the reverse-chronological social media feed — the way you’ve read Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and blogs for the last years - The unfiltered informational cascade that defined the internet of the 2010s is going the way of the front-page-style web portal: It’s an outdated way of processing online information.
The way we consume social media is being transformed and tinkered with as Silicon Valley tries to wring as much engagement, attention, and money out of it as possible.
Early on, putting content in a long list according to the time it was posted made the most sense. It’s the easiest way to organize anything, ever: You just make a pile, and the oldest stuff is at the bottom. It was a perfect paradigm for social networks: It’s transparent, so you don’t need to explain to your users how it works. It fits nicely on a smartphone. Best of all, it encourages people to constantly refresh, which reads as a certain kind of engagement.
Unfortunately, chronological order doesn’t scale well. Once a medium or platform has had its here-comes-everyone moment, the stuff you actually want to see gets buried in an undifferentiated stream — imagine a library organized chronologically, or even the morning edition of a newspaper. the once-coherent experience of people using a platform unravels into noise.
they are watching, even when you delete it - http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/12/facebook-collects-conducts-research-on-status-updates-you-never-post/
Twitter knows which tweets from your feed you have clicked on, and maybe linked to in a DM, but never liked or retweeted. They know that your approach to the feed, even for an experience you yourself had a hand in creating, is not neutral. And they’re going to help you out.
And so: Enter the curated feed.
It’s difficult for users to adequately curate their own feeds. Most people just follow their friends. And increasingly, content is not easily searchable text, but rather photos and videos, which can only be organized by titles, hashtags, and geotags. This makes it very difficult to organize.
Social media services can, theoretically, eliminate posting anxiety, find the people you want to talk to (and the people you want to hear from) and make the experience of posting feel safer and more enjoyable. It’s still organized in a mobile-friendly stack, and still has a vague relationship to time. But it’s made for you. People like familiar experiences and known audiences; they like to have their viewpoints validated and to know there are others like them. This has always been the internet’s best selling point: You can find your people.
users worry that information they want to see will be hidden, while the content they don’t (like, say, advertisements) will be promoted.
We’ve already given a lot of our online identities and public conversations over to social networks that we can’t hold directly accountable.
It stands to be the death of every last third-party sponsored-content photo on the service. Celebrities, demi-lebrities, wholebrities, and very decent photographers alike have made a booming business of posing conspicuously with cars, gadgets, clothing, and diuretic teas. These sponsored posts, though, get less engagement; companies like Instagram, which get no cut of “#spon” revenue, have no incentive to keep them high up in feeds.
the curated feed is an even better place for advertisers to target users. Your interests have been assessed and weighed, which means they are getting a handle on whether to hit you with an ad for a weight loss supplement or one for an airline. And within your newly styled feed, these services can time and place these ads even better than before.
But we haven’t even remotely begun to see what we, as products, are capable of doing for the companies selling us, and to us. When a lot of people come in and your feed starts to get messy, there is plenty of new engagement-measuring, metrics-optimizing, enjoyment-maximizing tech that can watch what you and everyone does, and turn a pile of chronological mush into entertainment gold for you, and actual gold for the people who own and use those tools.
Services that were never committed to the reverse chronological feed, of course, have no incentive to replace it with something as visually and conceptually similar as the curated feed. Snapchat’s central social feed is still organized according to which of your friends updated most recently, but its Discover publishers, like Cosmopolitan, BuzzFeed, and Vice, present tight packages of curated content on a daily basis according to their audiences.
Services that not only passively anticipate your needs but ask you questions, and answer yours, would be a good next step, as in the movie Her. Some platforms, like Facebook, are laying the groundwork for these interactions with chatbots that can respond as quickly as … within an hour. Mostly with terrible answers. Being alone, for now, is not so bad.
ID: 5119
NAME: death-of-the-feed
DESCRIPTION: ] By Casey Johnston @nymag.com - Johnston looks at the way social media organizes the information that it presents to us and how it is changing.
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STATUS: Write
PRIORITY: -5
OWNER ID: 75