TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants
Modern social media leaves a very big gap - that was filled by old Facebook, or to some extent MySpace: The "people directory" where basically everybody has a page, and you can see what friends are doing, or look up acquaintances and strangers. For me, social media feeds were never addicting, but more tedious. I found visiting friends pages and sometimes finding an update, sometimes not, like a slot machine, more addicting. And there was a whole culture around what it meant if you saw somebody (a crush?) visiting your profile, sending a "poke", or commenting on a picture.<p>I think it would be hard to start something like this again, because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006. And this narrative that big companies are sucking up data and ruining society was pushed by "old" media in a struggle to remain relevant, and I believe it was also not inconvinient for FB as they moved from home pages and Farmville to newsfeeds and now videos (which probably earns them more).<p>Maybe a Mastodon-derivative which deemphasizes the feed, but lets you design your personal page more creatively would be a cool thing.