Curating social media

July 2nd, 2020

There’s this post on indie hackers about how social media is currently more about trying to get people’s attention to what you think they might like:

 On Facebook, you show others what you think they'll like. You spend time picking the best photo, edit your text to be snappy, agonize over the feedback you might get[…] I think that could be a remedy for the ills of social media - antisocial media. Time with oneself. Curating an environment... for you.

A similar topic was addressed in this blog Websites and complexity:

At the same time though, it makes me kinda sad to see people giving up ownership of their web presence. Personal websites are a mirror of the human beings behind them.

Makes me wonder; How many of the 2.2 billion (2,200+ million) users of Facebook are interested in customizing their profile and content to make it truly unique? I guess that many, I mean most of us don’t even post original content, we just repost what someone else’s did.

I know carrd.co offers a service to create your own web page. Let’s do a Google search. Oh wow, 200k results!! That’s quite a number. I guess there’s some interest after all. 
That’s still the 0.01 percent  of the Facebook users, but then again, how many of them know about carrd.co?

The other aspect people might be interested on, is curating the content (not so much the appearance of the site) to keep track of their thoughts, photos, memories. Personal things. I don’t think there’s much out there except for all those note-taking apps and document management. Let’s see.

According to this site, there are 225 million Evernote users (obviously many of them are probably inactive, like the account I created years ago) that’s about 11 percent of Facebook users. Not bad at all.

Well it looks like people are indeed interested. It’s just mainstream social media is more prevalent and easier to use.

So, it seems people are willing to curate their content and tune the appearance of their profiles/sites after all.

Certainly, a topic to keep researching on.