Photo Source: “Substack is for Communities” via Substack
Good news to share with your family and friends? You run to post about it on Facebook where you know people will be excited for you.
Your boyfriend or girlfriend takes you out on a fancy, romantic dinner date? Phone eats first, you throw a picture of your meal on your Instagram story to show your friends how happy you are.
Get offered an amazing new career opportunity? You update your LinkedIn network as fast as possible, where people you care about can congratulate you.
Social media is currently a community-fostering array of platforms where you follow people and accounts that you want to follow. You are friends with people whose content you want to see and who you want to see your content.
The concept of an online community has been the pinnacle of being connected with your personal network for as long as it’s been around; however, artificial intelligence has the ability to completely change this community.
An article in Every by Michael Mignano titled, “The End of Social Media,” introduces the idea of “recommendation media” taking over and possibly leading to the death of social media as we know it. Recommendation media is a system in which content is distributed through platform-defined algorithms that favor maximum attention and engagement from users, as opposed to being distributed to networks of friends, followers or connected networks, and Meta has announced their plans to switch the dynamic of their platform to revolve completely around this concept.
A large change that recommendation media would cause is a shift of power in the industry. The recent rise of the creator economy has led influencers and creators to hold most of the power on social media, as opposed to the platform itself; however, with Facebook and Instagram switching to be algorithm-based platforms, the company gains back the control.
Popular creators are resistant to this change, as it diminishes the large community of followers that they have worked to obtain, replacing all of their content in their followers’ feeds with content recommended for them by the platform.
Kylie Jenner, the third most followed user on Instagram, has spoken out about her distaste for this change, as the switch to recommendation media makes her 361 million followers essentially worthless. Jenner shared the following image to her Instagram story, echoing the message by captioning the image with “PLEASEEEEEEE,” according to an article in The New York Times by Kalley Huang.
Photo Source: @illumitati on Instagram
Not only does Jenner have an issue with the platform switching to be more like TikTok, already a recommendation media platform, but so do other members of her influential family. Kim Kardashian, with 318 million followers, shared the same image to her Instagram story with the caption: “PRETTY PLEASE.” Jenner has disliked changes in the social media world before, and it hasn’t gone well for the platforms under fire. Let’s track back to February 2018, when Snapchat released an update requiring users to swipe between screens to see and utilize different features and pages.
Snapchat’s parent company, Snap, not even a week later, lost $1.3 billion in market value, according to Huang’s article, with their stock price also falling by 7%, according to Mignano’s article.
As seen through Jenner and Kardashian’s outspoken distaste, recommendation media already has its head in the game. In fact, it seems to be tied to one of the most successful social media platforms: TikTok.
TikTok, as well as YouTube, put less emphasis on friends and social networks, instead placing it on curating a “magical algorithmic experience that match[es] the perfect content for the right people at the exact right time,” according to Mignano.
According to Huang’s article, Instagram has been worried that the attention of their users is being stolen by TikTok. Mignano’s article further addresses why this may be true, crediting TikTok for birthing recommendation media, while also describing how they have one of the best social media strategies in the industry, maximizing the potential for growth of the platform.
In recommendation media, there is no guarantee that your friends, followers or social network will even see your content. Let’s say you make a TikTok video that you really want everyone to see. When you post the video to your account, it likely shows up more on “for you” pages of people you don’t even know than it does on your followers’ feeds.
Creators often find that the solution for this is to share the TikTok video to their Instagram, Twitter or Facebook, where they have an audience that has not been completely taken over by recommendation media. Each time TikTok content is shared to another platform and a user wants to consume the content, they have no choice but to click the link, leading them to TikTok itself. Not only does this drive a large amount of engagement on TikTok, but it also provides TikTok with the potential for new users because if the person clicking the link to the TikTok video from Twitter is not already on the platform, they may be after this.
Platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and YouTube give creators large potential of reaching other users, but the platform has the power. The platform decides who gets attention and when, as well as, who gains an audience and a following. However, Substack is addressing this issue within their platform; they give the power to the creator.
Substack creators write their own content, make their own email lists and manage their own payments. Readers are also in complete control of the content they see in their feeds and inboxes, only receiving content from newsletters they have subscribed to.
Substack takes a different approach to recommendation media, where they still leave the power in the creators’ hands. When a reader subscribes to a new publication, recommended newsletters appear; however, the list is not generated by AI or an algorithm. Writers have the ability to pick which publications appear in their newsletter’s recommendation list, even being able to write and add a personal endorsement to each recommendation.
As large, powerful platforms shift to a recommendation media approach, artificial intelligence will play an increasing role in the social media industry, not only just creating the algorithms used to generate and uphold the recommendation media concept, but also creating the content that will be posted on social media.
AI already has demonstrated the capability to create content, having the ability to write essays, blog posts and articles, create images, as well as, generate memes. More information on how AI can optimize content creation and marketing and some AI content creation tools can be found here.
Professor Jeremy Littau explains and breaks down the AI image-generating project DALL-E, which you can read about more in depth on his newsletter, The Unraveling, linked below, but I will give you the gist of it.
DALL-E is an artificial intelligence project that has the ability to turn descriptive text into an original image. DALL-E learns from us in a similar way that infants and children do: repetition, examples, reinforcement, etc. However, AI gets all of this from sifting through images we have posted online. It utilizes millions of images from the internet with text descriptions and labels to learn and understand what an object looks like.
Littau uses the example of an apple to explain this concept in his article, which I encourage you to read, and he also addresses the way DALL-E is able to generate images of more than just one object.
Here are some of Littau’s examples of DALL-E generated images.
Photo Source: The Unraveling
In recommendation media, the power of the algorithm reigns supreme. The machine learning that manages and influences these algorithms is unique and valuable, making it an expensive resource. Only the platforms that can afford to invest in the best machine learning will be successful, as in recommendation media, the best AI algorithm wins.
AI is changing the scene of professional media, leaving recommendation media to take the wheel. Large media publications are going to have to find and write more stories that are likely to be recommended to users. Creators and influencers are going to have to optimize their content to cater to trends. Social media platforms themselves are going to have to keep up with the machine learning utilized for their algorithms.
In this new era of social media, creators and publications will have to say goodbye to what they know and love. AI is calling the shots now.