At the beginning of the year, I predicted that 2026 would see the rise of a social media platform built with the express purpose of strengthening relationships over the exploitation of individual attention. Reporting from within my echo chamber, there is strong demand for some way to be in touch with one's community while omitting the endlessly refreshable timelines. Currently, Instagram is the necessary evil that ensures they hear about the next get-together, concert, or gallery opening; community-building events locked behind Meta's paywall of participation. Simply put, people are growing discontent with the ever-present predatory design practices of modern social media platforms.
This is no longer a conversation for consumption-conscious weirdos, entire countries are developing policies to defend their populations against harmful social media use. Negative impacts of excessive social media use are well documented and well reported, ushering the discussion into the mainstream. Many feel social media saps their energy and patience, an active obstacle that prevents them from living the life they want.
However, it is now September and my confidence in my prediction is admittedly shaken. I was dead convinced that BeReal's meteoric rise in 2022 meant that demand for an intentional and mindful social media platform was not trivial. Surely, it had been enough time since then for another platform to emerge and capture the orphaned user base that abandoned BeReal.
Perhaps it was naive to have extrapolated this lesson out of what was effectively a gimmick. BeReal's refusal to adopt industry standard dark patterns meant it came empty-handed to the gunfight. It was never a real alternative to Instagram, but a supplement to it; most users stayed loyal to their platforms with BeReal serving as a brief daily diversion. Without a captive audience, its backslide into the fringe (losing 50% of active users in a matter of months1) was inevitable.
It does still live on, but with a skeleton crew of a user base and in-app advertisements. The social media space has set a strong precedent of adapt or die which makes me question if the 'intentional' and 'mindful' social media that I envisaged would ever materialize. It is difficult to imagine what a platform would look like and how it would sustain a healthy active user count. After all, intentionality and mindfulness have faced semantic bleaching as advertising campaigns co-opt the term to promote guilt-free consumption of luxury goods.
But what of the demographic that was enticed by BeReal's promise of an authentic social media? Many have felt the urge to take drastic action, to delete their accounts and never look back. In practice though, this remains a fantasy for most with reasoning being quite diverse from person to person. Some find that a handful of their relationships are dependent on the shared consumption of media where continued contact seems unsustainable without posts or videos to send to one another. Some may concede a lack of self-discipline as social media is far too accessible to leave in the long term. Either way, social media has become so embedded in their lives and their environment that it has developed into the seemingly indomitable Goliath. It just so happens that this sentiment is captured by a spoken word interlude in one of my favorite DJ mixes.
Most people think that being on the internet a lot is a bad thing
They are trying to disconnect to reattain personal relationships like these
But they can't
They won't
It's impossible
I think nothing should ever be so big to include everyone
You can be a human
Or a person
Or a gendered body
But you shouldn't try to unite the world.
I feel it is unfair to strip this section of its sonic context and I emphasize this in hopes that you will give the track a listen sometime. Regardless, I do think it accurately portrays the helplessness to resist the status-quo. Whatever techno-optimism was present in 2022 has come and gone, incrementally surrendering to conservatism in the face of unparalleled uncertainty. Right now, solving social media with another social media platform is just not the vibe.
In this environment, the pursuit of social media reform takes subdued measures. On Instagram, the 'finsta' and casual posting with 'photo dumps' have become popular as rejections to the vanity of the platform. As media literacy developed and photo editing tools became more accessible, the quality of posts rose until it favored the well-funded social media team over the individual. Instagram became the place to build a brand, not to connect with friends. Personal accounts were run like corporations with slice of life moments replaced by formulaic portraits employing a limited library of poses. In 2018, it seemed like the needle was swinging the other way as Wendy's Twitter account developed a messy, dramatic, and confrontational personality that forced competitors to adapt accordingly. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we know it was not here to stay and instead it is us who feel the pressure to be filtered and refined.
Even casual posting has become a branding tool for celebrities. Wherever the line between individual and brand was, it is now gone on Instagram. The elevation of 'influencers' has the same effect as personalities are commandeered by brand deals, becoming vessels for corporate messaging. This is not universal as I have identified an unlikely space where people are allowed and expected to operate as people. If you will humor me, I would like to present LinkedIn as a case study against commonly identified social media misgivings.
This year, a report from Zety revealed that 1 in 8 US employees have been in a romantic relationship that started on LinkedIn.2 This is not the networking the platform was designed to conduct, a sizable proportion of employees sticking their necks out on LinkedIn is a strong indicator that the platform is serving something that is lacking elsewhere. If Zety's findings are to be believed, LinkedIn's secret sauce is trust and authenticity. A LinkedIn profile is interpreted to be a vetted record of one's life and activity. Somehow, these personal profiles have mostly eluded the degradation of confidence that has contaminated the rest of the internet in the age of AI.
I do not mean to praise LinkedIn, it has its flaws including the fact that fraudulent job postings have only grown over time. But what is admirable is how its purpose has stayed coherent despite its pervasiveness. Consider that with a user base of 1.3 billion, it has developed well-established linguistic markers that are ubiquitous among its structurally identical posts; these markers are traditionally signs of a tight-knit subculture with the need to distinguish between in-group and out-group members. Here, the use of self-enforced copywriting structure for all posts communicates a shared dedication to one's career, building an enormous network of superficially like-minded people.
Additionally, platform growth usually leads to the decentralization of the individual, but here the individual has stayed king. Posts are made by one on behalf of an organization with many pushing a performative humility in an effort to charm others and extol themselves. Personal profiles are often produced with more care and elicit more interactions than company pages. Peer to peer communication is brought into focus with priority placed on building and acting upon connections, the holy grail that social media escapists have been chasing.
Yet, there is a reason why LinkedIn has not emerged as a solution to our problematic relationship with social media. While the individual is the center of attention, individualism is paradoxically suppressed. There may be a lucky few who are content with the limited topics of acceptable self-expression on the platform, but most have to maintain their image of flawless professionalism with meaningful effort. It is simply too large and too uniform.
Social media has proven itself, time and time again, to scale poorly. At each growth step, a compromise must be made between the platform's mission, the protection of its users, and its economic viability. Sacrifices are made, and in most cases, at the cost of the anonymized user who is inevitably a statistic. LinkedIn is unique in having not completely alienated its users and perverted its mission while holding upwards of a billion users, but the irony is that the users have depersonalized themselves.
The solution, considering all of this, is scaling down. There is no need to wait for some innovative startup to capture the attention of millions. After all, the smaller the space, the more meaningful interactions are. Like analog communities, consistent engagement can yield worthwhile reward and connection as an online denizen. Forums and blogs for your niche interests, Discord servers that cater to what matters to you, perhaps even Youtube's comment section. For me, I have been delighting in the joys of recreational emailing -- an intimate skeuomorph of old fashioned letter-writing correspondence.
Ultimately, the resolution to social media fatigue is any space where you feel no pressure to conform. So, sorry to have spent this time developing this point, but it seems like if there was a moral to be derived, it is to be yourself.