Social media as we know it is in chaos. The landscape is becoming more centralized and the very notion of a follower is dying.
There's uncertainty about what all this that means for the future. So, I spoke to Jack Conte, the CEO and co-founder of Patreon, to talk about the state of the social internet, why algorithmic feeds could be killing our creator landscape, and where the internet is going in 2025.
Basically, social media these days are no longer a reliable way of following your indicated friends or the people/pages/channels you've chosen to "follow"/"like"/"subscribe"/whatever. Instead, more and more, an algorithm decides what to show you in your feed.
This is a trend that was pushed to an extreme by TikTok, according to Taylor Lorenz and Jack Conte, and the older social media platforms are, more and more, adopting TikTok's model.
This new system has the advantage of giving newcomers more of a chance to have their stuff be seen and possibly go viral. But, on the other hand, it has the extreme disadvantage of making it much harder, indeed well nigh impossible these days, to build any kind of online community around, say, a YouTube channel.
To me this has obvious political implications. It is likely one of the reasons for the recent rise of the extreme right wing, because right wing organizations tend to have more wealthy donors, hence more money to spend on social media influences in the first place, as well as more money to spend on finding ways to game the algorithms, whereas left-wingers previously had the advantage of having more of a focus on community-building.
_________________ - Autistic in NYC - Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area. - Autistic peer-led groups (via text-based chat, currently) led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.
Joined: 15 Sep 2008 Age: 72 Gender: Male Posts: 13,911
03 Apr 2025, 1:00 am
I've been wondering for some time whether to bother with my Facebook "newsfeed," or whether instead to set up a set of bookmarks or tabs that lead directly to my FB friends and the pages I'm interested in. I've got some good plugins that filter out the newsfeed junk that I don't want to see (ads and political / religious propaganda memes shared by otherwise likeable friends), but FB does a very poor job of showing me all the stuff from the people and pages I follow. I don't follow many, so it wouldn't be a lot of work. It's very narrow and protectionist of me, but the newsfeed sucks, and I think I can live without Zuckeberg sticking his idea of what's good for me (more like what's good for his wallet) under my nose. FB has definitely got worse over the past few years, from my perspective.
I can't do much about what FB is doing to the rest of the world. I guess the world will just have to stew in its own juice or figure out ways of its own to reach its audience or whatever it is that it uses social media for. Maybe a return to email and opt-in mailing lists would be better.
31 Mar 2025, 11:17 am
