“I've Never Been More Optimistic” (Flipboard’s Mike McCue On the Open Social Web)

About this episode

Mike McCue discusses the evolution of the open web and the future of social media with host Rabble.

Mike McCue has seen a lot of changes over the years to the open web. He was an executive at Netscape, which helped liberate the web from AOL's walled garden; he served on the board of Twitter but wasn’t able to prevent it from abandoning its open API ecosystem; and now, as the CEO of Flipboard, he's building towards a more open future. “I've never been more optimistic than I am now about how the internet is going to develop and how the social media world and ecosystem is going to develop into a much more open, connected experience for people, independent of app, independent of platform,” McCue says. But there are still big problems to fix, and today on Revolution.Social, Mike and Rabble talk about most of them, including the devaluation of follower counts, how rage bait economics poison platform incentives, and how AI-generated content lacks soul. As a board member at Patreon, McCue says he’s seeing a renewed demand for authentic human craft & niche communities; at this perilous and promising moment, which vision of the future will win? Chapters: 0:00 Introduction 5:14 From Netscape to the Fediverse 8:49 Elon, Zuckerberg, and the push toward alternatives 14:22 The shutdown of…

People in this episode

Host: Rabble a.k.a. Evan Henshaw-Plath

Guest: Mike McCue

Topics covered

• open web
• social media
• AI-generated content
• niche communities
• platform incentives
• authentic human craft

Keywords

• open social web
• Twitter API
• follower counts
• rage bait economics
• AI content
• niche communities
• internet development

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Netscape, Twitter, Flipboard, Patreon, Bluesky, Mastodon

Books & works: Revolution.Social

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