Is there a future for social media?

August 15, 2025

A thought that keeps coming up. We have Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Nostr, Warpcast, LinkedIn, Threads, Tumblr, and TikTok.

I think we need to stop thinking of these as social media platforms but rather micro blogging platforms with social features. They aren’t going to change the world. Regular people are moving into a post-social media world where they are intentional with where they put their time and attention, in some cases choosing not to sign-up at all.

People are going to choose these platforms based on if the service aligns with their values but also where their friends are. I discuss some of the distinction between the different platforms on my post The short form web.

In other words, social media is a product trap. People wish they didn’t feel the need to use it. Does this mean there is a future for social media? Yes because we’re not going to become perfect efficient consumers who choose services necessarily because we want to, but because we feel we have to maintain connection with people. We are moving in a direction where people realize they do have a choice and have chosen to log out and delete their account.

Social media companies are reliant on traditional ads to make money. As people choose to use social media less, this business model reveals an inherent imbalance in trying to reach your audience. Seth Godin frames it well:

Instead of simply creating value for the viewers/users, they mostly have to create value for the advertisers. They have an incentive to give the users just barely enough content to get them to stay for as long as possible to see as many ads as possible.

The conflict is real, and we pay for it with noise, trite content, link bait and annoying ads. Those are defects in the system, they’re logical outcomes of the way it’s built.

It’s difficult to get people to pay for something they used to get for free. But he uses Twitter to suggest if they had been more subscription based instead of ads based, it might have not turned into a swamp.

Does this mean social media is irrelevant? No, but the declining interest means you cannot continue to rely on social media to find your audience.