Welcome to Geriatric Social Media
Weirdos like myself, who pay too much attention to tech platforms, are currently mulling a question: Is social media dying? The New York Times’ Kevin Roose formally kicked this off in a guest post in The Morning newsletter last week, chronicling the recent struggle of Big Tech companies. It seems that, between the tech stocks getting hammered, a cooling social-media ad market, and platforms like Twitter hemorrhaging users and getting bought by mercurial billionaires, the social-media landscape does feel rather different than it has over the last decade. But what does that mean?
I confess that, even though it has very real consequences for the way these companies operate, I can’t bring myself to care that much right now about flagging stock prices or the marketplace for targeted ads on social networks. What I am interested in is the cultural notion of the question “Is social media dying?”
Platform decay on Facebook continues apace; one year ago, in the of this newsletter, I compared a lot of what’s happening on Facebook to the vast wasteland of daytime TV. Twitter is full of non-Musk-related bad news, the most notable being that sports and entertainment content are waning in popularity on the platform while crypto and pornographic content are the platform’s fastest-growing categories. (Moral judgements aside, historically, it is a bit scuzzier lately. It’s anecdotal, but my feed and the feeds of people I talk to are so overrun with algorithmically recommended “related content” these days that you have to work a bit to find your friends in the morass.
