Re: Slow social media

19 Sep, 2025

It's an interesting time. As mainstream social networking sites are more populous than ever, the pendulum is starting to swing back. Some of us (and quite a few now) are realising we don't quite like the status quo – some are old enough to remember how things used to be, but most understand that networking with others could be so much better than this. I am one of those someones, and I agree with Herman's thoughts on slow social media.

So, for anyone who wants to build, or is building, such a platform, I have a few ideas and words of hope/encouragement.

Critical Mass

There's a cocktail party idea floating around that social networking sites fail because they don't achieve critical mass. It's the idea that people will only join social platforms if their friends are on it, so if anyone ever hopes to build the next Facebook, they'd better have some way of getting a lotta users real quick. The flipside is that if you can get that critical mass, you can pretty much do no wrong – it's written in the stars at that point: you will succeed. And it makes intuitive sense, if we don't think about it too much. But I like to think too much, and I'd say it's a bit of an irrelevant red herring. Here's why:

To start with, the major social media platforms all started with a niche. Facebook was a campus site for Harvard students, Twitter was only known among tech conference attendees initially, Instagram was a camera app, LinkedIn was an online résumé page for Silicon Valley. YouTube was a video hosting site, TikTok was for lip-syncing, and Reddit was a geek homepage of the internet. It's pretty clear that all these platforms offered something of real value to a limited social circle and organically grew out of that.

Even if you had a cheat code for critical mass, your product may still suck. Google+ and Threads famously inherited large user bases, and at least in the case of Google+, many of us in tech actually tried it. And then it died. Because it didn't really have much use. Yes, it was in some regards better than Facebook, and it had all my friends on it – and that's an achievement. But that is also about as much as I have to say for it. I never went to Google+ because I wanted to or it did something for me. It was just sort of there for a while, I guess.

But what’s worse is that – as with any red herring – the critical mass theory diverts planning and resources from the real problems of a small social media platform. This is quite commonly seen in video games, of all places, believe it or not. A big-shot executive pitches a $400M+ idea for a massive multiplayer eSports first-person hero shooter, or perhaps an MMORPG, or even the metaverse. The whole thing hinges on critical mass of players in their mind, so they roll out expensive infra, teams and teams are hired to produce bulk content for everyone’s tastes, and programmers are pushed to implement every trend under the sun that "the masses" seem to like. But then a few thousand people try the game, and it peters out. And it turns out the real problem was never whether the game could hit critical mass, but whether it was fun to play. Without drawing players in and keeping them hooked, the game died upon contact with the market, with the critical mass question never entering the picture. And yet almost the entire production budget was spent on something related to this problem.

I'd say, don't solve the critical mass problem prematurely – it truly is tomorrow's problem. It's not always a big deal whether you have critical mass on your social media early on or not, but it is a huge drain of resources to try to achieve it.

Restriction Mindsets (aren't so good in product design)

I've met a large number of game designers in my life, and I've observed a few rookie product design mistakes they tend to make. One of the biggest mistakes is building games around limits and challenges. This appeals to many designers – competitive people in a cutthroat, hit-driven, winner-takes-all industry – because it's satisfying to "win" despite restrictions. But most players/users aren't so competitive, and restriction-first games don't tend to do well in player testing.

Experienced designers start with a cornerstone of fun in games – something people naturally love, like driving, fighting, building, shooting, optimizing, and similar. Then, they extrapolate from there – "what other fun activities can I add?" "Wouldn't it be cool if we could also do X?" "I think it would really be thrilling/dramatic/emotionally intense if we pulled a Y here." That's the difference between "chore list" – "aren't you challenged? don't you want to prove yourself?" – games and fun games players come back to again and again.

I think the same applies to much of product design, and while I agree that current-day social media has many faults and many mistakes to learn from, I'd say the cornerstone of social networks 2.0 should be a deep and pleasing feeling of human connection. We, as technologists, want to fix the problems – it appeals to us. But to the average user, it may not matter that much that the commercial side of social media is no more, or that there are limits to how often they may post or how many friends they can have. This is not me saying these aren't real problems, or that they should remain unsolved. No, I think we should simply start this journey somewhere else – build the centre of the experience that fundamentally fulfils people, and then... sensible commercialisation is a really lovely cherry on top.

Presence

So naturally, one might say – what is it that tech can do for interactions between people that it doesn't do already? What is that "warm and beautiful" centre of the social network experience we should strive to build? It's a million-dollar question.

But Meta has staked millions of dollars on an answer, so it's worth considering. When Meta was building the Metaverse, one of the key aspects Carmack and Zuckerberg said they wished to impart onto it was a sense of presence. And indeed, in a VR headset, the sense of being present and within the context of a shared world around you is strong. I think a lot of people missed the point of those Oculus Quest demos where a group of friends were playing board games on a space station – being in the same environment as your friends, hearing the same sounds and seeing the same world all around, does actually bring something to the experience.

That context is missing from social media today. When I scroll an algorithmic feed, I may be exposed to content made by 100 or more people, but the people are missing, their circumstances are missing, their feelings betrayed by non-verbal cues as they wrote the post... are missing, the song they listened to when they had the thought they posted is missing, the conversation out of which the thought came is also missing. Being surrounded by 100 people who all have to tell you something shouldn't feel like it does on social networking sites today. It feels like a very solitary activity. And that's because you get little ultra-processed micro-tasters of human friendship, fellowship, and basic interaction – no wonder we are all so starved.

So perhaps context and a shared experience are important in tomorrow's social networks. Whether it involves VR headsets, long-form articles, some sort of context-posting, or something else entirely, it could still be that important cornerstone to start with.

All in all, I think we should not dwell on the shortfalls of existing social networks, or how to achieve the success they have achieved (like the critical mass problem). It might be a case of not seeing the forest for the trees. I would say, we should start at first principles, understand what the pleasing and beautiful part of human connections is – something people are naturally attracted to – and then see if that could be the cornerstone of social networks 2.0. Or that's what I thought I'd yapp about for a moment when I read Herman's, overall, very agreeable article.

Thanks, Maybe

P.S. If I were to fix one thing in existing social media though, I guess it'd be the upvote and like buttons. I think this is originally Jack Dorsey's idea, but I think we should instead have a button that says "I agree" less and "Thank you" more – perhaps a "Thanks" button. I think it's just more natural to reward people for doing helpful things, rather than following the most common ideas.

The contrast between "like" and "thanks" is even more stark if you consider how withdrawing approval makes our monkey brains feel punished. Should we punish everyone who doesn't conform or has a slightly more diverse life experience? In some ways, the innocent "like" button can lead to a lot of pretty serious societal well-being consequences.

But anyway, that's just what I think. Hit the like button below if you want to say "thanks" for putting this yapping out there. 😉 And maybe offer your own perspective on the matter, I'd sure enjoy reading more on this.