Every year I try to write 1 blog predicting the future, so let’s do one about AI.
When you’ve been around long enough, you’ve seen entire digital empires rise and fall.
MySpace, Hyves, Vine, Bebo, Google Circles… all gone.
Most collapsed because they lacked strong positioning, a real differentiator, or simply had bad timing. In the end, they couldn’t sustain the single most important metric in social media: engagement.
But today, we’re watching the opposite problem unfold.
The Rise of “Engagement Automation”
Every day, new startups launch tools promising creators effortless engagement:
- Auto-liking or replying to posts
- AI-generated DMs or reply suggestions
- Scheduled posting, commenting or reposting
- Predicting optimal post times
At first glance, these are powerful accelerators. They help creators scale presence, build brand visibility, and squeeze more from every post.
But here’s the paradox:
Flywheel
The social media flywheel, at its core, runs on 3 things.
- Creators make content → driving engagement and value (brand awareness, ad revenue, ego metrics).
- Humans → visiting the platform, and consuming content.
- Platforms sell ads + data → which pays for the infrastructure and teams behind them.
While AI is helping content creators maximise engagement, the content that is created is more likely to be consumed by AI-bots.
AI-bots engaging with AI-bots doesn’t create real value because:
- Data from AI-bots can’t be sold.
- Ads watched by AI-bots won’t generate revenue.
- Engagement faked by AI-bots erodes human trust.
The Human Response: Shrinking Engagement.
Already, we see people losing faith in social media. Scroll long enough and it all starts to feel inauthentic, even uncanny.
Instead, people are shifting toward smaller, more intimate spaces: Slack communities, Discord servers, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram.
Why? Because these groups are:
- Human-driven
- Focused on shared interests
- Rooted in trust and authenticity
People are still oversharing about their vacations, their kids, their meals, but they’re no longer doing it publicly. They’re sharing in private, with people they actually care about.
My Prediction: The Future of Social Media.
We are the generation that has experienced every step and misstep in the digital evolution.
We know both the magic and the mess of social platforms.
Our children, however, will inherit something different: a world where public feeds feel fake, and real connections move into private spaces.
The soul of social media, messy, unfiltered, human connection, isn’t dying. It’s just leaving the stage.
And AI may be the reason the curtain closes.
Prediction: AI Killed the Social Media Star was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.