Prediction: Elon Musk will Create His Own Social Network
Sentiment Amplification rules the Metaverse
The Rise of Sentiment Amplification
In today’s internet in 2022 Advertising platforms use sentiment amplification, to make content that’s more emotionally triggering, positive or controsverial to engage and retain the attention of users more effectively.
It’s the culmination of years of product engineers finding the sweet spot and low hanging fruit of how to manipulate our attention in the infancy of the Creator Economy.
Just as companies clone features of products in their rivals, this has become the over-reaching dominant product engineering mechanism. I would actually credit ByteDance (who own TikTok) with this its optimization culminating in a good product circa 2019. Now just three years later, everyone is doing it.
This has led supposedly serious professional networks like LinkedIn, to look more like Facebook. Your feed will have so-called viral posts that plays on your emotions. This is the tell-tale sign that a platform now priorities digital Ads and wants to boost user retention.
This has led to recommendation engines that are very good at keeping our attention like TikTok and reinforcement based feedback loops that can even alter our ideology like YouTube. Sentiment amplification is all about that triggering headline, clickbait and has also led to a more profound cult of personality. The cult of personality is like influencer marketing on algorithmic steroids.
Sentiment Amplification created the Cult of Personality
As influencer marketing evolves in the Creator Economy this creates mega archetypes like Donald Trump, Joe Rogan and yes, perhaps the most powerful of them all, Elon Musk. An Elon Musk tweet is worth more than any advertisement. His tweets can literally move markets and crypto prices.
He has 72 million followers on Twitter and this number is growing. The cult of personality also leads these mega-influencers down a path typically of misinformation, since that’s a hack of sentiment amplification that they understand well.
The entire internet is based on the hack of sentiment amplification, and selective misinformation is a form of salesmanship for these actors. But we are not here today to judge the behavior of people as powerful as Trump, Xi Jinping, Rogan or Musk. Trump’s social network called Truth Social launchines in the early spring of 2022. It could be as soon as March.
Why Musk will Copy Trump in Starting His Own Social Platform
Elon Musk will likely capitalize on this trend of the cult of personality and sentiment amplification in the Metaverse, to launch his own social platform in 2023 or early 2024.
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Currently, the social media space is dominated by a select few platforms who wield a massive amount of control. To decentralize social media and pair it with a crypto like dogecoin, Elon Musk will go to great lengths to alter the future of social media in the Metaverse with his incredible influence.
Elon Musk will try to make crypto and decentralization key features of his platform, instead of Advertising based sentiment amplification. Due to his popularity in the Metaverse, there is growing demand for Elon Musk to create new rules for what a social platform might be based on, if not advertising.
Elon Musk understands the importance of changing the rules of social platforms, before the Metaverse truly arrives.
As sentiment amplification creates more Cult of Personality mega-archetypes few will want to improve on the existing framework as much as Musk. You could make the argument that with his resources and influence, such a platform could quickly become one of the most used in the world.
Just as Donald Trump changed the world in his own way, these Major influencers in the Metaverse have incredible influence over citizens. Joe Rogan’s podcasts have a reach of around 11 million. That’s an estimated 11 million listeners per episode in podcasting. Elon Musk’s influence is a lot bigger than that. He just doesn’t have the right platform. By using dogecoin or a cryptocurrency of his own making, he could build one.
Elon Musk’s Social Platform will Mary Web 3.0 and the Creator Economy in the Metaverse
Elon Musk’s hypothetical social media platform would also transform the Creator Economy towards more decentralized values where we would be paid via a stablecoin. Social media platforms today are plagued automated bans, poor customer service, app Store bans, restrictions, blacklists, fake account problems, spam, misinformation and advertising based incentives to keep their organization highly centralized and practically useless for most creators.
Elon Musk’s social platform would:
Make a cryptocurrency primary, likely dogecoin if not one founded by the company itself.
Bring content creators more to the center of the platform instead of algorithms geared towards sentiment amplification.
Stimulate content creation in the Metaverse not with likes but upvotes and downvotes in the Reddit or Hacker News style.
As Jack Dorsey retreats from Twitter to focus on Block, Elon Musk might actually be ready to create his own social platform that builds upon what we have learned about social media platforms in the last ten and more years.
As an amateur futurist I’m always making predictions about the future and I’m thinking more about the Creator Economy of the future, that’s more Web 3.0 and Metaverse based.
The best case scenario is Elon Musk is capable of democratizing the Creator Economy whereby creators can earn a content basic income (a form of UBI in the Metaverse). This could splinter social media back to the individual and away from the corrupt centralization of BigTech.
What do you think, could you see Elon Musk making his own social platform with new rules?