You probably don't fully understand some of the systems that power your life. And that's ok. You're just human. You might not fully grasp how the subway you ride to work runs or what cleans your water or delivers you high-speed internet. We often get used to the systems we rely on, which can fuel complacency with their technicalities and inefficiencies.
You engage with social graphs all the time, probably more than you even realize (or would like to). That is if you're one of the nearly five billion people who use the internet. Chances are you don’t know much about how they work or why.
Most define social graphs as a representation of the relationships between people, groups, and organizations that make up the world's social networks, i.e., apps like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Linkedin, and Twitter. If you look at an image of a social graph (see below), you'll see a bunch of interconnected circles ("nodes") which represent certain habits and interests that social networks use to connect us with others. It's like a map, but social graphs connect people instead of cities or countries and are the backbone of the modern digital social media experience. You're part of many social graphs, whether you know it or not, and they directly influence your entire online experience.
Social networks rely heavily on graphs to serve us recommended content and connections based on who's in our network. The differences between social networks’ graphs are where things really get interesting. Let's check out some of the major apps’ graphs, starting with one of the first to reimagine our entire meaning of "friend" — Facebook.
If you've ever seen the movie The Social Network, you might have a slight idea of how Facebook came to be and why it changed the game via a pioneering algorithm (an evolution of the code Zuck wrote on his dorm room window). What made Facebook so unique at the time was that its graph focused on connecting people based on relationships, which were initially limited to people who went to the same university. To grow one's social graph on Facebook, you had to request friends, and "suggested friends" helped recommend who you might want in your network. From there, connections could get deeper and more relevant.
Twitter's social graph, on the other hand, is all about who you follow and less about who follows you. Unlike Facebook's predominant two-directional friend graph, Twitter's is built from one-way follows. What's unique (or at least at one point was) about Twitter's graph is that you can follow others without requiring mutual consent, which is why it leans more interest-based. Chances are you don't follow LeBron James because you think he will follow you back and hit you up for a one-on-one game (but good luck if so!) — you probably love basketball and think he's the G.O.A.T.
LinkedIn's social graph isn't based on if you love cats, LeBron, or accepted a friend request from your mom; it’s all about professional connections, work relationships, and career-oriented interactions. Most people log in to LinkedIn to connect with others in their field, often hoping to land a job. As a result, LinkedIn's graph emphasizes your skills and work history to serve you with networking and career opportunities.
And, the ever-addictive TikTok. Understanding TikTok's graph will help you wrap your head around the evolution of social graphs, which have moved away from relying solely on connections versus interests. TikTok's unique algorithm helped influence a massive shift in how social networks measure success, attract advertisers, and retain users — it mainly serves to feed you bite-sized videos based on your interests (the mystical "For You Page"). It cares less about who you follow as it does how long you watch a video. As Eugene Wei suggested in his stellar piece on social graphs and network design, TikTokers aren’t as interested in who follows them as they are the relevance of the content they see. If you've ever scrolled endlessly on TikTok to the point that you have forgotten the time, date, and that you start work in an hour, you would inevitably have a harder time remembering the accounts you saw as you would the content you consumed.
Now that your crash course in social graphs is complete, let's explore what people need help understanding about social graphs and how, while they might entertain us, it's often to the detriment of our online experience. This is true even if most of us don't realize it, something our friend Eugene calls "survivor bias." Like some of the everyday actions described earlier (transportation infrastructure, public goods, amenities, etc.), we often become complacent with the design patterns that "win" in society. Social graphs are no different. Most social apps rely on two things: our social graph and content feeds. But how much control or ownership do we really have over our graph and how it benefits us? Very little.
Are you curating your feed, OR is your feed curating you?
Just think of how long you've been on social media. Depending on your age, that could be a decent chunk of your life. Now think of all the connections you've made, the content you've created, and the communities you've helped grow. This is your hard-earned social capital, and it can be modified, censored, manipulated, or simply taken away before you know it. Reality check: this has already happened to you and continues to happen more than you can imagine. This is because you lack ownership or visibility into your graph, which is vulnerable to data leaks and hacks because it's all hosted on a centralized server, which is susceptible to a single point of failure. Cambridge Analytica, anyone?
Are centralized social graphs only inefficient and potentially dangerous for users or is it the same for app developers, too? If you've got a genius idea for building the world's next great social network, you're obviously going to try and figure out that secret ingredient that makes a new user stay. Well, you've got to have some existing information on them to serve any such meaningful experience, right? Back in the day you could leverage other networks' graph or API (your social data they they don't own in the first place btw). Over time, social media companies who did initially grant third-party applications access to their social data quickly realized they were offering their future competition a helping hand — a big “no-no” in most centralized corporate environments.
Without any real user consent or awareness, these increasingly powerful companies decided they would rather take complete ownership of users' social graphs, and the data developers could leverage to build their own potentially better applications, leading to a troublesome data and infrastructure monopoly. The billionaire tech CEOs who now hold the majority of the power over the internet, social graphs, and our data structured their applications to expand their bottom line through a restrictive user experience that locks people in and developers out.
If it seems like social graphs are all doom and gloom, know there's still hope for a better future: open-source, token-powered protocols, which flip the current business model of social graphs and social network design. In web3, traditional social networks' limitations and manipulative tendencies give way to opportunity and empowerment for users while offering developers new tools to build the social networks they want to see in the world.
In the future of decentralized social media, users don't need to be locked into centralized social graphs just because of the powers that be say so (even if it might require some serious unlearning). Open-source protocols and decentralized social graphs allow us to build social networks that work for the users and the platform of their choice, not the other way around. Decentralized social utilizes context-specific social graphs customized around our passions and interests, whether niche-specific news or location and community-centric content. For you, that could mean more relevant content, stronger connections, and more confidence in the security and purpose of your social graph. For developers, it means they can bootstrap their social applications quicker and build better business models that don't depend on user exploitation.
In the decentralized future we're building towards at CyberConnect, we empower users and developers to build lasting connections and experience content that makes sense for them. So instead of getting served cat videos (or any content and connections) because you texted about a cat or talked about one nearby your phone, you'd see it because of a personal choice, not one made by a shadowy centralized corporation. This level of customization and transparency empowers people to get the most out of their time online instead of trapping them in a network whose real value grows murkier and more manipulative by the day.
About CyberConnect
CyberConnect is web3’s earliest and biggest decentralized social network that enables developers to create social applications empowering users to own their digital identity, content, connections, and monetization channels. Messari, 1inch, BNB Chain, along with over 2,000 projects, and 900k creators and users are building long-lasting connections through apps built on CyberConnect.