A Digital Enablement Analysis of Why Social Media Sucks
Time to escape
I had originally scheduled this post to go live in 2 weeks but one must follow what you feel and I feel given what’s going on in the world, this feels like it should go out today.
I want to shout out the wonderful Molly White (crypto critic and generally awesome blogger) for introducing the concept of “POSSE”, Post On Own Site, Selectively Share Elsewhere.
Maybe it’s emblematic of my age or just the general shittiness of every social media platform but I find myself longing for the days prior to social media.
I’m going to challenge all of us to start extracting ourselves from these awful social media platforms.
Social media, Meta and X in particular, make us miserable, sell us to the highest bidder, dominate the internet and are now trying to dominate our government.
One point Molly makes is that the old internet never left. We just stopped using it.
Our options are
Run our own sites, share content on those social platforms if you want to. Have a newsletter, share via email or text. Declare your independence, you might share to these platforms but they don't own you.
Dump the big platforms and move to social media with more freedom. Reddit is clearly less terrible, as an example. Meta and X are some of the worst offenders about feeding you crud, Reddit and Bluesky let you curate your own crud.
Leave it all entirely and throw your phone in the ocean
Personally, 3 sounds exciting but impractical, I don’t even live that close to the ocean.
But seriously, stop letting them dominate us. They’re not for everyone, they’re for themselves and we’re all for sale.
Anyway, on with my original post.
Let’s start with the customer/problem/solution framework of building digital solutions for social media.
I’m actually going to do this thinking of X, where Elon Musk says he wants to create a “digital town square”.
Customer: Humans With An Internet Connection.
Problem: People want to post their thoughts, spend their bored time scrolling, and connect with other people
Solution: Elon Musk says that the solution is X, the everything app!
X definitely solves the problem of posting. You can even get paid to post your thoughts.
X also solves the problem of spending your bored time scrolling.
So, X does accomplish 2 of their goals.
The third goal, connecting with people, I believe X fails at on a colossal scale.
X pays people to post, not by the quality of post but whether people like/reshare/comment on the post. The implicit assumption is that if people interact with the post it must be good. Instead it actually incentivizes being outrageous or provocative and, this is important, being provocative to drive engagement may have nothing to do with what you actually feel or believe.
Additionally, X allows people to operate under pseudonyms. There’s no accountability to anything you say, positively or negatively.
Finally, social media and X have very little in common with how people actually interact. When I talk to my partner, I have to pick up on social cues and body language, I listen for tone to interpret meaning, I have other means of communication like physical touch to communicate.
On X, the written word is detached from any of the beautiful nuanced things that allow people to connect deeply with other real humans.
X isn’t the town square, it’s an illusion of human connection.
Let me fix their problem statement….
Problem: People want to post their thoughts, spend their bored time scrolling and meet other people
X is a great space for an initial connection. It’s a weak tie, a beginning, a first date.
The problem is that to have real connections, a real town square, these online conversations have to move offline, to see other people’s faces and experience the depth of human connection that has existed for millennia.
Good social media should help to connect you with others you may not have met otherwise. Once you’ve connected you could transition those connections to in-person.
Social media and X make no effort to bring online communities offline.
My suspicion as to why they make no effort to connect their users offline is that social media users aren’t the customer they’re the product.
Instead, I believe the social media companies have the following as their customer/problem/solution matrix.
Customer: Companies with advertising money to spend
Problem: In an increasingly diffuse media environment, it’s hard to find good places to deploy advertising dollars targeted at your customers
Solution: Create an online space where people will share information about themselves and their interests so that companies can micro target effectively with their advertisements.
Now, that, social media does very well.