Social Media

Twitter is not a Silicon Valley giant. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are tremendously attractive to the average person; Twitter never was and never will be. But it loomed large in the lives of journalists and was over-represented in activist circles as well. Images, videos, and stories about unrest, protests, riots, and police crackdowns reached... See more

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

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

All social networking apps fall on a spectrum from love to fame.

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