About 20 years ago, Facebook exploded on college campuses as a site for students to stay in touch. Then along came Twitter, where people posted what they had for breakfast, and Instagram, where friends shared photos and updated each other.
Today, our Instagram and Facebook feeds are filled with ads and sponsored posts. TikTok and Snapchat are filled with videos of influencers promoting dish soap or dating apps. And soon, most of the most-watched Twitter posts will come from subscribers who have paid for exposure and other perks.
Social media is becoming less social in many ways. As major sites become more “corporatized,” the types of posts where people update their friends and family about their lives are becoming less and less visible. Instead of seeing messages and photos from friends and relatives about holidays or fancy dinners, users on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and Snapchat are now seeing specialized content from brands and influencers they pay to post. has increased.
This change will impact large social networking companies and the way people interact with each other digitally. But it also raises questions about the core idea: online platforms. For many years, the concept of a platform – an all-in-one public site where people spend most of their time – reigned supreme. But as major social networks prioritize connecting people with brands over connecting people with other people, some users are turning to community-oriented social networking sites that focus on specific hobbies or issues. I started looking for sites and apps.
āPlatforms as we knew them are dead,ā said Gigi Papacharisi, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who teaches a course on social media. “They have outlived their usefulness.”
This change helps explain why some social networking companies, which have billions of users and continue to generate billions of dollars in revenue, are exploring new avenues of business. . Twitter, owned by Elon Musk, is encouraging people and brands to pay between $8 and $1,000 a month to become subscribers. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is entering the immersive online world of the so-called Metaverse.
For users, this means that some people gravitate toward smaller, more focused sites rather than spending all their time on one or a few large social networks. These include Mastodon, which is essentially a Twitter clone divided into communities. Nextdoor is a social network where neighbors can empathize about everyday issues like local potholes. There are also apps like Truth Social, started by former President Donald J. Trump and considered a social network for conservatives.
“It’s not about picking one network to rule them all. That’s crazy Silicon Valley logic,” said Ethan Zuckerman, a public policy professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “In the future, you’re going to be a member of dozens of different communities, because as humans, that’s who we are.”
Twitter, which automatically responds to press inquiries with poop emojis, has not commented on the evolution of social networking. Mehta declined to comment, and TikTok did not respond to a request for comment. Snap, the maker of Snapchat, said that while the app has evolved, connecting people with friends and family remains its core function.
The shift to smaller, more focused networks was predicted years ago by social media luminaries such as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. I did.
In 2019, Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post that private messaging and small groups are the fastest growing areas of online communication. Dorsey, who stepped down as Twitter’s chief executive in 2021, has promoted so-called decentralized social networks that give people control over the content they see and the communities they join. He has recently been posting on his social media site, Nostr, based on this principle.
Over the past year, technologists and academics have also turned their attention to small-scale social networks. In a paper published last month titled “The Three-Legged Stool: A Manifesto for a Smaller, Dense Internet,” Zuckerman and other academics argue that future enterprises will need to build smaller networks at lower cost. We have outlined how to operate the system.
They also proposed creating an app that would essentially act as a Swiss Army knife of social networks, allowing users to switch between the sites they use, including Twitter, Mastodon, Reddit, and smaller networks. . One such app, Gobo, was developed by the MIT Media Lab and the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is scheduled to be released next month.
The challenge for users is finding new small networks because they are unknown. However, broader social networks such as Mastodon and Reddit often serve as gateways to smaller communities. For example, when signing up for Mastodon, people can choose a server from an extensive list, including those related to games, food, and activities.
Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko said users publish more than 1 billion posts a month across the community, and there are no algorithms or ads altering people’s feeds.
One of the great benefits of small networks is that they can create forums for specific communities, including marginalized people. Founded in 2011, Ahwaa is a social network for members of the LGBTQ community in countries around the Persian Gulf, where being gay is illegal. Other smaller networks focus on special interests, such as Letterboxd, an app for movie lovers to share their opinions about movies.
Smaller communities can also alleviate some of the social pressure to use social media, especially for young people. Over the past decade, Congressional hearings on the dangers of social media and more have revealed how many people have developed eating disorders from trying to live up to their “Instagram-perfect” photos or watching videos on TikTok. Stories have surfaced about teenagers.
The idea that a new social media site might become the only app for everyone is unrealistic, experts say. Once young people have finished experimenting with new networks, they move on to networks such as BeReal, a photo-sharing app that gained popularity among teenagers last year but now has millions of active users. Move on to the next network.
“They’re not going to be swayed by the first shiny platform that comes along,” Papacharissi said.
People’s online identities will become increasingly fragmented across multiple sites, she added. LinkedIn is the place to talk about your professional accomplishments. If you want to play video games with fellow gamers, there’s Discord. To discuss news articles, there’s Artifact.
“What we’re interested in is smaller groups of people communicating with each other about specific things,” Papacharisi said.
Even smaller networks may emerge. Harvard University, where Mr. Zuckerberg founded Facebook as a student in 2004, launched a research program last year focused on rebooting social media. This program helps students and others create new networks and experiment together.
One of the apps that emerged from the program, Minus, allows users to publish only 100 posts to their timeline for a lifetime. The idea is that unlike traditional social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, which use infinite scrolling interfaces to keep users engaged for as long as possible, people in an environment where the time they spend together is treated as a precious and finite resource. It’s about making people feel connected.
“This is a performance art experiment,” says Jonathan Zittlein, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard University who initiated the research effort. “As soon as you see it, you realize that it doesn’t have to be this way.”