This was a difficult week for the social media behemoths. Meta’s stock price plunged 25 percent—its lowest level since 2015—thanks to the poor performance and prospects of its two main businesses, Facebook and Instagram. Alphabet missed earnings expectations largely thanks to lower ad revenue at YouTube. And finally, after months of courtship, Twitter was taken over by a sociopathic, mail-order billionaire with all the class of a carnival barker who seems hellbent on unleashing the trolls who already make Twitter a miserable experience.

The common enemy causing billions of dollars of market cap destruction is TikTok. Proving the internet rule that a new, even-more-addictive way of wasting time is always just around the corner, TikTok is pillaging users and page views from the old guard faster than teenagers harvesting the best treats from a bowl of Halloween candy. Though TikTok’s 1 billion users are still relatively small in comparison to Facebook, it’s the type of users that they’re stealing that’s the problem: the most coveted active users.

Many industries rely on super consumers—the “whales,” “addicts,” or “power users”—who consume a disproportionate amount of product. Like binge readers of romance novels, college kids chugging beers, or degenerate gamblers who can’t leave the table, they are the most reliable and profitable customers, even if their demand feels exploitative. But for social media businesses, that dependency is even greater because those users aren’t just consumers of your product, they’re also the creators. Content generated by these power users is the “news feed” of crap the rest of us click on. They are the life blood of social platforms. Without them, the old guard social media companies will become the walking dead—and their executives and investors know it. Nobody wants to be the next MySpace (which still exists, by the way).

The truth is it’s really hard to kill a social media company completely. I know this from first-hand experience. Two of my prior companies were once fast-growing social media companies that just as quickly entered the realm of the undead. Spoke, which aspired to compete with LinkedIn as a social network for professionals but morphed into a data aggregator, and hi5, a social network that gained popularity thanks to international translations before Facebook rose to global prominence then pivoted into a social gaming site, both still exist—17 and 11 years later, respectively. Although the users, revenue, and investors are long gone, there is enough detritus bouncing around that it’s more expensive to shut them down than to let them continue generating whatever meager income they can. Like zombies wandering the internet landscape looking for brain remnants of their lost user bases.

The greatest fear of Mark Zuckerberg and the reason Twitter’s Jack Dorsey threw in the towel, is that those platforms are on their way to zombie status. Don’t believe me? Ask anyone under 30 what they think about Facebook. If they’ve even heard of it. The reality of the fickle consumer internet is it’s a hits-driven business. Just like music, movies, and video games, social media sites can rapidly rise, but just as easily and inexorably go out of fashion. Based on my experience and observations, I’ve created this helpful infographic I call “Mike’s Social Media Lifecycle” to explain the very natural phenomenon Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and others are going through.

Though the slope, duration, and arc of this lifecycle may vary, it is as immutable as the laws of physics. My parlor game whenever somebody disputes this premise in casual conversation is to ask them to name a social media platform (or really any consumer internet service) that, once it peaked and lost its cool factor, reinvented itself and regained its momentum. I have yet to hear anyone even offer a reply, let alone a compelling response. Just like 80s hair metal bands, Frasier reruns, and Dennis Rodman, social media platforms don’t age well. Once they jump the proverbial shark, nothing can bring them back—though nothing can kill them either.

I’m not saying Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have become zombies just yet. They still have billions of users and may yet extend their useful life. On the lifecycle chart, I’d put Instagram at Stage 8, Facebook at Stage 10, and Twitter tipping into the downward spiral of Stage 11 with Elon Musk shoveling stacks of money into the furnace to achieve failure even faster. But all of them will get to zombie status eventually, joining a long list of social networks before them. TikTok will end up there too before long.

This dynamic is perhaps the most confounding reason it is so difficult to regulate consumer internet companies. By the time regulators wake up to the monopolistic threat of the current dominant market leader, and the slow wheels of democracy endeavor to do something about it, some new upstart is already kicking the incumbent’s ass. It’s like tying an anchor to a sinking dinghy—you’re just hastening its demise.

The difference between social media platforms and other hits-driven businesses is that at that peak of the hill, multi-billionaires are created. Sure a hit song or TV show or video game can make its creators a lot of money, but not social media sized money. The smart founders get off the ride before the inevitable plunge. Time will tell who the smart ones will be. In the meantime, I need to create a TikTok account—an act that will guarantee it will soon become uncool.

Social Media Zombies