At some point last year, the internet stopped feeling like a place and started feeling like a billboard you scroll through. Every feed had the same tone: clever captions, cinematic reels, a certain face, a certain font, a certain rhythm. Everything became optimised to death. Even creative work began to look like it had been pre-approved by an algorithm.
Then something interesting happened, people started leaving.
Quietly, without announcements or grand exits, users began retreating into the digital side streets. First Reddit overtook X as the fifth most-used social platform at the end of 2024, and at the start of this year it overtook TikTok to take fourth place. And its growth is by no means done yet.
