I’m not entirely sure when it happened exactly, but at some point a few years ago Social Media stopped being social media. The logic of person-to-person, one-to-one connection was replaced by a one-to-many model. Social became parasocial. That was the first change.
A parasocial relationship describes a one-sided, psychological connection where a person feels a deep sense of intimacy or familiarity with someone they do not know in real life. The other person, the creator, most likely isn’t even aware that the consumer of their media exists. This is the logic of, say, a film star, or increasingly content creators online.
The other change was that Social Media was turned into an algorithmic distribution channel. Rather than being built around strong defaults of mutual connection (“following”), it instead was revamped completely. Today, it’s mostly engagement-based algorithmic upranking: Content that is consumed and interacted more with will get even more distribution, which leads to higher consumption rates, and on the circle goes until the next cycle starts. Algorithmic ranking replaced the follow-based model.
So in 2026, all we have left is essentially algorithmic broadcasting platforms — yet we use the same old language to describe those platforms. Those who don’t actively study the evolution of these platforms still seem to think of them as a place where people post personal stuff, but de facto (while it still happens) that’s not what the platforms are about anymore. And they haven’t been about that for quite some time.
The closest thing to the function that Social Media used to inhabit today is probably private chat groups on apps like WhatsApp and Signal, as well as Discord servers.
So that feeling you might have felt that Instagram and TikTok increasingly feel like watching TV only in shorter clips? It’s real. Because essentially that’s what it is now.