what is Social Media doing to us?
Articles about social media platforms and their effects on society.
Jerod Morris and
what is Social Media doing to us?
Shitty retention is ubiquitous
First, perhaps obvious, but no wonder retention in mobile products is terrible. I’ve often written about these benchmarks for retention:
When you reflect... See more
First, perhaps obvious, but no wonder retention in mobile products is terrible. I’ve often written about these benchmarks for retention:
- daily retention of consumer apps: D1/D7/D28 of 60/30/15
- the % of active users — that is, DAU/registered — should be 25%
- or, for consumer/SMB subscription: M12 of >30%
When you reflect... See more
How Novelty Effects and Dopamine Culture Rule the Tech Industry
Social media algorithms identify our politics and then shepherd us into a hermetically sealed bubble, framing our worldview through a window of rage and extremism.
Scott Galloway • No Mercy / No Malice
How social media algorithms reward clickbait and outrage, shaping creator behavior, language norms, and incentives for extremity.
TRANSCRIPT
I can't believe I stayed. I can't believe I sat here for 11 minutes, wasted 11 minutes of my life on this. One of the things that we used to have access to was this tool called CrowdTangle. So I could actually download all of the videos that these pages had ever put out. I could download the metadata around them, all the titles. And you can see the
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Via Jonathan Haidt
Yet, the hidden machinations behind everyone’s favorite social media and search platforms are engineered to exploit our primal instincts for validation, status, and mimetic desires (adopting or pursuing preferences and aspirations based on the influence of others rather than our intrinsic motivations), morphing into a manipulative force that feeds... See more
André Chaperon
The media has propagated a new definition of what it means to be a good consumer of information. They want you to read high-velocity content from multiple information streams and be constantly plugged into what’s happening. They can sell the most advertisements this way.
Bo Burnham (the musician comedian) on the business of social media:
"[Social media firms are] coming for every second of your life...And it's not because anyone is bad, it's not because anybody in this company has evil plans or is trying to do this, they're not even doing it consciously. Their entire model is growth. They’re coming for every second
... See moreKids will not believe me when I say this, but people didn’t always absorb their “content” by way of mysterious algorithmic black magic on endlessly-scrolling crack feeds. We used to type web addresses into our browsers, and actually visit our favorite sites. This, going to “www dot college shitpost dot com” or whatever, was itself considered a
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