The big story This week, I spent a few hours at a conference called “Social 2030.” The conference, which was put on by a couple of venture capital firms, aimed to identify trends that would impact the social media world in the next decade. The controversial bit of the conference came during an interview with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, where the executive blasted the hot social media platform of 2020: TikTok. In a discussion surrounding the hot new platform on the block, Huffman got a little passionate. "Maybe I'm going to regret this, but I can't even get to that level of thinking with them," Huffman said. "Because I look at that app as so fundamentally parasitic, that it's always listening, the fingerprinting technology they use is truly terrifying, and I could not bring myself to install an app like that on my phone." He also called the app “spyware,” something the folks at TikTok didn’t like too much. They sent TechCrunch a statement responding to Huffman, saying, "These are baseless accusations made without a shred of evidence." That exchange was the most newsworthy bit at the conference, but the broader trends addressed by panelists were more interesting. TikTok’s advent has proven that Facebook is vulnerable, something that didn’t always seem apparent during social media’s popularization. While its popularity has merely shown the ability of a non-Facebook app to out-Facebook Facebook, there isn’t so much out there right now that points to a dramatic shift in social media power-dynamics. Even with newcomers like TikTok, the world of social media feels a bit stale entering the new decade, the problems are getting broader but the user interactions seem to have only evolved web forums. This was where conversations got interesting at the conference, theorizing what could lead to dramatic shifts. Many panelists talked about the influence of smaller verticalized communities inside apps that were custom built for the needs of that particular interest, be it sports, gaming or parenting. The idea that a monolithic network is always needed kind of overestimates how widely people in these communities want to be sharing, they said, something that messaging apps have really doubled down on. The bottom line was that social media doesn’t have to look the way it does right now. Many executives at the conference spoke in terms of the transformative effects of the blockchain or VR or AR — it was clear that they didn’t quite know what exactly was coming, but they also felt that there was more to being social online than what we’ve already seen from the world’s biggest companies. | 
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