watching social media implode

I sincerely believe the future of internet communications is going to be email, IRC, tight-leashed forums and nothing else. And for everyone else, text messaging, which technically doesn't count as internet communication since it can operate outside of internet.

The last time I actually cared about social media was about 15 years ago. At that time, I was giving it a genuinely decent go. But then my brain kicked in and said, "Wow, I really don't give a shit about any of this", and that's when my posting slowed, then after a while stopped altogether. And by that I mean a 100% stop, which included posting no replies to anything on other profiles, because I seriously do not care about the crap other people post on social media. I should wear a nobody cares t-shirt. Or maybe a Breaking News: I Don't Care shirt. Either would work.

Before getting into the whole social media implosion thing, I need to describe the internet communications I was talking about above.

Email: You know what this is.

IRC: Old school chat like Undernet or DALnet.

Tight-leashed forums: Independent web sites with discussion areas. Each one of these sites is usually run by one guy (meaning not a company/corporation) with a small team of moderators, and all have semi-strict to very strict rules one must go through before being allowed to post anything regularly. Why? Mainly to avoid bots and spammers.

Now as for the social media implosion thing, this gets weird, but at the same time not.

The entire point of social media was to connect and make friends.

Nobody does that anymore.

There are only two things people use social media for these days. A contact list i.e. address book, and as a swap meet. That's it. And concerning that swap meet thing, it doesn't matter if the platform has an area to sell things or not, because even when it doesn't, people will still use it to sell their crap.

People are really quick to blame AI for social media being such a dismal thing to use.

It's not AI's fault.

Social media just got old.

When you've got a platform designed for human connections and making friends where nobody talks and all anybody cares about is selling their garbage, that's when the whole thing crumbles in on itself.

I've read a few posts in forums where people have said social media should just drop the whole social thing and solely concentrate on being a swap meet. Said honestly, that's not the most terrible idea I've ever heard. If you've got this giant-ass network with millions of users who are literally not talking, not connecting and just want to sell junk, um... yeah, cut the social crap completely (except for the contact list since people use that) and go all-in with the swap meet thing.

eBay is a great example of this. Did you know that eBay Live exists? Yes, eBay has social media style streaming, done the right way. That right there is what social media platforms need to do, except not a little bit. Go all-in with the commerce like what eBay is doing since that's all anybody cares about.

What's the Next Big Thing with social communications on the internet? There won't be one. This is why I say email/IRC/forums/texting is the future of internet communications. When people want to actually communicate with each other using something that isn't a bot/spam-infested nightmare, it's either going to be email, text chat, old style forum or a text message conversation on a phone.

And yeah, that means you might want to update your phone number and email contact list if you haven't done so in a while, outside of social media. If that means you actually need to physically write that stuff down in a real address book, well, that's what you do.

Enjoy the growing piles of dust on social media, because that's the only thing truly growing in those places now.

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