The Frog in the Boiling Social Media Pot
How we went from sharing photos with friends to scrolling short form content—and didn’t even notice.
Opinions are mine, and do not necessarily represent the views of any social media companies I have worked at in the past or will work for in the future.
Try to remember Instagram in 2015. What’s on your home page? Maybe a few vacation photos from your close friends, maybe some candids from your mutuals. How about Twitter? In-jokes and life updates from the select accounts you follow.
Now, transport yourself back to the present. What does scrolling Instagram, X, or TikTok feel like? You’re bombarded with short-form content, autoplaying videos, and people SCREAMING to get your attention in the few milliseconds they have before you scroll away. How many of these people do you know? These people are not your friends, nor faces you’ve ever seen in real life. They took the “social” out of social media.
How did this happen? From 2015 to now, you probably didn’t notice this change in real time. This shift consisted of a series of subtle but intentional UI and algorithm design changes; and we were none the wiser, like a frog in a boiling pot.
Remember this? Although often called an “infinite scroll,” 2018 Instagram had an end. Once you ran out of friends’ photos to see, you’d hit this wall at the bottom of your feed: “you’re all caught up.”
Come 2020, Instagram quietly adds content below this wall, which they called suggested content. This wasn’t a big change at the time—you’d still see exclusively media from accounts you follow above this “you’re all caught up.”
Soon, a switch was quietly flipped. The main feed became driven by the “suggested posts” algorithm; the old feed was only accessible through a small toggle at the top of the screen. (Which, of course, reset back to “suggested” every time you closed the app.)
The exact same thing happened with Twitter. The “For You” feed was added; a toggle was implemented to go back to the “Following” chronological feed; and quietly, this option was made not “sticky” so you would have to click it every time you opened the app.
During the introduction of each of these subtle UI changes, there was some backlash from power users, yet not much attention from the casual scroller. And this is how we got bait-and-switched into content consuming machines.
Some Other Thoughts
Is it a coincidence that Instagram moved the “Reels” button to the exact location where the “Notifications” button used to be? Muscle memory is very strong… and at a company with product designers and user research galore, could this really have been a coincidence?
Featuring songs in your “grid” posts seems like an innovative feature. But the slow creep of autoplay music and video makes social media feel markedly stressful, at least for me. There is no way to pause content, besides exiting the app, or literally holding your finger to the screen. And with the creeping sense that every second spent looking at a post affects your algorithm, there is no respite.
The Impact
Where do you have most of your spontaneous ideas? Personally, I am most inventive in the shower (the one place you literally can’t use your phone) or before falling asleep (intentionally designated as a no-screens time for me). This is all speculation, but I’d say that endless content has been a great detriment to our creativity as a society driven by the invention of great ideas. Every minute you spend thinking, you have a small but existent chance of “striking gold” with an idea that could change the world; every minute you devote to scrolling instead, you’re throwing that chance away.
What I’m Doing
So… today, I deleted all of my social media apps. My attention span has been noticeably declining since the moment I downloaded them at the age of 13. I’m restless in lectures, I instinctively pull out my phone when I’m waiting for an elevator… I’ll still be around to promote my upcoming games and post esoteric jokes on Twitter, but I won’t be consuming any more content. (We’ll see how long this lasts.)