The Death of the Newsfeed (2018)
ben-evans.com
ben-evans.com
* Doesn't need your social graph (Facebook) or third-party discovery (Snapchat) to get you engaged and keep you enganged.
* Your immediate audience are strangers doing the same thing as you are when you open the app, just add appropriate tags to your post and you're off to connecting with new people
Yes! 2.5 years later it seems obvious, since TikTok solves this problem by avoiding a newsfeed focus and just showing people whatever makes them happy and keeps them engaged, no matter the source.
The business motivation aligns much more closely with the user's motivation - as such, I trust TikTok to do content curation for me, whereas I hated whenever Facebook did the content curation and I felt just ok that Twitter let me do the content curation myself.
It's a complete paradigm shift that is not fully imagined in the article, nor in HN's 2018 comments.