Worth Reading – The Last Days Of Social Media

This pretty well sums it up, doesn’t it?

Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion.

https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

I think James is correct that scrolling large social media sites in 2025 is inviting a lot of AI crap into your life. Personally, Facebook is unusable for me. It’s nothing but scandalous headlines and AI-generated “news” that isn’t close to accurate. (As if Paul McCartney suddenly switched to playing guitar right-handed when he visited Phil Collins in the hospital.)

It is the definition of slop. However, other social media sites are also becoming increasingly awful. (Well, X might already be that awful. I haven’t looked at it in a long time.) TikTok can be entertaining, but it is full of AI-generated videos with questionable truth. Instagram is trying to be TikTok, and Threads is trying to be X.

That’s why we see the drop in the number of people who feel like they can stay informed by using social media dropping, as James reports:

Less than half of American adults now rate the information they see on social media as “mostly reliable”— down from roughly two-thirds in the mid-2010s.  Young adults register the steepest collapse, which is unsurprising; as digital natives, they better understand that the content they scroll upon wasn’t necessarily produced by humans.

WE still visit, though, primarily out of some sense of mild entertainment. We know it’s all fake, but it’s better than dwelling on the state of the world today.

But it also explains why we’re seeing more people yearn for the days of RSS – RSS: The Forgotten Technology That Gave Us Control Over the Web.

It’s also why we see more and more people starting, subscribing, and talking about newsletters – Newsletters Are What The Internet Needs Right Now.

They may not be the perfect medium for connecting with other people online or staying informed, but at least we get to choose what we subscribe to and what fills our readers’ and inboxes. As an internet user, I’ve always been a fan of RSS as a way to stay informed and follow my favorite sources. As a creator, I’ve learned to love newsletters as social media has become less effective for sharing my blog posts. As someone with many friends in faraway places, I’ve been a fan of social media as a technology that can keep us connected, but it seems to be doing less and less of that these days.

It’s our internet, though. We are free to create our own spaces to communicate with our people. How are you connecting with your people and communities online these days? Do you need help creating a space? Do you want to try new social networks, like Discord, Mastodon, and Bluesky? Or have you started doing more group texts, Telegram groups, etc.?  Have you started subscribing to more newsletters? (Like mine?)

AI may be overrunning the current crop of social media sites, but it doesn’t have to keep us from talking to other human beings online.

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