Ask HN: Has social media reached its saturation point?

The future of Social Media is no centralized social media entity. Everything these sites/companies do, you can do yourself. No need for a centralized service, just connect directly with your friends, share what you want, directly.

So yes, saturation has been achieved. What comes next is the methods of how we as humans connect. (remember, FB was just a condensed and easy to use version of the Web at large), they just made it really easy to post and share.

Do you really think we'll need a centralized service to do this in the future?

Maybe, but it's hard to say because some of social media is trend-based.

People want to connect to each other, but they also want novelty in how they do it.

After they get bored writing on each other's walls, they want to try writing 160-character quips for public consumption. And when they get bored of that, they want to try taking photos and sharing them. And when they get bored of that, they want to try trading short videos of themselves doing stuff. And so on.

So when a given service stops growing, is it because all the users who could have signed up have done so? Or is it because some people moved on to the new thing? Or some combination?

People need to understand what the outputs of some social media companies are. I think Elon is just trying to get governments to pay for using the system to spread, collect, and take action on what is shared.

If say a company like Palantir or Dataminr are connecting in to monitor for some type of activity, Twitter could charge much more for that monitoring. Hedge funds could also monitor or access data on postings to see how a stock is fluctuating.

Twitter has a great concept and high end information based personalities on the platform, but its executed so poorly. Improve the interface, allow most free speech and you have a great population monitoring system that give you real time focus groups essentially.

Facebook/Meta went too big brother, collected way too much information. It was bad. I used to love facebook until 2014 it started turning with all the boomers joining, and the algo changes encouraging conflict.

I think Reddit will really be the next social media platform. It already has, but it uses semi-verified users, and anonymous users (less and less). Its been relatively transparent.

It takes a huge leap of logic to come to the conclusion that Musk cares about free speech for anyone other than himself. What he wants is speech without consequences for himself. His ability to speak is mostly unrestricted by any government power, and policy changes at Twitter will have no effect on what few restrictions he might encounter.

OK, given you're correct then how do people's lives compare now with those in the past in the pre-social media days? We shouldn't forget that for all of history until the recent advent of social media individuals had to 'connect' in different ways and that they were somehow successful in doing so—or civilization/society wouldn't exist.

In the past, novelty wasn't much of an option as people had very limited choices when connecting with others. Perhaps the question we need to ask is was this more limited (and much slower) choice better for people's well-being and mental health. I don't reckon we've a satisfactory answer to that question as yet.