Social Media Is Over. Social Media Is Just Beginning

Everybody knows social media sucks. Social media usage has declined nearly 10% over the past three years. Fifty percent of U.S. adults say they are actively trying to spend less time on social platforms. We ally pretty much know why this is; it's no accident that Cory Doctorow's Enshittification theory, which has come to be applied to companies in virtually every sector of our economy, started out as an explanation of the decline of social media networks:

When switching costs are high, services can be changed in ways that you dislike without losing your business. The higher the switching costs, the more a company can abuse you, because it knows that as bad as they’ve made things for you, you’d have to endure worse if you left.

The whole point of social—to learn from and interact with each other—is pretty much gone. As Tony Haile noted in his nice piece for Filament (remember: After you've signed up for Rover's beta, make sure to get into Filament; it's great!) about journalism and the attention economy:

Main characters, reply guys, brigading, cancellations and harassment all made it better to consume than create. One deck quietly passed around Twitter leadership in 2021 suggested that if the trendline continued there would be no one creating original tweets by 2030.

As any user of X can attest, we're nearly there already. Today, social networks have stopped being social, or even networks, and are now just...media. Media that is designed to shock you, and harass you, and do whatever it takes to keep you looking for a single minute more. Media that is mostly made of advertisements, clout-chasing bad actors and, increasingly, substandard AI-generated content.

Given all that, it makes perfect sense that we're taking this moment to build Rover, an AI-enabled social network.

Why? Well, in part because Josh Nguyen and I are old Tumblr vets who remember the sheer magic of social media when it was good. But the bigger part is this: Our firm belief that AI can help provide context and meaning to support human conversations in ways that were not before possible at scale.

How? With Rover we:

• Use AI to help satisfy your curiosity: Ask any question and Rover gives you an answer in the form of a short podcast.
• Connect you to your friends on the network to learn from what they're interested in: Rover lets you listen to podcasts created by your friends and other people you will find interesting on the network.
• Host a great conversation about something you care about: Start an audio chat with your friends about a podcast; Rover acts as a host and resource to enhance the call.