How we surrender our agency on social media platforms to commercial interests





The transition from friend-follower internet to Recommended For You internet is a shift that drastically changed the way that interact with each other online And I think it deserves a little bit more attention and analysis when we’re talking about the digital landscape that we all exist in. Today, social media is about collective reactions to viral conversations. We’ve completely lost that feeling of the more antiquated kind of social media that was about relationships with people you knew in real life. That early internet sense of ‘togetherness despite distance’ was one of the things that was so attractive about the web back in the day. And when I say “back in the day”, I mean it. My journey to the interwebs started back when fax machines were still regularly in use.That community feeling is something that most platforms lose as they mature. TikTok in the early days of the pandemic, felt like it had a lot more community in it than it does today. Some have proposed that this is just the lifecycle of platforms, that as they become more driven by commercial interests, they lose their sense of community and start feeling more like the ad platforms they are. The feeling of being in community dissipates as we become consumers and creators of content rather than consumers and creators of updates. This causes a decrease in user selected content. You hit the follow button less often than you used to. You hit the subscribe button less often than you used to. You become more passive in how you consume this content, because in an algorithm-centric model of consumption, you just don’t matter as much any more.