For a tech writer, being offline too much is like being a marathon coach who doesn’t run. So in 2025, I tried to reverse the years of avoiding reading towards the world’s ubiquitous technological environment – I went back to social media. The change was temporary.
My first exit from the feed took some work – disabling notifications, removing apps from my home screen and deleting accounts entirely. This time, the phone hung up. The whole thing just lost its luster.
I started with Instagram. The whole experience went like this: I would see one post from one of the rare family members or IRL friends who are active on the platform. Next, I was fed sponsored posts, followed by suggestions to follow randos. After that, a series of powerful videos that, admittedly, appeal to my tastes (funny/silly women and urban editorials). That was followed by other sponsored posts, mostly from the companies I had applied for. It then circulates back to the influencers. My eyes widened and I threw the phone aside.
Years ago, the platform provided a social jolt that I spent hours soaking up. I ate silly thoughts from my co-worker, vacations from my college roommate, half-baked bread my old friend dropped but took anyway. Now it’s the norm for those things, sandwiched between towers of sponsored content and posts from people who make or market their lives on Instagram. The real people are gone. The connection is gone. FOMO is gone.
I experienced some variation of the same disappointment on every platform I rejoined. When I returned to TikTok a few months after the ban, it felt like a busy shopping mall. Every video appears to be four seconds long and most are advertising and/or commercial. YouTube Shorts is drowning in AI-generated videos, and I don’t want social media to look at fake footage of baby wildlife riding on helpful people’s boats. My life doesn’t need pretend kids commanding pets. Sometimes, I’d come across something compelling: a clip from late-night television, a recipe for a bad dessert, foreigners explaining cultural intricacies.
But for me, these social networks are no longer velcro for eyes. I remember losing focus, spending hours on YouTube Shorts and IG. I looked up red-eyed and embarrassed after hours of scrolling through the For You TikTok Page. Now, after a few minutes, the lonely ickiness started. I feel like I’m trapped in a maze of bots shampooing me and I want to go home.
It’s no mystery how or why things are different; The answer is always money. These billion and trillion-dollar companies have shareholders who prize annual performance more than anything else. So we get a lot of sponsored posts on Instagram. TikTok purposefully overloads itself with affordable content (which won’t change no matter who owns it). YouTube is so focused on engagement that it ends up rewarding people who flood the platform with AI slop. These platforms aren’t about human interaction and the spread of art — things that used to draw me in — they’re thinly-varnished ecommerce sites sprinkled with AI-forced weirdness.
I would be very disappointed with the whole thing if I thought it could be different. These companies are among the most important in the world. The fact that I can’t connect with my normal peers using their services is not surprising. Change does not drive everyone away. Instagram reported more users than ever before this year, reaching 35 percent of the world. Billions of users still scroll TikTok and watch YouTube Short. So maybe it’s just my thing.
And I have options. Making too much money may have put me off hanging out with a few social media behemoths, but things aren’t so bad all around. Bluesky reminds me of Twitter before X. I am comforted to see a post that proves that many people are disappointed as I am above the government and the broad economic system that is naked and has no interest in serving the public. Hot takes aren’t as funny as they were on Twitter years ago – maybe it was all said before or maybe things have gotten worse for fun. However, I don’t end up spending a lot of time on the platform. It’s not as weird as it was before the rebellion and I’m tired of tut-tutting headlines and hand-writing – I can totally do 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 stop Reddit – my social media alternative. It feels full of real people. Ads are there, but in a low, manageable way. And every contributor, commenter and moderator I’ve met on the app is constantly vigilant against the onslaught of hypocritically generated content. I also like the organizational structure. I know that My Home tab will only reveal me to my selected subscribers and I get a lot of joy from happy cows, cats chasing bugs, strange night moods and empty spaces. I use the local r/Albuquerque subreddit every day to answer questions and stay informed about the world (literally) around me.
Sadly, Reddit is outside the law, and now that it’s public, it may follow a similar monetization push. Bluesky is small, new and not yet profitable, so who knows where its financial journey will lead (although the “land without Caesar” shirt gives us hope).
There is something sad about the loss of the connections we have found in social media that were so compelling, engaging and filled with the creativity of our fellow human beings. Ultimately, any socially responsible company that puts profit above all else has no incentive to look out for its users. So I don’t expect any of the major social networks to back down from their money making machines. For now, I’ve decided I’m comfortable with my admittedly minimal interaction with the world of social media. As a Gen-Xer, internet-first was not how my relationship with the world began. And I’m sure I know enough about other things related to technology to be useful to my editors and students outside of the social black belt. (Ed. Note: There is.) Besides, Karissa has us covered.
