Rants // RIP Social Media (2008-2016)

Love him or hate him, Ted Gioia got it absolutely right when he titled his recent essay Social Media is Now Shrinking. Try asking anyone you know about the prospect of joining Bluesky and you can count yourself lucky if that will elicit anything other than a yawn.

This isn’t so much the fault of Bluesky per se, highly problematic as its recent responses to moderation issues were. The larger issues lies with tech industry’s overwhelming reliance on grift as a way of monetization, problem that started roughly around the time when Donald Trump got elected president, too much of a coincidence to ignore.

Back in 2016, arguably the last peak year for both Facebook and Twitter empires, former still had decent human moderation and latter still wasn’t owned by erratic South African billionaire. It was hard to imagine anyone breaking the dominance of both of those tech giants.

And yet something peculiar happened with social media between then and now – it gradually started losing its human element. What initially started out as a way of connecting people gradually turned into a giant surveillance machine and a way to manipulate public opinion. Spammers, scammers and bot farms gradually took over as well and tech industry did next to nothing to combat any of these, if not welcomed them with open arms.

Trusting tech companies to combat all of those issues was a costly mistake, to say the least. Companies and businesses let go of the idea of reliance on consumer and switched to reliance on shareholders/billionaires/upper class. In other words enshittification took hold – not just of social media and tech products, but the entire culture.

Yes, enshittification – overused as that word might be, it perfectly describes where we are now with social media and technology in 2025. Between the news of Barron Trump potentially taking over TikTok and CBS News getting new owners its abundantly clear that powers that be want things to stay enshittified eternally.

Given this I welcome the waning interest in social media. It may be far from dead, but the peak years are well behind it and the only way for us to fight the corporate/political battle to control the narrative is to slow down. Shrink the social media – if it means fewer likes and less engagement, so be it. I’ll miss the old Twitter, but I won’t miss the zone being flooded with bullshit.