Social Media Fails

Newsletter 2023-12-14

Social media has gone downhill lately. The main problem is everything. This isn’t one of those articles where I rant about how things used to be better back in my day. Social media has only existed in my day so the good and the bad were all in the same era. It seems unbelievable to me now that there was a part of my life when Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram weren’t a thing. Then again, I didn’t have internet in my house until I was in eighth grade and didn’t own a cell phone until after I graduated from college. When I tell my grandkids that story, they’ll think I grew up hunting woolly mammoths. Whatever its original purpose, these days, social media exists mostly to raise my blood pressure. I mainly see posts from accounts I don’t follow expressing views I don’t agree with using slang terms that seem scientifically designed to annoy me. The agitation makes me stick around because, deep down, I must enjoy being miserable. That gives the targeted ads more time to read my mind and try to sell me things I’ve thought about buying but never searched for online or spoken about out loud. That’s how I ended up with a thousand-pack of tiny umbrellas to make all my drinks fancier. Only God can judge me. All of this combines to make social media worse than it’s ever been before. That’s not to say the decline has been equal across all platforms. As someone with a larger internet audience than I deserve, I’m uniquely positioned to experience their individual awfulness in ways you might never notice if you have a life outside your screen. I envy all of you normal, well adjusted people. For everybody curious what things are like on the other side, here’s how the big three are falling apart.