It’s never been more boring to be online than in 2024. While it’s been clear for some time that monetization is turning social media into a different animal, this year in particular feels like a tipping point. Faced with endless streams of content designed to capture viewer views, buyable ads at every turn, AI and the incessant opinions of strangers, I was surprised recently that despite my regular use of these apps, I never really enjoyed the. any of them.

Get Instagram. I opened the app and was greeted with an ad for a bidet. I started scrolling. Between each of the first three posts at the top of my feed are a variety of ads: lingerie, squat-friendly jorts, shoes from a brand that sells items that appear to be dropshipped from AliExpress at a markup. Then, thankfully, two memes keep repeating themselves. I burned a ridiculous one to five of my friends in a way that felt obligated. After that, another ad, then a bunch of seemingly untargeted Reels from accounts I don’t follow. Minutes passed before I came across a post by someone I knew in real life. Oh yeah, time to turn off suggested posts again, something I have to do every 30 days or my feed will be filled with random crap.

But before I had a chance to do that, I got distracted by a Reel of a cat watching The Grinch. Then through a Reel of a man with a small chihuahua in his coat pocket. Curiosity got the better of me and I opened the comments, where people angrily wrote that the dog must be suffocating. Oh no. I scrolled to the next Reel, a video I had seen many times before of a chicken marching in a pair of pants. Downstairs, everyone is fighting over whether it’s cruel to put pants on a chicken. is that so? Next, a video of a girl doing her makeup, where men comment that it should be considered catfishing. Deep sigh. I realized that 30 minutes had passed and I closed Instagram, now in a worse state than when I opened it. I would be forced to come back in an hour or so, rinse and repeat.

This isn’t just an Instagram problem. On TikTok (which soon), the For You page I thought was good content and the presence of toxic commentators was minimal, but every other post might be sponsored or sell a product from the TikTok Shop. And it’s so easy to get sucked into the perpetual scroll. I tend to avoid opening the app just because I know I’ll be trapped there for longer than I want, watching videos about doing nothing by people I don’t know and never. But it still happens more often than I’d like to admit.

These days, it feels like every gathering place on the internet is so full of content competing for – and successfully capturing – our attention or trying to sell us something that there’s barely any room for the “social” element. on social media. Instead, we were pushed into different corners to stare at the glowing boxes in our hands alone.

Precisely, announced at the end of November that the Word of the Year for 2024 is “brain rot,” a term that expresses the supposed consequence of countless hours spent on the internet using stupid things. As appropriate, in Australia chose “enshittification,” which describes how the platforms and products we love are degraded over time as the companies behind them chase profits. (This too by 2023 Speech of the Year). Social media platforms were in theory designed around the ideas of friendship and connection, but what plays out on them today is indistinguishable from real human interaction.

Facebook — if you even have an account — might be where you go if you are Granted want to see updates from family and other people you know IRL, but its UI is filled with recommended Reels and products that seem obsolete. Twitter, where it used to be fun to keep up with the live discourse of major events or fandom events, is gone, and X, its new form under Elon Musk, is .

On the other hand, Threads, a branch of Instagram and Meta’s answer to Twitter/X, and it quickly becomes a hotspot for copy-paste engagement bait, a problem that is serious . The Threads team is apparently “working to get this under control,” but I still can’t scroll through my For You feed without seeing a dozen posts that are either regurgitated memes passed off as original thoughts, or mass questions. which is done with the intention of stirring the pot. The same feed is otherwise dominated by viral videos taken from other creators without credit and pop culture commentary that almost always turns to sex and genderism. I always walk away from Threads feeling the need to yell at a field.

Threads do not have DMs, meaning all conversations take place publicly. it around searchable topics in November, but topic pages are generally still full of bait-style posts, rather than topic-specific versions. That has meant up until now that it’s been quite difficult to find communities to truly connect with. Everything feels impersonal.

It doesn’t help that the Following Threads feed is currently not the default view and there’s no way to change that (). And at the end of the day, it is excluding all the many people I know, especially outside the media industry. The same goes for fediverse social networks like Mastodon and Bluesky, which are less populated but have a cliquier feel. Visiting platforms is like walking into a room full of people who all know each other, and realizing that you’re the odd one out. But at least Bluesky or Mastodon aren’t bad shopping experiences. (Threads are not currently, however, but ).

Maybe it all comes down to burnout in a time of overconsumption, but lately I’ve found myself longing for a place on the internet that feels inviting and PEOPLE. I’m sure I’m not alone. In recent years, we’ve seen alternative social apps pop up like BeReal, Hive and Myspace-reminiscent entrants SpaceHey and all aim to bring character and interpersonal connection back to social media. But no one has cracked the code for sustainable mainstream adoption. Discord and even Reddit to some extent address the same human-to-human needs, but they are more akin to proto social media chatrooms and forums than to the sites that emerged during the social dawn.

Meanwhile, Meta is pushing AI more in its apps. Just this summer we acquired chatbot-maker, AI Studio, which Meta prefers not only as a way for users to create AI characters, but for “creators to build AI as an extension of themselves to reach more fans.” Instead of talking to your real friends or making new ones around a common interest, you can deepen your parasocial relationships with celebrities, influencers and fictional characters by chatting in its AI versions. Or, choose from the many AI girlfriends you can find in your DMs menu. We’ve really lost the plot, I’m afraid.

I’ve started dipping back into Tumblr here and there, if only to find a less cluttered, more curated feed and love the reminder of how fun customization can be. Some friends mentioned that they did the same. But because of the platform and the nor is it an online oasis. As if on cue, I was just served a during my evening scroll that felt inappropriate: “we are not good. the rest of the internet is getting worse.”