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Social Internet Is Dead. Get Over It.
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The social-media Web as we knew it, a place where we consumed the posts of our fellow-humans and posted in return, appears to be over.…In large part, this is because a handful of giant social networks have taken over the open space of the Internet, centralizing and homogenizing our experiences through their own opaque and shifting content-sorting systems.
Algorithms optimized for engagement shape what we see on social media and can goad us into participation by showing us things that are likely to provoke strong emotional responses. But although we know that all of this is happening in aggregate, it’s hard to know specifically how large technology companies exert their influence over our lives.
The moment exposes the tension between how social networks wish people used their services and the reality … Asking users to unlearn the habit of relying on social media will take time and may not work at all.
I read these three articles and was reminded of something I have known for a while, though I had not synthesized it succinctly enough: the internet, as we have known it, has evolved from a quaint, quirky place to a social utopia, and then to an algorithmic reality. In this reality, the primary task of these platforms is not about idealism or even entertainment — it is about extracting as much revenue as possible from human vanity, avarice, and narcissism.
Frankly, none of this should be a surprise. Most of the social algorithms have been specifically designed and optimized to do just that. The Social Internet began as a place to forge “friendships” and engage in “social interactions.” It performed its role as intended until companies needed to generate profit. By then, we were all hooked on the likes, hearts, retweets, and followers and the boost they gave to our egos.
Looking back, the very idea that socially inept and maladjusted founders would define online social norms feels almost laughable. The notion of having 5,000 people as “friends” was as preposterous then as it is now. We were naive in our thinking, and happy to replace real-life friendships with an unlimited number of online friends. After all, digital friends are superior to real ones, right? In my column for Business 2.0 magazine, I wrote:
This new startup might seem like the bastard child of EdTV and Blogger, the latest in tech-enhanced West Coast narcissism. But it actually points the way to a future where we use technology to stay in close touch with our friends and families around the world. Companies that take advantage of this trend are poised to capture more than just our attention.
Whether in Parisian cafes, Bombay chai stalls, or Manhattan singles’ bars, humans have an overwhelming need to get together, talk, communicate, and interact. Our genes are coded that way. It’s no surprise that as we rush toward an always-on, ever more connected society, we want to mimic these offline interactions on the Net.
Back then, the internet was still seen as a utopian ideal — not a massive marketing machine. Our friendly chats and discussions weren’t enough for platforms to draw the advertising revenue required for giants like Facebook and Twitter to keep growing. However, sharing news and media links became an effective way for social platforms to keep users engaged. Discussing the latest news was often more straightforward than initiating a genuine online conversation. Hence, the social internet morphed into “social media.”
It was evident where this was all headed.
Over the past few years, I’ve argued that there’s nothing truly “social” about social media and that algorithms now primarily guide the flow of information. This direction serves primarily the deities of advertising and revenue. And the algorithms are there to do two things — boost engagement and sell more ads.
Six months ago, I looked up how to humanely euthanize a sick fish on Reddit. I found a method and now my fish is dead. Since then, Reddit has sent an email every week with novel ways to kill fish of all sizes. The algorithm must think I’m a fish mass murderer. It won’t stop. Dustin Curtis.
While it’s fashionable to point fingers at Elon Musk for his systematic (and accelerated) undermining of Twitter, the truth is more nuanced. Indeed, while Musk’s influence is palpable — and, with his $44 billion purchase, entirely his prerogative — social media platforms have gradually lost their social essence for years. Derek Powazek, an internet old-timer like me, in his seminal essay, noted that Twitter was programmed to be an Argument Machine:
With enough people, and enough short thoughts, arguments are sure to occur. When they do, we’ll add heat to them by making sure everyone can see the individual thoughts outside of the argument’s participants. Nothing like a hooting crowd to make a bad situation worse. I’m not saying that Twitter was designed to create arguments. I’m just saying that, if you set out to create an Argument Machine, it’d come out looking a lot like Twitter.
No one cared — and that is because we were all busy looking out for our selfish interests. And, to be frank, the platforms began to atrophy from the moment we started treating them as our personal marketing channels. As I’ve previously pointed out:
every tweet, every selfie is a chance to virtue signal, an opportunity to market yourself as someone — pundit, guru, genius, or goofball. There is no other way of putting it — we are addicted to the idea of an audience. When we go online, we are programmed to react to engagement triggers — likes, shares, retweets, hearts, and thumb-ups. Social and this addiction of audience have made us addicted to something even harder to give up once tasted: a constant feeling of self-importance. To live in this post-social future, one has to embrace ideas that are the antithesis of self-importance. After two decades of being trained by micro-dosing on dopamine, I am not sure we can!
How do social media algorithms work? To put it rather crudely (and simply), most social media systems follow pretty much the same rules — mostly because many of the people who designed these systems have hopped from one company to another. The algorithms examine the who, what, and why of every piece of content.
The algorithm considers who posted the content to the network. This could be a source of information, a friend, or a business. The value of this “posting entity” becomes more important if they have a lot of followers. A big media company, a major brand, or a famous person (aka influencer) is treated preferentially by the algorithm.
Algorithms decide what kind of content they will prioritize — photos, videos, reels, links to articles, memes, or plain old-fashioned text. (I explained this in my piece titled ‘What do Instagram and TikTok have to do with Asparagus.‘)
For instance, a post by Gigi Hadid will take precedence over one by a less-known individual, and a video will likely garner more engagement than mere words.
If half a million people “heart” what Gigi Hadid has to say, or a million people retweet “fake news videos,” the algorithm will amplify that point of view. To me, there’s no discernible difference between the content that the Kardashian-Jenner clan produces and any advertisement from a drop-shipper on Instagram or Twitter. So-called “influencers” are as inauthentic as any bot. It’s becoming impossible to distinguish between a “real” influencer, whose motives and intentions are dubious, and a virtual influencer, who is, by definition, a fabrication. It’s all a façade, as it always has been.
Moreover, the way social media is structured rewards extreme ideas, ideologies, and those on the fringe. A radical idea will likely get more engagement — comments, likes, or reshares than a seemingly rational comment. One need look no further than Twitter to see this in action. If you want to be heard, you must be quirkier or more outrageous than the next person. If not, you aren’t going to get even a nano-second of attention.
In a recent study, researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, highlighted that “after retweeting a fake political news story, the more hearts people received — the symbol indicating another user liked their post — the more they agreed with that story’s content.” Joseph Walther, a communication professor at UCSB who led the study, noted, “It’s social interaction with others, even through those small signals of social approval native to social media platforms, that magnifies false beliefs.”
Study after study is coming to the conclusion that algorithms can’t distinguish between information and misinformation because they aren’t programmed to do so. Academics Soroush Vosoughi and Deb Roy, both of the MIT Media Lab, along with MIT Sloan professor Sinan Aral, recently conducted a study that reached the conclusion that false news spreads faster than the truth.
Their research, published in Science, found that misinformation is ’70 percent more likely to be retweeted on Twitter than the truth,’ and that the fake news ‘reached 1,500 people about six times faster than the truth.'”
About 126,000 rumors were spread by ∼3 million people. False news reached more people than the truth; the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1,000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people. Falsehood also diffused faster than the truth. The degree of novelty and the emotional reactions of recipients may be responsible for the differences observed. (via Science)
This is based on a dataset from 2006 to 2017, long before the current management took over and foreign actors began using social platforms for propaganda. Like UCSB’s Walter, the MIT researchers reached the same conclusion: ‘This suggests that false news spreads farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.’
The problems have, of course, worsened. Now, only $8 a month is required for someone to appear legitimate, and battling disinformation has become less of a priority for major social companies. This includes YouTube, whose algorithms are even more efficient at spreading misinformation than what surfaces on Facebook or Twitter. The rise of generative AI is also making misinformation even more sophisticated — fake photos, fake videos, and improved copy will only increase the density of noise and misinformation.
As social media platforms increasingly shift from human interactions to algorithms, it’s no surprise that we all feel overwhelmed by internet noise. Consequently, the proliferation of spam, bots, irrelevant content, and ads has become (or should become) more apparent than ever. This is precisely why the internet feels less enjoyable. Social media seems less social, and lately, it feels even less like “media.”
Where do we go from here? We find ourselves lost in a fog of misinformation, a reality we must acknowledge. Reluctantly, we must admit that the Social Web, as we knew it, is on its last legs, and we stand at the threshold of a new era marked by social disconnection.
October 16, 2023. San Francisco
11 thoughts on this post
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Om- great post. I don’t think this outcome was inevitable. The government was complicit in creating social media. Sec 230 is an unmitigated disaster. What if Meta & Twitter had to abide by the same laws as Fox News? Ex A: Dominion Polling case. One can support the intent of 230 giving all voices a platform while abhorring its extension to giving certain voices a megaphone. Having worked in the govern, I am not surprised at its inability to move quickly and see the impending disaster. However, I am surprised at these companies’ unwillingness to accept what they created and its impact on our society and its people. I have plenty of friends who have worked at these places. I think they cannot fathom something that reunites high-school sweethearts on Sat can cause a massare in Myanmar on Mon.
Keep writing!
– Sunil
Without Section 230 we have no usable internet.
The answer isn’t to get rid of Section 230, but to get rid of hugely centralized systems.
And if Section 230 goes away, you almost guarantee there will be no services but huge ones, since the risk to smaller services would be too great.
Matthew
Just as we shifted from the old desktop to the web to the mobile, the same is going to happen to social platforms, as the risks and overheads start to outpace the benefits. We are already at that place. Just look at what the kids are doing and how they are thinking about their online lives. They are the pointy end of the spear.
Thanks for the comments.
I am not advocating to get rid of Sec 230. I am saying there are limits to its application. It should not be extended to algorithmic manipulation of the content in order to increase engagement. The whole premise behind 230 is that these companies were platforms, not publishers. When the manipulate the feed and timeline to increase ad revenue, I would argue they are acting as publishers.
I (mostly) agree with your headline, but not with the assertions nor th conclusion; in no small part because the various platforms differ and there’s one big segment of Socialwhich you didn’t touch on at all: messaging.
Twitter: I was on very early and effectively off it a long time ago. The same has been true for Threads, which unravelled (pun intended) for me pretty quickly. I start here because there’s something inherently flawed with this type of platform, as you’ve highlighted. They seem designed to bring out the worst in people.
Facebook & LinkedIn: Both have strayed very far from their original premises, both have done so very successfully (from a commercial POV), and both remain core parts of a huge number of people’s daily online experience (existence?). They clearly still fill a need for people that hasn’t been met elsewhere.
Instagram: It has also strayed from it’s original premise, also very successfully. However, it’s worth treating it separately as several key early decisions differentiate it from every other platform, notably around linking out to other platforms/the web. Originally it was link in bio, then swipe up in Stories for people over a certain follower threshold, then shopping stickers on posts & Stories, then link stickers in Stories for everyone and most recently multiple links in bio, and hooks into WhatsApp (both organic and paid). Links in posts still not a thing. This meant that Instagram stayed mostly self contained and that news most stayed off it, making it…different and it’s own thing. Another key decision was a flat graph in which people, businesses, celebrities all had a the same type of profile (no distinction between profiles <> pages, like there is on Facebook and LinkedIn). Features were added over time but this also shaped the platform in a fundamental way: it never really was about you and your friends (unless you really wanted it to be, hence, Finstas), and so it also really wasn’t…social.
YouTube: they don’t get enough credit for elegantly side-stepping the thorniest parts of Social. Simple, yet consequential, design decisions to hide dislike counts, put comments a click/tap away and invest heavily in trust & safety/moderation has made what was once the emblem of the worst of comments sections into something that can be avoided entirely if you want to (I do) or engaged with on your own terms. Arguably it’s barely even explicitly Social anymore, with all of the signal becoming implicit ways in which personalization is powered. Perhaps an example for other platforms.
Glass: I include this as it’s one that we’re both on and it’s an example of the latest emerging wave of vertical social networks with an ad-free subscription based model. Because we’re all there for the same thing (a shared interest in photography), we’re all really nice to each other (constructive criticism is about as boundary pushing as it gets). This is a good thing but like every other app with a follower/following model and a news feed it’s going to reach a point where some sort of mediation of the flow of updates will be needed.
I’ve left out TikTok because I don’t use it or know enough about it and Snapchat because it’s stayed relatively niche.
BeReal briefly emerged and then flamed out, leaving behind the idea of using the notification layer for…something more than just notifications.
I said that I agreed with your headline and I do. Of all of the platforms above I now only regularly spend any time on YouTube and Glass, though the latter is declining. Instagram was the last of the others: it’s now primarily a messaging app for me…which…brings me to Messaging.
This is where Social has gone, is alive…thriving. 1:1 message threads and group chats. WhatsApp, iMessage, Slack, Messenger, Work Chat, Signal, Telegram, Instagram DM, Snapchat: all co-exist.
Meta is again the largest player here, even Signal is it’s beneficiary.
However, none of the players have really figured out monetization. Apple subsidizes iMessage with hardware and services revenue. Snapchat has tried to build revenue lines from other sections of the app. Messenger has ads, WhatsApp is building a “for business” business and Instagram is…well, Instagram.
And so maybe…this is what we’re left with: public facing apps with an ads model which are more like entertainment channels which fund 1:1 and small group messaging apps which are which put the “S” in Social.
Is that the worst outcome?
Excellent post 👏
I think the solution for misinformation and content moderation lies in empowering non profit open source technologies alongside educating people.
The first solution is quick, the second takes time. A lot of time and both are necessary.
We need browsers, apps, protocols , and addons to be a tech layer that when put above the monopolies tech it reduces their bad effects.
It’s like what I do when I I rarely surf Reddit directly and I use Mailbrew or F5bot so I dont miss what’s important to me. That’s way I consume Reddit content with nearly zero bad effects from its marketing hungry algorithmic nature.
Ad blockers comes to mind as another example here. It’s a tech that seriously make huges financial damages to the tech behemoths. Freetube is another example too.
Thank you again Om.
Hey, thanks for the comment. I have not used Mailbrew but I am going to try it out. Really appreciate the heads up.
This post resonated with me. I fondly remember the days when people blogged to share knowledge and experience and not to make money. I miss those days but agree they are mostly gone. Now on most sites I am nagged for an email address and often am asked to pay for premium content.
I like sites where I don’t have to register and sign in. To me the best part of the internet is individuals sharing with one another. We don’t really need big platforms as intermediaries.
Your post prompted me to think about blogs today that still fit this bill for me. In addition to your great blog I can only think of two other blogs. One helps me to find great European TV and the other is a long-time blog by a fine American photographer.
Thank you for your blog and for this fine post.
David
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I think the challenge here is that most of the discovery that used to happen via blogs has been lost. I fear blogs have become the “vinyl” of the information age. A few of us will continue to use the medium, but the new generation of Internet users are going to be increasingly visual and will be using that medium as their way to finding information. I hope I can keep the spirit of blogging going and also evolving with times.
I think SN as a term conflates things that we need to consider separately.
For instance, the individual-scale aspect (“didja see this article” or “admire the cake I just baked”) is fundamentally different from recommender networks, and also quite distinct from public-broadcast-with-feedback. Orthogonal to the use cases is the basic question of whether it can be harnessed to sell something (advertising, but also it’s opposite: paid-content known prehistorically as “journalism”).
Whether these use-cases die oddly depends on payment. For the pure p2p form of SN, who pays for the infrastructure? Are people willing to pay anything for this – basically a low-key web presence? Will we be able to come to some political consensus on whether public (intended) communication should be a commons?
There are some technical facts that should inform this discussion. For instance, the infrastructure for pure p2p SN is now extremely cheap (I guess the marginal cost for a million interactions per day is maybe a few dollars per year). Another technical development is the availability of an open, free API (which Twitter has eliminated): such a thing is necessary for the “commons” approach, and also for the p2p case (since few people are going to pay much for a web presence).
Mark
Thanks for the comment. You are absolutely right but the sad things is that past decade and a half have trained us to be attention addicts, and that is what we need to break. I always look at the kids and the next generation, and they have totally moved off this idea of social media. They consume it as “media” but keep the social aspect of their world on private messaging apps. And most of the new new users are creating their own layer of the Internet on Roblox and Fortnite. We are the old timers and are stuck to the old paradigms.
It would be interesting to keep an eye on how they evolve in the future.
Thank you for the comments.