Social media has become antisocial — here’s how to save it

Why is it so hard to make friends online? It’s perhaps a strange question to ask: most of us aren’t u sed to interacting closely with strangers on the internet. But we spend hours of our time each day browsing the web, often in sites specifically labelled as “social media”. How much social are we getting out of it? I believe the factors that make social media addictive and toxic are also keeping us disconnected from other people and making it harder to genuinely get to know new people online. It’s a story of prioritising content and scale over people, weaponised by ground-breaking algorithms and psychological tricks to keep us hooked on the feed. Let us begin.

It wasn’t always like this. The early web was dominated by small, independent websites and blogs, linked together using hyperlinks. That’s where the phrase “surfing the web” originates from — exploring the internet by moving through hyperlinks. You can think of the early internet as a group of low-density villages, each with their own diverse content and users, linked to each other though hyperlinks. It all started to change soon. Search engines like Google mapped the cyberspace using crawlers, while aggregation of users into specific sites caused them to grow ever faster. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit grew from villages into megalopolises unheard of in the offline world. They used their dominance in user attention and data to build walls high and mighty around their empire, both to keep disruptors out and to keep their users in, hooked to their content. The rise of the aggregators corresponded with a decline in independent forums and blogs. If you’re an aspiring writer or game developer, why pay for your own infrastructure and user acquisition when you can set up shop in Redditopia or Twittopolis for free (there’s a reason this post is hosted on Medium). We no longer surf. We browse.

In mainstream social media, everything is built around growth. Growth in active users, session lengths, likes and subscriptions, nothing will ever be enough. The networks themselves need to show ever more ads and gather ever more data to stay ahead of their competitors, and users must keep their audience active and engaged to keep ahead of the algorithms. Drive more users to the platform and your posts will be promoted by the gracious algorithmic gods. Stay still and face eternal damnation at the bottom of the feed. You. Must. Keep. Running.

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