Social Media
Essays and more on social media
Packy McCormick and
Social Media
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.
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
We're seeing this same phenomenon play out all across the Creator Economy. Some of the... See more
How an advanced degree gives creators a competitive edge
We can always opt out of this arrangement, of course, and live happily in meatspace, but that is precisely the point: Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood.
Drew Austin • #162: Minimum Viable Self
Lots of consumer platforms — everything from Instagram to Youtube to Twitch — didn’t start out as ways for people to make money. They were initially about fun, status, connection and/or fame. They initially started as social networks, but as each grew their users realized they could build income off of them, which changed the trajectory of the... See more
D'Arcy Coolican • The ____ Economy
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?
In the heady days of the millennial media startup boom of the 2010s, the sense that large social platforms would pay publishers for content and create a new class of lucrative digital media outlets was pervasive and unquestioned. And in those early years, no one knew which platforms would succeed. It is almost impossible to believe, but there was a... 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
About
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