Social Media Has Run Out of Fresh Ideas
Social Media Has Run Out of Fresh Ideas
From corporate rebrands to AI-powered video reels to text threads, social media companies are throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.
Why does everything in tech need fresh ideas all the time? Why can't something just be good as it is? I don't see people trying to re-invent the spoon. Because spoons are fine. We don't need an innovative new spoon with special new spoon features.
Also, don't add new shit while you're still developing what you already have.
The tech space is intrinsically tied to the capitalist infinite growth mindset, that's why
an innovative new spoon with special new spoon features
Please do tell me more about that new spoon.
There is no spoon.
It has bluetooth so it can pair with your phone and sync with your health data. It will monitor your calorie intake throughout the day, and when the integrated AI thinks you’ve eaten enough, the spoon will vibrate to shake off any remaining food.
It will automatically take pictures of what you’re eating and post them to your social media feeds, and share with friends and family. This feature is on by default and can only be disabled manually through the spoon settings.
The OLED screen and speaker built into the handle will display high-definition ads for food recommendations at the nearest grocery store. The pro model has a microphone so you can easily add items to your shopping list. You can opt-out of ads for just $5/month.
It weighs 3kg and is hand-wash only.
Spork!
Short term profit mate. It's all they care at this point in my opinion.
Preach brother!
What kind of get-off-my-lawn take is that?
Of course because that's where a lot of the fun is in tech, inventing, learning about, using and talking about new stuff. Newness can make mundane things interesting and entertaining for a while, just look at a child figuring out new things for the first time.
Because more money.
Social media has been out of ideas since we got video chat. The fact is people want a free place on the internet to share interests with other people and communicate with them. Every company tries to figure out how to monetize it.
So of course they’re out of ideas, they never had them in the first place. Capitalism cannot drive progress
In theory it's easy to monetise - allow some targeted ads to communities and/or occasional relevant boosted posts, or paid awards like Reddit, etc.
The issue is greed / growth. They always need more and more - so you end up with more irrelevant ads, political ads, more boosted posts than natural ones, etc. - most companies aren't happy to just do one thing well with a skeleton crew maintaining it and keeping costs low - they need constant growth.
Just look at Reddit and Twitter for example.
That’s because most Social Media players aren’t interested in the social community aspect. They only care about the nigh infinite metadata they can harvest and then sell, and advertisements. It’s profit driven first and last. So everything ends up being rather samey because it’s the best method to achieve those goals.
Shh.... nobody tell them about the Fediverse.
On a separate note, anyone else finding Wired to suddenly be like the Boomer of tech publications? Ars Technica and Techdirt are vastly superior sources these days. Seems like Wired does nothing but pump out stale conglomerated opinion pieces that smell vaguely like Larry Ellison's sweat socks.
conde nast, the same company that is a major investor in reddit owns them. You may also be familiar with several of their other publications, Vogue, Golf Digest and The New Yorker, to name but a few.
They also own Ars Technica, which as @Arotrios mentioned, is still decent. You can’t just blame the owners, the editors still have some level of control over the content they put out.
I find it slightly sad that when our leaders talk of Technology and Innovation - they often mean these 'tech' companies that essentially work out how to better sell advertising and occasionally provide a useful service alongside this.
Where is the Bell Labs? The Skunk Works?
We have incredible problems facing us such as Climate Change and decarbonisation seems like it will be a very difficult challenge. And yet we focus on banal "innovation" in frivolous things.
America makes a lot more sense when you think of it as a corporation with nukes rather than a country with functional government.
I'm not sure when or how it happened, but Americans seem to have decided that everything has to be privately owned for profit, and making those private services into government services (health care for example) it's "socialism" and people would rather pay 5x as much for less care than our European cousins get with their taxes by default.
Where is the Bell Labs? The Skunk Works?
Federation is a fresh idea in the social media realm. Not chronologically, obviously (sorry mastodon), but fresh in the sense that it has buzz and momentum now that it hasn't really had before as a direct result of the "staleness" associated with data collection, advertising, and corporate greed by the big players. There are no fresh ideas from meta, Twitter, and tiktok because their goals are stale. Bluesky is very buzzworthy, and if they can build out and scale up fast enough they have a chance.
Metaverse might have something. Too bad their new hardware will have drm bullshit so I'll never know.
I know it's the wrong focus but I couldn't help imagining using the three buttons in the graphic. There should only be two buttons in the picture : "ctrl C" and "ctrl V".
Paywalled :/
Social media is having its quarter-life crisis, if a quarter-life crisis is a thing, if we can even put a lifespan on social media, which might in fact play a role in our society from now until the end of time. After 25 years of status updates, news feeds, clever tweets, performative photos, and endless scrolls, the US social media companies that have commandeered our attention and monetized it so successfully have run out of fresh ideas and are looking to reinvent themselves.
Lucky us?
Some 18 months ago, 3D immersion via face computers was going to reinvigorate our online social experience. Facebook believed in this vision so firmly that it changed its name to Meta to reflect it. Having determined more recently that something a little simpler might jack up engagement, Meta launched Threads—basically, Twitter for Instagram.
Now the video app TikTok is introducing a way to compose text-based posts—its own version of the Create feature found in Instagram Stories. Accessed through the app’s camera, where users typically go to post videos or photos, the new text option is billed by TikTok as “the latest addition to options for content creation, allowing creators to share their stories, poems, recipes, and other written content on TikTok.” Text: It’s the future. This comes right on the heels of Twitter rebranding itself as X, part of the company’s broader strategy for becoming an everything-app, like China’s WeChat.
TikTok’s new text feature, which feels mostly additive, and Twitter’s brand pivot, which feels mostly superfluous, are not by themselves causes for existential angst. But they’re part of an evolution in the social media landscape, where the polite “borrowing” of features has turned into a full-fledged land grab for our frayed attention spans. Whether through subscriptions, shopping, payments, or AI-infused products, social media companies are throwing everything at the wall to counter both an unpredictable ad market and people’s limited capacity for using a dozen different social apps.
“If we evaluate these apps from the legacy technology-innovation lens, then yes—they’re copying each other and there are no new ideas,” says Chris Messina, a software product designer who is credited with introducing the hashtag to Twitter. “But the better way to understand it is that social media is now a fashion industry, so as a product manager, you’re evaluating success based on engagement and retention, not innovation.”
Messina also adds that he believes X (née Twitter) is now “incredibly vulnerable, and the most competitive teams, like Meta and TikTok, aren’t going to sit idly by if they can carve up Twitter’s former advertising base.”
Meta’s early success with Instagram Threads—over 100 million sign-ups in under a week—has largely been credited to its platform advantage; over a billion people already use Instagram, and porting one’s Instagram identity over to Threads is frictionless. But that’s success in metrics only—quantitative, not qualitative. (In any case, daily active users on Threads have reportedly fallen off.) Threads still doesn’t have a web or desktop app, hasn’t yet rolled out its promised chronological feed, and doesn’t yet support a more open-source protocol that the company has said it will support.
“As social software has become more probabilistic and personalized, the more important thing is to have ‘shots on goal’ to keep people engaged and prevent churn,” Messina says. “And so Instagram does limited, progressive feature rollouts.”
Masha Liberman, a tech investor who previously built 3D bitmoji for Snapchat, believes that social media is experiencing a “crisis of ideas,” but she says that’s not a new thing. “It’s always been tough to invent something new,” she says. “What’s happening with social media companies is that they want to see themselves as media networks that offer everything inside the app. That’s the competitive advantage right now. And at some point we will probably view some of these things as new formats rather than copycat features.”
Social media as a category is probably overdue for a serious rethink, both in the usability sense and the regulatory sense. The time-suck it has become for some people, its potential mental health harms, and its fire-to-gasoline spread of misinformation are all reasons enough to question it.
See What’s Next in Tech With the Fast Forward Newsletter
A weekly dispatch from the future by Will Knight, exploring AI advances and other technology set to change our lives. Delivered every Thursday.
Your email
By signing up you agree to our User Agreement (including the class action waiver and arbitration provisions), our Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement and to receive marketing and account-related emails from WIRED. You can unsubscribe at any time.It has also, over the past 20-plus years, offered connection, community, entertainment, and access to information unlike anything humanity has ever experienced before. And a new group of apps is now promising a decentralized social media experience instead of the founder-driven model of the past two decades.
But this era of platform identity crises, brand pivots, and frenetic feature reinvention isn’t necessarily in service of users, either. “My experience working at a social media company during turbulent times, especially when there’s a separate app or even a separate page, is that these are huge internal political projects,” Liberman says. “They’re not for users directly, and users sometimes feel this.”
It’s hard not to feel it, to have a persistent sense of déjà vu after another new app feature is announced, or to feel like you never really asked for the thing to begin with. It’s hard not to feel like it’s getting a little late at the social media party, and that there has to be some other reason to stay.
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:9 (written over 2 thousand years ago...)
Meanwhile Apple: Introducing the revolutionary new iSpoon, complete with a 4K OLDED touch screen and a built-in Siri that tells you how to chow your cereal properly. Starting at the low price of
$1600$1099.99.But of course, don't forget to buy the iBowl, iPlate, and iNapkin as well, because who needs an ordinary cutlery set when you can have everything in true Apple fashion.
(Disclaimer ⚠️: The iSpoon can only be used with the iBowl.)
Have they ever really had ideas in the first place? Content created by the users is the main reason why anybody goes to these sites, not because we're wowed by their brilliant ideas. r/place is apparently the peak of Reddit's fresh ideas and people are just using that to shit on Reddit's CEO, but again, r/place is nothing without an army of people contributing (or writing up bots that contribute). For the most part, people tend to hate whatever ideas that Social Media companies come up with outside of the core functions (seeing other people's content), look at how long old.reddit has hung around for because people absolutely could not stand Reddit's ideas. Every "idea" that Social Media companies come up with are usually weirdly stupid and have some sort of ulterior motive behind it (almost always profit/cost-reductions).
tl;dr Social Media companies aren't out of ideas, they just never had them in the first place.
Thank god. Maybe we can try to heal our society from the massive damage it’s done now.
So many of them are trying to copy other ones it seems.
No, big cooperate "social" Media did.
Didn't read, had to laugh. Its funny that they use one of the most used symbols for copy paste to criticise the lack of fresh ideas.