Back in October of last year yours truly proclaimed social media dead. Caveat: its not, but its also not on the rise either and in fact it feels like the social media rot scares people off now. Hard to blame them if so.
Of particular interest to me are two journalistic takes that emerged lately. One was by Megan McArdle of Washington Post who proclaimed Bluesky will die off in not so distant future. The other one was by Nate Silver who maintains that all social media sucks, albeit still prefers Twitter himself. Worth adding too that Elon, being a master of eloquence that he is, called Nate an r-word in response to the said take. But I digress.
While Nate avoids Bluesky like a plague, I had a chance to talk to Megan McArdle. She maintains that her take wasn’t done out of hatred for Bsky, but out of sheer userbase comparisons between the two platforms. On the surface it makes a lot of sense, but if you dig deeper the take/opinion just falls apart.
For one – what does it matter if the Twitter userbase is bigger? Its borderline unusuable, Elon Musk is a proud bigot/racist/chauvinist and much of the platform by now is occupied by either bots or MAGA or 4Chan fanboys. Not the kind of place I would touch with a ten-foot pole, by any means. Facebook/Meta isn’t much of an improvement either.
Where I do agree with both Silver and McArdle is the declining use of Bluesky. It definitely starts to feel like fewer people are visiting site on a daily basis and its very likely the things coming from Bluesky devs/team did not make it any more attractive to the population at large. Neither did endless mainstream journalistic hot takes dismissing Bluesky as novelty, an echo chamber or something worse altogether. Unfortunately Bsky might’ve put in a lot effort to enshittify itself, as if often happens these days – the post from Why being a nadir of developers being completely tone-deaf.
I maintain that there’s still a time for Bluesky to turn the ship around. Its running out very fast, however, and increasingly likely scenarios are that it will either
A) end up being overrun by bots/MAGA
B) shut down due to bankruptcy / inability to monetize the platform
Hopefully neither scenario will come to pass. But in the meantime there’s a million dollar question – where do people that leave social media migrate? Our follower Uncle Brucy suggested something that gave me hope
I’ve seen this in the media, and among my own kids and their friends, but The Youth seem to be pulling away a bit and getting more into older things. Digital cameras, mp3 players, physical media upticks, etc., all on the rise.
I’m sure some, but (and not to be too earnest) I think they are finding community more than anything. The death of monoculture split us into smaller microcultures? Something like that maybe. My sample size is small, but it is a little encouraging.
That scenario certainly beats one involving everyone migrating to chatbots. Something that, I’m afraid Google, Amazon, Twitter et al desperately want to happen and if so I’d much prefer everyone going back to offline life or whatever remnants of it are still out there.
I miss social media of old and will deeply regret Bluesky’s ongoing decline/eventual death, but as the poet laureate once said “Nothing last forever. Even cold November rain”. Perhaps the disappearance of social media will open up new avenues for people to explore offline life in full and will result in emergence of new real-life third places. Here’s to hoping.
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