All about social networks

This brings anyone in the social media game an important lesson: enabling and preserving a path from newcomer to middle class is crucial for maintaining a moat. When it becomes too hard to “make it” in established channels, the door opens for new channels to take off.

But the constant changing of these privacy norms might only work to confuse our subliminal user habits even more. Our brains are increasingly disoriented by the different rules of each platform:

On LinkedIn, people can see if I view their profile.

On Instagram, people can see if I view their stories, but not their profile.

On TikTok, people can see... See more

the most important new social networks of the last few years have been notable for not really being social networks at all.

I’m referring to the TikTok-ization of user-generated content: the reason why TikTok was such a blindspot for Facebook is that, unlike Snapchat, it doesn’t depend on network effects, but rather abundance.

If this is all downstream of a small and relatively well-off group of high frequency posters (some of our elected officials among them), that would suggest what we might call an ‘elite radicalization’ theory of online politics. The idea is that social media has empowered a (relatively) small group of political influencers who, in response to the... See more

And yet, precisely as the platforms became more universal, they became more destructive of community. Communal in clusion relies on ex clusion: some notion of who is and is not a member of the group, and some ways of enforcing that boundary.