Social media is nowadays more media than social. And that, dear users, has to change.

Social media once intended to bring people closer, embrace online communities and allow for physical distances to appear seamless. Despite its initially good intentions, there has been a clear shift in the usage of mainstream social media platforms leading to two main worrisome factors: Estrangement and Entertainment.

Estrangement - Diminishing Sense of Belonging

The usage of mechanisms and app features like stories embrace the ephemeral. The fact that for only 24h your content is available and that this content is uploaded daily by most users results in an unprecedented immediacy of personal portrayal. This snackable content distances individuals instead of uniting them. Hence, people are drifting apart while being left with a feeling of fake closeness. Also, and most importantly, new communities are not forging.

Entertainment - More Media than Social

The social aspect of the platforms we use has slowly washed out, and now these applications serve users as boredom killers instead of community builders. Accordingly, they have evolved to algorithmic content over human networks.

TikTok is the epitome of estrangement and entertainment. These two factors are the driving forces that pushed social media platforms to drift away from their initial value propositions. Now, try to guess the sequel. (Spoiler alert: The empowerment of the attention economy). Catchy and fast-paced content that leads to higher screen time that, in turn, allows these platforms to do a better profiling of their users. Add this to ad placement, and there you have the recipe for the success of our favorite cash cows, aka social media platforms: your time is their money.

However, users without a pre-social-media strong network or community, especially gen z users, are slowly abandoning Meta’s platforms. 

This sought migration has been observable for over two years in favor of the new social media players like BeReal, Locket, Dispo, and Poparazzi. These newcomers think they are mildly disrupting the game by enhancing real and more meaningful relationships amongst their users. And, don’t get me wrong, they do facilitate more humane relationships and they are bringing people closer, but no disruption can come from any of them. The estrangement factor is and will still be there because they do not offer new mechanisms for users to establish new communities. This, in turn, results in a symbiotic relationship these newcomers have with the OGs: people post on Instagram the content just uploaded on the new app to reach broader audiences and to look trendy, presumably. Moreover, these new apps do not have the vision nor proposition to lay the foundation for long-term establishment in the space. Then, even if the success of this newcomer is established, it is just in the fleeting moment of problem detected, problem solved. As a result, in the long run, either the OG will acquire them or their main feature will be copied, ruling them out of the market.

At the end of the day, all the efforts made to bring back the early values of social media are bogged down, always ruling back to estrangement and entertainment, making social media just media. How can this situation be shifted? Creating a strong sense of community, having a broader vision of the social media paradigm and offering users new experiences.

Presenting: Moments, the new social network based on tokenized moments. By taking advantage of how the situation is overlooked by current newcomers plus our gen z perspective on the matter we aim to:

• Rebuild - User-centrism

No more features for the sake of features. Moments is human-centric, and, as such, the basal features it introduces are solely based on universal human interactions.

• Repurpose - Long-term vision

Allowing our users to build their digital identity parallel to their lives is essential for us. To ensure perdurance, we will knit and strengthen our network by broadening in time the different interactions users will get, our users’ moments. 

• Reshape - Encompassing digital within real

The interlinkage between humans has to be rethought and balanced in the so-complex digital-real mix.

All in all, Moments is the perfect space to grow and experience human interactions, build new communities, or strengthen existing ones by not focusing on entertainment but on revisiting the true value proposition of social media.