From an interesting piece on The Verge:

They each seem to have spontaneously discovered that shortform videos from strangers are simply more compelling than the posts and messages from friends that made up traditional social media. Call it the carcinization of social media, an inevitable outcome for feeds built only around engagement and popularity. So one day — it’s hard to say exactly when — a switch was flipped. Away from news, away from followers, away from real friends — toward the final answer to earning more time from users: highly addictive shortform videos that magically appear to numb a chaotic, crowded brain.

But where did the shift come from? I spent years in academia, and I know my script: the big bad evil capitalists did some wicked inception and got us to want something that in our beautiful tabula rasa we’d never want. But the picture isn’t this clear (it never is):

I’ve spent a lot of time blaming founders for changing their products at the whims of advertisers, but to any social platform’s credit, the users do indeed do it to themselves. In our own eternal quests for social validation, we’re out for growth, too! We readily give in to convenient, advertiser-friendly features like Stories, which prioritize broadcasting over simply communicating. We add more and more friends — because it feels good! — until our close friend group has become our audience.

We shift ourselves and our constitutions over time, from sharer to broadcaster, because this is the mode that is most appealing. We want to be broadcasters. The lights, the frame of perfection, the being of the act of appearing, of being seen and therefore known. The world we were raised in was one that prized the broadcaster, and all of humanity found the spotlight warm and inviting.

More:

“People want to be a product!” technology writer Rob Horning wrote to me via email. “Being a product is coded as success in our society… What people don’t want is to be exploited or misled — and that is hard to avoid in the context of ad-supported media.” And so, a bizarre symbiosis is formed between platform, user, and advertiser. The apps had changed, but so had users, leaving that precious early social media feeling out in the cold again.

We’re all disgusting broadcasters now. It started years ago when PR-speak crept into Facebook posts and most of your friends stopped talking to you in favor of issuing you witty press releases.

It’s worth checking out the piece in full–

https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/18/23672769/social-media-inevitable-death-monetization-growth-hacks