Social Media Evolution

But with AI, it’s now possible that such a thing may happen, that AI could come to generate the majority of the content we humans see on the web. Indeed, a 2022 report from European law enforcement agency Europol pointed out that experts believe that as much as 90% of online content may be synthetically generated by 2026—90%!

What’s happening outside your window is real; a feed of the people and subjects algorithmically determined to validate or anger you is not. I look out mine and see my neighbor on his roof. I see him there often, like he is today, watering his plants. We can do more than touch grass—we can get outside and help something, anything, grow.

Young people are rapidly becoming dedicated fans of New York Times Games like Connections and Strands, playing them obsessively and sharing their experiences on social media platforms like TikTok. To answer the question posed in the headline: Because social media sucks, and everyone wants to escape!

Each week, we see the emergence of a new tech wave that exposes a striking duality: on one side, a pursuit of simplicity and minimalism; on the other, a plethora of sophisticated technologies offering alternatives to the established leaders, aiming to define the future beyond smartphones.

Users keep telling the app over and over again what they want: To post photos for their friends. And yet for some reason Meta continually takes these learnings and decides that people avoiding Instagram’s front-facing features by increasingly using Direct Messages means they must want to *spins wheel of things Adam Mosseri scribbles into a notepad ... See more

Whatever we do, the internet isn’t returning to old-school then-common interfaces like FTP and Gopher, or organizations operating their own mail servers again instead of off-the-shelf solutions like G-Suite. But some of what we need is already here, especially on the web. Look at the resurgence of RSS feeds, email newsletters and blogs, as we disco... See more

When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.

Either way, what has been lost since the era of the human search engine is the joy of a distinct voice—while we can now find out almost anything automatically, the answer won’t be delivered with warmth or flair.

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not... See more