Social Media Is Getting Better by Falling Apart
Posting online has gotten weird. Twitter is X; TikTok’s fate remains uncertain; and upstart platforms such as Bluesky are growing. The future of social media may be less like the old Facebook and more like e-mail. Plus:
• How Trump’s tariffs fit the autocrat’s playbook
• The Brazilian judge taking on the digital far right
• Regrets? YouTube moms have a few
Social Media Is Getting Better by Falling Apart
Kyle Chayka
Chayka writes about technology and internet culture.
At the start of 2020, mainstream social media in the United States appeared quite monolithic. Like apex predators, a handful of social networks had won out: Facebook and Instagram were on top, followed by Twitter, Snapchat, and Pinterest. Then the pandemic drove more people deeper into the internet than they ever had gone before. They launched Discord chats, watched live streams on Twitch, and mainlined videos of influencers dancing on TikTok, which became the fastest-growing social network in history. Threatened, Meta turned its social networks into wan copies of TikTok. In 2022, Elon Musk acquired Twitter and remade it as X, where its influential real-time discussion fell apart. Other companies rushed to build clones to attract fleeing users.
The very idea of social media—that we should all be broadcasting online the minutiae of our lives for public consumption—has come to seem slightly absurd. Social media as we once knew it has fractured. But deconstruction can be a healthy process. New possibilities are emerging everywhere, disrupting the old monoculture and offering different ways of being online. Some people talk with A.I. chatbots on Character.ai more regularly than they speak with their human pals, and Reddit has been reinvigorated as an avowedly human community. Friends congregate on text-message threads more often than Facebook.
Bluesky, which I write about in the magazine this week, is part of that process. It is a strong alternative to X, so if you still feel driven to post fragments of text online in a kind of running global group chat you can do it there. But Bluesky also has a deeper purpose: to decentralize social media, giving power back to individual users. It’s built atop a data architecture that allows you to take your account and online relationships to a different social network, without having to rebuild from scratch. Thus, the tech companies and their executives can no longer dictate how users behave.
I still use plenty of social networks, probably too many and too often. I get hypnotized by TikTok. I click through to recommended Threads posts on Instagram. I post on X and Bluesky, but far less frequently than I once did on the original Twitter. That kind of culture is simply gone. I’m not convinced that we will ever again see the same kind of monolithic platform arise to serve billions of people all over the world at once, shuffling their attention through the same set of funnels and filters—in part because its consequences have proved so stultifying, if not outright disastrous. The future of social media might be more like e-mail, supporting our communication without dominating or dictating it. That way, you’ll never have to contend with another Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk.
Read Chayka on Bluesky »
For more: Chayka considers TikTok and the retreat from tech globalization. His Infinite Scroll column publishes on Wednesdays.
The National Magazine Awards
The New Yorker won three National Magazine Awards today. In the Reviews and Criticism category, the prize went to a trio of pieces by the former staff writer Parul Sehgal about divorce, medical uncertainty, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. See our other award winners, in the categories of Photography and Video, below.
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P.S. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, accused many in the media of having failed to consider the “art of the deal” amid the President’s tariff flip-flop this week. The ghostwriter of Donald Trump’s 1987 memoir of the same name regrets his role in creating that mythology.
Caroline Mimbs Nyce contributed to this edition.
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