More of the Same
Social Networks, Content Formats, Fad Culture, and Antitrust
Last week, the FTC along with nearly all 50 states, sued Facebook, accusing them of violating antitrust laws. The preferred remedy: break up the social networking giant and create more competition via newly independent Instagram and Whatsapp. The news came on the heels of a lot of tech chatter about reports that all the major social networks were adopting the same set of features in order to compete with one another (see this great Axios post). Ironically then, the FTC action comes at a time when the social networks have potentially reduced their differentiation and moats by chasing the same content format trends rather than investing in what makes them unique.
I wrote a few weeks ago about how the nature of our social networks and content platforms leads to cultural sameness via supercharging fad culture. But increasingly the social networks and content platforms themselves suffer from the same effect. A sort of cultural ouroboros. Modern distribution platforms are now just software and therefore malleable in a way that cables and wireless towers never were. These new distribution networks may deliver content, but being software, they are content themselves. So, while their fad cycles are longer, these networks experience the same dynamics that they create for the content on their platforms. The medium is the message and more basically a message after all.
These platforms do shape what we want to see. But as Benedict Evans is fond of saying, they are also surfing user behavior. They can not entirely control what we see so much as serve us what we want to see for fear of being made obsolete. Competition is just one click away and all that. But that is also true for the nature of the platforms themselves. The reality is that they surf behavior created not just by the content on the platform but by the content format and creation medium itself. They need to provide us not just the content we want to see, but in the format, we want to create it in.
It’s this last part that I think is often overlooked. We are so focused on evaluating our social networks and broadcast platforms from a distribution perspective that we often forget to analyze the other side of the two-sided content marketplace: creation. But our current internet culture is as much driven by frictionless distribution as it is by frictionless creation. We can’t process and sort through all the content distributed by our favorite platforms and in doing so end up coalescing around the most popular content. We do the same for content formats on the creation side as well. Social networks benefit from scale and network effects, but content formats do too. This drives our content platforms to scramble and add the same creation features/tools as a new format rises in popularity and more creators adopt it. In doing so, the platforms drive only more creation of content in the new formats until a new stable equilibrium is born.
Now, this isn’t exactly new. But perhaps the speed and scale of this synchronization are new. It used to take years for our large distribution platforms to rearrange the plumbing. Now, it seems to take mere months. Even innovators such as Snapchat are getting in on the copying. In the social networking game, you either die an innovator or live long enough to become a copy cat.
All of which brings us back to the FTC, antitrust, and competition among social networks. Ironically this format-chasing is doing more to create a standard API than any legal or cultural criticism ever has. It used to be that we lived in a networked age, inside of walled gardens. But now we live in a meta-networked age, inside of a park full of walled gardens, with paths that lead from park to park. People have been clamoring for so long for portable graphs and data sharing when in effect the platforms, in chasing the same behaviors and copying formats, are building the back doors and paths for us. What difference does it make if Facebook locks its graph if you can port your content to Instagram and then directly on to Tik Tok and then on to the next service and vice versa? If you can leverage roughly the same content to build your following across platforms. We see this perhaps most acutely with the rise of the multi-platform creator, and really who isn’t these days. It used to be a notable remark to point towards a creator shifting her audience from platform to platform. Now it’s just Tuesday.
Of course, the answer to why the platform matters is back on the distribution side, with the algorithm and the network. This is especially true for those of us without the ability to accumulate mass followings across platforms. But here too our social platforms are experiencing the same cultural clustering as well and in doing so, weakening their lock-in or at least making it more fragile. The latest trend is for the major platforms to increasingly adopt a TikTok style algorithm, less based on network graphs and more based on content engagement - “meritocratic” algorithm. To some extent, this is the logical conclusion for any broadcast platform; the outcome of our efforts to find the global distribution maximal. But it’s also a function of how good our creation tools have become, of just how much content we can and now do create--and of the increasing impossibility of sorting through it. Either way, it serves to yet again reduce the differentiation between platforms.
Now if you combine this style of distribution algorithm with similar content format inputs from the same popular creators, you start to think you may get to the same endpoint across platforms. There will always be differences among our platforms but the substance will be evermore the same. As such, it’s very possible that in chasing the latest content format trend, the major platforms may have been putting short-term greed ahead of long-term success. Perhaps, YouTube shouldn’t have been chasing TikTok or Snapchat, it should have been investing more heavily in its own unique format and supply, which is to say long-form videos created not by Hollywood but by individuals. It should have been investing in creative tools to enable more long-form UGC, not trying to catch up to others. Similarly, maybe Facebook should be investing more heavily into social and familial-related content creation, not UGC long-form video or TikTok knockoffs, thereby cementing itself rather than chasing new behaviors. To further differentiate itself and build a more robust moat, maybe Twitter should not be creating Fleets to compete with Snapchat but rather doubling down on interest-based real-time communication. Perhaps, even TikTok should not be investing in lengthening its videos as is reported, but in shortening them, in developing more tools to enable more remix culture by making it even easier to create bite-sized mashups.
So, while there’s real merit to debating the merits of the antitrust case, it’s worth noting that our platforms have never felt more fragile in their lack of distinction, not because of any regulatory action but because of their own behavior. That’s not to say that regulators and policymakers shouldn’t increase that fragility. There’s a real argument to be made that the increasing sameness of our platforms is a sign of anti-competitive behavior, that breaking up the platforms would lead to more innovation. But like many of our previous tech epochs, it seems more and more that the platforms are creating the seeds of their own destruction or at least irrelevance. As such, they need to change their behavior not just for the sake of regulators, but for themselves.
Credit to Axios for the Chart