Post-Social Social Media

May 25, 2025

There's been a lot of talk lately about Meta's antritrust trial. But one discussion subject subject in particular has been stuck in my brain for weeks now, ever since early May. Specifically, Mark claims that the average person:

has three people that they would consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's, like, 15.

Sure. It's not exactly news that Americans are lonelier than ever. But Mark genuinely believes that AI friends can replace real friends. I'm not here to wax philosophically about whether or not AI can replace human contact. But this whole conversation does have me thinking about the ever-changing value of social media.

I've often seen social media compared to cigarettes. The comparison is easy; they're both impossibly addictive; people zombified by their phones are almost as annoying as people smoking a cig; both have deleterious health effects; a lot of people think that children shouldn't have access to either; and both are a problem only because of clever marketing schemes.

I've been playing around with Mastodon lately, and I used Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter in their glory days last decade. Inspired by the usability of and lack of user-hostile dark patterns in Mastodon, I recently scrolled my partner's Instagram and Facebook feeds to see just how much things have changed since I left pre-2020. And that got me thinking: is social media in general the problem? Or is it just the twisted, manipulative, deeply psychologically problematic state of Big Social Media, or as I think of it... post-social social media?

To explain my thoughts, let's take a little walk through the history of tobacco.

The Origin of Tobacco Smoking

Tobacco smoking started with pipes and hand-rolled cigars (let's just call them blunts) sometime between 5000 and 3000 BC in South and Middle America. Aside from occasional experiments with tobacco-smoke enemas, tobacco use was largely pretty responsible; adults and children alike would mix tobacco with herbs as a cure for colds and coughs, and occasionally use it for religious ceremonies (or maybe just getting high -- future anthropologists studying life in 2025 would probably say that a lot of Americans use Adderall and marijuana for 'ceremonial purposes').

Tobacco reached Europe in the 1500s, but it wasn't until the early 1600s that colonial settlers first raised tobacco (largely with slave labor, largely with unsustainable farming practices) for profit.

Pre-1800s, an English King, an Ottoman Sultan, several Chinese emperors, several Popes, and a large portion of the Japanese shugunate all created early smoking bans. But in those days, only 2% of people smoked. In the 1600s, they simply didn't have the kind of mass-scale psychologist-informed marketing and advertising schemes that we have today. People didn't have the disposable income to buy cigarettes, nor did anyone produce enough cigarettes to sell multiple cigarettes per person per day. That didn't start until the turn of the 1900s.

The Dawn of the Cigarette

In the 1880s, James Buchanan Duke created the first mechanically-rolled cigarettes using a machine designed by James Albert Bonsack. The Bonsack Machine rolled cigarettes 50 times faster than humans, so by the mid 1880s, Buck Duke's American Tobacco Company was selling over a hundred thousand cigarettes a day.

It wasn't until the 1920s that companies starting adding additives like sugar and honey for flavor, and coloring compounds to paper to make their cigarettes look more uniform.

By the 1940s, companies started to add humectants (moisture retainers) such as ammonia compounds, glycerol, propylene glycol, and more to improve cigarette shelf life.

By the 1960s, it wasn't just aesthetics and flavors; science was figuring out ways to make cigarettes more efficient. Companies were adding burn accelerants like potassium nitrate and ammonia compounds to increase nicotine absorption. Everyone wanted a competitive edge to make their cigarette more powerful, more addictive, more irreplaceable compared to the generic alternatives. Just like today's arms race for increased vehicle size (for personal safety, of course!), every cigarette company wanted to make their product better. And just like with today's SUVs and trucks, winning that arms race made the product more dangerous than ever.

In 1964, Surgeon General Luther Terry published a report establishing a concrete link between cigarettes and lung cancer.

In 1967, the FCC applied the Fairness Doctrine to tobacco marketing, mandating anti-smoking counter-advertisements. The cause?

a law professor named John Banzhaf wrote the FCC and complained that under the Fairness Doctrine, TV stations broadcasting cigarette ads should be required to run anti-smoking public service announcements (PSAs) to represent the opposite point of view -- that smoking is a health hazard. The FCC agreed, and ordered TV stations to provide free air time to anti-smoking PSAs at a ratio of one anti-smoking ad to every five cigarette ads they showed.

By the the 1970s, cigarette companies were cumulatively enhancing their products with over 300 different chemical compounds. But more importantly, the marketing media machine was in full swing, showing cigarette ads on radio, on television, in newspapers, in magazines, on billboards, in the mail, literally anywhere you looked, you might find a cigarette ad. The inundation of cigarette ads became so obnoxious that in 1971, the United States actually banned radio and TV ads for cigarettes.

Cigarettes were successfully engineered for addiction, and marketed for maximum market penetration. At peak usage in the 1960s, well over half of the US population smoked cigarettes.

In the early 1900s, German scientists first linked smoking and lung cancer, and the world's first modern anti-smoking campaign began. So cigarettes are officially so unhealthy, even Nazis hated them!

To be clear, tobacco is bad for you. You really shouldn't smoke it. But if you roll a couple of hand-rolled tobacco blunts per day, or smoke a bowl or two of tobacco from a pipe, your risk is closer to your buddy who drinks one or two beers after work than someone who smokes a pack a day. To break it down:

• Two beers a day reduces your life expectancy by 6 months.
• Two tobacco blunts a day reduces your life expectancy by 24-48 months and increases your risk of cancer by 300%.
• A pack of cigarettes a day reduces your life expectancy by 120-180 months and increases your risk of cancer by 1500%.

So even smoking tobacco is by no means good for humans. But you know what's much much worse? Marketing tricking half the population into trimming a decade or more off of their lives. Before marketing and engineered addiction got involved, 2% of people smoked. Afterwards? Over 50%. It's hard not to see that we took a moderately unhealthy natural thing and turned it into a monster.

The Origin of Social Media

Social media started in the late 1970s with Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and Usenet. LiveJournal made blogging easily accessible to anyone in 1999. MySpace and Friendster showed up in 2002 and 2003, respectively. The Harvard-only The Facebook was born in 2004. The Facebook News Feed, the first thing recognizable to a young person today as real social media, was born in 2007. Facebook Chat in 2008. Facebook notifications in 2010. The first News Feed ads didn't show up until 2012.

Early Facebook was one of the best experiences I've ever had on the internet. It was easy to meet new people through mutual friends. New people were constantly showing up and trying to build connections. Facebook Chat made it easy to see when other people were online (and actually online, as in at a computer using Facebook, not just 'online') to reach out. Links and memes were rare, at least, until memes started to take over everything. Most importantly, Facebook was social -- as in, it was a great way to socialize with real people who you might not bump into in a really rural place like where I grew up.

When I went to college in 2013, the combination of Facebook and Google+ made it incredibly easy to get to know dozens of people in my freshman class before I ever set foot on campus. Join a group, add some friends, reach out over chat to whoever was online to get to know them, rinse, repeat. Virtual socialization begot meatspace socialization.

Throughout my time at college, Facebook evolved in a negative direction. It got harder to meet new people on Facebook, despite the annual dump of 1000+ new students and groups for most classes. People stopped posting. For a time, Chat ditched the green 'online' dot -- and then brought it back because nobody thought anybody was online any more. But smartphones somehow made it harder to reach out via Chat, because you weren't actually 'online' if you had your phone on you at all times. If you saw a notification from someone you didn't know, you'd most likely ignore it and possibly forget to respond at all.

By 2017, the feed was so inundated with ads and made it so difficult to see updates from friends and family that I deleted my Facebook account out of frustration.

Early social media helped people connect through chat, life updates, photos, and yes, even pokes. It was unhealthy to spend all of your time on it, but useful in small doses.

As recently as 2017, social media started tearing people apart. It became unhealthy to spend much (perhaps any) time on it at all.

The Dawn of Post-Social Social Media

So what changed?

Post-social social media started to:

• increase ads beyond paying the server bills, to the point where they began interfering with the core purpose of the product
• remove chronological feeds, removing a user's ability to stop scrolling when they see old content. Reminiscent of a casino that lacks windows, so you can't tell how much of your fleeting life you've spent at the slot machine.
• introduce never-ending feeds of 'suggested content' (an in-platform ad) so those non-chronological feeds would always have something new to show users. Reminiscent of a casino's twisting, winding floor layouts that keep people from easily getting from point A to point B (how this is compatible with fire codes, I have no idea; even worse, airports like London Heathrow have started to do this with terminal stores).
• employ dark patterns to suck people in for as long as possible. Farmville and Mafia Wars and Words with Friends were the start of these low-value time-sucks. I can only imagine what they have evolved into, but I have no doubt it involves billions of dollars of recurring revenue from predatory microtransactions and most of that revenue comes from people with fixed or near-zero income.
• employ those dark patterns to stop anyone from leaving, akin to a predatory gym membership -- when I left Facebook, for instance, there was no way to find the 'delete' button in the website or app itself. Instead, I had to find the link on a separate site, put in a request for account deletion, and wait 30 days (without ever logging in accidentally) to actually get them to delete my account.

In other words, enshittification.

According to Meta testimony in a recent antitrust trial, the average Facebook feed contains less than 20% followed posts and the average Instagram feed contains less than 10%; that means that 80% of content on Facebook and 90% on Instagram is either a suggested post (an ad bought for a Facebook page or Instagram profile) or an ad for something external. Your friends, family, every business you actually follow, even your enemies? They share the remaining 10-20%.

What Can We Do?

In the 1980s and in many other countries today, it might be hard to believe that we could ever wean society off of cigarettes. But cigarette use in the USA has plummeted compared to those days. Gone are the smoky restaurants and bars. Smoking indoors has been almost entirely eliminated. Do hotels even have smoking-friendly rooms any more? Do rental car companies even sell smoker-friendly cars? Apartments no longer advertise as 'smoker-free'; it's just assumed. These days, it's even rare to get stuck on the sidewalk behind someone smoking in NYC.

So there is hope. We've escaped the physical plague addiction of cigarettes.

The worst thing you can do is to continue to use post-social social media. The sheer volume of advertisements on these platforms is unhealthy for human consumption. You are literally being brainwashed every time you scroll the feed! Don't intentionally consume marketing/propaganda from the highest bidder.

The second worst thing you can do is keep your post-social social media accounts. We know that network effects lure people in. We know that people don't leave the networks because they're afraid to lose connections with friends and family. Even if you never log in, keeping your account means that friends and family might not leave because they're afraid to miss out on you. If you absolutely must keep the account because of some recreational group, do your friends and family a favor: remove them as friends. If they ask, tell them that you don't use the account any more.

The third worst thing you can do is join a different social media that's more social, but prone to the same problems. Threads and Blue Sky? They're run by the same people who made Twitter and Instagram and Facebook so awful (OK, I can't blame Twitter entirely on Jack Dorsey, but he got it most of the way here). Fool me once, shame on me...

The best thing you can do is socialize in real life instead. Of course, you probably don't live right down the street, or possibly even in the same town, county, state, or country as most of your friends and family, so for the distant folks:

• Texts and calls and group chats can do a lot, but they're not ideal for sharing minimal life updates, or photo albums, or longer thoughts.
• Letters are fun. Every time I get a letter from a friend or family member, I love that person a little bit more. People seem to enjoy my letters, too, but maybe they're just being kind. Regardless, they're a nice way to articulate longer thoughts to loved ones, and if you store them, a fantastic way to reminisce on a relationship a few years down the line.
• Blogs, like mine, are the best way to maintain a presence on the internet. They prove you exist. They give you a place to voice your thoughts. People can subscribe via RSS if they want to know when you post something new. But blogs are public, and not everyone is comfortable with that, and even if you're comfortable with that you probably shouldn't post all of your vacation photos of your children to a blog.
• Mastodon is social media owned by the community, with no profit motive. There's a lot of nerdy reasons to love it, but the important part is that your feed won't fill with ads and start brainwashing you to buy certain products or vote a certain way. If you decide to try it out, feel free to give me a follow at https://illegible.club/@natch.

And every time you open your post-social social media app to fill up 30 seconds of spare time in the middle of your day, think about the people 50 years ago who did the same damn thing with cigarettes.