Social Media
Essays and more on social media
Packy McCormick and
Social Media
Hear me out — what if instead of trying to keep up with UGC (won't work) someone started a news organization to only publish once a week with a high-quality investigation of all the biggest news of the previous week?
Alexis Ohanian 🗽x.comyes - media needs to slow the eff down
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
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
Youyang Gu • 21 Experts on the Future of Expertise - Future
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
“The internet, as we have known it, has evolved from a quaint, quirky place to a social utopia, and then to an algorithmic reality. In this reality, the primary task of these platforms is not about idealism or even entertainment — it is about extracting as much revenue as possible from human vanity, avarice, and narcissism.”
Quick Links for Wednesday, January 3
slapping the table, easy way to put it about the current state of the internet
What we're seeing is an end of the race to the bottom.
What's happened is that most of the major social networks only hire and promote people who make decisions primarily based on analytics. As a result these sites no longer have any real communities or organic content, and have been completely hollowed out by math-friendly refrigerator magnet... See more
What's happened is that most of the major social networks only hire and promote people who make decisions primarily based on analytics. As a result these sites no longer have any real communities or organic content, and have been completely hollowed out by math-friendly refrigerator magnet... See more
Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak | Hacker News
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
Ritual is vital because it gives us a sense that we belong to the world. A sense of connectedness, whether to society, nature or the divine, is in turn linked to a sense of psychological wholeness and lower rates of mental illness.
Social media offers the opposite; connection without relatedness.