SOCIAL MEDIA: SWAPPING TOWARDS SIMILAR

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Although I am not very active on social media platforms, through osmosis of news, family preferences, and analyzing platforms for a school project, it’s filtered through that there is a whole lot of borrowing, stealing, and potential repetition flying around the social media realm! It’s the nature of business cycles and competition, of course, but interesting to see what survives and what doesn’t. Companies want to get in on the next popular feature or integrate the qualities of an entire platform, and then figure out how to tie it to advertising revenue. Recently AXIOS covered the “copycat conundrum” with a chart illustrating some of those features. The author reiterated a point she’d made a few years earlier, that “Nearly every major social media feature has been copied or iterated on by rival apps, causing most major social media platforms to begin to look the same, even though the companies try to emphasize differences in their core values. 
A few examples that I’ve learned of through personal interactions, or the news are:
  • LinkedIn, which adopted the Facebook-like approach of incorporating a newsfeed, but now runs more and more ads. 
  • Pinterest -hooking up with Amazon for links to buy items on their platform.
  • Snapchat ushered in the concept of short videos and messages that quickly disappear, but since then, I see people hopping from one quick video feature on one platform to another.   
  • Instagram’s “stories” springing from TikTok -BeReal, which a few young family members use, seems derivative of both, but has a few different parameters. 
  • Lemon8, a social media app of ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company), is sometimes described as a combination of Instagram and Pinterest
 Analysts and journalists have been reporting on all of this for a while now, with Wired pointing out that “niche disruptors” can come along with a feature that everyone flocks to because it's a refreshing change, until it’s copied… 

Comments

  1. Jourdan LOctober 9, 2023 at 11:53 AM

    Great post Ellen! The older I've gotten the more I've always started to become confused with social media. I remember when they introduced short videos to Instagram and I thought- isn't that just snapchat with a slightly different paint job? Why bother using that if your already using the other? I also crack up at the many versions of "bitmojis" we now get with each social media app. I've noticed ads are doing this too, I know that in advertising you always shoot for what is successful, but sometimes I cant tell the difference in one product from another because both of their commercials are copy pasted! Especially if they have similar concepts.

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  2. Anna V.October 10, 2023 at 3:39 PM

    Oh, this is absolutely true! It seems that this is the way things go, regardless of what type of product it is.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ellen DooleyOctober 10, 2023 at 8:22 PM

    Thanks for all those thoughts! Another aspect that I found interesting, related to the issue of sites replicating each other that you mentioned, is the fact that some of the largest, most powerful companies were the ones who tried and had features just quietly fail into oblivion. Even they couldn't keep funding some of the odd rip-offs.

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