Social media was a town square, now it's like a collection of neighborhoods
For a long time, social media felt like one big town square.
Now it feels more like a collection of neighborhoods.
People are choosing communities that match how they want to interact. Some have moved to Bluesky. Others stayed on X. Some spend most of their time on LinkedIn, Threads, Mastodon, TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube.
At the same time, AI generated content, bots, and engagement farming have made it harder to tell what's genuine. Follower counts and impressions still matter, but they don't tell the whole story anymore.
I've found myself caring less about "How many people saw this?" and more about questions like:
Who keeps coming back?
Who's actually part of the community?
What conversations are creating real relationships?
It feels like we're moving away from optimizing for scale and back toward optimizing for trust.
Are you seeing this too? What feels different for you about socials in the last few years?
Replies
Super agree.
it seems we're gonna end up "ID verifying" on every app we use, Just to keep using it normally 😶
the trust over scale shift feels right to me. what changed for me personally is I stopped treating a big following as a signal of anything, since half of it could be bots or people who followed once and never came back. the smaller communities where the same 20-30 people keep showing up and actually reply to each other feel like the only part of social media that still works the way it used to.
The town square definitely still exists but almost seems to be constrained more and more based on how you tailor your algorithm and following. A better characterization of it in my mind may be a loose network.
I somewhat think about it like when you first get to college. There's a huge number of established groups, but you're not necessarily part of one right off the bat. As you get to know more people and find those who share your interests and values, you'll immerse yourself in one or many.
With the questions you propose, they play off each other a little bit. Who's actually part of the community seriously matters if you want to view any engagement as possibly having value rather than just being slop. This also plays into your third question of what conversations are creating real relationships. The value of social media actually being a place to hear valuable thoughts comes from the effort and critical thought that the purveyors of those posts put into them. There will always be some of those accounts or communities that garner attention from far and wide, but hard for me to imagine that it's much different in the real world where the people who you actually listen to are those you've spent time around to vet the validity of their opinions and thought process. Those people who take the loudest voices as gospel are generally disappointed when they find that loud voices are great for attention but not a proxy for valuable insight.
This may also be indicative of the "town square" being a bit of an illusion rather than a reality that ever was. The most pertinent example of where the idea of the town square actually held somewhat was discussing politics, but those who have a depth of understanding go elsewhere to hear any valuable takes and interact with anyone who they view as having good opinions. It's far more pronounced in any other specialized domains be it tech, finance, law, medicine, or even seemingly simpler things like recreation or hobbies. The town square may be where you start but most quickly move away from it. Seems almost like a natural progression of discussion.