I came from an internet that was powered by what I would call social media, which was chat rooms and then forums. A key component of these early formats was the chronological feed. In that chronological feed, you could get hit with absolutely anything if you logged on at the wrong time, the quality and content of the conversation was entirely dependent on which mods were online. Some mods were about protecting free speech at all costs and some mods were about protecting the exchange of very specific ideas, and both approaches were at each other’s expense. If you didn’t like the mods, you made your own website with hookers and blackjack. You and the people who cared enough about what you were talking about just went to hang out there, and eventually someone wouldn’t like the mods & would then host their own hookers and blackjack party…and so on.
In the last 20 years, we’ve experienced this “Eternal September” where people who are not familiar with the cycle have come online and been very online. And this September has been eternal not just because people don’t have the skills to leave their first platforms and choose spaces that align with their interests, but because the platforms have incentivized staying on them to the point where you are virtually locked into them, creating the sense that you couldn’t leave even if you wanted to. Managing facebook and google ads lifted me out of poverty, I got paid really well to do it, but with that I realized it came with handcuffs. If I ever lost my facebook profile, I wouldn’t be able to work. And FB regularly killed accounts for any number of reasons with no third-party appeal system (at one agency we called it “facecook”). So, if you didn’t do as facebook said, facebook could effectively just end your career, even if you ran ads on other platforms. I always worried at FB-focused agencies & even at in-house roles about what I would do if my account was disabled…because you can’t really easily start another FB account (& it’s against their TOS, so if they found out they would just nuke your new one too). It was a tenuous position, 6-figures but at any moment it could be gone.
That feeling drove me to look for more autonomy. First, it was “I gotta get out of these FB agencies”, then it was in-house because I could balance my fear with google ads…but then it became increasingly clear that FB was going to beat google because people don’t discover new things via google search, search is just reaffirming what you discovered elsewhere. Google search existed because people were being introduced to new ideas without a link to more information (i.e. IRL, in a book, some jackass on a forum). Google search ads are the cream of the crop in online traffic because it’s the most highly motivated audience on the internet, you have to care to google something. But with facebook, the link is right there. You don’t need to take the extra step to search, it’s right there. That meant that the world that was opened up by being indexed in google very quickly collapsed into itself. I saw budget splits go from 50/50 to 60/40, down to now where its like 80/20 or even 90/10 in favor of FB. A lot of brands don’t even run ads on other channels, they only do FB.
More and more I worked with brands that were entirely dependent on the algorithm, not just from FB but from YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn. The “hey, you gotta diversify your ad spend” talk fell on deaf ears, founders built castles and fed dozens if not hundreds of people on the sunny sandy shores of a social media feed. Founders never envisioned a time where a high-tide would come in and erode their foundation, and when they did realize it, most got scared and plugged their ears. I would say that now people are more entrenched in social media platforms than anyone ever fathomed. The world feels as if it revolves around these feeds, and conversely, the content that is suggested to people is fully the world as they know it. “If I didn’t see it on my feed, it didn’t happen.”
Feeds are algorithmically moderated and curated to give you exactly what you want. There is no annoying mod, you have your hookers and blackjack on the same feed as your grandma’s birthday party, new baby photos, and whatever product solves your problem. People believe that the ads enable the platform so we’ve all just rolled with the concept over the last 20 years because we need our birthdays and our blackjack. People are eschewing real birthday parties because they believe so wholeheartedly in the feeds (i.e. everything I saw on FB was true, so I’m not going to this person’s birthday party because XYZ”). But with the advent and proliferation of artificial content and even just real-life experiences with authentic content (people lie), we should know that the feeds are fallible. And I’ve observed the consciousness of the fallibility of the feed permeating the ads (“this ad with Joe Rogan is AI, this company is slop” as a comment on an ad featuring a real clip from his show). If it’s not obvious, that’s really bad for the performance of the ads & the businesses behind them.
The belief that ads enable the platform, that the feeds are powered by ads is less and less true every day. Apple sunsetting IDFA device identifiers, the deprecation of cookies, & larger “do not track” culture means that the ads do not work the way they did from 2008 to 2019, the ads just do not produce the same revenue per dollar they once did. However, people who don’t work in ads manager still genuinely believe that advertising on social media is a fool-proof get rich quick scheme, and moreover, there’s a whole ecosystem of feed content to call you an idiot if you aren’t buying FB ads. What I’m saying is, the belief in the fallibility of feeds is growing, but the religion of FB ads is stronger than ever, even as the ads themselves falter.
For example: someone just read the paragraph above and concluded that I’m probably just not good at ads anymore, and yeah, no, I’m still the GOAT.
Being really good at ads doesn’t mean anything if the ads aren’t good for the advertiser. In 2026, tons of advertisers are entirely dependent on pouring money into FB to carve out any slither of profit they can to continue to finance their business. They completely ignore the erosion of their profit margin just to spend more and more to get less and less of a share because they have to keep the lights on. A ton of advertisers are just working for facebook at this point and their primary function is just holding the risk of the debt. So what will that look like as the organic userbase declines? We’re already seeing it, people are left holding the bags, people get laid off. As liquidity tightens, the global debt crisis worsens, the content gets worse. Our feeds gave us everything we needed and everything we wanted, but that desire to centralize all elements of our lives is having outsized consequences.
Feeds are affecting us socially, politically, economically, my view is that centralized algo feeds are bad. I always placated my concerns about the dangers of social media with the belief that we could simply opt-out of the ecosystem by just not posting or engaging with content, but that isn’t true anymore, the platforms will animate you in your absence…with or without your consent because you don’t own your likeness. We don’t know about the veracity of the content on our feeds, we don’t know what’s been omitted but we’re asked to adopt these feeds as the end-all and be-all of our human existence. How often have we been asked “what’s your instagram?” not to keep in touch, but for the person asking to see and join your followers list? People use the followers as contextual credits…that’s really weird. I know it’s giving “old man yells at cloud” right now, but this is the truth, this is a brand new very bad thing.
I decided early this year to stop, I’m choosing to stop espousing the false belief that investing in social ads is a good idea. I still do email, web dev, and non-social ads like taboola (native) & display banners. My focus at the moment is on fortifying sales funnels so you can at least keep more of the traffic you’ve paid for. If you’re looking for me you can just email me at my domain.
