You’re A Social Media Influencer? Expect To Be Deplatformed

All good things come to an end. And so is the golden age of social media. It has been a good 10 years, but now the landscape is barely resembling to what the whole phenomenon was in the beginning. From an initial promise of transparency and potentially reaching every human on Earth – remember 6 steps to Kevin Bacon? – we’re now back into a walled garden, in which limitations are far stronger than the allowed activities. It’s not an unlimited potential anymore, but barely a backyard in which our attention is harvested for money.

How did we end up here?

Well, same as we ended up in any other history ditch until now: greed.

You see, in the beginning, social media was a way to connect and empower people form all around the globe. The graph designed by these sometimes incredible connections we were able to create was almost limitless. If your message was resonating with a lot of people, you could actually reach to those yearning for such a connection. And many of us did, if I remember well. It was the golden era of “organic reach”.

Now, “organic reach” is dead. It’s not like you’re told directly that your message won’t be delivered, unless you pay for it. It’s a silent, AI-managed ban, in which your message is carefully directed only to a limited amount of people. Social media is a black box – it has always been, to be honest, only we didn’t care that much – in which all the processes are controlled by the owning entity. And that owning entity wants a single thing: money.

And here we are, in this strange place in which, if you have the potential to become viral, you’ll be stopped even before this would be possible. Social media doesn’t want YOU to be viral. They only want you to spend your attention inside the network and click on ads. That’s all they want. All the processes they deploy, all the features they design, all of these are not aiming at “improving your experience here”, as they keep telling you, they are aimed at increasing your engagement in the platform. It’s like a virtual Matrix, in which, instead of electrical energy, a much subtle, yet even more expensive asset is harvested: human attention.

If you are an influencer, you are actually playing against the machine. As an influencer, you compete for the same gold they’re digging: other people attention. And they are in a better position to intercept this, because they control what everybody sees.

But, luckily, we still live in a flexible reality, and, when something dies, something else emerges.

Welcome to the DVD Media.

What Is DVD Media?

It’s certainly not a disc playing movies or music, as you probably thought. No, the name comes from: Deep, Vertical and Dark. I don’t think anyone else put these words together, in trying to define the new direction in which social media is going, but they work for me.

Deep

A Deep social media network is one that creates way more engagement than your standard Facebook or Twitter. It’s closer to a community than to a social network, in the sense that people spend way more time and attention, sometimes they share common goals, and even common actions to attain that goal.

Vertical

A Vertical social media network is very often geared at a very specific niche. Its messages are usually touching only a very specific area, being it something against the status-quo, or just hobbies and pastimes. There are more defined social networks mapped to neighborhoods, for instance, a model which functions way better, only for the sake of keeping those citizens in touch.

Dark

A Dark social media network is more often than not secret, or with a very low level of permeability. You either have to prove yourself in some way, to conquer a steep learning curve, or to take specific actions. To continue the example above, you literally have to move to a specific neighborhood to access that social media network, otherwise it’s completely impenetrable to you.

Decentralized DVD Media

During the last 3-4 years, decentralized social media platforms became a very good candidate for DVD media. They are already tokenized, in the sense that they don’t need external cash to function (or if they need it, it is done in a transparent way, by various fiat/crypto bridges, that all the players can access and consume). They are very niched, very vertical, sometimes to the point you have no idea what those people are talking about. And they are also dark, because many of them exist so outside the walled gardens of the traditional social media and, in all honesty, a lot of them have a steep learning curve.

I am quite active in some of these decentralized DVD social media platforms, one of them is called Hive, and you can follow me here.

But there are countless others, popping out and expanding as the bigger, monolithic platforms are becoming more and more fragile. Because, as they are cutting the tops of their user base, by deplatforming the influencers, and relying only on the middle layer for harvesting attention, they are also becoming less and less valuable for those who invest.




2 thoughts on “You’re A Social Media Influencer? Expect To Be Deplatformed”

  1. Well more and more people shy away from facebook and Instagram and I happen to believe is a good thing as well. I think though it will take more time until DVD media will be the new normal

    Reply

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.