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.
The terminology explains what happened.
The Zuckerberg movie was called The Social Network. At the time we saw the likes of Facebook as networks intended to build 1-1 communications.
Since then, it’s become social Media. It’s now about centralized structures broadcasting messages to subscribers and followers. The only difference from the past is who the broadcasters can be, but it’s no longer about building networks between people.
I think we’re seeing a similar thing pan out with AI. When the barrier for something is too low, people realize that it’s not actually worth the other party’s effort to communicate it to them.
For me, physical communication is quickly becoming a signal that someone actually put effort into things.
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?
Funny, every time I've joined a new group for dancing or art classes or DnD or anything it's always 100% of the time a WhatsApp group, no questions asked. (This is in Ireland).
Never occurred to me that Americans wouldn't have a common group chat app everyone uses. Do Americans not all use iMessage, since pretty much everybody has an iPhone there?
Exactly this.
Plus the notifications for chat groups are basically:
- show me everything
- don't notify me at all
Discord is a bit better about that with "pings"
When I ran a student society we used an email mailing list.
You can have two if necessary, one only for announcements and one for discussion.
I have messaging fatigue at this point.
- Doctors and services offices use SMS.
- Some of my close family and friends use Signal (on my pressure).
- The distant boomers use Facebook Messenger
- With the younger people they use Snapchat.
- Almost everyone else in the country uses Whatsapp.
- Online communities for tinkering and foss projects require Discord.
God I miss the 2000s.
Whatever the group owner picks, same as it's always been.
No one cares about the actual choice, only that it is made.
> No one cares about the actual choice, only that it is made.
If the actual choice requires me to install an app then I care quite a lot and will probably decline to join in.
I don't think that I am the only one who feels this way.
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.
After Cambridge Analytica, my "intelligent" friends basically abandoned the platform, while my distant conspiracy inclined uncles started posting baseless slop.
I noticed last year that FB did some change to their recommendations engine, that they’ll show posts by random people based things you’ve searched. A friend was diagnosed with cancer last year, I searched extensively, and now I’m exclusively getting posts from random people with cancer on my feed.
It’s often very good at finding posts that I might theoretically want to read, except that I never want to read them on Facebook, because it would get in the way of seeing posts from friends.
Isn't that how it has been?
No, it used to be a shuffled timeline of the posts and likes your connections/friends have made but I guess when half your platform are bots, you don’t want to store that metadata anymore.
Remember the little dot in the end of the feed when you saw all your friends posts?
Probably a crazy though, but I sometimes wonder if the pandemic/lockdowns did a number on social media activity too. Maybe a lot of people got burnt out on the whole thing after spending 2-3 years stuck inside with social media as their only way to communicate with friends and family.
That seems to be the point where most communities and social sites I'm on lost a lot of their activity/enjoyment, and where people seemed to start fading away.
Of course, increasing polarisation, an increasingly aggressive/selfish population and worries about privacy probably hit hard too.
I've noticed that a lot of my friends switched from text based status updates (Facebook) to image based status updates (Instagram stories). Personally, I got tired of going on Facebook because it was all rage baiting political stuff, and that was all from friends, not even ads.
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.
Like the writer I'm also a 'boomer' still keeping connected to an older friend group using Facebook and Instagram. For Facebook, I use the plugin "FB Purity" to filter out the generated cr*p posts and force chronological order. It's shocking too see how few posts are left, by agressive algorithm filtering and FB then deciding that "You're all caught up", refusing to show more posts. So my FB time is about 20 seconds every day...
I stopped using Facebook back in 2021 when the majority of my feed was reshared political content with 20+ comments from my friends fighting about divisive social/political issues. It wasn't fun, and it wasn't fostering community, so I left. A few years later I logged in again to see that most of my Facebook friends had also stopped engaging.
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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.
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.
Not sure if I see a bad thing in this. I'd like too know what old friends are currently up to and checking their social media has been a way to do so during the golden age of facebook.
Lately I feel more value in connecting with them personally, talking and letting them now, that I am still interested in what's going on for them.
That's great if you're cultivating a very small group of friends who are local.
Social media is how I keep vaguely aware of what's going on with my friends who now live scattered across the planet and get to see in person once per decade or so.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. At the very least, it should be used occasionally to post things as a kind of "public memory," not to expose your entire life just for likes and exhibitionism.
I wonder what would happen if: if I post 2 pieces of content, my friend would have to comment on the first one to see the next one.
I suppose the app will then mostly be full of throwaway comments in the form of "Cool" or "Wow". But maybe add a modifier that if the poster doesn't have any meaningful reply to a commenter's (let's name him Elon) comment, then the poster's next content will not be shared with Elon next time.
It seems like so much of social media is just individuals shouting into the void.
It's stochastic communication, sometimes other random voices come back from the void.
Social media is a skinner box for likes and reposts. You don't even want replies unless it's an opportunity to get more likes.
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.
Social media mostly polarise people (both women and men, in different ways) and generally speaking what you post will be used against you at some point.
So yeah, no wonder that social media is dying. People are just catching up to the fact that the best way not to lose is to just not play the game.
Social media these days is 80% psyop, 20% attention grind. That 55% of Americans stopped posting would be a healthy thing.
Strava is now the preferred app in my social network. And no "status update" is necessary as it does that automatically.