You Normies Destroyed Social Network, Not The Other Way Round
I’ve recently created my account on this website, and honestly, being an irritable and unfortunate person, I couldn’t help but get annoyed at the zeitgeist that this website’s algorithms show me.
Mainly, the idea that the social network is the perpetrator of every ill within the society. This whole debate irks me for a multitude of reasons, so much that the performative non-usage of social networks is merely the cherry on top.
Though I used the word “irk”, you may as well read it as “I believe the following thing is wrong”. First and foremost, the infatilization of adults is the most annoying in this all: the idea that a capable adult isn’t able to discern by himself that gluing his face to a screen for more than a couple of hours and turn off his brain is wrong, that the tech moguls force them to do so, misguiding them machiavellically while they rub their hands off, “Let’s show one more cat’s reel to that peasant”, they say.
The biggest public sin they commit is selling your data— yeah, they probably commit a couple of financial crimes, and they’re highly sociopathic; however, offering what YOU want isn’t a crime. You could’ve turned off your cellphone, but surely the war of attention brought you to your knees, right?
“Attention”, the new journo buzzword. I was scrolling through the news the other day, and I peeked at an article lauding Mr. Beast as ‘The Mozart of the attention economy’. I looked at it, turned my eyes into a line, and cackled. Of course, being the lazy person I am, I didn’t read it; I don’t know, maybe I’ll read it, it looks intriguing, the title is really good.
Speaking of which, YouTube, how much has it changed, only for you to use it yet for its original intended purpose: to watch videos. I like it— perhaps the sanest of the big social networks, and its algorithm is miles ahead of any other website, for reasons I can only speculate. For one, it has a style that allows higher-tiered content. A measly tweet will offer you not much with its limit of characters, thus there’s no reason to seek substance as you won’t be able to offer anyway, meanwhile, three minute YouTube videos aren’t that much of a bang, but I don’t know if the YouTube made it that way because users engage more in long videos, or if we’re mostly attracted to 15 minutes videos for biological reasons.
Still, they did launch their infinitesimally short videos tool to capture your attention, as the villain, those tech moguls are! Yet… It’s there, and maybe if you don’t want to rot your brain, you shouldn’t open it in the first place? Isn’t it… Common sense?
Common sense, yes. The way people say, it’s as if Mr. Beast’s videos are lead in the water— not only lead in the water, but lead which the tech moguls infused in the water thinking primarily in your demise, and secondly in their profit, but it is common sense, passed along by your grandmothers and mothers, that you should study, and not spend any more of your time in shenanigans such as doom-scrolling, yet, somehow, it’s novel! It’s novel to be manipulated by a screen, even though our elders have been so their whole lives, and the ills were spread around, even though the spreaders themselves probably turned their TVs on upon arriving at home.
Now that I’ve done enough of the de-culpabilization of the psychopathic tech dictators, I want to shift all the blame to you— the user. I’m in my 20s, and even though I didn’t use the social network in its infancy, I was a user in what I’d like to say was its prime. 2009-2012, maybe.
I’m proud of the first generation to be raised online. Ironically, every single line in the above picture is true. Those things, they were good, some are still good (DeviantArt, Blogger, YouTube), and had the world ended in 2012 as the gods intended, we’d have gone to the heavens with mostly good memories of the internet. So, what do you think that happened? (1) Mark Zuckerberg mind-controlled the users, (2) we weren’t smart enough to boycott when it was due?
When I was a student, my English teacher loved to write the following phrase on the blackboard, “Be the change you want to see in the world”, and as corny as it read back then, I took those words to my heart, though most of the students therein didn’t, nor the whole world. We’re in this “attention war”, where all we have to do is turn off the screens, yet we can’t— how stupid is it for an outsider, looking at one person in a jail whose keys are clasped by his scrolling-loving fingers?
But I haven’t blamed you enough yet. Yes, I blame you, all of you, for not uninstalling Instagram and Twitter, but I also blame you, the normies, for using them wrongly, and skewing the average userbase's desires back then. You could’ve had nice debates in the Facebook groups back then, in fact, I had them, but you didn’t want it, did you? You preferred to waste your brain matter away watching stupid videos. You, the end-user, the post-2012 users, the normies, the contemptible people who didn’t care in the slightest for the internet culture, you destroyed it all by being you, by not shunning the algorithm, but hugging it and showing to your real life friends so they could jump in and destroy it as much as you did.
Worse yet, Facebook was mainly used for conversations, do you remember? How far does it look right now? You preferred to veer away from human convention, and the poor Facebook chat is now rarely used. You. Destroyed. It.
The “enshittification” of social networks sounds ridiculous. For one, the term itself implies one thing gets shit (the midwit-y ironic scatology of the term irks me so fucking much) because an online service slowly moves away from its user-centric nature, yet people still get hooked by it regardless if the shareholders pocket the coins or not— so, in a way, it isn’t shit. It’s offering exactly what the end-user yearns for, which is slop. Staying on a website such as X after its recent atrocious changes makes you an indirect supporter of its changes.
For every “enshittified” thing, there’s an alternative right by its side. Tired of the Google Search? DuckDuckGo. Tired of [social network]? Real life. Tired of Airbnb? Hotels. Yet people are too busy preaching performatively about the demise of the Internet, how everything is doomed, and how, paraphrasing the guy who coined the term, “‘enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything" with ‘enshittificatory’ platforms leaving humanity in an ‘enshittocene’”, though it does sound hypocritical in the middle of such a petty rant for me to preach positivity. Frankly, what’s it, if not a word to save ourselves from admitting our complacency?
The biggest fallacy in this whole argument is that high-quality content for the average person is, in fact, high-quality. It’s not. Engagement metrics are, by definition, user-centric. Stealing your attention span is user-centric! Don’t act like you didn’t love watching those reels, don’t act like your mind didn’t calculate it as, for some time, the best outcome among all the choices you could’ve taken. Then again, I blame the end-user for not coordinating themselves enough, for not waking up in unison and orchestrating the next Social Network. I blame you for being complacent. It’s the end-user’s fault who can’t see a couple of steps ahead. It’s the end-user’s fault who, after indulging himself in reels for years, notices too late what he was doing was idiotic. I blame you for not knowing better, despite being a capable person.
New jargon and new buzzwords, and all they do is to infatilize you. The mainstream media wants you to feel like you’ve been cheated on, not that you were the one in the wrong. The Chinese are stealing your attention span! Read it so you can find out how they are doing it. Yet it’s pretty clear you’re the culprit.
Now, there must be an obvious reason for the new push against low-tiered content. The mainstream journalism is losing, which is unfortunate, as despite your average NYT still being brain-rotting inducing, it’s not nearly as bad as the AI vomit reelified by an ill-intentioned NPC, and they want to recaptivate you by acting as saviors; picture the boomers walking to and fro, cursing the zoomers for not doing reading anything they write.
All in all, I think making it a “their problem, not yours” works better for the average consumer, in the end. Or rather, it’s just a smart-y way to say things get worse because the evil market orders them to do.
You narcissistic normies ruined my safespace, so much that reptilians such as Mark Zuckerberg preyed on your need for attention. They sniffed the lack of self-control in you and offered you exactly what you couldn’t prevent yourself from indulging in. What is stopping us from creating a decentralized social network where the focus is merely talking? Oh. Wait a second, just like IRC? But I don’t want to use IRC! I need to show people my face. I need to post cute pictures of my animals; I need to watch short, stupid videos. We need to keep all of us in a single unified place so it’s easier for the ghouls to push new awful changes. I need to read short texts with little to no substance— some of them are maybe a bit intelligent! They’re quotes from famous Virginia Woolf’s books, but I’ll never read them, no. I’d rather stick to Twitter.
Yes, I’d blame those devilish subway companies’ CEOs for their awful work, to whom I’m a vassal, given my need to ride them for work. But for the worsening of the social network? It’s our fault.