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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

#151

Post by Jeff_Brown »

chromakode wrote: post #109
nicbou wrote: post #49

An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour. HN is like that. Small subreddits are like that. Group chats are like that. But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonal…

This is often termed a "Third Place" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

I love having a word for this.

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

#152

Post by delfinom »

tfgg wrote: post #106
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…

What was remarkable is how Facebook's Threads app jumped straight to being full of advertisers and hucksters - they didn't think that maybe the right way to bootstrap a social network would be to make it full of authentic conversations, at least to start with.

Lol, I think their plan is to still federate with Mastodon specifically to pad out their vapid platform with content. They were just too much of a self imposed rush to capitalize on Musk and his stupidity, to do it before launch.

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

#153

Post by HDThoreaun »

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…

There are tons of old people on social media though

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

#154

Post by mancerayder »

I've been observing a pattern that I've been trying to articulate here and I can best describe as a framework where stuff 'comes to you' whereas the Internet for a long time was an enabler of 'you go to stuff'. The pendulum swung back, thanks to ad tech, and centralization, that have or are trying to orchestrate a culture shift. Okay, here are some concrete examples.

1. Television/cable (absent a TiVo type device), things come to you (ads and programming were fixed and you had to conform to their schedule back in the not-so-old days). Early 2000s, we could download content (illegally), we could pay for Netflix to send us DVDs of our choosing, and the algorithm was benevolent: its recommendations were superb. Russian and French directors I positively rated -- ratings 1 through 5 stars plus a written review were permitted back then -- opened my world to suggestions for other movies that I got to select. Today, Netflix/HBO/etc display a limited UI set of options, highly hyped shows and movies shown repeatedly, and it now Comes To You. You have a tiny bit of choice, but not much.

2. Google search. Before, it was a resource for you to customize and find what you wanted: information about medicine, a product, or a store. Now, it Comes To You. You search for thing X, you end up in a rabbit hole of Y and Z topics or things, and a lot of things seem algorithmically generated or manufactured to steer you rather than help you.

There are many many patterns like this, from news searches to even tech problem searches and articles. Don't even get started on product comparisons. It's scary I can't even search on medicine interactions (I add reddit to the search field).

I should add, web sites all have their own mobile app so you get trapped, they can steer you, and you can't control ads, the UI, cut and paste, and so on. Thanks, world in which Things Come to Us now.

Such as it is: a heavy weight on pulling and steering us, and new generations growing up on phones not knowing it could be different.

Phones are an extension of our organ senses now. How will a world in which Things Come to Us and We Dont Go to Things anymore affect us cognitively long-term?

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

#155

Post by NikkiA »

seydor wrote: post #108
buro9 wrote: post #40

It might not be for everyone, but I'm posting more on social media than ever and seeing more engagement than ever... it's on the fediverse where smaller and safer communities are leading to much higher valuable engagement. I'm also finding it a lot more common for people to have multiple profiles / personas... the social one, the work one, the furry one, whatever is how you want to present yourself and to whom, witho…

TBH i don't get the point of mastodon. Social media is primarily "media", broadcasting, so they must be megaphones, which by necessity includes large scale commercial and entertainment activity. Mastodon's purpose of small cozy chats is better served by ... chat which is more self-selective and fit for the niches or countercultures

A full on chat program is more of an active pastime, whereas mastodon I choose to browse now and then throughout the day, and don't expect replies or reactions to be necessarily the same day, just 'whenever'. Perhaps that's why it skews so Gen-X older.

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

#156

Post by Sebastian_09 »

nicbou wrote: post #49

An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour. HN is like that. Small subreddits are like that. Group chats are like that. But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonal…

Although not exactly generic shopping streets you describe, but “anonymous” places also have been theorized and dubbed a “non-place” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-place)

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

#157

Post by Rustwerks »

queuebert wrote: post #131
CharlieDigital wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a bit of nuance in how these two are different and I'd say Mastodon feels more like early Twitter or early Facebook. On the consume side, that means your home feed has no algorithm. Practically, it means you only see what you want and you only see it linearly. You never wonder "why am I seeing this and how do I make it go away?" (e.g. Elon constantly in my feed for some reason) Content can only enter your ho…

I also found that Elon was always in my feed even though I don't follow him, so I blocked him and now he's gone.

This is the reason that Twitter is removing the block button...

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

#158

Post by Root_Denied »

Buttons840 wrote: post #146
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. W…

My biggest problem with Discord is still more related to support communities (what would have previously been a focused forum or subreddit) moving there, and the subsequent lack of archival of topics and answers for future reference.

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

#159

Post by BrotherBisquick »

buro9 wrote: post #40

It might not be for everyone, but I'm posting more on social media than ever and seeing more engagement than ever... it's on the fediverse where smaller and safer communities are leading to much higher valuable engagement. I'm also finding it a lot more common for people to have multiple profiles / personas... the social one, the work one, the furry one, whatever is how you want to present yourself and to whom, witho…

[dead]

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

#160

Post by muhammadusman »

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…

I love the domain potato.horse
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