👊💰 We need a revolution in social media business models

Free Our Feeds

Social media is broken: controlled by a handful of billionaires who shape what people see, say, and believe. These platforms profit from division, exploit user data, and lock people into closed systems.

Our Social Media is Broken. Is Decentralization the Fix? | Internet Archive Blogs

When Jack Dorsey, founder of the very centralized social media platform, Twitter, posted this message about decentralized social media, our DWeb community took note:

Social media algorithms can be redesigned to bridge divides — here’s how

"It falls to both the tech companies that built these systems and an engaged public to create technologies designed for social cohesion."

The future of social media is human

We cannot continue participating in social media platforms which do nothing to stop us being tricked by GenAI and the powerful people/governments that control them.

Media and Social Capital

We survey the empirical literature in economics on the impact of media technologies on social capital. Guided by a simple model of information and collective action, we cover a range of different outcomes related to social capital—from social and political participation to interpersonal trust—in its benign and destructive manifestations. The impact of media technologies hinges on their content (information versus entertainment), their effectiveness in fostering coordination, and the networks they create as well as on individual characteristics and media consumption choices.

🔭🖤🚀 Social media’s next evolution: decentralized, open-source, and scalable

How Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar

Building A Prosocial Media Ecosystem | NOEMA

There’s never been a better time to make social media what it always should have been: a tool to strengthen rather than strip-mine the social fabric.

Let's fund the open social web

A pro-social approach to building better platforms

Social media promotion improves job market outcomes

Social media has transformed how academics disseminate research, but its effect on academic job outcomes remains unclear. Previous research has shown correlations between social media exposure and metrics like citation counts, but these relationships may be confounded by unobserved factors such as researcher quality or access to professional networks. We examine whether social media promotion causally affects job market outcomes in economics through a field experiment on Twitter (now X). We first collect tweets about job market papers from 519 candidates and post them from a dedicated account. We then randomize half of the posts to be quote-tweeted by established economists in the candidates’ fields, and measure the effects on both online visibility and hiring outcomes. We find that posts in the treatment group receive 441% more views and 303% more likes than those in the control group. Candidates whose posts were assigned to be quote-tweeted receive one additional flyout invitation compared to the control group average of 5.4 flyouts. Furthermore, women in the treatment group receive 0.9 more job offers than women in the control group, who receive 3 offers on average. Exploring mechanisms, we find that academic reputation drives these results, with stronger effects for quote-tweets from highly cited scholars and for candidates from top institutions. Our findings suggest social media promotion causally increases research visibility and improves academic job market outcomes.