Create Rituals, Not Habits
Big social—my moniker for the collective of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube—is emblematic of what I call habitual social. Habitual social apps depend on having a large daily user base, usually measured as daily active users, or DAUs. The more time each user spends, the happier the platform.
Every • In the Next Era of Social, Build Rituals, Not Habits
Ritual is vital because it gives us a sense that we belong to the world. A sense of connectedness, whether to society, nature or the divine, is in turn linked to a sense of psychological wholeness and lower rates of mental illness.
Social media offers the opposite; connection without relatedness.
Alexander Beiner • Myth and Metrics: How Social Media Robs Us of Ritual, and How to Revive It
Can ritual social apps be big, or are they little social? It’s more a question of how big any emerging social apps can become now; very few will ever reach the scale of a Facebook or TikTok or maybe even a Twitter. It’ll depend on format, graph structure, network effects, and, of course, timing. But you could argue that big social will always have ... See more
Every • In the Next Era of Social, Build Rituals, Not Habits
