For a moment in 2023, TikTok did something genuinely strange. It told people not to buy things. Creators with large audiences started posting videos explaining why a product they had previously promoted was not worth it, why the skincare routine was too expensive, why the kitchen gadget gathered dust after three uses. Deinfluencing, they called it. It was the most honest trend the platform had seen and it lasted about six weeks before the algorithm found a way to monetize it.
The mechanism was predictable in retrospect. Deinfluencing content performed well because it felt authentic in a sea of sponsored posts. It performed well because the specific pleasure of hearing someone say a thing you suspected but were not sure about — that the $80 serum is the same as the $12 one, that the viral blender is a pain to clean, that the trending outfit looked better in the video than in life — is real and shareable. And then brands figured out that the anti-consumption aesthetic could sell products too, and the moment passed.
What was worth paying attention to underneath the trend was the appetite it revealed. A significant portion of the people engaging with deinfluencing content were not just looking for product reviews. They were looking for permission to stop. Permission to disengage from the cycle of perpetual purchase that social media has made the ambient condition of daily life — where the algorithm's job is to show you things you did not know you wanted until it told you, and the platform's business model depends on converting that discovery into a transaction.
The instinct behind deinfluencing — to interrogate desire before acting on it, to ask whether you actually want the thing or whether you have just been shown it enough times that wanting it feels natural — is genuinely worth holding onto. Not as an aesthetic or a content category, but as a practice. The question before any significant purchase: is this something I sought out because I needed it, or something I was brought to by a system designed to make me feel like I need it?
Most people cannot answer that question honestly because the seam between genuine desire and manufactured desire has become invisible. The algorithm is very good at its job. The solution is not to distrust all consumption — that leads somewhere equally performative — but to introduce enough friction between stimulus and purchase that the decision becomes a real one. A waiting period. A question. A moment of actual reflection before the cart converts.
Deinfluencing did not last because the platform that hosted it was not built for restraint. But the underlying question it surfaced — what do I actually want versus what was I shown — is one worth asking every time.
