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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

#291

Post by majani »

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 would need a shitload of personal data to reach the point of "it just works." This means that it's most likely one of the tech giants that will do this right

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

#292

Post by Kurtz79 »

spacehome wrote: post #278
Kurtz79 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at a local level. In many countries in Europe, WhatsApp is just about ubiquitous, and used by the average guy way more often than email. The same (from what I understand) for WeChat in China. Yes, if you need to communicate outside of your local circle of family and friends, e-mail is still king (for business communication for example, no contest), but how often does the average guy does it?

I'm a little shocked at your experience. It doesn't match my experience. Literally everyone I know has an email address.

Yes, everybody has an e-mail address, I'm talking about day-to-day communication and how much each medium is used.

My brother/sister/mom/friends might use the e-mail once or twice per day, while they would use IM on mobile dozens of times per day.

When you see people on public tranport or on the street writing on their mobile, what do you think they are doing?

Most of the time they are using some kind of IM, not writing an email.

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

#293

Post by ace_of_spades »

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.…

Thanks for your comment!

While I agree with your overall outline that „something“ is lost from current social media, I would argue that analytics or more specifically analtical mindset in general should not be blamed for this. Analytics is simply a tool that can be used for good and for bad. The real problem are bad overall societal incentives and ideals (i.e., focus on profits and other narrow/short term metrics) which lead to missuse of these powerful and potentially highly useful/benefical tools.

So I don‘t think we necessarily need to resort to an complete change of the tech stack (i.e., web 3), but should simply try to support projects focused on better incentieves and ideals (e.g., Mastodon over Facebook/Twitter) no matter the technology stack. Nevertheless, I agree that web 3 may enable more idealistic/well aligned business models in the long run.

Another thing to push for may be more end user friendly legislation such as GDPR. While it may stiffle innovation by small companies in the short run, having long term standardization around good practices will hopefully create better and enable easier scale up of organizations in the future. Hope some researchers are coming up with good designs to investigate the effects of such legislation on the internet landscape. (On that note, can someone tell me again why impact evaluation of laws is not a standard practice, yet?! How much grieve could be spared if we decided to use evidence and facts to ground legislation...)

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

#294

Post by welly »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #284
welly wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how you can say this when Meetup has been around for years. It does exactly what you describe.

By the same token, what does Facebook do that MySpace didn't?

My comment was in response to:

"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)."

When clearly Meetup have both attacked and been very successful in "putting together complete strangers with shared interests and coincident physical locality". That's exactly what they do, would you not agree?

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

#295

Post by CamperBob2 »

welly wrote: post #294
CamperBob2 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the same token, what does Facebook do that MySpace didn't?

My comment was in response to: "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)." When clearly Meetup have both attacked and been very successful in "putting together complete strangers with shared interests and coincident physical locality". That's exactly what they…

I'm honestly not that familiar with Meetup. I thought it was basically just a calendar for keeping track of local events. Do people maintain profiles or personal pages on it?

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

#296

Post by godzillabrennus »

ngngngng wrote: post #75
godzillabrennus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snap's UI is horrendous and it has nothing to do with ads. Kids can invest innumerable hours to find and utilize all the hidden ways to interact but your average adult is just going to do the basics and will put it down. That's fine. Kids are often the market these social media companies target as they launch anyway.

Snaps ui is one step above a text based terminal, I just have to learn all the swipes and taps and menu layouts through trial and error.

At least software that ran in a text based terminal would customarily come with a manual.

Snap is a lot like that magic bag in Harry Potter that was bigger on the inside. You never knew what was in there till you stuck your hands in and hoped for the best.

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

#297

Post by hcknwscommenter »

shawn wrote: post #119
hcknwscommenter wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It causes problems because then there is no profit incentive and then there goes the entire content creation industry.

You can remix themes and ideas all you want. Just don't call it Darth Vader and profit off other people's investment in that specific expression of the space opera.

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

#298

Post by hcknwscommenter »

frockington wrote: post #263
tw04 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

Yes it is.

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

#299

Post by hcknwscommenter »

jchw wrote: post #110
hcknwscommenter wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

except he will be 0.1 generations behind. Literally, the day you release your update he will start feverishly reverse engineering it. Once you show the way with all your hard work, copying becomes easy. Good luck monetizing that.

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…

It is not unsafe if the cracker is an actual company with brand, customer service, etc., because such a thing will at least briefly exist in an environment with no IP protection.

Then it all goes to heck because innovation just grinds to a halt.

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