We Put the Value in Social Media
So let's stop giving ourselves away
Even, and maybe especially, on a day when Meta’s platforms went offline, it is important to remember that there is no better “get rich quick” scheme that starting a social media Web site.
The key is just to make certain that users are not aware that while they provide all the value, you reap all the revenue. Take Instagram. Users create content, upload it to the site, and Meta feeds it out to customers, along with a string of targeted ads. Free content for Meta, nothing for the creators. “Senator, they sell ads.” And how.
Something similar happens at TikTok, Snapchap, Twitter, and just about any social media site. The content is free for the platform, so all it has to do is focus collecting your personal information and selling you ads.
Even this doesn’t work very well. The whole advantage of online ads was that those buying the ads were supposed to be able to know who is clicking and how often. Recently, however, I went to YouTube to watch a “Pod Save America” recording. I’m not interested in their liberal politics, but they teased some hilarious footage from a Trump rally, so I dialed up and was not disappointed.
But what interested me was the popup ad. Katie Porter, Democratic Senate candidate from California, came on to tell me she is being treated unfairly and I should support her. I’m not a Democrat and I don’t live in California, so the ad was a waste of money.
To be fair, I had my VPN turned on, so YouTube didn’t know where I was dialing in from. Also, I was watching a leftwing political show.
But still: this feels like advertising in the 80s, 90s, or 2000s. Back then, Macy*s would buy up pages and pages in newspapers and had no idea who, if anyone, actually saw the ads. All it could know was how many people bought the newspaper, not how many actually read it. How is sending a Katie Porter ad to a conservative in Virginia any different than taking an ad in the 1988 New York Times?
Elsewhere, CNBC says social media giant Reddit wants to make an initial public offering that would value the company at as much as $6.5 billion.
Reddit is an interesting site. The prime feature seems to be that the site allows anonymity, so a user can be whoever she wants to be. That seems like a great idea for scammers, but may not work out as well if you are looking for advice. The person speaking to you may be an issue area expert, or may have no clue what she is talking about. Seek help at your own risk.
Meanwhile, an untold number of Redditors are uploading naked photos of themselves. These users are creating the porn and giving it away. Reddit is posting it and selling ads. Hum. Even Playboy at its heyday had to pay its models. Maybe the site is worth $6 billion after all…
Except the Redditors of “WallStreetBets” may have something to say about that. They have made money driving up the price of stocks such as GameStop and BlackBerry. Ironically, they might make money driving down the price of Reddit. They may as well; they aren’t making anything off the IPO.
Using social media “activates the brain’s reward center by releasing dopamine, a ‘feel-good chemical’ linked to pleasurable activities such as sex, food, and social interaction,” McLean Hospital in Boston writes. “The platforms are designed to be addictive and are associated with anxiety, depression, and even physical ailments.”
So Tuesday’s outage isn’t a crisis; it’s an opportunity.
When it comes to social media, we are the product, whether we upload content or just look at posts from other people. Let’s just stop. Get your dopamine hit by taking a walk, or phoning a friend. If we take back our content, social media won’t have anything to sell us. What a concept.