Lately I’ve been thinking about how unhealthy most social platforms have become. X gets all the attention for being toxic, but truthfully the rot is everywhere.
X is designed to keep you in a loop of negativity. Outrage, fear, conflict, repeat.. and when it’s not that, it’s hype boys from fintwit promoting some bullshit trading strategy.
Instagram is the opposite flavour of the same problem. Endless perfection theatre. Everyone pretending their life is perfect when everyone secretly knows it is not. The whole thing is one big performance to protect the illusion.
LinkedIn might actually be the worst. A never-ending wall of corporate circle jerking, humble-brags, fake success stories and people clapping for themselves in the hope others clap back. Steven Bartlett, seems to be the ring leader here. It is less a professional network and more an attention marketplace where authenticity quietly goes to die.
Not to mention Facebook is just a digital retirement village these days. Boomers talking about their all-inclusive cruises, funded by inflated property prices and the distortions of the fiat clown world. A place where yesterday’s economic luck gets paraded as personal brilliance.
TikTok. YouTube. All of them run the same playbook. They do not optimise for connection, truth, or human wellbeing. They optimise for whatever keeps you scrolling long enough to show you another advert. That is the business model. That is the incentive structure. That is the problem.
People aren’t broken. The platforms are. They are built on a foundation of emotional manipulation and attention extraction because that is what the ad-driven, fiat-fuelled economy demands.
This is why decentralised protocols like Nostr feel refreshing. No algorithms trying to control what you see. No company harvesting your psychology for profit. Just people, conversations, and actual freedom to choose how you engage.
I think more of us are waking up to how toxic the legacy platforms have become. And honestly, the quicker the old social media models die, the better.
A healthier internet is possible. It just requires building systems that respect authentic human connection rather than exploiting it.
