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I have been following the development of this story since January, when Spain’s Prime Minister used his Davos address to call social media a “common resource for humanity.” He proposed sweeping interventions: ending online anonymity, enforcing algorithmic transparency, and holding platform CEOs personally responsible for harms on their networks. In the months since, Europe has begun moving in that direction. The Digital Services Act has expanded its oversight. The Algorithmic

We spent the past decade optimizing for impressions, clicks, and watch time. Not because they meant anything, but because they were easy to measure. AI is about to expose how shallow those metrics really are. When models can generate infinite content, infinite engagement hacks, and infinite “attention,” the question stops being “How much was produced?” and becomes “What was the value of any of it?” In an AI-abundant world, quantity stops mattering. Only value matters. And rig

AI made creation effortless but took the trust away. Anyone can now generate perfect text, photos, or videos in seconds. The result is an internet overflowing with content but starving for credibility. When everything looks real, who do you believe? Every major technological wave has had to rebuild trust. The early web needed HTTPS to secure transactions. The mobile era needed verified payments to unlock commerce. The AI era needs verified identity to make the digital world b

16 billion. That’s how much Meta is projected to earn in 2024 from scams and banned ads. Let that sink in. That’s not a glitch in the system; that is the system. These aren’t harmless click-traps. They’re people losing life savings to fake investment schemes. They’re children exposed to manipulative content disguised as games. They’re small businesses buried under counterfeit versions of their own brands. And yet, the feed keeps serving them. Because the feed doesn’t care if

Every era has an interface that defines it. For the past two decades, it’s been the feed. The next one will be something entirely different. The feed, as we all know it, is an endless scroll designed to keep us watching. It is optimized for reaction only. But users are starting to push back. A 2025 University of Ulm study found that 80% of participants felt “caught in a loop” while scrolling, staying longer than they wanted, often on content they didn’t value. An Oxford study

Large language models can develop AI brain rot when trained on junk social-media text. That’s what a new paper from Texas A&M, UT Austin, and Purdue University found: exposure to low-quality, engagement-optimized social media texts led to “thought-skipping” behavior. This means LLM's reasoning ability drops, long-context comprehension drops, and ethical alignment degrades. Normally, for a model to reason well, it might follow a chain of thought: step 1 → step 2 → step 3 → con

New data from the Financial Times suggests we may have already hit peak social media. Global usage has been falling since 2022, especially among younger users. People aren’t logging in to connect anymore. They’re logging in to kill time. And yet, the industry’s response has been the opposite of what the moment calls for. Meta, OpenAI, and others are doubling down, building AI-driven short-form platforms designed to flood feeds with infinite, auto-generated content. The same

"Where social media is going in the AI era?" is one of the biggest open questions right now. Especially after years of backlash against doomscrolling, polarization, and hollow engagement. Everyone’s debating whether the future should be human-only, AI-assisted, or fully AI-generated. But I think that’s the wrong question. The real issue isn’t who makes the content, it’s why the content is being made in the first place. Incentives decide everything: what gets created, what spr

“We don’t want to be on TikTok. But we have to.” A prominent creator said this to me recently during one of our conversations, and it stuck with me. Over the past few months, we’ve been talking with dozens of creators to better understand their realities: what drives them, what drains them, and what they wish existed instead. This one quote sums it up perfectly. They weren’t talking about personal preference. They were describing what it takes to grow an audience today. The s

“So you’re trying to replace ice cream with vegetables?” Someone asked me this in a recent conversation at a dinner with investors and founders. It was in response to me describing how we want to replace doomscrolling with meaningful engagement, and how we’re redesigning the incentive system behind social media. I hear a version of this comment fairly often, albeit not always so elegantly put. Most people assume that doomscrolling and junk content are inevitable because they’

“ Hate in the Time of Algorithms ”, a new study by Cornell University, found that when social platforms stopped ranking posts by engagement, exposure to toxic content dropped by 27%. The experiment used the same users, the same content, and the same conversations. The only difference was a randomized feed instead of one optimized for engagement. Same people. Same platform. Completely different outcome. It’s not human nature that changed. It’s the incentive system. If you’re l

Discovery, Exploration, Curiosity Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how AI is going to shape our behavior. As AI gets better at...