Same same but different

Life got definitely more miserable in 2020. Social media, Zoom and FaceTime are the glue that still hold our lives together. These days I am thinking a lot about social media and even more about the social aspect of it. I recently watched this Netflix documentary ¹ where people who all became rich through social media companies are now saying that these companies are all poison and perfidious and if we don’t pay close attention they will ruin us all. So far so true.

Looking at how these companies evolved over the years it’s funny to see that these days they are all looking the same. Twitter has fleets ² now. What?! Stories already ruined Instagram and now Twitter has this, too?

It no longer matters if you’re on Facebook, on Twitter, on WhatsApp or on Instagram, they all morphed into one giant piece of irrelevant time-wasting nonsense. Facebook was about connecting with friends, now it’s about self promotion and you can connect with a bunch of Nazis. Instagram was about photos, now it’s about self promotion and shopping and Twitter was about sharing quick thoughts. Now it’s about self promotion, sharing lies and writing endless threads that would have been quite pleasant if you’d find them in a blog post. And now they all have stories … I know that I exaggerate excessively here but is there still any social network that is not about advertising, click bait and driving people insane? I know I could leave all those networks behind but there are still these moments where I quite enjoy them. I still enjoy life updates from people whom I connected with on Twitter about ten years ago. For a quick moment there’s this feeling of a personal connection that shines a light through all this mess. But these moments have become quite rare. Have we innovated enough in the field of social media?