MFT: Brizzly - a social site without all that pesky social stuff

It is fascinating how over the course of couple of years citizens of the internet had went first through sheer fascination with all this social networking and then as quickly became disenchanted with them and started looking for something more fulfilling.

Amidst of that search - a new trend had emerged - anti-social networks. This is one of the examples.

Brizzly is a social media blogging platform that is all about defying its purpose. It was developed by Jason Shellen. Brizzly is like Twitter, if Twitter was a non-comformist antisocial iconoclast scum. It intentionally takes the concept of sharing your thoughts and opinions in a completely untapped dimension. The one where it is not supposed to be. There is no community, no trends, no drama, no terms and condition - nothing, zilch. You can't even register. You can only use it.

Here's what Brizzly does: you can type a text there and you can post it. That's it. But instead posting it - the text doesn't really go anywhere. It just disappears. This service is a digital equavalent of screaming into the void. And it is really good at that.

I respect that kind of attitude. It takes a whim and a gut to go there. Last year, i've reviewed similarly mean-spirited blogging platform TXT.FYI - Brizzly does something similar but from a different standpoint.

The thing with Brizzly was that it was originally conceived as a third-party interface shell for Twitter. It had a couple of features that were unavailable for Twitter and a distant aspiration of being more than just a reinterpretation of somebody else's intellectual property. Alas, it was bought by one legendarily incompetent big tech company and successfully EA'd for sake of much more important "potentially game-changing" thing known as AIM.

Then in August 2018, Jason Shellen had bought Brizzly back and remade it into an anti-social platform it is today. And it is much better that way.

Part of Brizzly's charm is in the fact that it is what it is and doesn't try to be something else. Social media tend to be frustrating and not really effective at what they are supposed to do - make connections and provide platform for expression. After a while you realize that no one really cares about anything but themselves and you can't even moderate your newsfeed.

So instead of perpetuating woes of social media - Brizzly just takes this element out of equation and presents you with a pure tool for futile expression. It is useless but sometimes you need a thing like this to let it out and release something from your system. In a way, Brizzly is weirdly therapeutic.