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Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak

nytimes.com

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Re: Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak

#111

Post by mmt »

striking wrote: post #104
blitmap wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to sound like an ass because I wholeheartedly agree with you. The experience is hollow. But you can't invest in things you can't quantify. You can't make money off of good vibes and authenticity without metrics. Snapchat and the like have thrown enormous money at understanding humans and have the best people in their fields to get this right. I think what worked 10 years ago no longer flies now. How we s…

Cord cutting isn't just about commercials (indeed, there is an ad supported tier of Hulu). It's about control over what you get to watch, when. No more waiting around for a particular time, no forgetting to set the DVR. This has always been a nuisance.

Indeed, even before full-on cord-cutting was a thing, Tivo was (and still is, AFAIK) a thing, including speculative recording of content (i.e. it became more than just a digital version of a VCR).

There's evidence that this has been an evolution rather than a revolution.

Re: Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak

#112

Post by felix_nagaand »

na85 wrote: post #84
Alex3917 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Web 1.0 lets individuals create and express ideas > Web 2.0 lets groups create and express ideas > Web 3.0 lets societies create and express ideas It's blockchain. Blockchain is what gets us from web 2.0 to web 3.0. The technology is almost here, and after another few years of basic R&D the stuff we're going to be able to start building is going to transform society in ways that are barely even imaginable today.

Name some problem that blockchain solves that isn't already solved, other than "make illicit financial transactions". I'll wait.

Chain of custody.

Re: Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak

#113

Post by mygo »

danepowell wrote: post #54
benwerd wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's happened is that most of the major social networks only hire and promote people who make decisions primarily based on analytics. As a result these sites no longer have any real communities or organic content, and have been completely hollowed out by math-friendly refrigerator magnet junkfood. _Exactly_ this. Rather than understanding their users as real humans, having unique insights about them, and building…

Sounds like an example of Goodhart's Law: "When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric." Optimizing for something as abstruse as "engagement" seems like a great way to completely ignore everything that actually makes social networks compelling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

they’re just optimizing for the wrong metric. If the metric was “user satisfaction” they could target it day and night and nobody would be complaining.

Re: Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak

#114

Post by majormajor »

blitmap wrote: post #103
benwerd wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's happened is that most of the major social networks only hire and promote people who make decisions primarily based on analytics. As a result these sites no longer have any real communities or organic content, and have been completely hollowed out by math-friendly refrigerator magnet junkfood. _Exactly_ this. Rather than understanding their users as real humans, having unique insights about them, and building…

I don't want to sound like an ass because I wholeheartedly agree with you. The experience is hollow. But you can't invest in things you can't quantify. You can't make money off of good vibes and authenticity without metrics. Snapchat and the like have thrown enormous money at understanding humans and have the best people in their fields to get this right. I think what worked 10 years ago no longer flies now. How we s…

> But you can't invest in things you can't quantify. You can't make money off of good vibes and authenticity without metrics. Snapchat and the like have thrown enormous money at understanding humans and have the best people in their fields to get this right.

Not everyone can, but great products often have a bit of genius or perfect timing in their creation. Snapchat - disappearing picture messages! - wouldn't have been arrived at by analytics alone.

Quantifiable metrics can amplify good instincts, but it can't replace them, and most of Facebook post-newsfeed, or Snapchat post-stories, has been just the metrics-driven iteration part.

Re: Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak

#115

Post by dkrich »

How did this article make the New York Times? It’s awful.

I listened to the entire Snap conference call and Spiegel directly attributed the drop in active users to the app redesign, a fact that wasn’t mentioned until 2/3 of the way through the article.

Moreover, they gave no guidance for DAU projections, and merely said that historically fewer users are active in the third quarter than the second. This does not equate to a longer trend, it simply implies that fewer people are active in the late summer months than the late spring/early summer which seems to make sense.

It seems like the NYT more and more either wants to report negatively on the social media industry or has more success from these sensationalist headlines. What happened to thoughtful fact-based reporting?

Re: Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak

#116

Post by dasil003 »

blitmap wrote: post #103
benwerd wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's happened is that most of the major social networks only hire and promote people who make decisions primarily based on analytics. As a result these sites no longer have any real communities or organic content, and have been completely hollowed out by math-friendly refrigerator magnet junkfood. _Exactly_ this. Rather than understanding their users as real humans, having unique insights about them, and building…

I don't want to sound like an ass because I wholeheartedly agree with you. The experience is hollow. But you can't invest in things you can't quantify. You can't make money off of good vibes and authenticity without metrics. Snapchat and the like have thrown enormous money at understanding humans and have the best people in their fields to get this right. I think what worked 10 years ago no longer flies now. How we s…

> But you can't invest in things you can't quantify.

I hope you mean the current world of VC and the greater finance world can't do that. Because as individuals and small companies we can absolutely invest in anything we want whether there's a metric or not. Granted, you can't organize a mega corporation or a hypergrowth startup around vague values because you're so far past Dunbar's number that any kind of shared understanding of anything more complex than simple metrics is tenuous at best.

However it's worth recognizing that there's a real thirst in the world for authenticity in a world driven by global brands and corporate behemoths. There's plenty of room for other approaches, it's just not what interests the financial world whose interest is directly proportional to the number of zeros involved.

Re: Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak

#117

Post by egfx »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #76
leon_sbt wrote: post #69

I really wish social media would "peak" to towards meeting people in real life semi-spontaneously. No profiles, no media uploads, no digital showboating. The best relationships I have with other people fall in this category. Real life,common interests,no digital uploads. Just add attributes of your geolocation and hobbies [biking, yoga,tensorflow,etc] or let it crawl your digital profile(s) to autobuild your attribut…

This does seem like a powerful idea. The problem of networking friends, family, and co-workers has more or less been solved, but the problem of putting together complete strangers with shared interests and coincident physical locality really hasn't even been attacked except in very constrained use cases (i.e., dating services). It's possible that the next big wave of social networks will be less "Facebook" and more "…

The problem of putting together complete strangers with shared interests is solved by Reddit.

Re: Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak

#118

Post by florabuzzword »

Alex3917 wrote: post #7

We might be at a local maximum, but we're nowhere near the peak. What we're seeing is an end of the race to the bottom. What's happened is that most of the major social networks only hire and promote people who make decisions primarily based on analytics. As a result these sites no longer have any real communities or organic content, and have been completely hollowed out by math-friendly refrigerator magnet junkfood.…

I bailed at the advent of forced non-chronological timelines. I would have been less insulted if Facebook hired someone to spit in my face.

Easily the scummiest design decision I have ever whitnessed.

Actively manipulating the structural representation of time in a communication platform is begging for chaos. Yes, of course I know the time stamps are still presented. That is not my point. Communication is sensitive; very sensitive. Adding barriers in reverse like that signals to me these companies do not have a clue. The issues with this sort of thing will not be measurable or even observable.

Our lives and society are impacted in mass proportions by events we as individuals will never perceive, or have the capacity to. And this is precisely what thinking is for; we theorize, organize, and make sense of things. This is the basis for all of our potential, and that potential is all we have.

But this is not rocket science. It’s a sorted list. that everyone uses. And now it’s unsorted. for And what?

Re: Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak

#119

Post by shawn »

hcknwscommenter wrote: post #107
shawn wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like Disney did with Alice in Wonderland, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk862BbjWx4 "And now you, dear filmmaker, want to come along and want to make your own version of Star Wars: A New Hope? For shame! That's like stealing food right out of George Lucas' mouth."

Your comment reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of copyright law. It is perfectly acceptable to copy the basic "idea" of a story. You just can't copy or make derivative works of Star Wars or Alice in Wonderland themselves, but you can copy all the themes and ideas thereof.

The argument is that it's harmful for society to restrict artists from remixing other people's work. And when you put it that way, how could it be otherwise? We'll have to agree to disagree that it'd cause problems for people to be able to tell a Darth Vader story.
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