Modern social media is just losing its charm and becoming corporatized. Even 10 years ago there were more unique social media sites. Tumblr allowed high customization with custom html and css to...
Modern social media is just losing its charm and becoming corporatized. Even 10 years ago there were more unique social media sites.
Tumblr allowed high customization with custom html and css to get users invested in creating a unique space to express themselves. Askfm allowed people to ask anonymous questions to their friends/enemies. Vine existed for a short while and kicked off the short form video craze that dominates social media today. Yikyak and After School created a hyperlocal network by creating a geographically locked message board that could be accessed anonymously on a mobile device. Snapchat introduced content that can only be experienced for a short moment before it’s gone forever.
One thing all these sites had in common was that they didn’t try to be everything at once. They all had a purpose and tried to be the best at what they did. Also those sites didn’t try to necessarily create a brand new virtual reality, but augment real life.
Nowadays every site feels like it’s trying to pack every feature into one place and create an online world that its users never have to leave. Social media used to be great because it augmented being social in real life. Now it feels like social media is trying to replace real life and I think lots of users have started to catch on and reject that idea.
This is what happens when a company put increasing profits ahead of literally everything else. It is no longer sufficient to have your own niche, provide one thing really well, because there is...
This is what happens when a company put increasing profits ahead of literally everything else. It is no longer sufficient to have your own niche, provide one thing really well, because there is limits potential for growth in that. So instead, companies look towards whatever other companies in their space are doing and do their best to steal the idea. It doesn't have be done well, it just has to add something, anything, to their bottom dollar. It's extremely noticeable in tech and social media companies, but it's a problem everywhere. The enshittification we're seeing is the result of entire industries putting short term profits ahead of long term sustainability.
It seems like the headline only focuses on one part of the story. It's not surprising to me that as social media platforms lean more heavily into monetization and ads they bleed some amount of...
It seems like the headline only focuses on one part of the story. It's not surprising to me that as social media platforms lean more heavily into monetization and ads they bleed some amount of users to private spaces where ads cannot (easily) infiltrate. But the article also brings up this point:
"Even with the backing of Meta, Threads may not have the juice to make it through, because it doesn't offer users a new way to interact. It follows in the footsteps of other buzzy startups that rise to the top for weeks, even days, before users get bored. The core issue is that these apps don't solve anything new. They are mostly copycat versions of each other."
The article frames the situation as private chat rooms being so appealing they'll pulling people away, but maybe it's the reverse? Maybe platforms are getting so boring, people are searching for anything else. And absent a new platform that's not just copying the model of the big players, private chat rooms are the default to fall back to.
I don't even think it's just the ads. I think mostly people want to keep in touch with their friends but social media, especially the stuff Meta runs, keeps prodding them to start following or get...
Exemplary
It seems like the headline only focuses on one part of the story. It's not surprising to me that as social media platforms lean more heavily into monetization and ads they bleed some amount of users to private spaces where ads cannot (easily) infiltrate. But the article also brings up this point:
I don't even think it's just the ads. I think mostly people want to keep in touch with their friends but social media, especially the stuff Meta runs, keeps prodding them to start following or get content injected from people they don't know. This eventually takes it from an active medium (interacting with friends) to a passive one (consuming "content" from "creators"). It's like the difference between having a video chat and channel surfing. Or having a conversation with a group of people vs. listening to a podcast where two hosts are having a conversation with each other. I could just respond in the general direction of my phone when a podcast host says something, and that's only marginally less likely to be heard by anyone than if I posted it on a twitter thread under them.
It's not bad, per se, but it's a fundamentally different thing. And yet the whole UI paradigm treats them like they're the same. That's where the problems happen. I don't want Chrissy Teigen's announcement about having a baby to be mingled up with my friend from college's announcement. I follow Chrissy Teigen, but we don't know each other. Yet social media platforms keep trying to put her stuff on an equal footing with the real relationships I have with people in my life. In fact, it probably privileges that stuff more because it gets more engagement in aggregate. This just replaces social interactions with parasocial ones, which is deeply alienating.
Group chats are fundamentally social though. It's not mixing up those social contexts into a big blender.
ABSOLUTELY! I spent a little bit of time replacing it with bsky, here, and youtube, but bsky and here simply don't have that many posts (which is a benefit, I'd rather see fewer high quality posts...
Reddit's rugpull helped me quit 90%+ of this pattern that was already low enough to not obviously be a problem, and I feel much better for it. There's space in my day like I wouldn't have believed.
ABSOLUTELY! I spent a little bit of time replacing it with bsky, here, and youtube, but bsky and here simply don't have that many posts (which is a benefit, I'd rather see fewer high quality posts than an ocean of crap), and youtube's recommendation engine has gotten noticeably much worse lately. I've been looking for an alternative, maybe just my yt subscriptions + my friends' and nothing else. There's so much low quality algorithm optimized content on youtube now, and I just don't care to have my time wasted by it anymore.
Social media started off as a cool idea. A shared wall where my friends could all post stuff and see what was going on with each others lives. Eventually, it started becoming a social norm to...
Social media started off as a cool idea. A shared wall where my friends could all post stuff and see what was going on with each others lives.
Eventually, it started becoming a social norm to friend every single person you’ve ever met and even a lot of people you haven’t on social media, so it stopped being fun because you could no longer be yourself. That was the beginning of the end, and now I get shown content from total strangers I’m not even friends with for some idiotic reason, and because that’s now the main use case, I can’t even disable that functionality. They’re all useless for anything but consuming the most low denominator, bottom of the barrel content in order to waste time now.
I wish Google had gotten G+ together sooner in a coherent way. Circles was a great early take at being able to present different sides of yourself to different people. Part of the problem being...
I wish Google had gotten G+ together sooner in a coherent way.
Circles was a great early take at being able to present different sides of yourself to different people.
Part of the problem being that Google sees all...but it solved nicely the gap between my work self and my personal self in a fairly nice UI without full segregation of 'linkedin for business, facebook for friends'.
Over 90% of the user base has apparently abandoned Threads. And I think part of the problem is that it's a shittier Twitter clone that lacks the basic functionality which even Mastodon offers. I...
Over 90% of the user base has apparently abandoned Threads. And I think part of the problem is that it's a shittier Twitter clone that lacks the basic functionality which even Mastodon offers.
I don't see Elon Musk successfully pivoting X into an 'everything app' before they're inevitably driven to bankruptcy, because it doesn't even offer anything other than the ability to post or DM at present. Sometimes I wonder if Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter was an elaborate shitpost that cost him billions, or if he truly had malicious intent to kill the platform all along.
Messager is definitely my main chat app even if I never do anything on Facebook anymore. It's crazy how Facebook seemed like a thing that would never go away. Everyone had an account. Then one...
Messager is definitely my main chat app even if I never do anything on Facebook anymore. It's crazy how Facebook seemed like a thing that would never go away. Everyone had an account. Then one year I realized that right under a bunch of happy birthday posts on my wall were a bunch of birthday posts from the year before. I had gone an entire year without posting anything and hadn't even noticed.
I definitely felt something like this the first time I used Twitter. I followed the handful of friends that used it, then a bunch of comedians, celebrities and hobby based accounts. Almost...
I definitely felt something like this the first time I used Twitter. I followed the handful of friends that used it, then a bunch of comedians, celebrities and hobby based accounts.
Almost immediately I realized that my friends who posted once in a while were buried under the mountain of other tweets from the more professional accounts. I was wishing there was a button to separate the tweets into different lists. After a week or two I stopped using it.
It is what it is. Like with many things, social media had a bit of a oversaturation and now is in a market correction, but it'll be around. The two types of communication are just fundamentally...
It is what it is. Like with many things, social media had a bit of a oversaturation and now is in a market correction, but it'll be around.
The two types of communication are just fundamentally different. You're always going to be different when broadcasting to the world, versus talking only to a select group of friends. That's just human nature. Both will be around, because sometimes you want to talk to the world, even if you have to take up a different persona.
That it wasn't always true in the beginning of social media was more just lag time. People never had the opportunity to blast out their thoughts to the world before, so they weren't use to it, and the first tweets were more intimate as a result. But it's inevitable that you are more closed off. Once people adapted, this is what you get.
It's of course not dead. Websites do become more or less popular but that's different from going offline. Which websites shut down? (Google+, but that was years ago.) Claiming things are dead that...
It's of course not dead. Websites do become more or less popular but that's different from going offline. Which websites shut down? (Google+, but that was years ago.)
Claiming things are dead that aren't is a clickbait headline tactic.
Edit: I just remembered that I do have the 'edit title' permission, so I copied the headline HN used.
I'm also really getting tired of clickbait articles like these. Facebook has nearly 3 billion active users per month. Instagram has nearly 2 billion. TikTok is just over 1 billion. Social media is...
I'm also really getting tired of clickbait articles like these. Facebook has nearly 3 billion active users per month. Instagram has nearly 2 billion. TikTok is just over 1 billion. Social media is nowhere near "dead".
Even so, none of the three sites mentioned has ever seen a year-over-year decline in active monthly users. Facebook has slowed in recent years to be sure, but it's still climbing. Instagram surged...
Even so, none of the three sites mentioned has ever seen a year-over-year decline in active monthly users. Facebook has slowed in recent years to be sure, but it's still climbing. Instagram surged through the pandemic, increasing active users from 1.3 million to 2 million between 2020 and 2021. Tiktok continues adding users as well, posting a 14% increase in the last year.
Social media isn't even in decline. It's still growing hand over fist.
The article isn’t talking about declines in use of the apps though. It’s talking about declines in people using the apps to share and socialize.
The article isn’t talking about declines in use of the apps though. It’s talking about declines in people using the apps to share and socialize.
Despite the efforts of big incumbents and buzzy new apps, the old ways of posting are gone, and people don't want to go back. Even Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, admitted that users have moved on to direct messages, closed communities, and group chats. Regularly posting content is now largely confined to content creators and influencers, while non-creators are moving toward sharing bits of their lives behind private accounts.
I mean... isn't this an agreement with the title being misleading clickbait? People are still using social media, they're just using it differently. It's not in decline, its use is just changing.
I mean... isn't this an agreement with the title being misleading clickbait? People are still using social media, they're just using it differently. It's not in decline, its use is just changing.
It’s in decline for the functions people used it for. That’s pretty clear from colloquial use if something being dead. People always say such and such a trendy place is dead because it’s too...
It’s in decline for the functions people used it for. That’s pretty clear from colloquial use if something being dead. People always say such and such a trendy place is dead because it’s too crowded. It means it’s not worth going there. The thing that was appealing about it has been wrung out.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on the definition of the word 'dead', even in colloquial use. The thing that was appealing about it to those few has been wrung out, but the majority...
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on the definition of the word 'dead', even in colloquial use. The thing that was appealing about it to those few has been wrung out, but the majority still enjoy it - the place is crowded. The place may be dead to them, but the place isn't dead, it's just different. It's certainly not in decline since it's thriving.
To call a service that's got such a huge, growing number of active users "dead" or "in decline" is just silly IMO.
Sure. Dead [in a certain way]. Not "Dead." The latter makes an inaccurate and clickbaity title article, which is my point. If my dog is getting older and doesn't play fetch anymore and prefers to...
Sure. Dead [in a certain way]. Not "Dead." The latter makes an inaccurate and clickbaity title article, which is my point.
If my dog is getting older and doesn't play fetch anymore and prefers to cuddle up on the couch now, I don't say, "My dog is dead."
Modern social media is just losing its charm and becoming corporatized. Even 10 years ago there were more unique social media sites.
Tumblr allowed high customization with custom html and css to get users invested in creating a unique space to express themselves. Askfm allowed people to ask anonymous questions to their friends/enemies. Vine existed for a short while and kicked off the short form video craze that dominates social media today. Yikyak and After School created a hyperlocal network by creating a geographically locked message board that could be accessed anonymously on a mobile device. Snapchat introduced content that can only be experienced for a short moment before it’s gone forever.
One thing all these sites had in common was that they didn’t try to be everything at once. They all had a purpose and tried to be the best at what they did. Also those sites didn’t try to necessarily create a brand new virtual reality, but augment real life.
Nowadays every site feels like it’s trying to pack every feature into one place and create an online world that its users never have to leave. Social media used to be great because it augmented being social in real life. Now it feels like social media is trying to replace real life and I think lots of users have started to catch on and reject that idea.
This is what happens when a company put increasing profits ahead of literally everything else. It is no longer sufficient to have your own niche, provide one thing really well, because there is limits potential for growth in that. So instead, companies look towards whatever other companies in their space are doing and do their best to steal the idea. It doesn't have be done well, it just has to add something, anything, to their bottom dollar. It's extremely noticeable in tech and social media companies, but it's a problem everywhere. The enshittification we're seeing is the result of entire industries putting short term profits ahead of long term sustainability.
Oh man, yak was an absolutely WILD time while I was in undergrad
It seems like the headline only focuses on one part of the story. It's not surprising to me that as social media platforms lean more heavily into monetization and ads they bleed some amount of users to private spaces where ads cannot (easily) infiltrate. But the article also brings up this point:
"Even with the backing of Meta, Threads may not have the juice to make it through, because it doesn't offer users a new way to interact. It follows in the footsteps of other buzzy startups that rise to the top for weeks, even days, before users get bored. The core issue is that these apps don't solve anything new. They are mostly copycat versions of each other."
The article frames the situation as private chat rooms being so appealing they'll pulling people away, but maybe it's the reverse? Maybe platforms are getting so boring, people are searching for anything else. And absent a new platform that's not just copying the model of the big players, private chat rooms are the default to fall back to.
I don't even think it's just the ads. I think mostly people want to keep in touch with their friends but social media, especially the stuff Meta runs, keeps prodding them to start following or get content injected from people they don't know. This eventually takes it from an active medium (interacting with friends) to a passive one (consuming "content" from "creators"). It's like the difference between having a video chat and channel surfing. Or having a conversation with a group of people vs. listening to a podcast where two hosts are having a conversation with each other. I could just respond in the general direction of my phone when a podcast host says something, and that's only marginally less likely to be heard by anyone than if I posted it on a twitter thread under them.
It's not bad, per se, but it's a fundamentally different thing. And yet the whole UI paradigm treats them like they're the same. That's where the problems happen. I don't want Chrissy Teigen's announcement about having a baby to be mingled up with my friend from college's announcement. I follow Chrissy Teigen, but we don't know each other. Yet social media platforms keep trying to put her stuff on an equal footing with the real relationships I have with people in my life. In fact, it probably privileges that stuff more because it gets more engagement in aggregate. This just replaces social interactions with parasocial ones, which is deeply alienating.
Group chats are fundamentally social though. It's not mixing up those social contexts into a big blender.
ABSOLUTELY! I spent a little bit of time replacing it with bsky, here, and youtube, but bsky and here simply don't have that many posts (which is a benefit, I'd rather see fewer high quality posts than an ocean of crap), and youtube's recommendation engine has gotten noticeably much worse lately. I've been looking for an alternative, maybe just my yt subscriptions + my friends' and nothing else. There's so much low quality algorithm optimized content on youtube now, and I just don't care to have my time wasted by it anymore.
I'd rather watch a good TV show.
Social media started off as a cool idea. A shared wall where my friends could all post stuff and see what was going on with each others lives.
Eventually, it started becoming a social norm to friend every single person you’ve ever met and even a lot of people you haven’t on social media, so it stopped being fun because you could no longer be yourself. That was the beginning of the end, and now I get shown content from total strangers I’m not even friends with for some idiotic reason, and because that’s now the main use case, I can’t even disable that functionality. They’re all useless for anything but consuming the most low denominator, bottom of the barrel content in order to waste time now.
I wish Google had gotten G+ together sooner in a coherent way.
Circles was a great early take at being able to present different sides of yourself to different people.
Part of the problem being that Google sees all...but it solved nicely the gap between my work self and my personal self in a fairly nice UI without full segregation of 'linkedin for business, facebook for friends'.
Over 90% of the user base has apparently abandoned Threads. And I think part of the problem is that it's a shittier Twitter clone that lacks the basic functionality which even Mastodon offers.
I don't see Elon Musk successfully pivoting X into an 'everything app' before they're inevitably driven to bankruptcy, because it doesn't even offer anything other than the ability to post or DM at present. Sometimes I wonder if Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter was an elaborate shitpost that cost him billions, or if he truly had malicious intent to kill the platform all along.
Messager is definitely my main chat app even if I never do anything on Facebook anymore. It's crazy how Facebook seemed like a thing that would never go away. Everyone had an account. Then one year I realized that right under a bunch of happy birthday posts on my wall were a bunch of birthday posts from the year before. I had gone an entire year without posting anything and hadn't even noticed.
I definitely felt something like this the first time I used Twitter. I followed the handful of friends that used it, then a bunch of comedians, celebrities and hobby based accounts.
Almost immediately I realized that my friends who posted once in a while were buried under the mountain of other tweets from the more professional accounts. I was wishing there was a button to separate the tweets into different lists. After a week or two I stopped using it.
It is what it is. Like with many things, social media had a bit of a oversaturation and now is in a market correction, but it'll be around.
The two types of communication are just fundamentally different. You're always going to be different when broadcasting to the world, versus talking only to a select group of friends. That's just human nature. Both will be around, because sometimes you want to talk to the world, even if you have to take up a different persona.
That it wasn't always true in the beginning of social media was more just lag time. People never had the opportunity to blast out their thoughts to the world before, so they weren't use to it, and the first tweets were more intimate as a result. But it's inevitable that you are more closed off. Once people adapted, this is what you get.
It's of course not dead. Websites do become more or less popular but that's different from going offline. Which websites shut down? (Google+, but that was years ago.)
Claiming things are dead that aren't is a clickbait headline tactic.
Edit: I just remembered that I do have the 'edit title' permission, so I copied the headline HN used.
I'm also really getting tired of clickbait articles like these. Facebook has nearly 3 billion active users per month. Instagram has nearly 2 billion. TikTok is just over 1 billion. Social media is nowhere near "dead".
Thankfully, someone edited the hyperbolic title.
Even so, none of the three sites mentioned has ever seen a year-over-year decline in active monthly users. Facebook has slowed in recent years to be sure, but it's still climbing. Instagram surged through the pandemic, increasing active users from 1.3 million to 2 million between 2020 and 2021. Tiktok continues adding users as well, posting a 14% increase in the last year.
Social media isn't even in decline. It's still growing hand over fist.
The article isn’t talking about declines in use of the apps though. It’s talking about declines in people using the apps to share and socialize.
I mean... isn't this an agreement with the title being misleading clickbait? People are still using social media, they're just using it differently. It's not in decline, its use is just changing.
It’s in decline for the functions people used it for. That’s pretty clear from colloquial use if something being dead. People always say such and such a trendy place is dead because it’s too crowded. It means it’s not worth going there. The thing that was appealing about it has been wrung out.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on the definition of the word 'dead', even in colloquial use. The thing that was appealing about it to those few has been wrung out, but the majority still enjoy it - the place is crowded. The place may be dead to them, but the place isn't dead, it's just different. It's certainly not in decline since it's thriving.
To call a service that's got such a huge, growing number of active users "dead" or "in decline" is just silly IMO.
It’s dead for the purposes people used it for, which is the point.
Sure. Dead [in a certain way]. Not "Dead." The latter makes an inaccurate and clickbaity title article, which is my point.
If my dog is getting older and doesn't play fetch anymore and prefers to cuddle up on the couch now, I don't say, "My dog is dead."
People forget Facebook grew to power only because it had FarmVille. /s