Reimagining Social Media: Part 1

The Problems

Ever since I left LinkedIn back in June, I’ve been taking a lot of time to reflect on: (a) What are problems I care about,(b) What are things that I am good at, (c) Where are areas in which I possess asymmetric information.

Theoretically, the intersection of these criteria would be a great place for me to start building a solution.

As I was considering these things, one very obvious space began to emerge, and that space was social media*.

*Note, for the purposes of this series, I will be using social media as an umbrella term to encompass other sub-categories such as general online media/content & the creator economy.

Like many people, I am apt to complain about current social media platforms at times. However, having worked for one (LinkedIn), I realize that creating and maintaining a healthy social media platform is far from an easy venture.

There are many different parties to please, ranging from general users (this term always feels weird), to power creators/influencers, and the advertisers that fund the platforms. Each of these groups has it’s own specific set of needs, and to create harmony on the platform, you can’t over-index towards any one of them.

That being said, just because the problems involved with a social media platforms are difficult, does not mean that they should be something entrepreneurs shy away from. Similarly, just because these social media platforms have grown to billions of users and $1 trillion+ in market cap, does not mean that a smaller company can’t come along and disrupt the incumbents.

So with all of these things in mind, I thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to dissect the existing social media landscape and attempt to discover what a reimagined social media platform could look like.

As with any solution, we need to first start with the problems. That is the purpose of this article

What are the problems with social media?

As mentioned above, one of the aspects of social media that make it difficult to grapple with is all of the different parties involved. To make this exercise easier, we will begin by parsing out some of the different problems that I see between: general users, power creators/influencers, advertisers.

General users

Problem 1: Content Relevance

I am going to spend the least amount of time on this problem, because frankly, the big social platforms have gotten really damn good at solving this problem.

The only reason I am still including this is because this is usually the biggest issue I see with nascent social media platforms which are liquidity constrained (like Clubhouse). Also, Tik Tok showed that as good as relevance was on some platforms, it can always be better.

Problem 2: Privacy/Data rights

This is probably the problem that has gotten the most attention over the past few years. So much so, that governments have literally started to intervene (see GDPR).

I think everyone is aware that their data is being harvested by these massive social media platforms, I just don’t think everyone understands why that actually matters.

While handing over our data to social media companies actually helps solve for problem 1, it directly hurts us in the long run by driving addiction (problem 3) and taking away our autonomy. In addition, it is also indirectly hurting us, by exploiting our data for revenue that we do not directly receive any piece of.

Problem 3: Addiction

It took me until this past year to finally admit, but I am addicted to social media. The largest social platforms have hired the world’s top psychologists, designers, data scientists, etc. to make these platforms as addicting as possible. Our human brains stand no chance.

How many other pieces of more valuable information, or fulfilling real-world experiences could I have experienced over the years if I didn’t spend so much time glued to my phone? It’s a question that keeps me up at night (or maybe that’s just the blue light from staring at screens all day).

Unfortunately this is the problem that social media companies are least incentivized to fix, so we shouldn’t expect them to. The irony is that the only companies that have done something (like Apple with screen time settings) have only done so in an effort to hurt the other tech giants that are starting to encroach on their territory.

Problem 4: Trolling/Bullying

It’s scary to think about, but there is a massive army of individuals who sit on the internet behind anonymous accounts and seek to bully/make fun of other people on these platforms. Worse still, this has created an environment where even non-anonymous users, can’t help but to pile on when an individual makes a mistake (especially a famous one, or worse still, someone we have differing views from).

In his book The Twittering Machine, Richard Seymour explains how all of this trolling and bullying has real world consequences. This ranges from an increase in depression among teens, to people losing their jobs, or in the most extreme cases, committing suicide because of what they read online.

(Did I miss any other major user problems? DM me or comment if I did)

Power Creators/Influencers

As Mike Solana pointed out in his latest Pirate Wires post, “the power law, in which the great majority of value is produced and captured by a small minority of people,” exists on every major social media platform.

This has created a specific class of users who not only have to deal with the aforementioned problems of general users, but also have their own subset of problems.

Problem 1: They don’t own their audience

While the top social platforms are crucial to driving reach, that reach is almost entirely at their mercy, even after you have built up your base. That is because they own the relevance/distribution, and they can kick you off the platform at any time (see problem 2).

That is why you see top creators constantly trying to convince their followers to also subscribe on other platforms or visit other pieces of digital real estate that they can actually own (website, email lists).

Some startups have already taken advantage of this problem, and have put the audience ownership back in the hands of their creators. A good example is Substack, which allows you to export your subscriber’s email list at any time.

Contrast that to my LinkedIn newsletter, which despite having 41K subscribers, isn’t that valuable to me since LinkedIn does not allow me to download the subscribers’ emails.

Problem 2: They can be booted from the platform at any time

Whenever I bring up the topic of platform bans, everyone immediately wants to make it political by honing in on Trump or other political fringe accounts that have been banned.

But the reality is that the issues go far beyond that. Take for example, Taylor Offer, a content creator I’ve followed for a few years and have some mutual friends with.

A few months back, Taylor was inexplicably banned from LinkedIn and unable to access his account that had 129K followers. I emailed a few VPs at LinkedIn (since I was still working there) to try to help him, and it turns out that he was banned by mistake. There was a bug in the system that miscounted his number of posts that had been considered ‘spam’ in a year. Even if it was broken, I would still have an issue with his post (which was some lighthearted humor related to Gamestop) ever being something that triggers a ban.

So again, this wasn’t some extremist being banned on Twitter. This was literally a former LinkedIn employee being temporarily banned for a Gamestop post because of some weird rules established by the LinkedIn trust team and an overdue bug. 🤔

Note: I’m not trying to rag on LinkedIn. I just have a lot of anecdotal examples from working there for years.

Problem 3: They own no equity in the platforms they build, and get paid a fraction of what they deserve

There are a lot of talented people you need to launch and maintain a massive social media platform: Software engineers to write code, Designers to make slick UX interface, PMs to drink coffee all day (kidding). But you also need content creators.

Could you imagine a social media company not paying their top software engineers for coming in to work every day? This notion seems ridiculous to us; and yet, for years, many social media platforms refused to pay their top content creators anything.

Even today, the revenue share agreements are underwhelming based on the value being provided by creators. Furthermore, while corporate employees at the tech companies are receiving massive equity (stock) packages and benefit from the company doing well, creators are completely cut off from owning any of the platform.

If the top 100 engineers at YouTube were to walk out of the company tomorrow, it would throw the platform into a tailspin. But make no mistake about it, if the top 100 content creators did the same it would be just as damaging.

Problem 4: Their content can be easily stolen or copied

One of the ‘miracles’ of the advent of the internet was that it allowed for theoretically limitless content distribution. However, it’s very bad at attribution/ownership.

This is because historically, the concept of digital scarcity and proprietary ownership of digital assets was blocked by the very technology that allowed for content distribution at infinite scale*. With just a few clicks on my keyboard, I can make a million copies of any piece of content and send it all over the world.

While you can argue that this is a problem with the internet writ large, social media tends to exacerbate the problem. That is because the incentive structures encourage this bad behavior, as stolen content can still be rewarded with likes and in some cases even money.

A classic example of this is the Fuckjerry instagram account which was accused of stealing memes from smaller creators and then reposting them on their page with millions of followers.

*Note many of these problems can be solved by blockchain and different crypto primitives, namely Non-fungible tokens (NFTs). We will discuss how this can be leveraged as a solution in a later article.

Advertisers

We’ll end by discussing the problems of advertisers. Admittedly I know very little about this space, and the information I did gather was from talking to other teams on LinkedIn Marketing solutions. This is a very important group to solve for, because ultimately these advertisers are the ones funding the entire operation.

Problem 1: Targeting

An advertisement is only as good as the relevance to the person you put it in front of. A pair of woman’s yoga pants isn’t going to be of much interest to me, but it could be very relevant for an active woman that’s my age.

The social media platforms understood this early on, and that is why they leverage your data to help advertisers with targeting. It is also why they became some of the most valuable companies in the world.

They’ve only gotten better with time, by finding ways to track (Facebook pixel) and target you (LAN advertising) even when you’re off the platform . Advertisers can even re-target you based on certain activities you take on the platform. Example: You’re a decision maker that attended a Salesforce event, let’s now show you an ad for their CRM solution.

Problem 2: Best price

If the output is how many leads your ad drives, then your input is how much you pay to get those leads. A few years ago, Google flipped the advertising world on its head by creating an ad marketplace that allowed for a bidding model on ads.

Now advertisers need to consider all of the variables that can affect their costs. At what level of granularity do they want/need to target users to drive their outcomes. And at what price does an ad no longer make sense to bid on?

Problem 3: Analytics

Like any function in the world, marketing needs to justify their budget. If they aren’t able to provide tangible results, then it doesn’t matter how well their advertising efforts are performing.

Furthermore, the more granular you make the analytics reporting, the easier it is for marketers to adjust their campaigns, and in turn, the more likely they are to spend more money.

Note — there are a long-tail of other problems for advertisers like: roles & permissions, handling multiple ad accounts, etc. But in the interest of time we will gloss over those for now

Next up

If you’re going to attempt to build any sort of solution, it’s important to understand the underlying problems you are trying to solve. As this article shows, creating a social media platform is incredibly complex given the large number of problems at play.

That is why the best social media companies in the world didn’t try to solve every problem at once. Instead they honed in on 1 or 2 specific problems and solved those first.

In order to determine which of these problems are the best to tackle first, I am going to start interviewing different parties involved in the social media space. From there I will hopefully gain the insights I need to hone in on the ones with the most potential.

If you’re interested in participating in an interview, please reach out to me on Linkedin.