Post-Social Media

The social media industry is a wretched group. It is not merely antisocial; it is the inventor of a new form of media that is social only in name. Lacking a better phrase to describe this nascent form of entertainment, I would like to propose the term post-social media for what we have today: content that is parasocial by nature, yet appears to be social for vestigial reasons.

The Last Decade

The year this transition definitively began, in my memory, was in about 2016. This was roughly the pivotal point where social media driven events became almost more real than real life, especially in the realm of politics. It also marked the start of what I would consider the tipping point towards post-social media: the algorithmic feed¹.

Before this point, social media served a clear purpose compared to other forms of media: you go onto social media to see content made by your friends, family, and acquaintances. Maybe you’d follow some famous celebrity or organization, but that was a rarity and definitely not why you joined in the first place. It was inherently social and a compliment to real-life relationships, which is a good thing. Fundamentally, this design was bad for capturing viewer attention because your friend’s lives are not so interesting as to keep you glued to your phone for hours, which doomed it to be abandoned as the companies grew.

To reach profitability, the users were going to need to see a lot more ads, which required showing them more attention-grabbing content and more of it than their friends were making. By recommending you content from people you don’t already follow based on what things you interacted with amongst your circle and rewarding successful content, the market for content creators began to form. Hobbyists making videos and posts became increasingly serious, and as these algorithms only further rewarded their behavior, they specialized and grew in size. Social media became increasingly centered around this parasocial experience of watching content creators over the social experience of seeing content from people you know.

Of course, this transition wasn’t completely clean; all the social media platforms let you do something akin to what Facebook was designed for in the early 2010s. You can still just follow your friends and see only their content if you so please, but every design feature on these platforms pushes you away from that path. The social features remain only to maintain the illusion that the companies have the same loosely positive intentions of “bringing people together” that they started with.

This brings us to the post-social media of today, where the platforms are all about serving you content from a class of professional content creators, to be consumed in a highly personalized feed tailored to you, with the content from your friends taking a backseat to that of strangers.

The Next Decade

There was such concern a decade ago about social media consuming real life and making the connection between people deeply invasive. Fortunately, this did not come to pass because everyone ended up scrolling in some deep tailor-made rabbit holes, which just trades one bad problem for another. Worse yet, there doesn’t seem to be a viable path to profitability for any social media business that permanently rejects evolving into a post-social media company. Bluesky is an extremely instructive example: it teaches us that the medium of social media is what breeds all the isolation and toxicity, not the people², and that heading down the road to avoid becoming post-social media will only get you there faster.

In the future, there will likely be fewer of these now-useless social features. TikTok or Xiaohongshu are there right now: you can follow content creators, but you probably aren’t going to follow your real-life friends on there. Individuals will stop posting, and the small content creator class will produce more output for an increasingly silent audience.

Any form of real relationships will occur in increasingly private spaces. iMessage chats, Discord servers, and Telegram channels are where most interpersonal connection will take place this decade since post-social media requires making the UX for “talking to friends” increasingly hostile.

Since there are only so many people to fill so many niches, and subcultures nest fractally, as I see it, there is no future in which AI content doesn’t become a major component of, if not a wholesale replacement for, most people’s content feeds on social media. This sounds outlandish now because LLM inference is expensive and AI content is largely unpopular, but I think these are both problems that will vanish with the passage of time (compute cheapens and exposure pacifies). At some point, it will be cheaper to generate endless videos for some niche that makes them happy than it will be to pay content creators to generate it, and that will mark the tipping point where human content makes up a minority of total feed items.

An Endgame?

The most ironic part about post-social media is the popular opinion of it. Not a single heavy post-social media user is able to deny that the consumption of their infinite feeds of choice is absolutely psychologically harmful these days, and yet almost none of them are actually able to drop doomscrolling³. (I myself have been extremely guilty of this in the past!)

It reminds me a lot of The Entertainment from Infinite Jest. In the book, The Entertainment is a film so addictive that viewers lose interest in anything other than watching it; then, they die. Post-social media usage is an addiction with no realistic path to be prohibited, no treatment that scales, no competitors, and might kill you in the sense that you stop living meaningfully.

Please consider deleting your account or committing to using the platforms for their social functions only.