What is posting zero and why is the Gen Z tired of social media?

Believe it or not, there was a time when the internet felt like a place where you actually hung out with people you knew. You would log on and see a grainy photo of a friend’s terrible breakfast or read a status update about how much they hated their commute.

That version of the online world has however been replaced by what The New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka calls “posting zero.”. It effectively marks the end of social media as we once understood it.

Chayka coined the term to describe a massive shift in behaviour where average people—the normies, the non-influencers, the people who just want to share a pic of their cat—have stopped sharing personal content almost entirely.

It is the theory that regular people are finally done providing free labour for tech giants because they are exhausted by the noise and the friction and the sheer volume of advertisements that have replaced the simpler stuff—like photos of their friends’ dogs.

Recent numbers back this up, with The Financial Times noting a global drop in social media usage, driven largely by young people who are sick of the algorithmic slop. The report noted that social media usage peaked in 2022, and has been on a steady decline ever since.

Going smartphone-free

If you want to know why this is happening, you only have to look at the people who have been online the longest: Gen Z. This generation grew up with a smartphone in their hands, and it turns out they are the ones leading the charge to throw that device away.

Per a Guardian report, two-thirds of young adults think social media does more harm than good, and a staggering number of them say they would keep their future children away from it for as long as possible.

They are taking measures to reclaim their brains. Gen Z is also making a lot of phone calls, and are actually preferring them. For instance, McKinsey found that 71 per cent of Gen Z consumers prefer live phone conversations for customer service, which is a higher rate than millennials.

A lot of the youth have also started going the smartphone-free route during recreation—or at least exploring alternative gadgets. The same Guardian report highlights that nightclubs in Berlin and Manchester that slap stickers over phone cameras are growing in popularity. This basically forces people to dance instead of film. And when people don’t record, they don’t post either, which further contributes to ‘posting zero’.

The "enshittification" of things

The exhaustion from social media noise has got a lot to do with a term called “enshittification”. Coined by author and critic Cory Doctorow, it explains why your favourite app suddenly feels terrible to use. Doctorow argues that this degradation is not an accident. It is a business plan.

It starts with a platform being good to you to get you hooked and then it becomes good to advertisers to make money and finally it becomes a giant pile of garbage that extracts value from everyone while giving nothing back. Think about Uber or Facebook.

At first, they were cheap and useful. Then they got crowded with ads and fees. Now, as Doctorow points out, they are just machines for “twiddling” the knobs of user behaviour to squeeze out profit.

We could be in stage three with most of today’s popular platforms. But as posting zero proves, users might finally be looking for an exit.