20 years ago we understood computers & internet pretty well, and basic social science hasn't changed much since then. Yet we mostly failed to predict the rise of social media. So what exactly did we get wrong then; what exactly have we learned the we didn't know then?
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Umm 20 years ago was 1998 and we *had* social media. Forums, Usenet, IRC, geocities, various messengers, early multiplayer games, pre-blog ezines with active comments, precursor to slashdot... many current patterns were well already known in those media. Many saw it coming.
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Okay, but new social media differs in systematic ways. How can we best understand those ways in terms of what it is we've learned?
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I actually don’t think it does. It’s primarily a scaling effect. Every scaling step requires resolving all the old problems at the new scale. I recall analogues to almost all today’s problems at smaller scales 20 years ago.
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Exactly! The problem with organic OG social media was that there was no "there" there. Real water becomes invisible to us fishes.
New Social Media platforms are fish farms. There is very much a There there, and it uses the lure of virality as a lottery for faux social credit.
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Pretty sure I was reading Slashdot regularly 20 years ago :)
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