Why did our friends stop posting on social media?

By Katty Kay

After two decades of sharing more online, it looks like we’ve decided to share less. New polling shows that nearly a third of all social media users post less than they did a year ago. That trend is especially true for adults in Gen Z.

In a recent essay for the New Yorker, writer Kyle Chayka suggested that society might be headed towards what he calls “posting zero”: a point where regular people feel that it’s not worth it to share their lives online.

I’ve noticed this downward trend in my own social feeds. For every picture of a friend’s vacation or of a colleague’s children, there seem to be dozens (if not hundreds) of posts from brands and influencers promoting a new product or discussing the latest trend.

Social media used to feel like an imperfect facsimile of my social life – but now, it feels more like “content”.

Some of this, I know, is because the platforms themselves have changed. TikTok and Instagram amassed endless troves of vertical videos and built eerily powerful algorithms to help guide you through them.

But what happens to our digital lives when social media seemingly becomes much less social? I called Kyle to ask him more about it. He is a staff writer for the New Yorker and his latest book is Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture.

Below is an excerpt from our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Katty Kay: When I look at my social media feeds, they’re full of ads and pictures of lovely houses that I will never buy in places I’ll probably never even visit. But I’m literally trying to think of the last time I actually saw a post from a friend. What does it mean for the future of these platforms if our reason for going there now is totally different from what it was even a couple of years ago?

Kyle Chayka: I think social media has become less social. It’s more about just consuming this kind of highly commodified content. It’s more about lifestyle aspiration, not just what’s going on around you and how you are relating to your friends and family. To me, that kind of removes the purpose of social media.

If the platforms are losing their grip on people’s normal lives and normal people don’t feel the incentive to post anymore, then social media becomes just like television. What we’re left with then is the brand advertising and the fast fashion and the houses and the hotel advertisements – and that’s just not the same kind of organic, highly textured stuff that we were used to.

KK: The people that run these social media companies have the most sophisticated algorithms to hook us in. What’s their response to this? Or are they just happy that there’s more advertising so they’re making more advertising revenue?

KC: I think their main clients are the advertisers. So, as long as we the users are still engaging, their business model still works.

I think they’re also betting that the human-generated content will be replaced gradually with AI-generated content. You can see Meta already kind of moving the Facebook feed and the Instagram feed toward that kind of computer-generated stuff, which is obviously infinite and cheap, but also meaningless, in my opinion.

KK: Do you think there’s a chance that the social media platforms are going to see a significant drop-off among people who actually went there to see things like where our friends were going on holiday or what they had for breakfast?

KC: I think so. I think there is a slow decline; I know of one study recently that found fewer people are actually posting on TikTok. But what these platforms have found, I think Instagram in particular, is that our personal sharing is moving more toward direct messages and one-to-one conversations with our friends.

We actually do need an online social network. The social networks that we have now don’t really want to play that role. So, I think there will be new spaces and maybe even new apps that emerge to serve that need, whether that’s like an expanded WhatsApp or a better management system for all your friends’ group chats. I think we’re just moving into a more private, more intimate way of connecting online.

KK: I have kids who are in their 20s and teens. There was a whole feeling amongst my generation that kids today don’t care about privacy and they’re happy to put anything online. I’m wondering if we were wrong about that, that young people tasted this world where everything was put out there in public, and now they’re thinking, “Actually, I’d rather my groups were more intimate and curated,” as opposed to the whole world knowing what I had for breakfast.

KC: I think we kind of learned the downside of broadcasting your private life online over the course of the 2010s. You could see that with public shaming or kind of viral embarrassments that happen to people.

I think the social contract of social media has changed. The deal was if you put stuff out there, if you put out content, you could get this massive audience. But that becomes a vicious cycle that becomes your entire life. So, unless you’re trying to become an influencer or a professional internet poster, the deal doesn’t seem so good anymore. The downsides of posting are too great and the advantages are not good enough. So, you might as well just text your friends.

KK: I had a super-interesting conversation with Jonathan Haidt, who’s obviously done a lot of work on trying to get phones out of schools. Do you think that if the trend you are spotting – you call it posting zero – turns out to be a kind of a significant wave that we’re moving towards, does it actually make it easier to break that phone and device addiction for kids?

KC: It’s a good question. I do think we’ve passed peak social media in a way, but I don’t think that removes the 24/7 digital conversation that people are having. It’s just that the conversation moves away from the public channels into these group chats, into DMs or a more ephemeral platform, like Snapchat.

The addictive capacity of the phone is still there. The distraction is certainly still there. But I think there’s less of this public nature of it. I think it is a little bit better that we’ve moved out of the public sphere and have removed that risk of just getting totally exposed to the entire world and going viral for the wrong reasons. But we’re still texting each other all day. We’re still consuming memes. We’re still getting distracted by feeds.

KK: Throw it forward. What are we going to be looking at on our phones in five years’ time? How different will our interactions be with the social component of our phones and our devices?

KC: I think it’ll be even more like television. If we look at the way things are going, it’s a lot of professionalised media. It’s a lot of passively watching stuff. We kind of see this merging today of YouTube and TikTok and Netflix into just an unholy combination of audio and video and algorithmic feed.

If I had to predict, the conversation and social aspect will be in text messages or I think it might move more into real life. I think this peak social media has created more of a desire for in-person interaction and has reminded us of the value of actually sharing things in real life. So, that makes me a little bit hopeful.

KK: Do you think we’ll get to a posting zero world, where people like you and I just are not posting anymore?

KC: I think so. I think it’s coming sooner than we expect, just because there’s no incentive to post anymore. Why post your selfies or post your breakfast if you don’t get attention for it, you can’t reach your friends and you’re just competing with all of this remote, abstracted garbage out there?

Maybe social media was this aberration in a way, or a detour. And this idea that every normal person should share their life in public was kind of flawed from the beginning. And we’re now waking up from that a little bit and seeing the damage that it’s wrought and moving on a little bit with our habits.

Feature image credit: Writer Kyle Chayka and BBC Special Correspondent Katty discuss the changing landscape of social media (Credit: BBC)