Web 2.0 Died
Vox—not the TV network, the media company that owns The Verge, Polygon, Eater—just fired fifty social media workers. The official reason: the industry changed. What they meant was that the whole Web 2.0 thing nobody was supposed to question turned out to be a cult, and the cult was collapsing.
For years the social media experts had a gospel. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat were the future. Your own website was dead. If you weren’t optimizing for the algorithm, you’d be unemployed within a year. Writers bought it. Editors bought it. Designers fed themselves to the machine and told others to do the same.
Now Zuckerberg’s killing organic reach and pivoting back to people messaging each other directly. Trump basically owns Twitter now. Snapchat had a redesign everyone hated and apparently you don’t recover from that. The feeds are cratering or already dead, and the people whose entire job was predicting these companies would save media are getting their severance packages.
This wasn’t a one-time layoff. Every major media company that over-committed to social is going to pay for it over the next few months. The social media staff that was supposed to be the future are probably updating LinkedIn now, which is its own kind of irony.
YouTube’s shedding advertiser money and getting more chaotic with every content rule change. Twitch streamers are drowning in moderation drama. Medium burned through cash and closed offices because blogs, which Medium was created to save, turned out to be dead yet again—dead before, alive briefly, dead again.
The actual young people aren’t even using these services anymore. They’re in Discord fragments, scattered group chats, Instagram Stories that vanish in 24 hours. Or they just quit and stream Netflix and call it digital detox. The grand unified social network was always a mistake.
I have no idea what replaces all this and I think that’s the healthiest thing that could happen. Instead of everyone chasing one future that turns out to be a dead end, maybe people just make what interests them. Stream games, write about mushroom poisons, post pictures of yourself, build something that doesn’t fit a template. Fail alone or succeed quietly instead of all failing together.
For the first time since social media exploded, the air feels different. There’s potential again. Fifty people lost their jobs to teach everyone a lesson about hype and the danger of betting everything on one platform, one future, one story. That’s a brutal price. But maybe it had to cost something to learn.