Facebook has become almost unusable in recent months, and Twitter seems certain to be a victim of what someone brilliantly called ‘toxic Muskulinity’ after Elon Musk wasted £44b buying the business and then set about alienating its staff and users. And he ain’t finished yet …
The user experience - and there’s phrase that should expunged from the English language - has deteriorated so badly, many users are simply leaving their accounts lying dormant.
Barely a fraction of my friends post these days. Most look in, have a quick scroll and then exit. The only posts they are in are when someone tags them as their interest levels drop to below that of a casual browse. It’s simply not as much fun anymore.
Facebook’s never ending tinkering with the platform just grinds our gears, while its algorithms seem to be completely haywire.
The simple pleasure of catching up with friends - people you know in real life and through the social media platform - has been shredded by the staggering rise in junk posts and “pages suggested for you” which seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with your life or your interests.
Facebook seems to think I’m a devotee of wrestling, Sheffield United, golf, Eastenders, and, bizarrely, West Michigan Weather Station, as well as being an avid reader of the Stoke Sentinel.
Hitting the wee ‘x’ is a bit like playing whacamole - you nail one, only for another to pop up.
I’m now reporting so many pages as spam I may end up with repetitive strain injury. I’m sure there’s a Facebook page for that just about waiting to for me to block and mute.
It feels like a world away from the days when we shared pics of nights out, and all built wee farms in Farmville.
And who remembers poking? Pointless nudges which replaced the actual art of conversation for a while. They went the way of ‘Follow Friday’ or ‘FF’ when everyone on Twitter offered up an account to follow.
How polite and civilised does that sound compared to the howling that goes on every second on Twitter? The art of debate and disagreement have been destroyed, and replaced by a never ending shouting match that leaves you bone weary.
When Musk bought Twitter everyone announced they were off to Mastadon which could have been a country somewhere south of Belgium, but turned out to be yet another social media platform, because what we really need in our lives is even more places to post, debate, rant and rave.
I have no doubt that, right now, some 13-year old geek is currently working on a prototype for the next big thing which will blow Facebook and Twitter out of the water, and consign it to the digital archives where Bebo and MySpace can be found covered in dust.
For platforms that transformed the way we communicated and interacted on a truly global level, they still lack real longevity – the sort enjoyed by print media whose content it takes for free and then buries out of sight.
That may also be down to the fact we now have the attention span of a goldfish, or maybe it’s because the platforms manage to destroy everything that is good and enjoyable about them with every tweak of those darned algorithms.