NEW LENSES: Experimental Capture and Release

The trend of social medias copying each other has been going on for a long time ever since Instagram launched stories way back in 2016 copying Snapchat’s most prominent feature “stories”. The most recent attempt at this has been Twitter with “fleets”. However it did not last long and twitter shut it down in July of 2021 due to a lack of interaction with the new feature. This trend boils down to students copying each others hw but changing it up a little so the teacher doesn’t notice. I believe the trend ends up becoming a regurgitation of content, you end up seeing the same or similar content on different apps

Due to the popularity of TikTok you see more social media companies churning out features similar to TikTok video format of small digestible videos. Instagram released its reels back in August of 2020 to compete with TikTok slowly becoming an amalgamation of different social medias. Even Youtube came out with its own form with Youtube Shorts in 2021. What ends up happening however is you’ll see re-uploaded TikTok’s on both platforms, at that point you might as well just stick to TikTok in the first place. Even snapchat has a similar feature with Spotlight, and the problem is the same you get the same content or same audio tracks that you would see on TikTok. Usually competition is good for business as it promotes innovation but in this case we are seeing the same features over and over.

Even with newer features like Twitter’s Spaces, it is just a remix of an older app called House Party. And features like Instagram’s shop section seem off-putting on a social media site, like it doesn’t belong. Despite the competition between these companies they still end up copying each other until a new social media pops up and they copy them

Additionally I believe it’s not great for creators either. It forces creators to get on each platform. They are either forced to create fresh new content, re-upload old content, or potentially lose out on a new following.