behold the grim spectacle of social media in  every platform has morphed into a 
soulless, cookiecutter contraption of bland and manipulative algorithmic feeds t
hat are virtually indistinguishable from one another. new apps may innovate a fe
ature or format from time to time, briefly defining a glorious new medium for co
mmunication, only to have every one of their competitors copy the newest feature
 in a frenzy of fomo. the problem is that copying every. single. fucking. featur
e. turns your social network into a mealymouthed chum box of an experience. your
 social networks got no flavor, man so, you might say, the solution is to stand 
out. keep your features true to the original spirit of the app. differentiate yo
urself from the crowd. i would certainly love that.but the social platforms are 
prisoners of their own walled gardens fueled by an insatiable hunger for attenti
on, facebook is left with no other choice than to rip off the most addictive pro
duct features on the market and shove them down your throat, kindly feedhttpsen.
wikipedia.orgwikifeedfacebook feed facebook  wikipediaing you exactly what you w
anted, you little  the end of closed social tiktok, notable crab look, i made yo
u some content daddy made you your favorite, open wide.httpswww.youtube.comwatch
vtnuxkmoq bo burnham  contentsocial platforms have a single euphemistic metric t
hey maximize engagement. every platform competes in a perfect market for our att
ention, because it is the prerogative of big social to keep you hooked. they nee
d you to spend the precious free minutes of your day on their platform, because 
without your eyeballs, theyve got nothing to sell to advertisers. so if someone 
invents a more addictive cigarettehttpswww.juul.com, the old platforms can eithe
r copy them or risk irrelevance. thats how you get a chum box. thats how you get
 the ceo of netflix saying that they compete with sleephttpswww.theguardian.comt
echnologyaprnetflixcompetitorsleepuberfacebook.ive long argued that tiktok repre
sents the perfection of the phonebased social platform. shortform video is highl
y engaging, and supercharging content discovery with a ui designed more for ai t
han humanityhttpsgimletmedia.comshowsreplyallzhd reply all  gleeks and gurgles i
s exactly what data mining has promised to do for us and for surveillance capita
listshttpnanopolitan.blogspot.combookmemefifthsentenceonpage.html since facebook
 started serving us content in the news feed. short video  algorithmic feed  the
 perfect engagement mechanism. so facebookand youtubeand instagramand snapchatan
d the guitar tab app i usehttpswww.ultimateguitar.comshoteleventothesun have no 
choice but to design for the lowest common denominator customized, hypertargeted
, usergenerated, microvideo feeds. these chum feeds are the platonic ideal for e
ngagement, maximized. by the time tiktok showed up, its biggest competitors were
 already getting old. when it started stealing users and their attention, the ap
ps simply copied it, as i