Good article by James O’Sullivan on Noema.

In the early days of social media, there was a certain romance. You could connect with friends, have fun, and, for a while, it even served as a funnel to discover interesting things—articles, podcasts, videos, research papers. As surprising as it may sound, Twitter still plays that role for me even today. But it takes effort: I have to suppress the urge to watch idiotic short-form videos on the home feed and instead stick to the carefully curated lists I’ve built.

But all of that is largely gone now. Social media has degenerated to the point of being utterly and totally useless. Even those who insist it still has value have to work really hard to make it useful. And yet, it’s not dead. Despite the proliferation of bots, scams, and the industrial-scale production of AI slop, social media still has millions—billions—of users.

My default theory is this: what social media provides today is distraction. We live in a society suffering from an epidemic of mindlessness. For a variety of reasons, people would rather do anything than sit alone with their own thoughts. Social media has become the perfect distraction machine.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter—today, they all look the same. Even Substack has morphed into a cheap clone of TikTok. Short-form vertical videos are everywhere, because they “work.” Engagement numbers are high. People don’t even watch most of it—they just swipe. But as long as the swiping continues, the system works for social media companies.

The result is a downward spiral. Humanity doesn’t end with a bang, but with a swipe.

While content proliferates, engagement is evaporating. Average interaction rates across major platforms are declining fast: Facebook and X posts now scrape an average 0.15% engagement, while Instagram has dropped 24% year-on-year. Even TikTok has begun to plateau. People aren’t connecting or conversing on social media like they used to; they’re just wading through slop, that is, low-effort, low-quality content produced at scale, often with AI, for engagement.

And much of it is slop: Less than half of American adults now rate the information they see on social media as “mostly reliable”— down from roughly two-thirds in the mid-2010s. Young adults register the steepest collapse, which is unsurprising; as digital natives, they better understand that the content they scroll upon wasn’t necessarily produced by humans. And yet, they continue to scroll.

The timeline is no longer a source of information or social presence, but more of a mood-regulation device, endlessly replenishing itself with just enough novelty to suppress the anxiety of stopping. Scrolling has become a form of ambient dissociation, half-conscious, half-compulsive, closer to scratching an itch than seeking anything in particular. People know the feed is fake, they just don’t care.