The main strategy for creating a social media firm is to expand as big as possible as quickly as possible. If you succeed, one of two things will happen: you will either grow to the point where you can start making massive sums of income from advertising, or you will sell to another company. In either case, as the founder, you’ll have amassed a sizable fortune and, more importantly, some long-term cultural cache. Isn’t that a good result?
Of course, achieving that degree of success is impossible, and only a small number of entrepreneurs achieve it. That’s why there are tens of thousands of other social media companies you’ve never heard of that never garnered enough traction to flourish.
Given how tough it is to build a successful social media firm, you’d think any founder who is offered millions of dollars to buy or promote on his social network would jump at the chance. Isn’t that the goal, after all?
Regrettably, this is also why social media has become so problematic. The ramifications of social media businesses’ monetization decisions generate significant challenges because they are so intent on monetizing what they’ve developed. We don’t have to go far for examples of this.
So, how do we address the social media issues? One of the founders, Drew Curtis, the founder of Fark.com, believes he has a solution. And we should probably pay attention to him because he founded a major social media network that has been active for over two decades.
A Difference in Approach:
Managing massive amounts of content is one of the most difficult aspects of developing a social media network. Manually moderating all of the content to ensure that it A) adheres to the site’s standards, and B) remains engaging to users to keep them coming back becomes increasingly difficult.
To help solve this challenge, social media businesses have resorted to algorithms, those ostensibly all-knowing and all-powerful pieces of code that anticipate what sorts of content users will enjoy and keep serving them more of it. The TikTok algorithm, which has gotten so good at the content prediction that the platform relies almost entirely on it to lure users, is the best example of it these days.
Drew Curtis, on the other hand, chose to construct and scale Fark in an entirely different way because he believes the algorithms are harmful.
Hard to believe, isn’t it? In the year 2021, there will be a social media website that does not aim to deceive users with algorithms that generate a drug-like addiction.
Rather than relying on algorithms, Drew employs a team of moderators who spend their days reviewing and managing content. Sure, it’s not easy, but they’ve been doing it effectively for well over two decades, and the result is a loyal community that keeps coming back day after day, despite all the distractions of other social media platforms, and that’s what’s made Fark.com one of the most popular websites on the Internet for well over two decades.