The Social Media Sea Change

🌀 People are quietly quitting Instagram (👋 fellow lurkers)

🌀 They're adding friction to break the scroll (deleting apps, muting notifications)

🌀 They're building slower, smaller spaces (on Discord, WhatsApp… and most importantly around 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹 tables again)

🌀 They're designing moments to experience, not to optimise for content

It’s not anti-digit... See more

People were losing excitement about the internet, starting to articulate a set of new truisms. Facebook had become tedious, trivial, exhausting. Instagram seemed better, but would soon reveal its underlying function as a three-ring circus of happiness and popularity and success. Twitter, for all its discursive promise, was where everyone tweeted co

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as much as the feeds brought me things I never would have seen or heard otherwise, my overdependence on them was also cutting me off from a different realm of experiences that I had forgotten about over the course of the decade: the encounter with scarcity rather than infinity, the process of judging and choosing for myself what I wanted to see in

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“I’m tired of making everything about myself. My job requires me to look at myself, talk about myself, post myself, and reply to comments about myself. It is way too much of a self-obsessive job”

“On TikTok, you have to talk in short sentences. I’ve learned to not elaborate on my idea — which for years of my academic life, I was taught to elaborate ... See more