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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

#311

Post by epolanski »

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…

vBulletin/phpBB forums and IRC were for me peak internet.

I would maybe add early Facebook for the social, but not funniest part.

Some discord servers do a good job at recreating the vacuum of IRC (albeit every single one of them has always way too many channels) but the vacuum of forums is just not well replaced.

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

#312

Post by epolanski »

markjonsona989 wrote: post #245
r00fus wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HN is way the driest and most soulless. Well if you are looking for memes and catposts, yeah, the S/N ratio here is quite low. Honestly I think of those things as noise, so I see S/N of HN as much higher. I can always go elsewhere for the vibes.

My instinct was to agree with the comment above, but after giving it a few minutes I think I'd rather have a moderated "soulless" HN. It seems to me that there is a fine line between innocent jokes and full-blown juvenile behaviour. The amount of effort you would need to invest into sustaining such a place is not worth it, best to just not allow it at all. There are plenty of places where you can get your dose of jok…

I think HN is fine as it is.

I come here because it is one of the very few places where you can have interesting discussions and read interesting comments from people with a similar intent and interest.

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

#313

Post by [deleted] »

jarjoura wrote: post #253
nitwit005 wrote: post #212

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.

Meta and I'm sure TikTok as well, would be MORE than happy to follow wherever users want to take the platform. The problem is, time and time again, users do not want what they say they want.

[deleted]

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

#314

Post by gumballindie »

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…

> How did we end up like this?

Shareholders, product managers, business people. Unlimited growth.

That's how these companies become shells of their former selfs.

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

#315

Post by OkayPhysicist »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #187
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…

I think online communities aren't. A pub is a healthy, proper, community experience. Any human interaction that isn't face-to-face is injurious to your health.

That's just a ridiculous statement. My friends gathering on Discord to play some board games or video games or TTRPG is not any more injurous to your health than any other social leisure activity.

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

#316

Post by OkayPhysicist »

VancouverMan wrote: post #196
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…

I don't see any real difference between your "online pub" and globalized-entity "pedestrian street" examples. They're both highly-controlled and highly-curated venues. Environments like those just encourage conformity. That, in turn, results in interaction/discussion that's rather bland, homogeneous, and sterile. I definitely find this site to be like that. The "showdead" setting very slightly mitigates it, but even…

The only way communities work is if people engage in some level of self-policing with regards to their behavior. Sites that fail to keep the kind of community necessary for people to largely self-police end up requiring top-down policing, or descend into cesspits.

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

#318

Post by OkayPhysicist »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #121
tfgg wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. I doubt that any social media platform owner wants authentic conversations - even initially. Instead of giving arguments, I refer to Paul Graham's essay "What you can't say": > http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html If people were really authentic in their conversations,…

There's a lot of middle ground between the stilted language of a corporate ad-read and people screaming slurs in a COD lobby. If you can't speak authentically without running afoul of the bare standard of human decency that is generally expected, the world's probably better for it if you don't speak at all.

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

#319

Post by OkayPhysicist »

dahwolf wrote: post #284
steveBK123 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also an age/generation thing. FB was cool until your aunt was there. Then IG was cool until the same. TikTok probably well through that cycle. etc.

I think my aunt is great and much cooler than my peers. I object to this weird anti-family culture. I don't give a shit what is "cool". It's a made-up concept, unlike family. Family has my back, and I have theirs. But I guess on "social" media being social isn't cool. There's nothing more natural and important than socializing with your family.

Eh, family is overrated. I choose my friends, acquaintances, and peers, because I enjoy their company, and they enjoy mine. Family is a luck of the draw situation. Luckily for me, my family's alright, but I have a far closer bond with my life-long friends than I do to some kid who happens to have come out of some person who came out of the same person as the person I came out of.

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

#320

Post by Atheros »

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…

The private messaging apps are modern social media. Social media is a service a group of people who know each other in real life communicate about things happening to them in real life. I know that a lot of people take issue with that definition but that is only because the well-known social media companies stopped focusing on social media and started doing publishing.

Posting on Facebook and Instagram is down because people discovered a significantly better social media service: group text threads. Those took off because they have a critical feature that Mark Zuckerburg doesn't believe in: privacy contexts. Good UI and lack of ads also help. So critical is this new social network to young people that adults on HN complain that their kids say that not having an iPhone (and thus a rich texting experience) would be "worse than death."

I don't intend to disagree with your points overall. Indeed, young people like social media more than old people.

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