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Why Reddit Is Destined to Turn to Crap
(www.motherjones.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Great read, thank you for sharing. I know it’s about Reddit, but I’m going to indulge a digression inspired by the article. One of the questions that’s been rattling around in my head ever since I wandered back onto Facebook in December after a 2.5-year hiatus: when is a social media platform “dead”?
My Facebook feed feels like it’s in its death throes, with a handful of hearty souls occasionally posting their own thoughts or pictures or jokes, and like two fun communities that are reasonably active, while the overwhelming majority of content in my feed (other than ads and promoted reels and whatever) is friends of mine simply sharing screenshots from Tumblr/Twitter/Reddit without commentary.
I understand that my feed, full of people and organizations I voluntarily friended over the last…oh god…19 years (?!) isn’t necessarily representative of Facebook as a whole. But it seems like the enshittification, the erosion of Facebook’s most basic utilities—it’s not even good at event planning or photo sharing anymore; it was way better at both of those things in 2012—disincentives using the platform for anything beyond the most anodyne resharing of other peoples’ hot takes culled from other platforms.
Is Facebook dead? It seems like it sucks for promoting/advertising small local businesses, which was one thing it seemed pretty good at ~10 years ago. It sure isn’t good for keeping tabs on your actual friends, and hasn’t worked well at that in a long time. So what does it do? What’s Facebook for in 2023?
(Bigger question for me personally is when to leave it for real, and if I’ll ever have the courage to actually deactivate when, for better or for worse, Facebook efficiently captured a huge majority of my contacts between 2010 and 2015, and I feel a certain amount of anxiety about walking away from that entirely.)
The only reason I keep FB around at this point is that's honestly the only way I have to contact a certain sub-section of people. The messenger app is the only real reason, that and FB is the new Classmates.com lol
ETA: I believe FB is dead in terms of what it once was. My GenZ teenagers seem to think so, and honestly so does almost everyone else I regularly actually interact with. What really killed it in my eyes is when they began targeting what showed up in your feed, instead of the old default "all, newest first". And over time it became harder and harder to find how to do "all, newest first". Once that happened, it was inevitable it would become the violently divided echo chamber it is today.
Exactly. I should use this moment to reflect on how many Facebook “friends” are “must have” folks I should put effort into keeping in touch with outside of FB, and then I should…do that.
But one thing I admit would be tough would be giving up on the possibility (more of a fantasy at this point) of popping into FB for a feeling…for of a general sense of what folks I know are up to. Where they are, what they’re enjoying, what they’re struggling with, etc. Do I need to know how my middle school acquaintance’s cancer treatment is going? Do I need to see pictures of a former coworkers’ dogs frolicking at doggie daycare? Well, no; I maintain my circle of close friends and family without Facebook and can continue to do so. But there was a time FB seemed to provide a sense of being at least casually plugged into a wider community of acquaintances and more distant relatives that I liked and enjoyed. I don’t think we’re ever really going to get that back.
Maybe losing that peculiar late-00s-early-teens sense of a network of real people you kinda care about even if you’re not close is a good thing. Maybe Facebook only ever provided a false sense of community that made us over-invested in near-strangers’ dramas; maybe it pulled us away from face-to-face community building with our actual neighbors. I dunno! Regardless, I’m reluctant to discard it entirely if only because I’m pretty sure we’ll never again see a mass “(almost) everyone is going to gather on this one platform, under their real names, and be at least somewhat reachable through it.”
@Suedeltica So, I've been around for what is turning out to be a long time now, and I can tell you that pre-web-based internet, I used to BBS a lot. And the fun thing there was we were online with people within our long-distance calling range basically. So we had that early sense of online community, but with people we eventually ended up meeting up with in real life once we got old enough to drive and be unsupervised and stuff. And the BBS's are long, LONG gone now, but these are some of the people I'm actually RL closest with to this day. So I guess I'm saying, yeah, the networks they come and go, and the people come and go too, but we do end up keeping the ones who really matter. FB isn't the first to disappear, and it won't be the last. The world changes so much, and there will be something new eventually. There always is.