Does X Foreshadow The Death Of Social Media?
Brazil has banned X. The social network formerly known as Twitter closed down last weekend. My X feed stopped working on Saturday, August 31st with a post from TeleSUR reporter Brian Mier on the screen alongside an advert for Elon Musk’s Starlink.
Musk has also owned X for the past two years. The company is now worth about a quarter of what it was when he bought it. I’m not going to go into the background of why Brazil banned X, but if you want a good summary then look at Brian’s report here — it is a row about criminal investigation subjects using X and it has rumbled on for years.
Brazilians have been talking about life without X. I’d personally become quite disillusioned with X anyway and I stopped using the service last April. It no longer felt as fun or interesting. I had to wade through a constant feed of racist and offensive posts from people I’m not following — it had become a sewer. Some journalists are now even asking if it is ethical to continue using X.
So the ban doesn’t really affect me. I did have around 17,000 followers on X and I had invested over 16 years in the network. The real disappointment is not the ban in Brazil, it’s that Elon Musk had already ruined it to the point that I just stepped away voluntarily before the ban.
I started an event focused on London Twitter users 16 years ago and it is still running today — it’s almost amusing that the founder can no longer use the service.
I have tried Threads and Bluesky, the networks that have long been touted as replacements for Twitter. They are both OK. I started getting a little more invested in Threads rather than Bluesky, but it really is like starting over from nothing.
The real question is why start again? What is the point?
In the early days of social networking it truly was all about connecting with people — especially friends and family, but also groups of people with shared interests. Myspace, Orkut, and then Facebook were all dominated by people who connected and then wanted to see a timeline of what their friends were doing.
At some point it started becoming desirable to increase your follower count — to appeal to strangers and to become a form of influencer. The timelines also changed to be what you “might” want to see, rather than what your friends are doing.
What is the comparable social media experience today in this environment where everyone is posting content for strangers?
It has also become very hard to develop a large online audience organically because the social networks realised that if they allowed people to build a community of thousands of other people then they could start charging the user to reach them — rather than allowing posts or messages to be visible freely.
This became a big challenge for artists. Bands that had built a community of fans in groups and pages found that they could no longer alert everyone in the group by sending a post — around 99% of the group would never see it on their timeline. They had to start paying to push messages to group members.
I did build up a Facebook profile where I tried to talk to people about my books and other projects. It grew to a community of over 10,000 people — thousands of people following what I’m up to. The reality is that the last time I posted something there, it got one single like. Unless I pay to push messages out to ‘fans’ nobody is getting the updates.
So without paying for ads social media has become fairly useless for businesses to build a community of customers and bands or artists reaching their fans. If services like WhatsApp allow you to build different groups containing different sets of friends and family then is there any remaining point in using the social networks?
This may be just the view of someone old and jaded, who has seen the arrival and growth and now decline of social media as a fun place to hang out. It’s no longer useful for me, but then perhaps my view is colored by knowing that it was not always normal to spend hours watching videos uploaded by strangers on TikTok.
A quarter of American teenagers spend 2–3 hours a day just on TikTok.
What does it add to their life? The fun in social media used to be around connecting and sharing with friends, family, and a wider group of acquaintances. Now there is usually no personal connection. The concept of following anyone is not needed when the algorithm can predict what you will like and will endlessly serve those plane crash videos you want to keep watching.
The focus on developing a following has been largely fuelled by the growth of influencer culture where it is no longer acceptable to be an expert in a subject, you can just self-declare that you know about it. If you look good then you can build a following in any subject — travel influencers, restaurant influencers, car influencers. How many photos are shared with the ‘expert’ in a bikini next to a car or hotel pool?
People follow — just wanting more photos - and the brands keep sponsoring them in the belief that this will ultimately help them to sell more cars or vacations. But the death of the influencer has been predicted by many in advertising because the general public has finally realised that if you want to know about travel then The Man in Seat 61 knows a lot more — even if he isn’t as good looking in a bikini.
So what is left? Nobody is on Facebook now unless they are still using it as a way to stay connected to their parents. Instagram remains OK for sharing pictures with a small group of friends, but the algorithm ensures that nobody sees pictures that are not promoted. LinkedIn is descending into a self-help hell where everyone gets spiritually awakened by innovation each time they walk their dog.
It really feels like less is becoming more. Sharing photos and memes with a few friends in closed and private WhatsApp groups is becoming more satisfying that chasing after a large follower count — filled with random strangers and bots.
The Atlantic recently published a feature suggesting that it is now more satisfying to follow the Venmo updates of your friends, rather than their social media posts. At least Venmo offers an unfiltered insight into how often your best mate orders pizza. It’s real and this now feels unusual in a world filled with unreality.
France has arrested Pavel Durov (Telegram) and Brazil has banned X. In both cases it is largely because the owners of these networks refuse to protect their users from offensive content.
Perhaps the governments of the world will not need to worry about Section 230, or other legislation, because most users will gradually melt away into smaller end-to-end encrypted networks. The era of the vast social network featuring billions of users may be over.
The COO of Bluesky, Rose Wang, perhaps said it most directly when she recently told the Guardian: “…a small group of people governing spaces for billions of people just doesn’t work.”
CC Photo by Brian Wangenheim
