What Is Social Media Anymore?

You'll be hearing a lot about the end of the Social Media Era.

Good morning.

The end of the Social Media Era for publishers has been happening for some time. In fact, it's been happening since at least 2018. But this month, an industry report in Axios on the plummeting traffic to news publishers and then a react piece from some of those publishers in the New York Times seem to have kicked the subject up again.

There were also two think pieces in the past two weeks about the current state and future of the internet from two notable writers that have been shared around: one from Kyla Chayka in The New Yorker and one from Katie Notopoulos in the MIT Technology Review.

But, before those pieces, there was a conversation between my fiance and I.

One night before going to sleep, we were talking (not about the space between us all—but maybe) about our jobs at media companies and what the future might hold. I made a bold proclamation, like I do, that: “There is no social media any more. There’s just entertainment.” To which my girlfriend responded: “That’s not true” and “What does that even mean?”

I couldn’t describe it in the moment, but it's something I’ve been feeling for the last two years or so. Really since TikTok became popular, everyone freaked out because it sucked up all the time and attention, and then everyone, in some way, tried to either be TikTok or compete with it. And Chayka’s piece along with Notopoulos’s piece publishing so close to each other made me think that maybe I wasn’t so off.

There are a lot of ways to define social media, but I like the way the pros over at McKinsey break it down: there isn’t a single “social media” there are many types of social media that we engage with every day. Each one has, over time, borrowed or emphasized features from the other types. But the ones we’ve talked about the most over the last decade have been “social networks.” Your boy David Fincher had it nailed.

But really there are also media-sharing networks (YouTube, TikTok, and IG) and discussion forums (Reddit, comment sections), and consumer reviews (Amazon reviews, Google review, Yelp, and also Reddit and comments sections on recipe sites or product review sites). All of those components have kind of been mixed together into “social media” over the last ten years or so and have made that term kind of blurry.

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Katie Notopoulos’s piece tackles what I’m digressing into here, which is the history of the internet and how we came to this specific moment. Her lede sets it up nicely:

“We’re in a very strange moment for the internet. We all know it’s broken. That’s not news. But there’s something in the air—a vibe shift, a sense that things are about to change. For the first time in years, it feels as though something truly new and different might be happening with the way we communicate online. The stranglehold that the big social platforms have had on us for the last decade is weakening. The question is: What do we want to come next?”

Focusing more concretely on how the Social Media Era is coming to an end, Kyle Chayka pretty much emphasized the same idea in his piece a little over a week earlier:

“The Internet today feels emptier, like an echoing hallway, even as it is filled with more content than ever. It also feels less casually informative. Twitter in its heyday was a source of real-time information, the first place to catch wind of developments that only later were reported in the press. Blog posts and TV news channels aggregated tweets to demonstrate prevailing cultural trends or debates. 

Today, they do the same with TikTok posts—see the many local-news reports of dangerous and possibly fake ‘TikTok trends’—but the TikTok feed actively dampens news and political content, in part because its parent company is beholden to the Chinese government’s censorship policies. Instead, the app pushes us to scroll through another dozen videos of cooking demonstrations or funny animals. In the guise of fostering social community and user-generated creativity, it impedes direct interaction and discovery.”

These are all good points and great examples. But, again, none of this is particularly new per se. Back in July, David Pierce made similar observations and asked similar questions over at The Verge. This increasingly shared sense of feeling like we’re on the cusp of something new, does feel different though—at least to me.

What I’m feeling and trying to articulate when I say “there is no social media anymore” is summed up nicely in Chayka’s piece:

“According to Eleanor Stern, a TikTok video essayist with nearly a hundred thousand followers, part of the problem is that social media is more hierarchical than it used to be. ‘There’s this divide that wasn’t there before, between audiences and creators,’ Stern said. The platforms that have the most traction with young users today—YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch—function like broadcast stations, with one creator posting a video for her millions of followers; what the followers have to say to one another doesn’t matter the way it did on the old Facebook or Twitter. Social media ‘used to be more of a place for conversation and reciprocity,’ Stern said. Now conversation isn’t strictly necessary, only watching and listening.”

This is pretty much how I feel. Over the last four years or so, for me, so much of the internet has become more about watching versus participating. At some point, I became more of a “lurker” on platforms than a participant. And that’s probably because I stopped seeing much of a point in participating. Because nothing I was going to share was ever going to get the engagement I needed to stay relevant or even show up.

Sure, a lot of that is probably jealousy or good ol’ fashioned snobbery at playing a game you see as beneath you or also because I’m not really that much of a participant in things in general.

But a good portion of it was also because participating on Instagram or Twitter or anywhere else didn’t really seem like that much fun. I think, as Chayka notes in his piece, that the shifting of personal priorities during and after the pandemic and the move to working from home accelerated this feeling, for me at least. And, honestly, it started to seem like more trouble than it was worth to actually post.

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So where does that leave us? Where is all of this going? As usual, nobody knows anything—particularly not me.

I do believe that social networks are dying and that the major platforms we know are going to become more and more focused on entertainment and keeping you on their properties. So media brands will need to use those spaces more as content marketing or advertising for their platforms, properties or services more than any way to drive direct conversion.

I do believe that there will be communities out there and that those communities will still have power. Reddit has them for better and for worse. And there are obviously the really bad ones. But there are also “communities” among commenters in places like the New York Times Cooking App or on The Athletic app or in instant messaging platforms like Discord.

I don’t believe, as Notopoulos does, that a new federated social media is what may be coming. “The big idea is that in a future where social media is more decentralized, users will be able to easily switch networks without losing their content and followings. ‘As an individual, if you see [hate speech], you can just leave, and you’re not leaving your entire community—your entire online life—behind. You can just move to another server and migrate all your contacts, and it should be okay,’ says Paige Collings, a senior speech and privacy advocate at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. ‘And I think that’s probably where we have a lot of opportunity to get it right.’

That all sounds great, but I just don’t see anyone wanting to do that—nor do I see anyone wanting to figure out how to make all that work. We’ve seen how hard it is for people to leave Twitter once and for all. And people are still hanging in to see if Threads will work (no pun intended). That’s mainly because the value of Threads is being able to have your IG followers added to your account and then connect your IG profile to your Threads account. 

But there are so many people who rely on their followings and their posts in ways that I don’t. They might be the ones to put in the work toward a unified posting future where everyone owns everything that they post.

At the end of her piece, Notopoulos describes herself as an optimist. If I’m anything, I am naive and optimistic. And I want to believe in a on the internet future like this:  

“We, the internet users, also need to learn to recalibrate our expectations and our behavior online. We need to learn to appreciate areas of the internet that are small, like a new Mastodon server or Discord or blog. We need to trust in the power of “1,000 true fans” over cheaply amassed millions.”

I see this happening here on Substack. And I think, as the “social media” we’ve known for the past 20 years continues to morph into something new, Substack has done the best job of creating a product that offers all the components of what you need to be both participatory in a meaningful and rewarding way and also to be a pure observer. The Substack App reminds me of why I first found Twitter valuable: Right now it is the easiest place to find good and interesting writing from people I’ve never heard of. 

Except…most Substack Notes are pretty boring (mine included), they still have issues with their approach to moderation, and people aren’t going to pay to subscribe to more than a few Substacks. I’m not “great at math,” but I’m not sure if clusters of 1,000 true fans can really support an entire online economy.

But maybe they can. There’s a lot of internet out there for us to explore—especially if “social media” as we’ve known it is dying. More and more of us feel as if a change is coming. We’ll see if that vague notion actually turns into something palpable.

See you next week.