The Importance of Smallness

Photo by Karl Hedin on Unsplash

This is the third part of a series on social media and how to understand its impacts on our lives. In the first entry, I talked about the evolution of social media platforms from the mid-aughts til now. In the second, I talked about what it means for us to be social animals. Next, I talk about why the trajectory of social media is bad for us, and how to draw boundaries around social media for your family and yourself.

Mark Zuckerberg has said that Facebook’s mission is to connect every person in the world. 

When Elon Musk took the helm of Twitter/X, he said he wanted the platform to become an “everything app,” competing with YouTube, banks, dating apps, and more. 

Big Tech loves this kind of maximalism. While these goals sound lofty, idealistic, and ambitious, in reality they create a world where users can’t not use their platform. Quite convenient for their egos and their bank accounts. 

The point of this series is to construct a frame of reference based on our innate, healthy, biologically social behaviors, and use that frame of reference to recognize how Big Tech undermines and exploits that natural wiring. 

From a product perspective and from a user perspective, it turns out that smaller tech is almost always better. 

Big creates alienation, not familiarity

There’s only so much we can take. There are only so many people we can meaningfully know and interact with in good faith. Is there any better evidence than Twitter/X?

Trying to function as part of an open range userbase of millions, if not billions, is simply untenable for the human mind. 

• In the 1990’s, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed that the average human can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships. Dunbar arrived at this number after researching the brains and social groups of humans and primates. Groups found in subsistence villages, nomadic tribes, military groupings, and others uncannily trend around 150. Plenty of flex and nuance here, but you get the point.

• Ina Garten, host of the cooking show Barefoot Contessa says that the perfect dinner party consists of six people sitting at a small, round table. Not eight people. Not a rectangular table. This is the ideal format for everyone to feel included, safe, open, and welcome. 

• The structure of early social media site SixDegrees was pretty prescient. You could interact with first-degree connections (people you were directly connected with), as well as second- and third-degree connections — no more. 

The vast, open-world quality of Facebook, Twitter, and perhaps YouTube, did anyone ask for it? Was it something we even wanted in the first place?

A lack of focus

Have you ever found yourself on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter/X and suddenly wondered, “Wait, what am I doing here?” Maybe you came to look up something specific, then got derailed. Or maybe you didn’t even realize you’d pulled your phone out, and snapped back into consciousness mid-scroll. 

It’s easy to lose focus when a product does not itself have one. That’s why the question, “What is social media for?” can be so nebulous to think through.

A common refrain in product design is, if it’s built for everyone and everything, it’s built for no one and nothing. Everything about a product starts with and stems from your users — their preferences and habits, the problem they’re trying to solve. I would bet my house that the platforms and apps you love using are laser-focused on a limited set of clear, specific problems and users. Just like I’d bet you’d rather have a dinner party with six guests than a hundred million of them. 

By the built for everyone-built for no one rule, the general social media apps fail. I suspect a huge portion of usage stems from habit, rather than value.  

One thing’s for sure, they do not serve you. It’s worth asking who they do.

In their clutches, at their mercy

Aside from the sheer size of their user base, the big social media platforms now take up an outsized portion of the internet itself.

These huge platforms have subsumed and consolidated the digital ecosystem to such an extent that many of us struggle at the thought of where else to go online. They have become an internet unto themselves, a place where you can shop, sell, consume news, learn something new, argue with strangers, message friends, watch videos, play games, and so on.

During the first decade of the internet, all of these activities took place across a distributed constellation of independent, unrelated websites. There wasn’t just one place to read book reviews, there were dozens. The connective tissue was public and neutral, unowned and uninfluenced by anyone. The average user had much more control over their online experience. 

This shift is problematic in two huge ways:

1) The social media internet increasingly informs our reality.

When social media platforms become the internet, their interests become the lifeblood of that experience. Given that more and more people are getting their news from social media, and 39% of people say they’re addicted to social media, it’s a huge scale for people like Musk and Zuckerberg have their thumb on.

One only need note how closely the Twitter/X algorithm’s preferences so closely mirror Musk’s opinion to see how this is problematic. AI will only compound these problems.

2) Big tech manipulation causes real-world harms.   

Ask a young person online how old they were when they received their first unwanted sexual advance on social media. 

Platforms with hundreds of millions of users cross-pollinating at the whims of an obscure algorithm can create risk and danger. Social media-related stalking, suicide, and extortion are a direct consequence of these platforms’ maximalist, attention-at-all-costs design.

They can’t have it both ways

Pay attention to the sleight of hand by the faces of these platforms. 

Musk claims that Twitter/X serves a public good as the world’s “town square.” Monsieur Musk, how big can a town be? Does Twitter feel like a town to you, reader? To me it can often feel like a mob of mean-spiritedness, with Musk at its head. 

Zuckerburg regularly speaks from both sides of his mouth. On an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Zuckerberg asserts that users actively interacting with others don’t suffer the depression and anxiety of those who mindlessly scroll. 

“I don’t necessarily want people to spend more time with computers,” he says. “I just want the time people spend with screens to improve.” 

It sounds nice, but when you think about it, it’s asinine. In reality, it’s clear that Zuckerberg will take as much scrolling and clicking as he can get — regardless of their nature. 

With size comes density, gravity. It’s clear to anyone who has been to dinner with someone who can’t stop checking their phone that the gravity of these platforms is anything but social.