The latest happenings in the realms of the crypto business and social media giants are confirming the thesis that "the free market will always regulate itself". The IT&C people with some business acumen or analytical skills were aware that changes were around the corner in both noisy domains.
In my opinion using crypto does make sense for exchanging currencies in certain unusual situations, but neither for regular shopping nor for savings. In general, supporting a cult of tricky guys at the expense of creative and hardworking people is leading to a non-resilient society.
In contrast to the web3 projects absorbing numerous juniors, the big social media companies were trying to attract seasoned workforce and retaining top talents. The novelty of digital marketing technologies and user tracking produced a hype around the AI algorithms developed and maintained by social media giants, and it generated a big number of jobs.
The data collected by user tracking can be used for showing personalized content to the user, for market analysis, and various predictions. As most people won't pay a membership fee for using social media, these companies are making money with adverts.
Over the years Facebook reinvented itself as the main global facilitator of local businesses, but Twitter was trying to keep an acceptable balance between offering a great experience to their unique mesh of communities and showing targeted adverts.
While Facebook has been growing an algorithm focused on precisely targeted adverts and content of the user's liking, Twitter was building an algorithm meant to bring together people interested in similar ideas, activities, or projects. In this respect Twitter's algorithm was offering a unique social value - at least until the company's recent acquisition.
In 2016 LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft and repurposed as a hiring & carrier building site. I consider that for the time being their social media features are not really relevant.
In 2019 the free tier of Google+ was shut down. They concluded that they got too many challenges for the existing user base. In other words, running an average social media site needs paying subscribers. In order to get the economies of scale necessary for supporting a freemium package (free lunch) the minimum number of unique users could be around 200 million - that would explain E.M.s great interest in counting the bots.
