For profit social media is totally possible. But a "healthy" version won't happen until govts reform social media such that Attention is demonitized or remonitized.
The post is right in that Attention has been monetized by social media companies. How much Attention you pay to something and how much Attention you receive both got monetized. They monetized Attention by adding View, Like, Share and Follower counts to everything.
And those counts started acting like Currency does in the real economy.
For example a key feature of Currency is that it acts as Store of Value. That value can then be exchanged at whatever time for something else in the real economy.
But in the real economy the Money Supply is regulated and controlled by the Central Bank. Why did that happen?
Before Central Banks (a very recent invention) showed up individual Banks printed their own currency. If they printed "too much" all kinds of strange phenomenon started emerging in the real world. For centuries no one connected that back to how much money was being printed. Because people had no idea what the level of the money supply was. Just like on social media there is no tracking or visible signal of the global Money supply and interest rate setting to control it.
So any time there was a price rising in the market, bank runs, bubbles in the market people would blame everything under the sun other than those responsible for money printing. After centuries of chaos Central Banks started emerging to control what individual Banks could do. Same story will repeat with Attention(which is acting just like a Currency).
This is why Elon and Trump rush to start their own Attention Banks cause they understand better than anyone being able to print a store of value that everyone else uses gives you power.
This is also why having China influencing the money supply (Attention) of US is via TikTok is non-optional.
So people eventually land on 2 paths forward - 1. Demonetize Attention - which is what the post is talking about
2. Remonetize Attention - where there is tracking of how much Attention anyone can receive, and how much Attention anyone can pay. Similar to what controls exist on Banks in what they lend and how much cash they need to hold. And Banks can then run for-profit without doing as much damage as they did when they controlled the money supply.
I miss chronological feeds the most.
Also Discord and Reddit are not too bad for more strangers with common topic based chat that isn't too algorithmic.
It’s hard to explain the difference between it and Twitter if you never used it, but the platform itself creates very different posting ideologies.
Chat groups in WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram etc fulfills part of it but that's only a subset since people in one chat groups know each other to a certain degree.
In the beginning when I left Facebook over ten years ago it felt alienating. Then it felt too quiet. Then whenever I met people, months apart or even years for distant family, I realised it didn’t matter. We connected like it had been days since our last meeting. Eventually more and more of them have also quit social networks entirely, though most use group chats for their immediate family — parents and kids to orchestrate activities etc.
Path[1] did that, but with a cap of 50, and then 150 (based on the Dunbar number of meaningful human connections one can retain). They had a crazy growth period but eventually went kaput.
(Before someone says I have rediscoered email -- I know email exists for a similar reason but not for instant messaging for a smartphone weilding generation)
The original Facebook Messenger and Google Talk both used XMPP, it has support for encryption and push notifications.... For a brief period, you could actually chat across ecosystems.
And it died, everyone closed up their ecosystem.
We do have matrix now, but it's still largely irrelevant, and doesn't really feel fully baked yet.
At this point, all the major companies have a huge vested interest in keeping things closed.
Without blue bubble lock-in, I, and quite a few people I know, would ditch increasingly mediocre iPhones for Android, so apple has to keep building iMessage exclusive features and has to avoid ever releasing an iMessage android app (most recently, Apple Invites, which integrates with iMessage cleanly and is impossible for third-party apps to integrate so neatly).
I expect Apple to continue to leverage "Apple Intelligence" as a feature that only integrates well with iMessage so that they can continue to lock users in, and keep the conversation as far away from open chat protocols as they can.
In the AI age, unencrypted textual conversations are a new source of training data, so Instagram, Twitter, and Google want to keep their own messaging systems to themselves.
I think this is more accurately
> And it was killed, everyone closed up their ecosystem.
Not to say there were not problems with XMPP or Matrix, "innovation" always feels slow because its federated, committee, opensource, etc.
... Really though, if you've got a whitepaper from 2020 about "building a protocol", and 6 years later you've got exactly 0 users actually using the protocol, it's maybe not even worth linking.
Writing a vague hand-wavy paper that says "We need a distributed graph, we'll use blockchain, there are IDs" is very easy.
Getting enough users that people can talk to each other, that's hard, and real usable applications help with that, while whitepapers do not.
Have any countries proposed legislation to help reign it in? What would that legislation look like? My main idea is to simply outlaw ML-based recommendation algorithms, but obviously that is not as simple as it sounds and is mostly based on looking fondly on the earlier days of social media, when I felt like it was making my life better instead of worse.
The largest social platforms right now are hardly showing any signs of slowdowns. The market signal is clear: this is what most people want and are fine with.
Perhaps a journaling-focused platform where social is a second-class aspect might succeed. You're documenting things for yourself anyway and if friends happen to see them and engage with them, that's an added bonus. Network effects would not matter here. In fact, this is how I used Path back in the day. I intentionally kept no friends on it and started using it like a journal, recording my thoughts, adding photos and checkins.
I hope meta doesn't ruin this feature.
It's Also available in signal I think
There are no good answers, because the reality is the next medium is probably quite different from the last. But yea personalised small group chat, feed, news makes sense.
Always. This broadcast ability is then a path to financial renumeration, which will see the rise of copy cats and another arms race to gather attention from people on the network.
Fundamentally, information / clout / something is resistant to being distributed equitably on information networks, especially online networks.
SilverElfin•3h ago