Social media is no longer fun

There was a time when Facebook was fun. You and your friends posted things, you had conversations. Then slowly it became worse, became a place for showing off—you logged on and envied your friends travelling and exploring nice places and chilling on the beach and getting engaged and getting married and having babies, etc. But even that was better than now—I mostly use Facebook for work and for posting photos—now I only see posts from about 15 friends out of the 116 on my friend list—my feed is mostly filled with adverts for things (and beauty procedures) I don’t need and stupid memes I don’t find funny and AI-generated images I don’t find impressive and clickbait from media outlets I don’t read and TikTok-style videos from pages I don’t follow and Reddit stories I don’t know whether are true. The short-form content creators are the worst: occasionally you find something amusing, but most of the time you see people doing stupid couple videos or doing stupid pranks or asking passers-by stupid questions, and you can see when people steal ideas as the algorithm shows you different content creators creating the same content. 

What is the point of all this? 

Twitter also used to be better. I don’t mean it used to be a cosy, heartwarming little place like people often pretend it was before Musk—it has always been a divisive place, full of hate, amplifying stupid opinions and making mainstream issues that should only be on the fringe—you try to create your own circle and curate your own feed and can have interesting conversations with interesting people. But I think in some ways it has become worse: the clickbait and ragebait are worse; with monetisation, you see more sensational stuff and see Twitter threads broken up by bots and unrelated videos; with Grok and other AI, you see more fake stuff and also see people talking to Grok instead of each other. 

On the one hand, it may be hard to leave Twitter permanently—I’m currently taking a break—because that’s where I have friends with whom to discuss classic literature and cinema; that’s also where I can see news unreported and aspects unmentioned and perspectives unconsidered by the mainstream media. On the other hand, I would also see depressing news and hateful tweets and stupid opinions, and none of us are equipped to hear one stupid opinion after another, every day.

The Twitter copycats don’t sound better either—Bluesky for instance looks insufferable. 

I don’t even need to be on TikTok to know it’s much worse than other social media platforms.

The fun is mostly gone. Social media is now largely ragebait and brainrot and bots. The Dead Internet Theory appears increasingly true.