What does the network effect of social media really scale?
A common argument about the value of platforms like Facebook revolves around what’s called the network effect of social media. To start, let’s define what we mean by the network effect.
The network effect: The value of a network increases as more and more people connect to the network.
Simply put, we feel the need to use a network because everyone else is connected to that network. Social media is an online service that can scale this effect at levels never before seen.
Take Facebook, which remains the most popular social media platform to date. In fact, this social networking service now has more than three billion users. To put that number into perspective, the world population now totals about eight billion. So Facebook’s users account for over a third of total people in the world!
With that many people on a single network, why bother with another that has fewer users—and presumably less value? That rhetorical question might sound like a good argument for the value of social media as a networking service. But there’s a hidden assumption behind this argument. Perhaps we can get to it by asking a follow-up question …
What exactly is the service of the network?
When questioning the value of social media as a networking service, we should probably also ask:
What exactly is the service being scaled by the network effect of social media?
In other words, we ought to consider what social networking services like Facebook are actually designed to scale. For instance, a common claim is that the service is designed to help people “stay connected with friends and family,” giving them “the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”
Unfortunately, that claim often doesn’t measure up to reality. As a business technology, the service is designed to hijack the attention of users with clickbaity ads and viral content. And it does so by collecting private data to determine what keeps users ‘liking’ and ‘doomscrolling’ endlessly, if not addictively, through social media feeds.
The network effect of social media: a service to monetize attention with viral clickbait
In the early days of social media, maybe it wasn’t completely unreasonable to claim that the network effect of these services could scale real-world connections and relationships, thereby bringing various people and communities closer together. Indeed, technology consultants like Clay Shirky argued for the merits of social media, based on such network effects. But nowadays, that claim has become difficult to defend.
The network effect of social media is much more about leveraging a service that scales the monetization of people’s attention. The service is ultimately designed to show off the most viral, clickbaity content and ads to the largest crowds, especially in ways that benefit advertisers. After all, it’s no accident that celebrities and so-called influencers—often backed by sponsors—can so easily dominate social media platforms today.