As much as I still rely on Twitter, using the site has also trained me to think of the whole practice of social media as cynical and corrupt, something that could only persist in a commercially incentivised form or as a bad habit.

For many of the communities making their move away from Twitter, it will become apparent that functional online spaces don’t happen by accident: they involve actual work. Why do this for a company that does nothing more than monetise your content to help make Musk’s next billion?

Apps like Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, OkCupid, Grindr, Scruff and Brenda offer affordances that are built into the way they are designed. These affordances import all the assumptions and norms of both those who make them, and adapt primarily to what sells: they turn daters into consumers of each other, and unwitting producers of data for the monopolistic behemoths of the digital world. Dating apps are actively involved in reproducing the traits of contemporary capitalism, transforming our very desires in ways that reshape and homogeneise how we love each other.

While it is a popular assumption that millennials have developed an over-inflated sense of ego thanks to their digital technologies, today’s brand of narcissism is radically different and detached from that of the 1980s yuppie narcissism familiar in books such as Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and films such as Wall Street, which turned 30 in December.