Social Media
Essays and more on social media
Packy McCormick and
Social Media
Gotta say, it feels like we missed an opportunity to reinvent social. Can you tell them apart?
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
All social networking apps fall on a spectrum from love to fame.
Li Jin • Love vs. fame: A framework for social applications
Li Jin’s observations on how social media apps/networks fall on a spectrum of love vs. fame
Social as a model works when people have about as much to offer as they want to receive along a given axis. But no trait is distributed uniformly; there are are outliers in the nice-to-look-at, nice-to-listen-to, nice-to-read, nice-to-get-stock-tips from axes, there's a population that can offer a respectable performance with these traits, and... See more
Is "Social" an Enduring Category or Just a Phase?
On the death of social media
His name is Tristan Harris, a former start-up founder and Google engineer who deviated from his well-worn path through the world of tech to become something decidedly rarer in this closed world: a whistleblower.
“This thing is a slot machine,” Harris says early in the interview while holding up his smartphone.
“How is that a slot machine?” Cooper
... See moreCal Newport; • Digital Minimalism
The tech platforms aren’t like the Medici in Florence, or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies—because they will be the dealers.
Ted Gioia • The State of the Culture, 2024
Like every human endeavour, every social network is there for a limited duration and will be useful to a limited niche of people. That niche may grow to the point of being huge, like Facebook and WhatsApp. But, to this day, there are more people in the world without an account on Facebook than people with one. Every single social network is only... See more
Stop Trying to Make Social Networks Succeed
Ben Smith, who ran BuzzFeed News during the height of the Twitter era, describes the moment in simple terms. The platform “was a kind of central, essentially elite conversation where political and tech leaders and journalists and activists and others talked to one another,” he says. “It was never complete or ‘real life,’ but it was actually a more... See more