My take on this kind of view: it wasn't built on authenticity or social connection. That was what the enthusiasts were claiming it would be. It was a reference to something known, very superficial in nature, only meant to to increase the appeal.
The same problems people
cite wrt social media are the same issues that have been cited for decades regarding living in a dense urban area vs a less populated one, but nevertheless people still overwhelmingly live in urban areas.
>> people still overwhelmingly live in urban areas
If you restrict the classification to urban vs. rural, then yes, people overwhelmingly live in urban areas, something like 80% to 20% according to the census.
If you add in suburban, it changes. There's no authoritative definition of the term, but there was a Pew Research Center poll that asked people to describe the community they live in and the response was 25% urban, 43% suburban, and 30% rural. (And I guess 2% something else?)
unrelated, but i logged in the other day to fb after months away (after the school and charlie kirk shooting b/c i was curious). huge mistake, every other feed item was something political either from a friend or some random page. the experience was decidedly worse than the last time i logged in. i had not been engaging in months and i could instantly feel the pull of wanting to respond or react to something inflammatory. promptly deleted the app again.
SM in its current form is truly a cancer on society. i can't say IG is that much better, but at least i can sort of curate what i want to see and i still see photos from friends and such and just random ads. i know it's just pointless scrolling for a few mins. FB truly is one of those pull you into the echo chamber to tell and show you how to think and it only took a few minutes. i don't even know what years of that does to you.
anecdotally, most people my age already left for other pastures. the ones left there are largely those who joined up to connect back when FB was actually useful and are now around for the ragebait.
Fall, or Dodge in hell, by Neil Stephenson has a take on this.
The internet is flooded with slop and rage-bait on purpose. So filled as to be unusable, like a firehose of shit. So in there comes a role if "editor" whose job it is (you pay them) to only give you, well not even what's "true", rather what reflects your world view. So which editor you have becomes a factor in how you live, where your educated, your status.
It will be interesting to see if something as explicit as editors arise.
I will say this, if you stay off Facebook and some of the other big social sites for a while, it is like a madhouse when you glance back
Without advertising you would have to pay for it. But that would not sufficiently deter bad actors. What you need is culture to repel and moderation to exclude them.
When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world. Now in 2025, the leader of the biggest platforms is talking about making people less lonely by connecting them to AI chatbots instead of making people find one another. That just feels like a huge lost potential.
Quality was simply better, because reputation mattered. People used to gather in dedicated forums around a common hobby. People would eventually recognise each other's user names and you would built a reputation in the community.
Accounts like "Endwokeness" would have never worked in the old internet era. First of all, low effort political opening post with one sentence and a link would simply be removed. Secondly, people will make fun of him. Doesn't he have job? Why he is so obsessed with gays and trans people? Stuff like that will haunt him forever.
Could it be that the connection between like-minded people is the problem?
Until this century, people lived in a social world constrained by geography: your family, neighbors, and friends were the people physically present around you, an accident of geography rather than one of interest. The people around you might well not have shared many of your ideas, and that friction kept you in check just as you inhibited them to some extent. Nobody you knew went out in public dressed like a dog or advocated for the disenfranchisement of people who eat peanut butter because you and his other friends would intervene, telling him that those are crazy views.
Now, with the internet, your crazy friend can shun your inhibiting company, lock himself away in his house, and spend all his time on fora and discord and corners of social media where people share his views. His like-minded friends tell him that dressing as a dog is fulfilling his Dog-given identity, and that the peanut-butter eaters are committing genocide against his own like-minded people. Without the inhibition of friends drawn from the accident of geography, the man who surrounds himself with virtual e-friends in a social media echo chamber thinks that the crazy ideas he hears online are normal.
Maybe the inhibition we get from socializing with people who don't share our interests, that friction of dealing with people in real life, keeps us from sliding into mental illnesses and political extremism that spring up when we get nothing but validation from people who share our interests.
Yes that's true. Everyone gets to interact with people that are closer to their ideals but it makes society less homogeneous and disconnected locally because there is no geographical grouping.
At the same time people are more mobile than ever because of technological, opportunity and work reasons as well. So, there is a lack of real grounding. Why bother being friends with your neighbors or local people when you can just travel for not very long and visit people you prefer?
It leads to tensions because people live close together but have a very different way of life and sometimes radically different values, even in close quater communities. They end up hating each other secretly because without communication you cannot even begin to empathise.
The social media groups reflect that; they are an echo chamber to cry about people and behaviors you don't like and reinforce your own opinions, behaviors and their superior validity.
There is also the part where large government of the providence state are to be blamed for favoring rampant individualism. Instead of having to deal with friends and family you deal with soulless corporation and obtuse bureaucracy to get your needs met.
When 50 years ago you could drop by to see your doctor, now you call a number, a robot answers and gives you an appointment in one month. It's not just social media that is to blame it's just technology in general that has allowed and basically created a massive bureaucracy for everything, pretending to focus on making things efficient when it basically only consumes value and is just a means of control/surveillance.
An AI chatbot is just the next stage on "like-minded people" continuum. It's a machine that bends over backwards to match what the user wants from it. (Maybe unhealthy but it's just the next step after interacting with anon posters over a shared niche interest)
Social media started as a way to keep in touch with people you know. Then it became a way to scroll through people you don't know. Now it's becoming a way to scroll through people who don't even exist. "Social media" is dying and needs to be reinvented in a bot-proof, dopamine-safe way.
I believe it takes maturity and wisdom to unhook from social media - facebook, youtube, linkedin, instagram etc. Especially reactive use, not the one which comes from internal pause / response.
I tried to unhook pretty much for the past 15 years as I sensed that it basically doesn't serve me. If I would summarize the one primary cause for my inability to do it is the following - the belief that consuming content online is better for my own being than learning to manage my monkey mind.
I mean any content - from scrolling dumb instagram and facebook feeds to factory making process videos on youtube and streamers playing online games, political debates etc.
The problem is not consuming content on social media, but doing it reactively, excessively.
What helps with unhooking is basically wisdom and experience because how to do it when pretty much everybody is doing it?
Realizing that entire social media world is just incredibly fucking corrupt. Like omg corrupt. It's the epitome of corruption, starting with CEOs themselves.
Last week I've had situation where the person I knew who has professional instagram profile with +10k and runs business there just went fucking nuts. Instead of focusing on working on herself she decided to double down on her narcisism and went mental. Episode, however this is where it leads.
I am just happy that I can see it better and better and step into the right direction - away from social media.
PS. I removed X account few months ago, oh my, what a relief!
I notice that Mastodon is only mentioned in the article in terms of protocols, but to me the killer feature there is the absolute lack of an algorithm.
Nothing is ever pushed on me by the platform, so the whole experience doesn't become combative. That does mean though that each user has to do some work finding others they like, and that can take some time. But that also weeds out those that just want to be spoonfed content, which is a plus.
The last three years on there have been some of the most wholesome social media interactions I have had in the last 25 years.
It's interesting to see Tumblr mentioned as a dead/zombified platform, while I understand it's found a perfectly fine niche for itself and it's living a great life in that sense.
It makes it overall sound like the author's metric of liveliness is the same if disguised metric of being big, which ultimately drove the other huge players to the state they're talking about.
Tangentially related, I've read recently (Twitter? article?) someone longing for having separate devices again: one for music, one for social networks, one for photography, one for email, etc.
Because unifying everything down to a single one dumbed us down and gave unwarranted control to fewer and fewer people on what we may listen to, what we may write, what we may photograph, what we may share. And how and where and why we do it.
(notwithstanding that this would allow to significantly enrich the affordance of each device/appliance, relative to its use, rather than just having everything only tactile on a screen made of glass and 2 buttons).
The problem is that people are addicted to tension, by raising tension it fills a need, but the release of that tension is also addictive. Social media is just uppers and downers churned over and over. In one moment you can see some guy assassinated and then a box full of puppies rolling around and being cute. But that tension is only present at the extremes.
The point where social media failed was when the government agreed, at the behest of the companies, that platforms aren't liable for what is published there. So it has allowed a flood of inflammatory accusations that make it hard to find the individual responsible, where it would be easier to just take the platform to court like you would a paper, or a TV channel.
> These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care. ...
I feel like the core problem is that the platform just die out in time on their own. It was Facebook's issue for years and years now, and such a fate will come to others, too - if only because people who used these platforms eventually statistically grow up and realize they have better stuff to do, and influx of new generations is limited.
Then the generation and promotion of trash is just a symptom in order to hide the fester underneath for as long as possible.
What it doesn't mean is that social media will necessarily die in time; I expect that new platforms and methods will take over, as Discord and federated blogs mentioned in the post do. The reason being that the youngest generations still have attention to spare and social needs to be met. Further, as my generation is the last one to experience the wonders of digital disconnect in their childhood, the ones to come are already born into world where certain phenomenons outlined here are normalized.
The problem is that ultimately it connects people around ideas because it isn’t taking place in the world, and everyone’s ideas are tired strange remixes of things we happened to grow up around
"exhaustion" is not the first word that comes to mind when I think about social media.
At first I was not sure if the article really means exhaustion of the user, but then it says things like
"people scroll not because they enjoy it, but because they don’t know how to stop".
Sure, social media is a big waste of time, like gambling is a waste of money and drugs are a waste of health (and money), but do any of these feel "exhausting" to to user?
"Regret" comes to mind, maybe "shame". I think if platforms were exhausting to a significant number of people they were not that successful.
There is a neurotic personality type that doomscrolls out of a compulsion. A lot of it is hyper-vigilance, constantly scanning for threats. Where will the next shoe drop? We feel threatened, then some feel like they need to take some kind of drastic action.
Of course what you’re reading is other neurotic folks sharing their anxieties. And algorithmic feed gives you their content. So it becomes self-reinforcing.
Exhaustion is absolutely the first word that comes to mind for me. Even when I'm not using it myself, I'm exhausted of all the oxygen it takes up in the room
HN is the same echo chamber though. This same topic posted here every single week from random blogs to The Guardian, everyone posts their anecdotes, group hug, taps on the back and back to nothing. Rinse and repeat next week. You could just copy paste the top comments from the previous posts if you want some free karma.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 79.1 ms ] threadIt never felt authentic to me. It always felt like a computer algorithm to create unnatural echo chambers at the full blast of a firehose.
If you restrict the classification to urban vs. rural, then yes, people overwhelmingly live in urban areas, something like 80% to 20% according to the census.
If you add in suburban, it changes. There's no authoritative definition of the term, but there was a Pew Research Center poll that asked people to describe the community they live in and the response was 25% urban, 43% suburban, and 30% rural. (And I guess 2% something else?)
SM in its current form is truly a cancer on society. i can't say IG is that much better, but at least i can sort of curate what i want to see and i still see photos from friends and such and just random ads. i know it's just pointless scrolling for a few mins. FB truly is one of those pull you into the echo chamber to tell and show you how to think and it only took a few minutes. i don't even know what years of that does to you.
anecdotally, most people my age already left for other pastures. the ones left there are largely those who joined up to connect back when FB was actually useful and are now around for the ragebait.
The internet is flooded with slop and rage-bait on purpose. So filled as to be unusable, like a firehose of shit. So in there comes a role if "editor" whose job it is (you pay them) to only give you, well not even what's "true", rather what reflects your world view. So which editor you have becomes a factor in how you live, where your educated, your status.
It will be interesting to see if something as explicit as editors arise.
I will say this, if you stay off Facebook and some of the other big social sites for a while, it is like a madhouse when you glance back
bet a social media without likes, organized in circles, would be way less toxic.
Accounts like "Endwokeness" would have never worked in the old internet era. First of all, low effort political opening post with one sentence and a link would simply be removed. Secondly, people will make fun of him. Doesn't he have job? Why he is so obsessed with gays and trans people? Stuff like that will haunt him forever.
Traditional forums still exist.
Until this century, people lived in a social world constrained by geography: your family, neighbors, and friends were the people physically present around you, an accident of geography rather than one of interest. The people around you might well not have shared many of your ideas, and that friction kept you in check just as you inhibited them to some extent. Nobody you knew went out in public dressed like a dog or advocated for the disenfranchisement of people who eat peanut butter because you and his other friends would intervene, telling him that those are crazy views.
Now, with the internet, your crazy friend can shun your inhibiting company, lock himself away in his house, and spend all his time on fora and discord and corners of social media where people share his views. His like-minded friends tell him that dressing as a dog is fulfilling his Dog-given identity, and that the peanut-butter eaters are committing genocide against his own like-minded people. Without the inhibition of friends drawn from the accident of geography, the man who surrounds himself with virtual e-friends in a social media echo chamber thinks that the crazy ideas he hears online are normal.
Maybe the inhibition we get from socializing with people who don't share our interests, that friction of dealing with people in real life, keeps us from sliding into mental illnesses and political extremism that spring up when we get nothing but validation from people who share our interests.
At the same time people are more mobile than ever because of technological, opportunity and work reasons as well. So, there is a lack of real grounding. Why bother being friends with your neighbors or local people when you can just travel for not very long and visit people you prefer?
It leads to tensions because people live close together but have a very different way of life and sometimes radically different values, even in close quater communities. They end up hating each other secretly because without communication you cannot even begin to empathise.
The social media groups reflect that; they are an echo chamber to cry about people and behaviors you don't like and reinforce your own opinions, behaviors and their superior validity.
There is also the part where large government of the providence state are to be blamed for favoring rampant individualism. Instead of having to deal with friends and family you deal with soulless corporation and obtuse bureaucracy to get your needs met.
When 50 years ago you could drop by to see your doctor, now you call a number, a robot answers and gives you an appointment in one month. It's not just social media that is to blame it's just technology in general that has allowed and basically created a massive bureaucracy for everything, pretending to focus on making things efficient when it basically only consumes value and is just a means of control/surveillance.
I tried to unhook pretty much for the past 15 years as I sensed that it basically doesn't serve me. If I would summarize the one primary cause for my inability to do it is the following - the belief that consuming content online is better for my own being than learning to manage my monkey mind.
I mean any content - from scrolling dumb instagram and facebook feeds to factory making process videos on youtube and streamers playing online games, political debates etc.
The problem is not consuming content on social media, but doing it reactively, excessively.
What helps with unhooking is basically wisdom and experience because how to do it when pretty much everybody is doing it?
Realizing that entire social media world is just incredibly fucking corrupt. Like omg corrupt. It's the epitome of corruption, starting with CEOs themselves.
Last week I've had situation where the person I knew who has professional instagram profile with +10k and runs business there just went fucking nuts. Instead of focusing on working on herself she decided to double down on her narcisism and went mental. Episode, however this is where it leads.
I am just happy that I can see it better and better and step into the right direction - away from social media.
PS. I removed X account few months ago, oh my, what a relief!
Nothing is ever pushed on me by the platform, so the whole experience doesn't become combative. That does mean though that each user has to do some work finding others they like, and that can take some time. But that also weeds out those that just want to be spoonfed content, which is a plus.
The last three years on there have been some of the most wholesome social media interactions I have had in the last 25 years.
1. No algorithm beyond most-recent-first
2. Stick to a maximum of ~250 following
3. Pay for the service instead of ad-supported
I can easily do all of those on Mastodon.
It makes it overall sound like the author's metric of liveliness is the same if disguised metric of being big, which ultimately drove the other huge players to the state they're talking about.
Because unifying everything down to a single one dumbed us down and gave unwarranted control to fewer and fewer people on what we may listen to, what we may write, what we may photograph, what we may share. And how and where and why we do it.
(notwithstanding that this would allow to significantly enrich the affordance of each device/appliance, relative to its use, rather than just having everything only tactile on a screen made of glass and 2 buttons).
The point where social media failed was when the government agreed, at the behest of the companies, that platforms aren't liable for what is published there. So it has allowed a flood of inflammatory accusations that make it hard to find the individual responsible, where it would be easier to just take the platform to court like you would a paper, or a TV channel.
I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts, what would a social media built for nuanced, meaningful interaction look like? Could there be such a thing?
I feel like the core problem is that the platform just die out in time on their own. It was Facebook's issue for years and years now, and such a fate will come to others, too - if only because people who used these platforms eventually statistically grow up and realize they have better stuff to do, and influx of new generations is limited.
Then the generation and promotion of trash is just a symptom in order to hide the fester underneath for as long as possible.
What it doesn't mean is that social media will necessarily die in time; I expect that new platforms and methods will take over, as Discord and federated blogs mentioned in the post do. The reason being that the youngest generations still have attention to spare and social needs to be met. Further, as my generation is the last one to experience the wonders of digital disconnect in their childhood, the ones to come are already born into world where certain phenomenons outlined here are normalized.
At first I was not sure if the article really means exhaustion of the user, but then it says things like
"people scroll not because they enjoy it, but because they don’t know how to stop".
Sure, social media is a big waste of time, like gambling is a waste of money and drugs are a waste of health (and money), but do any of these feel "exhausting" to to user?
"Regret" comes to mind, maybe "shame". I think if platforms were exhausting to a significant number of people they were not that successful.
Of course what you’re reading is other neurotic folks sharing their anxieties. And algorithmic feed gives you their content. So it becomes self-reinforcing.