Social Media
Essays and more on social media
Packy McCormick and
Social Media
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
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
Anil Dash • “Link in Bio” Is a Slow Knife
Other social media platforms followed, leveraging Skinner’s three laws to maximize button-pecking. They offered immediate reinforcement in the form of instant responses, conditioned reinforcement in the form of “likes” and “followers”, and unpredictable reinforcement that varied with each post and each refresh of the page. These features turned
... See moreGurwinder • Why Everything Is Becoming a Game
“A lot of people came to the conclusion that this thing is too powerful and too toxic, and I need to back off from it before I sink into a hole,” says Klein. “Musk came to the conclusion that this thing is so powerful, and so woke, that I need to own it. It was a billionaire megalomaniac response to the sort of feelings that make people like me... See more
In 1995, Putnam was concerned about teens who were alone 3.5 hours per day. But nowadays teens spend up to nine hours daily staring into screens, according to the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychology.
Meanwhile, the amount of time spent with friends has dropped markedly The number of social outings has declined too. Almost every metric... See more
Meanwhile, the amount of time spent with friends has dropped markedly The number of social outings has declined too. Almost every metric... See more
Ted Gioia • 8 Ways of Connecting a Smartphone Can't Deliver
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
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.
A decade of reporters working for Twitter’s algorithm while their bosses desperately tried to work for Facebook and Google did not result in stable business, happy reporters, or even satisfied audiences. Instead, the platform era hollowed out journalism, destroyed trust across the board, and resulted in a lot of shitty, boring work. It was a... See more