What is Social Media?

I didn’t expect to listen to a 6 hour long podcast about Meta, but I did and the question that has stuck in my mind since listening is; What is social media in 2024?

From MySpace to TikTok

Social media used to be sites where people within your real-life social network (and some guy named Tom) would post content to be consumed by friends and family, but nowadays we’re largely consuming content from outside of our actual social network; content posted by strangers or even non-humans like brands and corporations.

Of course, these “non-humans” are actually people posing as brands, but why the heck is REI asking me what my plans are this weekend?

Follow r/WinchellHouse on Reddit

Social media is dead. Long live content!

My feeling is that Instagram, Facebook, X, Bluesky, etc. are now simply Content Feeds. Their goal is to serve you content, regardless of where it’s from, that you’ll find relevant and engaging. That’s it.

Whether they determine which content to serve you using AI or human curation, it doesn’t matter. The point is the content is no longer “social”.

Anti-Social Social Networking

So if all that matters is content, regardless of where it’s from, what’s the point of “friending” anyone or connecting with anyone on these platforms?

There’s three reasons:

One) friending someone on any of these Content Feeds is largely to tell the algorithms explicitly, “I want more content like the content this account posts”, but think about how incredibly advanced these algorithms are. Even if I don’t follow the REI account for example, I guarantee that the algorithms, at some point, would learn me well enough to serve me REI content since it’ll have determined that I love hiking and camping.

Two) friending someone is an artifact from a time when these sites were meant to be social. I believe that as time goes on, less and less sites/apps will ask you to follow anyone or anything and they’ll simply just know what content to show you based on millions of pieces of data that we feed these algorithms unknowingly as we go through life doing Google searches and making purchases.

Three) friending someone allows you to more easily share the content that you find engaging with them. Zuckerberg confirms this by saying the social behavior he’s seeing is users sharing content with each other and using that content to prompt a discussion (socializing). What I’m curious to see is if apps will continue to create their own messaging platforms or if the messaging platforms that already exist at the OS level will become ubiquitous enough that we won’t need platform specific messaging solutions.

Listen to Meta episode from Acquired here: