Millennials are freaking out over the enshittification of the interwebs

?️?From the dumpster fire that is our socials:

Do not go gently into that goodnight, Millennials: It wasn’t enough that Millennials are freaking out about (a) Gen Z and (b) entering middle age — one of their own is now suggesting they’re aging out of the thing on which they have hung their identity: The internet. (Not convinced? Throw “Millennials age out” into a search on Threads or Twitter X and see for yourself.)

Where it started: Max Read’s The year millennials aged out of the internet, in the New York Times, hit the interwebs at the perfect time, catching Millennials on a Christmas long weekend. The combination of well-spiked eggnog / edibles / whatever and the kids already being in bed caught them unawares.

The claim: “For my entire professional life, I have started nearly every weekday morning with an extremely important productivity ritual: I make a coffee, I sit down at my computer, and I mess around on the internet for an hour or so. … But recently I find the task of wasting time online increasingly onerous. The websites I used to depend on have gotten worse, and it seems as if there’s nowhere else to look. … Something is changing about the internet, and I am not the only person to have noticed. Everywhere I turned online this year, someone was mourning.”

Evidence of enshittification:

• Why the internet isn’t fun anymore (The New Yorker)
• Social media is doomed to die (The Verge)
• The tragedy of Google search (The Atlantic)
• The junkification of Amazon (New York magazine’s Intelligencer)

The bottom line: “There was a time in my life when it was trivial to sign up to a new social network and pick up its patterns and mores on the fly. Now, I feel exhausted by the prospect.”

The NYT isn’t the first to suggest it — it’s just that Mr. Read’s take was really well-timed, we think. Our evidence: Are you sure you’re not guilty of the ‘Millennial Pause’? in The Atlantic, published in August 2022.