Sherry Ning on Substack

per Max Read, “The main purpose of social media is to call attention to yourself.” As he points out in this essay I still love, the fact that anyone can join social media and publish an opinion lends the industry a democratic air while it profits off of our every spare thought. We’re lulled into a stupor and call it participation. “Each new byte of... See more

Gurwinder

4h

“Social media makes more sense when you view it as a place people go to perform rather than a place to communicate.”

— Morgan Housel

We turn into each other’s audience, judging from afar. We become each other’s data harvesters, knowing who went where, at when and with whom. We even become each other’s digital oppressors: we form a limited perception of who we think someone is based on what they post, and when they do something that doesn’t conform to the imposed image of them, w... See more

I’d substitute genuine social interaction with a swipe, comment, message, or like. Keeping up with friends was essentially optimized– no longer did you have to text, call, or coordinate a meeting to catch up. You could just glance at their latest post and feel some shallow sense of connection. Social media provides the facade of friendship with lit... See more

I do think that social media is largely a trap... for users and for brands. It’s purposely built to create insecurity and false proxies, metrics that get people to work for free to support the business model of the social media companies, as opposed to their own goals.

When Wendy’s or Oreo cookies pulls some sort of stunt on a social media platform,... See more

Substack hasn’t just made me a subscriber; it’s turned me into a willing participant in the marketplace of internet intellectualism.

That’s the platform’s real magic trick—turning ideas into products, writers into entrepreneurs, and newsletters into status symbols.

People are not building meaningful social relationships on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Snap, or Twitter. On these platforms, you don't have friends but followers, content is put over people, and performance drives behaviors. The first wave of social networks are everything but social. They’re media monetized by performance advertising, which has... See more

In a world awash with information and eye candy, “social gaming” is rapidly evolving as the largest existential threat to legacy media’s claim on engaged consumer attention. Trust and manipulation issues are also causing people to look beyond incumbent social media platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.