Ya know, it's interesting how everything evolves, then evolves again, and then evolves one more time until, for whatever reason, you end up right back where you started. Not exactly the same place, but close enough to recognize it.
I think that's where we are with social media here in July 2026.
When it all started, it was basically a free-for-all. People just posted whatever the hell they wanted and hoped somebody saw it. Back in the MySpace days, I don't know exactly how they propagated the feed, but it felt far more linear. Some people had a ridiculous number of "friends," and I myself ended up with a couple thousand, and somehow it still felt like I was seeing what people were actually posting. Obviously there was plenty of chaos, but it was the chaos of people, not the chaos of algorithms. Marketing existed, sure, but it wasn't the primary purpose of the platforms the way it is now.
Today, social media platforms are advertising platforms, plain and simple. That's what they are. Everything else is built around that. If you're active, scrolling, commenting, sharing, liking, or messaging, then you're staying on the platform. If you're staying on the platform, you're seeing ads. If you're seeing ads, the platform is making money. It's really that blunt. They're captive audience businesses.
It's no different than driving down the freeway. The billboards aren't there because you asked for them. They're there because you're already committed to using the road so fuck you, here's a Coors ad, every, single, day, on your commute.
Every so often, one of the big tech CEOs comes out with a carefully polished explanation about how things have changed on Meta or Tik or wherever, how they're prioritizing meaningful engagement, fairness, community, or whatever the latest corporate tech-shit-speak happens to be. Strip away the PR language and what they're really saying is that "the algorithm decides everything now." Who you follow, and who follows you, matters a whole lot less than it used to, if at all.
I can prove that just by opening Instagram.
I don't even follow that many people. Around 400 or so. In theory, I should have at least a rough sense of what those people are posting. Not every post, obviously, but enough to recognize patterns. Instead, I'll see maybe 3 or 4 posts from people I actually chose to follow, and then the algorithm takes over.
"Oh, you looked at this kinda thing yesterday."
"You sent a DM about this 17 days ago to your homie, here are 100 posts about it."
"You've been watching concert clips lately, so here's another 200 concert clips, even though you don't follow a single account that posts concert clips."
Meanwhile, the people I intentionally followed are off posting all kinds of interesting work, and Instagram has decided that's apparently not the priority. Sure, if I manually visit their pages, go and Like everything they post, comment, share it around, and train the algorithm a little, it'll probably feed me more of them. But that's the point. It has to be trained away from the people I deliberately chose to follow.
And this isn't unique to Instagram. They're all drifting in the same direction.
So what does that leave us with?
Ironically, it leaves us almost back where we started.
Make the art you actually want to make. Be unapologetic about it. Tell people why you're excited about it instead of trying to reverse-engineer whatever nonsense the algorithm supposedly wants this week. Write captions that actually say something. Respond to people who engage with your work. Share it with friends who might genuinely appreciate it. Don't be obnoxious about it, but don't be shy either.
In other words, post your work with the same blind enthusiasm people posted dumb shit on MySpace in 2004.
I honestly think you'll be happier. And I suspect it'll work about as well as all the "algorithm hacking strategies" that everyone swears by until the platforms change the rules again 3 months later.