How (mostly) 'normal' people respond to the ideas of the Social Web Marketing the Social Web is a headache. Only heightened by the clashing of heads as everyone offers an opinion. Picture those dinosaurs that have their skull on the outside. That's us. No wonder it's a headache.
On Social Media and Its Discontents - Cal Newport
Split Reactions As someone who has publicly criticized the major social media platforms for years, I’ve become familiar with the common arguments surrounding this topic. ... Read more
Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed
The [structural] mechanism producing these problematic outcomes is really robust and hard to resolve."
Is Organic Social Media Dead? — Sympolymathesy, by Chris Krycho
There are easy critiques to make of Bluesky etc., and they are mostly wrong. There are also *deep* critiques, and they may be right.
Cognitive Load and Social Media Advertising
Social media engagement requires cognitive resources, which subsequently impact the advertisements consumers see while browsing. For the most part, however, advertising practitioners and scholars s...
How cognitive elaboration fosters knowledge acquisition on social media—a field experiment
Abstract. Social media technologies have been criticized as ineffective sources of information because users seem to increase their subjective but not thei
Facebook Wrestles With the Features It Used to Define Social Networking (Published 2021)
Likes and shares made the social media site what it is. Now, company documents show, it’s struggling to deal with their effects.
How Social Media Brings Out the Worst in Us
A new book argues that social media does more harm than good and we might be happier and healthier using it less.
How Online Mobs Act Like Flocks Of Birds
A growing body of research suggests human behavior on social media is strikingly similar to collective behavior in nature.
How Online Mobs Act Like Flocks Of Birds
A growing body of research suggests human behavior on social media is strikingly similar to collective behavior in nature.
Pluralistic: Social media without socializing (19 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
From the earliest days of social media, social media bosses have been at war with sociability. To create a social media service is to demarcate legitimate and illegitimate forms of sociability. It's a monumental act of hubris, really.
Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media
When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms and protocols that allowed people to socialize with friends and communities of interest by using digital technologies. Twenty years later, users of social media are far more likely to scroll than post – and the content that they consume is often strategically produced and algorithmically curated. In this essay, I argue that the very essence of social media has changed. To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.” Doing so raises new questions about digitally mediated sociality, not to mention the politics and governance of these platforms.
Introducing a network for thoughtful conversations
The quality of conversations on the Internet is terrible. Most platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, etc. optimize for engagement as their key metric. This spawns and rewards behavior that leads to bragging of gameable metrics such as likes and followers, self-feeding thought bubbles, knee-jerk reactions, “if you’re not on our side, you’re on their side” mentality, and thought policing even by people who think they’re fighting for a good cause. Today’s Internet doesn’t incentiviz
Social Media Algorithms Distort Social Instincts and Fuel Misinformation - Neuroscience News
Social media algorithms, designed to boost user engagement for advertising revenue, amplify the biases inherent in human social learning processes, leading to misinformation and polarization.
Social media is no longer social. Most of it is passive viewing of videos and pictures from people we've never met. But we're still studying social media like it's 2010. We've entered the post-social media era — and research needs to catch up. osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/6nue7_v1 preprint w/ Richard Rogers
rhosf.leaflet.pub/3mqsznoy55k2s/ Such an interesting post by @tessa.germnetwork.com! I feel like I have a different perspective on the social network vs. social media terms having lived through that era, but I definitely think about this distinction a lot too!
People, Not Posts
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