I have 16,000 connections on LinkedIn, and I get almost no engagement from any of them. On Facebook I have thousands of friends from the model, belly dance and Renaissance fair world, and when I post an article about something they love, they’ll respond. When I post anything about my own work, nothing happens. Not even a like.
A few years ago I could post a good story on LinkedIn and, maybe one post in ten or twenty, get 10,000 impressions, anywhere from a dozen to a hundred comments, lots of likes and some reposts. Then it slipped. Then, bam, 25 impressions and no comments. The posts hadn’t changed. I was posting the same kind of thing I always had, so the algorithm had changed.
So I read up on the algorithm and got the impressions back up. Then it changed again, and there was nothing, no impressions at all. Every time I mastered it, it changed again, sometimes a little and sometimes a lot. Across every platform my numbers slid for years and then fell off a cliff over a few months, on all of them at once. Every writer I’ve compared notes with tells me the same thing. We didn’t all get worse at posting on the same day. The platforms changed what they were for.
Social media sucks. I’ve written about each platform on its own, and I’ll link to those as we go. This piece covers what they all have in common.
Why doesn’t social media show your posts to your friends anymore?
Because your friends aren’t the product now. In April 2025, during the FTC’s antitrust trial against Meta, Mark Zuckerberg testified that the share of time people spend on Facebook looking at content from friends had dropped to 17 percent, down from 22 percent two years earlier. On Instagram it was 7 percent, down from 11. “The friend part has gone down quite a bit,” he said, and he described Facebook as “more of a broad discovery and entertainment space.”
If you’re a writer, that should scare you. The feed you’re posting into mostly isn’t showing people what their friends wrote. It’s showing them what the algorithm predicts will keep them scrolling, from accounts they never chose to follow. Your post about your new book is competing with every video on earth. How do you think that’s going?
A study by Renée DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory and Josh Goldstein of Georgetown measured the shift another way. The share of Facebook feed posts from accounts people didn’t follow went from 8 percent in the second quarter of 2021 to 24 percent in the third quarter of 2023. It tripled in a little over two years.
The feed you’re posting into mostly isn’t showing people what their friends wrote. It’s showing them what keeps them scrolling. – Richard LoweShare on X
What fills the social media feed instead?
Junk, a lot of it made by machines. The same study looked at 125 Facebook pages posting AI-generated images, pages that averaged over 146,000 followers. One AI picture of a kitchen got 40 million views and 1.9 million reactions. Many of the people reacting had no idea it was fake, and Facebook’s recommendation system was pushing those images to people who’d never heard of the pages.
Every platform has its own version of the flood. LinkedIn is buried in AI-written thought leadership. Reddit is fighting marketers who fake posts so AI search will cite their products. Quora puts machine answers next to human ones. Twitter, TikTok and YouTube each have their own flavor of the same disease. A real person with something real to say is one voice in a stadium full of bullhorns.
Your friends are in there somewhere. Shares invented.
And the people who are left get meaner. Have you read the comments under anything lately? Social media magnifies the loudest few and makes it look like they’re everybody. A small, furious minority starts to feel like the whole world. The Facebook writing groups I quit years ago were hostile long before AI, and now they’ve got a new reason to go after each other. I’ve been tracking those pile-ons in the Dogpile series, and there’s no shortage of material.
How much time does social media waste?
More than anybody wants to count. I’ve called social media a black hole of time on a podcast, and I meant it. You intend to post that your book is out, fifteen people comment, and suddenly you’re chatting instead of working. I’ve lost too much time on social media, and I never kept track, because I’d be embarrassed.
I also paid for the cure that the experts sell. I joined several paid engagement groups at $500 a month, where members promise to like and comment on each other’s posts. I quit after deciding none of it was real. It was vanity engagement between people who were never going to read my work, paid for by the month.
So I changed how I do it. I spent one hyperfocus day scheduling posts several times a week across LinkedIn, Mastodon, Bluesky and the rest, all the way through the end of the year. Then I closed the tabs. The posts go out whether I’m watching or not, and I don’t have to learn a new algorithm every quarter to keep them going.
I also took Facebook off my phone. It was killing the battery, and I couldn’t see why I should hand Facebook that much access to my life anyway.
Is social media worth it for authors?
As a place to sell books, no. I’ve said on air that social media is dead on arrival for my nonfiction, and nothing since has changed my mind. I tried Facebook ads and lost the money. Posts on LinkedIn, Substack, Bluesky and Mastodon send close to nothing to my site, and the Facebook visitors who do click leave almost as fast as they arrive.
Now Facebook charges for posting links, the main thing authors used it for.
Since December 2025, Meta has been testing a limit on Pages and on profiles in professional mode: two organic posts with links per calendar month, unless you pay for a Meta Verified subscription. Links in comments and links to Instagram don’t count. Authors in a big indie group said this fall that the limit had reached their pages.
One author summed it up: you can have thousands of followers and barely reach hundreds, so why pay $50 to $500 a month for that? Paying a fee to post links that already don’t convert is buying more bounces.
The one platform authors in that thread spoke well of was Pinterest, because it works more like a search engine than a feed. One author with about 170 followers said daily pins of her books in real settings, plus fantasy images her readers like, bring in 20 to 50 sales a month from half a million impressions. It took months to build, and it costs nothing but time.
It can still work as a place to be found and to talk to people you already know. A clean LinkedIn profile still does its job when somebody looks you up, and messages still get through. But posting your way to readers is a fantasy the platforms keep alive because it keeps you posting for free. They need your content. You don’t need their feed.
The worst part is how little control you have. My Facebook account was frozen for hours once over some bot or hacker, and I couldn’t do a thing about it. I’ve had friends with solid LinkedIn accounts who broke some rule or other. Which one? Nobody knows, because LinkedIn won’t tell them. Their accounts vanished and they couldn’t get them back. People make their living on that platform, and then boom, it’s gone. It’s disgusting. Why would you build your life’s work on land somebody else can take away with one click?
What should writers do instead of social media?
Own your ground. A website is yours, and nobody can throttle it because a feed changed its mind. I’ve written about why websites are getting stronger in the age of AI search, because the answer engines cite pages that say something clearly under a real name. A book is even better. It sits on a shelf, turns up in AI answers, and carries your name for decades.
You could spend your time working out which posts engage this month’s algorithm. Who’s got time for that shit? I’d rather spend that time running my business.
Keep social media small. Schedule it, show up for the people you care about, and never let the numbers tell you whether your work is any good. Most of the engagement is fake, and the reach belongs to the platform. Your ideas belong to you.
Social media promised to connect us with each other. It’s done a fine job connecting us with advertisers, bots and strangers who want to fight. The social media hub has the full series, and if you want to build something that lasts longer than a post, I write books for people who have something to say. Log off for a week and see how much of your life comes back.
