Social media platforms: what’s wrong, and what’s next.

Table of contents:

• INTRO: Social media platforms: what’s wrong, and what’s next (this post!)
• Part 1: Problems with the platforms themselves
• Part 2: Problems with the community aspect of social media platforms
• Part 3: Problems with the content of social media platforms
• Part 4: Problems with the users of social media platforms
• Part 5: Problems with moderators / curators of social media platforms

Introduction:

I think we need a new social media platform to emerge from the web.

Now, if the above sentence just sent shivers down your spine as a relic of a bygone era of entrepreneurship (So Mo Lo was parodied over 11 years ago on Silicon Valley), let me tell you why I think it’s still a good idea today.

I think social media platforms as they exist today aren’t serving people correctly, because they are incentivized in the wrong ways:

1. When the platform optimizes for DAUs, it doesn’t care when people create alt / fake accounts, because it boosts the platform’s user numbers
2. When the platform optimizes for engagement, it doesn’t care if content that is posted is clickbait / ragebait / outright lies, because those still boost engagement
3. When the platform optimizes for UGC produced on a platform (comments / submissions / posts / etc), the platform don’t care if that content is generated by bots, or if the content is just blatantly stolen from TV/Movies/YouTube, etc as it gives users more “stuff” to view
4. When the platform optimizes for reach, it doesn’t care if it gives its user’s data up to whoever wants to take it, if it means you can be integrated into more platforms
5. When the platform optimizes for monetization, it doesn’t care that it is selling user data to give advertisers the best way to target, and it doesn’t really care that users are mainly seeing ads vs actual interesting content (except giving them just enough content to make them not close the app)

All existing large social media platforms of today use one or more (if not all) of the above methods to incentivize users to consume, engage, and create content on the app — and that’s been the state of the social web for the past ~30 years.

But noticeably absent from the social web has been a focus on features that help us be social. When TikTok rolled out the TikTok shop, for example, no user thought to themselves “…You know, I feel like I’m not seeing enough advertisements. What I really want is for every third video to also be someone re-selling a $5 item from china for $25″.

So, if today’s social media platforms aren’t helping us be social in productive ways, what’s the solution? Well, it starts by first un-learning all the “known” truths about social media we have in our mind so far, and to do that, we first need to talk through the various problems in-depth that exist on social media platforms today.

Today, I hope to lay out all the problems that I believe exist with social media platforms currently, and then, in the coming weeks, suggest some potential solutions if I were to build a new social media app in 2025¹. I’ll probably get a lot of things wrong along the way, but hopefully it will spur someone out there to implement and solve at least some of these issues.

As always, let me know what you think — I’m ready to get roasted.

Up next:

“Part 1: Problems with the platforms themselves”

Footnotes:

1. As a side note, although I was mainly parodying the “Safety Not Guaranteed” famous newspaper classified ad in my intro, I actually have architected a social media app once before, one that got over 5 million users and generated hundreds of thousands in revenue. But that’s a story for another day. ↩︎