What happens now that we killed social media?

And why is that Little Mermaid fish so depressed?

Last week, I was sitting on Zoom with my friend Dylan, a content exec who spends his days mulling over the future of storytelling. Life etc. keeps us from connecting a lot, but every now and then we share the shows we love (YES Succession, NO Mrs. Davis), and I pry into what is coming down the pipeline that’s exciting him.

“Hm. I don’t even know what entertainment is going to look like this time next year,” he said.

Two days prior, I got a note from a pal of mine at Disney about the entire Disney+ brand team getting nixed. (You know, those folks that run the @Sleeping Beauty handle or the @Tigger account. The same team that wondered what would happen if Pinocchio had suicidal ideation.)

But those weren’t the only layoffs in my orbit. Paper Magazine, the downtown it-rag of the ‘00s, shut; Vice News was shaved, even the seemingly untouchable Insider had some serious cuts. And then, of course, there was the shuttering of Buzzfeed News, that goliath that once seemed so powerful that we all point and laugh at that Awl article about some poor schlub envisioning the utopian world she would have if only Buzzfeed would hire them. (And, fair: Ira Madison, Quinta Brunson, and Daniel Kibblesmith were all from that era—though not in news.)

(From Leila: This was written before rumors of Vice going bankrupt surfaced, which makes the topic particularly urgent.)

Media, video, entertainment, social: Disparate industries, but a clear through line. Of course, one can point to a coming recession, but there’s an emerging narrative. Social media—and the marketers, storytellers, and reporters who once used it so deftly—is coming to an end. If Dylan was watching our impending AI overlords looking at his job, my work as a full-time poster of content will be unrecognizable in two years.

Me, trying to figure out how to post better

The reason is not simply economic—who would’ve thought platforms and their unregulated attempts to incentivize the attention economy would suffer a decline?—but existential. Social media is dead, in that the social part no longer matters, and something new, phoenix-like and wet with afterbirth, is emerging and screaming at us. It’s the always-on content factory. It is constant content everywhere, without a drop to spare.

Here is, in short, a primer: About a decade ago social media platforms like Facebook (and Twitter, then Instagram) became big as a social connection between friends, family, and PR people who have no sense of boundaries. But to keep it feeling urgent, these platforms needed content. Not just your boring photos of your lame kids, but actual content that they could only get on app. Media companies shifted from dogged desk reporters or magazine editors with fancy bags to POSTS, and those who made the posts were rewarded, with traffic and plaudits. The investors came and made these websites even more important. And it was good.

Then, seeing the money flow like mana from heaven, the imitators came and used their very fundamental learnings (emotions! anger! lies!) to make more streamlined, less expensive and less vetted copycats. And then the people learned that perhaps news was nuanced, and they called it fake news. Which lead to regular, degular folks thinking that they could make the news, the memes, the stories.

And guess what: they were right. *gestures in TikTok*

This isn’t the death of content, just social content, as NYMag’s John Hermann defines it, “The ‘social web’ — an optimistic, mutually beneficial collaboration between independent websites and a new generation of big social-media platforms.” The process of consuming your news next to a birth announcement from your neighbor/a meme from your mom/Buzzfeed is coming to an end. Social media is over.

Holyfuckingshitballs. What does this mean? How will we air our various grievances? How will we survive, who will feed us as we starve ourselves on the endless always-on content churn? Well, my pets, my sweet summer children; two things.

1) What is old is new again. BlueSky has emerged as Twitter 2.0, a Twitter that is less centralized and, more importantly, not run by Musk. Discord basically acts as old internet forums. Start-ups like Landing and Ask Diem exist for very specific purposes (visual inspiration and search, respectively). Single serve internet is back baby, not everything is perfect for everyone but some things may be right for you. The algorithm works; we just don’t want this specific algorithm, tailored to the worst traits of humans.

Think of the social media site that has weathered the pivot to video and mass layoffs, the one that has (generally) dealt with its Nazi problem, the one that still courses relevantly through the internet: Reddit. Reddit remembers it’s not just engagement that matters, it’s good engagement. Facebook and Instagram just care about your commenting, even if that comment is, “Get off my feed you Nazi shitbird” (and suddenly your feed is filled with Fox News).

Ryan Broderick, formerly of Buzzfeed, currently of Garbage Day, writes:

My hunch is that going from the deeply polarized era of centralized feeds from 2015-2020 directly into COVID-19, which quite literally jammed the whole world into those centralized feeds, caused a deep reaction against those centralized feeds. Basically, four companies carved up the internet into easy-to-use silos, then, suddenly, everyone had to use those silos, and found them deeply wanting. And ever since then we’ve been searching, in various ways, for something else. Whether it’s Web3 or Discord communities or Telegram groups or Substack or live audio or whatever. The big winner so far, though, of this mass exodus from “social media” has been AI. Which is especially true if you remember that TikTok runs on AI.

There it is. The AI is going to become so specific, so tailored to your needs that you will find yourself perfectly at home on, say, Animated Dirtbag Cat TikTok without even knowing that that was your community. How could Buzzfeed ever hope to compete when the content in catered directly to your tiny perfect brain?

So, where does that leave Dylan, the exec pal from the beginning? Well, entertainment isn’t in a much better position because…

2) Storytelling has to evolve. The way we digest stories—or, content, as the two have become inextricable to me—is changing. Our messages need to meet with the medium. You cannot throw up a fun lil Instagram graphic with a heartening message and hope it “means something” for your brand. You cannot tell an audience to simply get tickets when the loudest part of the internet has determined your CGI fish are in excruciating pain, because there are better, more authentic storytellers on a free app that you can use right now, in your jammies. Your content is competing with vertical screens everywhere, and you have to make sure that content is worth someone’s time.

Because Quibi got parts of it right: We no longer care from where we get our entertainment. YouTube? Netflix? …TUBI?! As long as it effectively means shoving something into the gaping maw that is your target audience that they can ingest while, say, ingesting 2,000 other things.

(Does this mean I think laid off journalists should become content creators¹? Honestly…yes. [Don’t throw things please don’t throw things.] But that doesn’t mean influencers or a YouTuber or whatever, it means: take their storytelling prowess and do what Buzzfeed did in 2014: Meet the kids where they are.)

Sure, your Instagrams and Snaps and Likes aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. You can still use those to keep in contact with your friends and fam and see some silly little memes. Surprisingly, media still is pretty meaningful on TikTok, because it, well, knows how to frame a story. But the social media space—or perhaps better called the digital connection space, or the generative content space—is no longer going from one to many, but from many to many more.

Maybe we don’t need every part of the internet to be for every single one of us, always. But the social web that you grew up on? The one that asks you to click and share and like? That thing is dying a wheezy and flatulent death.

Or maybe you will go outside and touch some grass. There’s probably a TikTok community that’s into that sort of thing, you know.

1. Or, I don’t know, try to recreate some sort of flash in the pan that’ll never have the reach or impact that you are hoping for, as if every way of monetizing internet content hasn’t already been tried. (Micropayments! Elon, if we only thought of this before.)