Nearly 20 years ago, Facebook exploded on college campuses as a place for students to keep in touch. Then came Twitter, where people posted what they had for breakfast, and Instagram, where friends shared photos to keep up with their activities.
Today, the Instagram and Facebook feeds are full of ads and sponsored posts. TikTok and Snapchat are full of videos of influencers promoting dish soaps and dating apps. And soon, the Twitter posts that get the most visibility will come mostly from subscribers who pay for exposure.
In many ways, social media is becoming less social.
The change has implications for large social media companies and the way people interact digitally.. But it also raises questions about a core idea: the online platform. For years, the notion of an all-in-one public place where people spent most of their time reigned supreme. But as the big social networks prioritized connecting people with brands over connecting them with other people, some users began seeking out community-oriented sites and apps dedicated to specific hobbies and topics.
“Platforms as we knew them are over,” said Zizi Papacharissi, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The change helps explain why some social media companies, which still have billions of users and generate billions of dollars in revenue, are now exploring new avenues of business. Twitter, owned by Elon Musk, has been pushing people and brands to pay $8 to $1,000 a month to become subscribers. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is moving into the immersive online world of the metaverse.
Some users are now gravitating towards smaller, more focused sites. These include Mastodon, which is essentially a Twitter clone divided into communities; Nextdoor, a social network for neighbors to discuss issues like local potholes; and apps like Truth Social, which was started by former President Donald J. Trump and seen as a social network for conservatives.
“It’s not about electing one network to rule them all — that’s crazy Silicon Valley logic,” said Ethan Zuckerman, a professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “The future is that you are a member of dozens of different communities, because as human beings, that’s how we are.”
Twitter did not comment on the evolution of social networks. Meta declined to comment and TikTok did not respond. Snap, creator of Snapchat, said that while his app had evolved, connecting people with friends and family was still his primary function.
Over the past year, technologists and academics have also been focusing on smaller social networks. In a recent article titled “The Three-Legged Stool: A Manifesto for a Smaller, Denser Internet,” Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, and others described how companies of the future could run small networks at low cost.
They also suggested creating an app that allows people to switch between the sites they use. One of those apps, called Gobo and developed by the MIT Media Lab and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will launch this month.
The tricky part for users is finding the small networks because they are not known. But larger social networks, like Mastodon or Reddit, often act as a gateway to smaller communities. By signing up to Mastodon, people can choose a server from an extensive list, including those related to gaming, food, and activism.
Eugen Rochko, chief executive of Mastodon, said users were posting more than a billion posts a month and there were no algorithms or ads messing with people’s feeds.
One benefit of small networks, like Letterboxd, an app for movie enthusiasts to share their thoughts on movies, is that they target special interests.
Smaller communities can also take some of the social pressure off social media use, especially for younger people. Over the past decade, stories have emerged, including in US congressional hearings, about teens developing eating disorders after trying to live up to the “Instagram-perfect” photos and watching videos on TikTok.
The idea that a new social networking site could become the one app for everyone seems unrealistic, experts say. When young people are done experimenting with a new network — like BeReal, the photo-sharing app that was popular with teens last year but is now losing millions of active users — they move on to the next.
More small networks are likely to come. Last year, Harvard University, where Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004 while he was a student, launched a research program dedicated to rebooting social media. The program helps students and others create and experiment with new networks together.
One app that emerged, Minus, allows users to post only 100 posts in a lifetime. The idea is to make people feel connected in an environment where their time together is seen as a precious and finite resource, unlike traditional social networks.
“It’s an experiment in performance art,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard who started the research initiative. “It’s the kind of thing that, as soon as you see it, it doesn’t have to be that way.”
By: BRIAN X CHEN
BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/technology/personaltech/tiktok-twitter-facebook-social.html, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-05-19 13:00:08
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