Did we curate the fun out of the feed?

Most people think social media is more connected than ever.

The modern internet is stunningly beautiful, immaculately produced, and thoroughly optimised.

It’s also, kinda f*cking boring.

Between the collapse of Twitter and the rise of the aesthetic text graphic, we completely lost the art of the sh*tpost. And along with it, we destroyed the loose, accidental, and beautiful digital communities that used to form around a single, half-baked thought fired off into the void.

We swapped the digital neighbourhood for an over-produced gallery space. And we are paying the price in cultural stagnation.

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To understand what we lost, we have to look at what sh*tposting actually was.

It wasn’t just low-effort spamming or trolling. At its peak, sh*tposting was an act of aggressive, ironic resistance against a polished, commercialised web. But it also, like, wasn’t that deep. It’s hard to explain. You really had to be there.

It was anti-aesthetic, relying on pixelated screenshots, intentional typos, and deeply unappealing formatting.

There was always a sort of detached stance: giving creators a Zen-like detachment from the earnest outrage loops of the internet.

And its core objective was to cause the biggest emotional or comedic reaction with the absolute minimum amount of production effort.

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That’s basically the formula for the OG sh*tpost.

It was the ultimate equaliser. It didn't matter if you were a verified journalist or an anonymous account with a cartoon avatar. If your text-only thought was funny, weird, or jarring enough, it could alter the cultural fabric of the internet for a day.

It was digital graffiti that couldn’t be packaged, monetised, or turned into a sponsored content campaign.

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The death of Twitter, and its subsequent evolution into a heavily algorithmic, pay-to-play musk-coded-megaphone, was the final blow to the communal sh*tpost.

Early Twitter was essentially an SMS-based chat room for the entire world. Because it was short-form and chronologically fed, the barrier to entry for posting was non-existent.

There was absolutely no strategy. No need for a visual asset. And certainly no hook designed to retain a viewer past the three-second mark.

The lifecycle of an idea was beautifully simple. You literally just typed whatever intrusive thought crossed your mind and watched a little pocket of spontaneous discussion bloom in the replies, instantly birthing a fleeting micro-community.

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Today, that pipeline is broken.

The modern feed operates as a corporate broadcast. A thought must first be transformed into a highly curated asset before being pushed out by an algorithm. And this leaves the audience to passively consume content rather than actively connect with the person behind it.

When users scattered across Bluesky, Threads, and Discord following the platform's decline, that centralised public square fractured. More importantly, the vibe changed. We moved to new apps, but we also changed the way we behave inside them.

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In place of the chaotic, text-driven sh*tpost, platforms like Instagram and TikTok have built an environment where a raw sentence rarely stands on its own feet.

Enter the girlie pop OST Reel.

Now, if you have a fleeting, passing thought about relationships, late-stage capitalism, or existential dread, you format it into clean text blocks. Then you overlay it onto a 4K video of a moody cityscape, an empty highway, or your fit check.

As noted in my breakdown of the "glamorous philosopher" we are no longer sharing raw human observations. We are performing the aesthetic of depth. By wrapping a simple thought in the safety blanket of a curated video background, we strip away its spontaneity. The sh*t post has turned from a casual invitation to chat in the replies to a video product designed to pull passive views.

But when everything has to look like a Pinterest board, nothing feels real.

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This transformation highlights a fundamental shift from social networking to pure entertainment media.

During the sh*tpost era, the format was raw and text-first. Then it was distributed chronologically to a tight-knit network of friends and peers who engaged in chaotic, collaborative comment sections just for the sake of amusement.

In contrast, the modern OST era relies entirely on stylised video loops and curated text blocks. These are then pushed by an interest-graph algorithm to complete strangers.

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The ultimate goal has shifted from sparking a weird debate to chasing metrics, algorithmic reach, and personal branding.

Meaning what used to be a conversation is now a passive scrolling experience, or at the most, engaging with a “omg so me, girl!”

Because current feeds favour media designed for strangers rather than a timeline of your actual peers, the spontaneous neighbourhood feel of social media has largely vanished. A good sh*tpost requires a contextually aware in-group to land properly.

When you throw a hyper-specific, chaotic joke into an algorithm designed to push a highly polished video to millions of completely random people, the community aspect dies. You don't get much of a discussion. Just silent shares and repost metrics.

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Can we reclaim it?

The loss of sh*tposting matters because, well, it was fun. But also it marks the end of social media as an organic human playground.

When every piece of content must have a hook, a background loop, and a stylised text layout, we lose the casual digital spaces that allowed us to be creative without the pressure of performance.

If we want to build personal brands that actually have a soul, we have to stop filtering the humanity out of our accounts. We need to actively resist the pressure to turn absolutely every passing thought into a beautifully produced multimedia launch.

Bring back the blurry photo, the typo-ridden, zero-context observation, and the video rant that looks like a FaceTime with a friend.

Fire off a text-only thought simply because it amused you, not because it looks good overlaid on top of a sunset.

The only way to escape the algorithmic prison of the modern feed is to start posting like real, messy people again.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

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