I’ve taken over 300 photos during the month I recently spent in Sicily. Out of them, maybe 15 made their way on Instagram stories. Oh, and I half-assed a reel while waiting for my plane to take off.
I did, however, share way more than that (including fun(ny) stories) with my friends on WhatsApp — either individually or in groups. It’s been a while since I stopped posting regularly on my personal social media profiles.
This is partly because social media has become a very strange place to be social.
Everyone has advice. Everyone has a framework. Everyone is thrilled to announce something. Apparently, everyone is crushing it, scaling effortlessly, and learning profound leadership lessons from minor domestic inconveniences.
AI has made it even easier to manufacture this endless stream of wisdom. I can barely scroll through LinkedIn without encountering another suspiciously polished revelation about authenticity.
Meanwhile, I increasingly wonder where the actual conversations have gone.
The ones where people disagree, ask uncomfortable questions, admit they have no idea what they’re doing, or share something without first considering whether it has sufficient viral potential.
It turns out I was wondering about this three years ago, too.
In 2023, I published a newsletter called Pay-to-play makes social media less social.
Here’s what I wrote:
Creators engage with each other, while regular users stand on the sidelines and watch their feed.
My argument was that social media platforms were increasingly becoming conventional media businesses. The feeds were filling with professional content, advertising was becoming harder to distinguish from organic recommendations, and people who had no commercial interest in maintaining a social presence were gradually becoming spectators.
I also suggested building smaller networks of peers and reducing our dependence on platforms we couldn’t control.
Fast-forward to 2026, and I’m starting to think that prediction didn’t go far enough. I blamed the pay-to-play model for the decrease in socializing when, in fact, it was also about the For You feeds that turn us all into passive spectators rather than active participants.
More on that below. Until then, I want to introduce you to today’s partner, who has a very timely solution to avoid posting into the void.
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The social part of social media is disappearing
Ofcom’s 2026 research into online behavior found that 49% of UK adult social media users actively post, share, or comment, compared with 61% in 2024.
That’s a 12-percentage-point difference. Ofcom cautions that changes in its research methodology make this an indicative trend, but the accompanying qualitative findings are equally interesting.
Of course, people haven’t stopped socializing online altogether. DataReportal’s 2026 research shows that keeping in touch with friends and family remains a major reason people use social platforms.
But the experience varies dramatically by platform. More than 70% of Facebook users visit to stay connected with friends and family, while only about a quarter of TikTok users cite that motivation.
The technology that originally helped us connect has also become an incredibly effective system for keeping us entertained.
And those two functions have very different incentives.
The algorithm wants content. People need conversation.
Have you read Ben Thompson’s excellent The End of the Internet essay?
He examines how the internet has evolved from an open network of independent publishers, websites, and communities into an environment increasingly dominated by large platforms.
His argument goes considerably further, covering the economics of subscriptions, AI, software, and the viability of the open internet itself.
But this observation about social media particularly caught my attention:
“Public social media sites became personal entertainment sites, tuned for engagement.”
He argues that social networking has continued in smaller, private groups and chats as public platforms have evolved into enormous entertainment and discovery systems.
Sort of like my pics from Sicily.
Public platforms are fantastic at distributing content. They can introduce you to people you would never otherwise meet, surface fascinating ideas, and put an independent expert in front of thousands of potential customers.
But think about what their business models reward.
Content that attracts attention, keeps people scrolling, and produces measurable engagement has an advantage.
A complicated conversation about whether someone’s business model is sustainable has a much harder time competing with a controversial hot take, an emotional story, or another carousel containing seven lessons on becoming a better leader.
Useful conversations rarely arrive in neat, instantly understandable packages.
They require context. People ask follow-up questions, change their minds, disagree, and sometimes need to explain things that would bore the hell out of anyone who wasn’t directly involved.
That’s wonderful if you’re trying to solve a real problem.
It’s considerably less convenient when you’re trying to entertain thousands of strangers between two advertisements.
We may be entering the post-social internet: an era where public platforms distribute our content while the relationships that matter develop somewhere else, away from the public eye.
This also explains why so many social media posts are flopping
If you’ve noticed your reach, likes, or comments declining, you’re probably wondering what the hell happened. We have this conversation in The Council almost monthly.
There are several forces at play, and I think we’re making a mistake by reducing everything to yet another algorithm conspiracy.
1. First, we’re producing an enormous amount of content and competing for finite attention.
Publishing has become ridiculously easy, and the result is an extraordinary supply of material competing for people’s attention.
Metricool’s 2026 Instagram study, based on 24.3 million posts, found that brands increased their publishing activity by roughly 24% year over year.
During the same period, average reach for single-image posts fell by nearly 22%.
Those figures concern a specific platform and format, but they illustrate a broader problem: publishing more doesn’t guarantee that individual posts will receive more attention.
2. Second, platforms keep changing how content gets distributed.
In March 2026, LinkedIn announced significant changes to its feed, including more advanced AI-based recommendations and stronger action against automated engagement, repetitive content, and engagement bait.
Your followers are only one input into whether someone sees your work. Platforms increasingly make recommendations based on topics, interests, previous interactions, and their own assessments of relevance.
And that creates an uncomfortable situation for creators. You can build an audience of hundreds of thousands and still have relatively little control over how much of that audience sees your next post.
3. Third, AI slop is contributing to a very real quality problem.
It’s become so pervasive that LinkedIn introduced an option for users to flag low-effort AI-generated material.
In September, LinkedIn reported that its efforts had already reduced views of content classified as AI slop by 40%.
We have reached a point where platforms are deploying AI to identify and suppress some of the mountains of low-quality content produced with AI.
What a magnificent use of human ingenuity.
And while that’s a welcome development, the underlying content problem extends beyond AI. We’ve spent years teaching people to optimize posts for engagement. Use this hook, follow that structure, include a controversial opinion, ask people to comment, repeat until the algorithm acknowledges your existence.
Eventually, everyone starts sounding remarkably similar; AI simply makes the process faster.
4. Fourth, some interactions are becoming less visible.
Metricool’s 2026 LinkedIn study found that likes declined 13%, comments 17%, and shares 10% year over year.
However, overall engagement increased by nearly 14%, driven by less publicly visible actions such as clicks, carousel swipes, and other interactions.
That’s worth remembering the next time you’re about to declare your content dead because it received seven likes.
Someone might have clicked through to your website, saved the post, or decided you’re the person they want to hire without a single public trace.
Of course, sometimes posts genuinely perform badly. Sometimes because of the algorithm and sometimes because of weak ideas, unclear positioning, poor execution, and content that attracts the wrong audience.
The platform deserves scrutiny. So does the strategy.
We have created an internet where more people are producing content while a growing proportion of the audience appears increasingly reluctant to participate publicly.
And that changes what social media is useful for.
The interesting conversations are happening somewhere smaller
Think about the conversations you have in private messages, group chats, small professional networks, or trusted communities. They often look very different from what people publish publicly.
On social media, everyone seems to be building thriving businesses.
Behind closed doors, people talk about inconsistent income, difficult clients, disappointing results, financial anxiety, professional jealousy, and the decisions they’re afraid to make.
These are illustrative examples, of course. Plenty of private spaces are filled with superficial nonsense, and genuinely honest public conversations still happen.
But the difference in what people can comfortably disclose is significant.
When you’re talking to a small group of people who know your business, remember previous conversations, and understand your circumstances, you can skip a lot of the performance.
You can ask an imperfect question; admit you were wrong; explore an idea before you’ve turned it into a definitive opinion.
And, critically, the people responding can challenge you using information that would never fit into a public post.
For an expert business, that has enormous value.
A hundred generic comments congratulating you on your latest achievement might feel wonderful. But one honest conversation that prevents you from making a $10,000 mistake can be considerably more useful.
A paywall doesn’t automatically create trust
Given everything I’ve written so far, you might expect me to conclude that everyone should launch a paid community. I run The Council, after all. I have a fairly obvious commercial interest in the idea.
But running a private community has taught me just how difficult genuine community building can be.
People don’t automatically become comfortable sharing their struggles because you’ve put them behind a login screen. They need to trust the founder AND then their peers.
In The Council, I’ve seen people openly admit they have no idea what to do next, share experiments born out of urgent financial pressure, and discuss problems they’d never dream of publishing on LinkedIn. That level of honesty requires trust, and trust takes work.
However a community is structured, there’s one thing I keep seeing both in The Council and in all the other communities I’m in: the value comes from the quality of the relationships and conversations inside.
Social media used to provide that. Then this value moved to private(-ish) groups like those on Facebook and LinkedIn, until they, too, became slopful long before AI even entered the picture.
So, where do these real conversations happen?
In a handful of places:
- Some subreddits because Reddit allows you to be anonymous, so you can genuinely ask for help. Then again, you won’t know those who respond, so you can’t know how much trust to offer.
- Paid memberships.
- Small WhatsApp and Slack groups.
- Masterminds
- Informal networks of peers.
For many solopreneurs, joining an existing group or cultivating a small professional network will make far more sense than building and maintaining their own community.
The future I’m interested in involves trusted, smaller networks in many different forms. And I suspect their importance will keep increasing as public content becomes easier to manufacture.
TL;DR: Keep social media. Change what you’re using it for.
After everything I’ve said about the state of social media, I hope you’re not preparing to ceremoniously delete your LinkedIn account.
I’m certainly keeping mine, along with all my other social media profiles.
Public social media remains one of the most accessible ways for independent experts to get discovered, demonstrate what they know, challenge prevailing ideas, and meet people they would otherwise never encounter.
Even Circle’s 2025 survey of more than 1,200 community builders found that 76% relied on social media as their primary growth channel.
Turns out the private room still needs a front door.
The mistake I see people making is expecting social media to handle every stage of the relationship, from getting someone’s attention to earning their trust and eventually converting them into a customer.
You’re competing for attention in an environment specifically designed to keep people consuming content. Every interaction is surrounded by thousands of competing distractions.
And then you wonder why people aren’t developing meaningful relationships with your business.
I think we need to become much more deliberate about what happens after someone discovers us.
For me, this is where newsletters and private messages become particularly valuable. A public post can introduce someone to my thinking, but an email reply gives us the opportunity to have an actual conversation.
I can ask questions, learn about their business, and sometimes help them see something they’ve overlooked. Those exchanges can be far more valuable than months of public engagement.
As for working ON your business:
Get yourself into rooms where people can tell you the truth
Imagine posting on LinkedIn that you’re thinking about raising your prices.
You’ll probably receive a collection of enthusiastic comments encouraging you to know your worth, charge premium rates, and remember that the right clients will always pay.
Very inspiring, yet almost entirely useless without context.
Now imagine having that conversation with a small group of people who know your business.
You can explain what you’re currently charging, how much work your clients require, what your competitors offer, how strong your pipeline is, and what would happen financially if you lost a couple of customers.
Someone might challenge your pricing assumptions. Someone else might point out that your delivery model is the bigger problem. Another person might have dealt with the exact same situation.
You can disagree, ask questions, test different scenarios, and leave with a decision you feel confident making.
That’s the kind of conversation I think will become increasingly valuable as the internet fills with generic information.
And it’s why I encourage every solopreneur to cultivate a small network of people who understand what they’re trying to build.
You don’t necessarily need a paid membership. An informal group of trusted peers can be enormously valuable, provided people are willing to show up, share honestly, and challenge one another.
The challenge is finding people who understand your business well enough to give useful advice, who have the experience to challenge your thinking, and who are actually available when you’re staring down a decision you can’t afford to get wrong.
That’s why I built The Council
I’ve spent years watching capable solopreneurs lose time and money second-guessing decisions, chasing advice that doesn’t apply to their situation, or trying to solve everything alone.
And I’ve done plenty of that myself.
The Council is the kind of room I wish I’d had when I was building my first business: a private network of solopreneurs, coaches, consultants, and experts who take each other’s businesses seriously enough to ask the uncomfortable questions.
You get direct access to me, both in our twice-monthly Decision Clinics and through ongoing discussions, alongside a group of experienced peers who bring their own perspectives and hard-won lessons.
Bring the messy stuff: an offer you’re struggling to sell, a client situation that’s making you miserable, a pricing decision, or a marketing strategy that’s consuming far too much time for the results it produces.
We’ll look at your circumstances, challenge the assumptions, and work through your options.
And yes, sometimes I’ll tell you that the idea you’re particularly excited about has some serious holes in it. I’d much rather have that conversation with you now than watch you invest another six months and several thousand dollars into something that was never going to work.
If you already have a business in motion and you’re tired of making expensive decisions alone, come join us in The Council.
Borrow my brain. Borrow everyone else’s, too. Bring the real problems, have the difficult conversations, and leave with decisions you can act on.
