In the traditional media industry, some outlets differentiate themselves through quality, but social media hasn’t gotten there yet — there is no “ New York Times of social media.” The modern landscape for newspapers and books resulted from centuries of evolution, but “new media” hasn’t yet developed such strong brands and categories. However, although there aren’t any dominant players, there are social network companies seeking to stake out “high-quality” territory. The most common approaches are to specialize in either high-quality information, or to specialize in deep, emotional relationships. Of course, people do use existing comms and social software to manage quality information and close relationships — the beloved chat app Slack is widely used by couples and families, for example. But Slack is generally aimed at the enterprise market and doesn’t specialize in intimate relationships. Similarly, Facebook doesn’t specialize in purveying journalism, even though almost e
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