Factual Dispatch #60: Where Do We Go, My Lovelies?
You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.
It’s not just Twitter being murdered by the Emerald Emperor, social networks don’t work these days. Facebook Blue is drowning in anti-vaxx nonsense, MLM weirdness, and “Follow This Page” ads-but-make-it-related-content. LinkedIn entrenched itself as the home of toxic positivity, meritocracy myths, and deranged productivity signaling. Instagram feels overstuffed with irrelevant content and ads, with the rare photo from a friend or page you actually follow. If you haven’t felt like logging on, you’re not alone.
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It’s almost impossible to post on these networks without feeling exposed or like your labor is profiting someone else. Instagram used to be a place where people expressed themselves to their friends & followers. Now it’s a place where ads for drugs, guns, or stolen credit cards adjacent to your content. Twitter used to provide the ability to speak to the powerful. Now, Twitter is releasing a new ad format you can’t hide or report. With most platforms reversing their ban on election-related ads, the run up to 2024 will be as chaotic and disruptive to our brains as surfing killer waves and wiping out a few dozen times.
This has turned Logging On into a chore. Years ago, we didn’t like FB but it had all the people connections, birthdays, and events. Twitter was your source for news, sports, and breaking info. LinkedIn was a place to get a job, Pinterest was a place to build a vision board, even MySpace helped emerging bands & music producers. Today, doing everything they can to chase TikTok’s cache & revenue, every other social network turned into algorithmic content delivery engines, ignoring our repeated and explicit “Holy Crap Do Not Do This” warnings.
Advertisers aren’t hanging out either, and not just on Twitter. Now that “short form vertical video” is the dominant delivery format, influencers and “content creators” rule. Spend on Influencer Marketing is the only category of ad spend that is up, year over year. Ads are out, influencer TikToks are in. We know most are still ads wrapped in chocolate, but at least they’re entertaining vs. incoherent and insane.
I don’t consider TikTok or YouTube to be part of this conversation. You can’t really check on your friends using TT or YT, they have no scheduling functionality, and the overwhelming majority of people who post vertical video, crosspost on TT, YT Shorts, and IG Reels. What’s the difference between YT Shorts, IG Reels, TikTok, and Meta Stories to the average user? If every platform has the same features and pushes the same content, in the same formats, why be loyal to one platform or another?
Any remotely successful/viral content on one platform is instantly stolen and republished across all other platforms. TikToks, Tweets, and Tumblr posts are reposted in collections on Instagram, then FB, then LinkedIn, then back to the original platforms, sometimes without removing the original creator’s watermark. The TikTok or Reels user might see the content first, but it’ll be on Meta, LinkedIn, or X by the end of the month. The average user doesn’t actually have to change their habits, making these platforms a pack of seemingly identical Zombie Elephants.
Where do we go from here? Can’t say, but I’d personally love for any other social network besides Meta to start handling events and birthdays. Shubham Agarwal has a great piece over at Insider (surprisingly) that discusses the post-social network behavior I’ve already started seeing & participating in. Less Meta, more Discord. Less Twitter, more Reddit. Less YouTube, more Twitch. Less Insta, more private group chats.
BeReal, kind of like Yik Yak before it, tried to produce more ephemeral, social-graph driven content, but it’s been dying for months now. I can’t say I’m sold on this “Fediverse” or or whatever the post-social network world is being sold as right now. But I do think Bluesky, Discord, and Substack (cough) provide a much more useful alternative to Meta & X than Truth Social, Rumble, and Parler (RIP). So here’s to hoping the age of the zombie social network is coming to an end, with something unimaginably better coming to replace it.
Keep your head up,
T
P.S. Editor’s Note: We didn’t mention Threads for the same reason we didn’t mention Google+, Ello, or Friendster. If you think Threads is a social network, let’s check back in about a year. Bet.
P.P.S If you made it to the bottom, your reward is the song the title of this Dispatch is from. But of course.