later—earlier this week, right before XOXO fest—I’d logged back in. I’d missed an influx of comments. Over the past four months, a cultural shift had been underway: The users had been commenting “using!” “tysm, using!” “using thxx” and one user, named Aileen, had even simply typed “use.”
I was astonished. These comments were not for me. The kids were leaving signposts, signaling to one another that my code was working, that it could be trusted. And!!! to the last person who’d commented “it doesn't work on firefox,” two strangers had replied to assist—effectively intervening, relieving me of my duties as de facto helpdesk. I sank into my chair and smiled doofily.
One of the things that came up during the XOXO talks time and time again was “send the nice email,” because the Internet can feel like a relentlessly hostile place, especially to creators and would-be creators. It doesn’t take a lot to feel overwhelmed, and you just log off, you disconnect.
But what if, also, “post the comment”?? Things—whatever that thing is—will not work for everybody, but maybe part of being a good and helpful citizen is verbalizing to your fellow human when something is working for you. Maybe?? I don't know, I just thought it was interesting.