Capitalism Kills: Social Media

All our social media is becoming the same.

Doesn’t it seem like all social media is homogenizing?

I’ve been using social media since MySpace, and I remember when every platform felt like it had its own identity. Facebook was how you stayed in touch with people from high school or old jobs, and your extended family. Instagram was to post pictures of what you did. YouTube was for long-form videos. Vine for short. If you wanted to engage with mixed media, you went to Tumblr.

But now, it’s all the same. You can post any length of video to YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Vine is gone; however, even before it died, it experimented with longer videos. And everything is seemingly just designed to endlessly scroll videos.

Truly another example of how modern capitalism kills innovation: everything becomes the same. This is what happens when everything is driven by venture capitalists who are solely driven by maximizing profit and minimizing risk: they just want proven formulas. So they just copy instead of innovating. Or instead of letting things be niche and good, they expand it to the point of reaching a singularity with all major social media platforms. I kind of miss being able to just step away from one kind of social media and engage with a more dedicated medium. I regularly have fleeting moments where I can’t tell if I’m on Facebook, Reels, or TikTok.

Why can’t major social media companies just be content to exist in one medium? I understand it’s all driven by increasing user engagement and increasing shareholder value, but I am sick of those being given as reasons to constantly ruin everything unique around us. Fuck shareholders (as a shareholder). I’m not saying you can’t care about profit, but more companies need to find the balance between being profitable and maintaining a unique online presence.

We see capitalism killing a lot of different things, but this is my testimony as to its effects on social media.