Splatoon 3’s posting system makes it the only good social media platform out there

Imagine for a moment there was a healthier alternative to Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and every other social media service you can think of. Yes, even BeReal. Imagine someone built a new, better social media service from scratch. No doom scrolling. No toxicity. No discourse. This new service would have the power – nay, the responsibility – to free us all from the yoke of being online.

Imagine what this service would look like. Imagine if it could solve the myriad of problems endemic to all social media platforms. Imagine that it could transform the social media experience from a glorified one Skinner box into something fun.

What if I told you that this service already exists and was also launched in 2015 alongside a hit Nintendo Wii U game?

For the uninitiated, each iteration of Nintendo’s ink-’em-up shooter Splatoon ships with a simple posting feature that allows users to post a monochrome landscape (or portrait, in turn 3) and make this image appear over the user’s avatar and even on billboards, posters and walls.

As someone who has run entire social media departments in the past and also gone semi-viral Tweet about Amelia Bedelia, I consider myself a real expert in this field. I think I’m qualified to say that Nintendo inadvertently created the only good social media service out there. Here are some reasons why.

There is no discourse

The reason Twitter often feels like a toxic dopamine machine is because the service is built around “engagement.” In other words, it doesn’t matter if a post is good, bad, harmful, or helpful. As long as people are talking about it, you’ll see the discourse in your feed because the Twitter algorithm sees all those replies and retweets and thinks, Oh, people want to see this post. It might feel really good to smack someone’s butt in the QRTs, but at the same time it still reinforces the original bad post – the then continues to create discourses around the discourse until the next Twitter main character emerges or until you throw your phone in the sea.

Splatoon doesn’t have this problem because there are no answers. There are three ways you can interact with the Splatoon social media service:

• booking
• “Fresh!” respond to posts you like
• Report malicious posts

That means there are no hot takes. There are no engagement farming posts from brands. There are no algorithmic rewards for engagement, and there are no ways to start a discourse, so like this is no discourse.

You can only post once

One of the most subtly brilliant aspects of the Splatoon social media service is that each user can only have one “active” post at a time. If you want to post again, you must overwrite your previous post. This has an interesting dual effect.

While platforms like Instagram and TikTok reward you with reach for posting a few times a day, Splatoon’s posting limit makes users think differently about posting. Sometimes this leads to people posting amazing, elaborate, intricate art meant to adorn their profile for days; other times, it leads to quick, effortless shitposts (splatposts?). The true masters of the format are somehow able to do both at the same time.

Paradoxically, the one-post-per-user rule causes players to both value each post (because you only get one!) and treat it as expendable (because what if you can think of something else to post?). It’s the best elements of Snapchat without the bad.

It’s full of fun, cool people

Splatoon seems to be where everything is best, at least judging by the post tone Tumblr shitposters have landed after their great exodus. When you get in turn 3 Right now you see posts celebrating the Sans Undertale victory Mob Psycho‘s Reigen Arataka in the Tumblr Sexyman Tournament; Posts about how easily the Nintendo 3DS is hackable and modifiable; and hastily scrawled posts about how turn 3 is the first Nintendo video game Queen Elizabeth II wasn’t there for. The first “viral” Splatoon 3 post was from the Global Testfire event and just read “I LOVE MEN” in block text.

There is a lot of openly queer content out there turn 3, and any hateful or bigoted content is reported to oblivion almost immediately, thanks to moderation by both the player community and community managers at Nintendo. In addition, the embedding of this social network in a game like Splatoon leads to a kind of user self-selection, where inevitably the only people using this platform are also the people playing the game. They’re part of the Splatoon community, which means they’re invested in creating a non-toxic community. You are also really good at the post. JFRESH is probably the most well-known example – they’ve been consistently posting pixel-perfect splat posts, sometimes in webcomic format, for years – but there are many other well-known posters in the community that are regularly seen in lobbies and on stages:

There are no rewards

You can’t follow posters you like on Splatoon unless you find them and send them a general friend request, which means there’s no post or user follower count list. Also, there is no visible indication of how many “Fresh!” reactions a particular post has received. It’s all invisible – there’s no way for people to track their influence on Splatoon posts.

This might seem like a minor change, but it’s at odds with every other posting platform out there. Even BeReal, arguably the healthiest social media platform outside of Splatoon, shows reactions, giving users a subconscious drive to chase those reactions. Making likes invisible and making follows impossible means that at the end of the day you are posting because you want to post. They scream into the void – like on any other platform. Only this time you know you won’t get an answer. So you don’t expect any. Users just put something together hoping it will make someone smile or laugh and that’s where it ends. It’s the intimacy of BeReal with less pressure mixed with the hyper-public nature of Twitter, except without the weird and toxic dopamine cycles of both.

Imagine if that were what we were gifted with whenever we tapped that damn bird: poster paradise. No brands, no discourse, no answers, and no toxicity because there’s no one to be toxic to — just a mountain of aimless posts that you can sift through and add to at your leisure that say, “I peed my pants ‘ alongside a hyper-realistic portrait, the Mona Lisa lives with tentacles for hair. Both are equally valid and equally valued.