January 23, 2026
I think about social media a lot. I'm a computer science student at an undergraduate college, and I also happen to have an intense interest in political science and some of the humanities. I feel like it's almost natural from there that I would spend a lot of time thinking about the way we as humans use all this technology that makes up our world and our lives.
Back when computers were just a footnote in our everyday lives, back when only your more well-off friends had smartphones, I could forgive you for seeing deep analysis of the way humans interact online as a trite or unimportant endeavor. Today, however, I think it's well understood the amount of impact that these online networks can have on our real world.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/13/digital-rights/
I've often criticized current social media platforms for being designed in the interests of profit, which directly contradicts the interests of the actual people who use those platforms. Often a response to these criticisms — and indeed, I've been in this camp myself previously — is to decry the very idea of social media entirely.
"Hear ye, hear ye, brethren, as I shout from the rooftops! It is time to disavow from the oppressive state of social media platforms! Indeed, social media is simply a tool of the bourgeoisie to push down on the proletariat in order to further oppress the little man!
The only thing we have to lose are our chains! Disavow of all social technologies today, my brothers and sisters! Delete Instagram!"
— Me, probably. Circa 2024 (dramatization)
Is that really a good idea though? Should we be disposing of the very idea of a social networking technology that allows you to see baby photos of your out-of-state sister's first-born child on your smartphone while scrolling your feed? A technology that allows you to reconnect with the people you went to high school with, or to easily contact people on the fringes of your social circle? I don't think I've ever heard somebody criticize those features, and yet, they're the very stuff that allows us to call the platforms we criticize "social media".
In all fairness of course, the options of what actually exists are, well — abysmal, to say the least. I don't think that it's in any way unfair for somebody to look at the landscape of platforms that exist right now and to say "wow, social media is awful. These apps were a mistake," because, well, they are awful. And the fact they have been allowed to get this bad has been a detriment to our society.
I'm largely avoiding answering the question of "why do you think social media sucks," because if you're reading a blog on a website in the year of our lord 2026, I'm going to guess that you're at least partially clued in to why some people might be upset. For those who aren't, I invite you to open your screen time statistics for your phone. It should be somewhere in the settings. I'm going to guess that if you're in your 20s or 30s, you probably have a very strong desire not to look at that screen, for fear of how bad it might look. If you're one of the few people whose daily screentime tends to stay under an hour or less per day, then I guess you're better off than most of us. Most of my friends have daily times of several hours spent just scrolling on social media, wasting time, and not necessarily even having that much fun while doing it.
Okay, so we've talked about how social media as a concept is great, but that basically every single implementation of it is terrible in practice. While those who are not involved in technology might simply throw out the idea with the crappy execution, those of us who are actually involved in creating technology might want to keep our minds open.
In the world of software, we are only limited by our imaginations and our expertise. We can try to imagine tools that provide the utility we seek, without implementing the features that irk people. We can imagine a social media that doesn't play games with the "attention economy", trying to "increase retention" — corpo-speak for "waste more of your time, when you otherwise would've closed the app". I'd argue that Mastodon is pretty good at hitting all the positive user-experience metrics, without adding in any of the negative features you tend to see on the major platforms, but that's not really the point of this post.
The point is that I think people need to increase their creativity and imaginations. To criticize existing apps is fine, but I fear too many people forget that it's not really a problem with the format of the apps or tools, but rather, it's a problem that originates with the corporate, monopolistic structure of the designers of these tools.
Facebook doesn't suck because it's social media. Facebook sucks because Mark Zuckerberg and the Meta shareholders demand that the company make more and more money from this product every year. It sucks because they were allowed to buy up or corner nearly all their competition without drawing the ire of the FTC in the form of an anti-trust case.
The internet isn't worse today than it was 10 years ago because of the format of our communication tools. It's worse today because the companies who design our online experiences have been allowed to consolidate to the point of no longer needing to compete in the market. As a result, these major companies no longer need to create better products so that you will use them instead of a competitor, because now, there is no competitor to speak of!
A lack of privacy rights for US citizens means that these tech firms are also able hoover up all kinds of data about you, using that to enrich their own pockets on data brokerage market, as well as in targeted ad placements. The US hasn't passed a new federal privacy law since the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988. It was a Reagan-era, pre-internet law that made it illegal for the clerks at Blockbuster to tell journalists what videos you've checked out at their store (really, Blockbuster!).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act
We deserve more than this, and for a number of reasons, but if for nothing else, we need it so that tech firms cannot use all of our data as leverage in their eternal struggle to enlarge themselves.
https://riverseeber.net/blog/post/data-rights/
Anti-circumvention laws such as DMCA 1201 also play into this. They make it impossible for people to modify apps and software whose creators have a vested interest in you not being able to modify it. Companies are able to wrap their apps in something known as Digital Rights Management, or DRM, suddenly making it a crime to modify the app. The power this gives to firms is immense. It locks up our devices, so that they cannot behave in ways that benefit the user at the cost of the corporation.
All of these factors have led to the slow and continual enshittification of everything online, to the point where some people now negatively associate the internet and (certain types of) technology entirely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8
So to recap: Technology and the internet is a good thing. Not all the apps and software we use in our daily lives is good though. That's largely because they've slowly enshittified over time due to their corporate ownership. What we need is to fix the system to prevent this enshittification from happening in the first place, not tell people to embrace mountain-man lifestyles or Butlerian Jihad (though I'm sure both have a proper time and place associated with them).