The future of social (participation)
And three (+2) ideas to boost online communities for good
By: Juan José Díaz, Founder & CEO of Wizdem
TL;DR (spontaneously written by @albertotensai)
"I think I can outline three general ideas about how we should be building a new Social Platform, especially one with the purpose of doing good:
1) Focus on conversations over management – the new social won’t be built to manage assets, but to facilitate conversations (think Discord). Social participation and impact happen when people communicate, not when institutions manage and strategize.
2) Focus on discovery over graph – the new social won’t optimize to give you access to your very own community but will help you discover new connections and relations (think “For You” on Tik Tok). Serendipity is crucial to innovation and new ways of creating a positive impact demands accelerated discovery.
3) Focus on participation over consume – the new social won’t build a business on top of passive attention but active interactions (think tips/badges on Twitch). Social participation and impact are directly proportional to the effective work of the members of a certain community."
The world has changed a lot. And with it, the social participation and the internet.
In the past couple of centuries, social participation was built around institutions. From the hospices, almshouses, unions to the senate and courts. Institutions were the way we found to guarantee accountability and, maybe more important, continuity despite the everlasting social changes.
Institutions guarantee order, safety and control. The bureaux allowed societies to overcome the burden of time and build resilience. But it came with a trade-off: the more power the institutions gain, the less room for innovation, growth and improvement is left.
Enter the Internet Era and the XXI Century. Long story short, we’ve seen a tectonic shift in the way our daily reality unfolds.
The way we organize is moving horizontally at insane velocities, and the once clear hierarchical organizations are falling behind the matrices and networks. We are learning to be flatter societies in a flatter world.
Note: I know this is an impudent oversimplification. But please bear with me. I promise the next section I’ll try to be more explicit.
One interesting way to understand this shift is by thinking the transformation from a Stock World to a Flow World.
In a stock world, the competitive edge and the order and safety os societies come from high exclusivity, resources consolidation and specialization [Cf. Heimans, Jeremy and Timms, Henry; New Power]. Think of the music industry with its Labels and artists in exclusivity.
In a flow world, these values are turned upside down. Networks, collaboration, open-source and crowd wisdom are the new name of the game [Cf. Idem]. Think about Patreon, Masks4all, and the #MeToo and #BLM movements.
One more ingredient. This flow world is accelerating thanks to the liquidity of the information technology. Information-based platforms, businesses, movements, industries are catalyzing the evolution towards this new paradigm. And it won’t stop.
Of course, these changes bring their own challenges. One of the most pernicious is the deconstruction of our social institutions.
The tools that were built to bring us together (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit to name a few), have faced enormous backlashes, scandals and challenges. The scandals of democracy mining, bullying, racism, and many others, are symptoms of the profound impact this new paradigm is having in how we built our societies.
I firmly believe that all these behaviours are pernicious. There should be no room and no tolerance for coups, racism, bullying, etc. But I also believe there is also an underlying question: democracy is being hit by broken social platforms, but democracy itself is broken or, at least, outdated as it currently works. And the same applies to our human relations in all their complexities.
We haven’t been able to keep the pace of the changes nor as individuals nor as institutional societies. Tech companies have been faster in leverage social sciences than societies to digest the change, transform into new forms, and build renewed institutions.
For example, our democracy and the way we engage in social matters worked amazingly for the past 200-ish years, but they are in no way optimized for a flow-stated digital world. If you’d want to dive deeper on this, the work of Pia Mancini, Democracy Earth and the book Architecture of a Technodemocracy, by Jason Hanania, are great sources of information and inspiration about this topic.
Now the question arises. What can we do and how do we do it?
I, by no means, pretend to give an exhaustive answer to the question in this short essay. But I want to explore some ideas that may be useful. And I’ll focus the ideas on the social participation sphere, for that is nowadays one of my main concerns.
Disclaimer: I am the founder of Wizdem and so I have some biases regarding the role social platforms will have in solving these challenges. Despite it, I’ll try to be objective and thoughtful. Feel free to challenge my assumptions, arguments and conclusions!
If traditional social participation has been built around institutions and hierarchies that configured the social sector as one closer to a “club” than to a “movement”, social platforms have been built around two values: consumption and management.
When I say the social sector is closer to a “club” what I mean is it is organized around associations of similar-minded individuals in a very diverse catalogue of causes. Individuals with the same values become partners to positively impact a defined challenge. That’s why so hard to enter and participate in a social institution: bureaucracy protects the order defined by the founding members and the current leaders.
When I talk about consumption and management I address the two main attributes I find in the social platforms industry.
When the first era of social -as Sarah Tavel would’ve said it- the startups behind the first social products were still influenced by a pre-web and pre-hyperlink prejudice [Cf. Baricco, Alessandro; The Game]: it was about passive consumption of content, not that much of an active browse [navegar / sail, in Spanish] and even less an active creation of content.
Yes, there was some nuggets of a more participative experience: sharing our own content in form of posts, photos, etc., but the model was optimized to hook our attention and help us consume. This model was the cornerstone of the great business models of Social and Web 2.0.
This is the attribute of consumption. Regarding the attribute of management, we can see a similar configuration of the social platforms.
When brands and organizations wanted to enter the content market, they needed a relatable experience: they did not want to change their way of doing things IRL, they needed to manage their assets online.
So, all these platforms optimized the other side of the market to receive online services that would help them: (a) receive attention from the passive consumers; (b) control their information and execute their strategies; (c) build interesting ROIs on the money spent on the social platforms.
This managerial approach to bring organizations and brands was an amazing model to boost the growth of the new social platforms, but caused that the active participation decreased (that’s why I believe the main engagement metrics are consumption metrics). And with this decrease of participation and growth of consumption engagement, the online social participation became if not impossible, very difficult.
Underlying all this, the raising flow paradigm began to open cracks in those models. And those cracks were the foundation for a new way of understanding the social platforms. More and more creators and entrepreneurs began to push towards a more active social ecosystem:
Jack Conte - Patreon
Jason Citron - Discord
Markus Person (Notch) - Minecraft
Justin Kan - Twitch
Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang - Musical.ly / merged with TikTok
And this shift is great news to the social participation sector. This first wave of an active social (Participatory Social, in the words of Sarah Tavel, or Second Renaissance in the words of Jack Conte) is being fueled by a breed of creators and artists and they embodied and existentially comprehend some critical rules for success, amazingly exposed by Eugene Wei on his Status as a Service essay.
It is remarkable that this new active social demands proof of work in a peculiar way an in a very distinctive system for value creation:
Almost every social network of note had an early signature proof of work hurdle. For Facebook it was posting some witty text-based status update. For Instagram, it was posting an interesting square photo. For Vine, an entertaining 6-second video. For Twitter, it was writing an amusing bit of text of 140 characters or fewer. Pinterest? Pinning a compelling photo. You can likely derive the proof of work for other networks like Quora and Reddit and Twitch and so on. Successful social networks don't pose trick questions at the start, it’s usually clear what they want from you.
–Eugene Wei, Status as a Service
This proof of work approach is absolute contrarian to the “club” approach of our current social sector. If you want to earn value you have to create value. Your social capital is no linked to your previously earn capital (by being someone renowned, or having the same set of values as the other members, for example), but to your individual ability to add value.
What I believe is that this new Era of Social is being shaped by these creators on the top of a more participative experiences demand.
Of course, there are a ton of other attributes (privacy, intimacy, to name a couple). But I will stop here. With all that has been said I think I can outline three general ideas about how we should be building a new Social Platform, especially one with the purpose of doing good:
Focus on conversations over management – the new social won’t be built to manage assets, but to facilitate conversations (think Discord). Social participation and impact happen when people communicate, not when institutions manage and strategize.
Focus on discovery over graph – the new social won’t optimize to give you access to your very own community but will help you discover new connections and relations (think For You on Tik Tok). Serendipity is crucial to innovation and new ways of creating a positive impact demands accelerated discovery.
Focus on participation over consume – the new social won’t build a business on top of passive attention but active interactions (think tips/badges on Twitch (?)). Social participation and impact are directly proportional to the effective work of the members of a certain community.
There are two other ideas I’d love to explore but, honestly, haven’t had the time to study or think about them:
Focus on content over promotion/advertisement
Focus on stacking over on-demand
I’d love to read your insights into these ideas.
And, of course, I’d love to read your comments on this essay. I believe the more we debate, the more we’ll understand. And only understanding we will be able to rise to the challenges of our times and build a truly novel, good, participatory Social.
Final Note: We, founders ourselves, created a community for founders where we hope to build a safe space to help each other to grow and succeed. Join us here: https://wizdem.io/communities/finder/4651-17353