The End of Social Media

After 20 years of overloading and monetization at a wild speed, it will soon hit the wall

Jun 15, 2025

That old car cannot continue to carry more weight.

The Internet was a great idea with room for expansion built-in — but social media wasn’t, not when all the developments it has seen since its invention are considered.

Maybe you have, like me, felt how the news aren’t reliable? And I don’t mean whether you can trust what they say, because that’s already a big topic (with a serious tendency to news being untrustworthy in the way they describe things) – no, I’m talking about news being there or not, when you would have expected them. If they “show up” as promised.

The last few days, there has been a remarkable lack of news about some of the big things going on in the world. There were just small notes about the situation in Ukraine, a very limited coverage of the new war between Israel and Iran, and a very sparse coverage of the mass-protests in the USA (“No Kings”), and even, surprisingly, no live coverage and hardly even a mention in various news media of the self-pronounced king’s military parade in the USA.

It is hard to tell what has happened. Recently, some news websites have been hacked and blocked by internet attacks, and perhaps also the news distribution nets behind them have been exposed to such things? If no news is coming in, no news is being told. Of course, the journalists know that things are happening, but they cannot tell about them if they have no pictures and no interviews with key people.

Also, it could be that some of the news by dictate from government institutions of various kinds have been muted.

Whatever the reason, news was absent or bleak.

In such a situation, you would want to rely on your direct network, getting information from people you know around the world and to whom you are connected – through social media. But here’s the thing: social media was just as silent as the news media.

Posts were posted, comments were made, and advertising was poured out all over the social media, as usual, but there was no mention of the events of the world.

Again, this could be a matter of various organizations intervening, or the platforms themselves censoring the posts, which does happen normally and for some reason could have been intensified these days. Or it could be a matter of social media simply having died, quietly, being strangled by the increasingly heavy commercialization and control of the contents by the owners of the platforms.

This meant, as a strange thing, that I could look for information about the lacking news on, for instance, Substack Notes, and find nothing. Only some generic posts about the difference between good people and bad people in the USA, as always, and an increased amount of empty feel-good stuff, that didn’t tell about anything in particular and were of a “timeless” nature where you couldn’t determine when it was written or posted, if it wasn’t for its date-stamp.

Social media has run for too long now to be offering anything useful, as it has been grabbed by commercialism and self-promotion and has stopped being an exchange of thoughts between real, feeling and thinking, people.

So, is this the end?

Yes, in one way. There is nothing to come for if you are seeking genuine connections and free speech, because such things are close to extinct by now on most platforms, only popping up as a rare post that is then even being largely ignored.

And no, in the sense that this non-informative environment of exchanging platitudes and fabricated thoughts and influencing comments will live long, since there is nothing else to take over, so it can be allowed to just slowly fade out.

I have mentioned before how we often don’t have a real alternative when seeking social connection, as the old forms have largely died out:

You don’t, in many parts of the world, go for a walk in the city and find some of your friends sitting with a cup of coffee at the corner café nearby, to sit down with and enjoy a chat, before you move on and find some more friends and acquaintances to exchange a few words and smiles with.
You don’t decide to write a letter to the people you know, who are further away and can’t be stumbled upon at the café, but who you want to stay connected with anyway.
And you don’t get a call now and then from old friends who heard some news from your area and wanted to check if you were okay and if it affected you.

What you have left, as the first, last, and only way of staying in touch, is often the social media. And even if these are defunct, you will keep trying to get something useful out of them. You will read (doomscroll) through all the crap in the hope of finding something that can enlighten you or cheer you up, perhaps even make you feel that you are part of something, not just a leftover from the lost Internet revolution, the attempt to make the electronic world become alive and full of real, open talk.

It is there, but it isn’t social media. It is media, that’s true, but it isn’t social.

Social would imply a feeling of being a human amongst other humans when using it, and that feeling is hard to find now.

Today, on Notes, I saw one genuine little post by someone who felt some actual human feelings and also felt that she had to almost excuse the mentioning of them. Better than a censored ad, that’s for sure, but why is it necessary to excuse being human?

And that is where I feel that the social media concept has finally died, reached its end-of-life, probably to be schematically supported during a period after this, but heading towards its final day, when it will be switched off and forgotten.