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Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats

businessinsider.com

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Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats

#71

Post by lynx23 »

zirgs wrote: post #35
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes Early Digg was pretty good. Early Reddit had a lot of good help guides and interesting perspectives. Now on HN. And crossing fingers. (Slashdot seemed to go through the cycle, bottom out, and is ok again?)

Most niche subreddits are still good. Just avoid big/default subs and anything related to politics and culture wars. That's what disappointed me when I tried reddit alternatives. Politics and culture wars were there too, but niche subs were nowhere to be found. They don't seem to understand what made reddit worse in the first place. So I went back to reddit.

s,subreddits,events, and s,/default subs, festivals, in your first paragraph and it is still valid.

Saying that because I noticed this effect as a young festival goer. As the size of the event grew, the number of people I'd much rather not be around also increased. I am suspecting something similar is also at play here, in addition to the bot-effect...

Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats

#72

Post by dade_ »

azangru wrote: post #3

> no one is posting on social media anymore "Nobody comes here anymore, its too crowded".

Too crowded with robots designed to piss me off.

The bots are like tourists. The population of Venice is in steep decline, but the streets are congested.

Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats

#75

Post by dathinab »

IMHO this article shows a clear misunderstanding of what social media is.

Humans are culturally used to interacting with limited sized communities, probably even evolutionary idk.

When social media was new it was still limited sized, even through it was global, due to filter and it not yet having been adapted everywhere. (note: the term "limited sized" is a bit oversimplified, through I think most people will know what I mean)

Then it tried to add many more ways to uphold the illusion, e.g. by adding better filters and similar.

Then people moved to mainly consume social media platforms which do not create the dynamics of a more limited sized community, sure.

But they never did stop posting on social media which did have that property!

For example discord, which was fundamentally build around the idea of having limited sized communities with only some limited degree of cross community features.

Similar that family group you might have on WhatsApp, Telegram, Threema or similar _is still social media_. Sure it might be a bit more private but that doesn't make it not social media. And it can be semi public, too. And people post there "social media content" all the time.

Facebook is also still in use a lot, even through more in the background by older people.

In the end platforms like TickTock and Instagram focused on making people consume media, instead of creation of more natural feeling social cycles, but jumping from there to "no one is posting on social media anymore" just misses the core of the issue: There are many different kinds of social media with different dynamic.

Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats

#76

Post by Frost1x »

quchen wrote: post #15
c4mpute wrote: post #12

I think this is an eternal cycle. Maybe related to what has been called "enshittification", but not the same: Users will flock to a platform, make it their own. The platform will grow. Then the advertisers, professionals, and hucksters will swoop in, do their thing, and slowly overshadow the old "normal" users. Then old users will leave, leaving a wasteland of ads and glossy shiny. I'd like to call it "glossification…

How is this not the same? It sounds exactly like I understand enshittification. Literally: > First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. (Source: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ ) Do you mean that the context here i…

I'd say in one case it's a strategic corporate tactic: you intentionally build something to attract people with the understanding that you'll slowly boil and eventually gouge them if you're successful, peeling away freedoms and adding fees in some form.

In the other case, it seems like something is a victim of its own success. A product or service becomes so successful it draws attention of the lifeless leeches of society who swoop in to try and acquire and/or exploit it knowing there's opportunity there. There was no strategic plan to do this (other than the fact all leeches are drawn to blood as an inevitability). Also, in many cases, exploitation occurs from user space: we don't own this thing, only have the abilities of everyone else using this thing, but there's a lot of potential money there so how do we grab some?

Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats

#77

Post by sylware »

Will social media use AI to post content in order to keep attracting advertisers, showing that "stuff" is happening on their platform? Advertisers who should only trust One Metric: the correlation of the actual sales with an online advertisement campaign.

Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats

#78

Post by sznio »

jiofj wrote: post #57
rpastuszak wrote: post #47

0. It's been 15 years and I still don't know how to use Twitter. 1. Most of my online social interactions come from people interacting with my work (writing, code, drawings) through: - my say hi calls ( https://sonnet.io/posts/hi ) - Mastodon Quality > quantity ("the Internet is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is.", i.e. small niches are big enough) Not every company nee…

You don't know how to use twitter but you know how to use mastodon? Aren't they basically the same thing?

I never figured out how to find something interesting on Twitter. The algo feed doesn't surface anything interesting anyway. On Mastodon, since I picked an instance that fits my interests I can actually browse the local instance feed/trending and see things that do interest me.

Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats

#79

Post by neilalexander »

dzonga wrote: post #2

that's why tik-tok has grown. there's a sense of authenticity with it. no fake posturing. disclaimer - i'm not on tik-tok. just based on videos I see shared and posted everyn now and then

I'm not really sure on your definition of "authenticity" but it seems to me that TikTok users are optimising for the algorithm, for engagement and for advertising revenue just like on every other platform. If anything, TikTok seems to give users the power to be even more annoying and repetitive, between the computer-generated voiceovers and the same few songs being used over and over again ("oh no, oh no, oh no no no no no").

Re: Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats

#80

Post by philipov »

dathinab wrote: post #75

IMHO this article shows a clear misunderstanding of what social media is. Humans are culturally used to interacting with limited sized communities, probably even evolutionary idk. When social media was new it was still limited sized, even through it was global, due to filter and it not yet having been adapted everywhere. (note: the term "limited sized" is a bit oversimplified, through I think most people will know wh…

Social Media is a word that means less than the sum of its parts. It is not just the word Media modified by being Social; it was invented to describe algorithmic feeds like Facebook and Twitter. Discord is not social media. Discord is a forum, a type of thing that existed before social media.

Social Media's organizational principle is the user page, while Forums are organized by community and discussion topic. Reddit is also not social media, despite having some algorithmic features, because it is organized by community/thread, not by social network. You go to a subreddit to read the posts there, not to a user page to follow them.

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