Rivals tried and failed to beat Facebook at the social network game. But then TikTok figured it out. Yep, the big Facebook pivot arrives. Goodbye to the old feed, hello discovery engine. But will users want this?
Herein a short dive into social media.
26 July 2022 – Mark last week as the end of the social networking era, which began with the rise of Friendster in 2003, shaped two decades of internet growth, and now closes with Facebook’s rollout of a sweeping TikTok-like redesign. Facebook is making aggressive new moves to gain relevance in a world where TikTok is increasingly setting the pace. Along the way, the company is starting to let go of some ideas that have guided it from the beginning – starting with the principle that Facebook is first and foremost a social network.
But these moves were a long time in gestation. It was more than three years ago that Facebook’s News Feed era had come to an end. At the time, the company said the future lay in groups and private messaging rather than public posts. It has been two years since the company first began testing Reels, its short-form video answer to TikTok.
And it has been three months since CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an earnings call that the future of his company’s products lay in them becoming “discovery engines” – recommendation services, powered by machine learning, that surface popular and personalized posts from across the network.
The big picture: Under the social network model, which piggybacked on the rise of smartphones to mold billions of users’ digital experiences, keeping up with your friends’ posts served as the hub for everything you might aim to do online. Now Facebook wants to shape your online life around the algorithmically-sorted preferences of millions of strangers around the globe.
That’s how TikTok sorts the videos it shows users, and that’s largely how Facebook will now organize its home screen.
For background: last summer I wrote a monograph on TikTok for my TMT (telecommunications, media, and technology) followers. I put a large chunk of it on-line which you can read by clicking here.
And so Meta, the dominant player in social media, has been forced into transforming itself into a kind of digital mass media, in which the reactions of hordes of anonymous users, processed by machine learning, drive the selection of your content. And what is Meta doing at this new product level? Well, let’s look at just a few of the smaller tweaks to Instagram that the company has made lately:
• making it slightly harder to mute videos
• switching from the classic “infinite scroll” feed to a total takeover of the phone by each video
• swapping out labels indicating that posts are “suggested” for buttons encouraging you to follow new creators
All of these are “dark patterns” (a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things) and which many users will undoubtedly find annoying. But you could also simply call them “TikTok patterns,” and they are patterns that have been embraced wholeheartedly by a younger generation. Whether you can sell them to the aging millennials that form the core of Instagram’s user base remains an open question. In the meantime, though, Instagram is the only group involved that has real data on the subject. And the fact that it keeps biting off new pieces of TikTok to stay relevant should probably tell us something.
And so Meta is in this absolutely weird place. In the short term, the company has to radically overhaul its products to keep pace with TikTok; in the long term, it’s working to build a metaverse, requiring breakthroughs in building both hardware and software. And Meta is trying to do both things at the same time, with profits from the former funding the latter – at a time when user growth is flat and tech stocks are declining in value. And in the midst of this fundamental shift Facebook had to create a kind of “legacy Facebook zone” within the app to mollify older users who still like the old feed just fine – because it cannot afford to lose those subscribers.
Yep, Meta had to do something:
• TikTok now has 1.7 billion monthly active users (as of June 2022) – achieving that milestone at a growth rate 3X faster than Facebook did.
• According to Apptopia (pretty much the premier data intelligence platform in analysing competitive signals and insights across mobile apps and connected devices) TikTok remains the number-one download in the United States, increasing by 5-6% almost every year. And it continues its streak as the top-grossing app money-wise.
• It also continues to shoot past Facebook’s time-spent records – reaching 55 daily minutes per user as of March 2022, versus Facebook’s 32 minutes. It has also surpassed Instagram and even YouTube worldwide, according to eMarketer (which tracks digital marketing, media, commerce and user interaction).
• More than 39,000 TikTok accounts now have at least 1 million followers – about 6,200 more than on YouTube, and nearly 16,000 more than on Instagram. With so many influencers over the 1 million mark, the competition for sponsorship deals is growing more competitive, and TikTok is winning that race.
Side note: as I noted in my TikTok monograph, TikTok has anointed a generation of influencers by offering practically anyone a shot at going viral. The app made everything easy: no need for expensive editing equipment, no preexisting audience required. That has resulted in a tsunami of quasi-famous creators pumping out hyper-niche content, as well as a handful of megastars.
• Plus, TikTok has been taking Facebook’s ad dollars every year for the past 5 years and isn’t slowing down.
This move is what media analysts call a “discovery engine” (as I noted above) because it reliably spits out recommendations of posts from everywhere that might hold your attention. But it also looks a lot like a mutant TV with an infinite number of context-free channels that flash in and out of focus at high speed. And that’s what younger users right now seem to prefer, and it’s where Facebook expects the growth of its business to lie, now that new privacy rules from Apple and regulators’ threats around the world have made its existing ad-targeting model precarious.
Between the lines: For roughly a decade following the 2008 financial crisis, social networks – led by Facebook, with Twitter playing an important secondary role – dominated the internet’s culture and economy. Their rise came with high hopes they might unleash waves of democratic empowerment and liberate self-expression around the world. But their chief impact emerged in the transformation of the media industry and the digital advertising business. Facebook bested rival MySpace and absorbed or outmaneuvered challengers like Instagram and Snapchat as it transformed a simple “social graph” of human relationships into a moneymaking machine that helped businesses, particularly smaller outfits, target cheap ads with uncanny precision.
But as Facebook’s profits mounted and vaulted Facebook into the exclusive club of Big Tech giants alongside Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft so did the problems. Facebook’s friend counts and “like” buttons turned human relations into a depersonalized metrics competition. Keeping up with the volume of posts became a chore, which was why from 2009 on Facebook’s news feed defaulted to an algorithmic, rather than chronological, sort. That drove many users, particularly political organizations, to crank up the volume and try to game Facebook’s program. Over time, as we know, this dynamic became a driver for extremism, misinformation, hate speech and harassment.
But funny thing: the TikTok-style “discovery engine” model shares many of the same problems. Posts are even less rooted in a web of social relationships. The larger the crowd, the louder the threshold for speech to be heard.
Which is why, as Facebook rolls out its changes – quickly on mobile apps, “later this year” for computer/browser users – Facebook will continue to provide old-school friends-and-family networking via a subsidiary tab. Those posts will be chronologically ordered, as some users have long wished for. This move also helps Facebook avoid claims of bias in its sorting and keeps the company ahead of regulators who are threatening to restrict its algorithms.
But the era in which social networking served as most users’ primary experience of the internet is moving behind us. That holds for Twitter, Facebook’s chief surviving Western rival, as well. Twitter never found a reliable business model, which opened it up to an acquisition bid by Elon Musk. Whatever the outcome of the legal fight now underway, Twitter’s future is cloudy at best. The leadership of Meta and Facebook now views the entire machine of Facebook’s social network as a legacy operation. They aim to keep cranking it to generate the cash they need to subsidize their decade-long plan to build the metaverse — where, maybe, social networking will be reborn in a 3D interface.
What’s next? Oh, messaging will continue to grow as the central channel for private, one-to-one and small group communications. Meta owns a big chunk of that market, too, thanks to Facebook Messenger and its ownership of WhatsApp. At the other end of the media spectrum, the “discovery engines” run by TikTok and Meta will duke it out with streaming services to capture billions of eyeballs around the globe and sell that attention to advertisers. All this leaves a vacuum in the middle – the space of forums, ad-hoc group formation and small communities that first drove excitement around internet adoption in the pre-Facebook era.
Facebook’s sunsetting of its own social network could open a new space for innovation on this turf, where relative newcomers like Discord are already beginning to thrive. It’s really just a continuation of the dispersion of creativity, the continuing Cambrian Explosion of virtual spaces as I wrote last year.
I got lucky. I spent a good chunk of my career time at Ogilvy, the New York City-based British advertising, marketing, and public relations agency (which is now part of the WPP Group, the largest advertising and public relations companies in the world). It enabled me to learn the advertising business and allowed me to see the very beginnings of digital media and e-commerce and consumer data analysis which has informed so much of what I write about. Even after I left the firm I remained in touch and they graciously covered most of my expenses at the annual Cannes, France advertising conference called Cannes Lions, in exchange for a few video interviews and some long posts covering the event.
It might be hard to remember back that far, but Facebook used to be a place where people made content. In the early 2010s, it felt like there was a new viral post or video or story coming out of Facebook that made the news or did the rounds on morning talk shows. There were probably a few viral challenges or trending memes that popped up on the app after the Ice Bucket Challenge in the summer of 2014, but it was definitely the peak for Facebook-born viral moments and, basically, after that, there really wasn’t another massive internet trend to surface organically on the platform. Unless you count the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
People didn’t leave Facebook, but it evolved into something closer to the internet’s comment section than a traditional user-generated content platform like, say, Reddit. It was a place for talking about and sharing content made elsewhere. And Instagram, though a wholly different app with an extremely different user demographic, has had a similar downward trajectory. It was first a place to share your cool photos of brunch or a fun house party you went to, then it was a place to look at celebrities and people who think they’re celebrities, and then, by 2018, it had become synonymous with “meme pages” which were mostly just screenshots of tweets.
Meta, the company than owns both apps, has, over the years, continued to double down on the idea that users want to post life updates, “friend” or “follow” people in their immediate local and familial social networks, and have it all swirled together with algorithmically recommended content. That’s the core Meta experience: your posts, your parents’ posts, updates form people who live near you, some influencers, some celebrities, some viral content, and a whole bunch of ads for Away bags. The two apps have “tweaked” their feeds to offer a different ratio of those things over the years – sometimes there’s more news content, sometimes there’s more video, sometimes there’s more local updates, etc. – but the recipe has stayed the same. What’s interesting is this is absolutely not true for anywhere else on the internet.
But the tech world, the social media world, never remains static. The online experience was moving (has moved) in two different directions simultaneously:
1. there is your local internet, made up of group chats, mega messengers like WhatsApp and Telegram, and ephemeral content platforms like Snapchat or Instagram Stories, and
2. there’s the public internet, which, for most people, is sort of consumed like Netflix.
You scroll through your TikTok feed, your YouTube feed, or your Twitch feed, and maybe you’re compelled to make a video or start a little project, but you’d be pretty surprised if updates from your grandpa showed up there (unless you are a super cool grandpa, like me).
And, at first, this wasn’t a problem for Meta. The thinking was that every other app didn’t merge the private and the public in the same feed because that’s what Meta did. Assuredly, no one could compete. Except, over the last few months, Meta has rolled out updates to both Facebook and Instagram that seem to be acknowledging a very different reality for the company: TikTok won.
First, as I noted above, Instagram announced that it was tweaking the news feed experience to prioritize Reels content from creators.
Then Instagram said that it was experimenting with displaying all video content on the app in a Reel. This, in effect, has given Instagram a user experience extremely similar to the one people have on TikTok.
Then, last week, Facebook’s news feed announced it was making a similar shift. The company announced that it was giving users “a chronological feed of posts from those you follow,” but it was hiding it behind a secondary tab. The homepage of Facebook will now also offer a TikTok-like experience, as well, prioritizing personalized recommendations of video content from creators.
Then, over this past weekend, Meta’s war on TikTok was taken a step further. The Verge reported that public Instagram content will be “remixable” by default. Public photos on the app can be pulled seamlessly into Reels.
It’s obvious that this is Meta’s attempt at competing with TikTok’s fairly revolutionary “duet” feature, which allows videos to be pulled into other videos, like you would a quote tweet or a reblog. But the fact that Instagram has set remixes as the default is already causing chaos on the app. Photographers, in particular, are not happy about this, but the feature also seems tailor-made to abuse and harass people. One person told me they’ve already seen the feature being used to populate a “catfish account” – which is when someone uses images and information (often taken from other people’s social media accounts) to create a new identity online which is then used to damage the reputation of the true owner of the identity.
Meta seems to have correctly identified what people like about TikTok – short-form videos, remixable video and audio editing tools that works on mobile, and creators that make stuff rather than influence things – but they’re still trying to jam those features into an ecosystem that wasn’t built for them. Namely, Meta doesn’t have an app that anyone makes stuff for anymore. Not in a way that could meaningfully compete with TikTok’s completely democratized and seemingly-infinite army of (unpaid) creators who are ready and willing to jump on whatever’s trending. I swear, Meta seems to actively despise the people who make content on their platforms.
BOTTOM LINE: I want to be cautious on where this is all heading. We should take into account that Meta traditionally moves quite cautiously with changes of this magnitude. It’s difficult to imagine these changes would be rolling out if test groups did not show that they positively affected the amount of time that most users spent on the app. The company surely accounted for the fact that such a significant departure from the old Facebook and Instagram would roil users. But I Iearned from my days in advertising that much of this is baked into the cost of launching it.
However, I think TikTok has redefined how social media works and left Meta a bit unprepared for a future that’s been quickly approaching.