Why There Are No New Social Networks – The Ringer
▻https://theringer.com/social-media-invention-facebook-twitter-snapchat-tech-e40178df183
“Social apps are now focused on messaging, and certainly it’s a vibrant area of innovation and advancement,” Blau told me. “So I wouldn’t say that all social apps are stagnating.” Maybe the copycat cycle will just push us away from public-facing social apps altogether and into private messaging, an arguably more inventive (and in some cases, nicer) space. It seems that the only time someone is able to create a new social network, it’s by accident. Venmo is not a social app — at least, it wasn’t intended to be. The PayPal-owned payment system was launched as a dead simple way to share money, complete with a few lighthearted features like emoji and a real-time feed of users’ transactions. This feed ultimately became a sort of social network within the app: It fuels FOMO, forces us to consider the financial side of dating, and even acts as a window into modern drug culture.
Venmo didn’t set out to be a better Twitter or a Facebook alternative; it took a fact of daily life that wasn’t all that interesting and certainly not very “social,” and created new digital communication behaviors. It was accidentally inventive.
Product Hunt’s social editor and writer, Niv Dror, says there’s something else keeping this market stagnant. “Once an app becomes significant enough to pose a threat to the big players, they either get acquired or significantly handicapped by a competitive feature or restricted access,” he told me via email. He cites Meerkat, a huge 2015 hit I’d nearly forgotten about, which was one of the originating apps in the now-ubiquitous livestreaming trend. Dror worked at Meerkat until the app was forced to shutter. “On my second day working at Meerkat, Twitter decided to cut off our access to the social graph (since they acquired Periscope), which really hurt us in the long run.”