About 20 years ago, Facebook exploded on college campuses as a way for students to stay in touch. Then came Twitter, where people posted about what they had for breakfast, and Instagram, where friends shared photos and kept up to date with each other.
Today, Instagram and Facebook feeds are full of ads and sponsored posts. TikTok and Snapchat are full of influencer videos promoting dish soap and dating apps. And soon, the most high-profile Twitter posts will come from subscribers paying for exposure and other perks.
Social media is becoming anti-social in many ways. As the biggest sites become more and more “corporatized”, it’s getting harder and harder to see posts where people update their friends and family about their lives every year. Instead of seeing messages and photos from friends and relatives about vacations and fancy dinners, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and Snapchat users are paying for professional content that pays brands, influencers, and other placements. often see.
This change will affect large social networking companies and the way people interact with each other digitally. But questions also arise about the core idea, the online platform. For years, the concept of platforms—all-in-one public sites where people spend most of their time—has dominated. However, as large social networks have prioritized connecting people with brands over connecting people with other people, some users have created communities dedicated to particular interests and issues. I started looking for oriented sites and apps.
Gigi Papachalissi, professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who teaches a course on social media, said: “They live beyond their usefulness.”
This shift helps explain why some social networking companies, which continue to serve billions of users and generate billions of dollars in revenue, are now looking for new avenues of business. . Owned by Elon Musk, Twitter has been encouraging people and brands to pay from $8 a month to $1,000 for him to become a subscriber. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is venturing into the immersive online world of the so-called Metaverse.
For users, this means that some users gravitate to smaller, more specialized sites instead of spending all their time on one or a few big social networks. These include Mastodon, which is essentially a Twitter clone sliced into communities. Nextdoor is a social network for neighbors to sympathize with everyday issues such as local potholes. Apps like Truth Social, started by former President Donald J. Trump, are seen as social networks for conservatives.
Ethan Zuckerman, professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said: “The future is that you will be a member of dozens of different communities because, as humans, that’s how we do it.”
Twitter, which automatically responds to press inquiries with a poop emoji, has not commented on the evolution of social networking. Meta declined to comment and TikTok did not respond to a request for comment. The Snapchat maker says that even though the app has evolved, connecting people with friends and family is still a primary function of Snap.
Social media luminaries such as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey predicted the shift to smaller, more focused networks years ago.
In 2019, Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post: Private messages and small groups was the fastest growing segment of online communications. Dorsey, who stepped down as Twitter CEO in 2021, has promoted a so-called decentralized social network that gives people control over what they see and the communities they engage with.he recently posted Nostlea social media site based on this principle.
In the last year, technologists and academics have also turned their attention to smaller social networks.of paper Titled “The Three-Legged Stool: A Manifesto for a Smaller, Denser Internet,” published last month, Zuckerman and other academics outline how future enterprises will operate smaller networks at lower costs. I’m here.
They also suggested creating an app that essentially acts as a Swiss Army knife of social networks by allowing you to switch between the sites you use: Twitter, Mastodon, Reddit, and smaller networks. .One such app called Burdock It was developed by the MIT Media Lab and will be released next month.
The tricky part for users is finding new smaller networks. But broader social networks such as Mastodon and Reddit often act as gateways to smaller communities.For example, when people sign up for Mastodon, they choose the server as extensive listincluding those related to games, food, and activities.
Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko said users publish more than 1 billion posts per month across the community and there are no algorithms or ads altering users’ feeds. .
One of the main advantages of small networks is the ability to create forums for specific communities, including marginalized people. hourwas founded in 2011 and is a social network for members of the LGBTQ community in the Persian Gulf States, where being gay is considered illegal.Other small networks letter boxis an app for movie lovers to share their opinions on movies, focused on specific interests.
Smaller communities can also reduce social pressure to use social media. Especially for young people. Her teen developing an eating disorder in the last decade, including congressional hearings on the dangers of social media, trying to make “Instagram-perfect” photos or watching videos on TikTok came up with a story about
According to experts, the idea of a new social media site coming out and becoming one app for everyone is unrealistic. As young people finish experimenting with new networks, BeReal, for example, is a photo-sharing app that gained popularity among teens last year but is now losing millions of active users. They move on to the next network.
“They won’t be swayed by the first shiny platform,” said Papacharisi.
People’s online identities will become increasingly fragmented across multiple sites, she added. If you’re talking about professional achievements, you have LinkedIn. To play video games with fellow gamers, there’s Discord. For discussing news articles, there is Artifact.
“We’re interested in small groups of people communicating with each other about specific things,” Papacharissi says.
There may be more small networks. Last year, Harvard University, where Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004 while he was a student, launched a research program aimed at rebooting social media. This program helps students create and experiment with new networks together.
One app born from the program, minus, users can only publish 100 posts to their timeline in their lifetime. Rather than using infinite scrolling interfaces to keep users engaged for as long as possible, traditional social networks such as Facebook and Twitter encourage people to connect in an environment where time together is treated as a precious and finite resource. It’s meant to make you feel.
“This is a performance art experiment,” says Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard University who initiated the research initiative. “As soon as you see it, it doesn’t have to be like this.”
