[This was written prior to September 10th 2025 and had nothing to do with contemporary events of that week but my observation that Instagram is no longer what it once was – later in the week, however, I began pulling back from other social media.]

Instagram turned itself into TikTok. I found the still photos I shared there are no longer seen by my “friends” or “followers”. “The Algorithm” no longer exists to share content between Friends – instead, it, and Facebook, have adopted the TikTok model.

TikTok’s algorithm figured out that showing videos of attractive, mostly young people, engaged in “exciting” activities, preferably luxury – like traveling to exotic destinations – or videos that get people emotionally riled up and angry – leads to longer viewing sessions.

TikTok stole a lot of users from Instagram and Facebook.

Thus, Instagram and Facebook adopted the same approach. This is why – on Facebook, I no longer see posts from family members – in fact, I thought some had stopped using FB because I had not seen their posts in a year! Nope, they were sharing items but FB never showed them to me.

I read today that, on average, just 7% of posts seen on Facebook are from your friends. The “social” part of social media is gone.

Today, I deleted the Instagram app.

Update September 11 and 12, 2025

I deleted my BlueSky account completely.

The next day I deleted by TikTok app; 2 days later, I deleted my TikTok account completely.

I am considering canceling my Reddit account – there, my interactions were to answer questions from others about some health topics like brain injuries, and related health issues.

I have decided to only check in to FB once per week – may be even less often after this. I used to log in once per day. But when I logged this week, I saw just 3 posts from actual friends – everything else was FB’s random insertions, ads and group posts.

Today’s IG and FB are not what they used to be – and I learned A LOT OF PEOPLE have already abandoned them.

The concept of “social media” for sharing between friends is completely dead.

On X, most of my posts were viewed just 10 to 20 times this past week.

So why continue using X?

Social media is dead from self-inflicted wounds.