New social networks & new social graphs

Why not use the launch of Threads as a chance to diversify our follows? The frequency with which on Twitter or another platform somebody shares a list of 20-25 people to follow or 20-25 best books and it consists of 90-95% men, almost all white with perhaps 1-2 Indian or Asian-American men, rarely any Black or Hispanic representation is mind-boggling. Yep, I’m opening that melon …I am coming at this from a U.S./English-speaking lens (though also on Spain Twitter, it’s quite a similar gender dynamic); I presume it’s different in Japan or Nigeria or Colombia, at least on race/ethnicity. If the vast majority of the people you follow, whose work you read or whose podcasts you listen to, come from the same small swath of society, you are not getting the whole picture. It’s easy to fall into this trap if you aren’t conscious of it. Now look, if you are an expert in Shakespeare or in the NBA, obviously there will be a certain skew (I used to be a baseball reporter, I know this). But in generalist, how to be successful, accounts to follow, we are poorly serving ourselves, our careers and our businesses by not reading and listening to people from diverse backgrounds? This goes way beyond gender and race/ethnicity, including people with disabilities, wealthy or poor, from different sexualities, religions and geographies. Yet those two areas rise to the forefront. It’s easy for me to skim a list of 98 people you interviewed on your generalist podcast (read: you aren’t specializing in men’s soccer/football) and see that 5 are women and know off the bat that you are missing out on views from most of society. I wrote about this in late 2021 for Wharton Magazine.

So Meta/Instagram’s new Threads app offers a chance at a reset, to not just follow the same people as always. It exploded onto the scene this week, launching early in the wake of another Elon Musk Twitter change that angered and turned off many users, this time limiting access to a certain number of viewed tweets per day. As somebody who worked in media for more than a decade and who led social media strategy and operations for ESPN Deportes (ESPN for Spanish-speaking users in the U.S.) for two years, this limiting of ad revenue and limiting of use by your core users is a pretty wild strategy to me. But I didn’t come to write today to talk about Musk’s moves. I will include a couple of longer analysis pieces that will be helpful in exploring differences among platforms as well as in viewing the evolution of Twitter. Already as of Sunday, July 9th, 100 million people have downloaded Threads!

What I want to say is something I’ve been musing on for awhile - a fresh network is a fresh opportunity to upend your social graph. What we consume, whose views we read, who we are connected with, has massive implications. It’s a new version of “you’re going to adopt behaviors and principles of the 5 people you spend the most time with.” This poll is a few years old, but it shows that many Americans have no close friends outside their own race. It shocked me at the time, but then I polled people (non-scientifically) via my social networks and many friends and acquaintances said that was the case for them. As you join a new network (if you are joining; I know there are privacy concerns with any Meta-owned app), it’s an easy way to start being exposed to new people and new information. This can be done on an app you are already active on, but “pereza” or inertia tend to keep us from changing too much. Now is the perfect time for us all to consciously think about who we are following on social apps, as well as what we are reading and what podcasts we are listening to.

For more reading on the evolution of Twitter, this piece by Eugene Wei was exceptional, and here is link to it on Twitter as well. And this analysis of different social networks by Teri Kanefield is extensive.

Other reads of the week

Paul Graham on How to Do Great Work - curiosity underpins everything, and try not to pick fashionable problems.

The tragic story of a man who escaped Afghanistan, only to be shot to death as a Lyft driver in Washington, D.C.

Remarkable piece by Sally Jenkins on the rivalry, friendship and shared fighting of cancer of Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert.

How corporations can impact admissions in the wake of the new Supreme Court ruling.

Averie Bishop, Miss Texas, the first Asian Miss Texas and pushing back on far right narrative .

Why you shouldn’t visit Antarctica.

Podcasts of the week

When to eat the marshmallow Hidden Brain. Don’t save everything or wait on everything, sometimes indulge in everyday pleasures

Adam Grant interviewing James Clear.

Adam Grant interviewing banker turned Hidden Figures author Margot Lee Shetterly.

Hard Fork with Instagram’s Adam Mosseri on the Threads app.

Book of the week

The Cost of Courage by Charles Kaiser - based on a true story of a family in the French Resistance against the Nazis. It’s easy to think we would have done the right thing, but what are we not speaking up about and acting against that is wrong today, in our personal lives or in the world?