Ephemeral should be default
Meaning: your content should be temporary and only private to you.
You already know that ‘big-social’ records everything you do in their apps, and beyond. You’ve watched the documentaries. You’ve read about the horror stories, FOMO (JOMO), your data sold to the highest bidder, fake news, cancel culture, government tracking, election hacking, network-effects, etcetera, etc. What is going on in places like China. 1984? No no no, welcome to 🚨2084🚨. But still, the apps provide you with benefits that make you come back to them.
No problem. It’s fun to see what your friends are up to, it’s nice to join a group of people with the same interests. It feels good to share your own novel experiences with everybody and getting all the ❤️s. Getting updates of a festival you’re attending is handy. Following a couple of creators or a celebrity can inspire you. Chatting with your friends and sharing fun or embarrassing pictures in private is a healthy habit. Even watching ads for products from your favorite brands is ok. All things we’ve been doing before the internet, and we’ll keep doing them after the internet. Let’s just not do it all on the same platform right now.
“I’m talking about taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online.”
- The Social Network
In real life, that experience ends at some point. And so do most connections and friendships. That is healthy. Being around different people makes you able to explore new frontiers. This is true in both space and time; today you’re a different person around friends, family, colleagues or a sports team, and over time those groups evolve. Why not socialize with those groups in different apps as well, where you can be that other person.
The time for diverse hybrid apps has come. Let’s have a little bit of fun online, only temporarily. Ephemeral. Nothing that you don’t want to, gets saved permanently. Nothing to haunt you in public years later. Memories should be yours and only anecdotes to others, doubting if they remember correctly. Pictures that are left standing should only be in your personal library. Some apps will slowly lose their spot on the homescreen, being replaced by novel ones. Such a cycle would be a healthy ecosystem.
But the shift to more private groups has been noticed, and that is where the acquisitions by big-social are following. Snapchats’ Evan Spiegel had the right idea from the start and not selling out for a big fat $3 billion cash check shows integrity, unlike some other founders that regret their decision. You might dismiss Snapchat for focusing on silly teens. But those teens (being online the rest of their lives) have the most to lose from the eternal data-hoarding, or from their helicopter parents.
What IS wrong, is instead just copying novel apps feature-by-feature. Eventually all of the big-social apps will push each others bloated features, ruining the experience that made you come over in the first place. Making the platforms interoperable within a single company is a bug, not a feature. It will create an even bigger network-effect, locking you in to prevent the ‘social brain drain’ from big-social. Take down the walled gardens! Meanwhile, governments seem to think that their market-competition laws are ephemeral…
So what about all the recent focus on ‘stories’ within al the apps to make the content more ephemeral? This is probably a good idea. However, as history teaches us, (one) I doubt that the content is actually deleted from the databases and instead is just being ‘flagged’ as hidden, so it can still be abused in the ad-tech. Rinse and repeat. And (two) showing the content that is broadcast to everybody for only a day is probably very good at increasing the feeling of FOMO, which probably only helps getting does ‘Daily Active Users’ metrics up! Of course there is a range of ephemerality, so it is not to bad that companies are experimenting with different countdowns.
You might think that you are not contributing your data if you don’t have an account on one of these networks. But your friends will happily upload their contacts-list, photos and other data with you in them, making your browsing easily identifiable anywhere on the internet.
I’m not suggesting you should delete your old accounts immediately, those apps can still have their uses. Some shared memories are good. Some town-square conversations need to be held to broaden your horizons. I just want to encourage you to diversify your usage into a couple privacy friendly alternatives for the next time you: need to create a private chatgroup, want to send event-invites, need to sell something or want to broadcast your ideas.
Maybe even one that is not ad-funded, where the maker is only incentivized to give you and your social group the best experience. No extreme growth-hacking, no fake accounts, no 24/7 location sharing, no massive data-breaches, no tracking across the web, no surveillance, no stalkers, no like-buttons, no ads. No regrets.
But it doesn’t have to be only apps from indie makers. For example, I love the new Apple Photos widget on iOS 14. Just a couple of old pictures being highlighted every week brings back fond memories, and it happens privately. I might send one in a private chat to share, but that is it. I pay Apple for the storage for fifteen years of pictures, in return they deliver me a little joy in my day and a prompt for a social interaction.
Now you might miss some of the stuff that would be shared more broadly. Want to know what your long-lost friend did last summer? No more lurking, just ask them. Have a conversation. Reconnect! Maybe they’ll send you a picture or two. 🤗
In the meantime developers should make more hybrid apps that fall somewhere on the ephemerality spectrum between walkie-talkie and Wikipedia. Don’t wait until some features and apps are forced to spin off from big-social once anti-trust wakes up. Just build a more fun replacement.
I’ve tried to do just that last month and built a little MVP for social event spaces: Meetsy. Check it out below and let me know what you think!
