Social Media Is Over

This morning, I opened Facebook in the web browser on my phone for the first time in a few days. I use my browser instead of the app so that I will have one less app to open compulsively when I am bored. I scrolled through 28 posts without reaching a post written by a Friend or a Group that I follow. There were several posts from Attractive Log Cabins, Viral90, and Today Comiz, along with fan pages for Mel Gibson’s remake of Apocalypse and “Little League.” I closed Facebook.

Instagram was a skitch better. There was one post from someone I know personally. The rest were ads and influencer-type posts that I actually follow (weratedogs and overheardnewyork, for example). A couple of my actual friends posted to their stories. With IG, I can at least re-jigger the feed by opting for Followers in the upper left hand corner. When I did that, the first account I know personally (underdogca) was the 8th post. The next post I knew (zoejuniper_company) was 21st in line.

I left Twitter when Elon Musk bought it and haven’t missed it for a second.

I tried Mastodon. Not enough people I knew were on it.

Threads is terrible. Remember Tumbler? It was a microblogging website that might still exist but I haven’t visited in at least 10 years. Threads is an annoying version of Tumbler. It’s all personal narratives that are broken into multiple posts that have no payoff whatsoever. It was the only place I saw people who were especially angry that Joe Biden was being encouraged to drop out of the race, which made me think everyone on Threads is a Russian disinformation operative.

Substack has created a social media feed called Notes where you can follow writers on the site, if they choose to post there, or you will just be fed an almost random line-up of posts. I think so few people use it, you can see all the posts from everyone and still be wrapped up in 5 minutes. This is a good thing for the user’s attention span, by the way. The lack of algorithm is one of its best functions.

There are a whole bunch of social media sites that run the gamut from libertarian/wing to full-on Nazi. Truth Social, Donald Trump’s social media company, is probably one of the tamer ones. Normal humans do not join these.

Bluesky is like Mastodon with a few more interesting people on it. New posts load at the top so it can be frustrating. When you want to see new posts, you go back to the top, read them, and then have to scroll back through everything you read to find new stuff. This is good too. The “bottomless feed” is one reason we get addicted to social media. When there’s a natural stopping point, we hop off the train, which Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg hate.

Tik Tok is the obvious heavy hitter I haven’t mentioned. I have used it occasionally and dislike so much of the content and style, I don’t last long. It’s not “for me.” It’s for younger people, or for people who prefer to get their information and entertainment via video. Someday, Tik Tok will follow FB, IG, and Twitter into declining relevance, I think.

There are probably others I haven’t heard of, which only proves my point that while certain memes dominate the cultural imagination, social media’s fracturing will lead to its demise. If I can’t find you on our shared platform, I will stop using the platform. I’ve started texting old friends instead. This newsletter is my way of communicating with people and I love when people write back. Few people do, however. On my old blog, I regularly had several comments to every post. Now people email me directly rather than post publicly. We’ve either been trained to consume rather than engage or we know longer want to share our personal thoughts on the internet. Probably both.

You can probably surmise that I think the demise of social media is a good thing. I hope the fever has broken, and we can go back to interacting with each other, either in person, or by communicating directly to one another via text, email, letter, videos, snaps, whatever.

Most of you have already heard me bang this drum so I’ll stop now and share a couple of kid/pet photos.