TLDR
Exhausted by algorithmic feeds, relentless ads and the pressure to perform for an audience, Gen Z are quietly migrating to smaller, more private corners of the web: niche subreddits, Substack newsletters, Discord servers and group chats. Theorist Venkatesh Rao called this the “cosy web,” the informal, untracked spaces the bots and brands haven’t yet colonised. AI-powered search is accelerating the shift, replacing the serendipity of discovery with pre-packaged answers. Even within mainstream platforms, Gen Z are finding intimacy in comment sections rather than feeds. For brands, the lesson is clear: reach is becoming less valuable, and community is becoming more so. The audience that matters is migrating somewhere harder to see, and the brands that follow them there with a commercial agenda will find the door closing quickly. What works is genuine contribution, not broadcast.
Gen Z's changing online habits
Something is shifting online, and it’s not the platforms, the content formats or the algorithms. What’s shifting is the relationship a generation has with the open internet itself.
Gen Z, the first cohort to grow up entirely inside the digital ecosystem, are staging a quiet revolution. They’re retreating from the loud, commercialised surface of the web and carving out smaller, more private spaces where the algorithms cannot follow, and the ads have not yet arrived.
A 2025 Deloitte consumer trends survey of more than 4,000 Brits found that nearly a third of Gen Zers had deleted a social media app in the previous 12 months. A Harris Poll found that 83% of Gen Z adults aged 18 to 27 had taken steps to limit their social media use at some point, and 40% agreed that they wished social media had never been invented.
These are not the statistics of a generation abandoning the internet. They’re the statistics of a generation renegotiating the terms on which they use it.
What happened to the open web?
To understand where Gen Z is going, it helps to understand what drove them away from where they started.
The early promise of social media was participation. Platforms were places to share, discover, connect and explore. The algorithm was a discovery tool rather than an attention trap, and the ratio of genuine content to commercial content felt manageable. That era (if it ever really existed in the way we remember it), is long gone.
What replaced it is a narrow internet experience. Algorithms have become extraordinarily good at predicting what will keep a user engaged, and in optimising for engagement above everything else, they have paradoxically made the online experience feel smaller and more predictable. The behavioural resolution for many Gen Zers is not less time on social media but a reallocation toward platforms where they feel more in control of their experience: subscriptions over algorithms, community over broadcast, and curated follows over infinite scroll. The feed that once felt like an open window on the world now feels more like a mirror, reflecting an increasingly narrow version of what the platform has decided you want to see.
Add to this the relentless commercialisation of every available surface. Pop-up ads, retargeting pixels, branded content engineered to look organic, bots amplifying noise in every comment section, and 67% of Gen Z now viewing Instagram and Facebook as data exploitative. The open internet for this generation has started to feel less like a public square and more like a shopping centre, designed to extract attention and spending at every turn.
The dark forest and the cosy web
There is a framework that captures this shift with unusual precision. Technology strategist Venkatesh Rao coined the term “cosy web” to describe the private corners of the internet people retreat to when the open web becomes too noisy. In his words, it is the informal, untracked, messily human space. Think Slack groups, messaging apps, private communities and email, that the bots and algorithms haven’t yet infiltrated.
Rao built this idea on top of Yancey Strickler’s companion concept, the dark forest theory of the internet. The dark forest is a place that seems eerily quiet and devoid of life, not because nothing lives there, but because the creatures within it have learned to stay silent. The predators are the advertisers, tracking bots, clickbait creators, attention-hungry influencers and trolls. It is unsafe to reveal yourself to them in any authentic way. So, people retreat into private spaces. They hide in the cosy web.
What Rao described as a niche phenomenon a few years ago now describes something close to mainstream behaviour, particularly among Gen Z. When COVID hit, these spaces went from the very online digital fringe to a mainstream experience at an unimaginably mass scale. The pandemic accelerated a shift that was already underway, and it has not reversed since.
Performers, not participants
One of the most significant things that has happened to mainstream social media over the past decade is the transformation of what it means to post. In the early days of platforms like Instagram, posting was relatively low stakes. Now, every piece of content is subject to algorithmic evaluation, public metrics and the kind of comparative scrutiny that turns self-expression into performance.
The tension between engagement and exhaustion is the defining structural dynamic of Gen Z’s social media relationship in 2026, and brands that understand only the engagement numbers without understanding the fatigue are building strategies on incomplete data. For many young users, the experience of being on the open web feels less like participation in a community and more like performing for an audience whose approval is measured in real time. 55% of Gen Z have taken at least one social media detox in the past year to manage anxiety and digital fatigue.
The cosy web offers something the open feed cannot: an environment in which you can exist online without being evaluated. Discord servers, group chats, private Substacks, niche subreddits, these are spaces governed by human rather than algorithmic logic, where the incentive is genuine connection rather than content performance.
Simarin Tandon, Junior Digital Account Director at Brandnation, sees this shift playing out in how brands need to think about social strategy. “Gen Z can clock inauthenticity faster than any generation before them, and they’re actively curating their online experience to filter it out. For brands, that means the old playbook of interrupting feeds with polished content doesn’t land the way it used to. What works is finding the communities where this audience already exists, understanding what they actually care about in those spaces, and contributing something of value before you ask for anything in return.”
Is AI killing the joy of getting lost online?
There’s another force reshaping how Gen Z experiences the internet, and it operates at the level of search rather than social. The exploratory quality of the early web, the experience of following a link, landing somewhere unexpected and discovering something you were not looking for, is being systematically engineered out of the online experience.
Searches triggering AI Overviews now show an average zero-click rate of 83%, meaning eight out of ten users get their answer directly inside the search interface. Instead of opening 15 tabs to compare information yourself, Google increasingly does the comparison for you. The experience of searching on Google has fundamentally changed from gateway to destination, and what has been lost in that transition is something that is difficult to quantify but easy to feel: the serendipity of discovery.
A YouGov 2025 survey found that 59% of Gen Z and 56% of millennial users refer to AI-generated summaries over traditional search results, because speed outweighs exploration. That preference is rational in the short term, but it has structural consequences for how knowledge is encountered and understood. When an AI presents three best options and users accept that shortlist as definitive, the range of sources, perspectives and unexpected encounters that once characterised online exploration narrows dramatically. The internet gets smaller, even as the volume of content on it grows.
For a generation already retreating from the algorithmic curation of their social feeds, AI-mediated search represents yet another layer of editorial control being imposed on their online experience from the outside. The cosy web, by contrast, is one of the few remaining environments where discovery still works the old way: through human recommendation, word of mouth and the kind of organic, unoptimised sharing that algorithms are specifically designed to replace.
Subreddits, Substack and the architecture of the cosy web
The growth of specific platforms tells the story of the cosy web more clearly than any survey data. Reddit’s continued expansion, and specifically the proliferation of highly specific subreddits dedicated to niche interests, represents one of the most significant migrations away from the broadcast model of social media. Anonymous platforms like Reddit and Telegram have seen 25% growth as users seek environments where the content is community-generated rather than algorithmically curated and where the incentive structure rewards contribution rather than performance.
Substack represents a different expression of the same impulse. The platform’s growth reflects the appetite for content that arrives via subscription rather than feed, that’s written for a specific audience rather than optimised for algorithmic distribution, and that creates a direct relationship between writer and reader that platform intermediaries cannot easily monetise or manipulate. Venkatesh Rao himself noted that his bet on Substack was “an interesting bet against the ad-supported public internet,” recognising early that the subscription model offered writers and readers a way out of the attention economy’s logic.
Both Reddit and Substack share a structural characteristic that defines the cosy web more broadly: they function free from algorithmic pressures and advertiser influence, built on more modest incentives, naturally inviting deeper and more authentic conversations. They are, in Rao’s framing, non-indexed, non-optimised and non-gamified, and it is precisely those qualities that make them feel safe in a way that the open feed no longer does.
The comment section as a micro-cosy web
There is a more subtle and more interesting version of this retreat happening in plain sight, inside the comment sections of the very platforms Gen Z is supposedly abandoning.
While the feed itself has become a broadcast environment, the comment section of a well-engaged post has started to function as its own version of cosy web: a contained, human-scaled conversation that exists in the gaps between the content. TikTok comment sections have developed their own culture, language and internal logic, operating as community spaces that the algorithm surfaces but does not fully control. Creators build follow-up content in direct response to comments. Inside jokes develop and compound. Regulars recognise each other.
What is happening here is that Gen Z is finding ways to create intimacy within the architecture of the open web, using the comment section as a social space that feels participatory rather than performative. It is a workaround rather than a solution, a way of finding the cosy web within the dark forest rather than leaving it, but it reflects the same underlying desire: to be part of a conversation rather than an audience for one.
What This Means for Brands
The instinct when confronted with this data is to follow the audience into the cosy web, to find the subreddits, sponsor the Substacks, infiltrate the Discord servers. That instinct is largely wrong, and it misunderstands what makes these spaces valuable to the people who use them. The moment a brand arrives with a commercial agenda in a non-commercial space, the space loses the quality that made it worth being in.
The more productive insight is structural. The cosy web is growing because the open web has failed to offer something that human beings fundamentally need: the experience of being genuinely seen and heard within a community rather than processed by a platform. Brands that understand this are not trying to replicate the cosy web at scale. They are building the conditions for it to exist around their own products and content: investing in community rather than broadcast, creating spaces where customers can talk to each other rather than just listening to the brand, and treating comment sections as conversations worth joining rather than metrics to be optimised.
The generation that is most deliberately retreating from the attention economy is also the generation most attuned to the difference between a brand that wants to be part of a community and one that wants to extract value from it. Getting that distinction right is not a social media strategy question. It is a much more fundamental question about what kind of presence a brand wants to have online.
Want to build a social strategy that reaches Gen Z where they actually are?
Brandnation’s digital team works with brands to develop community-first social strategies that go beyond reach. Get in touch.
About the author
Simarin Tandon | Senior Digital Marketing Manager
Having worked with brands across the Beauty & Wellness, FMCG, FinTech, and Home & Lifestyle sectors, Simarin focuses on driving acquisition and growth, whilst managing the Digital team at brandnation.
A curious marketer, Simarin’s finger is always on the pulse when it comes to performance and digital updates across both paid and organic platforms.
