"TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube are all starting to look the same. That’ll change how they make money and compete."

From The New York Observer, April 6:

The Homogenization of Social Media Will Have Real Consequences

This story is syndicated from the Substack newsletter Big Technology; subscribe for free here.

Social media feeds are melting together. Instead of using separate apps for friends, family, news, culture and entertainment, you can now see it all on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. Open any, and you’ll likely be watching vertical looping videos, almost assuredly from people you don’t follow. The content is so similar it’s easy to forget which app you’re on.

The homogenization of social media is a testament to TikTok’s success — AI-based recommendations simply crush the follow model — but when apps look so uniform, it doesn’t tend to persist for long. Winners can roll up and dominate, creators can assert their value and governments can grow emboldened toward action. Some degree of this is already underway; the rest will likely come.

This week, let’s look at four key ways the growing homogenization of social media will likely play out:

A winner will take the market
The follow model, for all its faults, let you build distinct feeds on different apps. You could build a news and culture feed on Twitter, a friends and family feed on Facebook, a celebrity and interest feed on Instagram and an entertainment feed on YouTube. But when these apps replaced the follow model with algorithms — which consider all the content on an app, and serve what they think you’ll like — the purpose-built feed died.

Now, we’re in a testing-out phase for AI-based recommendations. Every app is unleashing its algorithm on (effectively) the same pool of content, and a winner will eventually emerge. A marginally better app will attract more users, which will give it more data to make its feed better, which will attract more creators to pump it with content, which will open its lead. It’s a flywheel. And eventually, the lesser apps will get worse and fall off.

“There’s a very real possibility that using artificial intelligence — some — or generally one of these companies will walk away with the everything app,” Instagram and Artifact founder Kevin Systrom told me on Big Technology Podcast last week. “The benefit you get of having a large user base, of having the best artificial intelligence for recommendations, is enormous.”....

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