Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

By Susam Pal on 20 Jan 2026

When web-based social networks started flourishing nearly two
decades ago, they were genuinely social networks. You would sign up
for a popular service, follow people you knew or liked and read
updates from them. When you posted something, your followers would
receive your updates as well. Notifications were genuine. The
little icons in the top bar would light up because someone had sent
you a direct message or engaged with something you had posted.
There was also, at the beginning of this millennium, a general sense
of hope and optimism around technology, computers and the Internet.
Social networking platforms were one of the services that were part
of what was called Web 2.0, a term used for websites built around
user participation and interaction. It felt as though the
information superhighway was finally reaching its potential. But
sometime between 2012 and 2016, things took a turn for the worse.

First came the infamous infinite scroll. I remember feeling uneasy
the first time a web page no longer had a bottom. Logically, I knew
very well that everything a browser displays is a virtual construct.
There is no physical page. It is just pixels pretending to be one.
Still, my brain had learned to treat web pages as objects with a
beginning and an end. The sudden disappearance of that end
disturbed my sense of ease.

Then came the bogus notifications. What had once been meaningful
signals turned into arbitrary prompts. Someone you followed had
posted something unremarkable and the platform would surface it as a
notification anyway. It didn’t matter whether the notification was
relevant to me. The notification system stopped serving me and
started serving itself. It felt like a violation of an unspoken
agreement between users and services. Despite all that, these
platforms still remained social in some diluted sense. Yes, the
notifications were manipulative, but they were at least about people
I actually knew or had chosen to follow. That, too, would change.

Over time, my timeline contained fewer and fewer posts from friends
and more and more content from random strangers. Using these
services began to feel like standing in front of a blaring
loudspeaker, broadcasting fragments of conversations from all over
the world directly in my face. That was when I gave up on these
services. There was nothing social about them anymore. They had
become attention media. My attention is precious to me. I
cannot spend it mindlessly scrolling through videos that have
neither relevance nor substance.

But where one avenue disappeared, another emerged. A few years ago,
I stumbled upon Mastodon and it reminded me of the early days of
Twitter. Back in 2006, I followed a small number of folks of the
nerd variety on Twitter and received genuinely interesting updates
from them. But when I log into the ruins of those older platforms
now, all I see are random videos presented to me for reasons I can
neither infer nor care about. Mastodon, by contrast, still feels
like social networking in the original sense. I follow a small
number of people I genuinely find interesting and I receive their
updates and only their updates. What I see is the result of my own
choices rather than a system trying to capture and monetise my
attention. There are no bogus notifications. The timeline feels
calm and predictable. If there are no new updates from people I
follow, there is nothing to see. It feels closer to how social
networks used to work originally. I hope it stays that way.