Since Elon Musk’s takeover, X has shed at least 15% of its global user base. Meta’s Threads, launched with great fanfare in 2023, saw its number of daily active users collapse within a month, falling from around 50 million active Android users at launch in July to only 10 million active users the following August. Twitch recorded its lowest monthly... See more

Substack is full of personal brands announcing their journeys, Discord servers host influencers disguised as community leaders and Patreon bios promise exclusive access that is often just recycled content. Still, something has shifted. These are not mass arenas; they are clubs — opt-in spaces with boundaries, where people remember who you are. And... See more

While content proliferates, engagement is evaporating. Average interaction rates across major platforms are declining fast: Facebook and X posts now scrape an average 0.15% engagement, while Instagram has dropped 24% year-on-year. Even TikTok has begun to plateau. People aren’t connecting or conversing on social media like they used to; they’re... See more

Shrimp Jesus

Connections between ideas must be made manually, and thus, thoughtfully — there are no algorithmic suggestions or ranked content.

— people scroll not because they enjoy it, but because they don’t know how to stop. Self-help influencers now recommend weekly “no-screen Sundays” (yes, the irony). The mark of the hipster is no longer an ill-fitting beanie but an old-school Nokia dumbphone.

But as social media collapses on itself, the future points to a quieter, more fractured, more human web, something that no longer promises to be everything, everywhere, for everyone.

These are not mass arenas; they are clubs — opt-in spaces with boundaries, where people remember who you are. And they are often paywalled, or at least heavily moderated, which at the very least keeps the bots out. What’s being sold is less a product than a sense of proximity, and while the economics may be similar, the affective atmosphere is... See more

Engagement is now about raw user attention – time spent, impressions, scroll velocity – and the net effect is an online world in which you are constantly being addressed but never truly spoken to.