The Death of Social Media

The Social Media Category Faces a Deeper Existential Crisis than the TikTok Ban

For approximately 12 hours a couple short weeks ago one of the largest social networks in the world was banned in the US, cutting off access to some 170 million users in the country. The sheer scale and cultural ubiquity of TikTok caused the ban to send a shock to the system for social media as both a consumer and advertising category. And yet, the past few years have given reason to believe that had the ban remained (or is resuscitated in the coming weeks through ongoing political gamesmanship)…very little would have changed, at least in the long term. “Social media” as we know it has been on a long but increasingly clear path towards a consumer experience that has everything to do with “media” and very little to do with anything approaching “social” or “sociability,” thereby leading to the inevitable demise of the purpose of these platforms. In short, the enshittification of social media results in an ecosystem marching towards an existential threat well beyond the bounds of any given ban by perverting the category from its core reason to exist.

One could see this shift, in part, by how the ban was received with some parts of disbelief, humor, relief, or horror, pending the corner of the internet you found yourself in that particular Sunday. From more competitive corners, namely platforms striving to win over TikTok users such as Meta and Bluesky, the chaos was met with the announcement of potential homes for the diaspora of shocked and blurry eyed TikTok user a need to scratch their short form video itch by incorporating similar functionality into their own social platforms.

Such is the cutthroat world of social media. Where one platform falters, another is quick to pick up the slack (and ideally, engagement) by launching carbon-copy functionality and features. It’s a playbook made famous by Meta, who for years had been taking shots at Snap and more recently launched an entire app to capitalize on the chaos at Twitter resulting from Elon Musk’s “hardcore leadership.” However unscrupulous, the results speak for themselves: Meta is the undisputed king of the social media world on the basis of scale and creating an entire advertising industry category that they now dominate (Meta captures ~20% of all digital spend, but nearly 75% of social media budgets therein).

While some platforms focus on niches to pry slivers of social media budgets away from Meta, the broader momentum of the social media ecosystem pushes towards homogenization via a more or less unequal race to be everything to everyone, stopping at nothing short of capturing the attention of everyone on the planet for the purposes of profit. “Influence” of “communities” through these “platforms” via “creating” compelling “content” has become the standard formula for success due to tightly tuned “algorithms” that ensure the most “engaging” content attains social “virality” (I think I covered off on the base for all requisite buzzwords, but feel free to leave a comment if I missed one).

More engaging content leads to a larger audience to see the content, and ultimately the CPM-rich ads wedged between these bite-sized moments of mobile-optimized entertainment. The content became the point, because the advertisements therein were the point. This may all seem to be a fairly basic (albeit snarky) account of how social media platforms make money; however, the broader point is that the overt focus on content for the purposes of revenue capsizes the very reason that these platforms exist.

The original purpose of social media (at a high level) was to share more about ourselves and one another. In the early days of Facebook, paying homage to Moore’s Law (or perhaps ripping it off, as is the pattern at Meta), Zuckerberg’s Law proposed that the amount of information shared on the internet would double every year. Zuck had to believe this to be true at the time, because Facebook's popularity was based on the fact that it was the most optimized and effective way to share content, largely fueled by its immense (and growing) social graph. This graph was the moat a media empire was built within - when you’re connected to everyone and everything within a given ecosystem (where I have argued that these ecosystems are the foundation of all durable technology companies), switching costs for users make a given platform or ecosystem that much more sticky.

Becoming a service that has manifest switching costs does, of course, incur real costs where the only real solution is “more money.” And thus, the slow, sometimes subtle commodification of billions of interconnected humans with real wants, needs, dreams, and desires scattered across the commercial internet became one of the most profitable and technology-defining products in history. Commodifying behaviors, with all the troublesome implications this entails, was distilled to commodifying media viewing not because it was the right thing to do, but because it was the profitable thing to do. Platforms whose purpose (and draw) was to connect with “people” you care about slowly shifted to the “things” you care about, and now finally the “content” you may or may not care about (and if you don’t, that’s OK, the next bit of content will be available in just a few seconds).

While it hardly does justice to a long, complex, multi-year evolution in just a few sentences, this shift from “people” to “content” as the the point of social media is more or less the core of the enshittification of these platforms. Profitable, yes, but carrying the unintended effect of leading towards what may be the inevitable dissolution of these same platforms: These subtle shifts in what social media platforms were optimized for breaches the formerly durable moats of these services - when sharing content instead of ourselves is the point, we don’t have “networks” of “friends” so much as “communities.” The same general functionality that defined social media is largely still in place (sharing, etc.), but we’re sharing with an increasing number of entities that we don’t know and may or may not care about. We may find value in our communities, but the strength of the connection is not the same as (say) the one we might share with our grandparents or college friends with whom we connected in the early days of Facebook.

In short, communities have switching costs, but not as high as what might be attributed to a network - and when switching costs are reduced, attention is commodified, and the reality of the person behind the userID is ripped from consideration, they quickly become interchangeable. I asserted that the TikTok ban doesn’t really matter because “communities” are increasingly fungible among a more or less increasingly homogeneous and interchangeable array of social media platforms that have now fully become content optimization platforms on the basis of advertising revenue. Sure, a TikTok creator might not love re-establishing their commodifiable community on another platform, but they will, and with hardly a beat missed. It is telling that the entire premise of enshittificaiton was based on a discussion of TikTok.

By moving away from their core, human-centric purpose, social media platforms (and whatever this label means now) are increasingly abandoning utility in the service of human users to content in the service to revenue. The category that fundamentally reorganized human connectivity has instead fundamentally reorganized human attention around a specific and compartmentalized type of media, and we are all collectively poorer for it. The result is a highly profitable, but highly vulnerable array of platforms catering to creators and shareholders above users. Banning any given platform doesn’t matter because few of the platforms in social media truly matter to us beyond our own affection and adherence to, say, any given TV channel.

One might find the comparison of “new/emerging” media to mere “legacy” media strange, and yet on this trajectory the only real difference between TV and social media is who produces and distributes the content (and not insignificantly, who gets a cut). The rise of social media as an advertising category is in part a reaction to the decline of TV as an advertising category, both of which are a function of where commodifiable human attention has shifted. And yet, if we are to assume that social media as it currently stands is on course for an inevitable decline, the question of “what’s next” is not merely a function of shifting attention, so much as shifting needs.

Social media, as with TV and most other forms of media, entertains us. They provide us with utility that we like, however, we rarely love them. Social media has drifted from being an essential part of our lives that contained people we loved to an inessential media channel that contains things we like. So to answer what’s next, you don’t just follow what consumers are paying attention to, but what consumers love.

Long time readers can likely guess where I’m going with this - but the full answer will have to wait until the next installment.