My experience with social networks in general has been extremely sparse since I closed my Facebook account in 2012. I have attempted to return on a few occasions, and tried out “new” things like Bluesky, but never stay long, and to-date I have not meaningfully resumed any social networking activity. I did however continue to play in a band until 2015, and through its group page, I experienced first-hand the eventual realization that the audience we had worked so long and hard to cultivate on Facebook had been transformed into pieces of flair. Merit badges. With little or no utility, and zero future returns for that investment.
More broadly, the whole premise of a social media platform that serves as a place “where everyone is” has become increasingly unattractive to me. It never works out like I expect (or want)—with the trade-offs necessary for monetizing the platform, and the inevitable mechanisms for retention and engagement that follow, it just hasn’t ever come anywhere near the promised potential for a “connected society” or “digital town square” or even just a place where my friends are. The experience is even more aggravating when returning from an extended break. It makes the internal culture that develops on platforms feel jarring, alienating. Facebook in particular felt very artificial, invasive, and perplexing. I honestly don’t believe any of these services could have launched in their current states, it almost requires some level of indoctrination or conditioning, to ease its users into a place where they no longer notice how utterly bizarre a lot of the behaviors on display seem.
Lastly, social networks are never quite universal enough to obviate the need for maintaining other channels, so their relative ubiquity has very little actual upsides as a means for socializing and networking (while there are plenty of downsides). I still have to maintain a functional email account, messaging app(s), Slack/Teams/Notion collab space, streaming media services, feed reader, etc.…and for the purposes of communicating with my extended network of contacts, reading the news, discussing current events, or consuming entertainment—I find social networks to be among the worst options for each individual purpose. That’s, of course, why they have largely lost the thread on the fundamental ideas of social networking, and are instead just advertising machines. It might be possible to develop a service that could do both, facilitate healthy and active social connections while delivering value to advertisers for a profit—but why bother? In the absence of antitrust enforcement, and with the network effects already in-place, what incentives do Facebook, Twitter, et al have to do anything else besides crank up the dial on “engagement” and harvest everyone’s data?