Stop Trying to Make Social Networks Succeed

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

It’s hard to compete with big social networks head-on these days. The network effects of those giant social networks are so strong, a straight-on challenge seems, well, challenging. But there is lots of opportunity to focus on one user niche or one specific form factor.

The only way to beat them is if a new social network has such a massive advantage in quality of content and interactions that people start straddling both until the original network dies.