Business Sunset of the social network - Big Tech sites are trading the friends list for the discovery engine.

Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios

Mark last week as the end of the social networking era, which began with the rise of Friendster in 2003, shaped two decades of internet growth, and now closes with Facebook's rollout of a sweeping TikTok-like redesign.

The big picture: Under the social network model, which piggybacked on the rise of smartphones to mold billions of users' digital experiences, keeping up with your friends' posts served as the hub for everything you might aim to do online.

Now Facebook wants to shape your online life around the algorithmically-sorted preferences of millions of strangers around the globe.

• That's how TikTok sorts the videos it shows users, and that's largely how Facebook will now organize its home screen.
• The dominant player in social media is transforming itself into a kind of digital mass media, in which the reactions of hordes of anonymous users, processed by machine learning, drive the selection of your content.

Facebook and its rivals call this a "discovery engine" because it reliably spits out recommendations of posts from everywhere that might hold your attention.

• But it also looks a lot like a mutant TV with an infinite number of context-free channels that flash in and out of focus at high speed.
• That's what younger users right now seem to prefer, and it's where Facebook expects the growth of its business to lie, now that new privacy rules from Apple and regulators' threats around the world have made its existing ad-targeting model precarious.

Between the lines: For roughly a decade following the 2008 financial crisis, social networks — led by Facebook, with Twitter playing an important secondary role —dominated the internet's culture and economy.

• Their rise came with high hopes they might unleash waves of democratic empowerment and liberate self-expression around the world.
• But their chief impact emerged in the transformation of the media industry and the digital advertising business.

Facebook bested rival MySpace and absorbed or outmaneuvered challengers like Instagram and Snapchat as it transformed a simple "social graph" of human relationships into a moneymaking machine that helped businesses, particularly smaller outfits, target cheap ads with uncanny precision.

• Rivals tried and failed to beat Facebook at the social network game — most notably Google, with multiple forgotten efforts from Orkut to Google+.

Yes, but: As the profits mounted and vaulted Facebook into the exclusive club of Big Tech giants alongside Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, so did the problems.

• Facebook's friend counts and "like" buttons turned human relations into a depersonalized metrics competition.
• Keeping up with the volume of posts became a chore, which was why from 2009 on Facebook's news feed defaulted to an algorithmic, rather than chronological, sort.
• That drove many users, particularly political organizations, to crank up the volume and try to game Facebook's program.
• Over time, critics charged, this dynamic became a driver for extremism, misinformation, hate speech and harassment.

Be smart: TikTok-style "discovery engine" model shares many of the same problems.

• Posts are even less rooted in a web of social relationship.
• The larger the crowd, the louder the threshold for speech to be heard.

Of note: As it rolls out its changes — quickly on mobile apps, "later this year" for computer/browser users —Facebook will continue to provide old-school friends-and-family networking via a subsidiary tab. Those posts will be chronologically ordered, as some users have long wished for.

• This move also helps Facebook avoid claims of bias in its sorting and keeps the company ahead of regulators who are threatening to restrict its algorithms.

But the era in which social networking served as most users' primary experience of the internet is moving behind us. That holds for Twitter, Facebook's chief surviving Western rival, as well.

• Twitter never found a reliable business model, which opened it up to an acquisition bid by Elon Musk. Whatever the outcome of the legal fight now underway, Twitter's future is cloudy at best.

Our thought bubble: The leadership of Meta and Facebook now views the entire machine of Facebook's social network as a legacy operation.

• They aim to keep cranking it to generate the cash they need to subsidize their decade-long plan to build the metaverse — where, maybe, social networking will be reborn in a 3D interface.

What's next: Messaging will continue to grow as the central channel for private, one-to-one and small group communications.

• Meta owns a big chunk of that market, too, thanks to Facebook Messenger and its ownership of WhatsApp.
• At the other end of the media spectrum, the "discovery engines" run by TikTok and Meta will duke it out with streaming services to capture billions of eyeballs around the globe and sell that attention to advertisers.

All this leaves a vacuum in the middle — the space of forums, ad-hoc group formation and small communities that first drove excitement around internet adoption in the pre-Facebook era.

• Facebook's sunsetting of its own social network could open a new space for innovation on this turf, where relative newcomers like Discord are already beginning to thrive.

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Archive

 

[Open Window Maniac]

I eagerly await the death of social media.

 

[TowinKarz]

It's been dead for years, we've just been dealing with the puss oozing from the putrefying corpse....

 

[Diana Moon Glampers]

I eagerly await the death of social media.

The "discovery engine" is even worse and more prone to becoming a propaganda machine that cannot be opposed. There's a reason these techs come from China.

 

[Amphotericin B]

I hope people reject this Discovery Engine and it crashes and burns Meta, but I’m not optimistic.

 

[whatever I feel like]

Holy shit, they're burning it down. They're burning it all down. This is the most expensive corporate suicide in history.

I eagerly await the return of chronological posts, though.

 

[Yamma Damma]

This writer is on crack. On one hand, it's because of all the random bulletpoints and bolding the first few words of each sentence leads me to believe so (brief artsperg but that "illustration" is just photoshop tricks on a facebook user logo. lazy shit).

On the other hand, it's believing all these websites will just shut down and begone. That's Simple Jack thinking. Websites that were big will live off hanger-ons and limp around until the sweet chariot swings low. It happened with AOL, MySpace, DeviantART and IRC, it'll happen with the current crop of robot circuses.

"Social" media has gotten by these past few years by allowing bot farms and artificial engagement for the rich and famous to still appear important and relevant online. Injecting tiktok parasites inside of it won't change that very annoying fact that's led to real life people leaving for alternatives. Nothing's going to shut down (unless clown world throws us a curveball) it'll just get stupider.

 

[Space_Dandy]

The "discovery engine" is even worse and more prone to becoming a propaganda machine that cannot be opposed. There's a reason these techs come from China.

I despise Facebook more than most, but even I can't really be happy at this news. Tik Tok is pure cancer and arguably worse than Facebook. At its heart there's something of worth within Facebook's model; re-connecting with old friends, family, and coworkers. This 'death of social media' is really death to the last remaining vestige of good within Facebook before it becomes a complete abomination.

My full thoughts on Tik Tok.

 

[b0o0pinsn0o0tz]

Damn, boomerbook really is a shambling zombie that refuses to just die already. It was over the moment the place was associated with grandmas and just like the typical grandma it's somehow defying nature and stumbling around in a senile haze.

 

[pikachudidnothingwrong]

Let me guess, no way to opt out or select who/what you see? So glad I stayed out of social media from the very start!

Putting on my tinfoil hat for a sec.. this also sounds like the perfect way to control the narrative of groups of people and outright prevent specific association and organization. Not to mention cut off people from others from real life. It sounds like a totalitarian wet dream actually. No surprise it came from TT.

Also once again.. big media/tech bros showing once again how retarded they really are. Though I guess some of it could be blamed on business "logic" and the ruinous fallacies of inf growth.