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What will be the future of social media?
We are witnessing social media moving at an unbelievable pace. You wake up everyday learning about new trends.
With all the hype around meta not being able to match the expectations, to Elon Musk doing some peculiar activities with Twitter. Are we about to jump into the new dimension of social media? If yes, then what are your thoughts?
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Mat Wiemann
I think social media generally helps people stay connected and get to know people based on shared interests to learn from each other. This is a basic need, so it's not going away.
With the advent of AI everywhere we will see more and more interesting use cases that allows us to express ourselves better and gives us new opportunities helps grow our skillset by adapting information to our expertise. Fake news is just a precursor to adaptive news. It will be information we can easily consume that is good for us - makes us more open - vs. information that is easy to consume, but is bad because it makes our worldview more narrow.
So much untapped potential... Let's get to work!
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@alessandro_canella2
My 2 cents on social / micro-blogging:
1. Be Inclusive:
It's an exclusive club. Needs to become inclusive. The masses aren't on it yet. The classes are. The classes should and will still the conversations. But the eyes of the masses need to be garnered. For that it needs to be in world languages. It needs to help people in express in multiple languages. It needs to enable people to interact with each other without a language divide through translations. 80% of the world doesn't speak English. There needs to be an easy way to enable languages.
2. Be Free:
Social is about people power. You can't charge the users for content no matter how premium it is. The internet was supposed to democratise. Not extract. Can't make a social platform about the platform or the owner. It has to serve the world. And not just a part of the world. The whole world.
3. Be Transparent & Neutral:
The platform needs to win trust. Trust is won through transparency. Transparency in the algos used, the way a blue / yellow / green tick is given, the way a piece of content or a person is moderated. It needs to be neutral. It can't have a bias. Can't dole out voting advice. It needs to reflect people power, community power and be governed by existing local laws. Not create its own legal structures.
4. Be Simple:
Today Twitter doesn't connect people well. Where can I see an entire list of people I could follow, divided by professions, content category, eminence, fields etc? It's not there. It's very easy to do. That will drive more followership for the content creator and more content for the user. Such a simple feature is missing.
5. Fresh & New:
Re-imagining of existing behaviours is needed. A fresh new UI. Fresh flows. Multiple profile photos vs just 1 small image. Expression in world languages vs just english. Lots of discovery zones instead of just # trending pages. Lots of new formats instead of simple attachments.
Do these things and you'll see the most inclusive social media platform on the planet. Give the power back to the people and magic can happen.
Would love to hear the community's thoughts on these pointers. It's everything that Twitter is failing at under Elon's leadership. He wants to turn it into something it wasn't supposed to be, leaving a screaming gap that Koo will fill.
Koo, the second largest micro-blog in the world, does all of this and more :)
@alessandro_canella2 @mayank_bid I still feel that social media is all about inclusivity. Tell me a place more inclusive online other than social media . Let's talk about it.
Metaverse will make social media more immersive thereby offering novel experiences for customers.
Brands including Gucci, Nike McDonald's have already begun creating virtual versions of their products that can be sold as NFTs within digital worlds. These can be used to decorate avatars and virtual spaces.
@dsarkar I still believe that's a long shot. The average social media user ( the core of SM) is still not buying the idea of metaverse. What are your thoughts about that?
I think future social apps will enable human thriving. It will help foster meaningful connection with others and would not dictate the rhythm of our lives. With people increasingly being aware of the harms of present social apps, humane solutions could potentially be a way forward.
Of course, for that to happen business models based on maximizing user's time spent on the app would have to go away.
@alessandro_canella I guess future social apps will have sub-communities where the conversation is centered around specific topics and quality of interaction will take center stage instead of just optimizing for virality. In a way that will resemble the subject specific conversation that we have on PH.
no code will allow everyone and every company to create it's own micro-social plateform. Live conversations and deeper debates in smaller communities will rise. As awareness of the mental health issues caused by social media and abuse of entertainment will rise, people can try to use social media for real-world causes and feel-good interractions. The climate and environmental crisis will make it less and less probable for a certain subset of people to use social media just for fun. to illustrate, see how some people use Geneva app or Slack as a small scale social Media, and as for some, private messaging has become the main way to connect with people.
@eve_angelique I agree but I have been hearing about such changes for a long time but haven't seen much change to be honest. Maybe people don't want deeper topics to be a mainstay in social media.
@alessandro_canella The social media I use is only topic-focused : a Genevaapp home for natural hair care, and a slack space that's basically used as social media for my church. I think there will be more and more of these communities, and those of us who like to think will form a subculture using our own communities' platform. We are too conscious of social media's bad effect to keep letting big companies dictate what news we get, and what people we interract with.
The explosion of visuals
Video will probably get more attention than words than ever. And with VR starting to act as a powerful platform, video will dominate even more.
Elon Musk has just energised people to follow social media. He has made twitter more interesting with all his stunts and the negativity people are seeing will eventually fade away.
@rahul_deora1 I see that you are pretty confident and that's nice. Can you please share any idea of how he will manage to curb this heat?
@alessandro_canella What heat? Heat is caused by people who are not in charge of running and executing things. The 'heat' is just a social media fluff and will die out. These companies are overstaffed 2-3x and this spoils productivity of even the good engineers.
@rahul_deora1 Do you know the reason behind them being "overstaffed"? It is a cycle of hiring and firing people and the same might happen with Elon's reign. Also, saying that the "heat" will die out on its own is pretty convenient.
I think VR is set to be the future of social media, and there are many reasons why. First and foremost, it allows you to experience content in a way that is truly immersive. You aren't just watching videos or reading articles; you are living the experience firsthand. This creates a more personal connection with the people or brands you're following, which can lead to greater loyalty and sales outcomes.
@rohit8x Apparently, but this is a long shot. There are substantial reasons why the average user is not able to welcome the metaverse.
Time flies, just 25 years ago we started getting a glimpse of social media, it took 10 years for social media to prove itself, and now we are seeing the need for new social media tools. One of the biggest reasons why social media drowned is still the same problem (the problem of fake news) whoever solves that would be winner for at least 1 century.
@iammhaseeb It also means that fake news and humanity have co-existed since eternity. How are you planning to change that? :)
The emergence of TikTok and short-form video content are the two most anticipated innovations. While smaller networks like Pinterest and Snapchat may finally take off in 2022, larger networks like Instagram and Twitter will likely remain significant (especially for B2B enterprises). Also, social commerce is essential for eCommerce companies.
Algorithim driven content is eating the world. There's a reason why all major social platforms are shoving shorts/reels/tiktok style videos down your throat.
@philipsnyder How do you propose on solving this issue and why do you think all social platforms are doing this on purpose?
I believe the future of social media is "future messaging". (the opposite of instant messaging).
Where users create and share messages with recipients at a later date. The premise here is that the messages becomes more meaningful to the recipient over time.
One example would be Kapsule - an app that allows users to record and share video messages with anyone months, years, or even decades in the future.
I believe we'll get more influencers and micro-influencers contributing to the world of social media
@shushant_lakhyani Influencer marketing is already skyrocketing! It holds a great future. 🚀
With YouTube and Instagram holding its popularity, maybe more networking system that cores around visual aspects, like clips and video may come around more?
As we’ve seen in the recent past, social media has been a useful tool for the media. It allows us to be informed, stay connected and get a feel for what’s going on in the world. However, it’s also seen as a potential threat to the traditional media. And there are concerns that social media is putting pressure on the news industry.
Social media is changing the way people consume news. And it's changing the way news is produced.
And only one question really remains - what will Elon Musk do with Twitter?
Hard to say what is the future of social media because it is an extremely broad term. The metaverse in the long term has a HUGE role to play in this space. In the near to medium term , I think paid services will start becoming popular.
@colin_johnson5 Could you please give me a brief about that? I'm interested to learn more.
@alessandro_canella Sure! It's in beta currently, so you'll need to request an invite from Dan Romero on Twitter. It's basically a semi-decentralized social platform, where your ID is stored on chain but the media/text is stored off-chain for scaling. https://www.farcaster.xyz