Social media has shifted from keeping up with friends to endless algorithmic entertainment. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts prioritize what keeps you scrolling for hours over personal updates. Professional creators now dominate because the business incentives favor engagement over connection.
That social media, traditional social media as we know it, was moving from follower platforms to like content platforms. Follower platforms was Twitter back in the day. You and your friends would all follow each other, talk about the fact you had eggs and bacon for breakfast, and then everybody would not really give a shit, but they would be somewhat entertained by it because it's the first time you're seeing your friends post on social media, and they would, you know, like it and engage and everything like that. People would follow their friends. And then gradually over time, those follower platforms turned into content platforms where people went on not just to be entertained by their friends, but they got entertained by professional entertainers who are obviously more entertaining than their friends, or more knowledgeable, more whatever people wanted to follow.
Yeah.
And so that basically led to this, what's called like an unbundling of the social and the entertainment which were 2 things that were together in old-school social networks, they started to get unbundled where a platform like TikTok became— and Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts and everything like that became super, super focused on purely just the entertainment. And it worried a lot less about the social.
I must say though that TikTok really does try to drive those social dynamics. So there is a constant like add to friends, share with friends, or— So I feel like maybe they didn't necessarily engineer it to go only entertainment way, they just failed at the social way. Is that fair?
Yeah, they failed, but it's also probably a better business, the entertainment side. The business model just makes a lot more sense. You can engage people, you know, people want to socialize for only so long, maybe 30 minutes, 40 minutes. They want to see what their friends are up to, all the weddings and engagements, things like that, all the funny stuff their friend says. People can be entertained for 6 hours straight. You know, you can scroll random stuff for so much longer than you can learn about what your friends are up to. And so the business model just makes more sense, the entertainment platform.
Ideally, if you're able to get entertained by your friends, that's the sweet spot.
That was the sweet spot, yeah.
But then people—
then gradually it just became clear that your friends were less entertaining than people whose entire job it was, was to be entertaining. And by the way, There's not just one person who's entertaining you. There's an entire universe of everyone in the world trying to make the most entertaining possible content for you, and then it's choosing the best. So how's your friends ever gonna compete with that in terms of entertainment? True.
