Social Media Evolution

If that’s the case, humans who want to engage with other humans and their creations may, for the first time in decades, have to avoid the internet and— gasp —return to the real world for authenticity. Sure, you won’t find shrimp Jesus there, but at least you’ll find some genuine human connection.

Either way, what has been lost since the era of the human search engine is the joy of a distinct voice—while we can now find out almost anything automatically, the answer won’t be delivered with warmth or flair.

Algorithms, or at least the ones used by social media platforms, were supposed to be about discovery. But now they’re operating more like those daytime HGTV home decorating shows. “Oh, you like horses? We turned your house into a fake stable. Your dinner table is now bales of hay.”

Rewilding the internet is more than a metaphor. It’s a framework and plan. It gives us fresh eyes for the wicked problem of extraction and control, and new means and allies to fix it. It recognizes that ending internet monopolies isn’t just an intellectual problem. It’s an emotional one. It answers questions like: How do we keep going when the mono... See more

But with AI, it’s now possible that such a thing may happen, that AI could come to generate the majority of the content we humans see on the web. Indeed, a 2022 report from European law enforcement agency Europol pointed out that experts believe that as much as 90% of online content may be synthetically generated by 2026—90%!

Whatever we do, the internet isn’t returning to old-school then-common interfaces like FTP and Gopher, or organizations operating their own mail servers again instead of off-the-shelf solutions like G-Suite. But some of what we need is already here, especially on the web. Look at the resurgence of RSS feeds, email newsletters and blogs, as we disco... See more

TikTok—one of the biggest repositories of AI slime—is exploring the possibility of releasing virtual influencers to compete for brand deals against its human influencers. Instead of a brand paying a human influencer five or six figures to flog its clothes or cars (a sum TikTok doesn’t get a cut of) the platform wants to offer brands the option of u... See more

When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.

Users keep telling the app over and over again what they want: To post photos for their friends. And yet for some reason Meta continually takes these learnings and decides that people avoiding Instagram’s front-facing features by increasingly using Direct Messages means they must want to *spins wheel of things Adam Mosseri scribbles into a notepad ... See more