The Death of Social Media

Have you felt it yet?

These days, social media can only accomplish two things. It can bore me, or it can make me angry, and not the productive kind of anger. It doesn't even take that long, maybe a few minutes. Every platform is full of hotheads who believe they know everything, and the discourse has devolved even further than some of us thought possible. It often sounds like nobody is talking to each other, just at each other.

It's not like important things aren't happening...

Miraculously, the CDC has expanded access to Covid shots. The Trump administration has deployed the military to Chicago, and they're openly threatening to declare martial law. Days after a flotilla nearly reached Gaza, a peace deal hangs in the air. Of course, that's little comfort to the countless dead. The U.S. government remains shut down over a healthcare battle, caused in large part by the implosion of our public health infrastructure, a mass exodus of healthcare workers, and an "unfathomable" storm of long-term illness brought on by a disease that almost nobody wants to talk about anymore, but which disables millions of people a year.

Economists and financial analysts are sounding the alarms over a stock market bubble driven by artificial intelligence, estimated to be four times bigger than the subprime mortgage scandal that destroyed the economy in 2008. Anyone with the means will probably start shorting all this soon.

One minute, we hear that AI is going to destroy the world. The next minute, it can't even spell blueberry. What's going on? I call it Stupid Skynet, an artificial intelligence that will probably kill us all by accident before it learns to do it on purpose. Anyway, we were talking about social media.

That's the thing...

A few years ago, these conversations were happening on social media. Something has changed over the last year or two. The discourse has plummeted. Good articles are out there, but they're buried under piles and piles of content garbage. The feeds have filled with nonsense. I have a theory. So do you.

It's called enshittification.

Cory Doctorow gave us this brilliant term back when the consolidation of social media began. He warned us. Some of us listened. We knew nothing good would come from billionaires buying up all the newspapers and all the platforms. It took them a minute, but now they're pushing their agenda hard.

We saw little whispers of this when Google and Meta started censoring valid discussions about Long Covid. They even censored Ed Yong. YouTube demonitized accounts for even saying the word. Since 90 percent of the public didn't speak up, they took that as consent to start censoring all kinds of other content. They rolled out algorithms that suppressed "doomsaying" and "pessimism."

It's not just us.

The Substack exodus is gaining steam. Bluesky is showing cracks at the foundation. Even Pewdie is moving away from YouTube and Google, driving other content creators to start self-hosting. I'm not saying it's good or bad.

It just is.

In some ways, it's not really good. The whole point of social media was to bring us all together and pool great content into one place. Now, it looks very much like we're drifting apart again, into our own enclaves and silos.

Writers and content creators all over the web are desperately looking for a place where they can talk about real things and share real thoughts, without having to drench everything in hopium or outrage sauce to reach an audience. They're trying to navigate a relentless gauntlet of algorithms and gatekeepers who care about money far more than they do about elevating humanity. The irony: All of these platforms and their CEOs have declared their intent to save the internet.

Instead, they killed it.

They killed it for one reason above any other. They're all elitist. They're all out of touch. None of them actually know what people want or need, but they think they understand the world better than anyone. They all think they're going to save us from ourselves, when we really just need saving from them and their bots.

The internet is now a vast chasm of AI slop, clickbait, and outrage porn. The billionaires and their machines have been working overtime to separate us. I'm even seeing it on Bluesky. My feeds simply don't show me what I'm interested in anymore. They push what some CEO thinks I should care about, and it hides the experts who used to inform me about the world. Now, I have to search them out with purpose.

This feels like the point.

I'm fighting it.

To counter the algorithms, I've started curating my own newsfeeds. I've been using tools like Inoreader and Feedly. I'm bypassing social media and going to websites more than ever. Because I want to know what's going on with public health. I want to know what's going on with the climate crisis. I want to know what practical knowledge could help keep my family alive at least a little while longer.

I don't want to know what this politician said about that politician. I don't want to hear what some junk candidate said on MSNBC.

You can do this, too.

A growing number of people are moving beyond social media and finding healthier ways to be in the world. Maybe we won't delete the apps. We'll still log in, if only to share substantive content that five people will see.

I'm getting okay with this.

I'm starting to think this technology has peaked. People want to browse the web again. They want emails. They want books. They also desperately want to be alone with their thoughts and not sucked into a device. They want substance.

This is bad news for anyone who's been trying to make a living with content. It's going to mean a lot of uncertainty and upheaval.

I don't think there's any stopping it.

Social media had promise once, but the billionaires ruined it. They turned it into an avenue of obscene profit, propaganda, mass advertising, and mass surveillance. When they weren't doing that, they twisted them into vanity projects or money laundering operations. They actively suppressed the social aspects of these platforms. They pitted us against each other, silenced us, or just siloed us so that we were only talking to each other. Now, here we are, with something that feels dead.

I'm still going to use social media to check in on people and writers I care about, but it's going to play a smaller and smaller role in my life. Not because I'm on some wellness kick, but because the enshittification feels nearly complete, and it's time to start something else, a new way to interact with each other. The idiots can have X. They can have Substack. They can even have Bluesky. They love it there.

What about you?

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