Would We Be Better Off If We Didn’t Rely On 1 Social Network?
Article link: https://www.npr.org/2018/05/01/607321023/would-we-be-better-off-if-we-didnt-rely-on-1-social-network
This article is a conversation between NPR interviewer Laurel Wamsley and technology experts Cathy O’Neil and Ethan Zuckerman wherein they discuss what an alternative to Facebook might look like. Wamsley begins the interview by acknowledging the power that Facebook has over its users due to its monopoly status. Wamsley herself is uncomfortable with the way that Facebook uses her data to send her targeted ads, but also doesn’t want to miss out on party invites from friends. O’Neil imagines a nonprofit Facebook competitor; it would allow users to connect with each other without having to worry about the company preying on their data. The platform would also have moderators who curate the conversation. Zuckerman on the other hand, believes that instead of having one alternative, there should be multiple alternatives. People have conflicting needs and desires and so there should be multiple social media platforms to satisfy those different needs. Zuckerman points to Mastodon, an open-source software, as a good example of a decentralized social network.
This article explicitly references payoff and network effects related to social media. For Wamsley, the social payoff of being on Facebook is greater than the cost of her privacy being violated and her data being sold. On the other hand, Wamsley acknowledges in the article that this network effect cuts both ways: it is easier for her to leave Facebook if many of her friends also leave. This suggests that for Wamsley, there is a threshold at which she will leave Facebook if a certain number of her friends leave. Facebook works to prevent this by buying up competing social media platforms like WhatsApp and Instagram. That way, even if Facebook manage to break away from the main website, they are probably still using subsidiary platforms, and Facebook is still able to harvest their data.
I disagree with Zuckerman in that I don’t think that Facebook tries to be everything, and I don’t think that people only use Facebook for their social network needs. Zuckerman himself says that it’s difficult to envision what a better social network looks like because there are so many different user needs. Some people want to connect with their neighbors and other people want to meet random strangers. Other people want to safely explore their hobbies while others want to engage in contentious debate about politics. Facebook dominates a specific sphere: keeping in touch with real life family and communities. For discussions, hobbies, and blogging, users can go to Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Discord, and so on, and in fact many people do. The fact that people use Twitter or Reddit doesn’t mean that they stop using Facebook because these platforms do not directly compete. You don’t keep up with family and friends on Reddit, just as you don’t go onto Facebook to discuss the latest episode of Game of Thrones. (By the way, I think O’Neil’s ‘Facebook but better’ social platform is basically Reddit since Reddit communities are already run by volunteer moderators.)
Facebook’s specific type of social network appeal can be defined as a real-life-connections network; you mostly follow people and organizations you know in real-life. Yes Facebook has news and memes, but the reason people stay on the platform despite its problems is because they want to stay in touch with people they know. Thus, the issue is not that there are not enough social networking sites, but that there is no social network operating within the real-life-connections space. This of course, is difficult due to the rich-get-richer phenomenon. People don’t have the time to use two similar social networking sites at once, so they choose one the one that most of their friends are using. This means that the more people a network has, the more “friends” the network will have and the more people will choose that network over competitors. Future competitors can try to market their product as a safer, less predatory alternative to Facebook, but it remains to be seen whether enough people will transfer over to spark a migration, or if people will just sit on their butts waiting to see if their friends decide to leave.