Hello Everyone,
What is the future of media? Google has recently touted an AI for news, but insists journalists can’t be replaced. Three trends dominate:
Consumers are exiting social media, a significant and on-going exodus
Media jobs are being lost
New A.I. of LLMs will automate much of the current media landscape
Record number of media job cuts so far in 2023 (June, 2023 Axios)
Twitter rebranded as X
Instagram Threads traffic is plummeting
A new exodus from Twitter to Mastodon (lol right?)
TikTok Adds Text Posting
“Express your creativity with text posts on TikTok”
Okay ByteDance, I think I might actually try that! Given my luck on X, Threads and I’m also being told Substack Notes is pretty dead this summer (not my own quote).
For those of us without a personal brand on TikTok and a Newsletter, is this then the time? I have to admit my initial hope in Threads was more out of desperation than genuine optimism. And that’s the problem, social media is a shell of what it once was. Media as a whole, is destined to follow the same course.
Is Gaming, video and chatbots the future of media? I hope not, but what other reasonable conclusion can we make? LLMs change coding and gaming as much as they change our media system, and this means it will become cheaper to make games and videos with A.I.’s help.
Video has been taking time away from text, websites and reading online for many years - but where is it leading us? A world with just YouTube? Or Text posting on TikTok? A world of X?
What’s clear is with the onslaught of A.I., media, social media and the Creator Economy will likely change pretty drastically.
How TikTok Describes Text Posts
A New Way to Create
Creators have been able to make content on TikTok across a variety of formats -- from LIVE videos to photos, Duets to Stitch. Text is the latest addition to options for content creation, allowing creators to share their stories, poems, recipes, and other written content on TikTok - giving creators another way to express themselves and making it even easier to create.
Simplifying Creation
Text posts offer a simple publishing experience that makes it easier than ever to share text content. Here's how it works:
Creating a Text Post
When you access the Camera page, you'll be able to choose from three options: photo, video, and text. By selecting text, you'll be directed to the text creation page, where you can type out the content of your post.
Enhancing Your Text Posts
Upon reaching the Post page, you'll find familiar options to customize your content. These include adding Sound, tagging a location, enabling comments, and allowing Duets, among others. These features make it so your text posts are just as dynamic and interactive as any video or photo post.
Features to Try
Text posts offer a range of features that empower you to make your text-based content stand out. Here are some highlights:
Stickers: Enhance your text by selecting stickers that relate to your content and add some pizazz to your post.
Tags and Hashtags: Just like in video or photo posts, you can tag other accounts, as well as add hashtags that relate to relevant topics or trends.
Background colors: Choose from a variety of background colors to make your text pop.
Adding Sound: Sounds are core to the TikTok experience, which is why we've incorporated them into text posts. You'll be able to add tunes that readers can groove to as they peruse your writing.
Draft and Discard: Similar to video or photo posts, you can save your drafts and store them with other unpublished posts for later editing or discard them entirely.
Threads, LinkedIn posts, X, Notes and TikTok Text Posts = not the world I would have been hoping for. Getting recommendations on ConvertKit, Substack and beehiiv sounds a lot easier to gain more readers for Newsletters. Creators might find ways to bypass the platform and Ad-media hopscotch. Or whatever you want to call it.
If I’m a Newsletter Creator, do I need to be a threadboi just to compete? Many of the young men in my category, actively use A.I. to create exaggerated threads on news in the space. I’m now in my 40s, I don’t have ambitions to be a “threadboi”.
But TikTok text posts, that could be educational.
But how could it be for Creatives?
TikTok says the new content option will allow creators to share their stories, poems, lyrics and other written content on the platform, giving them another way to express themselves.
At least I can somewhat trust TikTok’s recommendation algorithm for the right people to discover my text posts? I guess?!!
Social media and media are in a limbo along with the advertising slowdown. From X to LinkedIn, my feed is mostly a hodge-podge of gimmicks, exaggerations and network authority that ChatGPT could realistically automate. It’s lost a lot of its humanity.
1000 Character Limit
As X is about to launch “articles”, it all makes me wonder.
Text posts appear similar to Instagram Stories visually: users can add a background color, edit how text appears, and add music and stickers to the post. Posts have a 1,000-character limit. Other users can also engage with the post similar to how they interact with video — by stitching, dueting, and commenting.
For Newsletter Creators, that seems like low hanging fruit. I’m not 25, I didn’t grow up on TikTok, Snap Stories and the mobile short-form video craze. But a text post, I think I could manage.
It would be pretty ironic if it wasn’t Meta, but TikTok that got some of those “writers”. Some of those creatives and educators and aspiring niche creators. Newsletter Creators would be pretty high on the list. Consider also that Instagram is rolling out its own Subscriptions to more countries.
Creator are still pretty poorly treated on the legacy web. Creator Funds are pretty limited gimmicks. On most places where Subscriptions exist, it’s a pretty small number of winners, vs. aspiring Creators. That ratio has not gotten better over the years in any dramatic way to say that the Creator Economy is actually working. You could make the argument some places like OnlyFans have busted open that narrative a little bit.
But Creators of text? Sounds kind of retro!
Still this is not the canvas I was hoping for:
You can add stickers to your text post, along with tags and hashtags.
There’s also the option to choose from a variety of background colors.
Similar to video or photo posts, you can save your drafts and store them with other unpublished posts for later editing or discard them entirely.
Let’s hope the Articles interface of X is better as a UI.
So do I really have to call Facebook Meta and Twitter X now? Sounds pretty terrible, I would have never foreseen the abyss of media we are dealing with today. If I wasn’t writing Newsletters, I wouldn’t even be around. And it’s a sad realization to what digital has done to us.
The price of Advertising could be the defaults of democracy and the media going sour and south. America is good at pretending, until it isn’t a leader any longer.
TikTokers can now express quick thoughts via text instead of filming a video. It’s very concerning. Threads feels doomed and X feels like a parody, I can’t talk about Notes since my employer is prone to favoritism and imaginary enemies.
So where does this leave us?
Of course, text posts on TikTok look different than they do on Twitter or Threads, so people might not use text posts on TikTok like they do on other platforms. But how will they use them? How would you create in your niche related to your Newsletter with them?
And how long before you stop doing so, and are back at the scratch level we find ourselves in on all of these pointless feeds.
Thanks for reading!
Thanks. Very relevant