Social Media's Future

It’s amazing how we all have an astonishingly low opinion of social media. Facebooks privacy violations and experiments are well known; Instagram with it’s infamous reputation around body image issues; Reddit’s API incident, and the site being known as manipulable and censored; Twitter is hated by it’s own users since Musk, and is considered a sewer of discourse; TikTok is the most scandalous, as a ‘national security threat’ across the Western world, and has been banned to various degrees, from military and government individuals to the general public, in many countries. These are huge blemishes upon the image of these websites that most of us are more or less aware of. But I am not here to discuss why social media is bad, because we already know that it’s bad. I’m more interested in what we will do about it.

We’ve heard more in the last few years of people wanting to detox, take a break, disconnect, unplug, from social media. The very concept of detox reveals that many are aware of social medias negative effects and cared enough to take some action against it. There is still a great number of people who don’t detox, but have similarly negative attitudes towards social media. Very few people reduce their social media usage, either temporarily or permanently, without reporting that it improved their life in some way. Yet, I am torn on it. It does encourage people to have critical discussions about social media and it’s role in our lives, but when somebody detoxes they make a promise to come back. The negativity is pushed aside for a short while, but they return in due time. What does that say? To a social media platform, it says “You treat your users poorly, and you are aware of that; yet even the users who complain refuse to leave. Therefore you will suffer nothing to continue treating them in this way.” Nothing will change. So we find the problem: many people don’t want to use social media, but have an overriding desire to use it anyway.

The allure of social media is so strong because we have adopted it as the primary medium of socialization. I call face-to-face speaking the natural medium. Before social media it was the primary too. There were alternatives; historically there was letter correspondence, and greybeards may recall bulletin board systems and Usenet. In the case of letters, this was only an auxilliary medium and was so constrained by time and place that it wasn’t practical as a primary. The digital mediums I mention, may have been the primary medium of a small group within the absolutely tiny group of those early personal computer users, but these people were anomalous and bizarre. Social media is probably the newest digital medium made, but has displaced the natural medium as the primary for a significant chunk of the population, particularly young people. Young people who are not on social media are so rare because if you refuse the primary social medium, you drop off the social circle of others. Old friends slip out of contact and new friends become harder to come by, simply because you are less convenient to communicate with.

Social mediums remind me of Internet protocols. I promise this analogy is important, and I will not explain it technically. The Internet works because all it’s devices agree to use the same well-defined protocols. It’s hard to convince the users of these devices to switch to a new protocol, because a new one has nothing to communicate with. It’s useless. One of these protocols is called IPv4, which most of the Internet uses. A few decades ago, it was realized that only four billion addresses are possible, but the Internet was expanding so much it was feasible that we could have run out of addresses. Almost every book on networking since then says we will eventually switch from IPv4 to IPv6, because IPv6 has more space for addresses. Despite the magnitude of the issue — or perhaps because of it — that day hasn’t come yet. Considering that, it’s interesting to note that our social medium changed from natural to digital unnaturally quickly. However, while we still use IPv4, system administrators have been highly recommended to use IPv6 at the same time as well, which means if the change does come, it will go more smoothly and be a more successful transition. Can we gather anything from this? It is true that our social relationships, our networks, are very similar to computer networks. Perhaps we can use the same strategies. It mightn’t work to just tell people to leave social media, but it could work to encourage people for the sake of their happiness, to spend more meaningful face-to-face time with one another. Perhaps something will happen that could make people consider dumping social media completely, and with that preparation the transition would have a better chance of success. It’s a good thing, as I said, that websites like Reddit are very easy for even a single person, determined enough, to manipulate.

We can see there are two types of interaction in social media: symmetric interaction between users, and asymmetric interaction between content creators and users. Most social media was interaction-driven, but I think the popularity of content-driven platforms like YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok made other platforms feel the need to embrace content-driven features in smaller or larger parts. In both cases, the number of users engaged with the platform is the key to success. Interaction-driven social media works because all your friends are there, or you have a wide selection of communities to join. Content-driven social media works because users attention allow them to be fed a barrage of advertisement. I believe there must be some critical threshold of social media users leaving that would cause everybody else to want to follow along, but there’d be some other point where if a certain amount of users left, it would cause a content-driven platform to lose attractiveness to it’s advertisers, so would cause revenue to nosedive quickly. It would have to be a large portion of people, that’s true. Probably a minority of users, but that’s still a lot. But I’m sure most social media users today already have a strong distaste for social media, and as the days go on the scandals are more frequent, more awful. Resentment can only increase.

There is no reason why products of the fully-connected Internet cannot be used to further this. I’ve long known that memes, especially for youth, are extremely powerful at showing what people think and shaping peoples thoughts, in a giant, amorphousm, cybernetic feedback-loop. There is already one meme that is similar to what I’m thinking, the phrase ‘touch grass’, but unfortunately this is always used as an insult and is completely unhelpful. I think there are a lot of YouTube videos about leaving social media, which express the right attitude, but their problem is they lack the virality and the presence of the meme. People watch a few of these videos and forget them. If instead, everyone around them is quoting memes related to leaving social media such that the idea stays in their head, it would be far more impactful. A lot of people already feel bad about how much they use social media, making them feel worse about it won’t help. They should be made to feel inspired to change, positive about it, feeling like they are pursuing an ideal. It shouldn’t be difficult to infuse a meme about leaving social media behind with those feelings. It’s just tapping into a feeling that exists to some greater or lesser degree in everyone. Optimistically, it would only take out a small number of people anyway. The more important effect would be drawing everyones attention to this feeling they have and to make them think about it more.

Some people believe the problem with social media is the corporation, and we simply need more social media alternatives, such as the Fediverse. But I think that no amount of alternatives can make social media interaction a less inhuman form of social contact.

Some believe AI generated content will oust everyone as they become sick of generated content. I think it’s unlikely because content quality is already unimportant on social media, since engagement isn’t really correlated with quality most of the time. It’s likely, as others have pointed out, that AI would be used to create posts to provoke reactions from people to manufacture engagement. This isn’t a departure from how social media provokes it’s users and how users provoke each other though. I don’t think the change AI will bring to social media will be all that meaningful.

Ultimately, I don’t know how it will all happen. I have ideas, and even some things that could be actionable that may or may not help. But I cannot predict the future.

There is one thing we can do individually, which is to leave social media and encourage others to. Perhaps you’ve considered it yourself, but you have your reasons to stay. That is fine, but you need to ask yourself, does the idea of being on social media thirty years from now sound appealing? Does the person you want to be involve being an active social media user? Unless you are some “influencer” or something, probably not.

It’s easy to change. It’s no harder than giving everyone you care about your phone number and/or your e-mail address, and deleting all the accounts. Think carefully about why you want to stay, and critically analyze each reasons strength. Personally, the only good reasons I can think of are for small business use and cheap international communication. The list of the disadvantages of social media are plentiful on the other hand; the routine and increasingly disturbing violation of your privacy, the wasted time, being subject to social experiments without consent, and the negative feelings social media causes.

The choice is ultimately yours, but know this.

Nobody regrets leaving social media.

Nobody on their deathbed wishes they spent more time online.

There will be people who will cry and gasp for air, lamenting all the time they spent in a simulation of trifles. In place of fond memories, will be an impression of the white rectangle, indiscernable lines and blobs floating up, imposed in every fold of their brain. Like they spent their lives on the highway, looking down at the road when the rolling hills and ancient trees are right out the window.