Peak social media: Building better platforms
FT News Briefing
Forhecz Topher
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 5 August 2023
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Can we get rid of the bad bits of social media and keep the good? Is it possible to create a more positive social media experience than the one we get from the platforms that dominate the landscape today? In this episode, Elaine Moore asks what the social media platforms of the future should look like, and whether platforms designed for smaller groups of users with shared interests are the way forward.
We hear from writer and tech historian Benj Edwards about the BBS era of the early 1990s; University of Massachusetts professor Ethan Zuckerman; Sarah Gilbert, researcher at Cornell University and Reddit moderator; and Jonathan Abrams, partner at 8-Bit Capital and the creator of Friendster.
Presented by Elaine Moore. Produced by Edwin Lane and Josh Gabert-Doyon, Executive producer is Manuela Saragosa. Sound design by Breen Turner and Samantha Giovinco. Original music by Metaphor Music. The FT’s head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Special thanks to Hannah Murphy.
Mentioned in this podcast:
The Lex Newsletter: Reddit and the API apocalypse
Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else
Reddit stands firm in clash with users as blackout on forums escalates
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The FT News Briefing is supported by Equinole, the UK's energy partner. Learn more at equinole.co.uk. |
| 0:13.2 | I remember thinking like when Twitter became popular, you know, this is a horrible thing to think, |
| 0:18.7 | but like is this how like God feels, you know? Knowing everything at the same time, like what kind of |
| 0:24.5 | gift yet curse is it to know everything happening at the same time all around the world. |
| 0:30.9 | Benj Edwards is a technology writer and tech historian. He remembers a world long before |
| 0:36.2 | social media platforms when the online world felt much smaller. My first experience going online, |
| 0:43.6 | my dad brought home this little black box and he said this is called the modem and at the |
| 0:50.4 | yes he hooked it up and told my brother how to do it. My brother's five years older than me so he |
| 0:54.8 | was he jumped right into it and I just thought it was absolutely magical. Edwards was a 10-year-old |
| 1:00.8 | living in North Carolina when he first went online in the early 1990s. Back then, not only were |
| 1:07.6 | there no social media platforms, the internet wasn't widely available. To go online, you had to |
| 1:13.6 | connect your computer to a phone line and dial something called a BBS. A BBS is a bulletin |
| 1:20.1 | board system, a way for people to call and leave messages that other people could read later, |
| 1:25.7 | like a bulletin board. So imagine outside a grocery store or something where there's a, |
| 1:30.7 | you know, like a cork board or something where people could post notes. This is an electronic |
| 1:35.8 | representation of that. These electronic bulletin boards looked like primitive websites. |
| 1:41.3 | People could dial into them from their personal computers and leave messages on discussion |
| 1:46.8 | boards. They functioned a bit like social media platforms. I call the place called Baxter BBS. |
| 1:52.7 | That was a cool place. Every system had its own vibe to it. There was another called Octopus's |
| 1:58.9 | Garden that I really liked a lot. There was the Fastlane BBS. There were sort of like discussion |
| 2:04.8 | groups where people would talk about computers or politics or religion or all kinds of crazy |
| 2:11.7 | things that people would argue about or games or the latest movies. There were like a firearms |
... |
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