“It’s the kind of fragrance that wants to blot out anything recognisably corporeal or idiosyncratic about its wearer,” a user writes of Phlur’s Missing Person, the cult perfume designed to smell like the memory of an old friend. “Whenever I put this on and go outside, bees immediately attack me,” another writes of One Million by Paco Rabanne, a fruity, alcoholic cologne familiar to anyone whose walk home takes them by the queue for Coppers.
Meanwhile, Byredo 1996, comprising juniper and dusty patchouli, has inspired psychoanalytic responses. “If you suffer both mommy and daddy issues, this scent is perfect for you,” writes one contributor. Another concludes that “it’s the definition of problematic”.
Lately I’ve been spending time on Fragrantica, a site dedicated to perfume reviews. A small team of employees contribute posts and act as moderators, but the majority of its 1,460,295 reviews are user-generated, ranging from the evocative and precise to the florid, obsessive and patently unhinged (a thread on Tom Ford’s Tuscan Leather, made famous by the Drake track of the same name, warns that its latent cocaine note might cause wearers in recovery to relapse). The stakes are low here, the news cycle elsewhere. Conflict, when it does erupt – and it does, the page for Baccarat Rouge 540 serving as proof – is only ever about perfume, something nobody needs, and everybody enjoys.
Here is a hierarchy few would ever bother to infiltrate: that of the dedicated “fragcom”, or fragrance community, hoarding discontinued bottles and ordering obscure samples online (I’ve taken to this – eBay is good), forever on the brink of outrage over some reformulation, or their favourite indie brand being acquired by Estée Lauder. Base notes are discerned from top notes, sillage and longevity noted. It’s pretentious, verging on ludicrous, but there’s also something unusually vulnerable about perfume reviews; the act of conveying something so subjective and ephemeral in words demands a level of sincerity, and creative risk, rarely permitted in online life.
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When writing about online communities it’s tempting to play the digital prophet, to declare trends and make sweeping pronouncements on the future. It’s something I usually try to resist, but I think it’s safe to say we are now slowly exiting the era of general-purpose social media, the kind where users with little to nothing in common are flung into a timeline together, in the hopes of generating content through conflict.
Similarly, cracks are appearing in the recommendation algorithms used by mainstream social media platforms. Anyone who has used Twitter lately will have noticed the plethora of updates from people they never followed or expressed an interest in. This is in part thanks to neglect, and greed, and in part thanks to the post-Elon death spiral. It can also be blamed on clumsy attempts to emulate TikTok’s “For You” page. Either way, these platforms no longer show us what we ask for, nor do they have a clear sense of what we want.
The biggest lie Twitter and Facebook convinced us of was that by using their platforms we could save the world. They framed participation as a kind of digital civic duty, a mode of self-improvement, a morally purifying force
What comes next? I can’t say that niche platforms will totally replace mainstream social media, but I can make the case for them as an alternative for anyone experiencing that same fatigue, the sense of having stayed too long at a party with people you never liked much in the first place, and who have now, inexplicably, been swept into an algorithmic frenzy about something you don’t care about. The older style of shared, interest-based social media – forum culture, essentially, like that of the 90s and early 2000s – was around long before these platforms, and has not gone away during their reign. Now it stands to outlast them.
Personally, I’d like to see a return to niche, interest-based online communities, and a move away from grudging, unhealthy participation in daily online conflict, trudging toward a promised consensus, the end of the timeline, which draws farther away from us with every step. The biggest lie Twitter and Facebook convinced us of was that by using their platforms we could save the world. They framed participation as a kind of digital civic duty, a mode of self-improvement, a morally purifying force which now, as I look back on a decade of their use, only seems to have warped my sense of right and wrong.
After years of writing critically about social media, I still find that there is no clear “before” and “after”; I return to Twitter and Instagram, regularly, and sometimes I let them get inside my head. But what I’m working on now, and what I’d recommend, is viewing the internet less as an obligation, and more as entertainment. Once our work is done, our news dutifully consumed from news outlets, our social lives tended to (socially, in real life), we can take our boredom, our spare hours and our need for distraction, and spend that energy learning about and discussing things that make us genuinely happy.
Other highly specific internet adventures I’ve been on recently include Pl@ntnet, a “citizen science project” which helps users identify plant species by taking photographs, and the parts of Reddit dedicated to yoga, dog pictures and prehistoric animals (r/Naturewasmetal, for important velociraptor content). But I keep going back to Fragrantica, where a tiny and ridiculous war has erupted over a new fragrance called, somewhat tastelessly, Dictator. “It’s about getting attention,” one post speculates, next to another saying that “this is probably for the mature man demographic”, and another, angrier one: “You can’t just name a fragrance Dictator and not address why.” That’s about as political as it gets here. In a world of far more serious concerns, I am thankful for a website that’s so refreshingly useless.