Is this the beginning of the end for social media? Users are seemingly shifting to private spaces more and more and deciding to shun online public spaces.
Likes, shares and comments are steadily declining over many major public social media platforms, and the reasons are multifaceted.
More and more people are feeling drained by social media rather than engaged by it. The algorithms that drive content engagement are literally tiring everyone out. People are waking up to the fact that participating in social media is damaging their lives, and that dropping it lifts a giant burden off their shoulders.
Social media has grown and grown from the inception of such early websites as Myspace and link aggregators such as Digg, who then subsequently fell out of favour for their replacements such as Facebook and Reddit.
But now sites like Facebook and Reddit are overflowing with bots and AI slop, destroying the quality of the platforms that allow them.
The rise of social media all but killed off the internet’s bulletin forums as a replacement, but now people are again seeking more close-knit digital communities rather than a public space to share and follow others.
Private spaces like Telegram and Discord have experienced record growth in recent years. Real connections are in direct messages rather than feeds. The open internet is becoming more and more hostile for users. The public square is becoming a place that bots spam other bots, rather than a place that allows people to engage with each other.
In China, social media giants such as Weibo are losing engagement too, and it only has itself to blame.
The platform started to focus on “sales”, marketing products to people, rather than connecting people. This constant sale push eventually pushes people away, since no one wants to be constantly advertised to; they want respect and recognition from their peers, but increasingly that’s becoming harder on large social media sites. People’s feeds are dominated by paid actors who are trying to push a product to sell on people, and that’s just not an enjoyable space to stay for very long.
Ironically, in the drive to monetize their platforms, social media companies have instead driven away their user base, often forgetting that their core value is derived from that user base.
This is partly a result of end-stage capitalism. Once social media companies can’t grow their user base much more, their investment will dry up unless they can point to a new ability to generate profit. Their choice was to market products to their users, and let paid actors pay for attention. But this has hollowed out their product to become a lifeless advert platform filled with bots and toxicity. Manipulation has become rife, and people are tired of it.
Users are also tired of influencers, people who seemingly live a perfect life and are paid to advertise products to their followers. Influencers often showcase a perfect life online, when the truth is their offline life is completely different. Many are waking up to this fact, and seeing how much of online presentation by influencers is “fake”.
Influencers have been frequently caught pretending to be rich, and sharing designer goods with others to showcase their fake lifestyle. In contrast normal people are struggling with modern life, especially young people.
Youth unemployment is high; the average age of a first time homebuyer is getting higher and higher; couples aren’t having children; couples aren’t even forming, and more men and women are choosing to be single and have pets instead of children.
At this point, social media companies seem to be doubling down, especially on the idea that AI will save them. Tons of fake AI profiles are being created, and fake AI influencers are making poor content. Everyone is trying to leverage some kind of connection to “AI”, because it’s the tech buzzword of today. A few years ago it was blockchain and crypto, and before that it was cloud computing.
Eventually these buzzwords start to lose their power and reality sets in; everything has a product lifecycle, and social media as we know it is clearly looking down instead of up, which is a good thing because in reality it really hasn’t added much good to the world, it mostly wastes our time and only connects us superficially.
