so why don't we post anymore?

i know that my friends are online every day and most of them are on Instagram. so tell me why, when i go on Instagram and scroll for a little bit, i don't see a single person i know. i don't post either — maybe like a story or two, and that's on a good day.

i'm Farida, building cozyweb.space with my husband Pasha — a tiny house on the internet you can actually live in. i write about the old internet and staying human in a post-ai world. if this resonates, join the waitlist.

so i read this essay called "are you experiencing posting ennui?" by Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker. he basically puts into words something that i've been feeling for a while, and i'm sure you have been feeling that too. it made me think more clearly about the reasons why we stopped posting, and i think there are three.

reason one: the algorithm completely buried us

Chayka explains it by comparing the feed that we had before to the feed that we have now. before, it used to be just the accounts that you followed — your friends. now your feed is completely taken over by influencers, by overly professional branded content, and things that the algorithm just thinks you would like. there's this student he quotes who basically says nobody's seeing their friends' posts in the feed, so it doesn't even count as life updates anymore.

and i feel that very deeply. because i have privated my Instagram and i've archived everything. and i used to be a very active poster. sometimes i go back and visit those posts i used to make and a wave of nostalgia hits me — here i am with my friends, i'm taking pictures, they're riding this high sculpture, and here i am making a video as i open my favorite brand of instant coffee. and i didn't think twice. i just posted it.

and i know the reason why — because the algorithm wasn't there. when i was posting, i was sure that only my friends were gonna see that because my friends follow me. and i was sure that i'm not going to be served by the algorithm to this faceless audience of people who are just going to call me cringe.

basically, because of the algorithm, your friends are not going to see your post. so why bother?

reason two: the world made me feel wrong

the algorithm that mixes us up with different influencers and highly professional content also mixes us up with the news from around the world — horrible ones about wars and global crisis. Chayka tells this story about his partner's friend who posted some beautiful selfies and then just deleted them. when he asked why, she said she just felt insensitive with everything going on in the world.

and i completely get that. because if i knew that my video of instant coffee is going to be next to starving children, i would obviously not post that because that would feel tone deaf.

reason three: the retreat

i know it sounds quite dramatic, but i think it is. we're kind of used to AI slop appearing in our feeds. it's becoming harder and harder to distinguish between what's real and what's not, but that's the new reality and we're slowly adjusting to it.

but have you ever thought about what goes into training an AI model like that? that's where we come in. i think a lot of people know by now that all of the posts we posted online — all the things — they either get scraped or they get outright sold to the companies that create AI models.

i find it quite dramatic and maybe ironic that all of the posts we posted got fed into these AI models that now generate AI slop, and in turn they are now filling the feeds that we are not posting in anymore.

so what now?

so that's why we stopped posting. the algorithm buried us. the world made us feel guilty. and the platforms betrayed us.

i guess all i want to know is — is there something that is going to make us post again? or is the only answer to this basically retreating to group chats and personal blogs?

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