- My friend Andrew once pointed out that social media is optimized for consumption, not connection.
- One of the things I am doing on social media – twitter, especially – is hacking it to use it in ways that it wasn’t particularly designed to do.
- Who is the audience for this post? I like the idea of it being shared around Twitter HQ for people to tell each other that the future of social media is still up for grabs. That’s exciting. What do I want them to know? Well… I suppose if they’re thinking about users at large, millions of people, they’re going to appeal to the lowest common denominator. So if that’s what you want, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ good for you. But if you want to herald a golden age, if you want the best creators to congregate, you have to prioritize them. And I don’t think that’s about… making twitter the place where there are long videos. Like, be real. What Twitter really is is something like a public email. Where anyone can /AT anyone and anybody else can see it. It should have better CRM for follower management. People should be able to “view relationship” with someone they’ve tweeted at. Make Twitter the coffeehouse where the greatest minds gather. They kinda already are. Make it easier for them to connect. Make DMs suck less. Make notifications less of a pain.
- The hendrix stuff might be best for a conclusion, to be hopeful. We are still in the early days
I tell this story a lot when talking about the promise of social media. The title feels like it should be the title of a hendrix song… though at a glance I don’t see anything that works.
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Social media creates tremendous opportunities, but hardly anybody stops to really examine this. I think this is because most people operate via old intuitions. We interpret new things in terms of old things.
It took 30 years before Hendrix showed the world what you can really do with the electric guitar. Prior to Hendrix, most people thought of the electric guitar as “it’s like a regular guitar, but you can plug it into a speaker and make it louder.” Hendrix revealed that the electric guitar can be thought of as a different instrument entirely, capable of doing things that acoustic guitars simply cannot.
People often see the most lurid, noisy, loud, chaotic parts of social media and think, ugh, social media is a freak show. But that’s like thinking New York = Times Square. Yes, it is that, but it’s also so much more than that. It’s literally anything you want.
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It took about 30 years for the electric guitar to become an instrument on its own.
the internet is to publishing as the electric guitar is to the acoustic. and IMO, jimi hendrix has not shown up yet. we have celebrities on YT and IG, sure, podcasters, etc. none of that has even scratched 1% of what is possible. our imagination might be the bottleneck
in the 1910s there were patents for transmitters trying to amplify violins and banjos. in the 1920s hobbyists tried attaching microphones to the bridge, which was weak. The Rickenbacker Electro A-22, aka the Frying Pan, was developed in 1931/1932, received it’s patent in 1937. that’s kind of at the boundaries of what you expect from an electric guitar. it’s a lap steel guitar. but there does seem to be consensus that, ok, it’s the 1st to qualify
the rickebacker a-22 lap steel was made in 1931. Jimi Hendrix was born in in 1942 (the same year as Biden, McCartney and Harrison Ford), about a year after when Les Paul made The Log. The Fender Stratocaster was released in 1954, and it would be 13 more years before Hendrix set one on fire”
earliest electric guitar invented ~1930s, Hendrix born ~1940s, Fender Stratocaster ~1950s, Monterey Jazz Festival ~1960s (‘67) 1969 man lands on the moon
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when I meditate deeply and become absolutely still, it becomes clear to me that society has still not even really begun to understand the power and potential of social media
big reason for this is that people primarily operate via outdated intuitions based on past experience with past tools, and their imagination is constrained accordingly
the analogy I’ve used so far to talk about this is how people used to treat the electric guitar like an acoustic guitar for almost 30 years before jimi hendrix came along & demonstrated how you could push it to its limit not a perfect analogy bc guitar is (mostly) single-player
(hendrix wasn’t the first, like how pythagoras wasn’t either, but yadda yadda. mainstream narrative is formed around what most people are most familiar with)
would be kind of arrogant of me to insist that I am here to be The Jimi Hendrix Of The Internet, but I think I’m comfortable saying that I am the Jimi Hendrix Of Twitter Threads, for starters
Bowie was living in the present when everyone else was living in the past. Generally speaking most people live about 50 years in the past
maybe the most epic things people have done with social media you could say are things like “meme the guy into the whitehouse”, “storm the capital” etc… IMO all of this is still extremely early stage, play-doh stuff. I believe the real stuff will reshape society Foundationally
here’s an interesting thing to chew on – electricity was an innovation over steam, and even when it showed up, it took 50 years for systems to truly, fully adapt. we are still in the middle of the system adaptation for “everyone can publish” (It took 50yrs for factories to transition from steam power to electric power, even though it was cleaner, safer, more efficient. Why? Existing systems were optimized for the former – you can’t just swap A for B, you also need to change the architecture, production line, workers)
science and education should be completely revolutionized from the ground up. people get excited for a minute when they watch a ted talk, and then after about a year of trying some stuff they give up. but these things take decades even when the writing is on the wall
aside and in parallel: the challenge for a lot of people, based on a bunch of conversations I’ve had, seems to be: how to be excited about something relatively slow-moving over a lengthy period of time. this is actually a storytelling skillset I think
in concrete terms about my own publishing, which is sort of performance art: just as I grew from nothing to ~30k on twitter I will grow from nothing to 100k+ on youtube and use that to organize/coordinate human networks in cities worldwide. this isn’t about ME, I am just a wave in the ocean, I may as well be anonymous. this is about NETWORK EFFECTS that for some reason 99.99% of people are still oblivious to. but whatever, because 0.01% of people is a lot of people
“give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it and I’ll sell ads and merch to make money to buy consumer products for myself” – lots of people
we have not begun to scratch the surface. we are in the early days. the biggest things we’ve seen are but a fraction of what is to come. it’s always been that way and people are always surprised nevertheless.
there are so many people in the world that it actually makes perfect sense, from a cost-benefit analysis POV, to completely ignore/ghost anybody who doesn’t understand you that can be rude, so I wouldn’t go that far, but think about it. you’ll never even talk to 0.01% of people, that’s 700,000 people.
brains designed for tight knit group of ~150 people, maybe a small multiple of that culture designed for 10,000-100,000ish in a world of ~7,700,000,000 the opportunities aren’t just infinite, they are UNIMAGINABLE because our imagination is constrained by our history/culture.
we are like little babies playing with the froth at the farthest reach of the tide, trying to conceive of the true scale of the ocean do you know how big the ocean is; if you even begin to try to map it onto your intuitions you’ll still be wrong. and we get all caught up in our petty local drama, lol can’t be too harsh/mean to ourselves about that, we do have primate monkey brains. we are doing pretty good given the constraints. people be like “help me o lord why do I keep thinking bout the titty” and not “damn, fucken chimpanzees managed to calculate the curvature of the earth and photograph it from outer space and send probes into deep space”.
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Jimi Hendrix
the internet today is still like the electric guitar before jimi hendrix
the real powerful force is a bunch of nerds trying to outdo each other. it’s rivalry that drives innovation, IMO, more than prestige, accolades and even financial rewards. it’s clapton looking at hendrix and going What The Fuck
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On a tangential note, I really dislike the phrase “online classroom”. I consider myself thoroughly webschooled, & the whole point was to get away from everything about the classroom. Tech innovation is not about copying the old, but about figuring out what’s possible with the new
even with full VR, an “online classroom” will never replace an IRL one. Just as how an electric guitar will never perfectly sound like a full bodied acoustic. They might look vaguely similar but they are fundamentally different instruments
The point of the electric guitar isn’t to be a sorry, apologetic stand-in for the classic. The point is to allow for distortion, for overdrive, for the wah pedal – the point is Jimi Hendrix. The point is to do what could not possibly be done before
what are the guitar pedals of the internet? – You can publish anything, tremendous amounts of volume, for free. Write 1000 blogposts make 1000 YouTube videos
– you can @ anybody on the planet who’s also plugged in. millions of live players right now, countless scenes to join
IMO the fundamental killer feature of the internet is that it allows you to interact with people at scale in a way that simply isn’t possible IRL. Sadly, The Apps aren’t actually very optimised for this. Twitter could be even more powerful than it is now
(The amount of latent wealth sitting around my social graph is staggering to me. Some of you should date and marry each other, but you don’t know it yet. Some of you should start companies together, but you don’t know it yet. Social media is still not even 1% *truly social* – it’s optimized for consumption, not connection
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social media creates tremendous opportunities, but hardly anybody stops to really examine this bc most people operate via old intuitions
here’s the core thesis, with the analogy being “it took 30 years before Hendrix showed the world what you can really do with the electric guitar”. I intend to do this with social media. I don’t think anybody is using it properly, pushing it to its limits
people often see the most lurid, noisy, loud, chaotic parts of social media and think, ugh, social media is a freak show. but that’s like thinking New York = Times Square. It’s that, but it’s also so much more than that. It’s literally anything you *want*
just repeating myself again because people’s imaginations are tremendously constrained in this domain well, in all domains, but it particularly irks me in this domain, because this is a domain which can expand imaginations in other domains
you can use social media to build scenes. but IMO not a single social media platform really does a good job of encouraging this. maybe twitch is ~decent~ at it. but no platform really cares about glory. they care about profits. but i’m not being gloomy
because we can basically hack and jailbreak social media platforms to get what we want out of them, by simply refusing to do what they nudge us to do (consume content) and focus on what is powerful and world-changing (build relationships)
ok let’s switch gears from talking about platforms themselves, to talking about reply game people think that celebrities, hot girls, etc are overwhelmed with noise this is true they then assume this means you can’t get through to them this is false
you do have to be patient, persistent, sensitive, non-needy, thoughtful, & put in the work, w/ an abundance mindset this disqualifies like 99.9% of people which is why it works I’m one of the best reply guys on the planet, so busy ppl make time for me
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(Internet) Social relations in the FB age
I want this to be an essay in the modern romance sense. Surely much has already been written. Research, summarise. Ghosting happens now. And you can go back.
Amrita adding me again. Hearing from Fran about Natalie. Seeing old friends in Memories / On This Day.
thoughts on social relations on FB
- An interesting thing to think about. Most of us started using Facebook with no idea how it was actually going to turn out almost 10 years later. When I started Facebook, there was no newsfeed. People would send friend requests to pretty much every last acquaintance.
- Before Facebook there was MSN Messenger, ICQ, etc. It made sense to add everybody you knew, and even people you didn’t really know, because you never know when it might be useful to have access to somebody that you talk to maybe 0.1% of the time. LinkedIn still works like this. There is almost no cost to accepting a LinkedIn friend request, it makes it likelier that you’ll have a connection to anybody you want to be connected to.
- Status updates were a new thing.
- News feed/mini feed. Real-time stream. Pages. You might like a band, but you might not be interested in getting updates from them.
- Then comes the Ticker. Facebook progressively began to realize that people love receiving updates about what everybody else is up to.
- Wall -> Timeline
- subscribe/follow
In some way this should be a collection of moments. Seeing people in your “On This Day” memories an following up from there.
Jul2022
social media
I’m a pretty heavy social media user, and I’m very curious about what’s up.
Nathan Jurgenson has done some very interesting work.
Links:
I enjoyed this slideshare by Paul Adams – The Real Life Social Network
I’ve written quite extensively about my thoughts on social media on the ReferralCandy blog: Social Media. I wonder if these thoughts are a little dated, or if I could summarize them succinctly.
Social media is what happens when everybody gets the ability to publish information in a publicly accessible domain. It’s interesting to think about how Twitter started out as a microblog service, and Facebook started out as a social networking service. Neither could’ve foreseen that they would’ve become global nervous systems of information – that only came once the adoption was widespread.
I think marc andreessen once said something about how if they had redone netscape again they would’ve thought about the social component… baked into the browser itself?