Social Media is Dead-It just doesn't know it yet
How the implosion of YouTube and Facebook is sparking a renaissance of truthful communication
The online creative content market is over. Social Media pushed itself over the cliff.
First, Platforms got flooded with uncurated garbage. Then, human curation made a difference, until algorithms took over the quality stamp procedure. Now, we’re left with corporate trash and main narrative parroting influencers.
You needed to be around at the beginning of the hype. Like with everything else in life. Think Bitcoin.
Lets look at the reality of content platforms like YouTube, Medium and Facebook first, before going to the root of the problem.
The attention economy has become a cancer
It’s killing our social fabric, it’s imploding, eliminating itself in the process.
Here’s the way out.
The reality of YouTube in 2022
YouTube has become an uber-centralized, censoring nightmare.
Its content is a cesspool of boring corporate marketing, attention hijacking reals mixed with predictable influencer sound bytes.
Adds completely killed the ‘experience’.
When you decide to push content, daily, for over a year, you’ll be disappointed. Reaching 1000 views or 100 subscribers will likely take months. But you need to show up, put the hours in, you hear the influencers scream…
After years of hard work, and thousands of hours invested, your video finally gets millions of viewers. How much you’ll earn back?
Four million views made this YouTuber $1,275.99 !! It even gets more bizarre when you realize she’s from before the big monetization wave. She started making videos back in 2009.
That’s an insult.
Oh, by the way, YouTube gets 45%. They’re the crease fat mafia boss that comes and collects almost half of your profit. When you oppose, they shut down your store.
Or what about this person attracting 68 million views with a single video and getting paid… ZERO.
I know, this is cherry-picked. Some people that started early and have close to 8.000 subscribers make a descent $500 a month. And there are other ways to monetize content on YouTube like Merch and referral links.
But the main point is, that they all started early.
You’re too late. YouTube is dying of boredom.
The reality of Medium in 2022
I made decent money at the beginning of 2021 with my Crypto publication. Think up to $2.500,- a month. I published daily because the curators were following my tail and curated every single piece for 1,5 months.
This was my 90 days of fame on the platform. Just because Bitcoin was booming and everybody tried to get rich fast.
It will never come back again.
The most recent big Medium changes killed the platform. Period. It gave the platform away to algorithms, instead of humans curating content.
Medium chose quantity (new subscribers) over quality (good pieces from curated writers), the death sentence for the platform. It also started blacklisting critical voices.
Don’t waste your precious time and life energy, wisdom and experience on blogs that generate $2,44. You deserve much better. Despite whatever the influencers tell you.
They like to steal your attention by continuously creating the illusion that you can be there on the top too. As long as you follow their advice by reading their stuff.
They build this dream on the false premise of the attention economy itself.
All a big lie. And it's dying, making room for a better, more ethical, human model.
Facebook is a criminal organization and should be banned
Facebook has facilitated major crimes. The Myanmar example sticks out. Probably many people never even heard about this.
From 2015 onwards, Facebook capitalized on the political unrest between Muslim Rohingya and security forces in Myanmar. Facebook was synonymous with the internet in this country. Fake accounts, click-farms and misinformation played a massive role in creating more tension between these groups
The sheer volume of fake news and clickbait acted like fuel on the flames of already dangerously high ethnic and religious tensions. It shifted public opinion and escalated the conflict, which ultimately led to the death of 10,000 Rohingya, by conservative estimates, and the displacement of 700,000 more — MIT
In 2018, a United Nations investigation determined that the violence against the Rohingya constituted genocide and that Facebook had played a “determining role” in the atrocities.
Ten thousand people dying (indirectly) because of Facebook incentivized mis-information and nobody went to jail?
The Cambridge Analytics revelations changed close to nothing
Mind you, The Myanmar atrocities was Facebook on the crest of the wave of its corrupted non-ethical profit model, later exposed in the Cambridge Analytics scandal.
Criminal actors literally bought the opinion of innocent citizens in highly polarized groups, to cause unrest, violence and destruction.
People simply made more bucks by adding fake Facebook groups and creating false content than with regular jobs. Facebook did nothing to stop this
Without the platform, there simply would not be the bad actors.
Facebook has consciously polarized groups within societies using the thousands of data points they harvested from individual users. This has led to armed conflicts like in Myanmar, resulting in an estimated 10.000 death.
Elections of the most powerful countries in the world: Stolen.
Mark Zuckerberg should be behind bars and Facebook shut down.
Social Media is dead
Social media has become the social pest of humanity.
Here are 9 reasons.
It steals your attention for the sake of selling ads for stuff you don’t want
It clever hijacks your limbic part of the brain, which creates dopamine, to increase your time on sight. To get you addicted.
Facebook incentivized the rise of click-farms, factories where people mindlessly click on content, causing wars, political unrest, or otherwise do harm to people.
The Cambridge Analytics scandal showed the world that Facebook consciously rekt elections, misusing thousands of individualized data points they collected using your data without your consent.
Even after the Cambridge Analytics revelations, voices claim that private money saved the 2020 U.S. Elections, using Facebook. That’s because when you don’t kill the cockroach, it continues living. Democracy has died because of Facebook.
Social Media is a lie. It isn’t social. It has proven to divide big groups of people, playing into ingroup-outgroup dynamics, setting us up against each other by presenting a personalized worldview that is highly biased.
Social Media co-created Cancel Culture. It’s easy to insult, troll or otherwise attack the accounts of real people when you’re an anonymous user hiding behind a fake profile.
I’m not even talking about the bots here. Elon Musk refrains from buying Twitter when Twitter can’t be transparent about the real number of fake accounts.
Social Media has mass-diluted the quality of communication between humans
For all of these reasons, and there are many more, it should be banned, forbidden, brought down, or whatever to stop social media from incentive bad actors to funnel billions of bytes of misinformation and content to polarize dangerous situations that often escalate in personal harm.
A.I is slowly taking over this role. The worldwide misinformation for-profit model gets cleverly automated by self-learning machines.
This is the beginning of the end, my friends. Unless this happens.
Some ideas about the future of ‘social media’
Behemoths like Facebook and Google and their money-over-real-value intentions have caused much harm to humanity.
They became vertical tycoons living from your attention. Making billions dopamine addicted to useless reels and instant gratification. Is A.I coming in to finish the job, or do we choose a different trajectory that will actually serve humans, not a few CEOs becoming authoritarian tech overlords?
Soon, Google knows more about your health than yourself. Very dangerous, since big tech doesn’t really care about you. It's only interested in eating your data for profit.
Social media is eating itself and the online content creation model is fading with it.
YouTube is imploding under its non-ethical for-profit model too. On top of this, it’s censoring millions of good faith civilians. This is sparking a change. It’s actually triggering the social media of the future.
The cancelled influencers move to video platforms like Bitchute, Rumble or Odysee. Or media platforms like Substack. They act on different values and honour freedom of speech.
Or they create blogging platforms that are growing exponentially. These cancelled people sometimes attract more viewers than CNN on a Saturday night.
It’s based on good ethical, non-corrupted values.
People start to realize that clean truthful information is more important than making money on mis-information by hijacking minds
When we change, our tech will change
We’re slowly moving into a new social landscape based on higher values. This will spark a social and cultural renaissance. Eventually, this revolution of communication will be mirrored in social online platforms.
Tech is nothing but a tool. In the end, it will serve our newly created relationships and the communication we value.
Millions on this planet are aborting the corrupted social media. Are you?
This is how you become part of the new, decentralized movement of true communication:
Own back your focus and attention. It’s the most precious asset you got.
Focus on local and real things again
Co-Create real community
Help real people with real needs, without silly screens in between.
Make sense together, over dinners.
It's all about getting real again with each other in local communities, using good faith and honest communication.
Here’s where the renaissance starts. It has already begun.
Lucien Lecarme