Instagram is a Wasteland
But where do brands go now?
There’s a particular kind of silence happening on Instagram right now. If you’re a brand posting organically on Instagram, you’ll know what I mean.
It’s not the peaceful kind of silence, but the eerie, post-apocalyptic kind.
Instagram is now a digital wasteland where even great content goes to die; posts that would’ve soared two years ago now land with all the grace of a dropped brick. Content crafted with precision, intention, and the same magic that once guaranteed lift. Now? It hits the feed like a ghost signal. No boost. No spark. Just tumbleweeds rolling over content that deserved a crowd.
Stare at your engagement (or lack thereof) long enough and you start to wonder:
Is anyone… actually still on here?
Are we performing theatre to an empty room?
Desperation sets in as brands begin wandering the platform with little bundles of content, hoping someone, somewhere, still sees us?
Instagram wasn’t always like this. It used to feel like the centre of culture. A living, breathing city where brands could build worlds, architect desire, and be rewarded for originality and, let’s face it, simply just showing up.
Now, it feels like trying to broadcast poetry from inside an airport food court. Loud. Chaotic. Everyone numb.
For me, the question isn’t “Is Instagram dead?” That part feels quite certain.
It’s “What does a brand do when the main stage goes dark?”
From where I stand, today’s brands are digital refugees; unable to remain on a platform that wrings them dry, forcing them to churn out content that adds nothing to their equity or their cultural weight. They can’t stay… but where exactly are they meant to go?
The Algorithm Ate the Audience
Let’s name the villain. Engagement isn’t low by accident, it’s structural.
Instagram didn’t just move the goalposts; it replaced the sport.
We trained for community, craft, narrative.
And then, with what felt like the click of a finger, it gave us roulette.
Brands are now competing with:
People’s group chats
AI-generated faces
Rage-bait commentary
Micro-celebrity therapists
The release of the Epstein files (or lack thereof)
Dancing cats with better retention rates than global skincare brands
How does a brand, any brand, cut through a feed optimised for chaos, virality, and emotional whiplash?
Are we meant to out-shock shock culture? Out-dance Reels? Out-spam creators who spend 14 hours a day reverse-engineering watch-time metrics?
And the deeper question:
Should we even try?
The Myth of “If You Post More, It Will Come”
We’ve entered the era of desperation posting.
Brands have become the corporate equivalent of a situationship sending “???” at 2am.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth:
No one ever scaled a cult brand by appeasing an algorithm.
The algorithm has no taste, no ethics, no vision.
It does not care about your brand story, your craftsmanship, your nuance, or your thousand-person waitlist.
So why do brands keep feeding it like it’s a god?
Could it be that we’ve confused distribution with meaning?
Frequency with resonance?
Attention with affection?
What if engagement wasn’t the KPI we think it is anymore?
If Instagram Is a Wasteland, What’s the New Homeland?
Let’s sit in the refugee metaphor for a second:
If Instagram is a scorched-earth city, where do brands migrate?
What terrain allows for depth, nuance, memorability?
Where do we build culture now?
Some emerging answers:
1. Private Feeds > Public Feeds
Communities are going underground.
Discord servers, Close Friends, SMS clubs, Substack threads.
Places where intimacy can be earned, not algorithmically rationed.
Is the future not “audiences” but inner circles?
Not reach, but relationship density?
2. Personality-Led Media
If brands can’t win as brands, do they need a face?
Not an influencer (I personally feel like that ship has sailed).
They need a thinker.
A founder with a POV.
A head of brand who writes essays.
A practitioner who speaks in ideas, not slogans.
Are brands becoming media companies, whether they want to or not?
3. Search, Not Scroll
Instagram invented the infinite feed; TikTok perfected it.
But consumers are getting tired.
Fatigue creates a new opportunity: intent-led discovery.
Pinterest, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok Search; platforms where people arrive with curiosity, perhaps a little more intention than they do on Instagram.
Do brands need to show up where the audience is actively looking, not numbly scrolling?
4. IRL as the Last Frontier of Cut-Through
Events. Salons. Pop-ups.
Actual human energy.
The one thing the algorithm cannot throttle.
If everyone is invisible online, does offline become the new visibility?
5. Depth Content > Snackable Content
The pendulum always swings.
After a decade of digital junk food, the appetite for intellectual nourishment is rising.
Articles. Essays. Long-form conversation.
Aesthetic intelligence paired with cognitive substance.
Are the smartest brands about to win in the most old-fashioned way possible, by having something worth saying? This is why we turned to Substack. It doesn’t feel like another doom-scroll of a platform; it feels like a long-form supper club for the intellectually hungry. A home-cooked meal in a world addicted to digital snacks.
Maybe the Real Question Isn’t About Instagram at All
Maybe Instagram’s decline is simply revealing something bigger:
We’ve mistaken platforms for power.
We’ve outsourced brand building to places that were never built for us.
Instagram was never designed to make brands iconic, it was designed to make users scroll.
When that incentive misaligns, the brand dies first.
So instead of asking:
“Where should brands go?”
Maybe we should ask:
“What kind of brands are worth following anywhere?”
Brands with:
A thesis
A worldview
A cultural edge
A point of intellectual heat
A creative signature no algorithm can erase
Brands that don’t need the feed to validate them, because they build gravity, not content calendars.
Instagram may be a wasteland, but wastelands create new worlds
When the old city collapses, pioneers emerge.
Culture simply finds a new host.
Power reshapes itself into many hands.
Community drifts toward the places that feel alive enough to hold it..
So here’s the provocation:
What if Instagram dying is the best thing to happen to branding in a decade?
What if this is the permission slip we needed to stop optimising and start imagining again?
What if the next era of brand building revolves around resonance; the kind that lingers long after the scroll? The kind built on substance. The kind defined by intellectual and emotional gravity.
Instagram is a wasteland.
Good.
Wastelands are where the most interesting revolutions begin.
