Two bolts of lightning struck the tech world in the last nine months. The first one came out of nowhere on 30 November 2022, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT rocketing to a million users in five days and 100 million in two months. No sooner had the world let out its collective breath, the second bolt thundered in on 5 July 2023, obliterating ChatGPT’s record, with Meta’s social media app warping past the 100 million download mark in just five days. Admittedly, Threads had an unfair advantage, it had a 2.3 billion strong user launchpad in the form of Instagram, and all it had to do was get less than 5% of Insta users to sign up for Threads. Irrespective, it was a striking debut, and Threads seemed poised to overpower Twitter, now renamed X, in the social media cage fight. Zuckerberg had chosen his moment well; users were clamouring for an alternative to Twitter, and Musk also seemed to be doing everything to destroy his new company: renaming it an unwelcome X, laying off almost 75% of the work force, and also antagonizing its users as well as advertisers, both of which are the life blood of any social network.

Less than a month thereon, it was not Twitter but Threads which seemed to be hanging by a thread. As of 31 July, the DAU (daily active user) count of Threads had fallen by a drastic 82%, according to Sensor Tower, a digital intelligence company. Even its usage fell dramatically from 14 sessions per user a day to 2.6 sessions, and the daily average usage time plummeted from 19 minutes to 2.9 minutes. The precipitous fall continues, with its DAU count falling by about 1% a day. I am one of these users. I installed the app on Day 1, and it must have been a week since I went there, and my last post was probably a month back. So, what is happening?

Well, the answer is stark: social networking is neither social, nor it is a network.

The ‘social’ in ‘social network’ refers to conversing with your friends and family, and reconnecting with your school buddies, but that is not what these networks are about any longer. The New York Times’s Brian Chen (bit.ly/3ORaDnh) writes about how posts are not about people updating their friends and family on their lives: “The biggest sites have become increasingly ‘corporatized’. Instead of seeing messages and photos from friends and relatives about their holidays or fancy dinners, users of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and Snapchat (and now Threads) now often view professionalized content from brands, influencers and others that pay for placement.”

I remember that I joined Facebook because I wanted to rediscover my old friends, know how and what they are doing and converse with them. I got off it a few years ago, because its Feed became suffused with what Kim Kardashian was up to and mobile phone data plans that I did not want. Facebook (and every other large platform) had become “enshittified” in the immortal coinage of Cory Doctorow (bit.ly/3qOnO0h).