Innovation Monitor: Social networking is getting interesting again
Innovation Monitor: Social networking is getting interesting again
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Welcome to this week’s Innovation Monitor.
“Social networks are competitive again.” That’s not something you hear every day, or have heard much during this past decade.
As conversations around platform monopoly of FAMGA dominate the tech and regulatory conversation, we’re beginning to see a quiet(ish) boom in social networking competition. Clubhouse, TikTok, Discord, and other alt-tech platforms, new networks are being built off of different experiences that, for the first time in a long time, make the online places we use to connect with topics and people we care about feel a bit wide open.
As Casey Newton puts it, in this Platformer piece that is a great overview on the resurgence of competition in the space, “It’s weird, and it’s exciting.” This week, we’ll explore some of these new networks and examine the reasons they are flourishing.
Finally, our TWIBH section has a great video that features Marc Andreessen. As always, stay safe & thank you for reading, and if you were forwarded this email, you can easily sign up here!
All best,
Erica Matsumoto The space between TikTok and LinkedIn To understand how social networking is changing, let’s start with a look at how Americans are using social networks.
Over the past five years, the share of Americans on social media — roughly seven out of ten — has remained stable, according to Pew Research. While the majority of adults use YouTube and Facebook, the more interesting stats hover around the under-30 demographic.
“Majorities of 18- to 29-year-olds say they use Instagram or Snapchat and about half say they use TikTok, with those on the younger end of this cohort — ages 18 to 24 — being especially likely to report using Instagram (76%), Snapchat (75%) or TikTok (55%). These shares stand in stark contrast to those in older age groups. For instance, while 65% of adults ages 18 to 29 say they use Snapchat, just 2% of those 65 and older report using the app — a difference of 63 percentage points.”
Clubhouse is also skewing towards a certain demographic.
While Clubhouse seems to occupy a spot above the TikTok and Snapchat stratus, LinkedIn has captured the 46–55 market (while millennials make up a third of the audience):
Copy of a copy of a copy The new social landscape is difficult to copy.
As Eugene Wei pointed out in February, the “sheer number of forces that have gone into TikTok’s success has made it difficult for Facebook (or YouTube) to clone.” We highly recommend Wei’s deep dive into TikTok to understand what makes it….tick (sorry!).
“To clone TikTok, you can’t just copy any single feature. It’s all of that, and not just the features, but how users deploy them and how the resultant videos interact with each other on the FYP feed. It’s replicating all the feedback loops that are built into TikTok’s ecosystem, all of which are interconnected.”
There are competitors that pose less of an existential threat — Clubhouse with its star VC power and Substack with its stable of writers, both of which are copyable, yet forces on their own. This ecosystem of unique forces has helped shield startups from getting stamped out or reverse-engineered too early by giants. That’s not to say that the social giants aren’t trying to copy every new platform. Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Slack are all launching Clubhouse clones. We’re all familiar with Snapchat Stories now dominating our Instagram feeds, and languishing atop our mobile Twitter and LinkedIn experiences. What feels different now is, in the past, we just assumed a platform giant would quash one of these upstairs with a copy, like Instagram kneecapped Snapchat when it copied Stories. In 2021, this is no longer a foregone conclusion. Serendipity & storytelling For all the stats and justifications about what age gap an emerging social network is filling, in the end, it comes down to storytelling. People are craving new ways to take in and create those stories and spontaneity. Pinterest and Snapchat still have it, the latter more so. Reddit is probably the only old-school platform that consistently produces memorable moments.
Over the years, Instagram and Facebook’s genuinely surprising moments diminished in a sea of advertising, ecommerce, sameness, toxicity… and so on. The novelty of posting your status online wore off.
Now we’re seeing new ways of sparking magical internet moments, and Clubhouse… well, check out Steven Levy’s account. Levy, eager to talk about the bizarre Pharma Bro (aka Martin Shkreli) — Christie Smythe love story, found a Clubhouse room where people exchanged theories about them. Then, something happened…
“Suddenly, a new profile icon appeared on the stage: Christie Smythe herself…. For the next hour, she took questions from us, including a prosecutorial, borderline inappropriate grilling from venture capitalist Jason Calacanis.”
Here’s another example of the access and ‘get to the source-ness.’ During the height of the GameStop saga a few weeks ago, Elon Musk invited Vlad Tenev, the CEO of the trading platform Robinhood to “Spill the beans…What happened last week? Why can’t people buy the GameStop shares? People demand an answer and want to know the details and the truth.”
Since then, Musk has invited Vladimir Putin, the Russian president to a conversation. Perhaps Clubhouse’s privacy policies — which includes recording audio, collecting (and selling) identification data and internet activity Data — were a concern…
Try as it might, a megalith like Facebook cannot recreate this sort of spontaneity, giving Clubhouse and similar pandemic-era social networks a chance to carve out their own space. But maybe Twitter can try. Sure, tweet threads can still capture a bit of that magic. Behold Twitter Spaces, “where live audio conversations happen,” which is going straight after Clubhouse.
The battle isn’t so much which platform can create memorable moments — both can — as which can provide its users the most efficient path to maximizing social capital (Eugene Wei’s phrasing). As Alex Kantrowitz puts it in his competitive analysis of Spaces vs. Clubhouse:
“Twitter Spaces is better positioned to deliver that precious commodity though. On Spaces, people participate in rooms and add followers in the same way they do on Clubhouse (sounding smart, funny, engaging). And while they get that same ability to reengage their followers in a Spaces room sometime down the line, there’s an added benefit: The opportunity to drop tweets into new followers’ timelines.”
If there were ever a perfect representation of this newfound competitive environment, look no further than Kantrowitz and others simply hopping over from Spaces to Clubhouse with scheduled events:
Discord and harmony It was only in September that Microsoft’s deal to buy TikTok for tens of billions of dollars fell through. Now, the company is in talks to acquire Discord for $10B. Given that LinkedIn’s demographic tends to be middle-aged, the deal would open up doors to a much younger crowd, around the same age range as TikTok, and merge it with the Xbox Live crowd.
If Clubhouse is a high-profile conference panel with top VCs and journalists, Discord is “a neighborhood, or like a house where you can move between rooms,” as co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy puts it. More down-to-earth, a bit of Slack, and a bit of Reddit. With no “gamification systems, no follower counts, no algorithmic timelines,” Discord excludes something that most everyone — except maybe for Snapchat and Pinterest — need to rope users in. And hundreds of millions of users have found that an attractive alternative.
“Five years in, it’s clear that Discord has done something remarkable. It’s built a space that feels unlike any other on the internet. It’s not quite group chat, it’s not quite forums, it’s not quite conference calling. It’s all of those things and none of them. It turns out, in that messy middle, is a place that mirrors what it’s like to be human, and interact with other humans, more closely than just about anything else on the internet.” What’s next? For organizations like the NYC Media Lab, this surge in experience innovation and optionality makes this an incredibly exciting time to do our work. Every new platform and network means new questions and opportunities for readers like you, and we’re here to continue delivering programming and content to help guide you through the rapid changes.
And as a consumer, this is equally exciting! My phone’s home screen, for the first time in a long time, is in flux with the apps that live on the first page. In that variety comes the realization that the next great innovations and serendipity will find us all. It’s finally time for our available online experiences to really become interesting again! This Week in Business History April 4, 1994: The Netscape browser is launched
Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark created the Netscape Communications Corporation (originally launched as the Mosaic Communications Corporation. It was the corporate entity for the famous Mosaic web browser that Andreessen had built while working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at nights.
This video is a great throwback to the history of the web browser and how it forever changed the way we interact with the online world.
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