The End of the Social Media Era

It lasted about twenty years.

It occurred to me recently that the era of social media—roughly the last twenty years—is coming to an end. This is both obvious and also something that people seem to be oblivious to. How can something so all-consuming as social media be coming to an end? Without social media defining our time period, what will this era be? What will replace it? How will we understand ourselves? I don’t have any answers to that. But I do think that the era of social media is ending.

Obviously Twitter has been a shitshow for the last several months (well really it always has been an absurd awful place filled with subliterate antisocial scum), but last weekend when owner Elon Musk put rate limits on how many tweets you could view per day, it became truly unusable. Musk appears to have undone this measure, but it still heightened a feeling of jankiness and crappiness that has defined his ownership of Twitter.

And yesterday, Facebook (uh, I mean “Meta”) CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched his competitor to Twitter, called “Threads.” It’s basically a text version of Instagram (which Facebook also owns). On Instagram you just post pictures (making the discourse on there even dumber than other social media apps, if you can imagine that). Threads adds text and the ability to “share ideas” and “do discourse” to Instagram basically.

I took a look at it for like ten minutes, and that’s when I really got this overwhelming feeling that social media is over. It was all these users trying to figure out, together, what Threads will become. The CEO of Instagram was explaining how the Threads algorithm works, and how they decide what posts come up in your feed. Users were replying with little nitpicks and suggestions about how to improve Threads. Users were whining about how the app was useless. There was very little content there, just like there’s very little actual content on any social media app. And the design is so basic and ugly—rushed, cheap, pointless, nihilistic in a way. Representing nothing other than Zuckerberg’s desire to create a competitor to Twitter at a time when he senses Twitter is weak. So there is a fundamentally anti-social aspect to the whole existence of Threads—but Zuck also launched the app by pledging it will be the “friendly" place that everyone wants. It’s all so absurd.

It was something about seeing all these people in real time trying to justify the existence of yet another social media app, when we already have so many that have sucked for so long—it struck me as so absurd and as feeling like this massive endpoint. There’s this idea that the concept of social media is good, but the execution—from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram and so on—has been off. And that the next new thing will somehow correct it. But no matter the design of the app, it doesn’t really change anything. I almost forgot that just a year or two ago (hard to remember time anymore), Trump made his own social media app, Truth Social, that nobody really uses. Threads kind of seems like more of the same really—a vanity project social media app for Zuckerberg in the same way that Truth is for Trump. (Twitter is basically that for Elon Musk now too).

This is all that social media is now—vanity projects for scummy billionaires, and millions of users participating in their vanity projects for unclear reasons.

People will still use social media for a long time, I suppose. But I think it will continue to fade into the background, to become more and more of an afterthought, rather than represent this rising wave that seemed to be leading somewhere. We have enough history with it now to know that it leads nowhere.

So this is what I mean by the social media era is ending. What’s next? Probably nothing. Nothing will replace it. And that’s okay. It will be better for the world to have less content, less noise, less connection, less openness. I think that’s what people want.