Editor’s note: WRAL TechWire contributing writer Jen McFarland has 20+ years working in IT with experiences across a range of tools and technologies. She wants to help small businesses and teams design, improve, and maintain the technology that helps them succeed. In 2022, she incorporated Marit Digital.
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RALEIGH – If you’re a TechWire reader you’re probably someone who is at least moderately aware of social media. And you’re probably wondering what’s going on.
Perhaps you’re not following every iteration of web 2.0 so the breadth of the dysfunction isn’t clear. Let’s recap.
- Twitter, which has always struggled with how to make money, has found ever more creative and confounding ways to discourage users and investors since its takeover last fall by Elon Musk.
- Reddit, once the space for building online communities is now actively antagonizing its community.
- TikTok is being banned in more states and countries every day.
- Zuckerberg and Meta have thrown their interests into Threads, the new Twitter-like public conversation app, which might just be Zuck trying to antagonize Musk ahead of their proposed cage match.
There are lots of reasons for the upheaval. Both Reddit and Twitter are looking for justification for high valuations – Twitter after Musk overpaid for the company last fall, and Reddit ahead of a planned IPO later this year. These have been hard to come by for social media companies that frequently have business models with shaky income sources. The tightening of the economy, particularly the tech sector, has led to layoffs requiring the “do more with less” mentality. Meanwhile, lawsuits against social media services are becoming more prevalent, as are laws restricting tool usage and trying to impose age restrictions.
On top of that, the social media community has not been immune to the impacts of AI. As the tools become more popular details have emerged about how the technology has evolved to this point. It turns out models have been trained by reading the internet – meaning a lot of social media posts. The recent changes to Twitter and Reddit rules for access both clearly point to a desire to restrict future scraping of mass amounts of content.
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What does that mean for you?
First, let’s accept that social media companies haven’t been looking out for our best interests for a while. While Zuckerburg might seem like a savior for delivering a Twitter alternative that’s so desperately needed can we all agree that his aims are not wholly altruistic? As a reminder, he and Meta have a rough track record on user data and privacy. Meanwhile, many social tools that have traditionally been less profit-motivated have now learned that they made a grave mistake by leaving all their juicy content out there for any old bot to learn off. It’s not that Reddit and Twitter don’t want us to use their services anymore, they just want to make sure they can sell it when we do.
Second, all these changes in social media services have also led to an influx of new social options. Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Mastodon and Bluesky. Keep it up if you knew Tumblr was still a thing. People are trying out new and old tools in place of what has been standard for years. We’re moving from a few big services: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, which housed everything to a bunch of smaller, more focused tools depending on what we like, and where our friends have landed.
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This might seem annoying, and depending on the quality of your password manager (you DO have a password manager, right??) it may well be. But there’s also a potential bright light in the form of “the Fediverse”, formerly ActivityPub. The Fediverse concept is a single open protocol for sharing social media content across many platforms.
Consider: you have an account in one social tool, and connect with a new one. Your contacts and content flow between the services or maybe appear in a separate tool that aggregates all your social accounts. Suddenly things are back in one place, but you’re no longer relying on a narcissistic billionaire to not blow up the platform. Now you can check on your grandma’s posts about her weekly Bingo game and watch a live chat of an NHL game in the same place. Isn’t this what social media was always supposed to be?
A Social Alternative
Let me end with a final thought. Instead of rebuilding social media, maybe we could all just skip it for a while. Let the AI models rely on scientific journals instead of incendiary Reddit posts for their next round of training. Skip the rantings of this celebrity or that politician and instead open a book. Maybe check out a neighborhood meet-up instead of watching a Tik Tok video that has clearly been edited to make you think you can cook risotto from scratch in the microwave.
Although, geez that risotto looks good. Maybe I just did it wrong the first time…
