Are Social Media Platforms the Next Dying Malls?

It was cool to hang out at the mall—until it wasn't

A shopping mall destroyed my home town.

Maybe that’s not as scary as Godzilla destroying Tokyo (again!—yawn) or a cockroach eating Cincinnati. But it proved just as effective.

They cleared out 35 acres in the middle of my ‘hood to build this monstrosity, eliminating historic buildings and scenic park space. But the promised economic benefits never arrived—tenants soon left in the face of shootings, theft, and declining sales.

The mall eventually closed. But 25 years later, that huge wreck still sits in the middle of town—an enduring testimony to idiocy and greed.

Here’s what it looks like now.

And I am partly responsible.

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I worked in the construction of that mall—it was my summer job at age 18. And I believed the hype. I took pride back then in building a prosperous future for my home town.

But that’s not how I feel now. We all should have fought to preserve the old neighborhood.

Here I am on the construction site for the Hawthorne Plaza at age 18.

And not just my neighborhood—there are dead malls everywhere now.

My home town is just one example of many. And there are also many “dying malls”—defined as enclosed shopping centers with less than 40% occupancy.

Not long ago, we hoped that these artificial gathering places could be robust, vital replacements for the neighborhoods we tore down. But what I’ve learned is that you pay a heavy price for replacing a real community with a fake one.

And that brings me to the subject of social media platforms—which increasingly resemble these old, decrepit malls.

They are the ultimate fake community centers. This makes them vulnerable, despite all the current visitors and lurkers and noise.

My home town mall also once had many visitors and lurkers, and lots of noise. But that wasn’t enough to guarantee survival.

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Here are the ways in which web platforms are like these ugly malls.

1. People go there because other people go there—but this is a fragile foundation for a community.

In earlier days, gathering spots usually had some special claim to our attention and reverence. People gathered at the watering hole because that’s where they got water.

Or they set up shop at the dock or train station because that was where visitors, news, and commerce entered the community. Or they came together at some especially sacred, scenic, or useful location.

But tech leaders don’t pay any attention to those things. They operate on the Field of Dreams business model—if they build it, people will come. And they hope that this trend will create its own momentum, attracting more and more participants.

But the real world rarely operates like Field of Dreams. Just check out the foot traffic in Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse. A web platform needs something else to build a community, and that something else is getting harder and harder to find in the current environment.

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2. Malls died because there were too many of them. Social media is now entering that same phase.

During the 1980s, around 2,500 new shopping malls were built in the US. The market was saturated—even before the rise of online shopping.

There just weren’t enough consumers to support this huge expansion in consumerism. But they kept adding more and more malls—like Bob the Builder on Benzedrine.

Then the collapse came.

They kept adding more and more malls—like Bob the Builder on Benzedrine.

That’s how trends reverse—and it’s rarely a gentle process. The trend reaches a ridiculous extreme, and so the reversal is violent and unforgiving.

This is the Law of Reflexivity, and it deserves to be better known. Powerful trends actually cause their own collapse, because of the very intensity of their rise.

So in the US, 400 of the 2,000 largest malls shut down during just a three-year period. And the bloodletting isn’t over. Experts believe as many as half of the existing malls may not survive another two decades.

This is exactly the situation in social media—where hundreds (or thousands) of platforms compete for community members.

And more get launched every month.

People keep telling me that I need to move to Threads. Or Bluesky. Or Twitch or TikTok or Discord or Truth Social or Snapchat or Rumble or YouTube shorts or whatever.

I’ve set up profiles on some of these platforms—but then, sooner or later, I just walk away. Who has the time to post on all these apps?

Others are also abandoning the apps. Just look at the metrics.

Source

For a long time, I thought that I needed these platforms for my vocation. Maybe you think the same way. But I now realize that they need us even more.

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3. Malls started to look identical, with the same merchandise, tenants, architecture, and ambiance.

If you’ve seen one mall, you’ve seen them all.

The stores are the same. The layout is the same. The food court is the same. The ambiance is the same.

This is the curse of lookalike businesses. They need something distinctive to maintain competitive advantage—but that’s impossible in a business where everybody imitates each other.

In the last three years, social media platforms have started converging—imitating the endless scroll of TikTok. They think this is a brilliant move, because scrolling promotes addictive user behavior. It’s like a drug.

But the video content on these platforms is often identical—just like the stores at the mall. The interface is increasingly identical—just like the layout at the mall.

Users can move from one platform to another, and have the same experience. And it’s increasingly an artificial, claustrophobic experience.

That makes all of these platforms vulnerable. If some new player invents a slightly better algorithm—a cooler video slot machine or a more addictive interface—users will switch loyalties in a heartbeat.

You can’t build a business on the loyalty of addicts. And addiction is the state of play on social media these days. It started with TikTok and Instagram, but now it’s everywhere. I call it the dopamine cartel.

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4. Many malls, like social media platforms, became magnets for lurkers, losers, and toxic behavior of all sorts—and this made community-building impossible.

The first shootings at my home town mall happened a few months after it opened. A lot of bad actors gravitate to these locations.

So I’m not surprised that, during the LA riots of 1992, looters and vandals headed straight for this mall. It was the obvious place for mayhem.

Here’s where that Field of Dreams boast is really true: Build it, and some people really will come—and spray-paint graffiti on every wall.

Later when young lunatics started shooting innocent people for sport—a hot trend of the new millennium—the local mall was often a preferred destination.

Social media is the online equivalent of this. You can’t actually kill somebody directly on the web—but these platforms are now indirectly responsible for a lot of ruined lives.

It’s gotten so bad the the Surgeon General now wants warning labels on social media apps—as if they were a dangerous drug or a pack of cigarettes.

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5. These bunkers were never real communities, and never will be. They’re just businesses—often run with distrust or contempt for their users.

From the start, malls were artificial constructs designed to maximize profits for the owners—and this was insufficient to create a true community, a sense of shared purpose, or enduring loyalty.

The same is true of social media. The owners of these platforms don’t even pretend otherwise.

In the last three years, they stopped trying to build communities, and shifted to promoting addictive scrolling and swiping. They manipulate their users with a smug attitude that can only be described as contempt.

Just look at the terms and conditions. Imagine launching a business in your neighborhood and telling new customers this…

From the privacy disclosure on Threads.

That’s not how you build a community. It’s how you exploit addicts.

If cartels posted terms and conditions on the doors of crack-houses, they would look much like this.

So, despite the name, social media is no longer social. And that’s the result of deliberate actions by the owners.

Their ideal user is a scroll-and-swipe zombie cut off from all living communities. In this way, my comparison with a dead mall is appropriate.

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Maybe if you’re already a zombie, you might not care. So many people nowadays are overwhelmed with such anomie and depression, that they can’t find a better option for socializing than these apps.

But if you still have a pulse, do you really want to pledge allegiance to these bogus communities of the undead?

There are still living, vital communities out there in the real world. They certainly exist in our neighborhoods—if you know where to look. And some even exist online. (I believe we have one here.)

I’ve already have cut back on my social media activity. And when I do visit those sad enclaves, I make an effort to do something uplifting and healing—spreading a little bit of love or beauty or humor.

I refuse to join the zombie wars. I prefer to focus on other pursuits—both in the real world and the digital one.

Maybe these apps for addicts will flourish for a few more years. But healthy, sane people are already wary, and their ranks are growing. So I anticipate that we will soon reach peak social media penetration—just as we achieved peak mall penetration back in the 1990s.

Other forces in society will displace these deadening artificial communities. That’s inevitable—because living, breathing organisms always prosper more than the undead.

I’m still not sure what shape these alternatives will take (although I have a few ideas), or the pace of their ascendancy. But I hope to be part of them.