I started my first social network in 2016. It was called afroconscious.com and no matter how hard I tried to promote it as a space for conscious-minded Black people to socialize, it never got more than 50 users in two years so I gave up on it and shut it down in 2018. In 2019 I decided to try again so I launched joyrulez.com. It was still geared towards Black people but I decided to make it more inclusive to include a wider range of interests.

Membership grew rapidly but not among the people I wanted it to cater to. Instead, I noticed that the majority of members were signing up from India. I became frustrated but decided not to shut it down and use it as a SEO juicer and income generator instead. Today it is still active and has over 51,000 members, 98% from India. Why have Indians taken to it in such great numbers? I don’t know because I rarely log-in to see what’s going on. As long as it’s not costing me too much to maintain, I’ll keep it going.

Reasons why I failed

I failed as a social network owner because, although I had big dreams and a few hundred dollars to invest, I don’t have the technical know-how and financial resources to engineer it in the direction that I want it to go in. I believed in the saying that if you “build it then they will come,” but I found out the hard way that it is not the case. Black people are stubborn and have a crab-in-a-barrel mentality when it comes to supporting our own ventures. In other words, we would rather tear each other down instead of supporting each other to grow.  

I can’t blame our people though because I know that our dis-unity is a result of centuries and generations of social engineering. Our people will not change in one generation due to the overwhelming freedoms that social media offers. Our former masters also see and know the power of social media so, the fight to free the minds of Black people is ultimately a David and Goliath scenario.

#socialnetwork