Social Media Fragmentation and Engagement Fatigue
In which we browse too many feeds
I.
Twitter used to be the only social media platform I enjoyed. Sure, I have a Facebook and Instagram profile, but the last time I checked those was years ago. TikTok never appealed to me. Etcetera.
Twitter was never free of issues - no social media platform will ever be - but for a long time it was a way for me to find new, interesting ideas and interact with people from all over the world I’ll likely never meet in real life. To an extent, Twitter is still that virtual place for me. That extent, though, is shrinking. Every third tweet is an ad, profiles with blue or gold checkmarks are pushed to the front of my feed, and Twitter’s new owner is fond of making last-minute random changes that (to me) make little sense. To be fair, this might also be part of social media’s natural lifecycle. Journalist/author Cory Doctorow calls this the enshittification of platforms:
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I’m not alone in wondering whether there’s another virtual place to hang out. The blue bird’s competitors have smelled blood. From the decentralized Mastodon, over Meta’s hastily assembled Threads, to former Twitter guru’s Blue Sky and Substack’s very own Notes, many other platforms are vying for our attention (and sign-ups). All of them, more or less explicitly, promise us the Twitter experience as it was before the hostile takeover.
None of them, however, has quite hit the mark. This could be because the Twitter experience we’re seeking was never real, but rather an ideal we have dreamed up for ourselves. There will always be trolls, engagement will often be driven by false claims and fear-mongering, and, sadly, -isms will find a way to express themselves.
Still, the previously dominant blue bird is under siege by several aspiring competitors. As a result, people flock to different places as they flutter away from Twitter. Once upon a time, social media as a whole was a landscape with only a few large territories (or platforms). As with many great empires in history, social media’s territories are being carved up among the descendants of the original few platforms.
Eventually, all empires collapse into fragments.
II.
If (yes, for me it’s still an ‘if’ rather than a ‘when’) Twitter truly implodes this leaves me a social media refugee. Where do I go? Plenty of platforms wave seductively at me, but behind the surface that glitters with words like ‘kindness’, ‘community’, and ‘open source’, they all seem pretty similar (and are probably plagued by similar issues). Or, as media analysts Ian Bogost and Charlie Warzel put it in a recent The Atlantic piece:
Social media cannot become good again, because we will not let it evolve. It can merely live and die over and over, like a zombie.
And, to be honest, I don’t have the time, patience, or mental bandwidth to deal with a new zombie invasion and to make half a dozen profiles and maintain some semblance of activity and interaction on each of them. (If you wonder what might happen when one of these social media zombies finally cracks your brain, I can recommend the recent sci-fi novel The This by Adam Roberts. Don’t let the first stream-of-consciousness chapter scare you; it’s an intriguing novel.)
This brings us to the question that has been simmering in the background since the start. Why does anyone even need a social media profile?
Of course, no one needs social media, but it has become a major tool of discovery, connection, and even news for many, many people. For example, a 2018 survey by Pew found that social media is the most popular source of news for US adults between 18-29 years of age. Thanks to following a bunch of interesting people and journals, my Twitter feed points me in the direction of new ideas and papers on a daily basis (even if these days my feed is swarmed by ads).
It works the other way around as well. If you have something to share, social media is (or used to be?) the place where you should plant it. It’s where a lot of people are, after all. Unfortunately, since everyone on social media clamors for attention, getting noticed is very hard. Enter the rabbit hole of misinformation, fear-mongering, and engagement algorithm hacking.
Still, for me, there remains something aspirational about the ‘global village’ ideal of early social media days. True, ideals never quite survive the translation to reality, but they can be inspirations for an incremental step to a slightly less depressing world.
Too bad that the global village turns out to be a cardboard movie set.
III.
As a social media platform’s territory expands, it welcomes more people into its fold. With those people, new and different viewpoints enter the village. So far, so good. That’s the whole point. Then, however, our tribal brain algorithms kick in and groups of people will give in to those all-too-human traits of harassment, trolling, and doxing. Instead of tamping down those instincts, social media leans into - even encourages - them. Engagement, remember?
In a previous post, we met our faulty brain algorithms and saw how they drive engagement primarily through confirmation bias, incendiary language, and in-group/out-group animosity.
There’s another aspect of social media that doesn’t sit well with me. It could (partially) be because of my personality, but it feels like an existential splinter in my mind. It’s the commodification of individuals, which is a fancy way of saying that social media nudges us to not be a person but become a ‘brand’. One of the most prevailing chunks of advice for success as a (digital/online) creator is ‘find your niche’. Atchoo! Sorry, allergies acting up.
That’s not all, though. Beyond niching down, looking good is also a key factor for standing out. This can be literal (think about people with fitness and nutrition-focused accounts) or figurative (people and pundits positing themselves as ‘expert in…‘) Pro-tip: real experts don’t call themselves experts. It’s a designation others give you, not one you give yourself.
This shallow social media veneer can take many forms. Think blue ticks, badges for the number of subscribers, or filters that make everyone look like a Greek God(ess) with a perennial six-pack sculpted out of untainted marble. Here too, I’m not saying this is ‘bad’; it’s in our nature.
has a great piece called ‘Do You Believe in Love at First Sight? The Science of Love & First Impressions‘ that illustrates this quick-fire assessment mechanism in the world of dating. It takes you <1 second to determine whether you find someone aesthetically pleasing and, sadly, for many people this is what determines whether or not you’re willing to date them. I don’t mean to imply that which accounts we follow is all about the profile picture, though I wouldn’t be surprised that it often is. My point is simply that social media (so far?) toggles our quick & shallow assessment buttons and keeps us hooked by doing so. In truth, I too get a kick out of it when someone likes one of my posts. Addiction by design.(Another fiction recommendation? Sure, why not. Glitterati by Oliver K. Langmead takes this prominence of self-branding and outward appearance as raison d’être to dizzying extremes. You might think it’s already like that, but trust me, Langmead pushes it further.)
And all of that is… exhausting.
Interestingly, research on people quitting social media reports mixed outcomes (partly because - oh, irony - research participants can’t always stay logged off for long enough). The current consensus on whether social media is good or bad for you as an individual is… depends on how you use it.
In my naivety, I continue to think that social media can have both societal and individual benefits. In my cynicism, I recognize that the current social media platforms are designed with very different goals in mind.
What is the future of social media? What should it be? And how can we try to make those two answers align?
More thoughts:
I like Substack Notes a lot *better* than Twitter.
I got on Twitter because I was told I needed to be there for the career I was pursuing at the time. That was probably correct at the time, but it had stopped being true by the time I left that career - and in the intervening decade Twitter had left so many lives destroyed by mobs in its wake. Plus Twitter had generally come to replace the more substantial ideas on blogs. I don't miss it.
On Notes, most of the quips have a 500-word essay of substantial argument behind them. It feels like a much more civilized place.
Relationships are strengthened when people relate (couples, families, teams, tribes, cities, states, nations). At each stage there is common ground. The trick to making this more global is finding commonality. As a general rule (IMHO) we are either looking for differentiation or connection.