I quite enjoyed Nate Silver’s recent Substack post “Social media has become a freak show” (curiously, the title element of the page is “Social media is turning into a freak show”—I think the transformation has already occurred).
Nate Silver is still a Twitter power user, and yet even he acknowledges the increasing uselessness of Twitter for driving traffic to his newsletter or even just providing a forum for thoughtful engagement. I myself abandoned the platform a few years ago, having seen the direction it was heading under Elon Musk. My impression is that the utility of Twitter in most domains is asymptotically approaching zero, with a handful of exceptions (I will occasionally lurk for AI news, as the discussion is still robust, if polluted with a ton of low-quality bot or bot-like replies).
The rest of the social media ecosystem isn’t much better. Bluesky has declining engagement, probably because it has replicated Twitter’s old schoolyard dynamics on steroids. Facebook hasn’t been relevant for years, and I have no idea what it’s even for anymore if not connecting with your friends (I haven’t had an account in many years). Instagram might still be fun, though I have no idea because I’ve never used it. But it’s certainly not a place where “the discourse” happens.
A few weeks ago, I used the term “social media age” and a friend corrected me, observing we were actually in the post-social media age. This feels right. The crack-up of Twitter means that no single platform is able to determine consensus reality anymore—the platforms are either siloed (Twitter, Blueksy), frivolous (Instagram, TikTok), or irrelevant (Facebook, Threads). The centralized discourse machine has fragmented and is now spread over countless group chats, newsletters, podcasts, and Discord channels.
The reaction to Silver’s article on Twitter itself has been amusing, like this post from Silver and the wounded reply from the platform’s head of product:
