No, It’s Not Just You. Social Media Really Has Gotten Worse.

A couple of years ago, I noticed something happening to my social media feeds.

For starters, it began to feel like everyone was trying to sell me something. If it wasn’t a straight-up ad, it was a newsletter opt-in, a monetized meme page, or some personality trying to get me behind their paywall.

Then came the “suggested posts.” Entire threads, videos, and photos from people I’d never followed, often at the expense of seeing updates from the people I actually knew. And layered on top of it all was the steady sludge of AI-generated content.

I found myself mindlessly scrolling through a endless torrent of low-quality content only tangentially related to my interests. Engagement with my own posts had nosedived. And then, at a certain point, I paused, took stock, and asked myself that ever-pertinent philosophical query: What the hell was I doing here?

You’re Not Imagining Things. Social Media Is Shittier.

Like a lot of people, I originally joined social media to stay connected with friends and family members while also using it to build relationships with people I met when I was in college. During that period, Facebook was an indispensable extension of my social life.

My friends and I used social media to coordinate and plan parties, hangouts, and trips. And then we’d upload and share photos of our good times as a kind of collective digital scrapbook. Social media enhanced our sociability.

As I shared above, this is no longer what I experience when I log into social media — whether it be Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, LinkedIn, or the like. For lack of a better term, all of these platforms feel…well…shitty.

So, what happened? Is it a life stage thing? Did me and my friends change? Or did the platform?

Welcome to the Era of Enshittification

In 2023, science fiction author and surveillance capitalism critic Cory Doctrow coined the term “Enshittification” to describe the predictable way digital platforms degrade over time in pursuit of profit. According to Doctrow, enshittification unfolds in three stages:

• Stage 1: The platform is good to users to attract growth and expand market share.
• Stage 2: Once users are “locked in” and competition is eliminated or consolidated, the platform shifts value to third parties (advertisers, content creators, businesses) to monetize the user base.
• Stage 3: The platform pivots to extract value from businesses, leading to widespread deterioration of quality for all users.

(This video essay from Jared Henderson is a great introduction to the topic).

When I first heard about enshittification, it was like a firework detonated in my brain. It explained so much of what I and many of my peers were noticing and experiencing beyond our collective disillusionment with social media and often — incorrectly, it turns out — blaming on inflation.

Like a veil being torn away from your eyes, once you’re made aware of enshittification, you’ll see it everywhere:

• Airbnb rentals more expensive than mid-level hotels.
• Sponsored products overtaking Amazon and Google search results.
• Your email inbox filled with 95% online catalogues, spam, and promotions
• Vague “online service fees” making ordering takeout or going to a concert fiscally irresponsible.
• Clickbait-y “paid partner content” cluttering up news sites.
• Video games crammed with micro-transactions and pay-for-play loot boxes.

If enshittification has a mantra, it is this: You will pay more — whether in time or money — for lesser quality than what you initially enjoyed. It’s capitalist entropy, a direct consequence of the economic myth of perpetual growth — and it’s coming for everything. It leads to technological environment in which everything feels broken, half-assed, and cringe.

Netflix is a prime example. Higher-priced “ad -free” tiers push people to pay more for what was originally one of the primary reasons to switch from cable to streaming. And periodic across-the-board price hikes have not been correlated with an increase in quality — in fact, the opposite appears true.

Netflix’s business model has shifted from prestige Emmy-winning dramas and auteur-directed films (remember The Queen’s Gambit, Mindhunter, Ozark, and Narcos?) to pumping out cheap-to-produce reality TV and acquiring streaming rights to foreign-based productions.

Even their new release strategies for their tentpole shows reflects a shift toward enshittification. For example, look at the release schedule of the final season of Stranger Things, arguably Netflix’s most popular show. The final eight episodes will be released in three batches on November 26, December 25, and January 1. This is not to build hype. It’s to ensure people don’t cancel their subscriptions before the end of the quarter and fiscal year.

But nowhere is enshittification more obvious than social media. In attempt to emulate TikTok’s “success,” nearly every social media platform had adopted the “un-curated feed” model of engagement that prioritizes “discovery” over connection. This is why your feed is now filled with advertisements, suggested content, affiliate marketing, and other stuff you didn’t sign up to see.

The End of “Social” Media

During the FTC’s antitrust trial with Meta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that only “7% of time spent on Instagram in 2025 is spent viewing content from friends.” And in Meta’s own Q1 2025 Widely Viewed Content Report, the largest share of feed content (35.7%) is “Unconnected,” meaning it’s recommended content.

In a highly-relatable WIRED article titled, “What Even Is Instagram Now?“, Reece Rogers writes, “People I care about? My Instagram feed has long been chock-full of professional influencers hawking the latest fast-fashion trends, home cooks sharing their high-protein recipes, and random comedians doing stand-up bits. My actual friends are buried under a mountain of sponcon and memed-to-death dross.”

To be fair, the algorithm has nothing against your friends or family. It just has a different goal: To squeeze as much money as possible from advertisers while hooking you on addictive short-form video content.

In stark terms, social media isn’t social anymore. They’re digital marketing billboards that double as short-form media distribution channels. It’s a place you go to in order to scroll through junk mail in hopes of stumbling across something worthwhile.

And this dramatic shift has a chilling effect on users who aren’t content creators or using social media as part of their marketing funnels. Your casual brunch with friends post or low-key home renovation project just can’t compete in a feed filled with sensationalized news headlines, professional influencers, and gurus trying to sell you a new course.

The increase of ads and suggested posts gradually disempowers and disincentives “normal” people from posting — which, in turn, leads to more ads and suggested posts to fill in the gaps in your feed.

It’s a negative self-reinforcing feedback loop that turns you from a producer of content for the benefit of your social circle into a consumer of content created by strangers.

In an article for The New Yorker, Kyle Chayka writes, “The design of social media has discouraged casual posting, with metrics that make users feel inadequate for not getting enough attention, and with algorithmic feeds that prioritize popular accounts that post constantly — not mundane moments but punditry, provocation, and self-promotion.”

And nearly all of this suggested content is low-quality engagement bait, which only serves to gradually terraform the social media landscape into a vast wasteland of recycled “relatable humor” memes, AI-generated nonsense, political schadenfreude, cringey Jesus-flavored Stoicism, and ads upon ads upon ads.

And those AI slop videos? They’re racking up millions and millions of views and raking in monetized engagement money. So there’s no financial incentive to curb their spread.

Could it be more fitting that “brain rot” — defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging” — was named the 2024 Oxford Word of the Year?

What is perhaps most ironic about the term “brain rot” is that it’s not new Gen Z terminology. It first appeared in a line from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, the original “escape the industrial machine and return to nature” classic, published in 1854: “While England endeavors to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”

This is why the golden of age of social media — and perhaps all of the internet — is over.

Welcome to the era of enshittification.

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Note: This post is the first in a series of articles on the decline of the social media era, the impact it’s had on our mental health, politics, and children’s’ wellbeing, and the future of the internet and AI technologies.