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

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

#141

Post by kaycebasques »

matsemann wrote: post #91
navaati wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not remove these persons you don’t feel close to from your friends list ? When I was using facebook, after I moved in life, say going from highschool to university and my list grew with my new university acquaintances there, I pruned it from the acquaintances of the past life, high school people I knew didn’t matter so much to me once they were not part of my life anymore. So my friend list organically went throu…

Because I kinda want to keep up with their big events. Like kids, marriages, jobs, a new house or whatever. And I see some of them occasionally when "back home" and then it's nice to have kept somewhat superficially in touch. And fb works for that. It's just all the day-to-day stuff no one posts anymore.

There's also the unspoken norm that un-friending someone is rude. I frequently prune my following lists and then I run into someone I've met and imagine them getting slightly upset that I have unfollowed them. Maybe that sounds silly, but I'm pretty sure that a lot of my peers would say similr things.

The way that we describe the action, "un-friending", probably influences the notion that it's a serious / rude thing to do. We need some kind of UI that emphasizes that it's not a big deal whatsoever and is not a rude thing.

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

#142

Post by lifefeed »

89vision wrote: post #132
nightowl_games wrote: post #128

Social Media started it's down fall ~2008 when the teachers and parents joined facebook. I remember when facebook was _only_ the fellow kids you knew. There were inside jokes, offensive stuff, lots of pure text posts. It was _way_ different. Parents and teachers joined, a couple kids got in trouble for what they posted on facebook, and everyone stopped using it freely.

I remember when this happened. It felt like everybody's parents joined at the same time almost overnight

I remember the exact moment that happened to me. I was sitting with an old friend, and we were looking at Facebook friend requests from my mom, and we looked at each other silently, and realized that everything was about to change.

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

#143

Post by kaycebasques »

An alternative worth pondering: maybe social media just has a shelf-life of 5-10 years. You get into it during your hyper-social teen years, and then you get bored of it. That doesn't mean it will die. So long as we keep having young people there will be a market. But the social media apps are definitely delusional if they keep projecting that the entire human population will keep using social media all the time.

I know that this doesn't align with the article, because the article says that Gen Alpha prefers private messaging apps, but I still think there is something to this idea.

A lot of us here are the first generation of mass computer and internet usage and I think that clouds our long-term perspective about what computer usage will be like for future generations born into a world where computers always existed.

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

#144

Post by lifefeed »

Social media companies can get some of the people all of the time, or all of the people for some of the time. For a while Facebook and Twitter managed to be in the second group, which is an hugely profitable group to be in, and they both thought it would last forever.

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

#145

Post by jraph »

kaycebasques wrote: post #143

An alternative worth pondering: maybe social media just has a shelf-life of 5-10 years. You get into it during your hyper-social teen years, and then you get bored of it. That doesn't mean it will die. So long as we keep having young people there will be a market. But the social media apps are definitely delusional if they keep projecting that the entire human population will keep using social media all the time. I k…

Using social media seems common for people around 50 years old. Isn't it?

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

#146

Post by Buttons840 »

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…

HN loves to complain about Discord (with good reason), but Discord is anti-gloss.

Small Discord communities can generate a lot of discussion, a lot of user generated content. Discord is also a poor place to do stealth advertising; if you post fake messages about how good your product is, those messages will just get buried and will never show up in a search result; it's not very effective.

Things changed this year. We saw the rise of LLMs and the fall of Twitter and Reddit and the rise of federated social networks. I think the Twitter / Mastodon format is more robust for both small and large user bases; the Reddit format is dying. Real-time chat rooms still have a place, especially with the right tooling / notifications. LLMs threaten to replace all of them and end the online network effect altogether.

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

#148

Post by pmarreck »

Anecdotal data of 1 but I still post to FB and Twitter (uh, X) fairly often. I never got into IG (too superficial, and I actually prefer discussion). Tried Threads for a couple days and it never latched. Reddit (arguably accidentally) permabanned me across all my accounts after I accidentally used a different login to post to a sub I had been (debatably, mods can be jerks) banned on 1 of my accounts in a long while back (this literally flags all of your accounts, which they determine via ML fingerprinting, as "ban evasion accounts" which leads to a permaban across ALL of them... I wish I was joking), so mostly out of pure disgust I haven't been back even to view the read-only bits on a multireddit, and there's no one I can contact there who will respond fairly, so f**** Reddit (which is saying a lot, especially since I've had an account there since it was brand new!)

I've started checking out https://lobste.rs/ since I finally got an account there, but they literally make you wait 90 days before you can invite anyone else (I guess this is "anti-hockey-stick" development?)

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

#149

Post by p0nce »

bluetomcat wrote: post #5

It's not social media anymore. In their feed, people are bombarded with ads, news, jokes as regular "content creation" and group posts where strangers with a narrow interest in, say, collectible figurines are posting pictures of their new purchase.

Twitter doesn't show me the people I follow, and instead show people I "might like", in no particular time order. When I do interact, almost noone of my followers can see my post because I'm not an advertiser / paid user. Same from Facebook. So it's not worth "building an audience" if you can't communicate with it, and your audience can be taken from you at will.

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

#150

Post by aleph_minus_one »

andrewgioia wrote: post #23

> "How does a brand show up in somebody's DMs or Discord server if they're not invited?" Haberman said. But in many ways, that's the point. People can still go on Instagram to check on their favorite celebrities and influencers, but young people don't want brands and marketers infiltrating the closed communities where they spend most of their time. All people don’t want brands in their closed communities! Anecdotally…

> All people don’t want brands in their closed communities!

Since you can't avoid having these ads/brand placed in your preferred social media platform (the users are the product (to be sold to advertisers) and not the customers), the next best thing that you can do as a user is to subvert the undesired brands that you see in your social media stream (e.g. by posting something that makes fun of an ad that you see) to make the social media platform a less desirable place for the respective undesired advertiser.

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