New Normal: Professionalized media with comments

OK, so what exactly is different about using social media now than it was 5 or 10 years ago?

I think the best place to go for this is a piece from the Verge last fall by David Pierce. I'll put some things in bold for easy skimming:'

Add it all up, and the social web is changing in three crucial ways: It’s going from public to private; it’s shifting from growth and engagement, which broadly involves building good products that people like, to increasing revenue no matter the tradeoff; and it’s turning into an entertainment business. It turns out there’s no money in connecting people to each other, but there’s a fortune in putting ads between vertically scrolling videos that lots of people watch. So the “social media” era is giving way to the “media with a comments section” era, and everything is an entertainment platform now.'

Looking at these effects, it's easier to gesture at some of the likely broad causes, a few of which are in Pierce's article:

• the venture capital funding ran dry and thus platforms' design objectives changed;
• people got creeped out by hyper-targeted advertising, the lack of more genuine human connection, major ethics scandals, etc. and LEFT (fully or mostly);
• TikTok/Reels/Shorts etc. put a fine point on the fact that, on the whole, we'd rather be more passively entertained** than more actively engage with each other (social media -> media with a comments section); and
• all that doom scrolling during the pandemic helped us understand how bad it is to engage these tools without boundaries, but engaging them WITH boundaries is extra hard when the platforms work against this very commitment.

The long and short of it is that a LOT of people have left or majorly changed their habits, so what we're seeing now is less content from the people we're closest to and more content from professional creators/entertainers. We're also seeing WAY more AI spam dumped into the groups FB started trying to get us to join when we stopped actually talking to each other.

(Remember all those commercials during the olympics about how FB groups were going to teach us how to longboard? That was the beginning of what is now an attempt to get you to join these giant groups corresponding to your interests/habits.)

I'll say more later in the week about where everyone has gone and what we might do about it. For the time being, it's worth saying that what I think is most valuable about human communication is (1) interpersonal connection and (2) what learning people call "effortful processing"—how expressing yourself about something helps you get clearer about it for yourself.

I don't think our individual behavior is likely to change much about all this, but it might just be that what you're missing (if you're like me) is that today's social web encourages a lot LESS of these two things.

It was always true that if we wanted to experience these things we have to PRACTICE them. But the socio-technical changes mean than doing so means swimming against the current a bit more to do so. I'm grateful for the many ways people I'm connected with are game.

** But to give short video its due, it's not like engagement and interactivity don't exist on these platforms/formats.