For a technical writer, being very offline is a bit like being a marathon coach who doesn’t run. So, in 2025, I tried to reverse years of studied avoidance toward the most ubiquitous technological phenomenon on earth: I returned to social media. The change was short-lived.
My first exodus from feeds took some work: turning off notifications, removing apps from my home screen, then deleting accounts altogether. This time the phone went off. The whole thing has simply lost its luster.
I started with Instagram. Each experience went like this: I would see a single message from one of the few family members or IRL friends active on the platform. Then I received a sponsored message, followed by suggestions for following hikes. Afterwards, a series of videos from influencers which, admittedly, appeal to my taste (funny/absurd women and essays on urban planning). This was followed by more sponsored posts, mostly from brands I had looked up for work. Then it would come back to the influencers. My eyes widened and I threw the phone aside.
Years ago, the platform exuded a feeling of quasi-social connection that I spent hours longing for. I fed on the idle thoughts of a former colleague, the vacation reels of a college roommate, a half-baked loaf of bread that an old friend dropped on the floor but took a photo anyway. It’s now just a tiny fraction of that content, squeezed between rounds of sponsored content and posts from people who earn or promote their lives on Instagram. The real people are gone. The connection has disappeared. FOMO no longer exists.
I’ve felt some variation of the same disappointment on each platform I’ve joined. When I returned to TikTok a few months after the ban, I felt like I was in a crazy mall. Each video appears to be around four seconds long and most are promotional and/or shoppable. YouTube Shorts is full of AI-generated videos, and I don’t go to social media to watch fake footage of desperate baby wild animals climbing onto the boats of helpful humans. My life doesn’t need pretend toddlers scolding their pets. Sometimes I would come across something compelling: a clip from a late-night TV show, a stupidly decadent dessert recipe, people from other countries explaining cultural intricacies.
But for me, these social media platforms are no longer velcro for the eyes. I remember losing focus, spending long hours on YouTube Shorts and IG. I watched with teary eyes and shame on my face after hours of scrolling through TikTok’s For You page. Now, after a few minutes, a feeling of boredom sets in. I feel like I’m trapped in a carnival of robots selling me shampoo and I just want to go home.
It’s no mystery how or why things seem different; The answer is always money. These billion-dollar companies have shareholders who value year-over-year performance over anything else. So we’re getting more sponsored posts on Instagram. TikTok deliberately and enthusiastically overloads itself with shoppable content (which won’t change no matter who owns it). YouTube is obsessed with engagement, so it ends up rewarding people who flood the platform with AI slop. These platforms aren’t about human connections and the dissemination of creativity – which is what appealed to me before – they’re barely varnished e-commerce sites, peppered with brute-force AI quirks.
I would be sadder about all this if I thought it could be different. These companies are among the most valuable in the world. The fact that I cannot connect with my fellow citizens using their services is not surprising. Change doesn’t even scare everyone away. Instagram reported more users than ever this year, to the tune of 35% of the planet. Billions of users are still scrolling through TikTok and watching YouTube Shorts. So maybe it’s just a me thing.
And I have options. Over-monetization may have made me not want to engage with a few social media giants, but things aren’t that dire everywhere. Bluesky reminds me of Twitter before Hot takes aren’t as funny as they were on Twitter years ago — maybe everything has already been said or maybe things have become too dire to be lighthearted. However, I still don’t spend much time on the platform. It’s not as weird as it was before the defection and I’m sick of the flood of headlines contextualized with tut-tutting and hand-wringing – I’m perfectly capable of doing that myself.
It would be easy to say that social media just isn’t my thing, but that’s not true because I can’t leave Reddit — the shining exception to my social media boredom. We feel full of real people. The ads exist, but in a discreet and manageable way. And every contributor, commenter, and moderator I’ve encountered on the app is militantly vigilant against the onslaught of artificially generated content. I also like the organizational structure. I know that my Home tab will only expose me to the submissives I choose, and I derive great joy from happy cows, greble-hunting cats, enigmatic nocturnal feelings, and bizarre abandoned spaces. I use my local subreddit r/Albuquerque daily to answer questions and keep tabs on the world (directly) around me.
Unfortunately, Reddit is an exception to the rule, and now that it’s gone public, it could follow a similar monetization push. Bluesky is small, new, and not yet profitable, so who knows where its financial journey will take it (although the “a world without Caesar” t-shirt gives us some hope).
There is something lamentable about the loss of the connections we gleaned from platforms that were once compelling, captivating, and teeming with the creativity of our fellow human beings. Ultimately, any public company that prioritizes profits above all else has no incentive to look out for its users. So I don’t expect the biggest social platforms to give up on their monetization efforts. For now, I’ve decided that I’m comfortable with my admittedly close interaction with the world of social media. As a member of Generation X, being online is not how my relationship with the world began. And I’m pretty sure I know enough about other tech-related topics to be useful to my editors and readers without a black belt in social matters. (Ed. note: it is.) Plus, Karissa takes care of us.
