It's just public media now

Published: 21 January 2026

At some point, social media stopped being social. It’s just public media now.

One of the earliest signals I noticed was the slow disintegration of Snapchat. It was popular because it seemed to offer private and ephemeral sharing with a handful of followers, most of whom you would have met in real life. Then in January 2015, Snapchat launched Discover, a feature explicitly designed to shift the platform from growth to monetisation, partnering with media companies like CNN, ESPN, and Vice¹. With each major update after that, I watched it get worse. Friends’ stories moved to the explore section, and the space dedicated to people you actually followed shrank from a full page to a small bar at the top, with the remainder filled with promotional content, sponsored influencers, and advertisements.

Instagram followed a similar trajectory. Its Explore tab launched in 2012 as a simple way to see popular photos and nearby locations², but by 2015-2016 it had become an algorithmically curated recommendation engine, pushing “Videos You Might Like” and trending content over anything from people you actually knew.

Then came the TikTok-ification. In August 2020, Instagram launched Reels³. Three months later, Snapchat launched Spotlight, and they were so desperate for content that they paid creators a million dollars a day to get it off the ground⁴. Both were attempts to compete with TikTok’s algorithmic short-form video feed. This marked a shift from the “social graph,” where you see content from people you follow, to the “interest graph,” where an algorithm decides what you see based on engagement patterns⁵. The platforms stopped pretending to be about connection and fully committed to being content recommendation engines.

What comes next might make all of this feel quaint. In late 2025, OpenAI launched Sora 2, a text-to-video app that looks and feels like TikTok but generates content on demand. Meta launched Vibes, its own AI video feed⁶. Bot traffic overtook human traffic for the first time in 2024, and by some estimates over half of written content on the internet is now AI-generated⁷. The term “AI slop” entered the dictionary in 2026⁸. Engagement farms use AI to generate emotional bait at scale, and the content is engaged with by other bots. The dead internet theory, which emerged on fringe forums in the late 2010s, is becoming harder to dismiss when even Sam Altman is posting about it⁹.

This feels like the logical endpoint of the engagement-first model. When algorithms reward content that captures attention regardless of authenticity, and AI can produce that content infinitely cheaper than humans, you end up with platforms full of synthetic media made by no one, for no one. The “interest graph” that replaced the “social graph” is now feeding you content that never involved a human at all.

You’d expect the research to be clearer. It’s not. A recent preprint found that nearly a third of social media studies have undisclosed ties to industry¹⁰. Researchers funded by platforms are financially incentivised to validate their products, and when findings are ambiguous, conflicts of interest can shape how results are interpreted. Meta reportedly attempted to reopen “control rights” over how academics interpreted findings from the 2020 Election Project as papers neared publication¹¹. The same economic model that turned connection platforms into engagement machines also influences the science that might have warned us.

Maybe the term “social media” was always a misnomer. What we have now are public broadcast platforms optimised for engagement, not connection. The social part, the actual conversations with people you know, became an afterthought, squeezed into a corner to make room for content you never asked for.

I don’t care about platforms. I care about talking to people. So I’ve opted out of most of it. Facebook never offered me anything I couldn’t get elsewhere, so I deleted it. I deleted Snapchat when I finished high school and I don’t miss it at all. Definitely ephemeral, private maybe not. I’ve never heard anyone tell me that TikTok made their life better, and I’ve never used it. I stopped using Instagram on my phone and access direct messages through the web version occasionally.

But I’ve never stopped using services that facilitate actual conversation: Signal, Discord, SMS. I’ve even started occasionally using Twitter/X, and against all odds, I’ve found people doing interesting things there. One guy was working on a CLI application similar to a project I’d made. I contributed a feature that improved the quality of YouTube livestreams, so now I can listen to the Anjunadeep radio through the command line. Following actual people who do actual things makes a difference. X still has algorithmic noise, but at least I can separate it out and use the platform to aggregate news and updates on things I care about. I also skim Hacker News and a curated list of blogs via RSS. It might not be the purest approach, but at least it’s intentional.

There’s a lot written about how technology has made us more isolated, about people glued to their phones even when they’re sitting across from each other. But you can still go outside and talk to people. You can catch up with real humans, in person, without an algorithm mediating the interaction, even if fewer people are. The solution to synthetic connection isn’t better technology. It’s just connection.