This year, and I mean This Year, a lot of social media companies, unhappy with merely not capsizing and deflating and disappearing, are going through the unprecendented step of making themselves nuisances. From disenfranchising userbases to creating nonsense features that do nothing, to removing the publically-visible metrics that made their platforms interesting (before algorithms built digital cages so impenetrable that you need an anonymous browser to get anything useful out of them), to making themselves User Only Content, and more—the lions of yesteryear are shittier than ever, and less likely than ever to be replaced with better platforms. Let's face it: all your faved social media channels are going to hell.
Based Twitter
Twitter is throwing notifications about what other users are liking out as if they were the free money posts by famous/rich people that Cash App is using to create a user base, or political tweets that are as inane as they are frequent. #STFU much? This platform is drunk on pointless notifications, which break the experience for users when they go viral which is hilarious, and it takes a good week of weeding to get rid of most of them.
There seems to be a discrepancy where they're plaguing newer users with newer headaches, since only one of my accounts is notifying me about what Jim From Accounting liked two days ago and the other never sends me a notification at all: as the Twitter Gods intended. The fun part is when you tell Twitter you want to see less of this feature, CEO Jack Dorsey pins up your profile picture on his office wall and throws piss darts at it while cackling maniacally, and the notifications go on as if nothing has changed.
Going to settings to change this? Sorry. It's a proprietary feature that you're going to have to live with. Instead of notifications notifying you about something useful, this is now the cyber dystopia where that little number will cease to mean that 1 out of 10,000 people has actually meaninglessly liked your tweet. Instead, that little number will now alert you to what Brand Company interacted with User. Cool. Just tweet it.
And you have no choice, and it's dumb and pointless, but it might channel you and other users into mindlessly creating viral content and higher like counts that can be leveraged by squares, advertisers, and other lackeys of unfreedom. The sponsored tweets are a hotbed of unthinkable ad calls, influencer garbage, and purestrain trash so forgettable I didn't screenshot any of it.
Instant Gram
Instagram is recommending posts you like, making the already compromised timeline an absolute disaster. Compromised? You ask. Well, they took away the most useful feature of any timeline, which is using time as the criteria for what is displayed. Bye-bye chronology, we won't need you where we're going. So you might as well call it... a main page? Where you'll often see the same thing, by glitch, hitch, or intent.
The algorithms on IG are so powerful that you can easily be caged in a cramped little circle of content. So: your timeline won't show what your actual contacts post when they post it, and your larger feed won't show you anything outside of the #contentstrings that you've pinged. One acquaintance got locked into a Tik Tok death spiral for months before he got put on muscle-bound women through pure chicanery. The infinite scroll is full of endlessly-reposted content to the point where subtly-repurposed recycled content is actually surprising, and probably the only fun way to use the platform.
The worst thing IG did was make their desktop-accessible (read: anonymously-browsable) website log-in only. Why? Because of the next entry:
Face Booked
Facebook has for years refused to let you see a chronological timeline, simply out of spite. You can change it, but they'll tell you they're going to change it back to their nonsense version. Why? Algorithms. For a while they were also recommending content, and friends, which was pointless. We all know that Facebook is one of the biggest villains in the digital world due to their well-documented dalliances with dystopian digital dastards. They've made the world a worse place with each acquisition, to say nothing of the political poltroonery they've enabled across the world.
Facebook repeatedly tries to get me to divulge to them my phone number, which they probably know somehow anyway, but of course need me to give to them in order to legally misuse it. Still, as far as platforms go, this demonized dystopic wasteland has many uses, from staying in touch with friends to using a marketplace to see who's selling used iPhones near you.
Snapchat: RIP?
Snapchat is stagnating but making its interface worse for no reason but to tell stockholders and investors that change is on the horizon. Then they'll back off a little from it, but still keep the interface shitty. Instagram stole many of the things that made Snapchat unique, but they'll never be able to steal how Snapchat isn't owned by Facebook. Hopefully, as that would be the final nail in the coffin.
What's up with Pinterest?
Pinterest seems the only refuge because it's so vague and kind of meaningless, almost like a dunk into the old pre-algo ages, but nobody knows a damn thing about the mysterious ways of the Pinterest platform and it can't be used to talk to your friends or annoy strangers effectively. One thing Pinterest will do is endlessly plague you with email notifications and inspiration emails and... listen up, Pinterest: people seek inspiration ON your platform. There is no Pinterest Lifestyle you can market through emails. There is almost no reason to use it since it's almost entirely made of repurposed, infinitely-recycled content. I don't get it, and I never did understand it, but it's the least offensive place in the big 10.
LinkedIn, oh LinkedIn
LinkedIn sucks for so many reasons I don't want to go through right now. Professional networking is fun! say the dummies. Most of the content and interaction I see on LinkedIn is remarkably self-promotional, vapid, or just puzzling. It's truly a wasteland unless you become a power user and track down that professional who wants to actually discuss things seriously, and may actually offer you something important like advice or a job. 90% of people I've met or worked with keep up a front of using this platform, and 5% of those seem like they actually get anything out of it. The rest is just Keeping Up With the Pros/Faking It Till You Make It/Stupid Headshots of Ugly People. I've abandoned it for years so far, and I'm sure that I've missed out on Really Shitty Jobs in Dead-Zone Offices with Creepy Mannequin Persons.
If Microsoft hadn't acquired it, we might have been blessed with a LinkedIn-less world right now. Still, leave it to the masters of acquisition to capture this wonderful property and make it worse immediately, in terms of usability, paywall-gating, and even interface.
A Dispirited Conclusion
And finally, the biggest social media network of all, Real Life, is increasingly torn between all its competitors in an unreal struggle that makes everyone feel sad, anxious, and insufficient all the damn time. But if you have 3 to 12 friends, it's bearable. You just have to negotiate everyone's prejudices carefully, saying enough to be interesting but not so much that you create frisson.
Why is this happening? Some say we're getting close to a truly dystopian era that will make the 2000s/2010s seem like a lark, but these people assume dystopias skip a decade and that the 2010s haven't been remarkably oppressive, so I'm not sure they're right. The real question is: what kind of nightmares can we expect in the 2020s? How many of our settings will we have to change? Which will even matter?
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