For most of my life, the internet, particularly its social media \u2014 BBSes, Usenet, LiveJournal, blogosphere, even Myspace, early Twitter and Facebook \u2014 consistently made people happier. But roughly five years ago it began to consistently make people more miserable. What changed?<\/p>\n
I posted that question to Twitter<\/a> a week ago, and the most notable response was the response that did not exist: not a single person disputed the premise of the question. Yes, Twitter responses are obviously selection bias incarnate \u2014 but looking at the opprobrium aimed at social media from all sides today, I\u2019d think that if anything it understates the current collective wisdom. Which of course can often be disjointed from factual reality \u2026 but still important. So, again: what changed?<\/p>\n Some argued that new, bad users flooded the internet then, a kind of ultimate Eternal September effect. I\u2019m skeptical. Even five years ago Facebook was already ubiquitous in the West, and we were already constantly checking it on our smartphones. Others argue that it reflects happiness decreasing in society as a whole \u2014 but as far back as 2014? I remember that as, generally, a time of optimism, compared to today.<\/p>\n There was one really interesting response, from a stranger<\/a>: \u201cThe nature of these social networks changed. They went from places where people debated to places where lonely people are trying to feel less lonely.\u201d Relatedly, from a friend<\/a>: \u201cThe algorithms were designed to make people spend more time on those sites. Interestingly, unhappy people spend more time on social sites<\/a>. Is unhappiness the cause, or the result of algorithms surfacing content to make us unhappy?\u201d That\u2019s worth pondering.<\/p>\n Pretty much everyone else talked about money, basically buttressing the argument above. Modern social media algorithms drive engagement, because engagement drives advertising, and advertising drives profits, which are then used to hone the algorithms. It\u2019s a perpetual motion engagement machine. Olden days social media, early Facebook and early Twitter, they had advertising, sure \u2014 but they didn\u2019t have anything like today\u2019s perpetual motion engagement.<\/p>\n