Over the last 15 years or so we've seen the rise of social media platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. The social aspect of these applications was initially very compelling, both from an industry point of view as well as on a personal level. A place where an individual, company, organization, or government could interact with the public on a more "personal" level. The ability for personal interactions with friends and family. Companies, organizations, and governments could share meaningful and important information with the public.
From a web developer perspective, these platforms initially represented an opportunity for connecting web applications or websites with our clients' social media providing a back and forth of shared information. In the early days, this was an exciting opportunity to connect with what could potentially be an extremely large audience. A marketing coordinator's dream! Developers interacted with these platforms as they started to set up access to allow interactive connections to share data. The social media platforms primary motivation was to get as much data about their users and their users' web interactions as possible. Information is their stock in trade.
Over time the tools to interact with these platforms became quite robust and developers could build out their functionality to push information to these platforms quite easily. Specific meta data elements could be applied to various web page environments so that these social media platforms could pull data specifically how their systems wanted to use them. Again, from a developer perspective, this made page development available to a wider audience. However, after some time, more and more platforms popped into existence and some of them moved to a more proprietary set of meta data.
Eventually we, as developers, started to see a change in platform priorities. The goals for them seemed to be a push to keep the audience within their platforms as much as possible and to make it harder for developers to interact with those platforms from an external source, like websites. The sharing tools that were once so prolific, began to either reduce their functionality, or be abandoned in order to force users to do their sharing and content pushes directly on the platforms themselves. We can't blame these companies for moving in this direction. Their business models are geared toward having the audience interacting on their platforms as much as possible. If they're not on the platforms, the audience is not seeing advertising. Revenue generation is about eyes on ads and interaction with those ads on that platform.
Instagram is an example of an application that did not want outside interaction almost from day one. The application has been designed to only be available to those who have accounts, and the only way to see content or post content is directly in the platform. Facebook, when they purchased Instagram started to follow that same process. Facebook feeds that developers used to put into client websites have all but disappeared. While instagram allows their users to share individual images on websites, they do not allow the posting of Instagram feeds. They want people to get an account so that the audience is on their platform in order to see the content.
In the last few years, especially with Twitter/X, we've seen the development tools that we used to use to test elements have either been abandoned (as is the case with Twitter), or they have become somewhat deprecated. The concept of providing social media sharing tools on a website has become a sketchy mashup. Following the rules provided by those platforms don't necessarily work anymore. The idea of these sharing tools was to provide the person sharing with a preview of the content before it would be posted to the associated platform. Twitter no longer provides a proper preview. You need to actually post the content and hope it works as intended.
Facebook has image and content caching. As developers, we can run content through a debugging tool in order to test our shared content. As a developer this isn't an issue, however if we've created a tool for a client that allows the public to share a piece of content, this caching can be an issue. The client may load a test image and run a test post. Once that test post is run, the associated image or content becomes cached. This is a "Permanent" cache. Changing the image or the content of the element on the website will not break the cached content on Facebook, even if it has not been officially posted. The functionality requires a rebuild of the content with updated imagery in order to cache the new version.
This is a real issue, and as developers we're likely going to have to come up with a solution to get what our clients are after.
My personal view on social media is that I do not like it anymore. I have removed myself from Twitter/X, though I had to set up a new account since I need to run tests for work purposes. I do not interact on Twitter/X. I have removed myself from Instagram, the content there is mostly fluff and I do not find it engaging. I still have Facebook, but only because it allows me to interact with friends. I absolutely hate the various garbage that their algorithms push into my feed. Not only because most of it is terrible or irrelevant, but because some of it is very addictive. Scrolling through their "Reels" is a real time waster and most of the content is terrible, but in a way that you can't help but watch. I've set up the browsers on my computer so that they require a login if I need to access Facebook for work purposes. However my phone app is ridiculously addictive and if it wasn't for my need to have access to keeping in touch with friends and family I would definitely kill my account.
Outside of my personal work related views on social media, I find that almost all of these platforms have become varying degrees of cesspool. Twitter/X has become filled with hate messaging, misinformation, disinformation, and a harbour for conspiracy theories. Facebook isn't much better. Instagram is mostly full of fluff and influencer crap. TikTok has its moments with some content creators that speak to my sensibilities and my generation, but again a lot of it is just crap.
A lot of the content on some of these platforms are on the extreme ends of the political spectrum and have a tendency to devolve into arguments, name calling, and hate messaging. Some of the content found on Twitter/X and other more politically active platforms, I would consider on the verge of criminal in the level of vitriol that can be seen.
I think the world would be a better place if social media would fade away. I doubt it will.