| Hi all, it's Sarah Frier in San Francisco. This was the year social media stopped being social. But first… Today's must-reads: • Tencent won approval for a new clutch of game titles from China
• A $720 billion wipeout isn't deterring Tesla fans from buying
• Covid misinformation is spreading along with the virus A few selections from my phone prompts last week: Instagram tells me a fashion influencer is going live. Snapchat notifies me that DJ Khaled has posted a story. Facebook says CNN added a new video. Nobody needs to tell me what's on Twitter: It's Elon Musk, all the time. When I accidentally tap on any one of the alerts, I enter apps desperate to guide me to content from people I don't know — posts that I might be momentarily mesmerized by and never remember, touting gardening hacks or unique pastry designs. Without those wannabe-viral videos, the networks would have to show me updates from the same few people who still manage to display vibrant lives on social media. This year, social media mostly stopped offering a window into the lives of our loved ones. It turns out that the social part of social media, which helped shape human behavior online and off for more than a decade, is proving to be something of a fad. It's withering in the sad, slow way that internet habits do; eventually, the people who send public birthday messages on Facebook will be as rare as the ones who still have AOL email addresses. In 2022, even the social media companies gave up on salvaging friend-related content. The networks rely on having enough in people's feeds to keep them entertained during a scroll, so they can slot in ads between every few posts and make money. And there just isn't much of that personal posting happening anymore. Facebook has been worried about this inevitability for years. In 2017, for instance, the company started pushing people to join Facebook groups to expand their friend networks and the potential content they could be shown in their feeds. It worked for a while, but this year, as advertisers' budgets shrank and as Apple Inc. limited ad effectiveness, the parent company Meta Platforms Inc. decided more drastic steps were necessary. It let professional content creators take over. The kind of service Facebook and Instagram will provide going forward is different, focused more on users' interests than their friends. They're copying TikTok, the addictive short-form video app that's all about keeping people entertained with the aid of artificial intelligence and requiring minimal effort by the user to decide what's worth watching. The people who post most will be the "creators" — those trying to make a career out of using social media. Meta, despite the algorithm change and a mass layoff of 13% of its workforce, is the most stable company in the bunch. Snap Inc., the owner of Snapchat, cut 20% of its staff along with investments in experimental businesses. Even the richest person on earth is nervous: "How do you make a small fortune in social media?" Musk wrote a few weeks after taking ownership of Twitter. "Start out with a large one." There doesn't seem to be a popular-enough startup waiting in the wings to connect people to their friends. It's more likely that the default venue for sharing personal things just continues to be in private and small-group messages. But as you ring in 2023, go ahead and post those fireworks on Instagram if you still feel the urge. It might be the last time you do. —Sarah Frier Southwest Airline's storm debacle stems from outdated tech. The systems to schedule crews and aircraft all proved brittle this week, and when computers weren't up to the task, humans had to step in to hunt down pilots and flight crews by telephone. The airline had been warned about the need to invest, but at a media day last month CEO Bob Jordan said he couldn't put a price tag on the cost of slow modernization. Sales of nonfungible tokens plummeted 89% last month from January, threatening marketplaces including those launched by GameStop and Coinbase Global. Congressman Don Beyer is going back to school to get a masters degree in machine learning. The 72-year-old hopes one day to apply his artificial-intelligence knowledge to his legislative work. Gemini Trust and its founders, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, were sued by investors who claim the crypto asset exchange sold interest-bearing accounts it failed to register as securities. | 
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