Social Media

With billions of people using the major social platforms, and the people who remember a pre-social-media web increasing in age while decreasing as cultural force on the internet, we’re rapidly losing fluency in what the internet could look like. We’ve almost forgotten that links are powerful, and that restraining links through artificial scarcity... See more

Challengers like Meta’s Threads don’t seem like drop-in replacements for Twitter — especially since Threads head Adam Mosseri keeps saying his team will not “encourage” news on the platform. That makes Threads a comparatively tamer experience than the chaos that drove Twitter to its height. “Threads is to Twitter as methadone is to heroin,” says... See more

Hamish McKenzie: On social media, posers are often given the most status points, and so we’re left with a misleading idea of authority; it seems the people who are loudest in their claims to be experts — the ones we hear from most on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube — are the ones to be most wary of. When self-proclaimed experts are ultimately... See more

we’ve turned everything in life into a giant popularity contest–everything you say, everything you experience, everything you see, and even everything you feel–is a product of a giant worldwide counter of likes and follows. It’s a planet-wide exercise in objective convergence, a giant narcissism amplifier that cynically assumes that competing for... See more

This is a great example of how having an advanced degree — in this case, a law degree — can give creators a competitive edge in an extremely crowded market. It's not a coincidence that some of the biggest channels are run by former prosecutors and defense lawyers.

We're seeing this same phenomenon play out all across the Creator Economy. Some of the... See more

social media will never be the impetus for real social change. He compared Twitter unfavorably to the civil rights movement. The Woolworth’s lunch counter protesters had strong social ties with each other; social media, on the other hand, breeds weak ties. Meaningful change comes from strong ties, very little is achieved through weak ones.

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.