Social Networking’s Sunset

Fascinating piece from Axios on the implications of Meta redesigning Facebook and Instagram to be more like TikTok:

The era in which social networking served as most users’ primary experience of the internet is moving behind us. That holds for Twitter, Facebook’s chief surviving Western rival, as well…

Instead of the focus on what your friends and family are doing:

The dominant player in social media is transforming itself into a kind of digital mass media, in which the reactions of hordes of anonymous users, processed by machine learning, drive the selection of your content.

Facebook and its rivals call this a “discovery engine” because it reliably spits out recommendations of posts from everywhere that might hold your attention.

But it also looks a lot like a mutant TV with an infinite number of context-free channels that flash in and out of focus at high speed.

That’s what younger users right now seem to prefer, and it’s where Facebook expects the growth of its business to lie, now that new privacy rules from Apple and regulators’ threats around the world have made its existing ad-targeting model precarious.

Full story Sunset of the social network


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