Do We Still Need Social Media?
Threads launched with a bang — more than 100 million new users in the first week. After months of chaos at Twitter (now X) the team at Meta launched Threads. Closely integrated with Instagram and modeled on Twitter, the new service had what all the other Twitter-like services did not have — an instant network.
Bluesky, Koo, Mastodon, and others, had all tried to take the crown from Twitter, but they asked us to start from scratch again — no friends or followers. Because Threads would import your Instagram connections it would give everyone a flying start. The network effect is king.
But it hasn’t really taken off. Meta launched the app with only bare bones functionality — Threads did not even support hashtags at launch and still doesn’t today. There are no lists or any tools to help organize the news feed. It’s a minimally viable product and this could be a terminal mistake.
But here is my own suspicion — and this comes from someone that has been on social networks such as MySpace, FourSquare, Klout, Friendster, FriendsReunited, and Bebo all long before the current batch of popular services — I think the public is getting tired of social networking as it looks today.
What is the business model anyway? The service is an online tool that allows you to connect to friends and share thoughts and photos. In return the service watches everything you do, everything you click on, everything you ‘like’, and serves you adverts.
For most people it felt like a good deal — it is an apparently free service and it connects friends and family — and pets.
But it’s now a decade since Cambridge Analytica scooped up personal insights into 87 million Facebook users. They didn’t need to hack Facebook, they just built an app that would ask people fun questions.
Professor Shoshana Zuboff calls this ‘Surveillance Capitalism’ and she has long suggested that we are sleepwalking from a world of endless ads into an environment where democracy is impossible because we will no longer know truth from lies. Sounds familiar?
Our collective memory seems faulty. Facebook was so useful to most users that they ignored the concerns over data use and carried on sharing personal family photos online. In August 2023, a young reporter at the BBC made a documentary about her horror at Netflix identifying her as bisexual before she had even concluded this herself.
Who knew that the algorithms might be able to figure this out?
Now the Facebook business model is obvious to everyone because a visit to the app now resembles a dumpster fire. It’s like a visit to Woolworth’s — stores that look terrible and are full of junk yet people were full of fond nostalgia for them once they were closed down (in the UK anyway).
Apple has ruined the business model for many of the social networks by closing down information sharing between apps. In 2021, Apple started asking users ‘is it OK for this app to share your personal information with other apps?’ Advertisers relied on this data to target people. Google soon followed in 2022, so their Android system offers users the same option.
If you have said ‘no’ every time an app asks to share your information then one effect will be that the advertising you see on your apps is random. It’s like driving down a main road and seeing the poster ads at the side of the road— everyone sees the same advertising.
Advertisers argue that targeted ads are better for everyone, because the advertiser gets more value from their ad spend and the user only sees ‘relevant ads.’ We all know the reality though. You search Google for a pair of Crocs only to find that every single app is now trying to sell you Crocs — EVEN IF YOU HAVE ALREADY BOUGHT THEM!
I still use a number of social networks, but I’m becoming increasingly disillusioned by all of them. I can’t completely disengage as Facebook is my primary link to my parents and LinkedIn remains important for work, but all of them have issues today:
Facebook: it’s entirely boomer territory now with younger users only there to stay connected to older family members. This seems to be the only purpose for what was once the most important social network.
Twitter/X: has been ruined by Elon Musk. His ‘free speech’ doctrine eliminated most trust and safety mechanisms. Now the abuse is constant. I’m endlessly finding abusive ‘white power’ messages that I can’t believe are openly published by people in 2023. Twitter used to be essential for interactions with journalists, but today I only ever seem to talk about British history there — it has no useful function for any companies I work with today. I can’t see any path to profitability on the scale Musk talks about — a once essential app has lost relevance.
Instagram: for a long time the cool visual alternative to Facebook, but now the recommendation algorithm has been skewed so only promoted posts get any visibility. I can spend hours shooting and editing an interesting drone video only to see nobody outside my family circle noticing it. Instagram has been overrun with people who believe that posting photos on a social network is a ‘career’ — hence all the ‘travel experts’ that build a loyal audience for their regular bikini photos rather than travel advice.
Threads: it’s still too soon to tell if it will work. If they can add the missing functionality that helps to organize the feed then maybe it has a future. It is already a more positive environment than Twitter — although that is not difficult.
LinkedIn: the business network of choice — owned by Microsoft. It has been essential for networking for many years, but now faces challenges. Chinese spies have been using the network to access British government employees and it has turned into a constant drip-drip-drip of feel-good status updates. Check your LinkedIn feed today and you are likely to find how life-affirming it is to walk your dog, how innovation requires you to always learn from your mistakes, how the homeless guy you bought a coffee for was actually your new boss, and other meaningless nonsense aimed at helping stressed workers feel better about their life.
Is Threads the answer?
Maybe, but in my opinion people are no longer looking for an alternative to Twitter, they are looking for a reason why they need it in the first place. The launch of Threads has assumed that we are all desperate to participate in an online town hall, but most of us have been doing it for over a decade now and we are tired.
Tired of the ads, tired of the lack of privacy, and tired of the abuse.
I used to organize parties for Twitter users. They were full of interesting people from different backgrounds all sharing ideas. I can remember in the months before the 2010 UK General Election we had one ‘tweetup’ where the parliamentary candidates for the Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat, and Green parties all showed up — at the same event.
It feels like another time and place.
What is really odd though is that social networking in China is light years ahead of this. The main Chinese services combine payment, messaging, and social network status updates all in one. This is apparently why Elon Musk has renamed Twitter — he sees X as the future ‘everything app.’
Mark Zuckerberg already has most of this and yet he has poured billions into a Metaverse that nobody wants. WhatsApp already offers messaging, access to local businesses for e-commerce, payment from the app, and limited status updates. It is almost the ‘everything app’ already, yet Meta focuses their attention on half-built Twitter rivals.
A recent book by Jeff Jarvis argues that we are entering a post-Gutenberg age. A society of oral traditions was fundamentally reshaped by the printed word, but this period was only a parenthesis. We are now entering a time where we can no longer rely on the veracity of what we read online. The ability of social media to allow anyone, anywhere, to publish anything at anytime has been a key enabler in this.
Social media used to be essential. It has been how we have connected to friends and family since the 2000s, but has it reached the end of the road or is this just the beginning of a new age where we can no longer rely on anything we see published?
In any case, what can replace it now? Maybe Jimmy Wales has the answer?
