Stay Weird, Internet

Alexis Madrigal thinks niche social networks can survive the age of Facebook:

Social networking is not, it turns out, winner take all. In the past, one might have imagined that switching between Facebook and “some other network” would be difficult, but the smartphone interface makes it easy to be on a dozen networks. All messages come to the same place—the phone’s notifications screen—so what matters is what your friends are doing, not which apps they’re using. Take a look at the rise of apps that exploit the desire for anonymity, ephemerality, and the unknown—roughly the opposite of Facebook’s founding desire to connect real people (under their real names) on the Internet. … “I think we’re shifting in a weird way to one-on-one conversations on social networks and in messaging apps,” says Shani Hilton, the executive editor for news at BuzzFeed, the viral-media site. “People don’t want to perform their lives publicly in the same way that they wanted to five years ago.”

Taken together, these trends pose a direct challenge to Facebook’s supremacy. After all, Facebook is built around a trade-off that it has asked users to make: Give us all your personal information, post all your pictures, tag all your friends, and so on, forever. In return, we’ll optimize your social life. But this output is only as good as the input. And it turns out that, when scaled up, creating this input—making yourself legible enough to the Facebook machine that your posts are deemed “relevant” and worthy of being displayed to your mom and your friends—is exhausting labor. These new apps, then, are arguments that we can still have an Internet that is weird, and private. That we can still have social networks without the social network.