The Decline of Social Media and Its Implications

I joined Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2007, and Instagram in 2012—and I was smitten with them. Deeply smitten. My favorite was Twitter by a wide margin. There was a stretch when my inner voice found its outlet entirely in tweets.

No one grieves this reality more than I do, but the era of social media has ended. It’s finished. Over.

Those networks still exist. So do newer entrants. But they barely resemble the formats I once fell for.

In Reason‘s latest print issue, I’ve got a lengthy piece that tries to wrestle with why and how this tragedy—yes, I mean that without irony—took place. (Pull up for the finger-pointing at politicians, stay for my personal tie to AOC dancing on a rooftop!) It could have filled many more pages. To keep things tight, the focus was chiefly on political factors that have hastened the decline of social media.

Yet there’s a lot more to the story. So I’ll use today’s newsletter to indulge a touch of nostalgia, develop a few more theories, and share some entertaining commentary from others that didn’t make the final cut.

How It Began…

First, nostalgia—partly for nostalgia’s sake, partly because understanding what we lost requires recalling what we had. And what we had felt, for a spell, lighthearted, welcoming, and almost magical. Do you remember?

A brief setup, drawn from the print feature:

When AOC, my friends, and others created these videos, there was no money changing hands for this content. The aim was simply participation. The objective was to enjoy yourself. We were young, and so was social media.

A lot of early social media shared that vibe. Cheesy. Collaborative. Purposeless. People posted pictures of themselves “planking”—lying face-down in odd spots, like the kitchen counter—just to be part of a trend. They dumped ice water on their heads and posted it, supposedly for ALS awareness but mostly because it was the thing to do. They shared old photos on #ThrowbackThursday, lists of accounts they liked on #FollowFriday, and the results of whatever BuzzFeed personality quiz happened that week.

There were hashtags for weddings, parties, and conferences, so everyone at an event, or following along online, could see all the photos and updates. If you ran into friends, met new ones, or simply spotted someone you vaguely knew at an event, you absolutely had to snap a selfie and post it.

We tweeted about where we were headed, and we “checked in” at coffee shops on Foursquare. We made surveillance almost effortless, and we were too immersed in the fever of constant communication to mind.

We were all part of a sprawling, multi-layered parasocial web, yet the boundaries felt fuzzier. It wasn’t odd for online friendships to bleed into real life. And it wasn’t strange to care about the lives of people you interacted with online. (Perhaps the key word is “interacted.” Social media back then was more participatory, and the bridge from parasocial to social shortened when daily mutual interaction became routine.)

Before it became a battleground, Twitter was a place “where you could talk with people and try out ideas,” notes Ben Smith—now with Semafor but formerly editor-in-chief of the old internet cornerstone BuzzFeed News. People drifted away from it, and many traditional platforms, “because they grew toxic and awful. But also, do you remember how kind they could be?” he asks. “I used to enjoy your tweets, you’d DM me now and then with a kind note like, ‘great story!’ and I made many genuine friends there, and it felt like those conversations were real.”

Smith also shared a tidbit I have to pass on because it perfectly distills the kind of things that unfolded online in the early 2000s: his BuzzFeed colleague Ze Frank, a vlogger, encouraged people to construct an “earth sandwich” by finding someone who lived at the exact opposite point of the globe and placing a slice of bread on the ground at the same moment.

Absurd and seemingly silly? Yes. Yet it all centered on connection. With the social web, we invented radical new ways to connect, and we were testing their uses, feeling out the borders, learning by trial and error what they might be appropriate for.

Big Mood

It’s tempting to equate that internet era with particular sites. But it was also an ethos—an upbeat, goofy, possibility-filled spirit—coupled with a remarkable belief that social media would be our new normal, forever.

In its early days, social media felt omnipresent, and a set of etiquette rules formed to match that sensation. (“I think the way we engaged with social media, back then, was a quintessentially Millennial experience,” says author and Substacker Freddie DeBoer.)

If you met someone in person—at a party, a work gathering, or at school—the thing to do afterward was to connect with them on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. If you were organizing an event, the simplest way to spread the word was a Facebook invitation. If you had big news, you would announce it there.

As a result, it felt mandatory to be present on these platforms. If you wanted to keep in touch with old friends, build new connections, get invited to gatherings, view family members’ photos, promote your art or a fundraiser, participate in a cause—anything—you had to be there.

Smith suggests that for those of us entering or already in middle age, falling out of love with the old platforms might simply reflect the natural life cycle of hangouts:

I think, to a degree, social platforms come and go much like restaurants and clubs do. Why is a club popular? Because your friends are there. And why do you stop going? Your friends aren’t there anymore.

And even if they update the sound system or the lighting or, say, improve the beer—those changes don’t really change your habits. You won’t be going to the same bar at thirty as you did at twenty. And there isn’t any magical fix for that.

I suspect a lot of this stuff reflects social institutions that rise and fall. YouTube, perhaps, is the only one that has become infrastructure for everyone.

That sentiment feels right in parts. But there was a moment when all of social media seemed like infrastructure itself. So what changed?

…How It’s Going

In the early days of the social web, the feeling that “everyone you know and everything you care about is here” came hand in hand with a lack of algorithmic ordering. Our feeds were straightforward chronologies of what friends, brands, bands, groups, and media we followed shared. It might have been less thrilling in some ways, yet it was more customizable and predictable.

The advent of algorithmic feeds altered things dramatically. Instead of simply seeing a photo of a friend’s kid up top, someone’s FarmVille results, the latest BuzzFeed quiz, or a benign TV-trend post, you were more likely to encounter something that seized your attention, provoked you, or kept you scrolling. For a period, this actually made social media more addictive.

Look, I once penned a feature titled “In Defense of Algorithms.” I don’t claim algorithms are responsible for all the chaos they’re blamed for. But I do think the move to algorithmically chosen content may have started a process that the TikTok era would later accelerate, and that this, paradoxically, would erode people’s engagement with social media. The platforms weakened themselves by their own choices.

The algorithms—along with politicians nudging platforms away from news, politics, and journalism, as I noted in my longer piece—certainly helped professional influencers gain traction.

Back in the early days, no one spoke of “curation” or “content strategy.” The idea—at least in theory, if not always in practice—was simply to share what you were doing or thinking in that moment. (Or, if you were a professional or aspiring writer or commentator, to highlight things you had written and posted elsewhere.) Posting didn’t require much planning, and whether friends and followers would see your posts depended only on when they logged in. But in a world driven by algorithms, the most “engaging” content (as measured by likes and comments) and the creators chasing that metric rise to the top.

Influencer culture transformed how people approach posting. The days of uploading a batch of unedited vacation photos to Facebook, tossing up a casual party snap on Instagram, or broadcasting a long panel discussion on YouTube with a single camera are gone.

Influencer posting has become “very strategic” and “very deliberate,” says tech journalist Taylor Lorenz, who runs the UserMag newsletter on Substack. “It used to be fun to share things.” But now, “because we’re in a hyper-competitive attention economy” and “platforms are shifting toward entertainment, consumption-based experiences,” people feel anxious about sharing anything that doesn’t look highly produced. “There’s pressure to make it look good… the production value for everything has risen dramatically.”

Then TikTok began to eclipse others in the attention economy, and big platforms—especially Facebook and Instagram—sought to mimic TikTok, prioritizing short-form videos and pushing more of that format into people’s feeds, even if they didn’t follow the creators posting them.

Some No Personal News

The rise of short-form video was the main counterargument I heard against the claim that social media was dying. “It would be a mistake to extrapolate from ‘things that look and function a lot like Twitter are losing their relevance’ to ‘social media is dying,’” says Julian Sanchez, who authors the Non-Content newsletter on Substack (and earlier worked at Reason).

When judging whether social media is over, “the only real question is whether short-form video counts as social media,” says DeBoer. “If it does, then clearly the era isn’t over.”

And yet… “Instagram Reels and TikToks serve very different purposes than Facebook and Twitter once did,” DeBoer adds. “I think people mean something quite different when they talk about social media.”

I share that view. And I believe the pivot to short-form video—something not everyone can jump into—may actually have contributed to the decline of social media, or at least put it on a path toward that outcome. With the TikTok-ization of almost everything, posting becomes more demanding (a video is a whole different beast than a text post or image) and the impulse to post rather than merely consume declines. More and more of our feeds feature random videos created by strangers that an algorithm suggests we might watch, not the faces of our friends, celebrities, or culture-makers we followed.

Again, this shift is intended to boost engagement—and it does work for some people. But the combination of engagement-driven algorithms with a television-like model of social media that dominates now may also lower the incentive to stay on platforms or to join them in the first place.

“Network effects”—the fancy phrase for the advantage of everyone you know using the same service—helped keep people tied to legacy sites like X/Twitter and Facebook. Yet as feeds filled with influencer posts and a flood of short-form videos from near-strangers, we encountered fewer and fewer of the people who originally drew us to these spaces, making it feel less essential to be there.

Leaving Facebook or Instagram isn’t so hard when the content you encounter is largely produced by people you don’t know or have never heard of, alongside abundant ads and some AI-curation nonsense. It becomes easier when you’re not connecting and arguing as much as simply consuming.

When internet users feel disenchanted, they used to talk about “getting into nasty online arguments”; now they describe “doom-scrolling,” notes Katherine Dee of Default.Blog. “They’re not even really invested in what they’re watching on their phone—it’s just something to do.”

“I’m one of the rare people who believes that [short-form video] doesn’t necessarily rot your brain,” she says (and I’m with her on that). Still, watching quick clips may resemble leaving the TV on in the background more than the way we once used social media. The social web of old—often cheesy, but participatory—made you feel like you were all in it together. And that feeling, I suspect, is largely gone.”

The more passive form of “social” media—TikTok clips, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts—may not spell doom or herald a new phenomenon, but rather a return to a baseline. It brings us closer to the media and news consumption patterns of older generations of the millennial era than to the exceptional years of peak Twitter and Facebook, BuzzFeed quizzes, and “gram-worthy” backgrounds, pile-ons, and participatory memes.

Putting our phones down during those years was once tougher than switching channels or quitting a TV lineup mid-browse. Yet as social media becomes more like television—passive and populated by strangers—it also becomes easier to walk away.

More Sex & Tech

A.I. right now reminds me of the late-’90s internet. There’s a ton of hype around projects that hardly any consumers seem to want; you have to tune that out and figure out what uses ordinary people are finding for it.

— Jesse Walker (@notjessewalker) October 4, 2026

• A Wall Street Journal op-ed blaming porn for gang-rape claims “most online porn videos contain depictions of some kind of physical violence.” The referenced study looked at top-selling and most-rented porn from late 2004 and early 2005. (And the “violence” here includes spanking.)

• How Rand Paul ended KOSA (for the moment, at least).

• The campaign ad with a lesbian tilt that split conservatives.

• The Anthropics stop-talking-about-Claude-as-if-it’s-human challenge.

• Is it prohibited now to use AI to assist talking to federal agents?

STOPPED AT THE PORT 🚫 Washington Dulles
A traveler used AI to prepare for CBP questioning and apparently got one more tip: destroy the evidence.
Officers found the shredded instructions and put them back together piece by piece.
The plan meant to get them in helped send them home instead.
#OFOproud🇺🇸

— Executive Asst. Commissioner Diane J. Sabatino (@OFOEAC) October 1, 2026

• Every time a politician leans toward decriminalizing sex work, opponents trot out survivors of sex trafficking as props and pretend that letting consenting adults sell sexual services is the same as allowing women to be forced into prostitution.

• “U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) searched 47,047 electronic devices (phones, cameras, laptops, etc.) at U.S. ports of entry (POE), detaining 2,316 devices for further investigation in fiscal year 2024,” per the DHS Inspector General. “However, CBP did not properly document device searches or track key metrics related to extracted information.”

• Eric Boehm asked the White House’s new AI chatbot about tariffs, and the bot didn’t adhere to Trump’s script.

• It’s always “antitrust.”