Why Are We Still Using Social Media Built for the 2010’s in 2020?
Tags: Creators, Social Media, Digital Life, Surveillance, Online Community

Why Are We Still Using Social Media Built for the 2010’s in 2020?

Our relationship with social media is….complicated. It’s like swearing you’re done with Instagram, but all you actually did was delete the app from your phone.

We’re sure you’ve heard of social media’s negative side effects countless times before. Recently, Netflix’s ‘The Social Dilemma’ drilled social media’s manipulative tendencies into our brains. Thank you, Netflix.

Our lives revolve around our screens. If you don’t believe us, check your screen time right now and then get back to us. (Hint: settings → screen time, if on iPhone.)

Social media was built to be as mind-numbing, dopamine-inducing, and downright addicting as possible. This is because back in social media’s germinal stages, it faced two hurdles:

Each user was only worth a few dollars, meaning they would need an unimaginably large scaling effort to be profitable.

2. Users weren’t willing to pay for general social networking platforms.

As a means to monetize, these companies had to get creative. In their quest to alternate profitability, they stumbled on the most detrimental and harmful business model for society: the attention-extraction model.

Instead of forking over a credit card, users “pay” with their attention and personal data for advertisements.

Overnight, the user became a “product” and forgoed their “customer” rights completely.

Paying Attention Is Mentally Taxing

Getting people to pay attention to anything is unbelievably difficult. The fact that you’re still reading this article and haven’t bounced to TikTok is in itself a miracle. Considering that the average attention span is 8 seconds long, you should pat yourself on the back.

Yet for the major social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, your attention is how they make their money.

Their goal is to seduce you into spending as much time as possible on a platform and share information. The more time you spend, the larger the profit these companies stand to gain.

Over a decade ago, social media platforms set out to accomplish this. They cast out their nets, and began building these enormous, vague digital landscapes.

As the platform’s gluttonous appetite for data consumption grew, the dangerous implications of social networking began. Cue:

Surveillance Capitalism: personal data becomes a commodity that’s sold to advertisers

Social Media Mining: personal information (location, age, gender) allows big data to draw conclusions on users

Machine Learning: artificial intelligence track and predict every users move so its algorithms can coax users to stay as long as possible

If it sounds dire, that’s because it is. Building this business model — attraction-extraction — created an insidious social media ecosystem. And in this vast social network world, ‘status’ became its gravitational pull.

Facebook created the OG “like” button, meant to “spread positivity” on its platform. Unfortunately, these technological geniuses couldn’t figure out that if certain people didn’t get any likes, they’d actually feel way worse about themselves. Alas, the “like” button took off and the damage was done.

Instagram became catapulted into profit as its aesthetic took over. It was a place to share airbrushed avocado toast, “totally” candid photoshoots by the pool, and other strange demonstrations of artfully staged perfection.

“Influencer” became a career, which back then meant serving a carefully curated feed on a digital silver platter. Not shockingly, this saturation of perfect imagery and artificial thumbs-up began to take its toll.

Throughout the flurry of the social media landscape in the early 2010’s, we began to see clues of social media’s future.

We first began to observe this on Facebook. Chances are, if you recognize any of the following phrases

He broke her heart, so she broke his Xbox. Who do you think cried harder? Why do we have to be quiet during a fire drill? Will the fire hear us? Deep breath in…* Nope, didn’t work. I still want to kill you

You might have liked one of these Facebook “groups” back in the day. Don’t worry, we won’t judge.

People would join these oddly-named groups not only because they were funny. It was a way to build out your online presence: someone hilarious, sarcastic, effortless. You’d click the “become a fan button” thinking, this group is so me.

It seems inconsequential, but these fanbases were a precursor to the 2020’s current social currency: community.

Amidst the clamoring cries for attention, extraction, and influencing, communities began forming within these social media networks.

Until now, community was built on these social media platforms.

In today’s world, social media platforms must be built atop these communities.