🤳Media vs Messaging Apps

The implications of this are vast. Sure, you may follow your friends on both, but on Twitter you will also follow news breakers, analysts, insightful anons, joke tellers, and shit posters. The goal is to mainline information, and Twitter’s speed and information density are unparalleled by anything in the world. On Instagram, though, you might follo... See more

But Instagram is not just one app, so it’s effectively become three different Twitters: Instagram Stories for the people you know, the grid for people you used to know (and their weddings and babies), and Reels for probing the profoundly upsetting psychic void at the heart of our country.

But to get people to ditch WhatsApp and switch to Messenger, it will never be sufficient to be 10% better than them or add fun gimmicks on any existing attribute or feature. We will have to offer some new fundamental use case that becomes important to people’s daily lives.

The obvious takeaway is that the medium of social interaction transformed from being a physical to a digital place; but a more nuanced analysis reveals that the medium, for the first time, is no longer a locus of commerce. Social media networks create a completely new medium — an entire digital territory — for modern social interaction that use obj... See more

You don’t doomscroll Instragram to see content from specific sources, but to see what’s happening. That takes power away from creators. You don’t try to find any website directly; you ask Google. You don’t go looking for websites for apartments: you ask Airbnb. You go to Uber for a new ride, you don’t look for the card you received two years ago fr... See more