Articles tagged as "social-media"

While it’s hard to put a pin on exactly when things started to shift, it is somewhere between when Meta introduced the metaverse, and when Twitter became X. The last two years have seen a rapid increase in turbulence, with users moving from service to service trying to find a fresh start. Perhaps it is the effort that this involves, or the reflection on what matters in a social network in the first place, but the vibes have shifted with social media as an entire product category. Executives have pivoted from racing to deliver features that users want, to trying to convince a userbase that they need the new features being announced. Services have begun to mimic one another in an effort to be the one app that people can go for everything; it isn’t working, and what was once shiny and new is beginning to tarnish.

Over the past few months, I finished Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. Solidly in the self-help category, this book was more a reminder than a lesson, but one important takeaway that I had was around the paradox of choice. Even in a world of abundance, we still face the key constraint of time, and this single element of our lives inherently limits the scope of what we can achieve. The term “paradox of choice”, first popularized by Barry Schwartz in a book by the same name, has even more significance in a world that is digital, fast-paced, and rooted increasingly on comparison and expectation. We all know and recognize that it impossible to live a perfect life, yet we may be tempted to maximize our life to the best of our ability. We do this against a backdrop that feels like a never-ending series of choices. I could be doing so many things right now, how can I possibly know that writing a blog post is the best action to take.

Those that know me would describe me as a privacy-conscious person. When I talk to many people about privacy, they shutter at the thought of having to give up the connection they value with their friends online, or about not having a public presence on the internet. I get it, having an online presence in 2023 is all but essential for many careers, and opens the doors to new opportunities at a global scale. Due to the extensive data collection engaged in by almost all big tech companies, we have come to equivocate having such a public presence with giving up our privacy. I’m hoping to illustrate here that this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.

With the ubiquity of “social” sites in 2023, it is easy to forget that the world did not always operate with an omnipresent online mirror as a backdrop. To get to where we are today, the internet, and the behaviours adopted by society since its advent, had to take shape one piece at a time. Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz is the story of that journey, making it a great read to see repeating cycles of platform booms and busts that have delighted users, tormented creators, and lead to the birth of many techno-billionaires.

Social media seems to be undergoing a paradigm shift. As interest rates rise and further user growth becomes more allusive, many companies have been trying different tactics in order to increase profits. In the case of Twitter, this may be to breakeven. In the case of Meta, this is driven by being a large public company with demanding shareholders. In the case of Reddit, it seems to be a combination of the two. Regardless of the underlying reasons, one thing is for certain, users and spin off projects that ultimately depend on the underlying social network are beginning to feel the changes acutely.