My idea is a social app where your profile has different categories, so for example "Relationship", "Travel", etc. In these categories you can upload content based on what the content is about. So if you're traveling, you would post it and have it under your "Traveling" album. The goal would be to allow you to create as many categories as you want and give you the ability to use whichever medium you want to use as your form of expression (video, text, photo, audio).
This would then show what you enjoy, and allow others to also see what you enjoy. You'd be able to compartmentalize whatever content you choose to put out.
Hopefully that makes sense, and I'd love to hear your feedback on this whole discussion. Thanks!
I wish this were mandatory.
On Twitter, when it still made sense to use it (no, it's not about Musk, it sucked by shadowbanning almost everybody who wouldn't pay well before Musk came), several people whom I should really follow for my work basically FORCED ME TO UNFOLLOW THEM, because:
- their work-related tweets were ACTUALLY important for MY job (papers they published, slides from their talks, professional conversations...)
- but they buried them under garbage, meaning every work tweet was lost in 20/30 other tweets about food porn, what movie they were watching, what shirt they got for Christmas, and tons of other totally personal, totally irrelevant shit that was impossible to filter out, all coming as one stream
No matter how relevant their work tweet were, extracting them from that endless drivel just was not worth the time.
The social network from Google (forgot its name) worked like that. You could group your friends into Circles, and have them be in several Circles in the same time. You'd share your posts with those Circles instead on a generic Wall.
Any new social media project that tries to reconnect people without inserting heavy-handed promoted content and native advertising has my vote.
Facebook for friends/family, LinkedIn for work, Twitter for opinions, Instagram for fashion/social events, Pintrest for crafting, FourSquare for travel/food, etc, etc.
Getting to know someone involves getting to know their full self. Part of that is how frequently they post about food or their friends.
Segmenting a user’s personality into categories bifurcates the experience.
I haven't used IG for several years in a row, but now find myself in a situation where people do "Instagram me" instead of "Googling me" to find out what I'm about, and I'm painfully aware that my profile isn't up to the dreamy-influencer standards it needs to be for that use case.
So... I do think for a large proportion of the population it is still the profile of record. Maybe tied with LinkedIn for professional users.
I run a popular account and watch my subscriber numbers. The turning point was when IG started shoving unrelated short-form videos into every second post in the feed. People left almost to silence and only some returned. If new users are growing now, it's very very slowly.
Anyway, I don't hold hope for your idea. You're describing a service which people are used to getting for free. As every social network has shown, monetizing never goes well. Eventually you'll get all the subscribers you're likely to get and capitalism doesn't like a plateau. One day you too will jam in short-form videos or whatever the flavour of the month is, because you have forgotten your mission and want to emulate someone else's success like TikTok. Then you'll be the social network people are saying is dead.
Maybe one day the EU or similar will fund a noninvasive useful social network with taxpayer money, which isn't beholden to shareholders or constant growth. That's the only way I see a social network working anymore.