Anti-Social Media

[prompt: create a viral hero image that shows what I mean. Or, don’t]

Currently I am on a half diet of social media as I am still locked out of X and by now I really don’t mind any more. Social media is dead and has been weaponised into a distraction, propaganda and rage discourse machine. I wished it weren’t that way, but we truly and thoroughly allowed the “social” web to become a dumpster fire that fuels hate, distrust and confusion. The goal is not shared experiences or creativity, the goal is to keep people glued to the screens and pissed off enough so they comment on other people being wrong on the internets using pre-made memes, AI slop and sound bites.

Mostly mainstream social media?

I am talking about the mainstream platforms here, Meta’s offerings (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) and X, but this downward spiral is also taking over BlueSky, LinkedIn and yes, even Mastodon. The biggest annoyance I see is that people don’t use the social platform to publish their thoughts, ideas and creativity, but instead create a persona of themselves that follows every silly rule the platform comes up with. The most grating part of this is posting about their work without including the link to it, but to add it in the first comment. This has been mandated by platforms to boost engagement over views, which is also the new metric that defines possible monetisation.

We’re not interacting socially, we hold the doors to lock people in

In other words, the platforms turned people into content creators and interaction baiters. There is nothing social about it, and you hardly see people even following a link let alone comment without redirecting to their work or disagreeing whilst spouting ready-made soundbites. The overall endgame seems to be for everybody to be an influencer. Guess what, if everybody is an influencer, nobody is…

And that’s not even the bots. Or, maybe they are, after all the human on social media is an endangered species. So, why bother at all?

Web2.0 was the start of the decline

I’ve been around when social media became a thing, when “web 2.0” was the new cool. I worked on things like Delicious, Flickr and posted tons on Twitter despite being wary of it from the get-go. I blogged long before and it felt weird to be limited to 140 characters. But it was cool that you could text Twitter (that died quickly). I loved that people got a simple way to publish on the web using Geocities, Neopets and the likes. I liked when people learned a bit of HTML by tweaking their Myspace profiles.

Early social media had an emotional core

I really enjoyed the first social networks that gathered people around something they can feel something about. With Flickr, it was photos, with LastFM, it was music. We used Upcoming to find events to meet people and we used b3ta.com and worth1000 to create horrible but funny and unique photoshop experiences. Specialist sites like Ravelry gathered millions of knitters and Etsy was a place for people to show and sell their craft (and boyfriends to suffer).

What it already had was lock-in

One thing that irked me about these things already back then though was that they locked people in. This, of course, makes it easier to grow and quality control a community, but it als means that if anything happens to the platform – like a sale to a larger corporation – all of it can be gone in a snap.

Who needs an emotional core when you can have UGC?

The real beginning of the end was when we stopped even caring about a central idea, or emotional heart, of the products. All-purpose platforms had nothing people can rally around, all they did was offer users to post whatever they wanted. It wasn’t about being a platform specialising in hosting a certain kind of content, companies didn’t even bother with a content plan, it was all about the UGC or “user generated content”. And constant and explosive growth.

When I worked on Yahoo Answers, the idea was to give human answers to problems people had, rather than algorithmic and SEO poisoned web results. Later on Quora and the unfortunately named Expertsexchange did similar things. This was good and we had wonderful stories where people found a special screw to fix their fridge there that saved them a $5,000 repair and similar random successes. Then the company stepped in and demanded much more growth and traffic, so we turned off the quality settings and allowed any old tosh to be asked and answered. The rest is history and a quick death of the platform. This is what happens to all of them now, it is a race to the bottom. Engagement trumps quality, baiting trumps thought.

Mainstream media never reports positively about social media

One thing I find fascinating is that main stream media never reports favourably about social media. Instead all the news reports are about battling addiction, misinformation and how social media hard-core addiction machines like TikTok rot the brains of our children. This could of course be seen as defending their turf, but I see it as a wake up call. Social media has become antisocial.

Specialist groups are still kind of a thing…

Thing is that within systems that are going down there are glimmers of hope. I gave up on the main thread in Facebook, but I do still have a lot of fun in specialist groups. In my case, 8 bit computing, BASIC programming, lots of dog stuff, vintage lego sets, Star Trek and filmmaking. It is a joy to see how all these groups take a special stand against AI generated content and remind people to just post because of the joy of it.

Yes, there’s always the fediverse…

Of course, there is always the indie web and fediverse movement to find joy in. It is frustrating to see though that everything federated and open seems harder to grasp for people and whilst I have tons of fun with people on Mastodon, it feels hard to share that joy to the mainstream. Maybe on purpose, but I think it is more about trying too hard to be open and independent which puts the onus on the end user to take part in it.

When you ask yourself “why am I doing this”, maybe stop doing it

I just finished a podcast and the guest, a CMO of a company explained that almost daily he finds himself thinking “why am I doing this?”. Why do we write blog post only for agents? Why do we comment and share things that are obviously created by AI? He also talked about the lack of joy and fulfilment he feels creating content that is 95% by Claude and optimised to go viral and 5% himself. We frustrate ourselves with efficiency maxing. Maybe social media should be an effort. Maybe we will get more out of it if we allow ourselves to be ourselves. Currently social media feels like being in a cover band and we’re so good in repeating the work and thoughts of others that nobody wants to hear or can even find what we want to say.