I think you touch on an interesting issue. If I look at myself and my life, or at my friends and acquaintances and their lives, there seems to some inherent transience and change in my and their social world. This change can be prompted by entering new stages of life, or moving from one place to another, or simply a result of a changing environment. But it's there. I think for a large amount of people, maybe the majority, social life always changes over time.
This, of course, can pose (and has posed) a problem for companies that have 'social' as their core mechanism. Where companies like Apple can rely to a certain degree on the continuity of lifestyle of an Apple customer (well-off, relatively, for one), 'social companies' have to deal with a constantly shifting landscape.
If such a company aims at a particular demographic, they face the problem that merely being popular among another demographic (previous generation) is a big reason for them to be 'uncool' (snapchat/facebook).
I don't know if there are companies that instead focus on a particular generation, but perhaps that'd be an interesting business model. Grow with your customers.
I would fully expect this trend to continue - each new generational cohort will latch onto a new social network that is separate from the ones their lame parents and older siblings use.
This poses a massive institutional risk to any social network. They either need to aggressively pump out new brands to try and capture that themselves, or buy promising startups, but it wouldn't be too difficult to fail at both of those and just completely skip a generation. A few of those misses added up could be a terminal failure.
That was what I said about Facebook when they came out (I'd been an early user of LiveJournal and AIM, a bunch of my friends were on MySpace, and I saw people migrating en masse between social platforms as they got bored with the previous one). I figured that the biggest risk to them wasn't irrelevance, it was that someone newer & hotter would come along.
Turns out I was right - much of the Instagram and SnapChat usage is coming out of the pool of attention that previously belonged to Facebook - but the cycle time seems to be ~10 years, and getting longer with each generation of social software. If the history of mass culture & mass consumerism repeats itself, eventually the cycle time will be greater than a generation - forms of social interaction for the baby boomers stayed roughly constant for their whole lifetime. At that point it's meaningless to talk about shifts to the next big thing, because we'll all be dead before they happen.
Progressive stratification does not imply companies will disappear. We might well end in a situation where people "graduate" from one social network to the next as they get older. So preteens will start on Snapchat, move to Instagram when going to high school, then Twitter and/or dating networks in college, LinkedIn as they hit the job market, and eventually Facebook when settling down.
Most of our cultural output (books, films etc) works like that already.
Here are some trends that could drive a fundamental shift in social media:
1) Trust is the scarcest element in social media today. Any social media company that is built on advertising will never have the trust of a subscription-based social media company. Companies that address scarcity tend to be successful.
2) What's no longer scarce: the underpinning technologies of social media: capturing and displaying photos and videos on multiple types of devices, recommending new social connections and posts. What was cutting-edge in 2004 is now well-known.
3) Meanwhile, users are getting increasing used to paying for subscriptions: app stores, streaming services, SaaS applications, cloud services, etc.
4) Connecting socially with others is a basic human need. This only increases as some kinds of jobs can be done from anywhere, and friends relocate far away.
5) As Facebook/Meta and others pursue the novelty-driven user experience of TikTok -- "show me what's interesting from people I don't know" -- it creates room for companies that want to get back to meeting the need for keeping in touch with friends and family, even when remote.
6) Large tech fortunes have created a donor class focused on legacy, not profit. Example: MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos. Or Craig Newmark, of Craigslist.
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Put all these together, and it seems like new social media companies could be created along the following lines:
1) Mission-focused. Focus on social connection first, not whatever drives the most revenue. In other words, don't get pulled into the latest fads, as Facebook is doing with TikTok.
2) Subscription business model. This eliminates the conflicts of interest that drives Facebook's trust-eroding privacy practices. Again -- trust is the scarcest element.
3) Subscriber-owned business. Each subscriber owns a portion of the company, and thus the company has a fiduciary, legal obligation to protect their interests. This is similar to what Vanguard does -- investors each own a portion of the company -- which forces Vanguard to act in their interests. It's the opposite of Facebook/Meta's ownership structure, where Mark Zuckerberg controls 90% of class B shares, giving him control over the company. [1]
4) To fix the cold-start problem [2] inherent in building a business with network effects, make the service free until it gets to a critical mass of subscribers. We can debate if critical mass is 10 million users, 100M, 1B, or some other measure. But be transparent about the threshold, and the subscription price once its hit. Speaking of price...
5) Keep entry level prices low to be point of being negligible for the vast majority of users. Maybe one dollar a month. Whatever it is, keep it lower than most other subscription services in order to encourage adoption, but not to shift back to the problematic ad-driven model.
6) A very low subscription price, at scale, can fund innovation. 100M users at $1/month is $1.2 billion per year. That's enough to pay cloud infrastructure and the engineers to build and run apps. Back-of-the-envelope path: suppose for argument's sake that half of that, $600M, goes towards cloud service providers. That's approaching the $1B/year that Netflix spends. The other $600M could fund 2000 engineers at $300k/year/engineer. That's enough to build a great deal of capabilities and bring them to emerging platforms (like AR glasses, cars, IoT/smart home...).
7) A business like this probably might not attract traditional venture capital funding. Even if every one of Facebook's 3 billion users all switched to this business and paid 1 USD/month, that would be $36B per year. That's well short of Facebook's $120B/year [5]. Who might fund it? A set of mission-driven investors, who wants their legacy to include a trusted, self-sustaining organization that socially connects the world. Craig Newmark could be one such investor (at least advisor), having built one such Internet institution (Craigslist) that facilitates community and commerce in an economically-sustaining manner. But there could be many other investors as well. Again, the technologic acumen and capital required aren't what's scarce; trust is.
My thought: just because social attitudes change and something develops a stigma doesn't mean that thing won't still be commercially successful for a long, long time. Television, fast food and sugary drinks, over-sized cars, telemarketing...
It might be that in 5 years, Facebook will be as popular in the Bay Area as McDonald's is. I'm not sure that in that scenario Facebook won't still be a strong business.
Don't get me wrong: I think we're due for a cultural backlash against the kind of "information sugar" Facebook embodies. But I'm skeptical about how much such a backlash would really accomplish.
Maybe you'll see some kind of "up-market" services emerge that cater to new tastes (in this case: greater value placed on limited distraction/sustained attention). What is the Whole Foods Market in this area?
There is certainly a dynamic with social sites that the 'next generation' want to use something new - just like with music genres - you can't be cool indefinitely.
The next generation may reject social altogether - and not want to be tracked and recorded 24/7.
This article operates on the premise that companies can keep their users around indefinitely, if only they treat them with respect. I am not sure that's true in the case of social media companies (and probably other types of companies, too). I think there's an element of fashion to it. Companies go out of fashion. If you're in Gen Z, it's more fashionable right now to use Tiktok than it is to use Instagram. It's still more fashionable to use Instagram than it is to use Facebook.
How fashionable these platforms are seem to be inversely correlated with how deeply they've penetrated society. Once a teenager sees that her grandma is using Facebook, it starts losing its special luster.
That's not to say that shitty product choices don't also play a factor, but I have a feeling that it's a smaller factor than fashion at the end of the day.
Sorry, but 'Social' isn't going anywhere. There will continue to be different iterations of Social applications and technologies, but the core will remain. Humans are a social species. This will not change any time soon. Some have a vision of the future where humans are different and technology changes them. All I have seen is humans adapting technology and the world to what they are. The more you align the technology you create with what humans already are, or want, (including design, functions, and features) the more successful and adopted it will be.
Right. Everything is social now. The article's argument seems to be a no true scotsman fallacy. Of course there aren't any new facebook clones right now, why create one? But we've seen instagram grow like crazy (which is why FB bought them) and snapchat and twitch and kik and medium and whatsapp and slack, and so on. Things don't have to look exactly like what the previous generation looked like to fill the same ecological niche. Just look at smartphones and tablets (once derided as toys) as people's daily communication devices versus laptops, desktops, and telephones. Times change.
Don't ask "where are the things that look exactly like X social media platform but with different details" (e.g. facebook versus google+) instead ask "where are people spending their social time these days, is it in the same places it's always been or are new places becoming more popular?".
Also, to add on to your point about "sub-niches" one thing that facebook lacks is character, even though one of the primary organizing principles for social spaces is unique character and shared interest (look at HN, for example). People organize socially around interests. One easy way to take on a monolith like facebook is to take a stand, carve out a niche, have a unique character and build a sub-niche there.
A lot of what goes on with social media is a reflection of society, in my opinion. Can a new approach fix that?
The only thing I can think of is targeting different users by various segments (which isn't new). E.g. HN is mostly for people that like tech and the startup scene.
Is it so much the individual maturing, and not just the platform itself losing relevance? The whole nature of these social platforms seems to be entirely ephemeral - they spread by word of mouth because others are using it. The problem comes in when you consider that a person isn't going to use more than 2 or 3 of these platforms. So as soon as a new platform is released, older platforms are guaranteed to lose users even if the new platform is worse, as it will take a number of weeks or months for a typical user to understand and then reject the new platform. During that time, the older platform isn't being used.
This exact issue seems to apply to online gaming as well, so this isn't some new discovery of human behavior. There are some 'big' games (warcraft, cod) that retain their users even after a decade - but they do this by reinventing themselves and recreating their products constantly. I think social media and gaming are similar enough for a lot of these behavior traits to apply to social media also - which means the correct approach is to redesign/improve core parts of your social platform at least once a year to keep it relevant.
I wonder where the future of 'social' is going. If history is any guide, Facebook will soon be out of the 'cool' factor and younger, nimbler startups with take over. It's not clear to me though what kind of experience these will provide, i.e., what features will attract the next generation and form that critical mass. I do like the social app ecosystem to be fragmented though, it makes for good options and interesting new ideas to be tested.
I'd say that's certainly part of it. Even just escaping the hordes to stand out in a new place/way would be important to people. Think about how strongly teenagers define themselves with clothing and music to carve out a niche.
Beyond that, I think social networks are heavily reliant on active creators. If those people feel like minnows amongst the masses and grandmas, they're more likely to strike out in new territory whether it's a fresh network or mode of creating. Become a bigger fish in a smaller pond. Which leaves behind less-active users or people who've found reward/profit on the previous platform, making that platform start to feel more like TV than a mingling, social space.
That is the key transition. Once they start greying, users will perceive any new platform as unwelcome change. But until then, you have to eventually give them better reasons for staying than just "this is younger and wilder than that other thing".
Facebook's ticket for growing up in lockstep with their core user generation was coordination and communication for loosely coupled groups with some real life connection. People who move into a new development, the "parent cohort" around a daycare class, new hires who joined a company at roughly the same time and so on. All that is young adult stuff that fits well with what Facebook offers.
Nonpermanent asynchronous video messaging? If interpersonal exchange is always a blend between information propagation and entertainment, Snapchat seems dangerously lopsided towards entertainment. That is good for getting people excited (quick growth), but probably not so good for long term retention. MySpace was similar.
The only problem is that you are assuming continual growth. While they are the cool place to be now, as soon as the become the uncool place to be, then they will be screwed.
If I was facebook, I would be very afraid of this happening. I understand facebook has some patents on the news feed an other minor aspects of facebook, but their basic feature set is somewhat small, but reproducible.
I think that any social platform faces the problem, that people will jump ship to what ever they think is cooler. Look at Myspace, that was hugely popular and suddenly it become the uncool place to be and then everyone and their moms, jumped ship to facebook. History is bound to repeat itself.
I am part of a micro social network - a conversation group on WhatsApp on the iPhone. The name of the group changes occasionally but the members stay the same, mostly close friends and family, and everybody understands how it works. It would probably feel different if we tried to do it on Path or FamilyLeaf, or whatever other service pops up to commoditise the experience or connecting with people close to you. I wondered how long it would take for companies to arise out of this natural phenomenon, as Facebook becomes a hardened institution. I've been convinced for a while that new social networks will be smaller, yet more meaningful. I guess I need to look for the next move for my killer startup.
I had in mind more of a societal shift that makes FB/IG/etc. deeply uncool. Maybe living a super secretive life, never sharing anything, becomes the counterculture of the 2040s.
I just can’t imagine young people (main drivers of social media) are going to be happy with circa 2005 social media forever.
A pattern that has occurred repeatedly with many SoMe companies over the last decade is highly relevant to a discussion about the new SoMe company that allegedly solves all the problems of previous social media. It's not just needless negativity.
I remember moving to FB when my mom joined MySpace... I've since straight up quit social media, but I know folks that moved on to IG/Snap so they could broadcast content they didn't want certain social groups to see via FB. Of course now those social groups are joining the newer mediums.
Maybe social media platforms are inherently cyclical? At least under the "maximum growth" mindset:
* Innovators develop new platforms because they're unhappy with the old
* Early adopters like the new platform's features or community
* If it's good enough, the early majority slowly follows as knowledge disseminates
* New features and narratives are developed to attract the late majority and laggards
* The presence of those people, and tactics used to attract them, disenfranchise the early adopters
* Unhappiness rises until a new digital eden is discovered. Then the cycle repeats
This, of course, can pose (and has posed) a problem for companies that have 'social' as their core mechanism. Where companies like Apple can rely to a certain degree on the continuity of lifestyle of an Apple customer (well-off, relatively, for one), 'social companies' have to deal with a constantly shifting landscape.
If such a company aims at a particular demographic, they face the problem that merely being popular among another demographic (previous generation) is a big reason for them to be 'uncool' (snapchat/facebook).
I don't know if there are companies that instead focus on a particular generation, but perhaps that'd be an interesting business model. Grow with your customers.
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