Social media sucks, but what’s the alternative?

It would be fair to say that we’re going through a period of realisation that social media may not have been such a good thing after all. The list of serious complaints continues to grow. Social media is making our children depressed and anxious. It’s killing democracy. It’s guilty of fostering the rise of fascism across the world. It’s making us isolated. It’s making us insecure. It puts people in algorithmic filter bubbles where you are fed ragebait to keep you engaged. Strange how something designed to bring people together managed to do the exact opposite.

I won’t discuss again how our dream of social media as a force for good was shattered, that has been a well-trodden path in these pages, and I will not cover again the reasons for this change, but I will point out that not only has our erstwhile illusion with the potential of social media has dissipated, it has turned into a nightmare. We went from utopia to dystopia in a few short years.

There are lots of problems with social media, from the dodgy ownership of sites like Facebook and Twitter (I still refuse to call it X), to the insufferable tone of content on Instagram, to the sickly corporate lingospeak hellscape that is LinkedIn, ending with Bluesky, the smug corner of the Web where the Left went to have fights with each other.

The prevailing narrative as to why social media has turned out to be so toxic for humanity is that social media exists to keep people engaged, and nothing engages more than anger, so the entire business model is to keep people as angry as possible, this sows division across the board, and this eventually leads to most of the negative social consequences.The almighty algorithm directing us towards paths from which we can’t recover.

But it’s easy to blame the algorithm when it is being fed by everyday users. I grew up believing that people were mostly good, and I still think that this holds. But I also learned very early on that the world was filled with nasty people, I’m not talking the villains of the world, but your bullies, liars, cheaters, hypocrites, snitches, and petty tyrants. The bully at school who used to make my bus trips a nightmare. The guy who kept stealing stuff from the office and laughed every time we would point it out to him (but we wouldn’t snitch on him). The guy at the gym lying about pretty much everything, from weight lifted to his inexistent girlfriends. These are the people whose everyday conduct would not have made any splashes before, only to those immediately affected. But social media has given the not-so-worst of humanity a stage in which to commit their petty squabbles. So we have bullies, liars, and cheats at a global stage.

The result is that the global social media still is inhabited by normal people sharing pictures of cats, but the fuel that keeps the algorithmic hate engine going consists of an army of inconsequential pitiful users, the keyboard warriors fighting thousands of minor online battles. It’s death by a thousand petty disputes.

The solution then is to abandon social media, right? Touch grass and all that. But I don’t think it’s that easy as it has become an integral part of our everyday lives. One of the issues is that when we discuss the evils of social media, the first platforms that come to mind are Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok and Instagram. But if we define social media as any interactive digital platforms that facilitate the creation and sharing of user-generated content, then we start seeing that this covers practically all of our social interactions online, and includes messaging apps such as Whatsapp, Discord, Signal, and Telegram, as well as discussion forums such as Reddit. The problem there is that even if these sites do not suffer from the algorithmic element of most other social media, they are still inhabited by us, with all the good and the bad. And there is quite a lot of bad.

With that in mind, these are the top social media apps in the world:

Messaging apps are interesting because they act as information silos in a more comprehensive way than the worst echo chambers in the “traditional” social media sense. This fosters groups of like-minded people who can engage in the most arcane discussions never hearing a dissenting voice. Messaging apps and group chats are therefore a more pervasive breeding ground for all of the nastiness that social media has to offer. You can escape Facebook and Twitter, but are you really willing to let go of Whatsapp?

We can escape into new spaces, but the problem is that we always end up finding ourselves.

This is just a diagnostic blog post written while recovering from viral laryngitis, I don’t have solutions, and I don’t think that “just log off and touch grass” is a viable solution any more. So I go back to previous blog posts about not falling for the negativity, the algorithm wants you angry. But also try to be mindful of the users that are feeding you the anger in the first place. Why are you still paying them attention? That is one thing we can all do, turn them off.

I will go out though, and may even turn off my phone.