The first real online “community” I was part of was a guestbook page on the WB website called “The Bronze“.
Guestbook pages were online versions of guestbooks you might find at a wedding or bed and breakfast where you, the guest, could leave a comment or a greeting or a review. Guestbook pages on websites had a simple form (name, comment) and displayed comments of anyone who had submitted the form.
The WB was a network that used to exist and that aired the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The Bronze was the club on the show and the WB, in a cutting edge move for the time (1996), created this guestbook page so Buffy fans could leave comments about the show.
We Buffy fans did not use this guestbook page as intended and did not post comments about the show into the void. We used it as a discussion forum and since guestbook functionality does not lend itself to being a discussion forum, we had to make up our own clunky rules and shorthands. If you wanted to find a message someone directed at you, you had to scroll through the pages and see if you could find it. There were no users or logins — anyone could type anything in the name field of the form so if someone naively came along trying to post with a name that was taken by a regular, everyone would explain to that person that they would need to find a different name.
Week after week, we came together to talk about the show and our lives. We laughed, we cried, we met IRL (in the 90s!). And then the WB canceled Buffy and the show moved to UPN and suddenly The Bronze was gone.
We tried to find a new place to gather, but the community splintered and it was never the same. (I ran a Buffy fansite at the time and spun up a server to host a message board for bereft Bronzers that might even have some scafolding still running today.)
You’ve probably experienced your own version of the Bronze. Maybe it was a message board hosted by an online journaler or a corner of Tumblr. Or LiveJournal. Or the early days of Twitter that felt like real-time conversations and inside jokes with just your closest friends (aka the entire Internet). The right combination of factors came together and you felt like you weren’t alone in the universe.
But that precise set of factors don’t stay in balance forever. Things change and the moment is gone.
On TikTok, creators are trying to find the words to explain why that combination of factors can’t be replicated by getting everybody to move over to Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts or Red Note (as hilarious as that would be) or an app to be named at a later date.
Maybe it’s that TikTok’s content moderation (that has spawned so many euphemisms to get around it that a new language has practically sprung up) keeps the toxic comments low so creators feel safe to post. Or maybe it’s that the algorithms are tuned to be less universal and more personalized so that the only people who see someone talking about how loud the air can be sometimes and how headphones aren’t always the answer because you can feel them too much are people who also hear loud air and feel too much headphones so creators don’t have to wade through hundreds of comments that say “wtf ” and instead only get hundreds saying “are you in my house right now watching me or did you take these notes earlier?”
It’s probably both of those things and a hundred other things, but it’s that personalization that really seems key. We all feel as though we built our FYPs brick by brick and who we see when we open the app are people who understand us, who are us, who make us feel less alone.
What would the last 5 years have been without TikTok? What would the Eras tour have been like? Would we still be wearing friendship bracelets and reminiscing about grainy live streams without it? Would we all have discovered Noah Kahan and Chappell Roan in some other way? Would we somehow have figured out our mental health diagnoses anyway?
What happens now? If TikTok truly goes away, history tells us that we won’t all find a new place en masse, that the moment will be gone. There may be other places and other times but it won’t be this one. Some of us may or may not find a new space for our news, our connection with humanity, our unconscious standard practice life hacks we saw randomly one day. But we’ll all lose what could have been.