Social media split in two, and neither half is about your friends anymore

The BBC says your feed quietly stopped being about people

The BBC Worklife piece behind this 598-point thread makes a clean argument: social media is splitting in two. One half is a flood of content that has nothing to do with the poster's life. As the article's own line — quoted verbatim in the thread — puts it: young people "publish a lot of content but it's more funny parodies and remixes of existing material. The goal is to make people laugh, not to tell people about their lives." Across TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram, it concludes, "we are a long way from the 'digital town square' of personal interaction that social media was even just a few years ago."

(The BBC blocks automated fetches, so the article's wording here is taken from the verbatim pull-quote a commenter posted.)

The thread's first move: separate "social networks" from "social media"

The top-rated response argues the BBC is conflating two different things that died at different times:

"You're confusing social networks and social media. Social media was never meant to be a virtual extension of social life… Online social networks on the other hand basically do not exist any more." — a long-tenured commenter drawing the distinction

A fuller version of the same idea traced the mechanism — how a friends-graph mutates into a broadcast channel:

"Social media is the development that they can also use that personalized feed to show media, and actually, your real friends don't generate enough content to keep you hooked 24/7. So the site is quickly overwhelmed with professional content creators… This turns it from a sharing network to a passive consumption broadcasting one." — a commenter on how networks become media

"This isn't new — friends stopped being the focus 20 years ago"

The most common pushback was that the BBC discovered a decade-old shift. The money line came from a commenter who put the incentive plainly:

"There's not a lot of money in hosting a website where people share in-jokes and comment on each others' graduations… there's a lot more money in farming engagement through ragebait and division." — a commenter on why friends-feeds don't pay

The WebAssembly co-founder and former V8 compiler tech lead in the thread tied it to the one business model underneath all of it:

"It will never stop because the parasitic ads are the only thing holding up the edifice anymore… everything would be cheaper if there were no ads." — titzer, WebAssembly co-founder

The experiment that proves the feed is hollow

The most concrete evidence in the thread wasn't an argument — it was a result. One Android user patched his apps to strip out everything that wasn't a friend:

"It's scary how empty the feed is once you do this. It can be full days with the same post at the top. And the worst part is that I hadn't noticed how empty it was until I did the change." — an Android user who filtered out non-friends

That's the BBC's thesis demonstrated from the inside: take away the fads, the remixes, the strangers, and there is almost nothing of your actual social life left in the machine.

What actually got lost

The elegiac note came from someone who remembered the brief window when the incentives pointed the right way:

"Sad as it was, at least the incentives were somewhat aligned with a healthy social life. Seek out cool things in life, preferably with friends, share. This… is a world away from going on Facebook today, full of people definitely shutting down their life businesses, turning wood into MacBook cases and incoherent AI generated videos of 300m waves." — a commenter who was a young adult when Facebook arrived

The so-what isn't that social media got worse — it's that the thing the BBC is mourning, the friends-graph, was a transitional accident. It existed only while a network of real relationships hadn't yet been fully monetized into a content firehose. The feed didn't break. It finished converting.