Death to Social Media

At least, as we know it

I have over 75,000 followers on LinkedIn and Twitter.

So, it may be surprising to hear me say:

I cannot wait for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube to die

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a social media hater. I use them all the time for different reasons.

They are extremely useful technologies that:

1. Allow information to spread. Twitter moves faster than the news. YouTube enables anyone anywhere to learn anything.

2. Make connecting with people easier—for all the reasons people want to connect.

3. Democratize distribution. Anyone can post, and if it’s good, it will be seen. Previously, few had the resources and power to distribute information.

These benefits allow more and more people to create and bootstrap businesses—including mine.

Note this post was inspired from years of thinking about this, and reading Read Write Own by Chris Dixon.

But everyone can agree there’s a lot wrong with existing social networks:

1. You are not the customer. Advertisers are. That’s why all the innovations and changes in the past several years are in ad tech, not platform tech. And why it’s increasingly filled with ads.

   1. All the product changes in the past 5+ years are because a startup innovates, and the incumbents scramble to copy them. Examples:

      1. Twitter Spaces copied Clubhouse.

      2. Twitter/Instagram/YouTube subscriptions copied Substack.

      3. Instagram Stories copied Snapchat.

      4. Instagram Reels/YouTube Shorts copied TikTok.

2. Your attention and data are the product. Meta makes $200 per year per user. Even if every user paid a $15/mo subscription to use Facebook and Instagram, they would lose money—and there’s no way every user would pay for it.

3. They’re increasingly filled with spam. In the 90s and 00s, email inboxes were filled with spam, including viruses that could wreck your computer. The Internet community banded together to combat it. Today, Twitter is overrun with bots, and Instagram is filled with fake accounts.

4. You do not own your distribution. They control the algorithm. It can change at any time. It’s opaque. And they increasingly dislike you sending people off the platform.

   1. Instagram doesn’t allow posts with links. Twitter reduces their reach. And LinkedIn will never give you a “Top Voice” badge if you send people off LinkedIn.

5. You do not own the relationship with your audience. If you are banned. If the algorithm changes. If people leave the platform. You’re screwed.

6. You cannot innovate on top of them. Have a great idea on how to improve Twitter? Well, you can’t do that anymore. Perhaps you can file a feature request for the 20 overworked engineers?

   1. Twitter made its API horrendously expensive killing dozens of apps.

   2. Reddit killed off some of the most popular apps people built to view Reddit.

   3. Facebook killed Farmville and Vine.

There are various reasons why this happens.

1. No one will pay to use social media at this point. Only ~640,000 of Twitter’s 75,000,000 monthly active users pay for premium, a cool 0.85% of users.

2. Public companies need to grow to make investors happy. They need to keep extracting more money out of it.

3. They need to cover their asses. They can’t allow rampant innovation, which could lead to scams and problems for their real customers—advertisers.

4. It’s expensive to run a massive social network:

   1. Engineering talent to create a great, usable product.

   2. Customer support to handle the various issues that come up.

   3. Infrastructure to handle the billions of actions per year.

Email, podcast, and SMS subscribers are the only audiences you can own.

With email, as long as you have the list of emails and they’ve consented to receive emails from you, you can directly contact your audience.

The only algorithm that will prevent you is designed to filter out spam. As long as you follow good deliverability practices, you should be fine.

And even if your domain is restricted for spam, you can always move to another one. (Assuming you don’t do it so egregiously, the government comes after you.)

There are tons of different email service providers. You can switch back and forth between them as many times as you like.

With SMS, as long as you have their number, it’s even easier to contact them since there’s not as much spam filtering. That’s because sending SMS’ at scale is much more expensive than emails, which helps cut down on spam.

With podcasts, it’s a simple RSS feed. Subscribers receive your episodes in whichever podcast app they prefer. Sure, Apple or Spotify could de-list you if you did something really bad, but the RSS feed is still there.

With each of these, anyone can confidently create a business without worry of it being taken away from them one day by a corporate giant. This is especially true as anyone can buy a domain name and set up a website without fear of it being taken away.

But these 3 channels are not enough.

There are two types of channels:

1. Discovery: You broadcast content, and it allows new people to discover it.

2. Relationship: You send content to people who have opted to receive it.

Discovery channels include social media. You post, and assuming it’s good, the algorithms cause it to be seen by people outside of your direct followers.

It can also include things like SEO. Someone searches for something and finds one of your newsletter editions or a podcast episode’s transcript.

Email, SMS, and Podcasts are relationship channels. If you send them out, there is no built-in mechanism for them to be seen by other people. People will not stumble upon the output of your relationship channel unless:

1. Someone refers them to it. Example: A friend tells you about a podcast they love. Or it’s shared on someone else’s relationship channel (a newsletter links to another newsletter).

2. They find it on a discovery channel. This could be the creator sharing it, someone else sharing it, or finding it via SEO.

3. You (the creator) pay to run ads to it. This is a common way people grow their newsletters and podcasts once they make money from them.

4. Bonus: You create something people want and only allow people to access it if they subscribe. But that thing must still be distributed via discovery channels or other people’s relationship channels.

Social media allows someone with no followers to start sharing useful, interesting content and build a following. They can then siphon a percentage of those people from the discovery channel (LinkedIn) into their relationship channel (email) and slowly convert those people over time into customers.

Or monetize the audience by inserting sponsorships into their relationship channel (newsletter/podcast).

As creators grow, they also typically diversify across multiple discovery channels so they’re not completely reliant on one for their business and to expand their reach.

Without discovery channels, it’s way harder for new people to start businesses. They enable anyone to earn distribution for their ideas and their products.

So, we need discovery channels that corporate giants do not own

The incentive structures mean that social networks run by a central entity will always have these inherent problems. We need decentralized social networks.

Websites, email, SMS, and podcast feeds are decentralized. No central authority controls them. Anyone can build a business on them without fear. Decisions to update them are made by the community of users and developers, not by a small group trying to maximize their profits.

Until recently, we didn’t have the technology to run and bootstrap decentralized social networks that could compete with the incumbents.

But now we do.

Unfortunately, it’s a technology most people do not understand and make fun of (rightfully so in many many cases).

That technology is blockchain—the tech that powers cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

No, this post is not trying to shill cryptocurrencies.

Yes, many cryptocurrencies are scams, memes, or vaporware. Just like in the early days of the Internet, there were many scams and vaporware Internet startups.

But it’s technology that can radically fix a lot of the problems of the current architecture of the Internet to make it more equitable.

So, instead, I highlight the power of this technology to replace broken systems.

Nor will I dive deep into how blockchain works as it’s incredibly technical, and you probably have very little understanding of how the Internet, electricity, engines, or really most things you use daily.

You care about what things can do to make your life better. So, I’ll focus on that.

In short, blockchain enables:

1. A network of computers to all agree on something and to follow rules. Without blockchain, computers operated by strangers cannot all agree on who has how much money, followers, likes, etc. And it protects against bad, dishonest actors.

2. Funding projects and incentivizing developers. Companies create “shares” to enable people to own pieces of it. They raise money by selling their shares to investors. Blockchain networks create cryptocurrencies for the same reason, allowing them to fund development.

3. Incentivizing usage and bootstrapping a network. It’s really hard to get a network going. No one likes to be the first one at a party. Many blockchain networks distribute cryptocurrencies to early users to incentivize them to use them. As the network gets more active, they distribute less and less of the currency as network effects kick in and it’s running itself.

4. Enabling a large community of people to govern themselves. Cryptocurrency owners vote on the direction the blockchain network takes in the future. Rather than being decided by a small board, it’s decided by the network of users, developers, and stakeholders.

5. Anyone can innovate on top of the network. If you have a great idea to improve the network, you can build on it, and everyone else benefits, and you can profit from it. No one can take that away from you.

6. People can create different apps to interact with it. Twitter has a website/app that lets people interact with the data on their servers, i.e., the Twitter app. If you don’t like the app or its algorithm, you’re screwed since there’s only one. But if you don’t like Apple Podcasts, you can use Overcast or Spotify because RSS feeds are decentralized. This applies to blockchain networks as well. Someone can create a blockchain social network where people follow, post, like, and comment, and then you can have as many different apps that view that data. So if you don’t like how one does it, you can use a different one. But your followers and content transfer across all of them.

   1. Picture creating a Twitter account for the first time and all of your LinkedIn followers and posts transfer over.

7. Creators can get paid for ad revenue. YouTube is the only social network that shares meaningful ad revenue with creators (45%). Most of the others either do not share or share an incredibly small percentage of their revenue. With blockchain networks, the creator can get paid the lion's share.

   1. The community decides the fees, and they typically end up being set to the cost of running the network.

Problems with blockchain networks at the moment include:

1. They cost money to use. You need to pay to do things because there’s no central authority to pay for things, and advertisers aren’t footing the bill. Luckily, this is getting cheaper as technology improves. And with clever design, the network could help cover some of the costs by inserting advertisements into them. But that doesn’t exist so far.

2. They’re still scaling. Up until recently, they were super slow. There’s still no blockchain network that can handle the 1,000,000 actions per second that Twitter can handle. But they’re coming.

I know this is hard to understand in theory, so let’s use an example

Recently, a blockchain network called Farcaster was created.

This network lets people follow, post, comment, like, repost, and send DMs—everything Twitter does essentially.

Note: A tweet/post is called a “cast” and a retweet/repost is called a “recast.”

Warpcast is a mobile and desktop app that lets you view this data and looks very similar to Twitter, except it also has “Channels,” which you can think of as subreddits on Reddit—communities centralized around a common interest.

It costs $5 upfront to join Warpcast to help cover the cost of actions on the blockchain of follows, likes, and posts. $5 covers 5,000 posts/comments, 2,500 likes, and 2,500 follows. For the average user, that will likely cover years of use. And this cost will likely decrease over time or get covered by the platform or advertisers.

There is a core team that created Farcaster and Warpcast. Still, they’ll likely distribute a cryptocurrency that will give the majority of the ownership of Farcaster to the community of users and developers.

And other people are already creating alternatives to Warpcast. So if someone wants to view the data on Farcaster (like one might view podcast episodes) but doesn’t like how Warpcast works (like one might not like Apple Podcasts), they can use the alternatives instead.

One of the “channels” within Warpcast distributed its own cryptocurrency called $DEGEN to reward early members. The average USD value of the distribution was $8.7k.

Enter the frame

Just in the past 2 weeks, Farcaster created a special type of “cast” (tweet/post) called a “frame” where people can essentially embed a mini app into a tweet. They’re simple right now; they include an image, up to four buttons, and an optional text field.

Pushing a button can:

1. Change the image (which can enable a lot of things)

2. Perform an action on the blockchain (like create an NFT or buy something)

3. Cause an action to occur on a server (like subscribing you to a newsletter)

4. Take you to a website

The whole community has been innovating with these simple constraints to do cool things

Here are some examples

Subscription boxes

Imagine being able to have a nice email subscription box embedded directly into a tweet:

Or if you want to be able to read the newsletter inline first:

“Games”

Someone recreated the game DOOM. Another created poker. Another created 2048.

Contests

People have been making weird contest-like games, such as:

Last one to click

1. Each person gets to click the button once

2. The last person to click the button is “it,” and a 10-minute timer starts ticking away

3. If 10 minutes goes by without someone new clicking the button, the last person to click it wins $500.

4. The money is sent to them automatically by the frame.

Longest person to have it

1. Each person can click the button once

2. They then become it

3. The person to be “it” for the longest before the contest ends wins money.

Little apps

People made it so if you click the button, the image changes to show a graph of your Farcaster follower growth over time:

Another person made a frame where a button click generates an image of a chart showing the likes you got on each post over time:

Another person made a ranking game showing two random concepts and letting you choose which one you rank higher:

Stores

Others made it so you can show an image of an NFT. Clicking the button will open up a little modal for you to pay to buy it.

Another person made a frame with an image of shirts in 4 colors. The 4 buttons take you to a Shopify checkout page with the shirt of the chosen color already in your cart.

And this is just 2 weeks in

The concept of frames is brand new. They can be updated to have more than just an image and buttons.

And people have only had 2 weeks to play around with it.

It’s exciting to see what’s coming next.

Farcaster may not be “it”

At the moment, it’s just crypto nerds posting on it about crypto things.

But its Monthly Active Users are growing fast.

Twitter has 75M monthly active users, so there’s a ton of room to grow.

Farcaster needs to bridge the gap from early adopters to mainstream users to get there. To do that, it needs to offer something uniquely valuable to users and completely obscure all “crypto/blockchain” things from it.

Farcaster may not be the decentralized social network to do that. But I think it’s the first to have a real shot.

And it’s exciting to see the innovation already happening on it.

As I said, I can’t wait until LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube die and are replaced with more equitable alternatives that allow innovation and ownership.

Discovery channels are critical.

But we need ones where WE own our content, earnings, and audience.

Realistically, this will take years to play out. And the incumbents will do everything they can to compete, which will only mean positive things for users.

If you’d like to learn more, check out Read Write Own by Chris Dixon.

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– Neal