All about social networks
shit you should read if you are building or care about how social networks are evolving
sari and
All about social networks
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.
Everything Is Television
But the presence of normies was what made social media worth tuning into. In their wake, like detritus on a once busy beach, there will be only dry corporate marketing, A.I.-generated slop, and dreck from thirsty hustlers attempting to monetize a dwindling audience of voyeurs.
Great article by Ed Zitron, on the sad state of the web in recent years and its accelerating enshittification ‘thanks’ to “Degenerative AI.” He starts with the Reddit coming IPO and lays down the case for the increasing corruption of content, search results, and eventually LLMs themselves. “Generative artificial intelligence is poison for an internet dependent on algorithms”
Working in technology means one thing above all else: chasing scale. There is a reason why much of the tech world is obsessed with growth. Free from physical constraints, digital systems can scale to an incomprehensible size. The appeal of conquering the engineering, design and business challenges of mega-scale is strong, the rewards immense. But
... See moremany “social network” products/platforms think they’re just tech, but really they’re socio-technical systems, and part of the reason they break “at scale” is bc while the software might scale, other systems like safety & moderation don’t necessarily scale as easily. A single player (e.g) calculator app is tech/software only, social platforms are more than that.
Cyberspace Innkeeping: Building Online Community
An exploration of building online community and the dynamics of conversation in the virtual village, with advice for innkeepers of online services.
faculty.trinity.eduvia XH; from 1992