On social media gentrification

Photo by Sam on Unsplash

Many people complain that social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok aren't the fun and exciting online spaces they used to be 18 months ago.

This is due to a phenomenon I call Social Media Gentrification.

During the "glory days" of 2020 and 2021, if you posted something cool and creative, it could be seen and heard by many people very quickly. 

You were also more likely to come across content that would delight and entertain you. Better still, you could connect with the creators of this content, hang out with them online and share some laughs.

Sadly, those days are gone. And I see historical parallels between what's happening to Instagram and TikTok with the phenomenon of urban gentrification. 

Using my city of Toronto Canada as an example, there’s a neighborhood called Queen West. During the 1970s to early 1990s, it was a shoddy area inhabited by sketchy residents, lined with abandoned factories and warehouses.

Source: City of Toronto Archives, Queen West 1982

However, the rent was very cheap. Hence, it was the neighborhood that many in Toronto’s creative community gravitated towards.

It was the creatives who made Queen West such a cool place to hang out, leading to its "urban revival" (i.e., gentrification). 

The cool factor attracted the upper middle class which moved into the neighborhood. Starbucks, The Gap and other corporate entities soon followed.  

Photo by Viktoria Rokita, Unsplash

Rents eventually went up beyond what artists could afford to pay. So they moved out.

As a result, Queen West became just another bland and boring gentrified neighborhood.

And this is exactly what's happening to Instagram and TikTok. "Rents" have gone up in the sense that due to updates in their algorithms, you now have to pay for sponsored content if you want it to be seen by a wide audience. 

The quality of your content is irrelevant if you don't have the money to pay Instagram and TikTok’s landlords, Mark Zuckerberg and the Chinese Communist Party respectively, to get your content seen. This is why you see so much boring and uncreative sponsored content in your feed.

It’s also why I've been posting less frequently on these platforms. No matter what zany and creative stuff I can come up with, it won't stand a chance of being seen by a large audience unless I pay to play.

Which is fair - Instagram and TikTok are businesses after all. However, their owners are running these platforms into the ground because the best creators will ultimately end up leaving them, just like the artists who left Queen West.

The smartest thing the platform owners could’ve done was to leave their algorithms alone so that the best creators flourished based on merit (i.e., what viewers actually like, save & share) rather than how much they’d be willing to pay for sponsored content. 

In the longer run, this approach would've drawn more people to their platforms and as a result, would’ve drawn in more business advertisers. 

But because of the changes these platforms have made to their algorithms, people are now spending increasingly less time on them or are leaving entirely because the quality of the user experience has taken a nosedive.

Advertisers will soon follow and then both Instagram and TikTok will eventually end up like Myspace. C’est la vie.