🤳 HUMOR ME

Covering culture, tech,
luxury, travel, and media
in 5 minutes, 3x a week

🔼 LVMH. The luxury conglomerate’s stock rose to a record high, off of strong sales in China »» BUT. US sales have slowed »»

🔽 Demand for luxe watches. The heads of some of the biggest Swiss brands say demand is slowing after an unprecedented Covid-era boom »»

💬 “IRL connection is the mission.” A new startup is hoping to eliminate the need for dating apps by encouraging singles all over the world to wear a small green ring »»

🛫 A Spanish architect converted an 18th century townhouse in Menorca into the intimate, eight key (room) Hevresac Hotel »»

👗 7 clothing rental services for an infinite closet »»

💎 Why not browse Sotheby’s Mother’s Day edit? »»

Plot twist! Defunct crypto exchange FTX has recovered US$7.3b of customer funds, and could be open for business again as early as next year »»

JPMorgan ended remote work for all of its managing directors »»

Elon embarrassed a BBC interviewer »»

Musk also recently purchased roughly 10,000 GPUs, for a generative AI project within Twitter »»

How Blaze Pizza surpassed TikTok on the app store »»

Genetically modified houseplants are coming to clean your air »»

How Instagram’s logo became an icon »»

A new web/desktop/browser app called Fabric is aiming to be your AI-powered second brain, for every idea, site, bookmark, and file you come across and want to keep »»

5 nonnegotiable morning routines successful people use to win the day »»

After three years of closure, London’s National Portrait Gallery is reopening in June… with a new, late-night cocktail bar »»

Amazon announced 'Bedrock,' its ChatGPT and DALL-E rival »»

Xapien —a London startup that automates online ‘executive-level’ research on any individual or organisation anywhere in the globe using AI— secured a £6m seed round »»

Studies show a mysterious health benefit to ice cream. Scientists don’t want to talk about it »» 🔐

This developer decided to have ChatGPT code his new app. 3 weeks later, he sold the app for enough money to buy “a small house in a quaint village to escape to” when AI has “a significant impact on the world” »»

This is the best time in a decade to splurge on a premium OLED TV »»

Ageing studies in five animals suggest how to reverse decline »»

It’s the world’s most popular social media app, but hang on… is TikTok even “social?” The answer means a lot for the future of every app.

IT’S LIKE TIKTOK. For news.

Earlier this year, Instagram’s co-founders dropped a new app. Artifact describes itself “a personalized news feed, driven by AI.” When the duo unveiled it in February, one of them said it was inspired by “the future of social.” (Hold that thought.) So, what does it mean that they’ve basically turned their new news app into a slick version of Reddit?

IT’S A COMMUNITY. Around news.

As Mashable reports, Artifact was “intended to merge articles, facts, and AI.” And while you can DM other users on it, the app “didn't really invoke a lot of community-forming emotions,” according to one early reviewer. In fact, “for the first few weeks of its existence, using the platform felt a lot like using Pocket or Apple News but, honestly, worse.”

In the latest version, Artifact’s “users can create profiles, comment on articles, upvote and downvote, and earn a ‘reputation’.” In other words, Artifact’s beginning to look a lot like Reddit.

What gives? Is that the future of social?

Actually, kind of.

SOFTWARE, AMIRITE?

Zoom out: a lot of software packages are actually really, really similar to one another. For instance, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of project management apps —think Asana, Basecamp, Monday, Notion, Trello— out there, and they’re all pretty interchangeable. So are Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. When it comes to productivity suites, Google Workspace isn’t all that different to Microsoft 365. And speaking of Microsoft, Teams is basically a straight up Zoom and Slack clone.

Not only is most software not unique, but most software you use day in and day out isn’t novel, either: Zoom wasn’t the first video meeting app. Facebook wasn’t the first social network. Google wasn’t the first search engine. Word wasn’t the first “word processor.” And, Windows itself cloned the Mac OS. And the engineers at Apple weren’t even the ones who invented the mouse —and their Mac OS wasn’t the first graphical user interface either.

NEW, BUT NOT too new, k?

So, all that said, it kind of tracks to think that when something that is truly novel —like the audio only social network Clubhouse, the “anti-Instagram” app BeReal, or its distant cousin Poparazzi— tends to flame out, it’s simply because it was too unfamiliar to catch on.

But there’s something else at play here, beyond novelty, that ended Clubhouse, chilled BeReal’s hot streak, and inspired the Instagram guys to turn Artifact into Reddit. Those apps just just aren’t delivering the dopamine.

SOCIAL MEDIA LOST its social.

First gen social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat were built on who you knew IRL. That’s what made the apps sticky. After all, if you wanted to stay connected with the friends, family, and acquaintances you “friended” on Facebook, or send jokes to your friends on Snapchat, you had to, y’know, be on Facebook and Snap. You simply couldn’t find that same collection of people —again, the main allure of being on Facebook to begin with— on any other platform, so you weren’t likely to drop Facebook in favor of something else.

TikTok changed everything. By successfully (and rapidly) moving social media from a who-you-know, to a what-you-like-to-watch paradigm, TikTok effectively ended the “social graph” era of social media.

That shifted the currency powering social media apps from attention and connection, to attention and discovery. Replacing connection with discovery is an important shift. Once social media apps are fueled by discovery of something entertaining and new, and not by a connection to real people, the more interchangeable the apps become. It no longer matters who is posting to your feed. What matters is how quickly and efficiently your feed can entertain occupy you. This is the big picture.

IT MAY BE time to stop calling TikTok “social media.”

Seriously. And don’t just take it from me. Here’s TikTok’s president of global business solutions in mid-2022: “Facebook is a social platform. They’ve built all their algorithms based on the social graph. We are an entertainment platform. The difference is significant.”

This makes sense, and it is also why all apps look the same these days. Social isn’t social anymore. It’s a discovery and entertainment game now. BeReal and Poparazzi are struggling not because they’re too novel for people to grasp, but rather because they’re simply not entertaining enough to compete for our time. This is also why Instagram’s founders’ are turning their new AI-powered news app into, essentially, Reddit.

Bottom line: attention spans are getting shorter, and expectations are getting higher. If you’re running a consumer facing app these days, you better entertain your users quickly, or it’s delete.

More:

Artifact, Instagram’s founders’ new AI-powered news app, has a bit of feature confusion »»

BeReal may be on the out: users have nearly halved since peak »»

TikTok and the fall of the social media giants »»

BeReal still has potential for advertisers, but its hype period is well and truly over »»

Written by Jon Kallus. Any feedback? Simply reply.