It's not just you — no one is posting on social media anymore
Social media is on the decline. Instagram is all ads. No one's posting on BeReal. TikTok is for influencers. The new place for sharing: group chats.
www.businessinsider.com
Social media is dead
Group chats and messaging apps killed it
Sydney Bradley and Amanda Perelli
Aug 30, 2023, 1:19 PM EDT
Tati Bruening, a 22-year-old content creator and photographer, just wants to share memes and post about cooking green beans. Every time she logs onto Instagram, however, her feed is swamped by a combination of perfectly curated photos and professionally created content.
"It's really bizarre to me that everyone's gone to this place in their mind that content has to be so curated," Bruening told us. "So curated that you can't show what you're cooking for dinner, because that's not cool enough."
Frustrated with the state of the platform, Bruening launched the "Make Instagram Instagram Again'' crusade in 2022. Using her handle, Illumitati, the campaign pushed back against the platform's changes that prioritized algorithmically suggested videos over a chronological feed of accounts you follow. Thousands of users, and even some celebrities like Kylie Jenner, got on board. Soon enough, Instagram scaled back its aggressive recommendations push.
At the core of Bruening's frustration was a sea change that had swept across Instagram: Instead of everyday photos from regular people, the platform had become a curated platform where even seemingly authentic content was meticulously planned.
The fatigue average people feel when it comes to posting on Instagram has pushed more users toward private posting and closed groups. Features like Close Friends (a private list of people who have access to your content) and the rise of group chats give people a safer place to share memes, gossip with friends, and even meet new people. It's less pressure — they won't mind if I didn't blur out the pimple on my forehead — but this side of Instagram hardly fulfills the original free-flowing promise of social media.
"There's this very weird, unspoken social standard of what's allowed on Instagram," Bruening said. "I know that for my age group, it's like you give up on it entirely, and then you just post only to your Close Friends or alternate accounts. There's this sublayer of Instagram that's much more true to what the app once was, but it is just not viewable to the general public."
Bruening isn't alone. Despite the efforts of big incumbents and buzzy new apps, the old ways of posting are gone, and people don't want to go back. Even Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, admitted that users have moved on to direct messages, closed communities, and group chats. Regularly posting content is now largely confined to content creators and influencers, while non-creators are moving toward sharing bits of their lives behind private accounts.
As more people have been confronted with the consequences of constant sharing, social media has become less social and more media — a constellation of entertainment platforms where users consume content but rarely, if ever, create their own. Influencers, marketers, average users, and even social-media executives agree: Social media, as we once knew it, is dead.
Social media to social media
No app better defines the changing nature of social media than Instagram. The app started as a digital scrapbook — a place to keep up with real-world connections, close friends, and family. While other networks had more users (Facebook) or generated more news (Twitter), Instagram seemed to define the ideal form of this era of social media. Instagram became a verb, an aesthetic, and a generational signifier.
"You sort of end up in this world that is beautiful and you are following your friends and following your family," Jeffrey Gerson, a former Instagram product-marketing manager, told us about the early days of the app. "How often do you get the chance to see the world through your second cousin's eyes?"
But as Instagram grew up, things began to change. Sarah Frier, a Bloomberg tech reporter and editor and the author of "No Filter," which chronicles the history of Instagram, wrote that users learned curation from the introduction of photo filters. After filters and editing tools came hashtags, an explore tab, and the option to privately save people's photos. What was once an enjoyable pastime became a minefield of considerations: What should I say in the caption? Are emojis still cool? Is it better to just stay mysterious and let the images speak for themselves? This running list of questions made the posting process overwhelming, robbing Instagram of its early magic.
As posting became higher stakes, new features also pushed users away from the original mission: Instagram began prioritizing video, then livestreaming, and then shopping. Each change muddled the purpose of Instagram even further. Everyday people were still posting to the platform, but more and more of the content became professionalized. Bloggers brought their audience, editing skills, and expensive cameras to the platform. Influencers started to snag brand deals, and fashion bloggers made the platform into a career. Instagram encouraged the rise of influencers with programs that helped creators understand best practices, gave them technical support, and set up discreet payment programs.
Today, the app has become an aspirational entertainment app — a place where users can shop, find information, and get inspired (or, more commonly, overwhelmed) by snapshots of the best moments of a person's life. Nearly every photo on Instagram now is hand selected from an album of dozens of nearly identical images. The only difference is the one you're seeing isn't too perfect but just perfect enough for sharing. These shifts had a downstream effect on everyday users: The cadence of posting content changed. "Your friends don't post that much to feed," Mosseri admitted during a recent interview on the "20VC" podcast.
Hannah Stowe, a 23-year-old who lives in New York, said that while she uses Instagram every day, she rarely finds herself posting these days. "I used to post on Instagram weekly/bimonthly, but now it's much less frequent, like four or five times a year," she told us in a DM. "I add stories more impulsively but way less than I used to. Now it's probably like once a week. If that."
While sharing has tailed off, consuming content hasn't slowed, especially since the start of the pandemic, Andrea Casanova, an influencer strategist, told us. When people were confined to their homes, the apps saw an influx of photos "from people who either have a specific lifestyle or had specific talents," she said. This, in turn, reinforces typical people's decision to not post on their own feeds, Casanova said, because they assume the bar for what people want to see is higher.
"Culture in general has kept a lot of people from showing up because they don't think their life is aesthetic, or they don't think that they're selling anything, so why would they post on social media? 'I just don't have the lifestyle that all of these creators have, so I don't know what I would be sharing' and therefore fall into this loop of never sharing anything," Casanova said.
Be safe tho