How did we get here?
A business model designed to capture attention. Here is how it works.
How feeds choose for you
Open any social media app and you will see a feed. It looks like a stream of things people posted, roughly in order. It is not.
Every post, video, and link has been scored by a system predicting how likely you are to tap, comment, share, or keep watching. The posts most likely to keep you there make it to your feed. The rest quietly do not. On most platforms, you cannot change this.
The feed optimises for engagement: taps, likes, shares, watch time. Engagement is not the same as enjoyment. An audit of Twitter/X found that engagement-based ranking amplifies emotionally charged, hostile content well beyond what a chronological feed would, and that users themselves wanted to see less of the divisive content the algorithm was showing them more of.
The pattern is older than the internet. Newspapers, then radio, then television attracted audiences with engaging content and sold the audience to advertisers. What is new is the precision: your feed is tuned uniquely to you, adjusted moment by moment, by systems that guarantee advertising clicks regardless of what is being sold.
What gets made
In an ad-based model, an influencer, a content creator, or a newspaper earns fractions of a penny per interaction. That arithmetic decides which voices are amplified and which die out.
The United States now has 213 counties with no local news source at all. No one covering the school board, the water treatment plant, the local court. Print revenue collapsed, digital advertising never replaced it, and AI has accelerated the remaining traffic losses.
On influencer platforms, roughly 70% of creator revenue comes from brand deals. Independence is a look, not a structure. The better someone can hold attention and stay visible in the feed, the more valuable they become to advertisers. A few win big. Most supply the platform with cheap, abundant labour.
Three decades of this have trained us to expect content for nothing. Only 17% of people globally will pay for online news. So the squeeze closes from both sides: ad revenue falls, willingness to pay stays low, and what survives is whatever can be made cheaply enough, and perform virally enough, to live on fractions of pennies.
Why it sticks
Each part of this system is doing something locally rational. Platforms maximise engagement because advertisers pay for it. Creators chase engagement because the algorithm rewards it. People stay because the content is compelling and everyone they know is already there. The result is a system almost nobody is happy with, and almost nobody can change alone.
Scrolling a feed uses the same mechanism as a slot machine. Most posts are forgettable, but sometimes something lands, and you cannot predict which. That unpredictability is the point.
The longer pattern has a name: enshittification. A platform launches and offers value to attract users. Once they are locked in, the platform redirects value away from users and toward advertisers, and then toward shareholders. Features degrade. Ads multiply. The feed gets noisier.
The lock-in is social. Nobody stays because the software is good. They stay because the people they know are there. Group chats, professional contacts, community spaces are all inside. You may want to move; everyone you know would have to move too, and they won’t. That coordination problem is more powerful than any technical barrier.