Social media. A permanent, quantified status board.
It is a product you buy.
It exists to relieve Rank among peers, visibly, every day, The baby becomes a status object, Attraction arrives before the tools to handle it and Know what is happening. That is the whole reason it is here: nothing enters this map without a human problem behind it.
It could not exist without Smartphones and internet, Advertising industry, Cloud computing and data centres and AI models and inference. These are the quiet preconditions — remove any one and the solution stops working.
Solving that problem created new ones: Endless quantified comparison with everyone and Bullying, predators, and permanent records. Follow those and you find the next generation of products built on top of this one.
8 organisations in this map sell it, 7 of them publicly listed.
Its neighbourhood
Everything this entry connects to directly. Click any point to follow it.
The line back to a human being
2 hops from a person at a phase of life. The further a thing sits from the person, the more abstract it looks — and the more it tends to be mistaken for something that came from nowhere.
- SolutionSocial media
- FrictionRank among peers, visibly, every day
- Life phaseAdolescence
- Rooted inBelonging
- Rooted inStatus
Relieves
Created these new problems
Second-order frictions. This is where most of the modern economy actually lives.
Requires
Who sells it
| Organisation | Value | Type | Products |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meta Platforms | $1.7T | public · META | Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp |
| Tencent | $600B | public · 448 | WeChat, games, WeChat Pay |
| ByteDance (TikTok) | $300B | private | TikTok, Douyin, CapCut |
| AppLovin | $200B | public · APP | mobile ad engine |
| $35B | public · RDDT | communities, data licensing to AI labs | |
| Naver | $25B | public · 15120 | search, Webtoon, HyperCLOVA AI |
| $25B | public · PINS | visual discovery, wedding and nursery planning | |
| Snap | $15B | public · SNAP | Snapchat, Family Center |