Over the years, from the moment I first became conscious of the internet and started spending time online to where I am today, one thing has become very clear to me: every stream of content has a cycle.
If I open Instagram and look at the videos I saved years ago, say five years ago, I will probably notice two things. First, many of them will look blurry and outdated by today’s standards. Second, they will come from creators I no longer see. In some cases, I might not even remember who they are. They were once part of my everyday internet experience, and now they have almost completely disappeared from it
The same thing happened on YouTube, and the same thing will probably happen on Twitter and whatever platforms come after it. Recently, I have even started seeing creators I had not encountered in years suddenly appearing again through text. It is strange because it shows how temporary visibility on the internet can be. Even when you have a huge audience, the people who consistently follow what you do, your closest audience, are only a very small fraction of it.
I think that if you pay enough attention to this, you can start identifying certain patterns.
One of them is what happens when a new social network begins to grow. Platforms need to attract large numbers of content creators, so early on they tend to massively amplify the amount of attention individual creators can receive. There are fewer creators competing for attention, and the platform itself has an incentive to make creating content feel rewarding.
But there is something else happening that I find much more interesting. Every social network eventually becomes an expression of human nature.
I do not mean that there is necessarily someone sitting behind the scenes engineering every cultural shift that happens on a platform. Instead, it emerges from the way millions of people collectively begin using it. The swarm starts experimenting. People discover patterns, formats, sounds, editing styles, jokes, and ways of communicating that work, and other people begin copying and modifying them.
You could see this clearly with 2022 TikTok edits. Some of them were incredibly random, yet they received enormous numbers of views simply because they were visually compelling. Then people learned from them. The formats became more sophisticated. The editing became more complex, and what initially felt strange became familiar, and eventually something else replaced it
Everything becomes more complex, and everything changes, so the only thing that does not seem to change is the need to adapt.
With content, especially content distributed through social networks, following the current is not as optional as we sometimes like to believe. You have to follow it. You have to surf it. Otherwise, you remain stuck in what used to work while everyone else’s behavior continues moving somewhere else.
I like to think about it as light. It is much easier to illuminate something while facing the sun than while standing with your back to it. In the same way, it is much easier to create momentum when you position yourself where people are already flowing. You can still decide what you want to say and what you want to build, but it is much easier to do so from within the current than by fighting against it.
And perhaps the most interesting part is that none of us really knows where that current will go.
Five years from now, content will probably look dramatically different from what it looks like today. The formats we consider normal might feel old. The creators we constantly see might disappear from our feeds. New behaviors will emerge, new patterns will be discovered, and maybe (I hope so) an entirely new social network will change how people communicate again
I hope so, at least
But whatever comes next, I suspect the principle will remain the same: the current will keep moving, and the people who understand how to move with it will have a much easier time staying afloat