Structure 001: Late Stage Social

Welcome to this week's issue of Structure. As always, one topic, with the goal of providing you some extra insight into the themes you see online. If you enjoyed feel free to subscribe below!

Social media has to be one of the most impactful inventions in recent memory right? I think it has become so natural to us that we don’t always think about how crazy of a concept it really is. The entire world (almost) connected on the internet with interactions slimmed down to comments, link sharing, likes, and sharing pictures. Credit is certainly due for the CEOs and companies that have gotten us to this point, where I can send a tweet in seconds that is visible across the world.

Things have changed so significantly since these platforms were introduced it’s hard to remember how groundbreaking they were upon debut. That said, with how far we’ve come there certainly have been a lot of changes. I’ll be referring to the current social media climate as “late stage social media” because after all the incremental changes for the past two decades this is unfortunately where we’ve ended up.

Without any further ado: a rant on late stage social media.

The Current Situation

Social media has enjoyed the benefit of constantly holding the attention of people across the globe. It has infiltrated all age groups, political affiliations, religious affiliations, and any other variety of human you can think of. Due to the fact these platforms live online and users sign up for them, they also have the benefit of having access to the copious amounts of data associated with us. This combination makes them extremely valuable from an advertising perspective. Companies want to target their users and social media allows for extremely precise targeting on any grouping out there. The longer we spend on these platforms, the more ads we see and the more money goes back into the pockets of these platforms.

Stemming from this, these companies have been wracking their brains trying to figure out how to encourage their users to spend more time on their platforms. It’s directly incentivized, more time = more money. They allocate money every year to build and refine their algorithms that help recommend content to users. Content designed to keep them on the platform endlessly scrolling.

Creators and companies who use these platforms for business will try to stay on track with their own goals, but at the end of the day there is usually some level of submission to the algorithm. Any creator knows which pieces of their content are getting the most attention and naturally they will look to replicate that success with more content. The algorithm now has an endless supply of content to feed users.

This is a very high level outlook on social media, but the framework is there. These platforms have monetized the time we spend on their platforms and they’ve rigged the game in their favor to keep our attention longer. I’m sure nobody will be surprised when I cite the numerous negative effects associated with absurd social media usage that humanity has grown accustomed to over the years (depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, cyberbullying, and addiction to name a few). We are spending more and more time on these platforms and they are clearly not beneficial in the long run.

How Did We Get Here?

I mentioned earlier just how far social media has come since the beginning. Let’s look at some of the changes we’ve seen. Starting with Facebook and Myspace their early days were filled with status updates, friends lists, and photo sharing. Human interaction made simple and brought online. It was an easy way to keep up with people you don’t see every day. As time moved on we saw platforms like Tumblr, Instagram, and Snapchat enter the fray all bringing new features and additions to the table. Tumblr fostered a niche community where users could customize their own page and share content. Instagram popularized interaction based solely on photo sharing, and Snapchat was one of the first apps to regularize real time constant interaction through photos. Looking at more recent memory we have “stories” on nearly every platform allowing users to share real time content that disappears after 24 hours, along with looping videos from TikTok and Instagram specifically. The platforms themselves have adapted to what will draw users in most effectively. Facebook now owns Instagram and has used Instagram to emulate almost every trend social media sees while also adding in original ideas such as an entire page dedicated to shopping.

It’s clear that these platforms (as a whole) have no problem adapting to the changing tastes of their users. That is what makes them so addictive, they continuously evolve to keep themselves relevant.

The biggest factor now is how ingrained they are into daily life. Imagine removing all social media from your life right now, would the world end? No, not at all, but you’d likely find it requires more effort to stay on top of current events, sports scores, what your friends are up to, what the popular restaurants in your area are, what the hottest movies out are, and more. These things are available across the internet, but the collective slate of social media platforms allows you to indulge in the internet through very low effort swiping, surrounded by the faces of people you know. It is very possible to live without, but the negatives aren’t visible enough to encourage people to delete these apps for good. Unlike cigarettes there is no warning label telling people that socials have devolved into toxicity.

My Ideal Social Network

One of the most interesting developments in the story of social media was the introduction of BeReal. BeReal is a social app that takes a photo with both the front and back facing cameras on a phone. The unique part is that it signals for users to engage with the app 2x per day at random times, and users can only view their friends posts after posting their own.

I love the limited posting aspect of this. Social media today is on another planet from the word scarcity. All you see on BeReal is raw, unfiltered content from people you know twice a day. There are no creators or influencers posting thousands of times a day. There is a realistic limit on content and I love that.

My ideal social network would have an aspect of scarcity built in. Whether it be a limit of viewable posts per day, or a limit on posting for users. I believe people know they see a lot of noise online, so limiting the amount people can post will help slim down some of that chatter. It will also encourage more quality, thoughtful content.

This theoretical social network would also include a time filter. Allowing users to filter posts that were posted on the same day, the previous few days, the past month, etc. There would be no stories or any sort of disappearing post. This would help remove the urgency from these platforms. You know that anything posted will be easy to find later through the filter.

My final addition would be some sort of grouped followings. The idea being that when you follow someone you can add them to a bucket of other users that fit into your own predefined category. As an example creating a bucket labeled “cooking” and filling it with users who post cooking content. Then being able to view a timeline filtered only to that group of users inside whichever bucket you’ve selected. I think this could help with mindless scrolling as when you choose a bucket you’ve chosen a predefined theme and perhaps have a goal in mind. You can scroll through your own curated content until you’ve seen enough or have found what you are looking for.

I don't plan on building a social platform anytime soon, but the goal with this thought process is to really create a platform that brings back the interaction of social without trying to trap users in endless algorithms. I don't blame companies for trying to maximize their own profits, however I do think humanity would be a bit better off without these platforms being so determined to take away large portions of our time.

Where do we go from here?

I didn’t talk a lot about the numerous positives we’ve seen from social media because I actually do think the negatives outweigh them. Not necessarily by a large margin, but enough that I think life without social media is more healthy than life with. Maybe I’ll talk next about how we can leverage the good and start to parse out the bad.

I’m honestly not sure where we go from here, I think the current reels and TikTok trend will last for another couple of years before we see something really change the game again. I do think we may start to see smaller, niche social apps start to take some attention-market share. People already have options for apps “all my friends are using”, so we may start to see apps based around niches where people can connect outside of their standard social circles (Discord has exploded recently for this exact reason). I also think curation been increasing in popularity, so maybe an aggregation type app where people can curate content for others could arise. There is a lot of noise online, so having a creator or person you trust, cut through the traffic for you may hold some value.

Social apps have been evolving alongside humanity for years and they don’t seem to be going anywhere soon. Leave some input for me on Twitter if you think the late stage social experience described above is as good as it gets or if we’ll see platforms 10 years from now that are alike nothing we’ve seen before.

Till next time,

Braxton

Song of the Week

As a thank you for checking out this week's edition of Structure here's a song I've been listening to lately:

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