Welcome to Geriatric Social Media

We used to separate between analog and digital formats until, eventually, “digital” became an almost meaningless distinction. Something similar has happened with the term creators, which used to signify a very specific group. But now, it seems that more and more people are behaving like creators, or at least responding to similar incentives. It’s p... See more

That nothing has come around to quite replicate Twitter’s incredibly messy “siloed and yet still very public and observable” nature is probably the best argument that the platform is sticking around—for a while, at least. That said, I think that Twitter will likely become even more weird and uncool than it already is.

I’ve been trying to talk myself into the social-media death-spiral idea, but it feels like the wrong framework to describe what is essentially just an evolution of the way people use the internet.

We make our biggest mistakes on social platforms (especially lately) by assuming that any experience on an app is universal. But one thing that’s generally missing from the shift in social-media consumption is a central “town square” space.

A lot of what I’m describing is, admittedly, a vibe. But it’s a vibe of the “Welcome to Allegiant Air, yes we’re going to charge you for a glass of water” variety. It’s not quite an “Everything Must Go” doorbusters situation, but it isn’t exactly trending in the right direction.

The internet—everything that makes it wonderful and awful—is the product of social connection and networks of humans. If it’s enraging and chaotic and delightful and impossible to summarize because it’s being created in real time by millions of people who are all trying to make money/win affection/make friends/kill time, then it’s social media. It’... See more

Now, if your platform is in good health, with a vibrant, creative user base, and your recommendation algorithms do a good job of quickly assessing your users’ preferences, then it might work out for you. But if your user base is slowly atrophying due to the network decay I described above, or if your algorithms are pretty mediocre at understanding ... See more

All of this feels a bit weird to me, a proud denizen of geriatric social media. It is quite strange, especially when you write about technology, to feel like the tools that define your formative era of the internet are no longer ascendent. But just because patterns are changing, I think it’s a mistake to assume that social media is on its way out a... See more

You could say that social media isn’t exactly dying, but bifurcating. Apps like Twitter—which don’t really offer the ability to split status updates and broadcast capacities or switch to short-form video posting—and Facebook—which are essentially so rotted out by network decay—are not fertile ground for this kind of consumption shift.

But, given TikTok’s algorithmic siloing, I feel like the “global town square” experience is harder to replicate on that app than on others.