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Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

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21–30 of 204 posts

Re: Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

#21

To keep people engaged, social media platforms have shifted from showing you content from people you know to prioritizing viral content. The algorithms know viral content offers an endless stream of entertainment that keeps people scrolling longer.

"Viral content" got nerfed to oblivion in 2013-2014 something when Facebook made companies pay up for group exposure. (Promoted post)

Before that a popular article could be shared among different friends networks to like total exposure to like everyone logged in that were somewhat interested in the article.

I was kinda a journalist then it was a really obvious flip.

Re: Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

#22
Emotions experienced chart - that is insightful and matches my anecdata.

I think you get bad emotions when you have high expectations about social media and it is your main source of social life. Where positive happen when you have low expectations about social media and it is just addon to your life.

Example of gaps is being lonely, low self esteem, low self worth, no work network, no business network. So you stay glued to FB to build your life, to keep online friends, because you may have not many in life. Or you have no real work network so you need to stay current on LI because your next job is there.

Re: Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

#23
Back in 2005-ish era, I helped reboot a college club (I was the coach/advisor).

We started out using forum software to co-ordinate what we were doing but eventually (2008-ish) switched to Facebook as the president of the club pointed out "Alex, everyone is already on Facebook and the notifications from us are in the middle of the notifications for when the next party is" etc.

Fast forward to today and the club is rebooting again. I asked the current club president "What social network is everyone on these days?" His response: "Really there is no one place where everyone goes anymore." I then asked him how clubs share their info etc and he says "The bulletin board at the student center?"

While social media definitely has its downsides (echo chambers, extremism etc) I do feel like it's a bit of a net loss to not have a "commons". That model makes it super easy to start up new organizations, get the word out etc.

Part of me hopes that we got back to the late 1990s dedicated websites/forums. That seems to be the Discord model but let's see.

Re: Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

#24
post #7
post #4

Back to 2015, I stopped posting on Facebook when I noticed that it’s no longer about connecting with my friends, but a never ending stream of boring posts from groups and people that I don’t know or care to follow. All my “social” life just moved to direct communication in WhatsApp (meta owned as well)

2015 for me too. I wonder if there was some early day over juicing of the attention mechanism that put people off in that year, before they tuned it to reduce churn…

Tinfoil hat time but I think they definitely did _something_ at that time that "changed" the system. It's the Cambridge Analytica/Trump time and I believe that FB definitely "changed" at the same time.

Re: Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

#25
Twitter and Reddit went hostile to their users in 2023 with their respective API and other changes. A small percentage of leaders sought out newer and better options and this time the followers stayed where they were, not wanting to start over again. But everyone talks about hating social media now and they're going slowly inactive. It's the most expected outcome.

Re: Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

#26

Back in 2005-ish era, I helped reboot a college club (I was the coach/advisor). We started out using forum software to co-ordinate what we were doing but eventually (2008-ish) switched to Facebook as the president of the club pointed out "Alex, everyone is already on Facebook and the notifications from us are in the middle of the notifications for when the next party is" etc. Fast forward to today and the club is reb…

I tried hard but am failing to see how what you say couldn't just be fulfilled by a chat group today (or even back then).

Re: Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

#27
post #19

We're all in small groups on discord or in signal now. FB feed is just not the best medium for keeping up with friends.

Idea of keeping up with friends while being public to the whole world does not resonate with me. Internet was a different place indeed.

Re: Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

#28

Back in 2005-ish era, I helped reboot a college club (I was the coach/advisor). We started out using forum software to co-ordinate what we were doing but eventually (2008-ish) switched to Facebook as the president of the club pointed out "Alex, everyone is already on Facebook and the notifications from us are in the middle of the notifications for when the next party is" etc. Fast forward to today and the club is reb…

I tried hard but am failing to see how what you say couldn't just be fulfilled by a chat group today (or even back then).

But which one - SMS/RCS? iMessage? WhatsApp? Signal? Telegram? Discord?

Re: Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried hard but am failing to see how what you say couldn't just be fulfilled by a chat group today (or even back then).

But which one - SMS/RCS? iMessage? WhatsApp? Signal? Telegram? Discord?

Exactly this.

Plus the notifications for chat groups are basically:

- show me everything

- don't notify me at all

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