The paradox of social media, I think, is that it's not worth using unless you're actively and somewhat successfully making things on it. At the same time, making content for social media is an enervating and soul-deadening process. It's a lose-lose situation.
Using social media as a content consumer is about as miserable a waste of time as you can imagine. It turns social media into an entertainment medium, and it's not even a good one. The only thing it's "good" at is flipping the switches in your brain that make you keep going; the content itself is beyond sub-par.
The Internet is only valuable as a participatory medium, which is why people from the forum-posting era have such fond memories of forum posts. The moment you shift to reading and watching and nothing else, you're almost certainly wasting your time on something you'd enjoy less than all the other things you're capable of enjoying.
But the participatory nature of the Internet shifted with feeds, shares, and algorithms.
The crank in me felt in 2008, and still somewhat feels, like the Internet really started to go foul when we gained the ability to share each other's posts. Back when the only way to share content was through hyperlinking, there was a bit of a craft to content recommendation: if I wanted you to see something else I saw online, I had to persuade you to open a whole other website just to see what I was going on about. Bloggers like Jason Kottke and John Gruber made entire careers out of content curation; Kottke in particular almost never writes pieces of his own, and is famous only because he's dedicated literal decades to working out how to share an interesting blend of media with his readers.
Easy content sharing—starting with reblogging, retweeting, and the like—made it damagingly easy to fill the Internet with lowest-common-denominator content. I use the word "fill" there literally: there's a spatial quality to the Internet, especially once feeds are introduced. How much of your feed's infinite space is taken up by things that people were able and willing to share with the click of a single button? How much of that content wants to genuinely engage you, and how much of it only exists to be thoughtlessly reshared? The problem isn't with memes, or humor, or cat pictures, or whatever: it's that, in a space with ferociously little real estate, everything you see is taking up space that something else might have filled.
So pure content consumption is a fool's game. The only way to healthily consume content is to maintain some proportionality to what you're reading: spend only as much time consuming things online as those things are worth. Follow a handful of people on Bluesky, since tweets take barely any time at all. Read bloggers who write tersely, sparsely, and well: I think Paul Kafasis has mastered the art of writing just enough in every post to keep his material intriguing. And try not to watch much online video, but when you do, stick to people with a genuine sense of craft and who won't waste your time. (By which I mean, watch Jon Bois exclusively.)
But if we talk about video, we start to touch upon the latter half of my claim: the part where "content creation" is largely a miserable experience for everybody. The perfect online medium for video, in my opinion, was Vine, which only let you post 6 seconds' worth of video at a time. Vines were short enough that they pretty much couldn't waste your day: even Vine compilations are maybe 10-20 minutes long. It's hard to watch Vine for longer than that if you try. What's more, the short length forced creators to focus on their craft, while keeping the medium constrained enough that "craft" was not a daunting prospect. How do you best use the 6 seconds you've got? Even if you don't really know, at most you're only wasting 6 seconds of somebody else's life. It's perfect.
But even a space as constrained as Vine started to attract people who took content creation entirely too seriously. Logan and Jake Paul famously began dedicating elaborate film shoots to creating their 6 seconds of content: anything to ensure that their content would get seen. Nothing they did was as witty or clever or good as the stuff that online randos with good senses of humor managed to create, but they became famous enough to take their act on the proverbial road. And their process, which was excessive by Vine standards, became prohibitively difficult on mediums with longer-form videos, like TikTok and YouTube and Instagram. If success means the willingness to devote hours, days, weeks to creating five minutes of content, then success becomes all-but-inaccessible to most people. Participation becomes all-but-inaccessible. And the mechanics of content sharing guarantee that the Internet becomes a vicious cycle in which the few "success stories" rise to the top, and everybody else vanishes without a trace.
Any social media rooted in "rich" media—images, videos, and what-have-you—falls prey to this tendency. Instagram, which started as a medium for friends and interesting strangers to communicate wordlessly with one another, instead became synonymous with a bastardized flavor of "glamor" shoots, in which influencers endlessly obsess over outfits and backdrops and grotesque displays of wealth and "taste." Pinterest increasingly became less a space for hobbyists and enthusiasts and more an anxiety generator with endless overwhelming mandates for fashion and interior decoration. Even spaces like Etsy, which originally pandered to literal craftspeople and artisans, turned into a market for corporate brands mimicking an "artisanal" aesthetic. The cost of participation rises as algorithmic content recommendation ensures that it's a vicious fight just to get yourself seen at all.
The healthiest way to use social media is: use a site that doesn't use content-recommendation algorithms, follow a handful of friends and interesting people, and read and post sparsely. (And don't read people who post more-than-sparsely.) Even then, though, you're inevitably going to get caught up in the share economy: you'll either deal with people reblogging and retweeting or just interacting with each other's posts, or you'll get an endless stream of links to things posted off-site, meaning you'll still be caught up in the hideous "zeitgeist" that the algorithm-and-sharing-driven Internet has generated. Whether or not you directly use shitty social media sites, you'll be affected by other people's use of them. It's hard to get away.
One reason why Letterboxd, a movie-review site that's been around for ages, has seemingly grown more popular in the last five years is that it's rooted in participatory culture that's not inherently online. Yes, Letterboxd users care an inordinate lot about what other users think about various movies, but even that feels quaint, like a throwback to an easier and pettier era of Internet griping. The fact remains that Letterboxd participation requires you to watch actual movies, and to react to hours-long pieces of media that hundreds of people spend months of care and effort creating. The shittiest movie is nonetheless more thought-out than the most well-crafted "post." And movies, paradoxically, benefit from the same prohibitive cost-of-creation that participatory social media suffers from: it is far easier to crank out a mediocre piece of content masquerading as a "book" than it is to create an honest-to-goodness movie. BookTok and romantasy have replaced entire bookstores with the literary equivalent of slop; movies remain completely different beasts from online video, because the barrier to entry is so much higher. Even as film struggles as a medium—and film is certainly struggling—it has a quality and a dignity to it that makes Letterboxd, perversely, one of the most rewarding social networks to participate in.
I don't want to go too far in praising Letterboxd: I don't think it's especially good. But it's something, in a time when the vast majority of online interaction has been increasingly reduced to nothing. It's still possible to blog, of course, and to participate in a network of fellow bloggers who put care into what they write and who read each other's work. But that's an increasingly unpopular and unengaging medium, in part because it largely attracts limited demographics of people and fails to create a genuinely open social fabric. One of the promises of social media is that it connects people in ways that create new societies, by uniting them over their commonalities and giving them new ways to share their curiosities and enthusiasms and passions. And the modern era of social media has done that, in a sense. It's just that the culture it's created is largely dogshit. Even the people who participate in it acknowledge how horrible it is, and honestly? They don't know the half of it, because most of them don't have anything better to compare their horrors to.
An interesting question, and an interesting challenge, is this: what would a better social medium look like? How do you create a system that rewards genuine participation, by lowering the barrier to entry while simultaneously holding people to higher standards? How do you create a medium for consumption that offers people genuinely high-quality media to consume, where "high-quality" is partly defined by how effectively it encourages other people to stop passively consuming and genuinely take part? And how do you fight against that drive towards high-effort lowest-common-denominator content creation, where the shallowest and vainest people drown out everybody else, and where participants learn that the only meaningful flavor of content creation is narcissism and megalomania and paranoid self-obsession?
We need to find an answer to that question, because social media isn't going away. Our devices will continue to be with us at all times, they will continue to absorb us, they will continue to fight for every millisecond of our attention. The only way to fight that is to offer something better, and to ensure that our relationship to the digital world and to digital communities is a healthy and meaningful one. We're not even remotely there yet, but it's possible to get there. And the first step towards getting there is by accepting that the future of social media won't look anything like its present. Our current structures are inherently, unfixably unhealthy. Our task isn't to fix apps that are broken by design: it's to imagine what else is possible, even though all we know is what we've been forced to accept right now.
Using social media as a content consumer is about as miserable a waste of time as you can imagine. It turns social media into an entertainment medium, and it's not even a good one. The only thing it's "good" at is flipping the switches in your brain that make you keep going; the content itself is beyond sub-par.
The Internet is only valuable as a participatory medium, which is why people from the forum-posting era have such fond memories of forum posts. The moment you shift to reading and watching and nothing else, you're almost certainly wasting your time on something you'd enjoy less than all the other things you're capable of enjoying.
But the participatory nature of the Internet shifted with feeds, shares, and algorithms.
The crank in me felt in 2008, and still somewhat feels, like the Internet really started to go foul when we gained the ability to share each other's posts. Back when the only way to share content was through hyperlinking, there was a bit of a craft to content recommendation: if I wanted you to see something else I saw online, I had to persuade you to open a whole other website just to see what I was going on about. Bloggers like Jason Kottke and John Gruber made entire careers out of content curation; Kottke in particular almost never writes pieces of his own, and is famous only because he's dedicated literal decades to working out how to share an interesting blend of media with his readers.
Easy content sharing—starting with reblogging, retweeting, and the like—made it damagingly easy to fill the Internet with lowest-common-denominator content. I use the word "fill" there literally: there's a spatial quality to the Internet, especially once feeds are introduced. How much of your feed's infinite space is taken up by things that people were able and willing to share with the click of a single button? How much of that content wants to genuinely engage you, and how much of it only exists to be thoughtlessly reshared? The problem isn't with memes, or humor, or cat pictures, or whatever: it's that, in a space with ferociously little real estate, everything you see is taking up space that something else might have filled.
So pure content consumption is a fool's game. The only way to healthily consume content is to maintain some proportionality to what you're reading: spend only as much time consuming things online as those things are worth. Follow a handful of people on Bluesky, since tweets take barely any time at all. Read bloggers who write tersely, sparsely, and well: I think Paul Kafasis has mastered the art of writing just enough in every post to keep his material intriguing. And try not to watch much online video, but when you do, stick to people with a genuine sense of craft and who won't waste your time. (By which I mean, watch Jon Bois exclusively.)
But if we talk about video, we start to touch upon the latter half of my claim: the part where "content creation" is largely a miserable experience for everybody. The perfect online medium for video, in my opinion, was Vine, which only let you post 6 seconds' worth of video at a time. Vines were short enough that they pretty much couldn't waste your day: even Vine compilations are maybe 10-20 minutes long. It's hard to watch Vine for longer than that if you try. What's more, the short length forced creators to focus on their craft, while keeping the medium constrained enough that "craft" was not a daunting prospect. How do you best use the 6 seconds you've got? Even if you don't really know, at most you're only wasting 6 seconds of somebody else's life. It's perfect.
But even a space as constrained as Vine started to attract people who took content creation entirely too seriously. Logan and Jake Paul famously began dedicating elaborate film shoots to creating their 6 seconds of content: anything to ensure that their content would get seen. Nothing they did was as witty or clever or good as the stuff that online randos with good senses of humor managed to create, but they became famous enough to take their act on the proverbial road. And their process, which was excessive by Vine standards, became prohibitively difficult on mediums with longer-form videos, like TikTok and YouTube and Instagram. If success means the willingness to devote hours, days, weeks to creating five minutes of content, then success becomes all-but-inaccessible to most people. Participation becomes all-but-inaccessible. And the mechanics of content sharing guarantee that the Internet becomes a vicious cycle in which the few "success stories" rise to the top, and everybody else vanishes without a trace.
Any social media rooted in "rich" media—images, videos, and what-have-you—falls prey to this tendency. Instagram, which started as a medium for friends and interesting strangers to communicate wordlessly with one another, instead became synonymous with a bastardized flavor of "glamor" shoots, in which influencers endlessly obsess over outfits and backdrops and grotesque displays of wealth and "taste." Pinterest increasingly became less a space for hobbyists and enthusiasts and more an anxiety generator with endless overwhelming mandates for fashion and interior decoration. Even spaces like Etsy, which originally pandered to literal craftspeople and artisans, turned into a market for corporate brands mimicking an "artisanal" aesthetic. The cost of participation rises as algorithmic content recommendation ensures that it's a vicious fight just to get yourself seen at all.
The healthiest way to use social media is: use a site that doesn't use content-recommendation algorithms, follow a handful of friends and interesting people, and read and post sparsely. (And don't read people who post more-than-sparsely.) Even then, though, you're inevitably going to get caught up in the share economy: you'll either deal with people reblogging and retweeting or just interacting with each other's posts, or you'll get an endless stream of links to things posted off-site, meaning you'll still be caught up in the hideous "zeitgeist" that the algorithm-and-sharing-driven Internet has generated. Whether or not you directly use shitty social media sites, you'll be affected by other people's use of them. It's hard to get away.
One reason why Letterboxd, a movie-review site that's been around for ages, has seemingly grown more popular in the last five years is that it's rooted in participatory culture that's not inherently online. Yes, Letterboxd users care an inordinate lot about what other users think about various movies, but even that feels quaint, like a throwback to an easier and pettier era of Internet griping. The fact remains that Letterboxd participation requires you to watch actual movies, and to react to hours-long pieces of media that hundreds of people spend months of care and effort creating. The shittiest movie is nonetheless more thought-out than the most well-crafted "post." And movies, paradoxically, benefit from the same prohibitive cost-of-creation that participatory social media suffers from: it is far easier to crank out a mediocre piece of content masquerading as a "book" than it is to create an honest-to-goodness movie. BookTok and romantasy have replaced entire bookstores with the literary equivalent of slop; movies remain completely different beasts from online video, because the barrier to entry is so much higher. Even as film struggles as a medium—and film is certainly struggling—it has a quality and a dignity to it that makes Letterboxd, perversely, one of the most rewarding social networks to participate in.
I don't want to go too far in praising Letterboxd: I don't think it's especially good. But it's something, in a time when the vast majority of online interaction has been increasingly reduced to nothing. It's still possible to blog, of course, and to participate in a network of fellow bloggers who put care into what they write and who read each other's work. But that's an increasingly unpopular and unengaging medium, in part because it largely attracts limited demographics of people and fails to create a genuinely open social fabric. One of the promises of social media is that it connects people in ways that create new societies, by uniting them over their commonalities and giving them new ways to share their curiosities and enthusiasms and passions. And the modern era of social media has done that, in a sense. It's just that the culture it's created is largely dogshit. Even the people who participate in it acknowledge how horrible it is, and honestly? They don't know the half of it, because most of them don't have anything better to compare their horrors to.
An interesting question, and an interesting challenge, is this: what would a better social medium look like? How do you create a system that rewards genuine participation, by lowering the barrier to entry while simultaneously holding people to higher standards? How do you create a medium for consumption that offers people genuinely high-quality media to consume, where "high-quality" is partly defined by how effectively it encourages other people to stop passively consuming and genuinely take part? And how do you fight against that drive towards high-effort lowest-common-denominator content creation, where the shallowest and vainest people drown out everybody else, and where participants learn that the only meaningful flavor of content creation is narcissism and megalomania and paranoid self-obsession?
We need to find an answer to that question, because social media isn't going away. Our devices will continue to be with us at all times, they will continue to absorb us, they will continue to fight for every millisecond of our attention. The only way to fight that is to offer something better, and to ensure that our relationship to the digital world and to digital communities is a healthy and meaningful one. We're not even remotely there yet, but it's possible to get there. And the first step towards getting there is by accepting that the future of social media won't look anything like its present. Our current structures are inherently, unfixably unhealthy. Our task isn't to fix apps that are broken by design: it's to imagine what else is possible, even though all we know is what we've been forced to accept right now.