Social Media Stopped Being Social Years Ago.

I used to stumble across blogs the way you stumble into a tiny, perfect shop in an old neighbourhood; unexpected and full of personality. Someone with slightly messy handwriting and an obsession with single-origin coffee would post a photo of their kitchen counter at dawn, a recipe woven into long paragraphs, and a list of songs they'd been playing on repeat. You'd read, click through, and feel as though you'd been invited into a fragment of a life. Those early corners of the internet were small and human, a private-press zone translated into code.

Scroll forward a decade, and the corner shop has been swallowed by a mall. The people who once chronicled their days for the pleasure of it have professionalised into teams: creative directors, photographers, editors, and content specialists. Where there used to be a weekend hobby, there is now a content factory, churning out daily posts, reels, and sponsorship deals that read like magazine pages tailor-made for your algorithm. Blogging didn't just evolve; it graduated into something else entirely: content marketing companies disguised in the language of diary entries.

I say "disguised" knowingly. The charm still exists; perfectly framed breakfasts, earnest confessions about burnout, the occasional sentimental post about a grandmother's recipe. But threaded through these are product drops, affiliate links, and brand partnerships. The intimacy that once made blogs feel like conversation now comes with a price tag: a link in the bio, a swipe-up, a sponsored line that makes the confession feel performative. Many creators are not merely writing about their lives; they're packaging their lives as media for consumption and conversion. And there is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with that. Producing consistent, beautiful content is hard work, and many people have turned passion into a livelihood in resourceful, impressive ways. I'm a marketer and economist; I understand the math. But I also miss something that metrics cannot measure.

When my feed starts feeling like a marketplace, I long for the small dissonance that once signalled authenticity: an unedited slip, a post that wasn't optimised for engagement. Now everything is A/B tested, colour graded, and captioned to maximise saves and likes. The sense of surprise; the feeling that what you were seeing was created because someone wanted to say something rather than sell something, has been negotiated away. We've traded unpredictable intimacy for predictable conversion.

This situation is global. Live selling in Asia has been a sophisticated commerce ecosystem for years; people host shows and move inventory like charismatic auctioneers. European and North American feeds are catching up with their own rituals: Instagram Lives that feel like home-shopping TV, long-form videos that double as product demos, and "shop" tabs that turn profiles into storefronts. Social platforms now offer tools to make commerce frictionless; creators use them, audiences click, and the economy is expected to hum. What feels different; and what feels a little more painful, is that the cultural language of friendship has been repurposed as a sales technique. There is a moral grey area here worth unpacking. On the one hand, monetisation has democratised opportunity. A young person in a small town can build an audience, work with brands, and earn a living without ever entering the orbit of traditional media gatekeepers. For many creators; especially those who have been marginalised by mainstream institutions, this is a radical form of autonomy.

On the other hand, the pressure to grow an audience and keep revenue streams flowing incentivises a particular kind of content: unrelentingly polished, consistently cheerful, and strategically intimate. The messier parts of life; grief, confusion, and human vulnerability, don't always translate into engagement metrics, so they are quietly edited out.

I find myself nostalgic not for an imagined pastoral internet, but for the relational honesty that once punctured online performance. There was something appealing about being sold to by someone who also seemed slightly awkward, honest, and human. You could tell when a recommendation was authentic rather than transactional because the voice would wobble; the writer would explain why they actually loved the thing. Today, the wobble has been polished into persuasive storytelling. Authenticity is now a deliverable.

This is complicated by the fact that social media's transformation has also improved what creators can make. Budgets allow for better production, teams allow for more consistent output, and strategy allows for longevity. There is craft in the conversion funnel: copywriting that lands, cinematography that comforts, community management that listens. I admire creators who run this delicate, expensive operation with taste and integrity. But admiration can coexist with a sense of loss. The architecture that supports sustainable careers for creators often flattens the very quirks and imperfections that once made their work worth following.

So what do I actually want? Not a return to the unmonetised internet; people deserve to earn a living, but a reimagining of how creators and audiences might preserve real connection in a world optimised for transactions. A few small shifts could help: transparency about commercial relationships that goes beyond legal disclosures and into narrative honesty; episodic formats that allow creators to explore subjects without inserting products into the frame every time; and an acceptance from audiences that not every post needs to be an invitation to buy.

There is also responsibility on the platforms themselves. Algorithms that reward raw engagement at the expense of nuance incentivise safe, high-performing content. If discovery favoured serendipity over stickiness, maybe we'd see corners of our feeds that exist simply to delight rather than convert. Likewise, brands could lean into longer-term cultural investments by supporting creators in projects that are informative or artful, not just transactional product pushes. The industry is large enough to make space for work that serves both commerce and culture.

Until then, we shop with our hearts half open. We follow creators because we like to feel seen and understood, and we click because an economy expects us to. I still get that small thrill when a post feels like an honest letter: a paused frame where someone lets the camera breathe, an aside about a bad haircut, an unstyled photo of a messy shelf. Those moments are rare, but they remind me why we ever started reading blogs in the first place.

Did we expect the future to be about monetisation? Can we reclaim the gestures that made online connection meaningful; small, human acts of unpolished care that don't always have a call to action attached? If creators and audiences can tolerate a little less optimisation and a little more mess, we might discover that intimacy can be a sustainable aesthetic after all.

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Photo © Troye Sivan Photographed by Joe Brennan