The Post Social Network Internet

The coming re-fragmentation of online discourse

The big social networks seem, to me, to be “dying”, or, perhaps more accurately - they seem to be morphing into “Entertainment Networks.”  

In other words, they are moving away from the idea of “follow your friends”, with a feed of content showing you what your real friends are doing and are becoming, instead, television networks - 21st century style.  TikTok isn’t really a social network, it’s a television network that makes a new and different channel for every user.  Each channel uses AI algorithms to select the best videos for you specifically from across TikTok.  By “best videos” I mean, the ones that the algorithm has determined will keep you watching and keep TikTok selling ad space.  If  20th century television was addictive,  the new “television”, TikTok-style, is crack.

What these new networks have in common is that, for the most part, they have nothing to do with who you follow, who follows you, or who your friends are.  And this model is succeeding wildly.

Instagram, Facebook and all the other “old” social networks I know of are rushing to copy TikTok, because, from the network owner’s point of view - it’s much more lucrative to them if they can addict you to their crack and show you lots of ads.  The antics of your close friends will never hook you the way AI-assisted entertainment content will.  You might say you want a chronological feed of posts only by people you follow, but the machine uses eye tracking to record where your eyes actually look, and the algorithm cares more about what you actually watch, than what you tell it you want via other signals, such as follows.

But, even so, sometimes, you do actually want to connect with friends, or with colleagues, or with people who have like-minded interests.  So will you do when the social networks complete their metamorphosis?  Where will you turn to connect with other humans when you’re not simply looking for mostly mindless entertainment?

In this respect, I actually think the early internet, what we now sometimes call the “old internet”, was better.  

If you think about it, we’ve always had “social networks”, they just weren’t huge, monolithic walled gardens that everyone used.  We had a fragmented scattering of smaller, focused, and in many ways better forums, sites, apps, and even UseNet topics.  We had IRC chatrooms.  We had hundreds, even thousands, of “social networks”, but they were all individual, distributed and fragmented.

Before Facebook, artists used to go to WetCanvas to discuss painting.  Cruisers used to go to CruiseCritic to discuss cruising.  And programmers used to go to HackerNews (HN) to discuss programming and startups (well, we actually never stopped visiting HN because we’re tech people, and understood that Facebook would eventually betray the very users that made them successful.  I warned people about it in October 2007. I told you so, now get off my lawn, yada yada.) . 

Sure, it was a tiny bit more hassle that we had to visit multiple places back then, but, I think, in retrospect, even that was better.  The discussions were of higher quality.  You could have different “personas” in each place.  It was easier to bookmark and find older posts if you wanted to refer back to something you read a day, a week or a year ago. And, importantly, you couldn’t be hellbanned from the whole network for life.  If you got banned in one place, you still had access to all the other places.  And, unlike Facebook, you could usually reach a moderator and get help if the ban was a mistake.  In other words, the small hassle of organizing multiple networks around topics, made the overall system of many small networks resilient, and more resistant to monolithic problems. It was, as Taleb would say, “Antifragile.”  

According to an interesting theory I read recently, the modern idea of a huge “social network of friends” existing as our main form of online entertainment was likely a temporary aberration in the long term evolution of our digital lives.  

Below is a brief history, according to the theory, of our main form of entertainment and the stages it has evolved through:

1.  Pre-Internet media - Television
These networks tried to determine what shows would most keep us watching, but since they broadcast the same content to everyone at the same time, the content was, by definition, average and eventually devolved into mostly reality tv.  In other words, most of television wasn’t great but it was good enough in an era where we didn’t have many other choices. I believe Lessin used “People Magazine” as an example of this era, I’ve changed it to television but the idea is similar.

2.  Social Networks, Act 1 - Friends
Since most of television was average, and a lot of it “reality TV” about average people you didn’t know, the early social network had a huge advantage - your friends!  Since you knew the people you followed in real life, it wasn’t hard for your friends to post photos and videos of their own lives that were more interesting and thus entertaining than the drivel on television.  Attention increasingly moved online and social networks like Facebook prospered.

3.  Social Networks, Act 2 - Influencers
Professional actors, athletes and influencers saw that attention had moved online, and moved to provide content directly to their fans on these social network platforms.  Since actors and professionals are usually more interesting than your personal friends, they took over the social networks and what you saw, as the timeline became more algorithmic, is that the social networks became more “controlled” by influencers and you saw fewer and fewer posts made by the people you follow.  The network was just trying to keep you entertained (to show you ads) after all.

4.  Entertainment Networks - TikTok rises. 
But, while professional actors are probably more interesting than your friends, they aren’t more interesting than everyone on the network. As an example, a pop music star is probably a better musician than your personal friends, but out of the hundreds of millions of people on TikTok, there are plenty of musicians that are better, and more entertaining, than your average pop star.  TikTok’s genius is that it threw out the social graph, and it utilizes AI algorithms to find the best posts that are of interest to you, personally.  

If you consider it from Meta’s revenue point of view, It’s not hard to see why TikTok has ruined Facebook’s business and why Facebook and Instagram will continue to chase them.  In September 2021 Facebook was worth over 1 trillion dollars.  Last time I checked, Facebook was worth “only” 300 billion.  That’s 700 billion in Facebook’s value that evaporated over the course of only one year, so there is no doubt that they will definitely keep cloning TikTok until they succeed.  Any hope of “bringing back the old Instagram”, I believe, is wasted.

The last step in this evolution, which has not happened, yet, is probably obvious to you now:

5.  Pure AI Entertainment
TikTok is not quite the pinnacle of where all of this is going.  TikTok uses AI algorithms to determine what to show you from an ocean of human created videos.  But, importantly, the content itself is still produced by humans.  But, now, AI is rapidly advancing to such a degree that AI systems are beginning to be able to generate the content directly - no humans involved.  AI “art” is being created by systems like DALL-E.  AI “writing” is being created by GPT-3.  AI video, and eventually AI feature length films are coming.  Here’s a link to a completely AI generated “podcast” between “Bro Jogan” and “Steve Jobs:” click here to listen.

Once AI is advanced enough, it will be able to simply “learn” what you like and then make content, just for you, to entertain you.  Do you like feature-length Lord of the Rings style movies?  Why not have AI just create an endless stream of them for you?

Due to the rise of AI algorithmic entertainment, the golden age of big monolithic “social networks” has passed.

But, humans are social animals.  We still want to connect with like minded colleagues.  I might enjoy a movie made by AI, but I still want to engage in the art of conversation with real people.  I don’t plan to take an AI date to a fancy restaurant dinner any time soon.

So where do we go from here, socially?  And, for the purposes of this newsletter, how do you market art?  What will replace Facebook and Instagram in your marketing plan over the longer term? (The are still OK for that use for the moment)

What I think will happen, what I hope will happen, and what is already beginning to happen to some degree, is a re-fragmentation of social networks.  The big entertainment sites (including the current big social networks) will move increasingly to AI and algorithms, and smaller places will pop up to replace them. These will be places where people can connect around interests or relationships.

As an example, dating apps never went away and were never taken over by big social networks.  Other interests will go the same way, with an explosion of “networks” organized around specific interests.

People already connect over Whatsapp (in small groups), or Discord groups (which are like a modernized cross between forums and chat).  In fact, I’m in a wonderful Discord group for writers called the Soaring Twenties Social Club.  We have fewer than 300 members and you know what?  It’s better that way.  We have real relationships with one another.  People actually get to know one another.  We don’t get spammed by ads, and political propaganda.  We aren’t at the mercy of Facebook.  And we have real, even controversial discussions and we don’t worry about getting banned or shunned.  In short, we are humans being human.  It’s fun, and it’s far more interesting than doom scrolling Facebook or Twitter. What’s old is new again.

I think this trend will, like a wave, wash across the internet.  When it comes to art, we’ll see forums for art, for marketing art, for people to find art.  And this trend is actually something we, at BoldBrush, are trying to support.  That’s why we have launched Musero as a place where people can post art, photography, and other snippets of their life, and connect with other people.  It works almost just like the original Instagram.  Will it be as big as Instagram?  No.  Will it be better and more human than Instagram?  Yes! It doesn’t have to be bigger than Instagram, it just has to be a community where artists, art lovers and art buyers congregate.  And, we encourage you to join us there.

My hope is that in this continuing AI explosion we don’t lose our humanity.  The world needs more humanity, desperately, not less. 

So may a million points of light flourish across the internet!  Let the blessed re-fragmentation begin!

Until next time,

@Clintavo

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“An oil painting of a robot dancing” by DALL-E