Social media is dead

When the original iPhone was released in the late 2000s it felt so far removed from my reality living in Latin America at the time. I was working full-time and going to my college courses at night and weekends in order to complete my CS degree. Back at the time the idea of having a fully capable browser in our pockets was still alien to most of us.

It wouldn't be until 2010 when I was able to save enough to buy myself an iPhone 3GS. It is primitive and severely outdated by any standard today but back in the day it was definitely something else. There were many devices that had at least some sort of web and email capabilities many years prior but those were aimed at corporate environments and were definitely not intended for the masses. The iPhone on the other hand was intended to bring all of this convenience to everyone, myself included.

The app landscape back then was nowhere near the vast selection we have these days. A good chunk of our time is spent these days navigating our social media, but back then social media was completely different to what we have today. In Latin America the biggest social sites (not even apps, sites) at the time were Hi5 and Facebook to some degree.

Around that time I discovered Twitter almost by accident. It was not popular and most of the big accounts to follow were for all intents and purposes for the United States and consumed mostly in English. You could either navigate to the website, or you could buy a third-party app like Tweety on iPhone to get the full mobile experience. And that was just the thing, you could navigate to the website using the iPhone's web browser but the whole experience was subpar, it left you feeling that something didn't translate and you get this lobotomized version on your mobile browser.

I caved in and Tweety was just a joy to use. You could just use your fingers to scroll through your timeline (no algorithm BS) and gestures to access other features like retweet or reply. It felt like we peaked as species and nothing could top that.

Social media was different

Now that I have presented you with my 300-word preface, let's talk about what has been in my mind for a while now and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Social media feels different, isn't it? There was a time when social media felt like a true outlet to let ourselves share whatever we felt like. It was a rare glimpse into the oftentimes raw nature of those using it. There was an incentive to go into social media and truly see what others were saying and sharing without any of the noise and crafted algorithm recommendations. I miss those days.

Look, I'm not going to play dumb and pretend that social media just spontaneously materialized out of thin air. There was an army of engineers working behind scenes to develop, deploy and maintain such services and let's not fool ourselves, that's expensive. During those first years there sure was a struggle to figure out how to monetize all those daily users and that eventually led to the transformation of social media from the social experiment it once was to the business it is today.

Everything is a business

Like every human invention, when something shows potential of attracting people's attention there will inevitably be a transformation from ingenuity and simplicity to become a machine that produces money. It's the way it has always been and will always be.

I'm old enough to remember what the internet was like in the late 90s. Sure, there were some emergent businesses at the time but for the most part the internet was this raw and curious space for exploration and discovery. It was a wonderful place to explore and in just a matter of years it became this place where everything is centered around selling something.

Social media was this curious experiment that allowed us to have a space for self-expression and for a brief moment it was just that. Nowadays it is just a space filled with content creators and pseudo influencers trying to become the next big thing.

I used old Twitter as an example of this because every time I go there I get presented with these recommendations of accounts paying for Twitter Blue to be boosted and show up on my screen in the hopes of going viral and get all that sweet engagement clicks, replies, likes and retweets (aka money). Maybe I'm just too old and jaded but this is simply sad and empty.

/rant