The Decay of Social Media

I've been reflecting about this topic for months now: where is social media headed at in 2025? I will not cover Mastodon here for a variety of reasons, including the niche nature of the platform.

Let's also park aside the topic of how great "vTwitter" was, how we build great bonds and friendships together between 2008-2018 roughly. These times were great but I feel that they are long gone.

The Case of Twitter

X and BlueSky are two faces of the same coin, i.e. a once great platform progressively infected and corrupted by a rampant leprosy, i.e. irreconcilable political antagonisms, outrage of all kind, all exacerbated by the limits of 140/280 characters (or whatever it is these days) that make any meaningful argumentation impossible.

I left Twitter when Elon Musk purchased it, made an attempt to return at least for work stuff, then definitely left X when that same dude thought making nazi salutes was a cool thing to do, all while one side of the US political spectrum was generally outraged at things.

I tried BlueSky and, while technically somehow better than what X had technically become, I just found the other half of outraged people here, enraged at the folks from the other side, but with one extra negative downside: little meaningful content, too few interactions, all submerged by a flow of US-relevant politic content which, sorry to say, I don't care about: I am not impressed at all by democracy with American characteristics (as my friend Justin Warren puts it), or oligarchic gerontocracy (as I once named it). I claim my sacrosanct right to not care about foreign politicians or elections over which I have no influence.

Take BlueSky, filter <insert political party> <US president> <former US president> <feudal-style silicon valley technocrats> and you'll get one very quiet timeline.

What is the value then? I think that the value is completely gone, at least for me. What is the value of posting when the audience is limited and interactions nearly non-existent?

The Great Enshittification of LinkedIn

Well, Max, surely you have to be posting on LinkedIn? It's THE platform for professionals! Good lord, where do I start with LinkedIn? So many wrong things that I would almost need to call on ChatGPT to structure this. Let's try to do that anyways without HAL9000's assistance (and sorry in advance to my dear assistant Ummon).

LinkedIn is essentially the Instagram of professionals with a boring life. I can say this because I'm there and also making this boring stuff. It's all the pictures of us at events with people, all the "I'm delighted to share...", "I'm thrilled to announce...", pictures of random people having dinner together and gratifying team work, or folks celebrating milestones of any kind.

There is no place for authenticity anymore on LinkedIn, because we're all copying each other in a way: LinkedIn is now a mirror for success - or perceived success. If you're struggling with anything, are fighting imposer syndrome, or are having doubts about your ability to provide quality services, just come over to LinkedIn to get a good dose of self-harm: supposedly successful former colleagues, humble bragging that even fails to be subtle, FUD posts whenever any topic hits the news, etc.

If this wasn't enough, the rise of GPTs has led to an eruption of AI-generated content that more or less re-hashes the same stuff, follows the same patterns, the same emojis, and leaves me thinking whether the goal is to talk to other humans or just to generate content to complete checkmarks.

The typical 10-15 minutes LinkedIn session is a hopeless doomscroll. You soon find yourself drowning in the unbearably sugary molasses of professional success, AI-generated content, and - by the way - here are 10 things it taught me about B2B sales.

This endless competition for attention, even for someone like me who is trying to grow their business, is not sustainable. It just generates more and more content that gets more and more diluted while algorithms are adapted and make reaching one's audience even harder. Post more often is the new spam your audience to death for attention. And yet, there are still people out there creating meaningful content - but for how long?

I'm more and more mindful of the time I spend on social media and the less I believe in its intrinsic value, the less I'm included to post my content there - putting aside company content, mind you. Less content = less visibility = feeling of uselessness. But at the same time, it's the price to pay, and perhaps a futile fight.

Will Communities Save Us?

This is a long rant, and I've skipped on stuff that is not relevant or I'm not using anymore like Instagram or Facebook, platforms that I left long ago or I've significantly scaled down. And a good thing indeed, since the rise of AI content on those platforms seems to be an unstoppable trend.

So, with the impending demise of social media, what are we left up with?

I don't know if communities are the way forward, but I am inclined to think so. Be it on Reddit, on Slack / Discord, or even in good old fashioned forums, these seem to be the last bastions of human to human interaction and authenticity.

The other thing - perhaps old fashioned - is newsletters. Some of my industry friends do that and have great content. Think about Justin Warren's The Crux, Chris Evans' Architecting IT, and Keith Townsend's The CTO Advisor. I put time aside to read these either before a work day or at the end of the day.

The world existed pre-social media, and will likely survive it. It's up to us to decide what kind of interactions we want, and what communities we want to build. Personally speaking - putting my company aside - I'd rather interact with humans face to face rather than keep using social media - or at least keep it to the minimum. Until the next big thing!