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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

#211

Post by cfeduke »

Zetobal wrote: post #170
Buttons840 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Discord is the windows 11 of chat apps. Ads and subscription begging behind every third click.

As I type a message in Discord, a pop up appears next to my cursor with some disabled Emoticons, prompting me to pony up my credit card and upgrade to Nitro... so I can include these in my message.

This is the forum replacement. Right. :\

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

#212

Post by nitwit005 »

If social media means a way to communicate with friends, family, and extended community online, it's pretty clear Meta and Tiktok don't want their products to be that. They've made sure you can't get a feed of just your friends.

It's natural the people who want that sort of thing will go elsewhere.

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

#213

Post by AtlasBarfed »

mancerayder wrote: post #154

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), t…

Content you go to has to be good enough to justify your effort. Or advertised to make it good enough.

Content they feed you just has to be enough to keep you from leaving.

The first category is what every "channel" invests in but hates to do so. It's expensive, the creators get expensive, and diva-ish. The second category is what all the execs love to successfully get away with making.

Comic book movies are perfect second-category content.

It's strange that TV / Streaming seems to produce better content high points than movies these days, considering you have to physically go to the initial screening of movies.

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

#214

Post by mcshicks »

mancerayder wrote: post #154

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), t…

There are some places where I still experience "Things Come to Us". The open library on the internet archive is one. Worldcat is another although I still have to reserve/pick up the items. Using RSS and w3m to read news is another. You can use something like UserLand to run w3m on a phone, and the terminal program is pretty slick.

I've been reading older books on computing on open library, like "The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit" written in 1984 by Sherry Turkle and it's fascinating to see the questions people were asking back them. My favorite quote from that so far is this:

"That question is not what will the computer be like in the future, but instead, what will we be like? What kind of people are we becoming?"

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

#215

Post by brap »

My Facebook feed is about 40% sponsored posts, 30% suggested posts, 30% group posts (usually from very large groups), and then maybe 1% actual friends (and it’s usually just something that they’ve shared or commented on, almost never actual content).

If we could go back to the days when 80% of the stuff you see is from friends with the remaining being ads, I would happily use FB more frequently and I’m sure most of my friends would too. Surely FB would make more money this way.

How did we end up like this?

I think once engagement dipped a bit, they started adding filler content just to keep us scrolling and seeing more ads. But that made things worse so they had to add more filler. Which made things worse. Repeat until it’s all just filler and ads and people don’t use it anymore.

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

#216

Post by rpastuszak »

nicbou wrote: post #110
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…

Our personal websites are so similar! ( https://nicolasbouliane.com ) I thought "wow that font is beautiful" then realised that it was also EB Garamond. The art really brings it together. I wish I sketched as often or as well as you do. Potato.horse is a work of art. How do you syndicate to Instagram and Twitter? I'd love to do something similar. I like your art and the way you chose to present it. I also met a lot o…

Wow, that's uncanny. Your site looks lovely. Random remarks: I also used a fleuron as a decoration on my site before I replaced it with a little doodle (I call him Janusz). And, I'm even working on a recipes section for my own site at the moment! Also, hope the little subheader with the pronunciation of your name works.

(psst just checking out your carbonara recipe, here's my cacio e pepe with black garlic: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OUytE9oUnmnwf5BPqt79vqi_...)

> it was also EB Garamond.

Yeah, EB Garamond does the heavy lifting for me design-wise. I use it in Enso (enso.sonnet.io) and Sit. (sit.sonnet.io). I also have an alternative "brutalist" font stack (e.g. butter.sonnet.io), which I use in less serious/"louder" projects. I think I picked it up from a Germany based writer IIRC.

> How do you syndicate to Instagram and Twitter?

Instagram is hard. I don't know if even Buffer supports it without any manual steps. For Twitter I used their API. A GH Actions CRON job would query Contentful for the most recent posts, then push them to Twitter using the twitter NPM package. Recently it's been quite janky.

> I also met a lot of people through my work, including close friends. I love when people reach out and I try to reward it whenever it happens. What you describe seems like being a participant in a small community, instead of a person on a soapbox.

It does feel like this. Sometimes I manage connect some of the people I meet this way, but it happens rarely. I entertained the idea of having a small forum (like ponder.us).

Let's talk some time! (https://calendly.com/hey_hey)

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

#217

Post by kelseyfrog »

brap wrote: post #215

My Facebook feed is about 40% sponsored posts, 30% suggested posts, 30% group posts (usually from very large groups), and then maybe 1% actual friends (and it’s usually just something that they’ve shared or commented on, almost never actual content). If we could go back to the days when 80% of the stuff you see is from friends with the remaining being ads, I would happily use FB more frequently and I’m sure most of m…

My mastodon feed is 100% actual friends. That reality exists; it's just not evenly distributed yet.

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

#218

Post by nonameiguess »

mancerayder wrote: post #154

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), t…

Some of this is knowing where to look. If you want medicine interactions, examine.com has everything there is to know about the published scientific data on dietary supplements, and the FDA itself publishes all of the drug inserts for actual pharmaceuticals with every know interaction and side effect discovered during clinical testing. Great video content still exists, too. I recently watched most of the Kurosawa back catalog recently, which I should have done years ago, but now most of it is on HBO Max. Every studio having its own streaming platform now at least means virtually every great film ever filmed is at your fingertips now, but you have to put up with the reality that you still need to explicitly look for it. They're never going to put this stuff in the trending recommendations or whatever.

It's like the world needs librarians again and maybe all the nerds who used to staff video and record stores, poorly paid but passionate purveyors of information who had no incentive to sell you anything because they were going to get the same shit wage no matter what. Except I guess we need to figure out a way to also pay them.

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

#219

Post by kamma4434 »

brap wrote: post #215

My Facebook feed is about 40% sponsored posts, 30% suggested posts, 30% group posts (usually from very large groups), and then maybe 1% actual friends (and it’s usually just something that they’ve shared or commented on, almost never actual content). If we could go back to the days when 80% of the stuff you see is from friends with the remaining being ads, I would happily use FB more frequently and I’m sure most of m…

Same for me. Lately my feed is full of Formula One and Debbie Harris of Blondie fame, neither of which is an actual interest of mine. And basically no content from people I care about.

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

#220

Post by rightbyte »

piva00 wrote: post #67
lotsofpulp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

Woah. I had never crossed paths with this, it's great. It describes really well an experience I had with a few subcultures... And it hurts I can see it happening in real time to a subculture I've been part of since the early 2000s. Thanks a lot for sharing.

You care to namedrop them? I have never experienced this, but maybe that is because I am too late to the party each time to realize.
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