Platform mania

The hype in the digital world for a while has been all about platforms. There are the typical social media platforms that link friends with each other. There are marketplace platforms, directly linking buyer and seller for goods (eBay, Carousell) and services (Fiverr, Uber, Deliveroo).

But something really intriguing: I’ve seen a lot of attempts at starting up community platforms. These are platforms intended for collaboration between creatives, researchers, people with interest groups. There are big-name forums like Reddit, but those are mainly for anonymised discussion, and I’ve yet to see any big name for these community platforms.

I love the idea of them and I really enjoy opportunities that get people together. But there are so many of them, and all for the purpose of connecting people and promoting collaboration between individuals, that it makes me wonder if these platforms work.

Googling ‘artist collaboration platform‘ yields a bunch of names: ARTCONNECT, Creative Tracks, ProCollabs, Magma Studio, HitRecord, JamKazam, etc. etc. etc.. Have you heard of any of them before?

To be fair, I’m probably not quite these platforms’ target audience. I’m not actively looking for collaborators, and I don’t predominantly make art. But the problem with this abundance of platforms is that people would then have no idea which platform to go to. How do I pick one average platform over the other? Plus, the whole idea of platforms is that everyone should be on it. There are plenty of Facebook groups that probably have a much wider following, and off the top of my head subtle asian traits (and its other groups, including the very collaborative Asian Creative Network) gained a lot more traction a lot quicker. In part that’s because everyone’s already on Facebook.

What’s the solution? Stop trying to make the next ‘better’ independent community platform? Or keep trying, and assume that all the other platforms just haven’t worked it out yet? I don’t really know. It’s very interesting to me that so many of these platforms exist – it signals that there’s a real gap that startups are noticing and trying to fill. This desire for social connection and collaboration. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s anything online that will be able to truly fill it.