The Reason Social Media Sucks For Everyone These Days (Not Just Creators)

Social media these days sucks. That's probably a statement you've heard before, and it's the sort of statement that sounds like the usual old person griping about how things have changed since their day. You hear it with fashion, movies, music, and every other aspect of life, so of course people are going to complain that social media was so much better when they were young, and in the prime of their life.

As someone who depends on social media for at least part of my living, though, you aren't imagining it. It really does suck more now than it did before... and if you're a creator, that's a storm that just might sink your boat.

And it doesn't look like it's going to get better any time soon.

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The Enshittification of Everything

I really wish I could take credit for this term, but alas, I cannot. Enshittification, or to use its more polite term according to The Chainsaw platform decay, is basically a microcosm of the capitalist mindset on fast-forward.

So how does it work?

Well, the first stage of the cycle is where you create a platform, and do everything you possibly can to attract a huge user base to it. You charge little to no fees, you provide great features, you keep it open to as many people as possible, and most importantly you provide something of value to your audience. Maybe you're a search engine that gives fast, accurate results, an online storefront that gives you access to a massive amount of products at a low price, or maybe you're a social media platform that gives people a smooth timeline, ease of use, and the ability to connect to all of their friends.

Once a platform has made itself valuable to the users (often by running at a deficit, or by barely breaking even), that's when it starts altering its priorities. Maybe your social media site or your search engine starts slipping in more ads. It's subtle at first, but they're bringing in revenue, and they aren't too big of an eyesore. Maybe your video streaming platform ads a second ad at the beginning, or has several ad breaks throughout longer videos. Maybe your digital store now has "recommended" products at the top of your search results that are paid placement from clients who want to make sure shoppers see their stuff first. The platform isn't terrible yet, but it's taking its first steps down the path to hell.

Just sign here on the dotted line, if you will...

The decay continues as the platform's greed increases. Now the platform is choking off the signal for average creators, trying to squeeze money out of them to force them to pay for ad space. This also stops users from seeing anything from their friends, family and community. The platform increases the cost to bigger clients for ads as well, making it a huge pay-to-play market. In the end, no one other than the platform is getting anything out of this arrangement.

By the time you reach the end of the decay cycle, you have a platform that is rotten to the core. It's trying to squeeze its clients, its users, and the service it was providing is being actively degraded as it tries to charge you for more, and more, and more. And when all is said and done, there will come a point where everyone on both sides of the corrupt middleman dusts off their hands and simply says, "No more." They abandon the platform, moving on to somewhere else, and leaving the platform without the blood and treasure it needs to keep itself alive. Maybe it backs up and readjusts its course, but it's entirely possible that the platform just dies, leaving a power vacuum for something else to try to take its place.

This is Happening To Social Media Before Our Eyes

If you've been watching the trash fire that is Twitter, then you've seen this kind of action in real time. While the platform had its flaws before Musk took over, he put on the gas on the enshittification process. He started removing features users liked (and firing a lot of people to reduce the overhead), charging for things which were previously included (the ongoing saga of how much users would have to pay for the blue check mark), and actively alienating both users and clients with the way the platform was run.

Twitter is, of course, not the only platform dealing with this kind of decay.

We see it with Facebook, where user signals don't travel nearly as far as they once did, and creators are constantly encouraged to pay for advertising if they want people to see their posts. We see it on Reddit with the removal of fixes and work arounds that helped keep many communities functional. We see it on YouTube as they enact more and more stringent guidelines on many creators if they want to be monetized, eliminating entire genres of content off the platform, and leading to a bizarre kind of doublespeak as people try to avoid invoking the wrath of the algorithm.

And we're all suffering from this. The users in our audience, the creators writing books, running blogs, and making videos, and the companies who want to find a place to sell their products or sponsor us as creators... we're all getting squeezed.

And it's why so many of us rely on straight crowd funding these days.

I've got the numbers myself, just from my own little corner of the Internet. In ye olde days, I could share a blog post from Improved Initiative, or even from right here on The Literary Mercenary on just Facebook, and it would usually get around 400 hits just from the groups I shared it in. That was my bottom floor. If it was a popular topic it could get up to 800 or 1,000. If I also shared it on Reddit, I could easily see it climb to between 1,500 and 5,000 hits.

These days? I'm sharing my articles in more than double the locations on Facebook, and it generates about 20-50 hits. On Reddit I'm also going into more subs than I ever did in the past, and I'm lucky if a single post even breaks 1,000 hits. For something to get more than that it has to really catch the attention of a community, and start a small firestorm of replies, shares, etc. And even then, the reactions from the community are worth so much less than they were in the past, making it a monumental task to even be seen, much less to make sales.

So What The Hell Are We Supposed To Do?

As I said back in Why Writers Hate All These Twitter Alternatives (Hint: It's Because They're Useless), all of us are caught in the whirlpool of the drain of enshittification. It's not just Twitter, or Facebook, or Reddit, or YouTube. It's not just Amazon, or Netflix, or any other titan of industry... it's all of them. They grow as big as they can, crush their competition so they're the biggest name in town, and then they start turning the screws until eventually there's no more blood left in the stone.

So what are we going to do? Unfortunately, the answer boils down to, "Try our best to survive."

And that also means we need to rely on our audience more than ever.

Surviving has a lot of aspects to it. On the one hand, we need to try to navigate the changing faces of the platforms we're already using, even as they decay right under our feet. On another hand, we have to try to keep an eye out for replacement platforms that give us more tools, a more direct connection to our audience, or which help us find a bit of breathing room. And while we're doing all of that we still need to find time to actually create new content, write new books, or whatever else it is we're doing.

And let me tell you... it is exhausting trying to navigate a sinking ship day in and day out while also keeping an eye on the horizon for a more seaworthy ship, and remembering to play enough music for people to hear us. And most of us could really use a life preserver right about now.

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That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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