Maven Is a New Social Network That Eliminates Followers—and Hopefully Stress

Kelly’s vision depends on an evolution of the Internet in which the vast tangle of possible one-on-one connections partition into countless small cliques—each one a fandom or a mini community revelling in the discovery of others who share their quirks. Instead, the social-media giants effectively rerouted these connections through a small number of... See more

While social platforms are proving effective at pressure testing and gauging the customer response for new ideas, sometimes the general public isn’t the best curator for what’s next. It’s not just about the critical mass (how many people like something), it’s also about the credible mass ( who likes something). As algorithms mature, I suspect socia... See more

Cocoon is one of a new wave of apps aiming to change the way we interact on social media. These new platforms don’t encourage you to accumulate likes or followers, or require that you diligently craft an online persona. Instead they want you to connect with a small, curated group of people, and that’s it.

In other words, new social networks start up and there are all these people who were not influencers on any of the existing networks that get hundreds of thousands of followers just because they were first to switch. This is why every generation wants a new social network. Status becomes ossified on these big social networks. And there's const... See more

It’s an almost unthinkable reversal from Meta’s extremely lucrative walled-garden strategy, which it has employed for its entire history as a company. But Mosseri told me that decentralization is the future of social networks — even if it means that someday a disgruntled Threads user will be able to take the following they build in the app to anoth... See more

On the other side, new social spaces will continue to emerge and bring with them new rulesets, dynamics, and discovery algorithms to connect new people in new ways. We argue that this is the primary value of social networks and should be their sole focus: developing and providing different “flavors” of content and algorithms

It’s a social network that doesn’t show you follower counts, doesn’t let you edit pictures, it automatically follows everyone in your phone book, and I dunno, it’s an app. Josh Constine wrote about it with his trademark froth, suggesting that “the future of social is multiplayer,” a statement that - and I say this respecting Josh otherwise - means ... See more