Post-social media?

It feels like we've reached a point where everybody recognizes they feel bad using social media. We even have a lot of data to support.

But we still use it.

The Diff pose a great question: Is "Social" an Enduring Category or Just a Phase?

[I]t's also striking to look at two of the biggest growth areas in social media right now. First, short-form video, and second, group chats. These are both on the social media continuum—there are long-tail creators in short video, and some group chats are large enough that they're closer to a miniature Twitter than a one-on-one chat. But they're both at far ends of the "social media" medium.

Social media is transforming into media. With short-form video, our use of video-based platforms is increasing. And that makes a lot of sense, as this ever-relevant Reddit post shows: most people don't post on social media.

That shift in the business of entertainment is what Garbage Day this week describes more broadly as an unbundling of everything on the internet. From The End Of Everything And What’s Next (If Anything):

The last 25 years of the internet have been defined by the unbundling of what came before, reducing everything to smaller and more personalized atomic units of content. Newspapers and magazines became posts. Albums became singles, only to compress further into “audios”. Radio stations were cleaved in half, becoming playlists and podcasts. Linear TV shows, freed from linearity, now resemble single season-long mega-movies. Movies, freed from theaters, now feel like, well, shorter seasons of TV. And, both, are typically consumed as 90-second clips. But three other things arrived as this was happening, though. New “amateur” creators operating on much smaller margins suddenly gained bigger audiences. Spam and low-effort garbage filled in the vacuum left by previously healthy industries. And, counter-intuitively, a handful of institutional powerhouses from the previous age consolidated influence and got even bigger — The New York Times, Christopher Nolan, Taylor Swift. And I’m pretty sure that all of this is happening again, only this time, it’s to the internet itself.

The social media space is changing but it's not going away - not while usage goes up and money is there to be made. It's cheaper and easier than ever to produce and deliver video and it's more engaging than text or images. We're probably going to get a more extreme version of what we have today. Increasingly less importance on comments and community engagement and even more focus on subscribing and eyeballs on ads. Fewer trusted institutions and more influencers. Less quality, long-form and more garbage.

💩 Cool shit

No Vehicles in The Park – Interpret the rule of "no vehicles in the park" for a number of scenarios and see how your opinion differs from others. It's like the local council version of the trolley problem.

Brutal Web – I have a soft spot for brutalist web design and anything that leans in to being purely utilitarian. Here's a collection of brutalist web designs.

Past Rocket Launches – One for the space nerds. A searchable database of rocket launches.

Rank A Day – Every day there's a new topic you need to rank.

Tearable Cloth – CodePen never fails to deliver some truly fantastic web experiments. This simulates a cloth you can pull and tear apart.

Road Curvature – Discover the most twisty roads on Earth. I really enjoy this both for its cool data-vis and how practically it can be used.

Motchiri Metaverse Store – A metaverse link in 2024? Yes. 3D worlds built entirely in the browser are still technically impressive to me. I find this one interesting because it's both a fun but impractical 3D world AND a straight-up e-commerce site.

On the Internet Everybody Knows You had a Dog – An ode to Geocities sites dedicated to dogs.

Suspense Accents – Just because it's fun.

Share this with a friend because Someone tried to log in to your account, User ID #521489