The thing I find most concerning about the sudden and rapid declines of platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and to a lesser extent Discord and Facebook, is the loss of digital third places that will result from it.
[Definition: a Third Place is a space outside of work or the home that you spend a significant amount of time in. Usually a social gathering place like a church, library, park, or gym]
It's a known issue that physical third places are disappearing. Cities, malls, and shopping centers have cracked down hard on loitering, resulting in a lack of public space for people to just hang out in. Parks exist, but their use is usually dependent on weather conditions. Church attendance has been in decline for decades for a lot of reasons I won't get into here. Libraries exist but they're not a good place to talk with friends. And pretty much every other third place I can think of (bars, game stores, bookstores, coffee shops, etc) requires you to spend money if you want to be there. None of these are new observations, smarter people than myself have written whole books on the loss of in-person third places.
Social media has been filling in the gap left by these third places for the last couple of decades. As physical space has become less accessible we've migrated online to find community - and especially during COVID, social media was really the only place you could socialize with others. None of this is new information either.
But the current issue, that I've seen very few people talking about, is that companies are starting to price and bully people out of those digital third places the same way they did with physical third places. The difference is that it's happening much faster, and usually at the whim of just one or two people. These are not broader sociological trends slowly shutting down social spaces like what we saw with the decline of shopping malls. There will be no slow adjustment to another social medium. We are seeing individual billionaires making a choice in real time to monetize people out of some of the only public social spaces we have left.
I've seen people bemoaning the loss of information that comes with these sites collapsing, but personally, I am far more concerned with the loss of social space. Don't get me wrong, social media of all kinds is an absolute nightmare, but for many people (and especially for teenagers who have more restrictions on where they can go and what money they can spend) online space is one of the only places they can reliably go to socialize.
In a country like the U.S. where the federal government is calling loneliness an epidemic this is actually a much bigger concern than I think a lot of people realize. How many people have more online friends than in-person ones? What happens to rates of loneliness as social media platforms become inaccessible and people lose those connections?
Obviously, the preferred answer is that people will go make more friends in person, but remember that in-person social spaces have already been severely limited. This is not the easy option that you might hope it is.
My actual call to action on this is to fucking fight to get your in-person third places back. Talk to your local representatives about repealing loitering laws - organize protests or ballot initiatives about it if you have to. Work with rotary clubs and parks departments to fund new public restrooms and park shelters. If there are places in your community that provide free workshop spaces/ game nights/ art walks/ etc go to them and support them financially when and if you're able. Go to your local library and check out a book so they get more funding! I know this shit can be boring, but things are only going to get worse if people don't have places where they can connect with each other. We can't keep letting capitalists take community spaces from us.
I just want to add that there is a trend here; it's not solely the personal vagaries of few billionaires. Social media companies are following the same trajectory: start out open and connective, get huge, become infrastructural (socially as third places and in many other ways, e.g. information during emergencies in many countries - the information and social aspects are both very important and to a significant degree cannot be separated from one another), then try to become as proprietary and exclusive as possible. This is effectively the same gambit "tech" startups like Uber have always aimed at and Amazon has succeeded with: spend a lot of money to gain market share, drive competitors out, and then jack up prices when you become indispensable.
For the social media platforms that means things like: No access without an account. Stratifying functions and reach to turn full use of the platform's affordances into paid privileges. Increasing rules about who and how you can be on the platform for the sake of advertisers. Limiting scientists' and journalists' access to data and coders' access to code. Facebook did it, many of Musk's idiotic decisions for Twitter are attempts at doing it, Reddit is doing it right now. Unlike Amazon, though, in the not-very-long run this will kill the platforms, which of course does mean the loss of these digital third places. (My hope, and there are signs of this, is that life online will go back to something more like it was before these platforms became the internet - people will find other ways to gather digitally, just less centralized.)
This is all rent-seeking behavior, because the actual value of these platforms is not really monetizable, and the monetizable proxies have hit their limits for growth. It may be being somewhat accelerated by AI, but ultimately it's exactly the same process that closed down third places in brickspace: enclosure.
Everything else OP said stands! But there is a pattern, and it is important.
