Twitter is widely mocked as a cesspool of conversation. Facebook is seen as antiquated. Instagram and TikTok are the current darlings but they seem to have less of an iron grip than the OG social networks.
The future is probably not another winner-take-all network. We’ve tried enough of those. The future is probably smaller networks where users self-select into them based on affiliations, much like web forums.
Do I look at it daily? Yes, I do. But I'd say that 95% of the content I see on it is junk, very few of my peers are posting their lives on there.
As for blue-line Facebook, it's so slow it's borderline unusable. I'm not sure what happened (ReactJS maybe?), but the performance is a fraction of what it was ten years ago.
> The future is probably smaller networks where users self-select into them based on affiliations, much like web forums.
Yeah it's like everyone got drunk on connection and is slowly rediscovering peace in disconnecting. I'd wager you're right about this.
> very few of my peers are posting their lives on there
Yes, this is not a great sign for IG. It is still relevant in that people click the icon everyday, but it seems to be slipping.
Also, you say that "As long as I and my family are not zombies", but every single one of my friends and family with kids age 10 and up are genuinely pretty terrified about the potential impact of social media on their kids: "I feel so lucky I didn't have to deal with this when I was growing up" is a common refrain I hear. And yes, all these parents try to teach their kids about the pitfalls of social media, but they know they can't just can it, so it's a huge, largely negative influence that they feel limited power to fight against.
But I agree with idea that internet became dumber with more people in.
Certainly not in any way that mattered, and I say this as someone who spent the middle part of my career specifically on mobile.
I mean, sure, there was stuff like WAP, and some other niche phones that could (very, very clunkily) display full HTML. But the launch of the iPhone is what first brought the mobile Internet to the masses (and pretty much all smartphones after the iPhone aped the basic design), and most importantly, was the beginning of the change where websites started even giving a shit about mobile clients ("Mobile first" design and all that).
Nowhere! Social media brought out the true character of people; most (many?) of us are negative species, mix that along with bad people.
The primary issues are a combination of nature vs nurture. The age of argument, the solution has always been some combination of both.
But when you look at our western society over the past 60 years or so, you see that -fundamentally- the nurture part of the equation is being heavily influenced by capitalistic forces. For example, news used to be once a day, then 3 times a day, now 24/7/365. There isn't more news now than 100 years ago, so how do you feel all that time and how do you keep someone engaged? (If you have been paying attention, you know the answer is selling fear, sex, violence, and other negative emotions are traits of the human species.)
But really, the easiest way to counter this toxic mindset was said best by mister Rodgers: just look for the helpers. Look for the guys running into the fray when everyone else runs away... Those people are just as human as you or me... They are the true character of the human species. For we are a communal species that depends on one another, we always have, we aren't a bad species... We are just letting our man made systems bring out the worst.
If we have to look to find them, are they really the "true" character? I'm sure if we look hard enough we could find a polite polar bear, but is that a "true" polar bear?
So, I agree with your point, and I also agree that there isn't enough news to fill 24/7 coverage... but there is definitely more news, or at least more news that may be of interest to any given audience, than 100 years ago because we live in a more globally connected society where issues in another country can absolutely have direct impact on us because manufacturing/materials sourcing became something that now happens on a more global scale.
Then came for-profits that agressively monetised every single bad habit one might imagine online and got us where we are today. Knowledge is still at the fingertips, but so many of us are now short-attention-span information-holics and instant gratification addicts.
We imagined brave new world, but became an equivalent of chain smoking addicts trying to break out of their habit in a world where everyone else also smokes.
Wow that's so true... we totally didn't see the social media dystopia we're living in today coming. We imagined a world where everyone has all the world knowledge available at their fingertips would be wonderful. How wrong were we.