The greatest benefit that my Syracuse University experience afforded me — beyond a master’s degree, lifelong friends and recognition that the career path I had chosen was not the right one — was access to an alumni email address ending in .edu1. This was important because, in 2005, the only way for you to join The Facebook was to have a college email address. It was a place for college students and people who could find there way in through a back door.
Of course, I didn’t know anyone else on the platform because it was intended for college students and I was the creepy old guy. But, I was there and you weren’t, and that’s all that mattered.
Back then, social media was called social networking and no one knew who Mark Zuckerberg was. All we knew was that Facebook was going to be big and how glad we were that there wasn’t a trace of it five or 10 years prior when we were undergrads2.
Within a year, Facebook threw the doors open to the general public and everyone younger than 40 joined. In its infancy, Facebook was not the Boomer haven that exists today. It was where Gen X and Xennials expressed every stupid thought that crossed their mind3, to be seen by everyone they went to college or high school with. Where we obsessively wished people happy birthday. Where we poked one another and then joked with them later about the double entendre.
Facebook led to Twitter, killed MySpace, acquired Instagram, and paralleled dozens of other platforms that have since come and gone4.
Today, 70% of U.S. adults say they use Facebook, making it one of the most popular social media platforms available.
And, I would argue that Facebook, and most of social media, is dying.
One of my grad school professors, Stephen Masiclat, gave a presentation some years ago on social media where he noted that the intent of social networking/social media was embedded in the name; it was to be social. Social media is supposed to be a platform that encourages sharing and conversation, and the social compact of social media is that you are either a sharer or a commenter. Take the social aspect away and we’re all just forcing our crap upon one another.
Or, taken another way, social media is so 2025.
When was the last time you scrolled your Facebook feed as opposed to posting or commenting on something? My guess is that you check Facebook on a daily or frequent basis but your posts are far less than occasional. Your reasons are your reasons and there’s no wrong answer, but at the same time, it’s undermining that social media compact.5 Or, as Jenny Odell writes in her book How to Do Nothing, “Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act like dams that capitalize on our natural interest in others and an ageless need for community, hijacking and frustrating our most innate desires, and profiting from them.”
Of course, Facebook doesn’t care. It’s doing just fine without you as it collects your data to better target advertising that you see on apps and other websites. The stock price of its parent company, Meta, continues to grow. Don’t shed a tear for them.
Not that there haven’t been unforced errors. Though it boasts one of the highest numbers of users, your Facebook feed probably looks emptier than normal. The app continues to lose users, shedding 50 million users between 2021-24. It lags among the 18-34 age demographic; 28% of Facebook’s US users are in that segment, far behind the TikTok’s 46% and Instagram’s 42%. In an attempt to cater to everyone, Facebook slowly lost hold of the youngest and most tech-inclined age group.
Or, think of it in different terms, as
did recently. Social media is the 21st century shopping mall. You remember shopping malls, right? It’s where your parents would take you so you could go to Sears, try on selections from the Husky line and check to make sure there was enough room in the crotch.Or maybe that was just me.
Anyhow malls were a community’s social hub. Teenage weekends meant roaming the mall with your friends, going to the movies, spending money on CDs and terrible mall food, and other “hanging out” adjacent activities. Remember hanging out? It’s what we did before smartphones.
The advent of online shopping brought pain to shopping malls6 and the pandemic was the ultimate throttler. My local shopping center, once billed as a generational destination shopping center, is slowly bleeding out. I can’t remember the last time I was there.7
Malls were hives of social activity for young people and a retail destination for everyone until they weren’t, as Ted explains:
During the 1980s, around 2,500 new shopping malls were built in the US. The market was saturated — even before the rise of online shopping.
There just weren’t enough consumers to support this huge expansion in consumerism. But they kept adding more and more malls—like Bob the Builder on Benzedrine.
Then the collapse came.
This is the Law of Reflexivity, and it deserves to be better known. Powerful trends actually cause their own collapse, because of the very intensity of their rise.
So in the US, 400 of the 2,000 largest malls shut down during just a three-year period. And the bloodletting isn’t over. Experts believe as many as half of the existing malls may not survive another two decades.
This is exactly the situation in social media—where hundreds (or thousands) of platforms compete for community members.
And more get launched every month.
People keep telling me that I need to move to Threads. Or Bluesky. Or Twitch or TikTok or Discord or Truth Social or Snapchat or Rumble or YouTube shorts or whatever.
Twitter/X usage peaked in 2022 with 368.4 million users. By 2024, it had lost 33 million users. Some were likely bots, sure, but many are people like me. I have a Twitter account that sits idle. I get on every month or two and like something so it doesn’t get reclaimed for inactivity, but it’s dry docked.
You can easily pinpoint the Twitter/X recession to a date: October 27, 2022. That was the day Elon Musk completed his takeover of the company. The exodus has continued as the company transforms further and deeper into an ecosystem of conspiracy, hate speech and overall lunacy.
Facebook’s downfall doesn’t have an exact date. It’s more or less an event: the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign. In short, third parties (foreign and domestic) spread false news stories and lies on the platform, targeting voters who would (by and large) vote for Donald Trump. It’s been the subject of academic study and analysis. And, while Facebook once suspended Trump for his campaign’s complicity in the scandal, it has since welcomed him back into its loving embrace.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s policy shifts to align the company with RePresident Donald Trump — including the suspension of third-party fact-checking, deemphasis of content moderation around politics — has caused many to quit Facebook. Others have just given up on the pervasive nature of the commentary on the platform, like my friend here:
Facebook was useful for a while, but original intent and end result often differ. While Facebook was intended to create a network for Harvard students, the pursuit of money outgrew its social aspirations, as it did for every social media platform that followed.
From The Verge:
And then the founders discover, one by one, that there’s something not quite right about the business of social media. They made their apps free to scale their community, and then they found there was no turning back. Unfettered growth became the only way forward, no matter how unrecognizable the product had to become to get there.
Unlike most other businesses on Earth that live and die by their customers’ demands, social media services are caught trying to satisfy both their users and the people actually paying for it all: investors and advertisers.
The needs of these groups are dramatically different. Users want what the platform was originally for — be it ephemeral messaging, sharing photos, or otherwise. Surprising, energized spaces to connect with friends in a new way. But these use cases inevitably have a limit. You can only post so many photos. You only have so many friends to message. And for investors and advertisers, that’s a problem. So each social network has to find ways to make you send another photo, or it has to deploy a brand-new feature and encourage you to use that, too. More usage, more space for ads, more money for investors.
And, duh, the money won.
When a company submits to digital advertising, there’s no avoiding the tradeoffs that come with it. And users get put in the back seat.
“We want the chronological feed back!” Instagram users scream into the void. “Here, have Reels and Shopping,” said Instagram’s CEO, on the hunt for new revenue streams.
“We want freedom of speech!” tweet the denizens of Twitter. “But then our sponsored hashtags won’t be brand safe,” said Twitter’s CEO (whoever that is this week).
“We want to show our kinky side!” Tumblr users blogged to the heavens. “Sorry, can’t do it,” said the overlords at Yahoo. “It’s scaring the advertisers!”
The idea of checking in8 gave way to checking out, which is how my wife and I spend parts of our evenings. With a basketball game on the TV, we send each other (and my sister and a limited number of friends) Instagram Reels that we think are funny. There’s nothing social about that. We’re not actually talking to anyone or giving them a glimpse into our condition. It’s mindless disassociation. I would argue that a measure of this is healthy after a long day of work, but the more we scroll, the more we empower and validate Meta.
It’s as if the best way to break the social media cycle is to have honest-to-God social contact with people the way we once did. In person.
Odell again:
From either a social or ecological perspective, the ultimate goal of “doing nothing” is to wrest our focus from the attention economy and replant it in the public, physical realm.
I am not anti-technology. … Rather, I am opposed to the way that corporate platforms buy and sell our attention, as well as to designs and uses of technology that enshrine a narrow definition of productivity and ignore the local, the carnal, the poetic. I am concerned about the effects of current social media on expression — including the right not to express oneself—and its deliberately addictive features. But the villain here is not necessarily the internet, or even the idea of social media; it is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.
So, what’s the answer? I should be like my friend above. I should quit Facebook and Instagram. Unfortunately, they are marketing channels for this and my other writing, so maybe not a full abandonment.
For about five to 10 years, Facebook was a societal magnet. I reconnected with people I knew from college and developed actual relationships with them. I became part of the local craft beer group and met people that I consider genuine friends. I had the chance to watch my friends’ children grow up, graduate high school and college, all from the nosebleeds seats of Facebook. This loss of community, as manufactured as it may have been, is about all I miss from
But even Cormac McCarthy would have a hard time finding the words to describe the wasteland of social media today.
Final Thoughts on Finality
“Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power. ”
— P.J. O’Rourke
Dirt Nap is the Substack newsletter about death, grief and dying that is written and edited by Jared Paventi. It’s published every Friday morning. Dirt Nap is free and we simply ask that you subscribe and/or share with others.
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Seriously, go email jaredpaventi@alum.syracuse.edu. I think it redirects to one of the email accounts I still check.
I can count at least four things I did that, had social media existed back then, would have led to my transfer, expulsion or public shaming.
Ever look at your memories and think to yourself, “I really posted that?” Yeah…
R.I.P. Ning, Digg, Bebo, Google Plus, et al.
I’m using it simply as a means of sharing work and showing my kids photos on Facebook Memories.
The discovery of Music Boulevard — a predecessor to CDNow and Amazon.com — in college meant never having to pay $18.99 for a CD or trek to the mall. You can blame me.
I think my oldest played Christmas carols there one night in 2021 or 2022. I can’t say for certain the last time I spent money at the mall.
Remember FourSquare and checking in places? I think I was the mayor of my next door neighbor’s house for a few months. I would walk to his porch, check in and leave, just to spite him. It was great.
Another great essay and as it often is a fun trip down memory lane. I'll take the credit for the post about deleting Facebook from the phone. There are a few informational accounts I miss having easy access to, and I've found my doom scrolling moved over to LinkedIN, which I guess is better? I at least have a better idea of what my professional colleagues are doing in their careers right now and the politics is much smaller.
I have also noticed, that its far easier to put the phone down and be present with the person I'm with since its one less option for distraction. I still log on to the desktop, but that's the necessary evil of actively managing 3 or 4 business accounts. From a marketer standpoint its a bit sad, because Facebook was gold for reaching people about our events. Trying to advertise events is tough because of the fragmented nature of where people get their information and for about 5 years Facebook was the best place to do it.
This piece had me thinking about civil discourse. Where will people practice it? Yes, Facebook could be annoying, but it was also a place where people could explore ideas. Of course, I am not afraid to have hard civic conversations. I don't think politics should be discussed only privately. However, I can concur that political ideas have been polarized, and Facebook encouraged that. I deleted all Meta because of Zuckerberg's public statements concerning content mediation and gender in the workplace, as well as his attendance at Trump's inauguration. For me, social media is dead because expert analysis was not elevated.