The end of the social network
www.economist.com/leaders/2024/02/01/the-end-of-the-social-network
What Jamie wrote
I've believed for a while that social media is a dead end. Actually, more than that, it is dangerous, addictive, and bad for you. It is today's cigarette. This section foretells that path.
The striking feature of the new social media is that they are no longer very social. Inspired by TikTok, apps like Facebook increasingly serve a diet of clips selected by artificial intelligence according to a user’s viewing behaviour, not their social connections. Meanwhile, people are posting less. The share of Americans who say they enjoy documenting their life online has fallen from 40% to 28% since 2020. Debate is moving to closed platforms, such as WhatsApp and Telegram.
This is exactly what happens when you set a bunch of people and algorithms with only one goal — capture peoples attention and time. That is the raw material monetized for Facebook's current $1,200,000,000,000 ($1.2 trillion, I thought it would be fun to put all the zeros there) valuation.
The part that nobody is talking about is the economics. Government regulation isn't the answer. Nor is tweaking an algorithm, unless we are going to decide that these companies should be forced to run less efficiently and less profitable than they could be run. That seems like a terrible idea. The fix is to bring economics into the solution, get people to pay, use micropayments for actions. All easily powered with Bitcoin Lightning or some other financial instrument ready today.
Ultimately that is also a dead end, because these platforms do not have enough value for people to pay. They will abandon in droves.
That is where it is different than cigarettes. Cigarettes people will pay a lot for. Social media is so hollow and useless nobody will even pay a penny.