How Social Platforms Lose Their Way and What It Means for Your Brand

I have been around long enough to watch social platforms rise, fall, reinvent themselves, and repeat the same cycle. Most people think these platforms evolve. They do not. They follow a predictable pattern that feels a lot like what some folks call enshittification. I call it the moment a platform forgets who it is serving.

It always starts the same way. Stage one. The platform treats the user well. It makes everything easy. It feels fresh. It feels human. It feels like a place you want to be. That was Facebook in 2006. They needed to convince millions of MySpace users to make the jump. So they positioned themselves as the safer, cleaner, more responsible place to connect. They warned people about the dangers of platforms owned by disconnected billionaires who treat users like data points. Ironically, that pitch aged about as well as you would expect.

People joined anyway. Not because they loved Facebook, but because their communities were there. Support groups. Church groups. Neighborhood updates. Customers. Parents organizing carpools. Once your real relationships live inside a closed ecosystem, leaving becomes almost impossible.

Then comes stage two. The platform shifts its loyalty. Users become the product. Businesses get the red carpet treatment. Advertisers are promised precision, insight, and targeting that borders on mind reading. Even though users were once told their privacy mattered, the business model starts leaning harder and harder on surveillance and behavior tracking. Every hour. Every click. Every reaction.

And businesses buy in. Because the pitch sounds too good to pass up. Until one day the numbers stop lining up. A major brand famously cut hundreds of millions of dollars in digital ad spend and saw zero impact on sales. Zero. The money did not stop working. It simply had never worked the way everyone assumed. That is the point when companies realize they, too, are locked in. They depend on an ecosystem that no longer delivers what it promised.

Then comes stage three. The platform turns its attention to shareholders. Not users. Not businesses. Shareholders. Prices rise. Performance drops. Fraud increases. Trust shrinks. The value that once existed becomes a faint shadow of what it used to be. Just enough to keep people from walking away. Barely.

This is the brittle middle ground where most platforms sit today. People say they dislike the experience, but they stay because they feel stuck. One major scandal or crisis can send the whole thing crashing down. When that happens, the people who run these platforms panic, rebrand, rename, and pivot into whatever new idea sounds shiny enough to distract everyone.

And every few years we get another vision speech from a tech leader promising a digital future that nobody asked for. A future where humanity slowly gets replaced by avatars inside a world built to extract more attention, more data, and more time.

Here is the truth. Platforms do not decline because technology moves too fast. They decline because they forget the two groups that matter. The people who use them and the businesses that rely on them.

If you build for shareholders first, you lose everyone else. If you build for real communities, you win long term.

Organic social strategy works the same way. Focus on people. Focus on relationships. Focus on authenticity. That is the entire game. The rest is noise.

This is why I have spent my career helping brands grow without depending on paid ads or rented platforms. When your strategy is built on trust, you are not vulnerable to someone else’s pivot.

The platforms will change. They always do. Build something that does not.