Genuine, human content is increasingly sidelined by algorithmic prioritization, receiving fewer interactions than the engineered content and AI slop optimized solely for clicks…. The problem is not just the rise of fake material, but the collapse of context and the acceptance that truth no longer matters as long as our cravings for colors and noise are satisfied
Since Elon Musk’s takeover, X has shed at least 15% of its global user base. Meta’s Threads, launched with great fanfare in 2023, saw its number of daily active users collapse within a month, falling from around 50 million active Android users at launch in July to only 10 million active users the following August.
At first glance, the feed looks familiar, a seamless carousel of “For You” updates gliding beneath your thumb. But déjà‑vu sets in as 10 posts from 10 different accounts carry the same stock portrait and the same breathless promise — “click here for free pics” or “here is the one productivity hack you need in 2025.” Swipe again and three near‑identical replies appear, each from a pout‑filtered avatar directing you to “free pics.” Between them sits an ad for a cash‑back crypto card.
Scroll further and recycled TikTok clips with “original audio” bleed into Reels on Facebook and Instagram; AI‑stitched football highlights showcase players’ limbs bending like marionettes. Refresh once more, and the woman who enjoys your snaps of sushi rolls has seemingly spawned five clones.
Whatever remains of genuine, human content is increasingly sidelined by algorithmic prioritization, receiving fewer interactions than the engineered content and AI slop optimized solely for clicks.
These are the last days of social media as we know it.
Drowning The Real
Social media was built on the romance of authenticity. Early platforms sold themselves as conduits for genuine connection: stuff you wanted to see, like your friend’s wedding and your cousin’s dog.
Even influencer culture, for all its artifice, promised that behind the ring‑light stood an actual person. But the attention economy, and more recently, the generative AI-fueled late attention economy, have broken whatever social contract underpinned that illusion. The feed no longer feels crowded with people but crowded with content. At this point, it has far less to do with people than with consumers and consumption.
In recent years, Facebook and other platforms that facilitate billions of daily interactions have slowly morphed into the internet’s largest repositories of AI‑generated spam. Research has found what users plainly see: tens of thousands of machine‑written posts now flood public groups — pushing scams, chasing clicks — with clickbait headlines, half‑coherent listicles and hazy lifestyle images stitched together in AI tools like Midjourney.
It’s all just vapid, empty shit produced for engagement’s sake. Facebook is “sloshing” in low-effort AI-generated posts, as Arwa Mahdawi notes in The Guardian; some even bolstered by algorithmic boosts, like “Shrimp Jesus.”
The difference between human and synthetic content is becoming increasingly indistinguishable, and platforms seem unable, or uninterested, in trying to police it. Earlier this year, CEO Steve Huffman pledged to “keep Reddit human,” a tacit admission that floodwaters were already lapping at the last high ground. TikTok, meanwhile, swarms with AI narrators presenting concocted news reports and “what‑if” histories. A few creators do append labels disclaiming that their videos depict “no real events,” but many creators don’t bother, and many consumers don’t seem to care.
The problem is not just the rise of fake material, but the collapse of context and the acceptance that truth no longer matters as long as our cravings for colors and noise are satisfied. Contemporary social media content is more often rootless, detached from cultural memory, interpersonal exchange or shared conversation. It arrives fully formed, optimized for attention rather than meaning, producing a kind of semantic sludge, posts that look like language yet say almost nothing.
We’re drowning in this nothingness.
The Bot-Girl Economy
If spam (AI or otherwise) is the white noise of the modern timeline, its dominant melody is a different form of automation: the hyper‑optimized, sex‑adjacent human avatar. She appears everywhere, replying to trending tweets with selfies, promising “funny memes in bio” and linking, inevitably, to OnlyFans or one of its proxies. Sometimes she is real. Sometimes she is not. Sometimes she is a he, sitting in a compound in Myanmar. Increasingly, it makes no difference.
This convergence of bots, scammers, brand-funnels and soft‑core marketing underpins what might be called the bot-girl economy, a parasocial marketplace fueled in a large part by economic precarity. At its core is a transactional logic: Attention is scarce, intimacy is monetizable and platforms generally won’t intervene so long as engagement stays high. As more women now turn to online sex work, lots of men are eager to pay them for their services. And as these workers try to cope with the precarity imposed by platform metrics and competition, some can spiral, forever downward, into a transactional attention-to-intimacy logic that eventually turns them into more bot than human. To hold attention, some creators increasingly opt to behave like algorithms themselves, automating replies, optimizing content for engagement, or mimicking affection at scale. The distinction between performance and intention must surely erode as real people perform as synthetic avatars and synthetic avatars mimic real women.
There is loneliness, desperation and predation everywhere….
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
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