Platform decay is accelerating on Facebook and LinkedIn
Two threads, one funny and one alarming, pointed at the same underlying problem. The LinkedIn CringeBot story was mostly a joke: someone built a bot that generates LinkedIn-style motivational slop, and the comments were a mix of delight and exhaustion. But LinkedIn's own new 'this looks like AI slop' reporting button was noted as actually working to clean up feeds. The Facebook rage-bait story was not funny at all: investigative reporting showed Facebook is actively paying creators to produce inflammatory content, with the algorithm rewarding toxicity especially before elections.
The pattern connecting these: both platforms have optimized for engagement so aggressively that they are now paying for or algorithmically amplifying content that their own users find repellent. The difference is that LinkedIn's fix is a user-facing report button, while Facebook's problem is structural and deliberate.
Bluesky's user base shrinking while the team pivots to building AT Protocol infrastructure is the third data point here. The social platform moment may have passed, and what survives will either be infrastructure or something that succeeds in spite of its algorithm, not because of it.
So what?
Founders building on top of social platforms, or building alternatives, should take the Bluesky lesson seriously: protocol-level work is more durable than app-level growth, but you have to survive long enough to matter at the protocol layer. And if your business depends on Facebook or LinkedIn distribution, the rage-bait and slop problem is actively degrading the audience quality you are reaching.
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