Zuck changed the company name and is now fixated with the metaverse, which is something nobody can really define or understand. Cartoonish characters used as avatars and the other elements put forward in his keynote leave people wondering what will the actual improvement be.
Twitter is making the transition towards a "free speach" platform which will now ask people to pay to play, somehow creating synergies with Tesla and SpaceX (what???) given the cult of personality surrounding the new owner.
Seems to me like we are really splitting hairs with regards to future improvements and innovation from both those companies, the plateu of the S-curve is in for both of them.
Twitter was originally a free speech platform. It transitioned away from that, much to the chagrin of its co-founder.
"Twitter stands for freedom of expression. We stand for speaking truth to power. And we stand for empowering dialogue." https://twitter.com/jack/status/651003891153108997
The point is to restore the platform's core value and be a neutral, trusted public square. Jack himself said Elon is the only one he trusts to do that.
... and you're the one lecturing about flawed logic?
Oh, and Twitter also made a website where you could find these status updates, but that wasn't the initial focus. Eventually, the SMS delivery bit became obsolete and everyone used the Twitter website or apps, and the content became less "what am I up to" and more "what are my thoughts on current events". So yeah, then it needed content moderation in the same way that any web comments section needs content moderation but your iMessage group chat with some friends does not.
I think Elon's talk about "free speech" and "open sourcing the algorithm" will just result in users having a choice of a handful of open-sourced, but vetted and approved newsfeed algorithms. By default it'll probably be something like today - users who post hate speech or who incite violence will be hidden. Sure, there will probably be an option to show tweets from everyone, even loonies who think Jews should be killed before their space lasers activate the 5G COVID vaccines or whatever, but hardly anyone will enable that algorithm. But Elon will have technically "brought back free speech" and will declare victory.
The inertia from that led to today's Twitter, where being on Twitter is nearly a prerequisite if you're a reporter, famous, or otherwise in the public eye, because of the number of users. Even though a high Twitter follower count is worth about as much as Mardi Gras beads, it's perceived as valuable because the Important People on Twitter see it as valuable.
I'm not sure what Musk's endgame is (and I doubt anybody else does either, and I may be including Musk in that), but a privately owned Twitter is probably the best case for the platform, if people want it to continue.
Not sure how Elon intends to fix any of that by making it even more of a free for all.
People want to connect to each other, but they also want novelty in how they do it.
After they get bored writing on each other's walls, they want to try writing 160-character quips for public consumption. And when they get bored of that, they want to try taking photos and sharing them. And when they get bored of that, they want to try trading short videos of themselves doing stuff. And so on.
So when a given service stops growing, is it because all the users who could have signed up have done so? Or is it because some people moved on to the new thing? Or some combination?
In the past, novelty wasn't much of an option as people had very limited choices when connecting with others. Perhaps the question we need to ask is was this more limited (and much slower) choice better for people's well-being and mental health. I don't reckon we've a satisfactory answer to that question as yet.
If your social club was a dance hall or book club or garden society or union pub, your interactions were limited to people within an hour of travel time or so. That's such a TINY sample of people that fringe beliefs and behaviors were always recognized as marginalia and tended to stay there.
This was a double edge sword.... queer kids in small towns were trapped in the closet, but no one thought contrails were dispersing mind altering drugs.
Social reach may be a cursed problem. It's not obvious how to create a platform that will be safe for, e.g. trans people in socially conservative towns, but prevent it from also sheltering nazi sympathizers. Relying on self policing by the platforms has resulted in problems and dangers we still haven't addressed.
Well, you have to make money somehow and users will never pay for social media after having been spoiled for 15+ years by free Facebook , not to mention the 20+ years of free Google.
When I paid for Linkedin Gold I felt scammed and canceled after a month.
People are not willing to pay for marginal improvements, they are only willing to pay for very important and vital stuff which matters a lot to them. For example...getting laid, that's why Tinder pay feature brings in revenues.
Getting laid is the dictionary definition of "important and vital" and the difference between chatting on Tinder and actually getting laid using Tinder is enormous, it's not just a marginal improvement and thus prompts people to pay out of pocket to have their profile shown to a much higher number of users
SomethingAwful charge(ed|s) $10 to create an account and we’re ruthless with banning people who were not behaving. It worked really well
Somehow Mastodon has 3 millions of users despite those problems AFAIK, and growing exponentially.
On the other hand, lower-reach social communities like forums are still humming along just fine after all these years. Their popularity grows and wanes with trends but there will (probably) always be people on forums.
Social media has broad reach but shallow depth.
Forums, mailing lists, etc. have narrower reach but can be support incredibly deep dives.
They don’t have good growth but it’s the closest thing to an authentic “public square” in my opinion. Actual conversations, instead of people just yelling on their soapbox.
Is the web still full of vBulletin and phpBB forums that can sustain themselves with donations and such? I think the only ones left are the ones who asked for donations from the start. Yes, hosting is relatively cheap, but when boards get bigger they have to add capacity and that all adds up. There's only so much 'pocket money' can get you. Eventually you will need to sustain a forum with fees or donations.
I'd argue that the OG university-only thefacebook.com was successful because it had narrow reach and deeper depth (at least compared to its one-size-fits all modern form). The features were tailored very specifically to that audience, and the audience found a lot of value from it.
I tend to think of it more that discrepancies between what the platforms are purported to be, and the actual use patterns and motives are, has grown to a point where it's getting scrutinized and having substantial pushback. Another way of looking at this is the limitations and drawbacks of current platforms are being exposed in unavoidable ways.
Another issue that's gotten some attention but maybe not as much as it deserves is the diversification of social media and generational trends. I think Facebook and Twitter trends older and has become more of a political punching bag, which has led to the sorts of things you're talking about. "Younger" platforms, demographic-wise, have largely gone under the radar and we haven't seen the sort of repositioning and jockeying that we've seen with Twitter and Facebook. So Facebook is trying a sort of pivot (wisely so in my opinion, even though I'm not sure about the nature of that pivot), even as things like TikTok are percolating up into media consciousness. It may not be that social media is saturated it might be that people are migrating, passively or actively, to other platforms that have so far gone unscrutinized by older demographics who tend to use things like Twitter and Facebook.
Who knows though. For me it's interesting to watch. I've never really been involved with either platform, for multiple reasons.
There seems to be growing interested in more decentralized or federated platforms. I'm starting to wonder if these will gain traction sort of slowly and organically as the other platforms churn over time and they're the only things left being stable.
The problem with TikTok is that it's essentially just for actors, musicians and dancers.
On Youtube people can Vlog, it's impossible to vlog on TikTok.
I think among the many social media Facebook and Instagram manage to capture the most people.
- Facebook/Instagram everybody can take a pic or draw some art, or a video or even engage in written discussion, plus they get some officially & professionally produced content from TV (not as much as YT but they do)
- Youtube misses out on people who can take cool pics and write insightful thoughts but captures those who can take cool videos or can vlog, plus they get tons of official professionally produced content from TV
- TikTok misses out on everybody except amateurs who can act, sing or dance
- Twitter is a stadium for culture wars and breaking news
- Reddit is where you can take your time to articulate thoughts/research and link up with people who have the same interests. The news arrive just as fast as twitter without the 140 ch. limits, and it's not properly a stadium for culture wars...more like a small UFC arena
There are so many excellent creators on it. Nature focused. Rare book dealers showing their wares. Medievalists. And trades, showing you how things work (herding sheep, thatching roofs, general home repairs). Not to mention all the artists (drawing, painting, sculpting, pottery, stained glass, sewing, etc).
It really excels in the area of photoshop/illustrator tutorials as well. None of the YouTube bloat, just a quick 1 minute video that shows you exactly how to do one cool thing.
Yes the cool stuff is buried under dancing teenagers spitting memes, but there’s exceptional creative stuff on there and an audience that buys that stuff.
> On Youtube people can Vlog, it's impossible to vlog on TikTok.
I've got 40k followers mostly just ranting into the camera about politics and without any desire to do it seriously.
The old guard of social media may have reached its saturation point, but there's still plenty of innovation to be had.
While this is true, people coming online are not targets for advertisers because they have a very low disposable income/wealth and for the same reason they would never be able to pay if social media transitioned towards that model.
The mental image is something like Facebook be hitting up the IMF to see when Nigerian incomes take off. That is the definition of saturation to me, it's not "web eats the world anymore", but "web paitiently waits his turn like every other industry"
The total addressable market for social media will grow only slowly now. New platforms will contine to arise, but they will mostly succeed by taking market share from existing services rather than expanding the market.
"Web 2 Socials" were the bundling of for purpose communities into giant super communities; reddit, facebook, twitter, etc.
If this follows everything else that has gone before it on the internet. The next phase will be an unbundling where things go back to for purpose communities again until they get rebundled and the cycle repeats.
https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundli...
It's always the same pie, only the size of each serve as well as the number of serve which changes . That's at least the intuition I get it from the famous phrase "2 ways of making money: bundle or unbundle" that you mentioned.
When govt. broke up Standard Oil the pie of oil extraction didn't become bigger, it was just partitioned in a different way.
Smaller communities derive value from addressing the unique needs of their users, better moderation, the unique audience is the value. Each of those communities in aggregate may be more valuable than the previous, one-size fits all mega-network.
I'd expect (or maybe hope for) a stable point with a couple large general networks, and many small, niche gems.
Once something is saturated with X, you cannot add any more X to it.
However the younger people understand now that posting things on public social media can have consequences, so things like Discord and Telegram are now going to be the future, and classic social media like Facebook is simply going to become more and more inauthentic until it fades away into something 70 year olds preoccupy themselves with out of habit like television.
I'm in several small clique channels on discord and slack, including one for my extended family, instead. I've been wondering how common these are getting.
Discords are a kind of panacea to these kinds of self-harmful thoughts, since joining a Discord says "Hey I want to talk" and now the burden is on the other participants; if they are not in the Discord, clearly they don't want to talk.
I believe this is the point we are now: a lot of people have now discovered the positives of discussing with people alike and are searching for places where they have more of their kind. This is why Reddit, Twitch or Discord are growing strongly, unlike Facebook.
While more and more people are still joining the platforms, the future will bring other smaller places for niches. Social Media is not saturated, it’s fragmented.
Trying to see surface something from years ago is damn near impossible.
It took centuries for the meta-game of chess to develop. With the advent of supercomputers, this process has sped up considerably, but even still, it took a lot of trial and error to discover niche moves for certain scenarios.
MMA is the same way. Some techniques, like the calf kick, have only been recently refined and started to be perfected, despite kicking being more or less a move any human could perform for over 200,00 years. Yet we don't seem to have a history of it.
You see this across the board in many domains. Perhaps it has something to do with the difficulty of optimizing game theory. Or maybe for centuries information just didn't traverse that efficiently and now with the Internet and improved data storage, it just occurs much faster.
At any rate, I suspect social media is similar. We probably don't know what an "optimum" site would look like. Twitter doesn't even have an "Edit" button yet, which is a fairly simple mechanism that would unlock a lot of new interactions.
The platforms are not changing, people are. They are tired of these superficial interactions.
Advertising only delivers profits if users are pulled into algorithmic feeds that massively expand the scope of stuff they actually choose to follow. Twitter has its "this person you follow liked this other person's post" and FB and IG just spam you with posts from groups you're not a member of.
Not enough people will walk away from SM on their own volition. So the cycle will continue.
There is a right size for a healthy place for people to talk to each other and Facebook and Twitter are both way above this size. I will mourn neither of them when they vanish, for they have both optimized entirely for keeping users on the site as long as possible, without a single care as to whether what they're doing on the site is good for them or not - as long as the company gets to serve more ad views in between you spinning your wheels in an endless flame war, they're happy.
I believe the main improvement of Facebook's "metaverse" is that Facebook hopes to have a thriving marketplace for user-generated content, of which they generously plan to only take a 47% cut. I'm sure they'll still quite happily find a way to take money to shove ads into every corner of your time with their VR helmet on, too.
Some combination of decentralized storage, decentralized identity, and some form of (not saying in its current form) crypto-assets (whether blockchain, L"x" scaling, or something entirely different).
The idea is giving control back to where it belongs without a central authority, with a completely-uncensorable platform by design, which also "pays" the creators (and people who host those content) by design automatically instead of relying on YouTube/Instagram etc.
I'm definitely not saying we are there, but I believe it will be the next big thing as technology and ideology evolves, not only for what we currently call social media, but generalized into many other aspects of information technologies such as hosting, IoTs, any kind of resource sharing being some examples.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/08/a-brief-history-of-the...
If say a company like Palantir or Dataminr are connecting in to monitor for some type of activity, Twitter could charge much more for that monitoring. Hedge funds could also monitor or access data on postings to see how a stock is fluctuating.
Twitter has a great concept and high end information based personalities on the platform, but its executed so poorly. Improve the interface, allow most free speech and you have a great population monitoring system that give you real time focus groups essentially.
Facebook/Meta went too big brother, collected way too much information. It was bad. I used to love facebook until 2014 it started turning with all the boomers joining, and the algo changes encouraging conflict.
I think Reddit will really be the next social media platform. It already has, but it uses semi-verified users, and anonymous users (less and less). Its been relatively transparent.
So yes, saturation has been achieved. What comes next is the methods of how we as humans connect. (remember, FB was just a condensed and easy to use version of the Web at large), they just made it really easy to post and share.
Do you really think we'll need a centralized service to do this in the future?
"What? You don't have a facebook account? Is something wrong with you?" - 2017
"Damn, that's a good idea to delete facebook, I wish I could" - 2022
There are plenty of improvements one can make - but the power positions are all taken and it'll take 20-30 years for those useless idiots to die and/or retire.
The golden age of the internet is over and when they and/or life finally exhausts Elon Musk, there won't be anyone who isn't a useless idiot left that has any power.
We'll be right back where this species loves to be - useless idiots controlling the minds of the idiot masses, while the non-idiots quietly engage in creative pursuits.
