Social platforms algorithms have gone from being “helpful” in recommending what people want to see to outrightly being bad, upsetting and draining.
Considering that triggering content is generally likely to lead to more engagement, it's not surprising that this has been cooked into the designs.
Although I'm not an addict like most people are these days, I barely use any traditional social app. However, when I visit these platforms occasionally to try to get information on certain things, I'm usually stuck scrolling through numerous crap that are not helpful and eventually gaining a headache in the process.
This happens a lot when I go on X. It gets even worse when certain events are a hot topic at the time, you interact with one and instantly just get fed so much information through numerous other posts that it all becomes a terrible experience.
User experience is growing bad
Humans are not robots, eventually people get exhausted, some even fall sick. As mentioned, I personally get a headache even if I've only scrolled for 25 minutes.
The idea of building algorithms around trapping users will eventually become a problem and people will seek alternatives.
There's nothing fun about falling sick each time you jump on an app, it discourages going back unless absolutely necessary. These days, social platforms are mostly filled with people trying to make money off others and content consumers that are mostly very young people(lots of children) and a couple adults that may just be seeking to distract themselves from real life or find information on certain things here and there.
Most others are probably seeking less draining spaces to be involved. But of course, this post isn't really about the dark side of social media, it's about something rather very new.
Too much information, all at once
Remember how people say that traditional media platforms will die thanks to AI and social apps like X?
I am one of the few people that think otherwise and I've written articles on that a couple of times.
Traditional media(news sites generally) are somewhat niche solutions for people to access information. You cannot kill that with an everything app because an everything app will generally overwhelm people.
If you go on X right now and search “Israel Iran war,” I guarantee you that you'd have learnt nothing worthwhile about the terrible event thus far. This is because there's just so much content on the topic that it all becomes completely difficult to assimilate.
The Grok experiment on X proves this
And that shows the importance of blockchain to the future of social platforms.
The average popular X post has so many people always pinging @Grok AI to confirm the validity of what's shared, or to more broadly explain it.
I find myself reading Grok's responses many times and there's often lots of evidence that if X doesn't have enough people tweeting what's accurate, Grok will likely defend false information.
Sometimes, it also tries to leverage information on traditional media sites(the very same that people think will not be relevant again) and that in itself also shows that the AI is always going to rely on third party information.
Of course, this is to be expected because these AI bots are just channels to information already out in the open. That said, the growing wave of information on social media platforms, especially with the aid of AI applications where completely fake videos, and convincing contents can be created in huge numbers and dumped on these platforms, it's evident that social media will need blockchain to prove validity of information, enabling users access what's proved accurate through incentivized consensus.
Of a surety, this isn't something that will happen in a day, and it's pretty likely that alternative social platforms, specifically web3 options will be first to consider these sort of integrations.
Traditional social media platforms may be slow to embrace this due to how more profitable it is to have users remain lost and consistently searching for accurate information.
Information spread is going to completely go out of hand in the coming years. It will be left to blockchain solutions to restore trust and improve user experience.