Social networks have become the greatest technological and social phenomenon of our time. It all started with a Harvard kid's idea to swap photos with his classmates, and before long we had all ended up inside.
Then the venture turned into a machine for attention and data. Along came Instagram, a network built on the image, which was quickly bought by the hegemon. Then, quite unexpectedly, the next “game changer” arrived from, of all places, China: TikTok. The platform, built on short (and often rather… ahem, shallow) little clips, became the choice of today's young people. It came to the point where, for the first time in its nearly 20-year history, the hegemon Facebook woke up with fewer active users.
Social networks keep evolving as technology advances, generations change and countless other forces come into play.
So what comes next? What will the social networks that rule after today's giants fade look like? What kind of content will they offer us, and how will they manage to win us over?
It Doesn't Matter What Color the Net Is…
“Networks”—or nets—is the perfect metaphor here. We swim along through life, stare at the shiny bait and, before we know it, we're inside for good. We huddle tightly with the rest of the catch and together we start polluting the water around us with the emotional equivalent of our natural bodily functions. Meanwhile, the people on the other side, invisible to us, sell off the caviar of personal data we spawn, because they are farsighted enough to know that this way we'll stay valuable longer.
And all that changes is the lure. Facebook came with the promise of keeping us close to our friends; Instagram, of saving us from the burden of words and from the hate, and of welcoming the next generation of the young. And with the newest generation came TikTok and the craze for short videos.
Every new kind of platform cultivates its own audience, its own rules and quirks, which quickly show up on the others too.
When one idea for bait works, gradually everyone gets busy copying it—sometimes “creatively,” sometimes outright. When Instagram appeared, the hegemon solved the problem by simply buying it. With the next generation it couldn't do the same, so it just tries to bring in as much of its competitor's approach and type of content as it can.
Tight Lines!
For now, you can't say it's working out too well. That is exactly why it is especially interesting to look to the future and at other intriguing ideas on the horizon.
Yes, maybe if you asked that same boy who dragged us into the first net, and who never quite managed to become society's darling, the future looks pretty clear. The metaverse will be the virtual environment that “beats the game.” It will take us to another dimension and, as Zuckerberg himself often says, the goal isn't to keep us inside longer but for us to spend our time better.
Yes, except that the grand promises of huge investment and rapid progress collided painfully with reality, and for now they're more of a drop in the ocean.
Then isn't it logical to turn our gaze to the other, already established social networks and let them take up the rod?
Big Fish
Hardly. If anything, they have already given all their model can give. LinkedIn, for example, is the place for business, for serious communication; it could never become the mass solution. There is no doubt that over the past decades the importance of more niche social networks has grown—ones that bring people together professionally, by interests, or simply locally, with the typical examples coming from China and Russia.
YouTube is worth a mention too: the platform where people once only watched videos has also tried to look more and more like a social network, and to some extent it has succeeded. Still, it is hardly in a position to take on the biggest players either.
And where does Twitter fit in? Not even a professional fortune-teller could tell you. Will it turn out to be its new owner's visionary network that revives free speech, or will it collapse under the weight of expectations and his strange moves? Let's hope for the former, but…
Little Goldfish…
Making a social network isn't hard at all… just ask that same Harvard kid (not our own Harvard boys, the Bulgarian politicians who studied there). Or Donald Trump. Not that his Truth Social has stood out for any special achievements or technical solutions, but it's one more example that in today's online world it isn't all that hard, technically, to create something that quickly becomes huge.
As long as you have a good idea and manage to show it off.
The venture is also quite dangerous: you can crash and burn before your time, and it has happened to the biggest. Perhaps you remember Google+, the app that was going to beat Facebook? Or MySpace, the big rival that was neck and neck with it in the early years of the fishing battle?
To a large extent, the evolution of networks has gone hand in hand with that of the internet itself. Content overload led us to pictures. And then our inability and unwillingness to take in longer, deeper content brought us to short, not overly substantial clips.
“When an app focuses on short-form content, it really can't go wrong today,” says Nora Mati, a trends analyst at Uptime App who previously did the same for YouTube. “The problem, though, is that apps today are easily replaceable. If you take away TikTok, someone will very easily and quickly find an alternative.”
Sprat or Whale?
The new ruler won't give up without a fight. TikTok has only five years of history and has already racked up 1.5 billion users!
Despite the efforts of authorities in the West to tarnish its image, the Chinese platform shows steady user growth there too. Its office in California is WhatsApp's former headquarters. Its teams include dozens of people with experience at the other big companies in the industry.
One option is to go straight from the TikToking comedy to the horror. One of the platforms, Triller, is very similar to TikTok but focuses much more on video editing with the help of AI tools. Its investors include Snoop Dogg and Eminem, and among its managers is Josh Richards, an 18-year-old marketing guru with 20 million followers on TikTok. In recent months the app has been climbing the charts fast.
So do we just want more of the same bait? Hardly.
Groundbait
How could content possibly get even simpler or quicker “to consume”? The trend can hardly keep going in that direction; we have reached some sort of ultimate extreme.
What then? Perhaps the sequel comes from a different trend, again tied to the history of the global network. As we've discussed, if the first era of the internet was about static websites and content, and the second about user-generated content, then the still-emerging web3 should be the age of decentralization. Here that could mean one of two things: either the sunset of social networks, or… social networks that work in a decentralized way.
An example in this direction in recent years is Discord, with its 100 million users. The platform makes communication fast and convenient while also bringing back some of the romance of the days of forums and primitive chat rooms.
Tangled in the Net
At first it was called “Slack for gamers”; today it is much more, and it's no accident that the platform is valued at $15 billion. Discord certainly achieves decentralization: you communicate only with the servers that matter to you and where you find meaning.
Will it manage to become the mass solution in the fishing for audiences? Not very likely. It's too complicated for the average user, and in essence it offers no new type of content.
But something has to come next. If nothing else, because the following generations are also boldly moving into TikTok, which always means the young find a new place to “escape” to.
Poparazzi is a social network that racked up 5 million downloads in its first year, with 95 percent of its users between 14 and 21. Its creators stress that the app is the exact opposite of what Instagram offers. Namely, it takes communication back to where social networks began—easier, faster interaction with friends instead of consuming curated content.
Mostly photos and videos are shared, with no need to write long texts. Users create their own boards, which only people they know are allowed to post on. That way friends—or “paparazzi,” as they're called here—communicate in an environment shielded from prying eyes.
Here, Fishy, Fishy, Fishy
The list of similar projects also includes Yubo, Locket and LiveIn. They all bank on the idea that the big companies' platforms are no longer a place to meet friends from the real world.
Also standing against Instagram, and TikTok too, comes BeReal. As the name suggests, there's no reverence here for gloss, filters and polished photos that leave you unable to recognize your favorite influencer if you bump into them in person. Today the platform, which started in France, has about 3 million subscribers and is quickly climbing the download charts, Bulgaria included.
Interestingly, users can post only once a day, and only within a two-minute window chosen by the app. You get a notification and must immediately upload a photo or video from wherever you are. Others react with emojis or with a short clip of their own. The content disappears from the walls after 24 hours and stays only in the user's personal archive.
Under a Big Stone, a Big Fish
Another interesting example that cuts “across the current” is Mastodon. The logo with the elephant's great-grandfather squares off directly against Twitter's little bird. And that's no accident: quite a few of the users who abandoned that network because of its new owner switched precisely to this rival. Its user base grew to 700,000, with 230,000 of them joining in just the week after Musk barged into his new acquisition carrying a sink.
The network has actually existed for six years, but apparently it has only now hit the right moment…
Mastodon has no ads and no centralized management. New posts appear not at the whim of a blind algorithm but chronologically and according to each user's personal settings—you can sort topics by priority and choose the principle by which posts are ordered. Of course, the main problems come up once we start talking about content moderation…
The venture sounds quite sensible, but whether it works effectively we'll find out when (if) the number of subscribers grows. Meanwhile, Twitter's creator Jack Dorsey has also picked up his spinning rod, announcing that he is working on a decentralized platform called BlueSky.
Going with the Flow
Another suspect is not a new solution at all. Twitch has 140 million users and has been around for more than 10 years, but it has made a splash only in the last few. Video is shared here too, but the focus is specifically on live broadcasts. A similar contender is Caffeine, where you also “broadcast” live to friends and fans.
Some are looking for the next big contender in audio content. And there is a certain logic to that, rooted in the success of the podcast genre in recent years. It turns out people enjoy getting information by listening while they do something else.
An interesting new contender is the social network Clubhouse, which in two years has gathered 10 million weekly active users. It's about sharing audio in real time, but… didn't they invent radio a century and a half ago? Still, the niche evidently exists, since lively conversations on all sorts of topics never stop flowing there.
In Murky Waters
Here are a few more possible answers:
Stallios relies on paying a dollar for every person you bring into the network. But we know this kind of fishing scheme in our parts—just ask the Bulgarian pop-folk singer Volodya Stoyanov about his early days.
Octi moves communication into the world of augmented reality, with the idea of using it to help people meet offline.
CloutHub is something like a modern Hyde Park—a place for cultured, intelligent discussion and debate on all kinds of touchy subjects.
HalloApp lets you communicate only with your family and acquaintances, without collecting any personal information.
Whisper, meanwhile, is… an anonymous network. Users post a statement—true or made up, as text or an image—and a discussion begins. No friends, no followers, no likes. But yes, the main idea here is for the conversation to go beyond the personal, and anonymity is guaranteed.
The Old Man and the Sea
And yet… we keep going either with copies of familiar ideas, or with a return to old solutions, or with the exact opposite of the platforms that exist now.
Experience shows, however, that the breakthrough comes from bold and unexpected ideas.
What they might be is hard to guess; not even the man with the sink has that kind of foresight. But new and interesting things are certainly “baking” in the online world, and the winners will be those whose idea manages to catch the wave…
What will the next irresistible bait turn out to be? Will the future Platform once again be “free,” or will it have a subscription and win precisely because of that? Will it allow anonymity, or will it matter that everyone stands behind their own name? Will it be centralized? Will it have sponsored posts? What will be the main type of content it offers?
If you have good ideas (and, of course, some fishing experience), now is exactly the right moment to turn them into a startup.
