Who wins the next era of the Internet?

Winners and Losers in the coming social web

AI generated image, Bing Image Creator

Last week we discussed the ‘Death of the Internet’. That post is paywalled,¹ but for those of you who are free subscribers it essentially concludes the following: the internet isn’t dying, but it is undergoing a major shift in how social communities operate and what the social web looks like. A significant chunk of people are becoming disillusioned with disinformation, AI, algorithmic feeds and the general process of enshittification on the largest platforms. They’re retreating from the global scale of social media into more private and semi-private spaces.

It’s possible to overstate the case here - scale still matters and network effects still matter. It’s very unlikely that we’re going to see the giants of the social web completely overthrown. But there is a shift already underway to a new era of the internet, and it makes sense to spend some time breaking down who wins and loses from this shift.

Winners

Messaging Apps

As people retreat from the broader web, we’re seeing a resurgence in group chats. Apps like WhatsApp, Snapchat, Telegram and Signal aren’t really social media in the classic sense.² They don’t have global scale, and you can’t go viral by texting your friend chat some great memes. But that’s a feature, not a bug.

In the new web, an increasing number of people are sick of the way social media is now dominated by influencers. Social media used to be social - you would follow people you knew and get updates on their lives. But today’s social media isn’t a many-to-many service that lets you network with peers. It’s a few-to-many service where professional content creators you’ve never met take up most of the space on your feed. Watching Instagram Reels isn’t really that different from watching TV, it’s just produced by an independent creator rather than a television studio.

Don’t get me wrong - lots of people like this. The engagement metrics don’t lie. But while watching TikToks is fun, people still want to be able to social network with friends and family. And that’s a very good sign for messaging apps.

Snapchat’s Super Bowl ad from February takes direct aim at the idea that we’re all tired of Influencers and Content and that we want our apps to be more local in scale, more social, more human:

Snapchat also released a sort of manifesto to match the ad, which is worth quoting at length.

"The promise of social media started out great. It was a place where we could connect with people and share bits of our lives. A place where we could be a part of something bigger than ourselves — where we could feel supported and loved.

But somewhere in the adolescence of social media, things began to feel off. Friends became people who felt more like strangers. Moments became more curated. Sharing became more contrived. Social media felt like an inauthentic version of our lives, rather than a source of genuine connection. And this made us feel less connected, less open, and less comfortable expressing ourselves.

People feel exhausted by the social media popularity contest. Fed up with having to look pretty or perfect in every post. Tired of competing for likes and comments. Misled by misinformation.

But Snapchat is not social media. It never was. In fact, it was built as an antidote to social media…

Snapchat opens to a camera, and not a feed of content, so we can share our perspective easily with those who matter most to us. Conversations on Snapchat are designed to delete by default because that’s just how conversations in real life work.

Because ultimately, it’s surrounding ourselves with the people who matter most to us that makes us the most happy. We all need more connection. We just need less social media to do it.

This is a really, really good encapsulation of the direction the internet is headed in. And messaging apps are in prime position to take advantage of it

Mid-scale Aggregators

Sometimes, you need more than a simple group chat. You’re tired of the influencer-dominated, virality obsessed platforms, you’re tired of the global scale of social media. But you still want to meet new people, you just want to do it at a more human scale. The platforms that are going to thrive here are what I call mid-scale aggregators.

Twitter, TikTok, Instagram and other global services promise to connect you to the entire social internet all at once. But what if you’d prefer to hang out with a couple hundred or couple thousand like-minded people? That’s what a mid-scale aggregator does. They connect you with communities at a more realistic level than ‘the rest of the world’. And they can do it at scale. They are can provide tens of thousands of smaller communities to choose from, and make it easy to start your own.

Slack and Discord are the category-defining examples here. They’re a place to hang out in a setting that’s not fully private, but also isn’t fully public. They can be defined in any number of ways - around your company or your job, around a hobby topic, around a sports team or a friend group or a political organization. They’re very good at building small scale communities and starting a new community is incredibly easy.

Reddit is the other platform I’d place in this category. Reddit is composed of hundreds of thousands of ‘subreddits’. Some of these are huge (/r/philosophy with 17M users) and some are tiny (/r/Dover with 300 users). Each is centered around a particular topic, and they fit the exact same mold as a good Discord - great at creating a persistent, medium-sized community. Every topic under the sun has a subreddit, and probably also a Slack or Discord dedicated to it, and in a lot of cases they’re really good and filled with interesting people you’d like to chat with. Taking this all the back to 90s/early 2000s era - Reddit is the natural replacement for the forum internet, while Discords are a sort of natural replacement for the chatroom-internet.

The Upper-Middle Class of Creators

There’s a specific type of content creator that I think comes out ahead in this new version of the internet. I don’t have a snappy name for them yet, so I’m just calling them the upper-middle class of creators. These are the people with enough of a following and enough pull that they can credibly defect from a global social media site, start their own venture, and have it work out financially for them.

Most stories about the media focus on doom and decline, and that’s because the media industry - newspapers, magazines, independent websites - has been gutted over the last decade. But there’s a specific class of site that’s unexpectedly thriving. It’s Defector, the irreverent sports site headed by former DeadSpin employees. It’s Dropout, the comedy sketch site headed by CollegeHumor alumni. It’s political commentary sites TalkingPointsMemo or TheBulwark. What do all these sites have in common?

• They’re membership based. To read or watch, you need to pay a small monthly fee.

• They’re independent of any other platform. They may use social media, but are apart from it. They directly own the relationship with their fans/customers.

• They’re based around upper-middle-class personalities. These are not world-famous writers or movie stars, but they are people with loyal online followings who are in the upper-middle class of social media clout.

There are many more examples,³ but this type of business model is increasingly successful. All the sites listed above are (to my knowledge) profitable and sustainable. They’re not going to ‘reach scale’ to hundreds of millions of people, but their loyal fanbases can keep them in business. Online ads as a business have collapsed for anyone who isn’t Meta or Google⁴, but subscriptions seem to be flourishing. In the previous era, sites like TPM or Gawker could sustain themselves through advertising. Now, sites like Defector or The Information sell access directly to their readers.

Not everyone can make this work - you need to hit a critical threshold of popularity before it’s viable. But for those who can hit that level of popularity, setting up your own independent business is more realistic than ever.

And that leads into the last major winner of the new era:

Substack

Substack is basically a combination of the two previous categories. It’s the mid-scale aggregator for upper-middle-class internet personalities to start their own blogs, podcasts, and perhaps even video. It’s a lot of work to set up an independent site. Substack makes it dead simple to start pushing out content to paying subscribers, like the beautiful people here at Infinite Scroll.

There are a few differences between independent ventures like Defector and a popular Substack. The most obvious is that popular Substacks are at least partially reliant on Substack’s infrastructure to handle payment, email, and a dozen other tasks. One of the keys of this type of business is owning your relationship with your supporters, and Substack is a middleman in that relationship. Still, Substack is relatively good about not being too intrusive. They let you export your email lists at any time, and if you want to decamp to another service that’s fully allowed.

Substack is also moving somewhat in the direction of being a social network itself. One selling point of an independent site is freedom from the algorithmic rat race - focus on doing what your fans love, without worrying about whether the algorithm of the broader social internet likes it. Substack is mostly like that - after all, these newsletters get emailed directly to you! But they’re also moving in the direction of algorithms, with things like their Notes feature. And I’ve noticed an increasing amount of my new subscribers are coming from Substack’s ‘Recommend’ feature.

Neutrals

YouTube

Youtube has things going for and against it in the new era of the internet. It’s a global scale social network, which people are increasingly tired of. It’s also owned by Google, who have a track record of enshittifying a whole lot of core products. You’d think they would be vulnerable.

But! They’re also one of the best managed and most sustainable social sites. They’re consistently profitable. And beyond just making money for themselves, they’re a reliable way for content creators to make money. There are probably more professional full-time Youtubers than there are Instagrammers, TikTokkers, Substackers and Twitter posters combined. It’s well-known among online creatives that TikTok pays almost nothing, that Twitch is broke, but that YouTube pays out well if you can draw eyeballs.

That business success has made them a home for tons of the ‘upper-middle-class’ of content creators we talked about above. And given that they’re less social media and more similar to broadcast television these days, I tend to think they’ll sail through the next era of the internet just fine.

Facebook

Every time someone posts about how cooked Facebook is, Meta laughs and keeps making money. I’ve talked in interviews about how everyone continually underrates Meta, simply because of how uncool they are. But their stock sure seems to be doing fine.

Facebook occupies a weird spot in the social media landscape. On the one hand, it’s culturally backwards, the opposite of cutting edge. It’s filled with the worst sort of grandma-trap engagement bait and AI-generated slop. There are genuinely a lot of reasons to think they’re going to be in terminal decline sometime soon.

And yet! You’d be surprised to learn that young people still use Facebook at a pretty decent rate. And the main reason is Facebook Groups, which is exactly the kind of mid-sized community-driven space that will flourish in the coming web. Can Facebook pivot their site to emphasizing groups more heavily? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t count them out.

Losers

TikTok and Instagram

It feels very weird to be more optimistic about Facebook than Instagram, but here we are. TikTok⁵ and Instagram have the same problem - they don’t have any semblance of mid-sized community building.

Both are enormously successful right now. But the future seems to be leaning harder into semi-local rather than global networking, and TikTok and Instagram are pure global sites. There’s just no community features whatsoever. Both sites are globally-focused algorithmic feeds. Both sites treat comments as an afterthought. Both lean heavily into the broadcast model of social media, where a small number of huge content creators dominate what users see. All of this is undoubtedly working for them right now, but it’s not the direction we’re headed in.

I don’t think that Instagram is going to die, to be clear. But they will be facing headwinds. Looking into the future, sites that can offer smaller-to-mid-scale community features are going to have a sizable advantage over those that don’t.

Easily replicable sites

One of the things that’s become clearer to me over the past few years is that when it comes to social media, your user network is the moat far more often than your technology is the moat.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a moat is some factor that stops competitors from being able to instantly produce the same thing you do. Maybe they don’t have the technical skill to create the same widgets, etc. For social networks, the traditional moat is the network effect of having the most users - people want to be where the action is. Whoever is big is likely to stay that way.

But we’ve seen increasing cracks in that theory. Twitch was the first and biggest site in livestreaming, but they’re now fending off huge challenges from YouTube and Kick. TikTok was the first site to truly succeed with vertical video, but now YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels are eating their market share. The technology isn’t a barrier, only network scale is a barrier.

And that’s why I think Twitter is one of the losers in this new era. Twitter has one of the easiest possible sites to replicate technically. Livestreaming is, at least, a difficult technical challenge to get right. It’s hard to build a livestreaming site that actually functions well - not impossible, but hard enough that it provides a little bit of a moat. But Twitter is just text, and not even that much of it. That’s why we saw a dozen different clones spring up in the wake of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Remember Nostr? Post? T2? There are the right wing versions like Gab or Truth Social. There’s BlueSky and Threads and Substack Notes and Mastodon. It turns out it’s *very easy* to spin up a Twitter clone.

Twitter’s only moat is that everyone else is already on Twitter. But in the coming era, people don’t necessarily want to be on the largest, most global platform. They might prefer a more niche site like BlueSky or Mastodon. That’s a problem for Twitter, and it’s one I think their current leadership is ill-equipped to solve.

Single Channel Creators

If independent upper-middle-class creators are the winners in this new era, I think platform-reliant single channel creators are the losers.

One of the things that’s fascinating to me is that so many professional content creators - individuals who do this work as a full-time job! - are fully reliant on a single platform. TikTok is one of the worst platforms for this. I routinely see TikTokkers with more than a million followers on TikTok, but with Twitter and Instagram followings only around ten thousand.

This leaves them incredibly vulnerable. If their site were to get banned, as in the case of TikTok, they’d genuinely have to start over from zero. They’re also completely at the mercy of the algorithm. Sites we mentioned above like Dropout, Substack, etc, all allow content creators to directly own the relationship with their fans. But content creators on giant platforms are often dependent on the algorithm boosting their videos. ‘Subscribing’ or ‘following’ someone on TikTok or YouTube is really more like a weak suggestion - the algorithm is what really matters. If the algorithm decides your content is no longer what people want to see, you’re just shit out of luck.

If I was a content creator, I’d be making sure I either own my fan relationship directly, or that I’m at least diversified across a number of platforms.⁶ Otherwise you’re courting disaster.

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Ultimately I think most social media sites are going to have to make a choice. Will they focus on famous content creators, on global reach and algorithmic feeds and a few-to-many broadcast model? Or will they focus on small-time friend to friend communications, medium sized content creation with less algorithm and more community?

I want to emphasize that the global sites are not going away. People still like them, and they’re still going to remain huge businesses and huge cultural forces. But the winds of change are no longer heading exclusively in their direction, and over the next few years more and more folks will head into more niche community spaces left behind by the big boys.

1. You should join up! 👀

2. Although they do share some features, and Telegram especially is in a fuzzy gray area between ‘messaging app’ and ‘social media’

3. Major podcasts arguably also fit into this model

4. I’ve thought about whether or not to place ads in this newsletter like some writers do, but at least for now it seems like more trouble than it’s worth

5. TikTok is going to be a loser in the new era because they’ll be banned in the US, but even apart from that I think they have real difficulties coming.

6. My god, this implies I need to start posting vertical video. Help.