Hi,

This week, we’re going deep into social media with a handy guide to what the hell is going on in that weird world. I hope you find it useful food for procrastilearning.

Welcome to the social media hellscape!

What is social media even for?

To be social, I guess, and connect people. And different demographic cliques use different platforms for that purpose.

Below is a breakdown of how the big English-language social media platforms are used - at least over the last decade or so…

A quick guide to who uses old-school social media:

• Facebook: Everybody over 50

• LinkedIn: Everybody who has ever decided to change their job at least once

• Twitter: Journalists, politicians, boastful entrepreneurs & crypto bros (but mostly bots until this year)

• Instagram: Advertisers, influencers (i.e. the advertisers’ minions) & the vain

• TikTok: Everybody under 25

• Reddit: People who hate social media but still want to scroll people talking about stuff

• Pinterest: Interior designers, chefs & wedding organisers

• Discord: Gamers, developers & incels

• Tumblr: Depressed teenagers

• SnapChat: Smart-arse teenagers

Ok, I am being a little unkind.

If you want actual statistics you can check DataReportal’s latest report where you'll find that Facebook and Instagram dominate everywhere, and Whatsapp does the same for private messaging apps. (It also reveals the depressing fact that LADBible is considered a top news source... 😵)

No platform makes anyone happy and everybody seems to use several. People are always seeking alternatives.

For example, if you're a pregnant woman, there's a specific social media app aimed at you called Peanut. But the more specific these things get, the weirder things get - for example, Peanut has a so-called "Chinese gender predictor", whatever that means.

So let's have a quick look at how weird this world is getting and our miserable future:

Newish social media contenders (or future abandoned failures)

Lemon8

When the US started threatening to ban TikTok, its parent company Bytedance tried to think up some alternative plans. Primarily, they split TikTok and Douyin into two separate legal entities even though they are the same app. While that was happening, just to be safe, ByteDance brought out an Instagram-Pinterest hybrid called Lemon8 using a visual format already popular in Japanese apps.

Lemon8 is now one of this year’s fastest-growing apps, (mostly because the TikTok algorithm keeps pushing it at people…).

The Lemon8 app firmly stamps its claim that it's for beauty and fashion when you sign in and it's mostly just posts by women covered in make-up saying how happy they are to be using Lemon8 and that it's "much nicer than Instagram". The content does seem just like Instagram to me - there are a lot of people in the sun standing next to swimming pools. As for those threatened bans, Montana has already banned TikTok, so maybe Lemon8 will be full of Montanans soon enough.

X

As announced this week, X is the new name of Twitter. Or rather, it's Elon Musk reusing a company name he liked back in the late 90s. The name is changing because it's going to change into a completely different app, one that will have an integrated payments system so you can use it as a digital wallet. Again, like his old company back in the late 90s.

Musk has said he wants X to be "an everything app" like WeChat is in China. I guess that means he likes how WeChat is a mass surveillance system exploited by a mistrustful government. We have yet to see how this will play out, but at the moment, people just think the X rebrand is stupid.

BeReal

BeReal was massively popular for a hot minute last year. Interest seems to have waned, especially since TikTok stole its main feature: take a photo of yourself when the app tells you to.

There is an excellent short sketch from SNL starring the bloke from Whiplash and Top Gun 2 that tells you everything you need to know:

Vero

Vero is for hipsters who are concerned about being constantly farmed for their data and getting shown endless ads, but still want to their apps to look like Instagram. One of the biggest accounts on it is Zack Snyder, the film director, and if you know who that is, then you will be able to tell if this is a place for you or not.

It's meant to have a subscription model eventually, but is actually still free to use, despite being out for a few years - it clearly hasn't gathered enough users just yet for that to work. The founders are all millionaires and don't seem to mind.

More importantly, Vero recently bought Tokenise, a "stock exchange" that allows you to buy "shares" of anything you like. So eventually you will be able to buy a share in your favourite content creator on Vero. I think that's a step in the right direction, especially since it's been proven that people happily sponsor creators they like on platforms such as Patreon and the infamous Only Fans. I also think tokenising everything is going to become more important as the years go by, since the Internet will slowly morph towards the principles of web3 (at least part of it will). Which brings us to our next app...

Threads

The Twitter clone Threads set the record this year as the most downloaded newly-launched app ever. A remarkable feat until you realise it's basically an add-on for Instagram, and Instagram already has a billion users. I wanted to try the app out for myself, but you need an Instagram account to sign up, and I deleted mine many years ago.

Is it good that everybody on Instagram is being encouraged to use this Twitter copycat? Yes and no.

People use Instagram because they like pictures, not writing. Will the big IG accounts start writing long threads instead of making pictures and videos? I find it doubtful, even though repurposing is an important tactic in social media strategy.

The one thing strongly in its survival favour is the fact that Instagram and Facebook's advertising technology is going to eventually be integrated into it, and that will make it sexy to advertisers. Twitter's advertising reach has massively dwindled over the last couple years and is infamously ineffective. We will see over the next year or two how much advertisers like using it, and that will tell us if it does become the text app of choice.

Finally yes, as hinted earlier, Threads does have a whiff of web3 about it despite being owned by Mark Zuckerberg, who seemingly wants to own the whole Internet. One of its few good features is that its user profiles are supposedly decentralised. That means you will be able to use them on other random platforms in the future, even ones that have no affiliation with him.

This concept will be important as the Internet evolves - nobody wants to sign up for every service from scratch. It will be much easier to migrate from one place to another with a transferable profile. Again, this is part of that fancy new web3 doctrine of trustlessness, permanence and voluntariness (although I don’t think Zuckerberg really believes in all that, and he just wants his foot in the door to whatever comes next).

Twetch

If you want to see a social media platform that is fully web3, there is Twetch. I don't think it has broken half a million users, so it's almost meaningless in size, and it’s another Twitter clone, but there is something that makes it worth mentioning: its reliance on blockchain technology.

(And maybe that its most famous user is Mexican actor Danny Trejo, also known as “oh I know that guy, he’s in everything”.)

Making blockchain central to any app means it will cost you some sort of money or currency to use. Twetch uses BSV (Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision), which is a cheap and easily ignored fork of Bitcoin, but the user sees payments in USD.

Why would you want to pay for every little thing you do on social media? It’s because these micropayments put off bots, scammers and bores. Most social media are full of fake accounts and phishing messages, as well as "farms" of people employed just to troll others for political gain. Putting up a payment barrier massively reduces these - Twetch even features a "troll toll" in which you can put extra costs on annoying users who you don't want to interact with your account. Watch this guy explain why the system works.

The huge data harvesting and constant advertising in current social media will, I believe, push more and more people into paid platforms, but it will take time. Especially when the nefarious data harvesters are as fun as TikTok...

TikTok

Like Instagram, TikTok also announced it will integrate text to compete with Twitter, but it remains to be seen how that will work out, much like Threads. But if Twitter can make its own rip-off of TikTok, (the Videos For You section on the Search page), then I'm sure TikTok, a much richer and smarter company, will be able to do something usable going the other way.

TikTok's also been changing a lot of different industries since it’s become the hip place for consumers to discuss different products. For example, #BookTok is where people discuss books they are reading, and #SkinTok is where the latest trends in skincare are found. When you take into account that the majority of TikTok users are childless and under 30 with cash to spend, then you can see why industries are taking note that these hashtags have billions of views.

Before TikTok really does get banned for continued dodgy revelations, we need to talk about its live video streaming feature. It’s resulting in a bizarre new moneymaking behaviour.

The app now gives your live viewers the chance to send you virtual gifts that actually have a monetary value. Live streamers have even started acting robotically and repeat the same action every time somebody gives them a gift. This phenomenon is becoming known as “NPC streams” because the stars are acting like Non-Playable Characters from video games, just brainlessly making the same stiff programmed movements over and over again.

Do watch the example below of one famous NPC streamer, but be warned it may leave you feeling it’s best you never switch on the Internet ever again.

So, what have we learned?

The apps I’ve talked about above are the bigger ones out there. There are plenty of even more niche ones popping up, especially for Gen Z youngsters that all seem to be offering “safe spaces”.

Honestly though, although these are all interesting developments for us curious types, it will take many years before the gorilla in the room is toppled.

Facebook will continue to completely dominate social media even though it’s so uninteresting to use and seemingly endlessly rocked by scandals and scammers.

Why? Well, if you end up quitting Facebook, you’ll have no idea when other people’s birthdays are. And that wouldn’t be very sociable, would it?

AI website of the week

Most AI apps will feed you random errors when you ask them questions. This is predominantly because the Internet itself is full of nonsense (take this newsletter as an example).

So instead of using any old AI for research, use Consensus which sticks to research papers as its database. It's way more direct than using Google, and will give you lots of useful clever quotations to use. You can make it generate writing for you, but even its basic research function makes it worth bookmarking.

That’s definitely it for this week. Thanks for reading. I’m going to go read a book. On my phone though. I’ll just quickly check Twitter first. I’m sure I’ll read that book soon.

Adam

Adam Zulawski
Procrastilearning.com / More stuff

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