Feed: Slashdot
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Title: What Happens After the Death of Social Media?

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/09/15/0502...

"These are the last days of social media as we know it," argues a humanities
lecturer from University College Cork exploring where technology and culture
intersect, warning they could be come lingering derelicts "haunted by bots
and the echo of once-human chatter..." "Whatever remains of genuine, human
content is increasingly sidelined by algorithmic prioritization, receiving
fewer interactions than the engineered content and AI slop optimized solely
for clicks... " In recent years, Facebook and other platforms that facilitate
billions of daily interactions have slowly morphed into the internet's
largest repositories of AI-generated spam. Research has found what users
plainly see: tens of thousands of machine-written posts now flood public
groups - pushing scams, chasing clicks - with clickbait headlines, half-
coherent listicles and hazy lifestyle images stitched together in AI tools
like Midjourney... While content proliferates, engagement is evaporating.
Average interaction rates across major platforms are declining fast: Facebook
and X posts now scrape an average 0.15% engagement, while Instagram has
dropped 24% year-on-year. Even TikTok has begun to plateau. People aren't
connecting or conversing on social media like they used to; they're just
wading through slop, that is, low-effort, low-quality content produced at
scale, often with AI, for engagement. And much of it is slop: Less than half
of American adults now rate the information they see on social media as
"mostly reliable" - down from roughly two-thirds in the mid-2010s...
Platforms have little incentive to stem the tide. Synthetic accounts are
cheap, tireless and lucrative because they never demand wages or unionize.
Systems designed to surface peer-to-peer engagement are now systematically
filtering out such activity, because what counts as engagement has changed.
Engagement is now about raw user attention - time spent, impressions, scroll
velocity - and the net effect is an online world in which you are constantly
being addressed but never truly spoken to. "These are the last days of social
media, not because we lack content," the article suggests, "but because the
attention economy has neared its outer limit - we have exhausted the capacity
to care..." Social media giants have stopped growing exponentially, while a
significant proportion of 18- to 34-year-olds even took deliberate mental
health breaks from social media in 2024, according to an American Psychiatric
Association poll.) And "Some creators are quitting, too. Competing with
synthetic performers who never sleep, they find the visibility race not
merely tiring but absurd." Yet his 5,000-word essay predicts social media's
death rattle "will not be a bang but a shrug," since "the model is
splintering, and users are drifting toward smaller, slower, more private
spaces, like group chats, Discord servers and federated microblogs - a
billion little gardens." Intentional, opt-in micro-communities are rising in
their place - like Patreon collectives and Substack newsletters - where
creators chase depth over scale, retention over virality. A writer with
10,000 devoted subscribers can potentially earn more and burn out less than
one with a million passive followers on Instagram... Even the big platforms
sense the turning tide. Instagram has begun emphasizing DMs, X is pushing
subscriber-only circles and TikTok is experimenting with private communities.
Behind these developments is an implicit acknowledgement that the infinite
scroll, stuffed with bots and synthetic sludge, is approaching the limit of
what humans will tolerate.... The most radical redesign of social media might
be the most familiar: What if we treated these platforms as public utilities
rather than private casinos...? Imagine social media platforms with
transparent algorithms subject to public audit, user representation on
governance boards, revenue models based on public funding or member dues
rather than surveillance advertising, mandates to serve democratic discourse
rather than maximize engagement, and regular impact assessments that measure
not just usage but societal effects... This could take multiple forms, like
municipal platforms for local civic engagement, professionally focused
networks run by trade associations, and educational spaces managed by public
library systems... We need to "rewild the internet," as Maria Farrell and
Robin Berjon mentioned in a Noema essay. We need governance scaffolding,
shared institutions that make decentralization viable at scale... [R]eal
change will come when platforms are rewarded for serving the public interest.
This could mean tying tax breaks or public procurement eligibility to the
implementation of transparent, user-controllable algorithms. It could mean
funding research into alternative recommender systems and making those tools
open-source and interoperable. Most radically, it could involve certifying
platforms based on civic impact, rewarding those that prioritize user
autonomy and trust over sheer engagement. "Social media as we know it is
dying, but we're not condemned to its ruins. We are capable of building
better - smaller, slower, more intentional, more accountable - spaces for
digital interaction, spaces..." "The last days of social media might be the
first days of something more human: a web that remembers why we came online
in the first place - not to be harvested but to be heard, not to go viral but
to find our people, not to scroll but to connect. We built these systems, and
we can certainly build better ones."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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