On June 30th, Pro TV asked me why a generation that grew up online is now posting less and less — the phenomenon people have started calling "digital fatigue".
The trend is real and measurable. GlobalWebIndex 2025 data shows 16–24-year-olds posting less often on Instagram and TikTok, and a YPulse study finds the same group leaning toward private messaging and "finsta" accounts — a second, locked profile shared only with a handful of close friends. In Romania, the number of active social media accounts actually dipped slightly last year, the first decline after years of steady growth. The young people in the segment put it plainly: one keeps aesthetic photos for the public and funny things for close friends only; another said posting simply stopped being interesting once high school and its peer pressure were behind them.
My contribution was about the mechanism underneath — why the feed itself pushes people to withdraw.
"To find, among a hundred posts, the one that actually brings you something worthwhile is exhausting. So you give up — and you retreat into a small circle of close friends instead."
The feed used to be your friends. Now it's mostly ads and strangers, and the signal-to-noise ratio has collapsed: the effort of digging for something meaningful outweighs the reward. When broadcasting to everyone stops paying off, people stop broadcasting — they move the real conversation into DMs and closed groups, where it feels human again. It's a rational response to an environment optimized for engagement rather than for connection.
The segment's sociologist, Dan Petre, added the other half of it: this generation grew up with these platforms and understands the risks better than we assume — including that an oversized public history can become a liability later, when you're applying for a job. Going quieter online isn't apathy. It's a deliberate, rather grown-up decision about how much of yourself to leave exposed.