Social Networks#

To me the concept of a social network seems great: get in touch with people you know, share important moments of your life and you can meet new people and make new friends. So where’s the catch in that? Why are current social networks failures? and what am I doing about it?

I’m going to dive into what I believe are the answers to these 3 questions and why I’ve started my own blog.

What’s the catch?#

It has become common saying by now that “If you aren’t paying for a product, then you are the product” which is very much true for social networks, but it isn’t as simple as that. Most social networks profit by showing ads to the end users and selling their data, if we look deeper there’s a cycle happening in social networks:

1. User browses the social network
2. The network collects data on the user and builds their profile
3. Advertisers pay for to show ads for specific user groups
4. The user sees the personalized ad and interact with it*
5. Start again

*User interaction doesn’t require the user to click an Ad, networks can also track other forms of interaction such as: time spent looking at the ad, how much of the ad a user sees

Of course advertisement is mixed with actual content that interests users, for my personal Instagram account I noticed that, when scrolling for some time, 1 in every 3 posts are ads.

Ads aren’t a problem in and of themselves, as they are a way to keep the business floating without the users paying, but when the personalized ads join the picture, we start entering a morally gray area. With personalized ads a social network will not only keep it’s business afloat but generate a pretty large revenue.

When you look at all modern social networks, the trend is that (much like Google) they are advertisements companies with a platform that users can log in and look at ads. It’s only logical at this point that if they are to maximize their profit, they need to show as many ads as possible.

So if we accept my empirical evidence of the 1:3 ratio, the only way the social networks can generate a bigger revenue is by making users stick around as long as possible in their sessions. To me this is the point where social networks become a threat: they already have user profiles, they already have the advertisers and they already have a large enough user base.

With this data social networks can build advanced recommendation systems (popularly known as “the algorithm”) which are optimized to the retention metric, meaning the system is trying to recommend content which will make the user stick around longer

In the field of Artificial Intelligence, or more specifically Machine Learning, when training a model there’s always an objective. For example when predicting stock prices we can compare the predicted prices against the real prices and generate an error metric, the objective in model training is to optimize this error metric to be as low as possible. In social networks the metric being optmized is to maximize user session time

This is the catch with social networks: about a third of the content you watch are ads and about half the content you see are recommended posts (in contrast to accounts you actually follow). Most of the content you see is not what you originally wanted to see. The second catch is: this is detrimental to mental health. I’m no psychologist but the internet isn’t lacking in information related to this effect. Social networks make users stay around for far longer then they actually would and in a way this is constantly draining the user.

To me these 2 catches started outweighing the positive effect of seeing things I wanted or keeping in touch with people I like. When I made the move to leave Twitter in 2019 I’ve felt like a weight was out of my shoulders not having my life sucked into an endless feed.

Alright so now that we have all of this context clear, it’s time for the next question:

Why are current social networks failures?#

To put it simply social networks create unhealthy relationships between people and tech. Technology is supposed to be this wonderful thing that improves life quality and make our day to day better, and as of now, social networks are failing at that goal.

Let’s stop looking at the company side and look at the user side for a moment. I’ve already talked about how social media drains the user, but there’s another way it impacts society: Trends.

I don’t want to be too repetitive but social media is trying to get users to spend more time in their platforms, and now let’s add Digital Influencers to the picture.

I’ve always disliked the term Digital Influencer but I believe it’s very true to it’s meaning. After all these people are in fact influencing others and this is a very dangerous power to have

Digital Influencers achieve this status more or less by becoming famous on social network, that is having a big amount of followers and getting their posts recommended to many people. Achieving the status of digital influencer is in a way a badge of honor, being recognized as “worthy”. And you have people with a desire to feel this “worth” who try to cheat the algorithm. Either by envy or by desire to become famous these users try to make algorithmic positive content. But then when I think about it:

1. The system recommends content the user wants to see
2. Influencers make the content the system wants to recomend
3. People are influenced into also producing this type of content
4. There’s a saturation of this type of content
5. This is “going viral”

This to me is a UX failure, people are not making the content they want to make (read people aren’t being original and personal) they are following a Trend to achieve views, followers and the feeling of being worth.

To me this is the biggest failure of modern social networks. We aren’t using social networks to be ourselves, we are using social networks to achieve fame and status. It’s not a positive place to be, it’s a rat race to achieve ephemeral fame while degrading mental health (and don’t forget the advertisers).

I believe that we need a paradigm shift, we need to make the network more social.

What am I doing about this?#

I don’t have the power to change the world, but what I do have the power is to choose how I use my time and my tech. Lately I’ve realized that the negatives far outweigh the positives, so I chose to have a healthier relationship with tech.

I’m leaving behind social networks and I’ll have my social presence in places I can control, for example this blog. And for a more modern replacement, I’m going with the Fediverse. These technologies allow me to have a presence on the web, allow me to connect with people I like but removing the incentive for going viral or for creating an endless sucking feed. I don’t make money on my blog, there’s absolutely no incentive for me to publish anything that’s trending or clickbait.

As for the fediverse, decentralization means we can chose who we connect to, for example the majority of the fediverse doesn’t federate with threads). It means we have the freedom of no centralized hub where everyone is, and that means we aren’t subject to things like ads or algorithmic feeds to keep us scrolling, we choose when to stop.

Final Note#

Thank you for reading through this rant. This post is something I had on my chest for a long time and I had to let it out. Big social networks are destroying the fun in tech and I’m not taking part in that anymore.

Song Suggestion#

With each post I’ll be recommending a song from what I’m currently listening. If you don’t have Apple Music, feel free to listen to it on your preferred platform