what makes social media apps good is something you can’t measure.
We talk a lot about technology, and quantify the impact of technology through through the lens of scale: daily or monthly active users, amount of impressions, click through rate, etc. Something I don’t think we mention, or quantify enough, is what makes a product culturally relevant.
The best products, in my opinion, are not the ones who are boring and reach a lot of people. They are messy, impactful, and cornerstones of a specific point in time. Unpolished, maybe even unworkable today, but representative of everything that a platform was, could be, or is.
Examples:
- 4Chan is for people who have terrible social skills.
- If you were on MySpace, you are definitely not under the age of 25
- TikTok shop is synonymous with being scammed
- If you can only pay for something online in Bitcoin, you’re probably buying something illegal.
These are not all social media companies, but I’m sure you’re following the thread I’m throwing down. Culture creates a depth of modern-day context to features that enables it to spread quickly through our society.
The true sign of a culturally successful social media platform is when the content transcends the app it has originated from, into an abstraction of the platform itself through the content.
The screenshot of the UI design communicates some underlying context without you even having to use the app.
I’m always on Pinterest, and most of the pins I save are screenshots of content from another platform. Pinterest was pushing me sponsored ads on its own platform encouraging me to turn my Pinterest boards into videos (so they can be cross-posted to TikTok). TikTok branded posts are on Pinterest.
A lot of my memes and mental health folders are screenshots of tweets: tweets being shorthand for short, poignant messages.
Take BeReal, an app that encourages people to take photos at differing periods of time to create a more authentic and realistic view of someone’s life. The BeReal memes are fucking crazy: partially because sometimes the images are nuts, partially because we have the context that BeReal itself demands authenticity from the user.
You can see this about old MySpace posts. The concept of top 10 friends still sticks around today, showing longstanding influence in regards to the fact that some product features are so successful, they are turned into contentified representations of that time.
Even Hindenburg Research, a notorious short seller who talks shit about companies to make money, mentioned this in their Cash App expose: that Cash App was known for being how people buy drugs and pay for assassinations. Venmo is linked to many a political scandal through the features that allow others to see what you have paid people for.
Cash App and Venmo itself are replaceable. But a cultural legacy and reputation transcends branding and advertising.
Think about the cultural legacies of doomed Ask.fm / Yaak / After School style apps, known for promoting bullying and self harm in school. Yet, they also act as a new cultural marker of going up in a interconnected age: hearing people’s full opinions of you from the second you’re online through anonymous online brutality.
There’s a strange emotion I get seeing resurrected products. Often times, I’ll come across a product that by itself is a new reconceptualization for a piece of software that is already dead.
Revival apps are built on nostalgia and past good moments to grow a user base with the promise that they don’t need to learn something new. You’ve seen these: iPhone tamigotchis, myspace knock-offs, old versions of PictoChat from Nintendo, and the list goes on.
While I have appreciated the technical prowess it takes to create these, I’ve always found what they create to be temporal and lacking any cultural value. They’re not becoming relevant within their own perspective: they’re just repackaging it.
This is partially why Threads vs. X is tricky: both of them are aiming to get to the scale of twitter through their own cultural lenses. Neither of which replace the Twitter we knew.
Threads is attached to Instagram, and brings a specific sort of pre-existing Meta Ick to it. No comment on X.
Either way, they are both looking to capture a market that can never be recaptured, because they recreate the features without recreating the culture.
People do not download apps for the features, they do it for the cultural relevance: to themselves, to others, to major events, or to patterns they may not themselves recognize.
This WAS what made Twitter twitter, and why it’s failing today.
Twitter was where you went to see shit go down. There was fights, news articles, and new things breaking through everyday. Did you go to write in 256 characters or less? Probably not. You went to see Shaq tweet about his ass not fitting into the ride at Knott’s Berry Farm.
That’s why Truth Social was completely culturally relevant (at least for a specific political party), although it’s stalling user growth and has a dim future. Truth Social has probably had more impactful moments on their platform for the average American than Threads has.
The first relevant to me thing I have seen from Threads is that Elon’s daughter roasted him on it-once again setting Threads against Elon and X in the eyes of the public.
So, how do you build a new culturally relevant app? You take something that seems unexplored and build it into a cultural representation of a sub-group or market. Culture is about your features, your wording, your underlying product philosophy, people you hire, features you keep alive, and the moderation you do AND do not do.
Your product culture is your thesis of how your product should navigate the world, and who would be on board with that.
Anyone can create a generic social media app. Very few can create a product that enables the community who uses it to create part of their identity. That identity with the product brings cultural relevance.
Superfan is a relatively young Spotify-data creation app. Built on the initial premise of a weekly Spotify wrapped, Superfan is now currently working towards monetization models built up around closer fan relationships, and more granular celeb / fan interactions in a world where it seems easier (and harder) than ever to get authentic with our favorite artists.
Sure, artists are more online.
But for every open artist, there’s one maintained by a PR team. The average entertainment company has never gone bust by overestimating how much money parasocial relationships bring in: Superfan is no different.
Every week, Superfan gives you new statistics about your listening. You can share them with friends within the app, or share them to IG or other social media platforms.
Their lateral move to fan / artist relationships make sense: the people who want to be associated with listening to specific artists also probably are ingrained within the music scene, and receptive to features that link them to deeper interactions with those artists.
I was introduced to Superfan through a friend, Gabby Frost: social media content creator and Toad Hat cover singer. She accurately predicted that TikTok was going to be a kingmaker in the music industry prior to the pandemic, and when she started posting screenshots of Superfan on her IG stories as content, that’s when I realized what Superfan could be.
You use Superfan to share the status of your music listening in a beautiful, self-identifying way.
You identify as someone listening to these artists, and you access them deeper and deeper through the app.
Superfan gets the attention of these artists by people who tag them through reposting onto other social media platforms. They even have a waitlist section they probably use in negotiations with artists to bring them onto the platform.
They’ve worked to create a perfect, cultural flywheel. User self-identifies as a fan, they share, they tag artists, artists see it as a way to reward their top fans and gain consistent PR. As the artist releases content to fans, it’s sure that some of the posts may leak, or may link Superfan to greater cultural scandals and moments.
The steps that Superfan needs to nail? Making the content the artists share as culturally relevant and as much an identity marker as the Spotify data they started with.
If they can nail a unique, visually compelling form of content that can be sharable and synonymous with being a Superfan: they’ve won the true game.
Success is ever-shifting, and often tied to monetary values. But I think there’s substantial value in tech products that eschew our definition of what it means to have success or “product market fit”.
So much of tech financing itself comes through venture capitalists, who have a one-dimensional lens on which they measure returns and impact: cash.
Numbers. DAU, MAU, Burn, Runway, etc.
Most of a company can be reduced to numbers. This is the opposite of cultural impact: it can be small or wide, but it is a form of often incalculable impressions that lay dormant. Cultural impact is emotional, not numerical.
Don’t think about the apps you’ve used the most. Think about the ones that have bewildered you. The websites you’ve run across one or twice and think about all of the time. The first website you visited, or the ones you wish you never did.
Software (like physical places) contain and fossilize our emotions, memories, and hearts. Pieces of our lives are forever fragmented into digital shards, saved in databases we’ll never see with developers who we will never know.
Cultural impact and the consumer reputation that gets formed around products is one way (and maybe the only way) that real humans can define software in the way that software defines real humans.
