Search, Social Media, Discovery, Engagement

Social media is a nexus of many of the topics I've written about. The company formerly known as Facebook has had a major hand in shaping society, digital markets for both physical and digital goods, projects in both physical and digital space, digital factories through SDKs for third-party software, and digital products through its own offerings which today include Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta is also effectively a platform gatekeeper and a host to a storefront of its own - years ago Facebook even had its own digital currency that was sold at brick and mortar retailers.

Facebook is both a B2B and a B2C service enabled by the web. It is one of the most widely used services on the internet and its infrastructure requirements are presumably commensurately significant. The name Meta is a reference to the concept of the Metaverse, a proposed evolution of the web that so far has not come to pass.

It is difficult to understate the influence this company and the venture capital ecosystem more broadly has exerted over the last two decades.

Facebook was not the first social media platform, but it did gain traction unlike any that came before it. In doing so, it changed how people interacted with the web. In the earliest days of the web there were many small hubs of curated content and many individuals who were interested in technology had personal websites that were highly differentiated. It was somewhat difficult to reach people in digital space unless you had some kind of direct connection to them in the physical world, i.e. high profile publications such as the New York Times were notable early adopters of the web.

Search engines would eventually emerge to tackle this problem of discovery through digital space. Search provided a natural centre of gravity, yet there was still a requirement from users to be active participants in the curation of the content they would be served. Outside of the web, storefronts had a similar role as a discovery channel where people would use charts and curated features to help identify what software they might be interested in. Social media would displace these modes of engagement to some extent, becoming the "homepage of the internet" for hundreds of millions of people that formed a habit of scrolling through the content feed, which was once a chronological timeline of activity from people and organisations they had expressed interest in and today has "evolved" into a personalised aggregation of content determined by the platform that lies inside your realm of declared interest as well as outside of it.

Both search and social media would become large global advertising platforms. This had consequences that were felt well beyond digital space. The market for print and online media, which was (and is) supported by advertising, was decimated and has not really recovered - their access to the masses, the passive discoverers, has long evaporated. In the digital games sector, publications that once made a name for themselves for criticisms of substance largely serve as some combination of a syndication channel for PR messaging and a consumer price guide in addition to serving content that sits outside their traditional remit.

Social media as a form distorts growth in a number of ways. One is by non-deterministically serving content - this has evolved over time as platforms have experimented with serving the content users asked for when they express their interests but also serving them content they might be interested in but have not seen, but most platforms have settled on one single content feed by default. Another is the increasing prevalence of bot-farms, automated software processes that are making real comments, leaving reviews, and otherwise posing as real people. This has an obvious potential to disrupt markets and also broader society. In the past with feedback businesses may have had to ask themselves if a consumer and the business have the same understanding about what a digital product is offering. They now have new lines of bad faith inquiry to contend with. If reviews cannot be trusted, people can make decisions based on a lie.

There are other aspects to how social media and software collide, and to explore those we should consider other platforms.

One of which is LinkedIn, a professional networking platform that was acquired by Microsoft in 2016. The following remarks are based on what is served to me. In general content focused toward software developers relates to many of the topics I've previously written about from conferences, technology choice, the supply chain and primitives. I can't claim to be an expert about how content is surfaced or the human psychology behind 'likes' but the one observation I have the most confidence in is that digestibility reigns supreme. On a daily basis I can personally see an enormous volume of content that amounts to '1+1=2' that gains a lot of traction. Sometimes I see posts about the current technology landscape and what the future will look like that in my opinion amount to an assertion that '1+1=7'.

I think that we can relate this back to a concept introduced in subjective software - the Imagined Experience as a field. It seems to me that it has never been more important to be discerning and to form a strong conceptualisation of what is valuable. Technology as a sector is prone to hype cycles, and the industry does not spend a lot of time looking backward at its effect on society - that work is often left to other professions. The result is a pretty significant accountability gap that would not be tolerated in many other industries. This predates social media and even the internet, although it does seem like the promises that companies make to the general public have never been more ambitious which of course also means that they have never run the risk of being further off the mark.

Social media and the natural point of gravity on the web is a story that is still playing out in real time, no one quite knows how it will end.

Until next time.