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Social media is integral to my life in multiple ways. It was what stoked the flames of my love for fandom circles online (thanks to the Wings of Fire subreddit and related Discord servers), it is my primary news source, and it used to be my primary source of entertainment. But since starting college (and even a bit before that), my overall feelings on it have soured somewhat. This is largely due to multiple factors: a huge portion of my downtime was spent mindlessly watching YouTube videos (which is kinda sorta social media?), which contributed to a really bad writer’s block that lasted around 2 years, the buyout of Twitter by Elon Musk and the public IPO of Reddit both helped me realize how easy it was to ruin platforms (or at the very least, make them worse than they already were), and at some point I found my life was largely better off disconnected.

These days I only really use Mastodon, Bluesky, and Discord as my social media, though even then I make sure to limit my time on Mastodon and Bluesky (as for Discord, I’ve made it boring enough for myself that I don’t spend much time on it to begin with). It hasn’t solved all of my life problems (the hole left by YouTube was partially filled by video games, so I may need to work on that), but I do think I have noticed significant improvements in myself. I’ve actually been able to set aside time to get uncomfortable and do things I’m not used to doing, like working out on a somewhat routine basis, making music somewhat often, reading books again, and even creating personal programming projects (check out my Codeberg account for those). Going in, it’s clear where my bias is: I am not a very big fan of social media’s effect on my life, so don’t expect this to me an overly positive post.

With that, though, I’d like to list the ways that social media is beneficial for my life, and the ways that social media is detrimental for my life.

Positives

News

This is probably the biggest positive for me. I really like that I can get updates on current events from real people rather than big news companies who are owned by or in bed with billionaires. Granted, Twitter is owned by a billionaire, Facebook and Instagram are owned by billionaires, and I avoid those platforms accordingly because they abuse their users in ways I’ll get into later. Bluesky is also very much funded by billionaires, but it is probably more afraid to push the nazi views pervasive in Twitter because its userbase specifically joined to avoid Twitter.

Using social media for news obviously isn’t perfect. Even something like Mastodon, to my understanding, uses some simple algorithm for its “Explore” section, though it thankfully doesn’t appear to be personalized by user but rather by server. The reason why I am averse to personalization algorithms is because while they can make it easier to find things you’re interested in (with the addiction that might entail), it also makes it easier to push propaganda to people who are already leaning a certain way. I’m not going to pretend as though I’m immune to propaganda, or that Mastodon is a bastion of neutral and unbiased takes (because it isn’t, and that’s something I like about it), but knowing my biases and where I stand, and knowing my views are fairly unpopular to the US’s current regime (though not necessarily its population), I appreciate the more people-centric approach that some social medias can offer. Discord is also good for this since it is literally just a chatroom at its most basic level. I think staying connected with real people in our world who aren’t being employed by billionaries is certainly one of the most valuable things about social media.

Answers

This is probably the second biggest positive for me. You can also read this as: Reddit is the new Google (but Reddit still sucks ). Since I’m a programmer I often have really specific problems or questions that can usually be answered accurately by social media posts. To be fair, though, forums also do this exact same thing, except better because they’re usually less centralized and therefore less susceptible to enshittification. Search engines will often come up with totally useless results these days, not just due to the often incorrect AI answers that get spewed out, but by the SEO garbage websites that are also AI generated but are often found at the top of a search. It’s a frustrating time we live in, but as people often say, appending “reddit” to your search usually fixes this (for now ).

Personal updates

I don’t connect with specific people very often on social media, but this is probably one of the main reasons social media exists in the first place. And yeah, as human connection is a vital thing for us to continue functioning, this is probably one of the most important aspects of social media objectively. It’s also the reason why switching social media platforms or ditching it entirely can be so difficult for some people: it can cause isolation.

It’s also useful for bands who want to share their music, though so far we’ve had… limited success. Perhaps things will change once our album comes out.

Negatives

Entertainment (addiction)

For a lot of people this is the entire reason they use social media, and for me it’s the entire reason I try not to use social media. Yes, there is a lot of really fun entertainment available on social media, especially something like YouTube. It also can lead to crippling addictions that outright remove motivation to express myself in non-essential ways. After seeing just how much more I’ve been able to do, and how much more I’ve been able to talk to people after cutting YouTube, I just can’t go back to it.

Surveillance

When you post to social media, you are basically giving free data to tech companies. This is true whether you are posting on Facebook or an obscure Mastodon server (though at least with Mastodon, the company might have to work a bit harder to scrape the data, especially if it defederated with Threads ). You need to be careful when posting because any information can be used to target you, whether with ads, with phishing scams (via data the company sells to a data broker, who sells to another data broker, who sells to another data broker, who sells to a scamming operation), or outright government oppression. Social media is likely a prime source for those looking to compile data on people, and given how an autism registry was proposed by RFK Jr , this should scare you. You have to be mindful of these sorts of things.

Enshittification

One of the most frustrating parts of social media is that, for now, a given platform is only temporarily good. Most of the popular social media platforms are businesses, and in my opinion healthy social media made to serve the people is incompatible with for-profit businesses. I think many businesses understand this because it is difficult to onboard people onto social media with an existing business model, apart from maybe an optional subscription like Discord Nitro (but for Reddit that clearly wasn’t enough to keep the company afloat, and given how Discord plans to go public soon, I foresee a repeat of the Reddit fiasco).

Most of the time, though, companies choose to offer their social media as a free service with no strings attached. Except, of course, there are. Once these centralized platforms gain enough users, they are able to start selling user data, showing obtrusive and sometimes VERY NSFW ads , and pushing subscriptions. Elon Musk even once considered making a Twitter subscription mandatory , but given how many people already hated him enough to flee to Bluesky, I think he probably knew this would kill Twitter. The trick is to put people in a situation where it is more painful or expensive for them to leave the platform than it is to put up with the harmful changes. It’s predatory and frankly a tiresome routine I keep seeing happen lately.

Some people argue that this is normal and okay, that platforms eventually should die. Think of something like MySpace: it technically still exists, but as we know it it is long dead. Facebook came around, then Twitter, then Instagram, then TikTok. New social media paradigms came to replace the old ones, and people thus migrated.

But no, people still use these platforms! Except MySpace lol. Yes, people joke about Facebook being for old people, but it absolutely is still in use by many people. And frankly, I think such a mindset is defeatist and wasteful. Rather than organically building online spaces for people, that respond and develop to the people’s needs, why would we build up and burn down several things that largely serve the same purpose, but with a new coat of paint or “sleek” interface, in the pursuit of fame and money? It’s a waste of time.

In my opinion, the solution is decentralized, open source, non-profit platforms like Mastodon. Yes, it is not for-profit nor backed by any VC funds, and thus it has much less money to push out improvements. However, I think for social media in particular, being for-profit is part of the problem. With the profit motive removed, there is nothing to chase over the needs of the people, save for maybe your own personal vision of how a social media platform should function. Additionally, if the platform is decentralized and open source, not only can unpopular changes to the way the platform works be vetoed by the server hosters by not including the change to your own version of the code, but users are not held captive to one particular server if the leadership is bad.

The Fosstodon fallout is actually a fantastic example of this. One of the moderators was known to have really weird views based on their conduct on other platforms, and this issue was brought up with the other server admins. The server admins did not care though. On any other platform, most users likely would have voiced their disgust, but then shrugged their shoulders and moved on because well, are they just going to ditch all their friends to protest one bad mod?

However, because Fosstodon was just another Mastodon server, people decided not to put up with the leadership’s bullshit and moved their account to different Mastodon servers, retaining their followers and friends and enjoying virtually the same experience, but without the leadership problems of Fosstodon. To encourage migration, other servers defederated with Fosstodon, severing communication with the network (though some gave a warning in advance so people could move).

I’d like to point out that compared to what the big platforms do, this drama was comparatively small. Yet if bad apples are punished this much in terms of userbase just for this, imagine how much more monumental the punishment would be for the shit Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have been pulling on a routine basis! They don’t get punished, however, because they have put themselves in an entrenched position where they can’t be punished.

Unfortunately, I think our culture has a tendency to value short term convenience, flashiness, and consumerism over long term security and respect in these tech platforms. A lot of them likely don’t even know how their data is being used behind the colorful interface. Sadly, until our culture adapts to the predatory behavior of big tech companies, decentralization will probably remain a niche thing. Bluesky is probably the most popular “decentralized” social media platform, but I put it in quotes because the vast majority of its users are on the main, billionaire backed bsky.social instance, running behind relay servers run by the same people (Bluesky is built in such a way that expensive relay servers are necessary for decentralized content to be viewed across the network). If most Bluesky users are on the main network and do not understand the implications of this, it would be extremely easy for the people running it to defederate from all other instances, suffering a negligible loss in userbase since most users are on the main instance, and then it is a centralized platform again and we have accomplished nothing.

Much like free, libre, and open source software, decentralized networks only truly work when both the technology works and when the userbase understands the social implications of decentralization. Anyway, sorry for the tangent there. The point is, the platforms most people are on will keep abusing them, often in ways they don’t understand, until people are knowledgable on the real solutions rather than the band-aid fix of moving to another centralized platform.

Is social media useful?

Yes, it is a useful tool. But that’s just it: a tool. You must use it; you must not let yourself be used by it. If used right, it can be a great way to stay in touch with your peers and to stay connected with current events. If used incorrectly, it can cripple you and even be used to manipulate your beliefs. Always be mindful of who benefits from your use of a platform, and remember that there is a world outside with grass waiting to be touched.