The future of social media
Imagine a world, in the not-so-distant future, where anyone can launch a fully functional social media platform with a few clicks and a credit card.
From a menu of options, you choose the primary media type (video, microblog, photos, etc.) and basic functionality. You can upload your logo and choose your color palette.
There's a marketplace for algorithms, recommendation engines, and other backend AI-powered functionalities.
AI moderation engines are pre-baked in and meet all necessary regulation requirements for every major country in the world.
A turnkey advertising network is optionally available. If you choose to run ads on your new social media platform, it's a 60/40 split.
You choose your monthly cloud service subscription based on estimated monthly active users, enter your credit card info, click “agree” and voilà! You are now the proud owner a your very own social media platform. Now all you have to do is get people to sign up for it.
What I'm describing would be the world's most sophisticated Platform as a Service offering in the history of Silicon Valley. Moderation, advertising, bug fixes, and improvement updates are all handled for you without you having to do much but cultivate a community.
Sound too good to be true? Yeah, it probably would be. But my guess is people would do it anyway.
Such a technology would completely change how venture capital is invested. Whereas in the platform era it would take a talented team of engineers and a business-savvy founder to lock in that round of seed funding, this new era, what I call The Computational Web, would dictate that any social media founder must only have a certain level of celebrity and influence to attract investors.
At first, this new Platform as a Service—let's call it Meta Cloud—would likely attract grindset influencers who see it as another Discord server where they can trap an audience and convince them to buy thousand-dollar e-seminars. Eventually, though, a big-name celebrity will see the potential and launch a fully-branded social media platform to great fanfare. It'll only take one, then the floodgates open.
Exclusive merchandise, early releases, a chance to chat one-on-one via live stream, whatever it would take to build a niche social media community with ten million users. Who will be the first? Taylor Swift? Oprah? Surely, Jeremy Renner would do it purely for the meme.
Of course, not everyone will want to spend their scrolling time on a celebrity-branded app. Even Taylor Swift's number one fan would want to switch it up a bit from time to time.
And that's where it gets interesting.
You see, all these micro-platforms run on the same cloud infrastructure. The account you created for Taylor Nation (working title) is actually a Meta account that gives you the privilege to hop in and out of any platform you want, whenever you want. So long as it's running Meta Cloud. It's like a digital passport that lets you visit anywhere on the internet without ever having to change your “digital identity.”
Think about it. A whole digital universe at your fingertips. A Metaverse, even.