According to Eleanor Stern, a TikTok video essayist with nearly a hundred thousand followers, part of the problem is that social media is more hierarchical than it used to be. “There’s this divide that wasn’t there before, between audiences and creators,” Stern said. The platforms that have the most traction with young users today—YouTube, TikTok,... See more
I can't think of a single positive change to a social media platform in years. Nothing has been done with user value in mind; every change is only made to satisfy shareholders. They've killed link sharing. They've killed the ability to see updates from your friends and family. They've killed reach for creators. They've killed news and trustworthy... See more
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
Algorithms optimized for engagement shape what we see on social media and can goad us into participation by showing us things that are likely to provoke strong emotional responses. But although we know that all of this is happening in aggregate, it’s hard to know specifically how large technology companies exert their influence over our lives.
In July 2016 Instagram publicly stated that their algorithms were changing because people missed 70% of posts. The sequence of posts became determined by the following factors:
Likelihood that the content is interesting for users
Relationship with the user posting (whether you are relatives, friends or