A personal reflection on the decline of social media from its early days of community-driven platforms like Flickr and LastFM to today's engagement-obsessed, bot-filled, AI-slop-saturated mainstream networks. The author argues that platforms have turned users into content creators chasing metrics rather than genuine connection, that the shift from specialist emotional communities to all-purpose UGC platforms was the beginning of the end, and that even alternatives like Mastodon and BlueSky are following the same downward spiral. Specialist groups and the fediverse offer some hope, but the broader web has lost its social soul.
Table of contents
Mostly mainstream social media?We’re not interacting socially, we hold the doors to lock people inWeb2.0 was the start of the declineEarly social media had an emotional coreWhat it already had was lock-inWho needs an emotional core when you can have UGC ?Specialist groups are still kind of a thing…Yes, there’s always the fediverse…When you ask yourself “why am I doing this”, maybe stop doing it299 Impressions