All about social networks

Still, as Baszucki made clear, the goal is still actual social networking: surely that will always be better than interacting with an AI! Or will it? It seems to me that perhaps the most important constraint on the web — to actually interact with people as if they are, well, people — disappeared a long time ago.

Few serious observers can consider what we might call the “public square” platforms—particularly Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the public square’s library, Google—a boon to democracy. Nor are they a flourishing intellectual marketplace. Although it is tempting to shrug at their problems by comparing them to the heated partisan newspapers of the... See more

Reclaiming national power to define and incentivise the creation of social technologies should not come at the cost of efforts to also improve the global technology landscape. One way to advance both aims is by enabling interoperability with existing and emerging initiatives to build and scale regional and global solutions that serve the public... See more

Today it feels like we’re living through another important cultural shift—the decline of Twitter—and a new generation of networks is experimenting with new structures to try and capitalize on it. If we want to understand what’s next, it helps to ask: what caused the culture shift? What new structures would be better? And what will it feel like to... See more