Eugene Wei ha scritto un lungo articolo in cui spiega l’economia e la sociologia del social web meglio di chiunque altro. Te ne raccomando vivamente la lettura integrale. Mentre lo leggo prendo appunti, perché è veramente lungo e ricco di spunti. Cito qualche brano, preceduto da una introduzione, utile se vuoi farti un’idea del tema
Twitter è cambiato nel tempo. Lo sa chi lo usava 10 anni fa. Da luogo dove condividere cosa stai facendo, oggi è un ambiente completamente diverso. Effetto del business e del modello di business di Twitter: attenzione in cambio di pubblicità:
Read Twitter today and hardly any of the tweets are the mundane life updates of its awkward pre-puberty years. We are now in late-stage performative Twitter, where nearly every tweet is hungry as hell for favorites and retweets, and everyone is a trained pundit or comedian. It’s hot takes and cool proverbs all the way down. The harmless status update Twitter was a less thirsty scene but also not much of a business.
Compare early Twitter to modern Twitter; it’s like going from listening to your coworkers at a karaoke bar to watching Beyonce play Coachella.
Tutto si riduce sul social web alla ricerca di un riconoscimento sempre più alto. Il tutto attraverso contenuti ripagati in follower, mi piace, commenti e condivisioni:
Thirst for status is potential energy. It is the lifeblood of a Status as a Service business. To succeed at carving out unique space in the market, social networks offer their own unique form of status token, earned through some distinctive proof of work.
Copiare le funzioni di un concorrente non basta. Il paragrafo seguente spiega bene perché il contenuto che scompare, copiato da Snapchat, su Facebook non ha attecchito, a differenza di Instagra:
Copying some network’s feature often isn’t sufficient if you can’t also copy its graph, but if you can apply the feature to some unique graph that you earned some other way, it can be a defensible advantage.
Nothing illustrates this better than Facebook’s attempts to win back the young from Snapchat by copying some of the network’s ephemeral messaging features, or Facebook’s attempt to copy TikTok with Lasso, or, well Facebook’s attempt to duplicate just about every social app with any traction anywhere. The problem with copying Snapchat is that, well, the reason young people left Facebook for Snapchat was in large part because their parents had invaded Facebook. You don’t leave a party with your classmates to go back to one your parents are throwing just because your dad brings in a keg and offer to play beer pong.
The pairing of Facebook’s gigantic graph with just about almost any proof of work from another app changes the very nature of that status game, sometimes in undesirable ways. Do you really want your coworkers and business colleagues and family and friends watching you lip synch to “It’s Getting Hot in Here” by Nelly on Lasso? Facebook was rumored to be contemplating a special memes tab to try to woo back the young, which, again, completely misunderstands how the young play the meme status game. At last check that plan had been shelved.
Machine learning Vs. adolescenti
We talk about the miracles of machine learning in the modern age, but as social creatures, humans are no less remarkable in their ability to decipher and internalize what plays well to the peanut gallery.
Stories of teens A/B testing Instagram posts, yanking those which don’t earn enough likes in the first hour, are almost beyond satire; a show like Black Mirror often just resorts to episodes that show things that have already happened in reality. The key component of the 10,000 hour rule of expertise is the idea of deliberate practice, the type that provides immediate feedback. Social media may not be literally real-time in its feedback, but it’s close enough, and the scope of reach is magnitudes of order beyond that of any social performance arena in history. We have a generation now that has been trained through hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of social media reps on what engages people on which platforms. In our own way, we are all Buzzfeed. We are all Kardashians.
Perché a un certo punto tutti sono passati al filtro dell’algoritmo, eliminando la proposta di contenuti in ordine cronologico? Per alzare ulteriormente l’asticella:
As people start following more and more accounts on a social network, they reach a point where the number of candidate stories exceeds their capacity to see them all. Even before that point, the sheer signal-to-noise ratio may decline to the point that it affects engagement. Almost any network that hits this inflection point turns to the same solution: an algorithmic feed.
Remember, status derives value from some type of scarcity. What is the one fundamental scarcity in the age of abundance? User attention. The launch of an algorithmic feed raises the stakes of the social media game. Even if someone follows you, they might no longer see every one of your posts. As DiCaprio said in Django Unchained, “You had my curiosity, but now, under the algorithmic feed, you have to earn my attention.”
Lo status social conquistato sul social web corrisponde a una nuova moneta che genera nuova ricchezza, non necessariamente da convertire in euro o dollari:
These modern forms of social capital are like new money. Not surprisingly, then, older folks, who are worse at accumulating these new badges than the young, often scoff at those kids wasting time on those apps, just as old money from the Upper West and Upper East Sides of New York look down their noses at those hoodie-wearing new money billionaire philistines of Silicon Valley.
Il motivo per cui Facebook non piace ai giovanissimi? Una sola identità (tanto cara a Mark Zuckerberg), che le comprende tutte, non piace:
Incidentally, teens and twenty-somethings, more so than the middle-aged and elderly, tend to juggle more identities. In middle and high school, kids have to maintain an identity among classmates at school, then another identity at home with family. Twenty-somethings craft one identity among coworkers during the day, then another among their friends outside of work. Often those spheres have differing status games, and there is some penalty to merging those identities. Anyone who has ever sent a text meant for their schoolmates to their parents, or emailed a boss or coworker something meant for their happy hour crew knows the treacherous nature of context collapse.
Add to that this younger generation’s preference for and facility with visual communication and it’s clearly why the preferred social network of the young is Instagram and the preferred messenger Snapchat, both preferable to Facebook. Instagram because of the ease of creating multiple accounts to match one’s portfolio of identities, Snapchat for its best in class ease of visual messaging privately to particular recipients. The expiration of content, whether explicitly executed on Instagram (you can easily kill off a meme account after you’ve outgrown it, for example), or automatically handled on a service like Snapchat, is a must-have feature for those for whom multiple identity management is a fact of life.
Facebook, with its explicit attachment to the real world graph and its enforcement of a single public identity, is just a poor structural fit for the more complex social capital requirements of the young.
Facebook non ha mai avuto l’interesse di salvare i giornali online:
Then, one day, Facebook snapped its fingers like Thanos and much of that dependable reach evaporated into ash. No longer would every one of your Page followers see every one of your posts. Facebook did what central banks do to combat inflation and raised interest rates on borrowing attention from the News Feed.
Was such a move inevitable? Not necessarily, but it was always likely. That’s because there is one scarce resource which is a natural limit on every social network and media company today, and that is user attention. That a social network shares some of that attention with its partners will always be secondary to accumulating and retaining that attention in the first place. Facebook, for example, must always guard against the tragedy of the commons when it comes to News Feed. Saving media institutions is a secondary consideration, if that.
Il fatto che Snapchat non ha mai avuto i mi piace non lo ha reso una piattaforma fuori dal gioco del capitale sociale, anzi:
Many will say, especially Snapchat itself, that it has been the anti-Facebook all along. Because it has no likes, it liberates people from destructive status games. To believe that is to underestimate the ingenuity of humanity in its ability to weaponize any network for status games.
Anyone who has studied kids using Snapchat know that it’s just as integral a part of high school status and FOMO wars as Facebook, and arguably more so now that those kids largely don’t use Facebook. The only other social media app that is as sharp a stick is Instagram which has, it’s true, more overt social capital accumulation mechanisms. Still, the idea that kids use Snapchat like some pure messaging utility is laughable and makes me wonder if people have forgotten what teenage school life was like. Whether you see people attend a party that you’re not invited to on Instagram or on someone’s Snap, you still feel terrible.
Remember Snapchat’s original Best Friends list? I’m going to guess many of my readers don’t, because, as noted earlier, old people probably didn’t play that status game, if they’d even figured out how to use Snapchat by that point. This was just about as pure a status game feature as could be engineered for teens. Not only did it show the top three people you Snapped with most frequently, you could look at who the top three best friends were for any of your contacts. Essentially, it made the hierarchy of everyone’s “friendships” public, making the popularity scoreboard explicit.
Tutti partecipiamo al gioco dello status, che lo vogliamo ammettere o meno, sul social web o altrove:
Some people find status games distasteful. Despite this, everyone I know is engaged in multiple status games. Some people sneer at people hashtag spamming on Instagram, but then retweet praise on Twitter. Others roll their eyes at photo albums of expensive meals on Facebook but then submit research papers to prestigious journals in the hopes of being published. Parents show off photos of their children performances at recitals, people preen in the mirror while assessing their outfits, employees flex on their peers in meetings, entrepreneurs complain about 30 under 30 lists while wishing to be on them, reporters check the Techmeme leaderboards; life is nothing if not a nested series of status contests.
Il motivo per cui Apple e Google hanno fallito nei tentativi di partecipare al gioco dello status:
Since Apple positions itself as the leading advocate for user privacy, it will always be constrained on building out social features since many of them trade off against privacy. Not all of them do, and it’s possible a social network based entirely on privacy can be successful, but 1) it would be challenging and 2) it’s not clear many people mind trading off some privacy for showing off their best lives online.
This is, of course, exactly why many people love and choose Apple, and they have more cash than they can spend. No one need feel sorry for Apple, and as is often the case, a company’s strengths and weaknesses stem from the same quality in their nature. I’d rather Apple continue to focus on building the best computers in the world. Still, it’s a false tradeoff to regard Apple’s emphasis on privacy as an excuse for awkward interactions like photo sharing on iOS.
The same inherent social myopia applies to Google which famously took a crack at building a social network of its own with Google+. Like Apple, the team in Mountain View has always seemed more suited to building out networks of utility rather than social capital. Google is often spoken of as a company where software engineers have the most power. Engineers, in my experience, are driven by logic, and status-centered products are distasteful or mysterious to them, often both. Google will probably always be weak at social, but as with Apple, they compensate with unique strengths.
Sei hai creato capitale sociale su una piattaforma, gioco forza ci pensi due volte prima di abbandonarla:
For any single user, the stickiness of a social network often correlates strongly with the volume of social capital they’ve amassed on that network. People sometimes will wholesale abandon social networks, but it’s rare unless the status earned there has undergone severe deflation.
Il problema dell’abuso delle piattaforme e gli effetti determinati da fake news e devianze richiede prima di tutto una presa di coscienza, se lo si vuole risolvere ovviamente:
Contrary to some popular Twitter counsel, the problem is not that the leaders of these companies don’t have humanities degrees. But the solution also doesn’t lie in ignoring that humans are wired to pursue social capital. In fact, overlooking this fundamental aspect of human nature arguably landed us here, at the end of this first age of social network goliaths, wondering where it all went haywire. If we think of these networks as marketplaces trading only in information, and not in status, then we’re only seeing part of the machine.