It seems a bit like tragedy of the commons. If we all move towards consuming content this way, who is posting what and where? How is it discovered?
One of the great losses of the age of social media is physical community, as people substitute digital presence for in-person interactions. This is the next step with the loss of digital community.
Why would those content stop getting made? A lot of hardcore tech YouTubers are university lecturers. Chinese fried rice stalls on TikTok makes living in selling the rice. Japanese anime keeps getting made and aired.
I think there might be a lesson learned from the era of attention economy and also a potential explanation as to what advertiser friendliness was about - the attention economy did not graduate from being a surplus market. Advertisers had no incentives to subsidize the waste byproducts of fried rice stall, but the system was too deeply molded for them. The amount of standalone contents that are native to social media are tiny.
Anyway, I just don't think the contents that are made because of a social feed are the ones that weren't worth much even on social media.
You assume that if digital communication is lost, people wouldn’t communicate at all? I highly doubt that seeing as our natural instinct is to search for human connection.
I see the concern, because I agree that social media has to some degree already done this, and that we've lost something in that process.
But - there's no reason this couldn't actually be a good thing. I can totally imagine a platform[0] where the focus is less on creation and more on curation. I sub to some person or community who's going to share good links, and I see only that, instead of the slop firehose from The Algorithm.
(and yes, social media was already more like this, in the early days).
[0] and platform implies more than I mean, could just be some nice wrapper around RSS or activitypub or whatever
One of the great losses of the age of social media is physical community, as people substitute digital presence for in-person interactions. This is the next step with the loss of digital community.