We still haven’t solved this. Looking back at this conversation from six years ago, what stands out isn’t disagreement – it’s how hard it was to even name the problem we keep circling.

Over the last 20 years, again and again, the discussion slips into the same dead end: personal value versus social value, framed through the language of platforms, followers, influence, and business growth. What we need to learn from this is the confusion wasn’t accidental, it is structural.

We compost, this messy path. The #OMN project was never about optimising personal outcomes. That framing belongs to platform logic, the idea that every action must be measurable in reach, influence, growth, or return. But the posts people found “hard to understand” weren’t speaking that language at all. They were articulating what the #mainstreaming was #blocking and thus missing from our tech culture: social value.

Not social media value, not engagement, not visibility. But value that exists between people, over time, as shared culture, trust, memory, and capacity. The chicken-and-egg problem, people ask: “What personal value do I get from this?”, “Will this help my business?”, “Can I use this without it using me?”

But social value doesn’t work like that. You don’t extract it first and then decide whether it was worth it. Social value only emerges after people act collectively, without clear personal payoff in advance.

Yes, personal value does flow from social value. Skills, relationships, meaning, resilience, opportunity. But it’s indirect, uneven, and slow. That makes it almost invisible inside systems trained to prioritise immediate, individual reward.

That’s why the conversation keeps short-circuiting, one of the early questions was whether the posts were meant to “influence followers”. That already assumes a vertical model: speaker → audience → outcome.

But #OMN thinking starts from a different place. It’s not about influencing people. It’s about creating conditions where different kinds of interaction can happen – horizontally, over time, without a central controller. That’s why the work often looks vague, unfinished, or “omelette-like”. Cultural value can’t be shipped as a product. It has to be grown, maintained, and defended collectively.

Facebook as a comfort trap is revealing in hindsight. Several people describe using it pragmatically: staying in touch, organising events, maintaining real-world relationships. All true, and still kinda true today. But the counter-point raised then has only become clearer since: you don’t get to opt out of being used, no matter how carefully you think you’re using the system.

The lock-in effect (“everyone is on it”) was already obvious. What was less visible to meany people than was how deeply this would shape behaviour, politics, culture, and attention – and how hard it would become to imagine alternatives once that infrastructure was taken for granted.

Why this was hard to hear? This conversation shows how difficult it is to talk about non-market value inside market-dominated spaces. Language itself becomes a barrier. People reach for familiar metrics because they have no shared vocabulary for anything else.

So the discussion stalls. People get frustrated. It feels circular. Someone says “find out for yourself”, another hears that as dismissal. Nobody is wrong in isolation, but the frame itself is broken.

What we can learn now? Six years on, a few things are clearer: Social value is real, but it’s slow, collective, and hard to quantify. #dotcons platforms systematically erase the conditions needed for social value to emerge. Personal value derived from social value is indirect, not extractive. You can’t explain this cleanly inside systems optimised against it. This wasn’t a failure of communication. It was an early signal that we were trying to grow an open, cultural infrastructure inside environments hostile to its existence.

The unfinished work… #OMN project was – and still is – about creating space for social value to exist again: shared media, shared process, shared governance, shared memory. That was hard to see then. It’s still hard to see now. But the confusion in this old thread isn’t embarrassing. It’s instructive. It shows exactly where the fault lines are, and why the work has always been messy, slow, and necessary.

Some things only make sense after you start doing them together #KISS

DRAFT