Last time I wrote about the end of social media was in November 2022 . I say wrote, in effect I shouted into a dark room and nobody heard me because of all the other people shouting into the dark room.

At the time Elon Musk had begun his terminal fiddling with the Twitter platform and people threatened to leave in droves. Some did, and never returned, while others left for a period of time then realised that the world is actually a quiet place where nobody listens.

Today, well, this weekend, a perfect storm of social media decline hit the socio-sphere of the internet. The storm arrived on several fronts and while it seemed calm in the present, will only pickup and become more tumultuous. Predictions not being my strong suit – but you only need to read my 2010 disertation on Youtube/Twitch/user generated streamed content to see how accurate I was.

The first front was spotted at the beginning of June when Christian Selig, developer of the awesome thirdparty iOs reddit reader app Apollo, announced to the world that Reddit were about to start charging third party apps for api access. A torrid shitscape of social media platform ownership was suddenly revealed to the world like a table cloth being lifted from a table smeared with fecal matter.

Reddit, like many other social media platforms, and especially Twitter, relied heavily on third party apps – from the userbase to the business users who used these platforms to promote goods, services or content. Of course there would be some element of abuse but users being mostly good “self editors” could, if the platform allowed, remove the content they had no interest in or pay a minimal subscription to remove ads. The self regulation and peer review of comment section allowed Reddit to flourish like a breath of fresh air amongst the controlled and mostly “hyperdermic needle of media” modelled alternative platforms like Facebook.

In the prepandemic world of 2018, when Facebook began hemmoraging users following the revelation of unpopular “user psychomanipulation” practices for driving political narrative, the Reddit platform did a “remodel” to make it more “accessible” to Facebook users attracted to the seemingly unmanipulated and open thinking Reddit yet who were unfamiliar with or uncomforable using message-board style platforms in an age of “scroll and reward” mindcontrol.

This was unpopular with hardcore Reddit users – much in the same way as hardcore Usenet users were unhappy with the eternal September but some came round to the “Modernisation” and “move with the times” ethos that helped push Reddit growth. New third party readers arrived on the appstores to enable the scrolling masses to get their regular thumb driven seratonin fix while Reddit struggled with its own app redesign, ghastly user interface and “management knows better” style guide. Apps like Apollo flourished and the user base of Reddit grew.

Reddit plc didn’t like this – with third party apps allowing users to self-edit their own feed content it was easy for the user to avoid advertising. If the user avoided advertisign, advertisers wouldn’t want to advertise, and if advertisers dont advertise there is no revenue and when there is no revenue – you can’t float your business on the stock markets of the world and when you cant float your business – you can’t become a multi-billionaire…..

Reddit started to demand cash – not in a nice “oh well we’ll start in a year so you can come to some equitable solution” way but in a nasty “Give us the money we expect you to owe us next year in a month” way. They denied it was like that, but Christian Selig, being the savvy guy he is recorded the whole exchange and pulled the plug on his app driving Reddit users to an month of blackouts, protests and the futile selfdestruction/reconstruction of subreddits. When the only way to drive the whole protest, like with Facebook, would be to quit the platform entirely.

But nicotine, heroin and social media are strong mistresses and their siren calls are strong to the weak – eventually, like on Twitter, those that said “Never again” were on their knees – thumbs twitching and extended – like mindless drug addled zombies. Eventually the protests waned and the site returned to some form of normality with only the hardcore protesters leaving the platform without anyone caring or paying attention.

Twitter, the second front of our perfect storm, recently started limiting the number of posts users who didn’t subscribe to the blue tick could read. At time of press, it was about 800 posts but that might change by the time anyone actually reads this post. Master of all Baters – Mr Musk, posted in his twisted gloaty maniacally evil genius tone that the reason was to help people get over their addiction to swiping.

The Twittersphere exploded – users who had thrown their toys away on the last Twitter themed exodus only to return a few weeks or days later left again. This time “For good” or at least until the realisation that on Bluesky or Mastodon or whatever federated platform du jour your audience is not as big or directed to you as you might like.

Musk’s other weapon was the shadow hiding of posts directing users to alternative platforms. Fleeing users could post all they liked about where they could be found next but nobody would see it. A stroke of genius. Show the cattle what an abattoir is but prevent them from choosing a different one or finding the way out then force them to buy into the blue tick scheme by limiting the number of other moos the cows can hear in a day.

Sure, in the early days, platforms like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter made it easy for users to match to their “friends” by delving into the user’s addressbook and matching the user to other users they knew. Their friends. Yay. Simplicity! You can find people you know without needing to ask them.

Privacy nightmares aside – this was swiftly removed under the guise of “It was a Facebook patented bit of code all along so now nobody else can use it KTHXBI” some time in the late noughties. This prevents platforms other than Facebook from matching you to people you know – like you can only have friends….ON FACEBOOK. Zuckerberg controls your social life and network.

Thirdly, I think it was either Trashfuture podcast, Cory Doctorow or Content Mines that talked about how the investers that liberally gave Silicon Valley social media platform startups the financial backing to get off the ground in the early noughties are now calling their chicken farms and asking where their roast chicken is. This has resulted in many minor social platforms going off line forever lately. The likes of paper.li – a handy protoSubstack/pinterest platform that allowed users to share links in their own “newspaper” closed without fanfare a few months ago. Livejournal – now an echoey ghost town consisting of a few hard core remainers – recently had their app removed from the Apple appstore. WordPress have realigned towards business and are drifting away from blogging. Finally, try knocking up a website these days without a fancy bit of AWS hosting, HTML5 coding knowledge or a nice bit of Googley wizardry – yeah good luck in attracting visitors. Google now dictate completely where, who and how your website should be shown to people. The internet is broken.

That leaves us with the realisation that this internet has now become a dark room shaped raft afloat an ocean of information. Lonely. Adrift. Maybe with a few old friends you cling onto for affirmation. Those people that you lose contact with that really couldn’t care less about your Mastodon or Pixelfed accounts or those that used social media to drive their businesses – because they didn’t pay for all that free advertising. Only those that shout the loudest will be heard until a new less echoey room is found – maybe with a few lights on so users can see. Eitherway, once this storm passes, the damage done will be to the users who will need to reconnect and start again but only if they are able to do so without the need for some form of approval to connect from a faceless oligarch who alone decides whether those people should associate together .

This post was first made on Substack and nobody read it there either.