Christian Heilmann

A personal reflection on the decline of social media from its early days of community-driven platforms like Flickr and LastFM to today's engagement-obsessed, bot-filled, AI-slop-saturated mainstream networks. The author argues that platforms have turned users into content creators chasing metrics rather than genuine connection, that the shift from specialist emotional communities to all-purpose UGC platforms was the beginning of the end, and that even alternatives like Mastodon and BlueSky are following the same downward spiral. Specialist groups and the fediverse offer some hope, but the broader web has lost its social soul.

Source: https://christianheilmann.com/2026/08/11/anti-social-media. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.