The internet is at a crossroads
“Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
This starts a defining piece of journalism on the state of today’s dominant internet platforms.
I have been on Twitter since January 2007. A fairly early adopter.
Over time it has been my favourite social media platform. I have learned new things, been inspired with different ideas, met interesting people and even won new business.
It has had its ups and downs during those 16 years, but since Elon Musk's takeover it feels like it's on a steady decline.
It's lacking the right kind of energy.
Fewer people are active, bugs are appearing more often, the algorithms aren't working well and Musk's decisions feel haphazard.
Twitter is where journalists and writers spend their time and so its decline is garnering plenty of column inches. Writers are looking beyond Twitter and thinking about the wider impact on how we spend our time on the internet.
A consensus is developing. Social media monopolies have reached their peak. Our time on the internet will be fragmented between different platforms and private messaging apps.
These are the articles that explain this change so much better than I can.
Firstly, Twitter won’t disappear
In last week’s Observer John Naughton thinks Twitter will continue to be infuential because there are so many journalists on the platform.
This is why Twitter, a small social media platform (compared to Instagram, Facebook or TikTok), dominates the headlines. A good example is the wide press coverage of a recent controversial Labour advert which was only posted on Twitter.
But this is where we may be going
Kyle Chayka wrote in his thoughtful piece The Post-Platform Internet:
“I don’t think I’m alone in feeling adrift on the internet right now.”
He goes onto say… “The first major set of social networks — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter — have all decayed... they are less actually social than ever. The tech companies would rather we looked at ads than talk to our friends. That’s why we’re all in search of something else.”
He doesn't think any of them will die. He thinks more and smaller platforms will gain traction. Each of us will find our tribe and this is where we will be most motivated to engage.
In the olden days we had forums
On similar lines Noah Smith thinks the internet wants to be fragmented.
Once upon a time you used the internet to find like-minded people with similar, niche interests on forums or chat rooms.
But in the 2010s internet interaction began to be concentrated on Facebook, Twitter and then Instagram. For the user this was convenient - everyone was in the same place. But, for some, it became a toxic place to be.
“Why did this happen to the centralized internet when it hadn’t happened to the decentralized internet of previous decades? In fact, there were always Nazis around, and communists, and all the other toxic trolls and crazies. But they were only ever an annoyance, because if a community didn’t like those people, the moderators would just ban them…
… Community moderation works. This was the overwhelming lesson of the early internet. It works because it mirrors the social interaction of real life, where social groups exclude people who don’t fit in.”
If you didn’t like how the forum was moderated you left. There were plenty of other options.
But where do you go if you leave Twitter now? Mastadon? Post? Substack? Blue Sky?
Or Discord, What’s App or Signal where you can chat privately?
The consensus seem to be, at present, that if there is an exodus it won’t be to a single platform.
“Because maybe, just maybe, we’ve learned our lesson. Maybe we’ve realized that the internet simply works better as a fragmented thing.”
A sidenote. Some platforms are still growing. YouTube and TikTok are different because they are more like broadcast media where interaction with fellow users isn’t the prime reason for being there. Instagram too - because, despite Reels, it is still more geared towards personal interactions.
Or is social media doomed to die?
Ellis Hamburger thinks the time is up for social media.
On a similar line to Cory Doctorow, he writes
“It’s about a pattern that all social media apps seem doomed to repeat — to veer from their initial promise of a place to connect and share with friends and family, toward something entirely different. How is it possible that social media apps always seem fated to manipulate and disappoint us?”
Founders generally start with good intentions. They launch a platform and offer access for free. Free is the only way to build up a significant active user base so investors can be wooed.
However, users have different needs to investors. There are only so many things you wish to share with your friends and there is a limit to how many friends we can all interact with properly.
This limits the time you are on the platform. Good for our well being but bad for investors and advertisers. They want you to spend more time scrolling. So they encourage you to broadcast what you do. In other words to create posts for people you don’t know but probably share similar interests.
We have all helped fuel social media’s rise. We all have some responsibility.
“In our own eternal quests for social validation, we’re out for growth, too! We readily give in to convenient, advertiser-friendly features like Stories, which prioritize broadcasting over simply communicating. We add more and more friends — because it feels good! — until our close friend group has become our audience.”
“Audience” - that is the key word. As individuals we are encouraged to have a ‘personal’ brand, an online persona.
“Only later do we look back and reminisce on how fun things used to be, whether it was Instagram’s early filters, Facebook’s wall posts, Snapchat’s selfie messages, or Twitter’s mundane text posts. But would we go back?”
The article thinks that new platforms will arrive more slowly and which will prioritise “social” again. An alternative options is to monetise the creator / audience via subscriptions rather than ads. This is the Substack model.
But for how long will investors tolerate that? Investors want to go big.
“In Facebook’s case, the company makes something like $200 per year of ad revenue on each American user, but how many of those users would pay $15 / month to use Facebook? According to one study, not many.”
The article ends with
“I remember the joy of posting hundreds of photos to Facebook the day after a party, excited to relive those memories with friends. At the time, it felt like a new form of connection.
Now, I just text them.”
