Photo: Sean MacEntee

WHAT IS IT?

No, but seriously? What is it?!?

If the past few weeks of Twitter drama have proven anything, no one is exactly sure, even the people who own these companies.

ANY BUSINESS IS JUST A STORY

Complete with protagonist, antagonist, love interest, conflict, challenge, triumph, and disaster. That doesn’t mean to imply they don’t have an effect on the real world. Stories can be dangerous!

Okay, most of the time, a business strategy document is a really boring story, where the villain is a slightly disappointing third-quarter report and employee turnover, but I don’t think enough people realize it’s a story they made up about a hopelessly complex reality nobody can completely comprehend.

But sometimes even business stories become totally fascinating.

SOCIAL MEDIA WAS AN INNOVATION.

It upended the publishing industry. Yes, the publishing industry.

Up until this point, publishing companies of all descriptions would employ professionals to create content. And then instead of charging customers the full cost of creating that content, they would charge other businesses to advertise their products alongside the content.

It was a win/win/win situation most of the time.

The publisher stays in business, the advertiser gets new customers, and the customers get valuable content and get to hear about products they might like. The customer did sometimes contribute to the publisher, mostly with letters to the editors, but that was a minority of content.

THE GENIUS OF SOCIAL MEDIA

The tech industry dreamed up a genuinely new strategy for doing business as a publishing company: combining two (and often all three) of these roles!

The publisher stayed the same: push out content and ads to customers while taking a cut.

But suddenly producers and customers were one and the same.

Think about it, it’s absolute genius. Instead of paying contributors, you got your own customer base to create your daily magazine full of content. And recruit customers to come and read it. And then you could show the same audience ads and take a cut of that money, for nothing.

Some tell the story of how we are the product of social media, sold to advertisers, but I don’t think that’s quite right.

We are its volunteer content creators and its customers in one.

And for those of us who own a business, its advertisers too! Genius! (If you’re a social media company.)

WILL YOU PAY TO CREATE CONTENT?

Musk’s idea to charge people $8 to use the site is another innovation. He’s making a gamble that in exchange for not seeing as many ads, people will be willing to pay for volunteering to create content.

I’m not saying it’s never been done before, but certainly not at scale. Everyone’s on Twitter because everyone else is on Twitter, and nobody with this big of a platform has tried to switch from advertising to pay-for-play. (I’m leaving aside the dramatically bad rollout of this thing.) It’s failing because it was poorly executed, but also probably because this is not an innovation that will stick.

What is it usually called when you pay to publish content? Vanity publishing? A scam?

Judging from the pushback, most people on Twitter see it that way.

If anything, historically, Musk should be paying THEM to create content. Some social media companies work like that. Both Youtube and Tiktok have creators sharing revenue. Others get away with the fact that easy access to your friends is worth the time commitment of creating for them for nothing, and if you get big enough brands pay creators directly in addition to companies.

WHY I’M NOT HARPING ON FREE SPEECH/TOWN SQUARE ARGUMENT

That is another story a lot of people have told about social media. That it’s some kind of commons/public utility.

You use a public utility like telephones and the internet in private. In my opinion, the moment you broadcast to a larger audience, you enter the realm of publishing.

It’s like if the church bulletin board went online, only the bulletin board made billions, and could sell all of your most private and personal thoughts, hopes, wishes, and dreams to local businesses in exchange for selling things on the board.

Free speech is about the GOVERNMENT silencing people, not about what private publishers choose to publish or not.

That’s called… an editorial decision. Arguably the one has very little to do with the other.

We do have protected classes you can’t discriminate against, even in editorial decisions, and, say, censor all of a certain minority group, (like TitTok has recently been accused of doing) but there aren’t that many protected classes this applies to and they’re governed by totally different laws than the first amendment. And they’re really hard to prove. (Political affiliation is NOT a protected group… Just saying.)

We also have libel laws about ruining other people on social media, but since they’ve successfully argued they’re a utility company, magically don’t… And I’m not saying they should be, but only because we just don’t know what we’re looking at. We don’t have a good story about what these businesses are.

VOLUNTEER CONTENT CREATORS AND LACK OF EMPLOYEE HANDBOOKS

Which is also why the harassment problem is so bad. Not only are you a volunteer content creator, but you’re also outside of any kind of employment protection or code of conduct, or journalistic ethics standards that a paid employee would be entitled to and held to.  And all the family bloggers are outside any kind of child labor law protection.

SO WHAT IS THE STORY OF THE IDEAL SOCIAL MEDIA?

I think it is the story of a unique kind of publishing company. Their main competitive advantage is making the interface easy to use for those creators and showing their audience what they want to see, using ad targeting that people consent to.

If I’m dreaming, I might as well say their workforce is no longer volunteer unless the social media company is also not-for-profit. All for-profit social media content creation should be a profit-share with the company.

They should have standards for publishing and standards for behavior that limits a lot of legal speech and who can use their site because they’re private publishing entities that can censor whoever they want so long as it is not a protected class like every other publishing company quietly does every minute of the day.

At least, that’s the dream story I would like to tell.

In the meantime, we have people railing about public utilities and the first amendment, people trying to charge their volunteer content creators, people upping ads until the content/ad ratio drives the audience away, and people refusing to protect their content creators/customers from harassment of other content creators/customers because… public square/free speech?

THE CURRENT STORY MAKES NO SENSE!!!

Some people are moving on because the magazine just isn’t good anymore. Or cool anymore. Nobody wants a subscription to the magazine your mom loves. Everyone laughs at MySpace for crashing and burning but what looked like a one-off fluke now looks like a feature of the industry. Maybe no social media company has a shelf life beyond 10 years. Most magazines don’t.

In reality, it’s going to take a long time for Silicon Valley, the government, and the public at large to reach some understanding of what this business is, and what is legal or not. If nothing else, it’s going to be entertaining to watch. Most stories are.

The post How to Stop Worrying and Love Our Social Media Future first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.