Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by runevault » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 2:27 PM UTC

havermeyer wrote: post #156

florabuzzword wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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;…

One of the reasons that I like Twitter... It has a short section with "important" (by some metric) tweets since the last time that you viewed your feed, followed by tweets in chronological order. Facebook surely has the ability to do something similar but it would negatively impact how much time people spend on the site.

Personally I'm not a fan of this feature, but thankfully it doesn't do it to lists, so most of the more interesting people I follow I put into various lists by topic instead. That and I'm not a fan of the main timeline injecting likes from the people I follow, but that's twitter for you...

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

#262

Post by Raphmedia » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 2:41 PM UTC

We dropped Snap because it moved from being that nice platform to share tidbits of your life with your friends to a platform made to push ads in your face.

The "Snapchat" we have today is an entire different app experience to the one we all adopted into our lives. If you build a new app and then skin it to make it pass like something else, users are going to notice and move on.

It doesn't help that they keep moving features around. First your friends' stories were on the left swipe screen. Then they moved them among the ads to the right. Then then moved them back left... and now they are back on the right screen with the ads. To be honest, I haven't watched any of my friends' story in age because why bother learning where they are every few months?

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

#263

Post by frockington » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 2:42 PM UTC

tw04 wrote: post #252

jchw wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the incentive to crack it, to sell it? Does the cracker sell it for less? Would I be willing to buy a cracked piece of software? It'd be a horribly unsafe idea if it were, for example, security software or a tool for modifying my operating system. Even in a complete wild west, some people are going to do the right thing. Maybe even most people. Probably is far more a cultural issue than a legal or technical on…

>Would I be willing to buy a cracked piece of software? It doesn't matter if you would, it matters if the general public would. And all you have to do is look to China, where more cracked copies of windows are sold every day than legitimate copies. The only reason that doesn't exist here is because it's almost impossible for the average consumer to buy a cracked copy. If they were available at every corner store the…

Is China full of computers running vulnerable unpatched Windows? At such a large scale a future (or current) vulnerability could have a huge effect

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

#264

Post by gammateam » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 2:50 PM UTC

Qwertie wrote: post #27

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.

Could you explain exactly how blockchains allow societies to create ideas? I'm not sure how append only lists allow idea sharing in ways a database does not.

Distributed Ledger Technologies are unilaterally being called web 3.0 by the blockchain community.

This isn't THAT different than a bunch of startups calling things web 2.0 five to ten years ago.

so just roll with it.

The Ethereum project's javascript library is literally called web3.js

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

#265

Post by VLM » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 2:51 PM UTC

joeblau wrote: post #2

My main question is: Where are people going? It seems like there is a slight dip in usage across all social media, but I'm trying to figure out where those hours/days/weeks are being spent. Are people turning to more real-life activities, just broadcasting and communicating less, turning to other up and coming platforms, or relying more on private messaging?

Its the era of the notification and the interruption, now that we've addicted a fraction of the population to endless human-powered interruption we "need" to change all our software to have computer driven interruption. Consider app-spam in android notifications, the completely worthless notifications in the Windows notification bar.

The addicts will still get their hit, but much as bad money chases out good money, its too expensive and politically sensitive to have humans generate that attention / interruption rush, so have machines spam the hell out of us.

Besides, TV is dying, nobody watches that stuff anymore, and all those "push media" people need work.

Expect life in the 2020s to be filled with a lot more interruption, mostly machine generated.

Some interesting predictions: going to run into problems with work/life balance because of merging too close and spam explosion, such that even cognitively successful people are going to be much less well informed at work in the future than now due to sheer spam volume. Another novelty is we're in the last decade of the voice telephone call, in the death of the voice phone call era there will be bot armies in the cloud calling you dozens of times per day until you disconnect your voice call service. My guess is federated social media will have to rise when legacy hyper-centralized social media becomes pure propaganda and advertising to the point of being unusable. Possibly the same social factors that led to TV regulation of commercials back when people used to watch TV, might be reimplemented for the internet in a peculiar fashion. It'll be a major social status symbol to be interrupted all the time, much like follower counts used to be a big deal, of course cool people will spend all their time holding their phone to their face, swiping away meaningless notifications.

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

#266

Post by tonyedgecombe » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 2:52 PM UTC

quotemstr wrote: post #210

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you assume that, all the research shows we spend most of our time on auto pilot.

I assume my fellow humans are sentient creatures with volition and judgement. Do you?

No, if you want evidence then just look at the numbers of obese people in the population. People don't make rational decisions, this isn't some moral failing, it's just the way we are.

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

#267

Post by ryanbrunner » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 2:58 PM UTC

Klover wrote: post #219

xf00 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A tool should make me more efficient, hence, for the same task, make me use it less! It makes sense when you consider Android phones as a set of tools used by advertisers to reach consumers. The more eyeballs the more efficient the tool becomes.

It shows in both app stores on either platform. The play store gives me lots of suggestions on apps to download based on activity, and the iOS store has these write ups to promote apps. Both get them money. Does Android have something like Siri suggestions with P? Because that seems intended to do the exact opposite of what you’re saying. It is the feature that suggests your notes app if you often use your notes app…

It does have a suggested apps section at the top of the apps list. It's supposedly time / location aware, but I haven't dug into how effective that is (I tend to use 3-4 apps almost exclusively on my phone, so that's all I tend to ever get suggested).

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

#268

Post by daveFNbuck » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 3:19 PM UTC

lloeki wrote: post #187

danepowell wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Optimizing for something as abstruse as "engagement" seems like a great way to completely ignore everything that actually makes social networks compelling. Or anything else, for that matter. The most shocking part of Android Pie release[0] was the repetition of the "drive engagement" mantra (in the post as well as surrounding articles). Fundamentally, phones are tools; how good is any tool to me when it's purposely…

I guess that's why they took away the option to silence your phone. I'll be less engaged if it can't ring during movies and meetings.

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

#269

Post by acd » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 3:27 PM UTC

One can use Google Trends to analyze Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp.

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

#270

Post by tryitnow » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 3:35 PM UTC

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 don't know if that's it at all. I think the more likely explanation is that all of these companies are competing for a single, finite resource: human attention.

Maybe the opportunities for developing new ways to exploit human attention are simply drying up. Between streaming video, games, social media, podcasts, and just plain old traditional media (TV, radio, newspapers) how much more room is there to grow?

If I'm right this could be the signal of the current tech bubble finally bursting.