Major social platforms degenerated into engagement-driven imitation lacking distinct culture.

Evidence

On Facebook, the decline was even more pronounced. The platform became the “dying Rust Belt city of the internet,” overrun with vapid AI-generated clickbait videos promising shocking revelations but delivering literally nothing. Instagram, meanwhile, succeeded in popularizing Stories, copied from Snapchat. Then it tried to steal the mojo of TikTok, stuffing feeds with vertical-video Reels from accounts that the user didn’t follow. Zuckerberg launched Threads in 2023 as a competitor to Twitter, reaching 275 million users through engagement hacks. But as tech reporter Katie Notopoulos noted, it did so “without ever having any sort of usefulness, unique culture, or ‘moment.’ ” But the true Twitter-killer was Elon Musk, whose stewardship of the platform, rebranded as X, exemplified the internet’s growing dysfunction. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 702

Categorization

• XREF: This is the empirical evidence for Marx’s ‘omnivore monoculture’ thesis — platforms copying each other’s features until no platform sustains a distinct culture, mirroring how subcultures flatten into omnivorous taste. — connects to: Platforms replace asymmetry with reciprocity but lose editorial filtering — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 33; Web 2.0 culture made audience size an alternate status hierarchy alongside engineering wealth.; Creators deliberately minimize dialogue and use emojis to engineer cross-cultural reach — Crystal Abidin, Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame…, 136 (+4 more)