Social Media's Death Spiral

Image: “Sad boys” / Badly edited by author

I remember the early days of Facebook. I had just gone to university around the time it really took off, and whatever the hell this thing was, it offered me and my new friends a new way to engage with each other (and distract us from lectures) — and we loved it.

It's hard to imagine now, but it was actually fun to use. Sharing status updates, waking up after a night of heavy drinking to see what awful pictures the nightclub had shared of you, poking each other (okay, that one was weird), joining funny groups, following local band pages, and, of course, 'fraping' each other. (In our defense, it was simpler times back then, and the worst we did was write fake coming-out announcements). 

It was social media that was… social. 

It was a little, wonderful moment in tech history. 

And it was nothing but a brief respite before the whole thing became a cesspit. 

It was a time before we discovered the truth behind social media, before we realized we had willingly submitted ourselves to the world's largest data-mining facility, before we learned of the devious deeds of the overlords who controlled it, before we discovered the mental health side downsides, the brainwashing, the fake news, the election-swaying, the hate speech, the trolling and the divisions it has caused in society.

It's hard to say when the wheels started to fall off. Maybe the Cambridge Analytica scandal? The Capitol Hill riots? Perhaps it was the moment social media sold its soul to the algorithm? Or when the only metric the top brass began to care about was “time spent”?

The platform's golden years were certainly pre-pandemic. Sure, they enjoyed a staggering rise during those years, but it was hardly down to business acumen — we were trapped indoors, after all. What else were we going to do? If we put share price aside — which is high only due to the insane ad revenue these platforms pull in — the user experience has been on a downward slide for years now.

I'd argue these platforms are in their death spiral. 

Fun fact: A death spiral is a crazy phenomenon where ants get turned around and follow each other's pheromone tracks in an endless circle until they die of exhaustion.

In business, a death spiral is a period of continuous downturn that leads to catastrophic failure or complete collapse. So, by those definitions, social media isn't in the early stages of its death spiral; it's been circling to exhaustion for some time. Many pioneers have already met their end, like Myspace and Tumblr. Others, like Snapchat, are hanging on by a thread. Rivals and competitors have come and gone. Most of the leading platforms are a shadow of their former glory, mostly trapped under Meta's inability to create anything new or tying themselves in knots trying to tread the fine line of being a "public town square." The biggest breakout success, TikTok, is facing a US ban. They've circled and circled, desperate to find the way back to the good old days. However, thanks to rotten leadership, lack of innovation, and being beholden to shareholders, they've done nothing but accelerate the downfall. 

Remember when Facebook announced its shiny new rebrand to Meta and pinned its future on the Metaverse, envisioning a world where social media merges with virtual reality to create an immersive digital playground, minus the legs? It was a glorious, insanely expensive waste of energy and billions of dollars that barely got off the ground. Or when Elon Musk and his ego thought he could turn around the fortunes of Twitter, only to deliver one of the worst rebrands in history, destroying the product and halving the company's value in the process? Or when Instagram thought, "Hey, let's just copy TikTok," and proceeded to ruin the app's core experience (killing photos)? 

I can't think of a single positive change to a social media platform in years. Nothing has been done with user value in mind; every change is only made to satisfy shareholders. They've killed link sharing. They've killed the ability to see updates from your friends and family. They've killed reach for creators. They've killed news and trustworthy information. They killed news feeds and home feeds by making it almost impossible to scroll chronologically, and almost impossible to see anything but suggeste content and sponsored posts. All in favor of what? Engagement metrics. Make number go up. It's thoughtless trend chasing done at scale, and the result has been a slow yet steady destruction of anything useful these platforms once offered. 

Just look at the current trend: AI-stuffing. 

Meta's AI celebrity avatars. AI suggestions instead of letting people search for what they want. Meta's weird AI chatbot. X's even weirder chatbot, Groc. All of it is pointless and shitty. But worse than that is the content on the platforms. Facebook is a mess, with AI-generated images — sometimes even of dying children — garnering thousands of likes and comments. LinkedIn is becoming a platform where "creators" generate AI posts, and a swarm of accounts automatically comment with AI-generated responses. Instagram and TikTok are being swamped with entirely AI-generated accounts — fake avatars, fake people, fake videos, fake engagement. It has already reached the point where some form of AI is responding to itself in a loop on a site that is MEANT TO CONNECT HUMANS. 

AI could be the death blow for this generation of social media. I hope it is. The overlords who run it deserve nothing more than to see their empire crumble. 

I say this generation because I don't believe for a second that we will live without some form of social media. It's so entangled with our lives it is hard to envision how the world would function without them. While we moan about them and worry about the consequences of overusing them, humans are also fickle creatures. While we like to shout about platforms dying — see the countless cries of "I'm quitting" on Twitter X — most don't leave. Most can't leave. And that's what the social media overloads are counting on. It's what they've worked towards for all these years, at first in stealth when we were blind to the truth, and then with blatant disregard for us even when we discovered what they were up to. They showed us a way to connect with others, widen friendships, find others in similar or different communities, and stay on top of life events and milestones. Then, they stripped it all away, stuffed everything with algorithmic sludge designed to push engagement metrics higher, and left us scrolling like the dopamine addicts we are. 

It's so intertwined, so profoundly linked into society, that no matter how shitty the platforms get, no matter what damage they do or allow to occur under their watch, they are able to hang on long after they've outstayed their welcome. It's clear the leadership has long believed we were stupid, gullible and happy to eat this shit up.

And for a long time, we hadn't been able to save ourselves from this misery. 

But it seems we've woken up to the realization that these platforms serve no one but their shareholders. We've realized that, on the whole, using these platforms is a net negative. We've realized it's no longer about connection but about engagement. We've realized it's no longer about authenticity but about pretending to be someone or something you're not. We've realized the utility of these platforms is not worth the downsides.

And we're finally sick and tired of it. 

We want something better. 

Unfortunately, the platforms will do their best to cling on. Death spiral or not, they aren't done for until they hit the bottom. If they don't die anytime soon, I suggest a few solutions that may at least mitigate some of the issues (I don't believe we'll ever see these come to fruition) — 

1. Social media should be age-gated, and this should be enforced.

2. All humans should be verified, and bots — both good and bad — must be labeled. 

3. All imagery/text/video produced by AI must be watermarked (this is tricky when AI is used and edited). 

4. And please, start holding these platforms accountable for the content they willingly (despite their denials) surface to users. 

Alas, maybe the only thing we can do is build a time machine, and enjoy that period of bliss once again, where social media was social, where Google search worked and the Internet didn’t suck.

One can dream.