The Last Days Of Social Media

James O'Sullivan has a banger of an editorial on the "late attention economy", including this bit illustrating the various platforms' pivot from active participation to passive absorption:

While content proliferates, engagement is evaporating. Average interaction rates across major platforms are declining fast: Facebook and X posts now scrape an average 0.15% engagement, while Instagram has dropped 24% year-on-year. Even TikTok has begun to plateau. People aren't connecting or conversing on social media like they used to; they're just wading through slop, that is, low-effort, low-quality content produced at scale, often with AI, for engagement.

I'm grateful to be living a timeline-free life for the most part, but on the rare occasion I log in and catch myself scrolling, this haunting characterization resonates:

The timeline is no longer a source of information or social presence, but more of a mood-regulation device, endlessly replenishing itself with just enough novelty to suppress the anxiety of stopping. Scrolling has become a form of ambient dissociation, half-conscious, half-compulsive, closer to scratching an itch than seeking anything in particular. People know the feed is fake, they just don't care.

I suspect many of you reading this continue to use social media apps because you were around back when they were social networking apps and are having a hard time accepting the fact that isn't what they are anymore. Likewise, many businesses are still earnestly crafting useful blog posts, only to optimize them for search engines and social platforms that will only ignore them—they should probably figure out a new racket, too.