Why social media is broken and what to do about it

Yashad Kulkarni28min

Speaker 1

00:01

Hey, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We really appreciate your time. Today we're gonna talk a bit about how social media is broken. That's not a particularly controversial ideas. I'm sure everyone on this panel would agree. But you know, I think in recent, in recent years, particularly in recent months, some people social media is problems are manifesting on a society level scale. And obviously, that's an even bigger problem than before. You know, from stuff like deadly COVID, misinformation to white supremacists, organizing militias online, even stuff like harassment that's been around for ages. You know, all of this stuff is kind of coming to a head this year. And so it's a conversation we want to have. And the other side of the coin, I think it is possible to imagine something better, you know, if social media is broken, there's bound to be a way to fix it. And if not about to be a way to build something that's better. So that's kind of where we want to kick off the conversation today. And on that note, now, I would love to start my first question. By asking you a little bit about your projects, you have two things going on Ethel's club, and somewhere good, both our communities built by and for people of color. Yes, they sound like really special places. You know, and they start with a really different idea than traditional huge social media platforms. So I'd love to know a little bit about what you think, um, regarding the question, if social media platforms need to be smaller, to be better, do they need to be small? Do they need to be custom built for communities? Is size important here?

Speaker 2

01:26

Yeah, thank you for asking that. And I think the most important thing that social platforms should do moving forward in the future. And something that we're super focused on, is just being super intentional to start to be intentional about size, about our framework about foundational aspects of what the product is delivering to the end user. One of the aspects that was really important to us when we got started was size. And so one of the factors of somewhere good is kind of connecting people with smaller, more intimate communities, because people tend to behave better in smaller networks. One of the things that we use in our product meetings to kind of base a lot of our decisions off of is mimicking a real life dinner party. Who would you invite to that party? How do people interact when they're in those kinds of smaller intimate spaces, it tends to, again, be a lot more aligned with Better Behavior. And then that's, you know, that's our perspective in terms of the many ways in which social networks can sort of be more user friendly and a multitude of ways.

Speaker 1

02:34

That's really interesting. It obviously, Ethel's club began as an offline community, right, it was founded pre COVID. And then you kind of had to transition into being an online community, which is a really unusual story, I think, and maybe a lesson for other social networks.

Speaker 2

02:49

Yeah, we had to make the decision and about three hours, it was March 12 of last year, so we're coming up on a year. And it kind of answered the same problem, which was that in the physical spaces that people were visiting pre COVID, it was still sort of this, like, you kind of go into a space and it was a white empty box, and you didn't have that familiarity. And so even with Apple's cloud, the physical location in Brooklyn, we built it out, so that it necessitated smaller, more intimate interactions with our members. And so we took that same little nugget of knowledge and used it digitally and somewhere good is now our technology platform that allows us to build that out on a much larger, faster scale, but still at that level of intention that people want to be connected in a more intimate manner with one another.

Speaker 1

03:36

Something really interesting about your project that I think fits into a broader conversation we're gonna have here we might get a bit into policy and other stuff that's going on politically with tech platforms is the idea that it is you know, custom built from scratch and it's small. And like the big conversation right now in tech is we need to break up big tech is big tech. The problem is that the problem that it's big, Jessie and Rashad, I'd be really curious to know what you think about like this idea that you could build social networks from this completely different place. And is this like part of what's made social networks today so toxic and created all these problems?

Speaker 3

04:16

I can I can take a first crack. I guess, I think, I think I think what Nigel said about intentionality is so important. And I think that that I do think that these platforms have gotten too big. I mean, Facebook, for example, you know, that it's all built theoretically around community, but you just can't really have a community of 3 billion people. That's just not really how communities work. And so, but I think that part of it is about intentionality. I mean, there are platforms. For example, example, you know, I'm sure Snapchat has plenty of issues but it was designed with a certain intentionality. And you don't see stories about Snapchat being overrun by misinformation, even though You know, it is a large platform. And that's just because it was fundamentally designed with intentionality in a way such that you're not just being shown, algorithmically recommended and amplified, you know, or get posts from whoever, based on virality. You know, it was built in a way where they were, they were clear minded about who they, how they wanted people to be interacting and what the app was supposed to do. And so that's, I think Nozbe makes such a good point about like, if you have that intentionality from the beginning, I think everything else can flow from there. Whereas if your goal is just growth at any cost, you know, you're going to end up with all sorts of problems.

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