There used to be social networks. You'd tell the computer who you knew in real life and you could talk to them through the computer.

Then it was social media. People could publish things and their friends would see what they did in a single feed. Like TV or radio media, it pushes info to you, about your friends.

Lastly it was just media. It was the same feed pushing stuff to you, but it isn't your friends any more. It's unknown micro-celebrities, ads, whatever keeps audiences hooked and makes profit for the company. Tiktok exemplifies this but they've all done it now.

The next step will be removing humans from the loop entirely, a feed of personalized AI generated slop engineered to keep you staring at it.

YouTube and Facebook are almost turning into this organically. YouTube seems to be trying to fight it. Zuck seems to just not care anymore, generally. Eventually one will fully embrace it.

Are there even any social networks anymore? Oddly enough as weird and cringe as it is I think LinkedIn kind of qualifies. It’s business but that’s a form of social interaction that involves real people doing stuff.

I think most social interaction has moved onto messengers, Discord, Slack, etc.