Nearly two decades ago, Facebook exploded
on college campuses as a site for students to stay in touch. Then came Twitter,
where people posted about what they had for breakfast, and Instagram, where
friends shared photos to keep up with one another.
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Today, Instagram and Facebook feeds are
full of ads and sponsored posts. TikTok and Snapchat are stuffed with videos
from influencers promoting dish soaps and dating apps. And soon, Twitter posts
that gain the most visibility will come mostly from subscribers who pay for the
exposure and other perks.
Social media is, in many ways, becoming
less social. The kinds of posts where people update friends and family about
their lives have become harder to see over the years as the biggest sites have
become increasingly “corporatized.” Instead of seeing messages and photos from
friends and relatives about their holidays or fancy dinners, users of
Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and Snapchat now often view
professionalized content from brands, influencers and others that pay for
placement.
The change has implications for large
social networking companies and how people interact with one another digitally.
But it also raises questions about a core idea: the online platform. For years,
the notion of a platform — an all-in-one, public-facing site where people spent
most of their time — reigned supreme. But as big social networks made
connecting people with brands a priority over connecting them with other
people, some users have started seeking community-oriented sites and apps
devoted to specific hobbies and issues.
“Platforms as we knew them are over,” said
Zizi Papacharissi, a communications professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago,
who teaches courses on social media. “They have outlived their utility.”
The shift helps explain why some social
networking companies, which continue to have billions of users and pull in
billions of dollars in revenue, are now exploring new avenues of business.
Twitter, which is owned by Elon Musk, has been pushing people and brands to pay
$8 to $1,000 a month to become subscribers. Meta, the parent company of
Facebook and Instagram, is moving into the immersive online world of the so-called
metaverse.
For users, this means that instead of
spending all their time on one or a few big social networks, some are
gravitating toward smaller, more focused sites. These include Mastodon, which
is essentially a Twitter clone sliced into communities; Nextdoor, a social
network for neighbors to commiserate about quotidian issues like local
potholes; and apps like Truth Social, which was started by former US president
Donald Trump and is viewed as a social network for conservatives.
“It’s not about choosing one network to
rule them all — that is crazy Silicon Valley logic,” said Ethan Zuckerman, a
professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “The
future is that you’re a member of dozens of different communities, because as
human beings, that’s how we are.”
Twitter, which automatically responds to
press inquiries with a poop emoji, did not have a comment about the evolution
of social networking. Meta declined to comment, and TikTok did not respond to a
request for comment. Snap, the maker of Snapchat, said that although its app
had evolved, connecting people with their friends and family remained its
primary function.
“Platforms as we knew them are over.”
A shift to smaller, more focused networks
was predicted years ago by some of social media’s biggest names, including Mark
Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, and Jack Dorsey, a founder of Twitter.
In 2019, Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook
post that private messaging and small groups were the fastest-growing areas of
online communication. Dorsey, who stepped down as Twitter’s chief executive in
2021, has pushed for so-called decentralized social networks that give people
control over the content they see and the communities they engage with. He has
recently been posting on Nostr, a social media site based on this principle.
The tricky part for users is finding the
newer, small networks because they are obscure. But broader social networks,
like Mastodon or Reddit, often act as a gateway to smaller communities. When
signing up for Mastodon, for example, people can choose a server from an
extensive list, including those related to gaming, food, and activism.
Eugen Rochko, Mastodon’s chief executive,
said users were publishing more than 1 billion posts a month across its
communities and that there were no algorithms or ads altering people’s feeds.
Smaller communities can also relieve some
social pressure of using social media, especially for younger people. Over the
past decade, stories have emerged — including in congressional hearings about
the dangers of social media — about teenagers developing eating disorders after
trying to live up to “Instagram perfect” photos and through watching videos on
TikTok.
The idea that a new social media site might
come along to be the one app for everyone appears unrealistic, experts say.
When young people are done experimenting with a new network — such as BeReal,
the photo-sharing app that was popular among teenagers last year but is now
hemorrhaging millions of active users — they move on to the next one.
“They’re not going to be swayed by the
first shiny platform that comes along,” Papacharissi said.
People’s online identities will become
increasingly fragmented among multiple sites, she added. For talking about
professional accomplishments, there’s LinkedIn. For playing video games with
fellow gamers, there’s Discord. For discussing news stories, there’s Artifact.
“What we’re interested in is smaller groups
of people who are communicating with each other about specific things,”
Papacharissi said.
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