social media in 2026 and beyond
the new social is coming, and we aren't quite prepared for it
social media in 2026 and beyond
The professionalization of social media itself is a big reason why accumulating tons of followers can now seem like a mark of bad taste. Whereas social media in the early twenty-tens tended to be a hobby or a personal passion project, today the relationship between follower and followee has become rampantly commodified. Personal social-media... See more
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a huge audience today could mean little in terms of human enthusiasm—the majority of followers might be bots, hate-followers, and dead profiles, as evidenced by low engagement on the user’s actual posts. Moreover, now that social media has dominated culture for more than a decade, many big accounts belong to figures of an earlier era of notoriety;... See more
Kyle Chayka • It’s Cool to Have No Followers Now
“the establishment versus the vanguard”
implications:
1/ what does this then mean when it comes to measuring success for brands on social?
2/ are we truly going into a IYKYK type of social success? (see: RADAR’s new model of trust)
Right now, we are seeing IG and TT all being overrun by what can be termed as the intellectual influencers, all who are parading and shilling their expertise as a type of content to buy into. However, Reddit is the one platform that, given its veil of anonymity, preserves that spirit of community in the sense of wanting to help and offer guidance
... See morePerhaps being pointedly low-key on Instagram speaks to a different kind of hustle: the effort to escape the allure of the screen and build clout in physical spaces. Keeping your follower count down is its own kind of discipline.
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a new aspirational signal
Grace Clarke, the head of community at a large e-commerce tech company, told me, “Audience-amassing is actually no longer ‘expensive,’ a.k.a. hard or rare. It’s easy to game.” At the same time, users have been drawn to more individualized digital publishing platforms, ranging from YouTube to Patreon, where small and devoted audiences can congregate... See more
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We are just drifters on big social. It doesn’t quite matter as much who we follow there, but it’s in the niches, the smaller social platforms that truly reflect what we love to consume and are actively engaged in.
The large numbers don’t quite mean what they used to as signals of relevance or clout, as social media has become more aged, more manipulable, and more automated by artificial intelligence.
Kyle Chayka • It’s Cool to Have No Followers Now
MORE IS LESS IN THIS CASE.