The Algorithm Didn't Kill Social Media. Our Culture Did
October 22, 2026
✍️ Authored by Karishma Rane, Mumbai Head | Treasury Technology | Trafigura
The World Social Media Day was launched by “Mashable” to recognise how social media platforms connect cultures and bring the world closer. Facebook, for example, essentially started from a Harvard University dorm room enabling students to connect, share personal information and find out who else lived on the campus.
A recent essay in the New Yorker argued how our friends have stopped posting on social media. The article suggested that we might be headed towards a “posting zero”, a point where regular people feel that it’s not worth it to share their lives online. Remember the early 2010s when “xyz is watching a movie, is having a sandwich, is drinking a cup of coffee” were regular things all of us posted about?
There is a reddit thread about it where someone has commented “I miss casually posting things like - mozzarella sticks and dr. pepper as an afterschool snack :)) YUM!” Such posts received only a like or two and there was no particular motive for sharing our thoughts online. We all followed one another – real people we knew in real life and shared just for the sake of sharing. As social media evolved, the baseline expectation for posting kept rising.
Capturing a mundane moment was replaced by content creators investing time and efforts to create carefully curated posts.
Our feeds now comprise majorly of advertisements, brand deals and algorithms pushing the same kind of content based on our scrolling history. Posting about the mundane simply gets lost in this sea of professional influencers generating high quality content designed to reach a wide audience base.
Most people simply do not have the bandwidth to create content that receives that kind of engagement. So, the things that our friends post about keep receiving lesser and lesser attention which lead to their posts dwindling even further. Most of us do need an online social network. It is a useful tool to connect with friend circles that are now spread across continents and to build and become part of communities that share common interests.
And as much as we would like to blame social media giants for changing our social media consumption habits, it’s not a platform problem. It’s a culture problem.
If we want to go back to the era of using social media for the reason that it was created for in the first place i.e. connecting with people, we will have to change the kind of things that we pay attention to.
This might mean engaging with regular people posting about regular things or taking lead ourselves in posting about the day-to-day that isn’t going to earn us any brand deals!