Social Media Is Now Anti-Social: Feeds Full of Fads, Not Friends

Remember when you opened a social app and actually saw what your friends were up to? Feels like a distant memory, right? A BBC Worklife study confirms our suspicions: social media has ceased to be social. Feeds are now dominated by trends, challenges, and endless videos, with friends' posts buried under algorithmically curated content.

Algorithms, like an overzealous but slightly clueless grandma, have decided they know better what we want to see. They push whatever is trending, not what your friend just posted. So you end up watching yet another dance routine to a viral song, when all you wanted was to check if your buddy's cat is still alive.

Developers, does this sound familiar? It's like your CI/CD pipeline suddenly decided to deploy not the latest commit, but the most popular one from the past week. "Oh, this PR got the most likes — ship it to production!" That's essentially how social feeds work now. Except instead of bugs, you get an infinite loop of identical content.

What's the fix? Maybe it's time to bring back RSS feeds or build your own private social network. If you're a developer, you could write a script to filter only friends' posts. But will it work tomorrow? That's the million-dollar question.

METABYTE studio comment: If social media algorithms think we only need trends, at METABYTE we'd rather create trends — by building software that actually solves users' problems, not just collects likes.