Peak social media: The future

This is an audio transcript of the Tech Tonic podcast episode: ‘Peak social media — The future’

Elaine Moore
Where do you post now? I presume you’re posting on Twitter, maybe on Instagram?

Cristina Criddle
I don’t post very much anymore. That’s the thing. I think I did get a bit of that fear of posting because I just saw how good everything was.

Elaine Moore
Cristina Criddle writes about social media for the FT. And maybe you feel a little like she does about using social media these days — that sharing photos and text and videos can feel a bit intimidating.

Cristina Criddle
I used to post on TikTok with my cat Buffy, and used to make little videos for her, but it would take hours. The filming, coming up with the shots, then editing it and then uploading it and then trying to engage with people so that the video would do better. And then when the video didn’t do very well, you were like, Wow, what was that all for? Like, I don’t understand why I’m doing this.

Elaine Moore
Making videos that attract lots of views and likes is now the full-time job of content creators. Social media platforms are shop windows for brands and for the influencers that promote them. And that can mean it doesn’t feel like there’s much room for us amateurs.

Cristina Criddle
As the content that we were watching became more sophisticated, funnier, smarter, I think normal people decided, Oh, I don’t really want to post on there. I don’t want to post my cringe pictures or even try to talk to the camera. And so that meant a number of people making basically professional content. But then those ordinary users not posting as much.

Elaine Moore
There’s been a big shift that’s taken place in social media over the last few years. Big platforms like Instagram and TikTok are becoming more like shopping malls and marketplaces rather than networks where we might interact with our family and friends. Cristina thinks that trend might continue, and as a result, social media is going to become a lot less social.

Cristina Criddle
I do think there is a bit of a reckoning now where people realise that they’re going to these platforms, but not necessarily for authentic interactions with people that they know might be in the real world. So I think that is an awareness that they’re not the most social of apps anymore and perhaps people are seeking those interactions elsewhere.

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Elaine Moore
This is Tech Tonic from the Financial Times. I’m Elaine Moore and in this season of the podcast I’ve been asking whether we’ve hit peak social media and if so, what comes next? We’ve heard a lot from employees, creators and critics of social media in this series. For the final episode, I’m turning to some of my FT colleagues to ask them what will the future of social media look like?

Cristina Criddle says that if you want to understand the current state of social media, the company you need to look at is the one that she spends a lot of her time covering: Gen Z favourite TikTok.

Cristina Criddle
So during the pandemic, we saw this huge explosion of TikTok and lots of young people using it, and it grew very, very quickly to more than a billion users. And they’re now seeing it as the dominant social media app, especially for younger audiences. It came out as a real rival to Facebook and Instagram. It got them very worried and it’s got this whole culture around it fuelling the music industry and entertainment industry and has just taken over a little bit.

Elaine Moore
The runaway success of TikTok has upended the social media sector. Other platforms quickly realised that to compete with TikTok they had to copy it.

Cristina Criddle
You kind of saw other social media companies jumping on the short video bandwagon. YouTube released shorts, which has been really successful. Instagram has Reels and that’s the main thing on there at the moment. And I think they’ve noticed this trend as well for people just wanting to watch and scroll. Also kind of caused by the algorithm and how it’s designed to make you spend more time on the platform.

Elaine Moore
This has proved to be a good business for the platforms. They get a large audience that consumes adverts alongside creator-made content. But Cristina says TikTok doesn’t just want its audience to see ads on the platform. It wants them to buy products through the platform as well.

Cristina Criddle
So advertising is still Tiktok’s biggest revenue-maker. It definitely has been pushing into ecommerce. It has a marketplace on its app in the UK and is starting to launch it in the US where you can buy products through the platform and often creators or small businesses will share links in their videos and then you can buy it completely on the app. So it’s quite a nascent feature, but it’s been really successful in Asia and Bytedance’s had huge success with this on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.

Elaine Moore
The idea of social media as a marketplace is already big business in Asia, but it hasn’t had quite as much traction here in the west.

And why has it not taken off in the US or in other western markets so far?

Cristina Criddle
There’s lots of theories about this. I think the style of selling is quite different in Asia, where you will have these big livestreams and people are used to watching them and used to buying products on there. British consumers, younger consumers aren’t really used to that kind of behaviour and buying those things. I think there’s also a trust element as well where people still don’t really know how likely they are to get their products on time, whether their money’s safe through the platform. And so that’s an awareness and I think that will change over time.

Elaine Moore
And is TikTok the only social media app that has a chance of turning itself into a place for ecommerce and payments? I know that Elon Musk has talked about the idea of Twitter doing the same thing.

Cristina Criddle
Yeah, Musk has talked about payments and obviously he has a huge payments background, so that would make sense. He’s spoken about wanting an everything-app very similar to WeChat in China. And on WeChat you can do payments, commerce, you can read the news, you can order a cab or order some food. So you definitely see that happening on singular apps in other parts of the world. But again, whether that can really take off, I’m not sure. Instagram tried shopping for a very long time and actually cut its shopping features quite recently. I guess just deciding that there wasn’t enough take-off. So whether it’s worth the investment at this stage, it’s not really clear.

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Elaine Moore
The rise of TikTok does indicate a trend in social media towards apps that are more about entertainment and ecommerce rather than social interactions. But despite that, there are still signs that people want a place to go online where they can actually talk to each other and feel part of a global conversation. Elon Musk might want to turn Twitter into an everything-app along the lines of WeChat in China, but as we talked about in the first episode of this series, he faces a huge challenge just to keep the company going. It’s still losing money. Users are still complaining and advertisers are still unhappy about changes to moderation.

And increasingly, it’s facing the prospect of users abandoning the platform altogether in favour of one of its rivals. While we were making this series, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, surprised everybody by launching its own Twitter lookalike, an app that it called Threads. Tim Bradshaw, the FT’s global technology correspondent, was among the 100mn or so who signed up in the first few days of its launch.

Tim, I’ve joined Blue Sky and I joined Mastodon and I joined Threads and Threads felt like it might be different, probably because a lot more of my colleagues and friends also joined Threads. You joined Threads as well. What do you make of it so far?

Tim Bradshaw
Feels like . . . it feels like early Twitter. It’s got a sort of cosiness to it. And there’s that weird sweet spot, isn’t there, with social networks where it’s big enough to be interesting, small enough to feel intimate and like, you know, those people rather than just being random names on the feed.

Elaine Moore
Tim says that although there have been Twitter-like apps before, such as Blue Sky and Mastodon, Threads could be the first serious competitor.

Tim Bradshaw
Twitter’s problems had been obvious for quite a while. Since Elon Musk bought the company, there had been a lot of challenges around content moderation. There were stability problems. There was this somewhat clunky attempt to get people to pay for things, and a lot of people had already kind of left, but there hadn’t been an obvious place for them to go. There’d been Mastodon, which is this sort of decentralised version of Twitter that sort of looks, felt like Twitter, but it’s just a bit hard to wrap your head around. You have to join a particular thing and the usernames are a bit weird and I just, oh, it’s just a bit hard and I can’t be bothered. And then there was Blue Sky, which was sort of the same as that kind of thing, but with a bit of Jack Dorsey kind of sheen to it and looked kind of appealing. But that was invite-only. And so quite a lot of people couldn’t get into it.

And then suddenly Threads come along and I think people were pleasantly surprised by how good it was. There were 7mn people and then there were 25mn people, and then there were 100mn people in less than a week. And this was suddenly the fastest growing app there has ever been. So Twitter has been on the ropes for a number of years, even before Elon. But I don’t think it was obvious how much appetite there was for an alternative until Threads came along and delivered an experience that was just good enough for people to go, OK, I’m gonna start again.

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Elaine Moore
Whether Threads really does end up rivalling Twitter remains to be seen. It could establish itself as an influential online space for news and debates, just like Twitter is. Or it could become just another social network that generates lots of excitement and then fades quietly into the background, just like other social media fads like Clubhouse and Be Real. But Tim thinks that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Instead of waiting for one platform to dominate the rest, perhaps the future of social media will be a succession of platforms that rise and then fall, with users leapfrogging from one to the other.

Tim Bradshaw
To me, a lot of new social media services are almost kind of fads and fashions in themselves. Over time every existing social platform has become a bit gummed up, either by new features or just overrun by ads and spam and bots and trolls and all those kinds of things. So there’s a kind of constant appetite for a fresh start. You get on the new thing because you’re a bit bored of the old thing and you try IT out and it’s that kind of early exciting ‘Hey, we’re kind of new dating’ sort of period. And then it was a bit thin and you move on to the next thing. And I don’t know that social media will ever leave that, periods of sort of coming and going.

Elaine Moore
Tim, if we look forwards, go forward ten years, what does social media look like?

Tim Bradshaw
I think social media looks a lot more like Hollywood than it looks like Silicon Valley, because I think what we’re gonna see is remakes and reboots. It’s going to be slightly different ideas, repackaged with a combination of novelty twinges of nostalgia. But the same people that you’ve got because there aren’t new people in the world to bring online in developed markets, and they’re just gonna have to keep iterating and keep reinventing things. Almost like the summer blockbuster every year to keep people’s attention, because otherwise there isn’t enough to keep people coming back to the same old social networks decade after decade.

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Elaine Moore
If Tim’s prediction is correct, then we can look forward to years of new social media platforms, even if the new platforms might just be reinventions of old ideas. But there are some people in the tech sector who believe that we might be on the cusp of something that would transform the entire social media universe. There are two main candidates for change. The first is virtual reality and the second is the rise in artificial intelligence.

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Hannah Murphy
So you’ve had Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, balloon interviews, places where you follow famous celebrities, creators, viral trends. They’ve perhaps become less sacred spaces to connect with friends.

Elaine Moore
Hannah Murphy writes about social media for the FT from San Francisco, and she agrees with the point that Cristina Criddle made earlier — that many social media platforms have become more focused on content creators and influencers rather than socialising. Hannah says that’s resulted in the rise of other platforms that do cater to people who just want to chat with their friends.

Hannah Murphy
Instead, you see the rise of these community-led platforms, Platforms where you might know each other or at least know each other’s online identity or avatar, might connect over certain themes or topics. And so that’s the sort of Roblox, the Reddit or the Discord model.

Elaine Moore
Do you think that model is something that’s going to take off more and more over the next ten years?

Hannah Murphy
I think it will. I think you’ve got Twitter and Meta where you’re sort of blasting out a message into the ether, kind of megaphone style. And then you’ve got TikTok, which is more about consumption and entertainment. They’ve been branding themselves as an entertainment platform. Then you’ve got that Discord platform that allows you to communicate with your network in multiple ways, sort of chat groups, video chat streaming, different sizes of groups. And these typically mark that return to sort of smaller networks of trusted communities. But I don’t think it’s a sort of shift from one to the other or that it’s a zero-sum game. I think that it’s just young people spending more and more time on these platforms, and that will be across both sort of entertainment sites and sort of chatting with their friends and community sites.

Elaine Moore
Do you think that there will be a lot more social media companies in the next 10 years? Or are we stuck with the big four or five?

Hannah Murphy
By and large, we are stuck with the big four or five, save for a very deep pocketed new app coming into play. Because if you look at the only app that has really broken through in the last few years, the only new social app, it’s TikTok and they have, you know, ByteDance, a multibillion-dollar Chinese parent behind them. And I don’t think that today, given lots of platforms, you already have your, your network, your social graph on those platforms, it’s easier. You’re familiar with them. I don’t think the draw of a new zippy start-up, unless it has something really unique, is going to be strong enough.

Elaine Moore
Hannah says the future might be a plurality of social media platforms catering for different experiences, but perhaps still dominated by the Big Tech companies that we have now. That sounds like an evolution rather than a revolution. But she says there are two really big unknowns that could change that and might make social media radically different to what we have today. The first is whether something like the metaverse, as hyped by Mark Zuckerberg, will really take off.

Hannah Murphy
The bigger questions are sort of around what the next computing platform will look like. Will we move from mobile phones to augmented reality headsets or some sort of immersive experience? Meta would say that its vision is that we will all be logging in to socialise in the metaverse as avatars, which either look like us, the sort of hyper-realistic versions of us even. But I don’t think in the same way that you have sort of 3bn, 2, 3bn people logging on most days to their social apps to communicate, I don’t think they’ll be doing that via a headset with an avatar.

Elaine Moore
The other big unknown is the impact of artificial intelligence. AI, in particular generative AI that powers chat bots like ChatGPT, has dominated the conversation in Silicon Valley for the past few months. Like the rest of the tech sector, the social media industry is still working out what the impact of AI is going to be.

Hannah Murphy
I do think there will be a beneficiary of the generative AI boom, the app that works out how best to wield generative AI in these new technologies, whether that be for users or for creators, helping creators create in a certain way.

Elaine Moore
Companies like Snap and Discord are already experimenting with AI chat bots, and Meta is trialling the use of AI to help it with advertising. But there are some people in the social media world who believe that artificial intelligence could be far more consequential. Could it actually spell the end of social media as we know it?

Evan Henshaw-Plath
We may get to the point where the idea of a big, unified public sphere with all people being able to participate., that itself becomes untenable because we aren’t gonna be able to distinguish between real people and bots. And all of a sudden you can’t tell what’s real and not real.

Elaine Moore
This is Evan Henshaw-Plath or rabble, as he’s known. He’s one of the people who helped to create Twitter back in 2006. I spoke to him in episode one of this season. He says AI could change social media completely because in a world full of convincing AI, it’ll become even more difficult to know whether we’re communicating with real people or with bots.

Evan Henshaw-Plath
Our solution as people will be to fall back to more tribalism, fall back to more vetting more closed spaces, more things like the way in which sub-Reddits and Discord and Slack groups and Signal groups and all these others have been things where you you have a more sense of who they are because you can’t trust anything you see out there on the open networks. And so that’s gonna totally disrupt the advertising market. It’s gonna totally disrupt the entire model of all these social media companies. And, you know, in 10 years, we have no idea what it’s gonna look like, except that we know that it can’t look anything like what we’ve got today.

Elaine Moore
Will AI end up destroying social media as we know it? Who knows? But it’s a reminder to us that something can come out of the blue and change a sector entirely. I started this season by asking whether social media have peaked. It felt as if it had — the early days of jokes going viral on Twitter and friends sharing photos on Facebook and Instagram were long gone. But what I found is that social media has fractured and it’s still evolving. We started this series with Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter. And whatever you think about that, it’s made us all consider what we want from social media. Toxic content is depressing to read. Content moderation will always be a difficult balancing act, and spending hours scrolling online every day is not healthy.

But social media is also incredible. It helps us to discover new ideas, to connect with strangers, and to keep in touch with our friends wherever we are. The connections and the jokes and the photo sharing is still going on. It’s just more likely to happen in private groups now. And even if I’m not posting on Instagram or on TikTok, creators are turning the platforms into a new form of entertainment. At its best, it’s creative and it’s fun. We’ve had close to two decades during which a handful of social media companies have dominated the sector. We don’t know if they’ll still be around in the next decade or what they’ll look like, but new platforms are being built and social media will still be with us. We’re social creatures. That’s what social media reflects.

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You’ve been listening to Tech Tonic from the Financial Times with me, Elaine Moore. This is the last episode in this season on social media. All six episodes are available now on your favourite podcast app. My thanks to Cristina Criddle, Tim Bradshaw and Hannah Murphy for this episode. If you want more from them, we’ve made a selection of their articles free to read on FT.com. Just follow the links in the show notes. Tech Tonic is produced by Josh Gabert-Doyon and Edwin Lane. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Sound design by Breen Turner and Samantha Giovinco. Original music by Metaphor Music. The FT’s head of audio is Cheryl Brumley.

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