I wrote a few weeks ago the social web is one of the big tech shifts at the moment. Despite the timely launch of Threads to capitalize, how social media will look in a few years is increasingly hard to predict.

There are two forward-facing dynamics.

1) Social platforms have been shifting away from social graphs (showing you content from who you follow) to algorithms (showing you content from anyone, like TikTok). Ben Thompson explains the advantages:

It’s ultimately a math question: are you more likely to find compelling content from the few hundred people in your social network, or from the millions of people posting on the service? The answer is obviously the latter, but that answer is only achievable if you have the means of discovering that compelling content, and, to be fair to both Facebook and Twitter, the sort of computational power necessary to pull off a TikTok-style network didn’t exist when those companies got started.

Threads and the Social/Communications Map (Stratechery / Ben Thompson)

More content means more attention which means more advertising eyeballs.

2) There’s growing talk of decentralization. Even Threads are promising to support it. But, decentralized protocols are still based on who you follow, and an algorithm model is something that needs to be built and managed on top of the protocol. The proliferation of AI content, which I wrote about last week, is going to only make this harder to do. Casey Newton argues the cost is prohibitively high:

Over a long enough time period, the challenges of decentralization still seem solvable to me. But events of the past few weeks suggest that the cost will be high — and higher, perhaps, than some of the companies that are building this world are prepared to pay.

Bluesky, Threads, and the decentralization dilemma (Platformer / Casey Newton)

Threads seems likely to succeed here because Meta have the money and experience building social platforms before. However, open protocols are hard to monetize (just look at email) unless you build walled gardens around additional features (just look at iMessage).

The challenge of monetizing on top of an open protocol suggests we won’t get a diverse, interoperable social media wonder land. Instead, we may end up with a handful of fragmented platforms that never reach the critical mass of a single dominant player. For marketers that means further splitting advertising dollars. For users, that means even more micro-cultures on the web.

💩 Cool shit

CloneDub - This is really cool. Upload audio and it will convert it into another language using the same voice.

The World’s Writing Systems - The info on each writing system is limited, but it’s still a wonderful tour through different glyphs.

RoboPianist - There’s something mesmerizing seeing the robot fingers play a piano. Scroll down for the interactive demo.

What I See When I Close My Eyes - I’d never really thought about this before, but seeing the spectrum is wild (I’m choosing to assume people are telling the truth).

Yeti Upsetti - If you ever played SkiFree on Windows you’ll know what this is. This version lets you play as the yeti.

Wiby - A search engine for obscure sites that are mostly lightweight and self-hosted.

The Penske File - Giphy but just Seinfeld, so every moment can live on forever.

The Blob Toy - It’s just so fun to play with.

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