Some of the things I love about working on social media

Understanding, challenging, scalable, improving, fun, personal, unfinished.

Someone commented this (see image) on my recent video about moving to Paris to work on social media:

Here are some of the things I love about working on social media ever since I started Hunchat:

It helps me understand the world

I am a big believer that everything around us is inherently social. Everything is either people, interactions between people, or things made by people. To understand why people do what they do is to understand a very large portion of the world. That makes me like design. Especially UX.

It’s challenging

I also love a good challenge. From a design perspective, building a product that a 15-year-old can understand and use while listening to music, eating, and texting 3 friends on other apps is incredibly hard. Managing to do so while making that teenager’s life a little better and more connected with their friends is - to me - the pinnacle of digital creation.

It has an unparalleled scale

After achieving these design goals for a single person, chances are your creation has the potential to be used by billions of others. Social media solves core needs. The scale of billions with a B has been done in the past and will be done again. There are very few product categories like this one.

Social media makes relationships better

I have friends in different parts of the world. Keeping relationships as meaningful as the ones we have would be impossible without the online context we share. I have also made extremely positive relationships entirely online. It made my life undoubtedly better. How much you like the world is predicated on the people you hang out with and how you interact with them. In today’s world, this also refers to who you hang out with online and how.

It's Fun

I have a ton of fun not only building but also using the products I build. This is non-trivial. People who love what they do still burn out fairly often from working on shitty projects, especially in agency environments. No matter how much you like writing, if I make you write about a shitty topic for long enough, you will start to hate it. When I work on social media it energizes me. After I am done working, using whatever I have built with my friends also energizes me. It’s an amazing combo.

It is related to my personal story

I have learned a substantial portion of what I know through social media. I have also met a bunch of incredible people by using these apps and websites. None of it would be possible if some lunatics hadn’t decided to build the products we take for granted today. The future isn’t guaranteed. Someone has to build it. I want to pay it forward to those who’ve dedicated their lives to building better social experiences for the whole world by being part of that group of people.

There is a lot to be done

There is no shortage of people who think that “social is done”, “every idea has been built”, and “social media is bad”. I believe these people are wrong. We are only now scratching the surface of what digital social experiences will look like in the future. It is true that in some ways the current state of social media does not treat its users the way they should be treated. It is also true that this opens an opportunity to build something better.

This but in long tweet format:

https://twitter.com/jose_goncalves_/status/1678107605741326338

xoxo,