New Delhi: The world might look like it is chronically online, but turns out social media activity is on a decline worldwide.
A study published in The Financial Times surveyed 2,50,000 online users across 50 countries and concluded that social media usage has fallen by as much as 10 per cent. The decline is led by young people: The generation that made the internet its extension is now growing increasingly tired of it.
These trends coupled with over commercialisation of social media—instead of your friend’s life updates, your feed is now filled with curated ads, regurgitated trendy reels, and AI generated slop—has led to ‘Posting Zero’.
Coined by The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka in his weekly column Infinite scroll, it refers to daily life updates by an average online user becoming rarer.
In his widely read column, Chayka reminisces about the time his feed was full of banal life updates of his friends: The breakfast photo, the photo of the pet, or meet-up with friends.
“We might also be heading toward something like Posting Zero, a point at which normal people—the unprofessionalized, uncommodified, unrefined masses—stop sharing things on social media as they tire of the noise, the friction, and the exposure. Posting Zero would mean the end of social media as it was once conceptualized, as a real-time record of the world created by anyone who was experiencing anything at all,” Chayka wrote in his column.
Chayka’s theory has picked up steam on the mainstream internet, with the BBC inviting him for an interview.
Many reshared his article on platforms like LinkedIn.
“This has weighed heavily on my mind. I too loved social media when Twitter and Facebook were the two major channels. I would have fun and engaging conversations with so many people. I felt connected, a part of something. My Facebook page is now so full of ads and posts from people I barely talk to that I cringe every time I open it,” one person commented.
It is a word play on the theory of ‘google zero’, a hypothetical internet where search engines stop driving traffic to websites, and all queries are resolved by AI.
Another popular conspiracy theory that seeks to explain the decline of social media is the Dead Internet Theory. It posits that much of the content online—especially on popular platforms like social media and forums—is no longer generated by real people, but by bots, AI, and automated content mills.
“…the presence of normies was what made social media worth tuning into. In their wake, like detritus on a once busy beach, there will be only dry corporate marketing, A.I.-generated slop, and dreck from thirsty hustlers attempting to monetize a dwindling audience of voyeurs,” Chayka wrote in his article.
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What is enshittification?
Cultural pundits have been writing about the altered facade of our favourite online destinations for the last three years.
One word that encompasses the increasing frustration over how feeds and timelines look is ‘enshittification’, coined by journalist Cory Doctorow in 2022 who authored a book of the same name.
“We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit,” Doctorow wrote about coining the word, which had really captured the Zeitgeist and was American Literary Society’s word of the year in 2022.
Enshittification is seen in how the characteristics of the biggest social media websites have transformed.
According to Doctorow, enshittification is a three step process.
“First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves,” he wrote.
The Posting Zero trend is the result of enshittification.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)