course on the inside workings of social media sites

September 24, 2022 11:47 AM

All the courses I see about social media focus on how to use social media to market something. I'm curious about how the sites themselves are designed and architected, and how those decisions interact with how their users use the sites. Where is my book or online course?

So, for example, I don't want MIT's "Social Media Strategy: Creating Engagement, Insight, and Action: Gain an understanding of the science behind social media to optimize your social media strategy."

I'd like something like "Structure and features of major and obscure social media sites: how software and marketing decisions have influenced the way people and businesses interact". Where is this information?

I already know about the idea of gamification and generally how social media is designed to be addictive. That aspect is something I could certainly Google, but I'm interested in other aspects too, like moderation strategies, dispute handling, prompting, new user acquisition, etc.

The focus would be maybe an intersection of marketing, computer architecture, usability design, graphic design psychology, social psychology -- any of these.

posted by amtho to Grab Bag (2 answers total)

The Garbage Day and Read Max newsletters get into a lot of this from a journalistic perspective, and have lots of links to other people writing about this, including some academics.
posted by sagc at 2:59 PM on September 24, 2022

you can find both pop and academic books in individual platforms, but i havent seen an online course about all of them.

Andrea Lopez on twitter also does a great job of covering the various platforms and their moderation whims.
posted by wowenthusiast at 7:49 PM on September 24, 2022