my social feeds seemed to finish their years-long transformation from a neighborhood populated with friends to a glossy condo development of brands.
Anne Helen Petersen • Culture Study | Anne Helen Petersen | Substack
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my social feeds seemed to finish their years-long transformation from a neighborhood populated with friends to a glossy condo development of brands.
Compared with the fragmented, D.I.Y. Web I knew, social media felt strangely predictable. User profiles on new sites like LinkedIn or Flickr were templated and surrounded by ads. They offered preset options from categories and drop-down menus—age, location, institutional affiliation—and quantified influence through friend and follower counts. The n... See more
Kyle Chayka • Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet | The New Yorker
The reigning ad model is becoming less viable for emerging social platforms—and less enticing for creators.
Anne Lee Skates • Six Ways New Social Companies Will Monetize | Andreessen Horowitz
In the 2010s many of our public spaces started to be molded, physically and literally, by the market advantage of luring patrons looking for highly Instagrammable shots. Businesses that once paid large sums of money to have photographs taken for advertisements that cost even more to run now had access to an army of free labor, taking pictures for f... See more
Freddie deBoer • Review: Kyle Chayka's Filterworld
What lies before us maybe isn’t one main mass migration but a dispersal, a disruption of the hegemony as everyone throws up their hands, shouts “OY!” and heads off to a variety of smaller, more bespoke environments: influencer Discords, celebrity or fandom communities, invite-only groupchats, boutique apps like Cohost and Somewhere Good. Of course,... See more
Ryan Broderick • How do we find each other again?
Influencers, now a slowly fading cliché in the Internet’s tableau vivant, found success articulating the cult of personality, and marketing themselves as direct-to-consumer-goods. The shift away from this algorithmic surrender can be traced to the macro and micro “creator economies” spawned by the likes of Patreon, Substack, OnlyFans and even Cameo... See more
Eileen Isagon Skyers • Dirt: Are we post-platform?
This commodification of the self accelerated with the advent of Instagram, which turned the visual trappings of our personal lives into fodder for the feed.
Kyle Chayka • Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet | The New Yorker
Creators, who once felt like far-away friends sharing their authentic selves, slowly started monetizing every post, every outfit, every “casual” recommendation. The personal connection we felt was being recalibrated into a business model. They weren't just sharing their lives, they were capitalizing off of them, turning personal narratives into luc... See more
Social media is designed to make us all consumable, which translates into turning people into brands. Brands have one single message, and they’re always signaling that one specific, digestible message.