Hello there!

I just had a terrifying thought, so I figured HEY I’ll just come to let you know about it, cause I’m sure that you don’t have enough to worry about right now. I think a lot about social media and I think a lot about content, and like, how like content and platforms interface and also like the human behavior that that like exists in between those things.

And some of the economics that exists, that like to to sort of like push for. or against one or the other of those things. And here’s something that like, is true of content: the the more people want to do this job, that I have, the the harder they will work for it. And hard work functions.

And I’m sorry that I’m like a 40-year-old judgmental old man now, but this functions in two different ways; one as you create higher quality content, that doesn’t have to mean more expensive content, but it doesn’t usually mean harder work, sometimes it can mean really good ideas, but it’s usually some combination of hard work and good ideas and more money. And then there’s this like other thing.  There are folks who will also differentiate themselves not with money, not with quality, but by being, you know, by pushing boundaries. And I think that’s something like sometimes you get like, yes, go push boundaries there are lots of boundaries that you know we don’t know whether they’re necessary until we push on them, but but also like sometimes it’s just like this is clearly destructive stuff for kids.

And ahhh like im old and im a dad and i dont like it. So there’s there’s also that thing. And then I think back to how YouTube started, which is it was pushing a boundary, it wasn’t pushing a cultural boundary was pushing a legal one.

And that legal boundary was copyright.

Lots of stuff was getting uploaded a YouTube, daily show clips, Family Guy Clips, and people were going to YouTube to watch that stuff that they couldn’t find any other way. You’d have to watch a whole up is that a Family Guy if you wanted to see just the funny part.

That is kind of the story of a of social platforms. And I think even, you know you could you could imagine Facebook this way. Facebook didn’t think it ton about the significance of the impact that they might have before launching, and like their their thesis was move fast and break things.  And you know...

I don’t think they meant democracy, but here we are. Not broken but, you know. dented. And now we are entering into the era where these platforms, and really there aren’t that many of them, there’s Twitter Facebook, Amazon - through twitch, and YouTube- Google.

But then you’ve got like a couple of minor players like Snap which has managed to maintain its independence. despite And then once it was clear that they were going to do that, Facebook just just went after them, and mostly, you know, neutralized a lot of what of snaps competitive advantage. But what you didn’t see was snap really moving fast and breaking things. There’s a little bit of that, when they launched they’re like like location cloud feature. there was some concern about how that might be used for privacy stuff.

But for the most part to me Snap feels like it’s moved out of the realm where it’s going to do something that’s sort of like super weirdly world-changing, (and but) but in a like a destructive way, or either a constructive way.  Like it just sort of seems like it’s going to exist, and do its thing, and be good at messaging and be good at like certain certain kinds of communities. But I don’t use it very much anymore though so what do I know.

And then we get to TikTok which I  think is really interesting, not just from the like, it’s its own self, but like what it might mean for the future, and I think what it might mean for the future is that we in the US, for two different reasons, can’t create things like this, that move fast and break stuff, and so we won’t anymore. The two reasons are monopoly, because Facebook and Google and Amazon won’t let it happen, they’ll snatch it up or they’ll crush it. And two, because we care now, we’re terrified, we’re like  Our regulators are starting to pay attention, we’ve got some people in there who actually understand any of this,we’ve got journalists who are writing stories about it, we’ve got critics, we’ve got op-eds. We’ve got all the things, people being like "actually we’re worried and we should be more careful with this," because we have no idea what the impacts are and they could be pretty severe, we’re seeing an increase in teen depression and teen suicide, we’re seeing more misinformation, and it’s spreading faster, and like all that stuff’s worrying, and so like we’re gonna pay attention. And these main companies are gonna invest less in this kind of content, in these kind of companiesm so Facebook in Google mostly- also Amazon, are going to invest less, in content type in like content platforms They’re going to push them less, they’re not and they’re going to compete them out, because they have the power to do that. So now what you have is like.
Back to my original conversation here, the reason I brought up the content because like I see things through the lens of content.

You can’t compete on quality, you can’t compete on money, and so you have to compete on being on the outskirts a little bit.

And if you can’t do that inside of America, because of you know fear of regulation, and this like overwhelming monopoly that we’re dealing with. Then you like the entrants, almost definitionally, have to be from elsewhere and start and build in other markets before coming into the US, and that’s really scary to me, One of the big reasons that I’m terrified of Google and Facebook, is because we live there, and they are corporations. And so I live in a company town, that is called YouTube, and that’s where I run my business, I spend a lot of my time there, I socialize there so in other other places that are corporations, Twitter and Facebook. 

And I, you know, a lot of socialization happens on the inside of Apple’s ecosystems, and the inside of Facebook’s ecosystems, so like, we now live, (I’ve talked about this on this channel before) inside of corporate spaces. Places that are we we have no voting rights, but we do live there. Theyre where like, social interaction happens and I don’t think that you can call it anything but like, living. So we live in spaces that are controlled by corporations, TikTok it’s a little a little more worrying than that. One, because like it’s already a corporationm so you have to worry about all the same stuff, but then also it’s a Chinese corporation. Which means it has to abide by all kinds of China’s specific rules, that mean you know censorship is more easy, they can sort of like the Chinese government can ask for datam, and the you know in the US there are pretty serious rules against like when and how data can be shared with the government, in China they there are none. So that’s that that’s a thing of concern.