All about social networks

But I don’t think platform companies should—or can—act as the governance layer of our online lives. In this, I share tech journalist and Bluesky board member Mike Masnick’s informed belief that global centralized moderation is a dead end. And if centralized moderation isn’t a plausible way forward, then experimentation toward genuinely... See more

But digital media hasn’t become the antidote to television. Digital media, empowered by the serum of algorithmic feeds, has become super-television: more images, more videos, more isolation.

When I say “everything is turning into television,” what I mean is that disparate forms of media and entertainment are converging on one thing: the continuous flow of episodic video.

But the internet’s history suggests that, if these products succeed, they will follow what Ben Thompson calls the 90/9/1 rule: 90 percent of users consume, 9 percent remix and distribute, and just 1 percent actually create. In fact, as Scott Galloway has reported, 94 percent of YouTube views come from 4 percent of videos, and 89 percent of TikTok... See more

Social media has evolved from text to photo to video to streams of text, photo, and video, and finally, it seems to have reached a kind of settled end state, in which TikTok and Meta are trying to become the same thing: a screen showing hours and hours of video made by people we don’t know. Social media has turned into television.