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Thandeka Xaba's avatar

I think the way that these businesses are structured plays a significant role in how they view and engage with their user base (probably an obvious statement). What if revenues and profits were secondary to user experience (and by experience I mean prioritising the users values and overall quality of life)? We’d hopefully see less of the reds because I’m sure if you asked people whether they’d like to spend hours on their phones stalking random people they don’t know vs invest time in pursuing a passion or catching up with a friend the answer would be the latter. I think social media has made us (the user) the commodity instead of the customer and that’s not how it started out. If we had more input into how we’d like to consume content this would be better for us but worse for the social media companies (presumably).

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Toby Mather's avatar

I think this is interesting (especially the menu point - what would we choose?), and makes me think that the graph (social vs graph) thing is a cousin of a wider category of 'JTBD' (Job To Be Done): why am I here? Over time it seems we've moved from 'communicate', 'find out what's going on (and the FOMO it might entail, sure)', 'get details for the party', 'remain in loose touch' --> 'be entertained', 'be jealous/boastful', 'kill time on the bus'. Which really makes me wonder why we lost Facebook as a core tool. What actually happened to make me stop using it? Well, enshittification i guess. I still want to go to events, and see what interesting stuff people are up to/writing/sharing, but that's now harder and more fragmented. Meanwhile, the product that did that job increased its ad load, and moved to algorithmic feed in order to monetise. But doesn't that JTBD of 'general social network' actually still exist, underserved? I'd love your take on the _why_ of this, and the mix of economic, social, etc that means no one has created a genuine competitor product that's taken off in an way, with a social graph at its core rather than an interest one.

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