Entering late stage social media

A cultural shift toward a more chaotic - but also more real - understanding of the world.

I’ve been finding it harder and harder to write about the long term outlook of social media. When you zoom out, platforms blur together in a gradient of brain rot, misinformation, ads, and money-grabbing schemes. A common denominator across platforms, the current social media experience is a symptom of late stage social media.

To frame it: Facebook turned 20 this year. Instagram will be 14 in October. Twitter *would have* been 18. Reddit just turned 19. Surprisingly, LinkedIn is an elder among them, managing to cling onto the corporate zeitgeist for 21 exhausting years. Even the “new” platforms aren’t young anymore. Snapchat is 12 years old and TikTok is 8 (even though it didn’t launch in the US until 6 years ago). Oh and social media managers are now turning 40.

Two decades into mainstream social media and there’s a desire for the next chapter, but it’s unclear how that looks. Like late stage capitalism, social media is operating in a model where key players have the monopoly. A lot of people agree it's a bad idea, and it has a ton of downsides, but it's also so ingrained in society that we can't easily disentangled ourselves from it.

The symptoms: Creators are slaves to the algorithm (everyone follows the same viral playbook). Brands are losing their voices (still chasing Wendys’ lightning in a bottle success). Advertisers dominate feeds, AI influencers blur reality — all while platforms scramble to monetize and optimize the dopamine drip.

Social media has become boring. Platforms look and feel the same, relatively speaking. Dollars drive reach now, suffocating real interactions with ads masked as posts. Authenticity and trust are fading — we’re seeing the ricochet effect in real time as creators push creative boundaries to bridge that gap.

I won’t make claims on what social looks like after this era, but I still have hope in decentralized models like the fediverse, where creators and publishers and communities self govern. In this world, creators control the means of production and in a collective sense, the means of distribution. There’s a growing demand for digital spaces that prioritize people over profits, and these platforms could be the start of that. For now, I guess the algorithm-industrial complex wins.

Keep scrolling for more tips on how to thrive in late stage social media! There’s updates on Telegram’s founder’s arrest, AI safety bill SB 1047, the latest on Threads, and a really funny AI song (NSFW).

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Taylor Peterson

P.s. I’m in London for the next week so hmu if you have a good coffee spot!