Here's a hot take; we haven't seen the first really successful social media platform yet. I know there have been may platforms with hundreds of millions, if not billions, of users, but the issue is that most platforms start declining after roughly a decade of use. This isn't scientific, but the successful platforms I've seen so far in my life have a lifestyle that goes something like this; you start out with a cool gimmick that everyone loves, people flock to you and build lots of accounts, those accounts begin to befriend one another, those friends form networks, bullies and jerks from outside appear to start trouble, someone points out major problems with the way the site deals with minority groups, drama starts, people demand moderation, the site owners fumble, everyone gets angry, the site get's sold to someone hoping to make a profit with no knowledge of how the site functions on a community basis, everyone leaves for the next big platform.
We all, I think, know this by now. The problem is that this process can take anywhere from a few years to a decade. I've been posting daily on a Blog with no followers, and I've already realized that transferring to another blog if I have to close this one for any reason would be a major hassle. Imagine doing that once a year, or worse, after spending a decade on a platform, amassing thousands of posts about your life and interactions with your followers. If the decades since the internet's inception are any indication, it's not IF you have to flee to another website, it's when.
So why is it like this?
In my opinion, my deeply uninformed opinion, it's a social problem, not a platform problem. Take Twitter, as an example. The cause of it's grief is that it was bought by Elon Musk, a man with the distinct dishonor of being deeply popular in one segment of the population, while being universally hated by pretty much everyone else. But because of the rules of capitalism, he was allowed to buy Twitter, even though most of Twitter's userbase didn't want him too. If that doesn't seem like that big of a deal, let me put it another way; imagine if, instead of electing a president, our country was just outright owned by Bill Gates. He's not Universally loved, but he knows how to keep people happy enough to not want to revolt against him. Mostly. Then, one day, Jeff Bezos decides he wants to own America, as a way of avoiding taxes on his Amazon warehouses. There's a lot of teeth gnashing, but the transfer goes through. The issue is that Jeff Bezos is much more disliked, and lacks Bill Gates' knowledge of how to keep people just happy enough to not want you dead. So the country starts to fall apart as people leave, revolt, and stop trying to keep America afloat.
That's what's happening on Twitter. Only with one of the worst billionaires alive (who should be very grateful that Donald Trump hasn't kicked the bucket).
To me, the way to solve this is twofold; make social media more democratic, and make it so that the moderators are in regular contact with the people who use the site. One makes it so that Hostile Takeovers can't happen anymore, the other makes it so that people know why a post was flagged, and so moderators have a better idea of what people do and don't want to see.
I don't think people should be taking any advice from me, but I do think the real solution to our social media problem is going to come from learning more about the "social" part. I think that we, as people, don't really understand how society works, and why certain rules help or hurt. Economists have tried, but they only understand a small part of it. It's going to take a lot more time, and a lot more effort, on the part of academics and normal folk alike, to make the first truly successful social media platform.
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