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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

#221

Post by rpastuszak »

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?

The other comments explain this better than I could.

In short:

I can post the same message on Twitter and Mastodon and get a thoughtful comment on the latter vs. no engagement/shitpost on the former.

Twitter feels like a bunch of angry people screaming into the void, whereas Mastodon is like screaming in a small cave filled with friendly weirdos. I like that. Eventually you lower your voice and start chatting.

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

#222

Post by klardotsh »

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.

If I recall from the algo weighting dump they did last year, Elon is hard-coded to be basically the absolute most important thing to the sorting algo with a pretty long decay time. When he posts, it's effectively guaranteed to be in all Twitter users' feeds, and that's how he wants it.

Then again, I don't know first-hand; I quit Twitter many months before it got this version of Billionaire Buffoonery as an owner.

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

#223

Post by Buttons840 »

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.

I've never seen an ad on Discord, but I have seen them trying to sell premium features. When I talk about Discord being "anti-gloss", I mean all live-chat formats, Discord, Matrix, IRC, etc.

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

#224

Post by brap »

kamma4434 wrote: post #219
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.

Oh yeah, this is definitely a great observation. Once in a while FB decides I have a new interest and shoves A TON of suggested content in my face, as if it’s all I ever cared about.

And it’s usually the most random things. Dragon Ball Z. Gangsta rap. NBA. Race cars. Marvel. None of these things interest me yet for WEEKS they only showed me those very specific things.

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

#225

Post by rpastuszak »

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.

Same here:

1) block the brain parasite,

2) disable half of the UI using an ad blocker,

3) condition yourself to click the "Following" tab without noticing it, and

4) voila, now you have a semi-pleasant Twitter experience.

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

#226

Post by irrational »

mancerayder wrote: post #180
Liquix wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellently written. A nitpick on your final point: > 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? This may be looking at it backwards. Rampant smartphone addiction and overuse begins to shape all things in a "medium is the message" type of effect. The less need there is to physically "Go to the Thing" -…

So you're saying we're allowing ourselves to be victimized by it via laziness ? That's certainly true, if that is what you mean. I guess the part I didn't speak about was: some people value independent thought more than others, and I think for those that do, the Things Come to You paradigm is even more frustrating. My concern is that children are growing up in the Come to You dynamic. Flip side: they can generate con…

>they can generate content and release it in the wild, something that couldn't be done even in the 90's prior to IG, TikTok, YouTube, etc.

In the mid-90s I was creating content and releasing it to the wild on my own website that was hosted for free on one of the myriad free website hosting platforms back then. Frankly, the website sucked, but it was my content.

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

#227

Post by dcsommer »

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…

FB has a friends-specific feed, but it is buried a bit. EDIT: just browsed it a bit and I was refreshed to see things that are at my scale and about the people I care for. I wish this was still the main thing with FB.

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

#229

Post by ngc6677 »

Buttons840 wrote: post #223
Zetobal wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've never seen an ad on Discord, but I have seen them trying to sell premium features. When I talk about Discord being "anti-gloss", I mean all live-chat formats, Discord, Matrix, IRC, etc.

Using matrix.org to post in public/private chat rooms is practical, and can chose any client to CRUD content, or subscribe to rooms (feeds). Element allows export of room contents (with attachments) to JSON or XML. https://libli.org/libli-news:matrix.org

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

#230

Post by nickdothutton »

When thinking about Internet platforms, the lens I like to view things through is one of power. As a user what power do I have if any, to control my experience? To control what I see when and from whom. If I have little or no power, or the power is only shallow or superficial, if the power isn’t very granular, then this all counts against the platform. It may surprise some (younger) members of HN, quite how much power the individual user had on early “primitive” platforms like USENET or closed user groups or chat systems, compared to the big, modern social networks of today.
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