For a tech writer, being very offline is sort of like being a marathon coach who doesn’t run. So in 2025, I tried to reverse years of studied avoidance towards the most ubiquitous technological phenomenon on earth — I got back on social media. The change was short-lived.
My first exodus from the feeds took some work — disabling notifications, removing apps from my homescreen and then deleting accounts entirely. This time, the phone put itself down. The whole thing has simply lost its luster.
I started with Instagram. Every experience went like this: I’d see a single post from one of the rare family members or IRL friends who are active on the platform. Next, I was fed a sponsored post, followed by suggestions to follow randos. After that, a series of influencer videos that, admittedly, appeal to my taste (funny/absurdist women and dissertations on urban planning). That was followed up with more sponsored posts, mostly from brands I’d looked up for work. Then it’d circle back to the influencers. My eyes glazed over and I tossed the phone aside.
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Years back, the platform gave off a jolt of quasi-social connection that I’d spend hours sucking up. I fed on pointless thoughts from an ex-coworker, vacation reels from a college roommate, a half-baked loaf of bread that an old friend dropped on the floor but took a picture of anyway. Now it’s a bare sliver of that stuff, shoehorned between towers of sponsored content and posts from people who make or promote their living on Instagram. The real people have left. The connection is gone. The FOMO is no more.
I experienced some variation of the same disappointment on every platform I rejoined. When I got back on TikTok a few months after the ban, it felt like a frenzied shopping mall. Every video seems to be about four seconds long and most are promotional and/or shoppable. YouTube Shorts is drowning in AI-generated videos, and I don’t hit up social media to watch fake footage of desperate wild animal babies clambering onto the boats of helpful humans. My life has no need for simulated toddlers admonishing their pets. Occasionally, I’d hit on something compelling: a clip from late night TV, a stupidly decadent dessert recipe, people from other countries explaining cultural subtleties.
But for me, these social media platforms are no longer velcro for the eyes. I remember losing focus, spending long hours on YouTube Shorts and IG. I’d look up bleary-eyed and shame-faced after hours scrolling TikTok’s For You Page. Now, after a few minutes, a bored ickiness sets in. I feel like I’m trapped in a carnival of bots hawking shampoo at me and I just want to go home.
It’s not a mystery how or why things feel different; The answer is always money. These billion- and trillion-dollar companies have shareholders who prize year-over-year performance over anything else. So we get more sponsored posts on Instagram. TikTok purposefully, enthusiastically overloads itself with shoppable content (which isn’t going to change no matter who owns it). YouTube is obsessed with engagement so it ends up rewarding people who flood the platform with AI slop. These platforms aren’t about human connections and the spread of creativity — the stuff that used to draw me in — they’re thinly varnished ecommerce sites sprinkled with brute-forced AI oddities.
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I’d be sadder about the whole thing if I thought it could be any different. These companies are among the most valuable in the world. The fact that I can’t connect with my fellow common people using their services is not surprising. The change isn’t even driving everyone away. Instagram reported more users than ever this year, to the tune of 35 percent of the planet. Billions of users still scroll TikTok and watch YouTube Shorts. So maybe it’s just a me thing.
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