Social Media
Essays and more on social media
Packy McCormick and
Social Media
That split between the big audience on Facebook and the influential audience on Twitter was instantly obvious to anyone in any newsroom who ever cared to look. Sicha is right to note that Twitter never sent any amount of meaningful traffic to any website — it was Facebook traffic that warped most digital media executives into futile aspirations of... See more
You might think that bootlicking of this sort is just how you do business in China. But here’s the interesting twist—TikTok doesn’t exist in China.
A similar app, called Douyin, is available in China. TikTok is only for outsiders. And they love it. TikTok has more than 1.5 billion users worldwide.
Ted Gioia • Where Did TikTok Come From?
Well, one explanation I liked quite a bit was recently written by Wall Street Journal columnist Christopher Mims, who argued that social media isn’t dying, but changing into broadcast media. The majority of the content we see on a daily basis is now made or shared by a small professional class of users, known as the creator economy. Which is making... See more
Garbage Day • Selling your filter bubble back to you
How important the small communities are
Gamification once promised to create a better society, but it’s now used mainly to addict people to apps. The gamifiers, like Skinner’s pigeons, prioritized immediate rewards over delayed ones, so they gamified for the next financial quarter and not for the future of civilization.
Gurwinder • Why Everything Is Becoming a Game
In all the clamour over ‘the virtual’ and ‘the digital’, we tend to forget that social media is more about the social than the media - it’s about people coming together and what people think about us and what we think of ourselves because of that.
Jonathan Rowson • Taming the Blue Bird
people think the solution to the web becoming a big performance stage is to have lots of fragmented smaller communities. But finding the right community is really hard. A better way is to use novel technologies and network mechanics to matchmake in real-time. You get a new community every second depending on what you’re thinking.
“Journalists are in general a bunch of insecure overachievers, so being in one ‘room’ with your ‘peers’ giving you constant feedback and information creates a truly awful petri dish in which the most terrible forms of groupthink thrive,” says Polgreen. “It can be very hard to resist for reporters, which makes it tough for editors to reorient their... See more