As a content creator, I let myself down in 2023. Sure, I wrote tens of thousands of words, most of which were published. But in past years, I hustled on social media platforms to promote my work, monitoring the shares, likes and comments my posts received.
Something fundamentally changed this year. I largely gave up on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, which for many years was my go-to place to find out what was going on in the world and to broadcast my stories and opinions.
I’ve basically stopped using Facebook, too. My main social media activity is in a private group of a dozen friends using the Signal app.
The signal-to-noise ratio on social media has been dropping steadily for years. But in 2023, social media became truly tedious. It’s more toxic than ever thanks to failures in content moderation, particularly on X, which has largely abandoned its efforts to maintain any sense of decorum. The scammers are out in full force and misinformation is rife.
But what’s most irksome is the near total takeover of social media by influencers. It seems that the only ones putting effort into these platforms any more are the hustlers, with their carefully curated Instagram timelines. Even if I don’t follow them, they end up in my feed. The naked self-promotion on Microsoft-owned LinkedIn is nearly unbearable, though it at least features real people using their real names.
Over it all is the growing proliferation of content generated by artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT. Before long, it will swamp social media platforms.
The bottom line is that the digital dopamine hit I used to get from social media isn’t working any more. I get it instead from following creators on platforms such as Substack, Patreon and YouTube, where I pay to have the adverts stripped from the videos.
On such platforms, there are real people doing interesting things. I’m following a British man’s efforts to rebuild a ruined chateau in France. Dan is definitely a hustler. The money he makes from adverts running alongside his videos is paying for the whole project. But he is far more entertaining than an episode of Grand Designs.
Kiwi business commentator Bernard Hickey and satirist David Slack have built healthy subscriber bases on Substack, the newsletter platform that has social media elements to it. But even Substack has been criticised for the racist content slipping through its lax moderation. Patreon allows users to pay a monthly fee to support their favourite content creators or online personalities and now provides a base layer of income for hundreds of thousands of them.
These are the platforms where the action is for me these days. The difference, with the exception of YouTube, which still has a predominantly advertising-based business model, is that people are actually paying to support them. Social media’s business model still relies on the attention economy and the platforms will try any trick to keep us scrolling and swiping.
The last big pivot by Facebook-owner Meta was to chase TikTok and its addictive short video formats. It was as if a switch was flipped, former Snapchat employee Ellis Hamburger wrote in technology website The Verge in April, “away from news, away from followers, away from real friends – toward the final answer to earning more time from users: highly addictive short form videos that magically appear to numb a chaotic, crowded brain.”
Enough. I’ve moved on. Some see a “pluriverse” of small social networks such as Mastodon, Bluesky and Discord breathing new life into social media. I tried them all this year, but logged out underwhelmed. I’ll keep watching Dan rebuild his chateau brick by brick. Hope lies in the passionate creators.
