Everyone's reluctant to post (and the platforms have noticed)

Okay SO, as it turns out, yesterday when I deleted a mirror selfie ten minutes after posting it, I wasn’t just being neurotic (shock, I know).

In fact, I was part of a global trend so big it’s making billion-dollar platforms scramble to reinvent themselves (thank you very much.)

Snapchat’s CEO Evan Spiegel recently admitted the obvious in his annual letter to employees: speaking on the platform's challenges, namely the fact that people aren’t posting “Friend Stories” the way they used to.

Now listen, I’m 29 years old. I don’t use Snapchat. And if I did, you’d have the right to be concerned. But I do know that the casual snaps were what made the app go ‘round. Stories that sparked convos, led to inside jokes, and made you feel like your friends were living vicariously through you.

Well they’re now dead. In their place, users are now DM-ing each other influencer videos from Spotlight, Snapchat’s TikTok clone.

Instead of “look at what I’m doing,” it’s “look at what they’re doing.”

Instagram is seeing the same thing.

Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s head, openly admitted that public sharing is in decline, while private sharing is booming. That’s why you may have noticed Insta is “doubling down” on messaging: adding more DM features, rolling out a long-awaited repost button, expanding the “friends” tab, even stealing Snap’s idea of a social map.

Basically, if you don’t feel like posting yourself, Meta will make it easier than ever to co-sign someone else’s content and send it straight to your group chat.

Here’s the part that I found kind of crazy in all of this though: our little “nah, not posting this” impulses, like mine yesterday (but multiplied by millions) are literally bending platforms to our will.

We tend to think of social media as shaping us, but we’re shaping it right back.

My deleted selfie. Your skipped story. Our collective “posting ennui.” All of it adds up to a cultural force strong enough to rewire entire apps.

And what are those apps telling us about the culture right now? That feeds are dead. DMs are alive. Posting feels risky; sharing feels safe. Putting your own face out there invites cringe, judgment, or worse. Forwarding a funny TikTok to your best friend? That’s frictionless, communal, and still feels like participation.

We’ve traded originality for co-signs, breakfast pics for repost buttons, silly little updates for influencer snippets that double as “conversation starters.”

Platforms are retooling themselves to fit the mood, because if they don’t, we’ll leave them behind.

So yes, maybe posting a mirror selfie or sharing part of our lives now come with a vulnerability hangover.

But zoom out, and you’ll see: that hangover has the power to topple entire strategies at Snapchat and Instagram. Even when we feel powerless online, our behaviour shapes the internet right back.

Which is both comforting and a little tragic.

-Sophie Randell, Writer