My teenage years were during the 2010 era of social media, with status updates, niche forums, and direct friend requests. I remember reading everything I wanted to know as a young girl on the Dutch Girlscene Forum, which doesn't exist anymore.
Last year, in 2025, I have realised I'm stupidly addicted to my phone, and I don't even like what I'm consuming that much. Sometimes I do, and I feel super inspired. But most of the time, I just scroll mindlessly, and I feel worse after using social media. My brain feels fuzzy and I get tired, anxious, and dumber from it. So I've started a journey to drastically decrease my social media usage.
The problem with social media today
Nowadays, social media has transformed into a world of influencers, very fast-paced trends, and endless content consumption - there's almost no one in my direct circle who is still posting regularly on a platform that's out in the open. Sure, maybe on Snapchat, or a private Instagram account, but it feels too daunting and exposing to post publicly anymore. The algorithm shows you mostly influencers whose job it is to make things look perfect, making you get a distorted view of what things should be shared online. It's too scary and off-limits to casually post. You can be seen and judged too easily.
There is a lot of AI-generated short-form content, which creates a lot of "slop" in everyone's feed. It's all focused on dopamine hits (by showing people doing crazy things) or on controversy. Or, which is a very big part, just plain advertisement. There are product placements or links in bios everywhere. I'm not sure if it's an oversaturation of influencers, or if it is just that influencers have become too general.
The Financial Times has shown that social media use is declining among younger generations.
It can be said that COVID-19 definitely spiked social media usage in 2020-2022, but even so, the AI slop and phone addiction is making people step away from social media more and more.
I have also noticed this from people in my close circle. There are friends who have removed apps from their phone, turned off notifications, set their phone to greyscale, or set timers for certain apps. We all want to use our phones less, but it's so hard to do.
The shift to niche
What I notice is a rise in small, hobby-like apps.
- Strava has never been more popular, with people having so much fun sharing their running and cycling journey. The tracking part also makes it kind-of addictive (again?).
- Letterloop, a newsletter app so you can share updates with your close friends in a newsletter format, is something I love the idea of. I tried the free period with a friend, and we both loved it.
- Ditto, a list app where you can share lists like they are from your notes app with your friends, is such a cool idea. I love their branding and social media presence as well.
- iNaturalist. Apparently, there is this huge rise in people logging observations of plants and animals on this platform.
The same can be said for the popularity of Goodreads, or even Discord servers around specific interests. Matter also mentioned it in their post Hobby Apps Are The New Social Media:
"Because hobby apps are nicer places to exist, people spend more time on them than traditional social media apps," reported The Guardian earlier this year.
Specifically nicer places to exist. We might have realized that you can definitely find a community and friends on the internet, but you cannot replace physical human connection. We want to see each other again.
Back to the real world
Being unavoidable is not desirable anymore. No one is posting to the grid anymore, people are only sharing videos with their friends via DM. Celebrities have started going more offline, leading to a trend where being offline is now cool. I loved this article about your phone is why you don't feel sexy.
Besides finding alternatives on your phone, there is a lot of commotion around 2026 being the year we go analog. We want to step away from our phones. Dumb phones are getting very popular. Just like tools such as Brick, which is a physical device that helps you stay off your phone by locking it away for a set period of time. I also found Internet Sculptures which are physical objects with tiny NFC chips inside of them that can be connected to your phone, such that you might have to tap your phone on the sculpture to (dis)able apps. There's also a digital church art work that can only be accessed by going offline on your phone. I love how creative people are getting with finding ways to deal with a phone addiction.
There's this creator that threw a no phone party, which attracted 700 people! Tiffany chained her phone to a wall for a week and reached so many followers because of this.
Finding creativity again
But we also want to go analog in the sense that we want to make things again ourselves, to find the creativity back that we lost from the beginning of social media: the time when everyone was excited to write blogs, engage in forums, and create digital scrapbook posts.
Maybe it is my own algorithm talking, but I have seen a rise in people talking about digital gardens, blogs (maybe even the indie web), zines, and newsletters (have you seen the rise of Substack?!). People want to share their thoughts in a more long-form way again.
What's next?
I hope we can find ways to use the internet in a more meaningful and fun way. I love the internet, actually. I love the way you can play with it and break it. I love seeing what other people create on it.
So let's see if we can create and find some fun things, and less slop. Because that is not it.