What comes after short-form video?

Over on her Substack, Kate Lindsay, of Embedded as as well as Slate’s ICYMI podcast, Kate makes a great observation: Short-form video platforms are starting to feel like there’s more AI than human content. Or, I’d add, at least the balance is tipping in a way that requires a lot of curation to not get inundated with AI slop. Nobody wants to get slopped. No slopping, please. So, here’s where she’s going with this: This is the longest we’ve ever gone without a new social media platform. By way of providing context, she quotes an older essay of her’s: After Facebook was founded in 2004, Twitter launched two years later as a status-only feed. In 2010, Instagram made photography a pillar of social media, while Vine and Snapchat made way for TikTok’s short-form video explosion in 2018.That’s when the innovation stopped. Instead of a new app emerging to improve on this pattern, the pre-existing apps, now worth billions of dollars and making up significant parts of the economy, all…