Social Media Is Having Its Nokia Moment

Okay, we need to talk about something that's been eating at me for weeks (and before you ask, yes, I've fallen down every research rabbit hole trying to figure this out Social media as we know it is basically dead. Not dying. Dead. Walking-zombie-still-posting-but-nobody's-home dead.

I know, I know—dramatic opener. But stick with me here because if you're selling anything online, this affects literally everything about how you connect with customers.

Here's what's actually happening: I refreshed my Instagram feed yesterday and counted. Out of the first 20 posts, 14 were either AI-generated or bot accounts pretending to be real people. The other 6? Ads. Not a single actual human friend posting actual human content. And before you ask—yes, I do have real friends. They've just... stopped posting.

The Bot Apocalypse Nobody's Talking About (Except Everyone Kind Of Is)

So here's the thing that really gets me: Facebook now has tens of thousands of machine-generated posts going up daily. TENS OF THOUSANDS. And the wild part? They're getting more engagement than real human posts because the algorithm literally can't tell the difference anymore.

I did some digging (by which I mean I went down a research rabbit hole until my partner physically removed my laptop from my hands), and the numbers are genuinely bonkers:

• X engagement rates have crashed to 0.15%—that's not a typo

• Instagram is down 24% year-over-year

• Even TikTok—the platform we all thought was invincible—is plateauing

For those of us trying to sell stuff online, this is basically like finding out the mall you've been renting space in has been taken over by mannequins that somehow get more foot traffic than actual stores.

NYU's Center for Social Media just dropped this bomb: in controlled tests, users can't tell the difference between human and AI content anymore. But here's the kicker—they don't even care. That indifference? That's what's really keeping me up at night (well, that and my neighbor's inexplicably loud 2 AM karaoke sessions, but that's another story).

The Influencer Economy Is Eating Itself (And It's Not Pretty)

Remember when influencers were, you know, actual humans? Yeah, about that...

OnlyFans (stay with me, this is relevant to ecommerce, I promise) made $6.63 billion last year. Want to know something wild? Thousands of those accounts are now just AI. Like, completely synthetic humans generating content, chatting with subscribers, the whole thing. They're calling it the "bot-girl economy" and honestly, that name alone makes me want to lie down for a bit.

How the hell do real humans compete with that?

The answer is: they don't. They become more robotic themselves. Real influencers are now automating their responses, A/B testing every post, performing "authenticity" at such scale that they've basically become the bots they're competing against. It's like watching everyone turn into robots to fight the robots, and honestly, the robots are winning.

For those of us paying influencers to promote our products, this creates a triple-threat nightmare:

1. Is the influencer even human?

2. Is their audience real?

3. Does anyone actually influence anyone anymore?

(The answer to all three might be "no," which is... not great for our marketing budgets.)

AI Content Is About to Make Everything Worse (Or Better? I Can't Decide)

OpenAI just dropped Sora, and Meta's got their own version coming. These things can generate professional-quality video content from text prompts. Like, you type "show my product being used by a happy customer in a sunny kitchen" and boom—instant commercial.

Part of me thinks this is amazing. The bootstrapped entrepreneur in me is like "Finally! Professional content without hiring a crew!" But the other part of me—the part that stayed up until 4 AM thinking about this—realizes this is going to absolutely demolish what's left of social media. And tons of creative jobs too.

Think about it: When anyone can generate unlimited "authentic" testimonials, product demos, and user-generated content, how do you know what's real? How do your customers know YOU'RE real?

We're entering what researchers call "ambient dissociation" (I know, sounds like a prog rock album from the 70s). It's when people scroll without actually seeing anything, consume without engaging, just... exist in this weird digital fugue state. And honestly? I caught myself doing it yesterday. Scrolled for an hour, couldn't tell you a single thing I saw. My brain just... opted out.

The really messed up part? These AI systems are already churning out videos about conspiracy theories, violence, copyrighted stuff—all the things they swore wouldn't happen. So not only is the content infinite and meaningless, some of it's actively harmful. Cool. Cool cool cool.

Everyone's Fleeing to Weird Little Internet Corners (And That's Actually Good)

Here's where it gets interesting (and gives me a tiny bit of hope that we're not all doomed to digital purgatory). While the big platforms turn into AI sludge, people are running away to these tiny, intentional spaces. Discord servers with 50 people. Substack newsletters. Patreon communities. Places with actual humans doing actual human things.

The exodus is real:

• X lost 15% of users since Elon took over (shocking, I know)

• Threads went from 50 million daily users to 10 million in A MONTH (that's got to sting, Zuck)

• Meanwhile, platforms like Are.na—which deliberately makes things HARDER to use—are growing

  

Are.na is particularly fascinating to me. It's an ad-free creative platform that adds friction to everything. Want to post? Think about it first. Want to engage? Better mean it. It's the opposite of everything social media has taught us, and people are loving it.

These micro-communities operate on completely different physics than Big Social. They have paywalls that keep bots out. Real humans moderate them. You can actually build relationships. Remember those? Relationships? Where you know people's names and they know yours and nobody's trying to sell you a course on how to make six figures working from a beach?

Digital anthropologists (yes, that's a real job, and yes, I'm jealous) call these "intentional spaces." I call them "the only places online that don't make me want to throw my phone into the ocean."

Social Media 2.0: Smaller, Weirder, Actually Better?

So what comes next? Not another Facebook, that's for sure. (Thank god, because I cannot handle another platform asking me what's on my mind. Nothing's on my mind, algorithm. I'm dead inside from all your notifications.)

We're looking at an ecosystem of smaller, specialized spaces. Think less "town square" and more "that coffee shop where everyone knows your name and your weird order and judges you only a little bit for it."

These new platforms are experimenting with wild ideas like:

• Letting users choose their own algorithms (revolutionary!)

• Subscription models that keep bots out (money as a bot filter—simple but effective)

• Community-level moderation by actual humans (remember when that was just called "having rules"?)

• Revenue models that don't involve selling your data to the highest bidder (shocking, I know)

The infrastructure already exists. Protocols like ActivityPub (powers Mastodon) and Bluesky's AT Protocol let you take your followers WITH you when you leave a platform. Imagine that—actually owning your audience instead of renting access to them from Zuck. It's like the difference between owning a house and living in your parents' basement, except the basement is full of bots and the house has a nice garden where real humans hang out.

The EU's trying to regulate all this with their Digital Markets Act, but honestly, they're mostly just trying to put a leash on the existing monsters rather than imagining something better. The real innovation is happening at the protocol level, where nerds are building the plumbing for a better internet. (God bless the nerds. They're going to save us all.)

What This Actually Means for Your Business (The Part Where I Stop Rambling and Get Practical)

Look, if you're selling stuff online, you need to start rethinking your strategy. The old playbook—build followers, boost posts, pay influencers—is probably very soon going to be disrupted.

Here's what you need to start thinking about:

Develop "Algorithmic Literacy" You need to understand not just how to post, but how the sausage gets made. How do recommendation systems work? How can you spot AI content? How do you fight back when your competitor starts using AI to generate fake reviews? (And they will. Trust me.)

I've been nerding out on this stuff for months, and it's actually fascinating once you get past the existential dread. It's like learning to see the Matrix, except instead of dodging bullets, you're dodging bot farms. (My Amazon peeps, you know what I’m talking about)

Focus on Community, Not Audience Would you rather have a million followers who might be bots, or 10,000 actual humans in a Discord who genuinely care about what you're doing? Six months ago, I would've said the million. Now? Give me the Discord nerds every time.

A business with an engaged Substack list or a thriving Discord is going to outlast and outperform someone with a million zombie Instagram followers. Those smaller communities have higher conversion rates, better lifetime value, and they actually tell their (real, human) friends about you.

Create Uncopyable Value When anyone can generate perfect product photos and testimonials with AI, what can't be faked? Your actual expertise. Your weird personality. Your specific point of view. The random tangents you go on that somehow relate back to your product (like this entire article, honestly).

Content strategy isn't about going viral anymore. It's about being so specifically, authentically you that an AI couldn't replicate it if it tried.

Measure What Actually Matters Throw out your spreadsheet with follower counts and engagement rates. Those metrics are basically meaningless when half your audience might be robots and the other half is dissociating while scrolling.

New metrics that actually matter:

• Community retention (do people stick around?)

• Conversation quality (are humans actually talking?)

• Trust indicators (do people buy from you repeatedly?)

• The "would they miss you if you disappeared" test (harsh but effective)

The Bottom Line (Where I Pretend I Have My Shit Together)

My theory is that the social media era as we knew it is over (or very nearly there).

What's coming next is messier, weirder, and requires actual effort to navigate. But it's also more human, more real, and more sustainable for businesses that actually give a damn about their customers.

The feed will keep refreshing, serving up its infinite stream of AI-generated nothing. But the future of selling stuff online? It's in those weird little corners of the internet where people still remember what actual connection feels like.

So here's my advice (and yes, I'm aware of the irony of giving social media advice in an article about how social media is dead): Start building your weird little corner now. Find your people. Create stuff AI can't. Build relationships that matter.

Again, I see the irony given that this is the AI for Ecom newsletter (by default, I bang on about how to use AI).

BUT…. AI is a tool and so it should remain.

 Because when the last bot is talking to the last other bot on whatever remains of Instagram, you'll be over in your thriving Discord, actually knowing your customers' names, selling them stuff they actually want.

And that, friends, is how we survive the social media apocalypse.

(Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go check if my Instagram followers are real humans or highly sophisticated potatoes. Based on my engagement rates, I'm betting on potatoes.)

• My friends Andrew Bell and Max Sinclair just published their latest research on Rufus.

• Google AI Mode rolls out in Europe

• Pew says AI search summaries are everywhere, but only 1 in 5 users rate them highly useful

• Meta rolls out Business AI agents across ads, messaging and websites

• OpenAI’s Sora 2 launches an AI-only video feed with physics-aware 1080p clips and Cameos, pointing to a future where feeds tune content to each user while platforms quietly optimize for stickiness.

• AI brand mentions now shape discovery and recommendations, so track your AI Share of Voice

• Strange decision made by OpenAI?

  

• Anthropic is testing Claude Skills, letting users upload .skill files for reusable automations and bespoke behaviors, a power-user move that narrows the gap with rivals.

• Google’s best $1.65B bet was YouTube

• Claude lands in Slack, searching channels you can access, drafting replies, prepping briefs and pulling files so research and coordination happen where teams already work, with admin and privacy controls intact.

• Apple reportedly pauses cheaper Vision Pro to fast-track smart glasses, starting with an iPhone-paired model as soon as next year, leaning on voice and AI to challenge Meta’s wearables.

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😍It was great, all I needed

🙂Good, not great

🙄It sucked