Twitter and tiktok appear to be holding their own though. Seen more "delete twitter" sentiment lately though
I'm guessing the others are similar, but I don't use them much.
The problem appears to be that most social networks get to a stage where they've saturated their potential markets enough that their only way to grow is to find ways of growing engagement, and one major way of doing that is to try to get people to interact more with each other.
Unfortunately that often trigger actions that are completely counter-productive, in e.g. trying to push content people don't want across the islands, and in doing so reducing the value of the platform to users. You may get short term boosts in engagement but long term rot as people are less happy. E.g. see the frequent complaints about Twitters algorithm and how they try to avoid you sorting content chronologically.
[incidentally I have a code base I used to do very basic bayesian filtering and ranking of tweets, as part of a bot; it worked very well at surfacing better content, so sorting the good stuff from Twitter is possible. But I got other things to do and also had concerns about investing more time in anything that relied on the good will of Twitter to keep working...]
Their actual engagement numbers across the general population are quite good. This sounds more representative of your bubble using different platforms than the general state of the app.
It might lead to the situation that OP describes where most of the “forum” conversation has died down but it’s thriving in various segments.
I got to see how teenagers were spending way too much time on their smartphone this summer: it was all tiktok and instagram, some twitch, and absolutely zero FB. To them FB is their parents' platform. Their parents are my friends and in my friends group nearly everybody stopped posting on FB. My father (74 y/o now) was at some point relentlessly posting on FB. He got tired of that and never uses the site anymore.
I remember when FB was big, really big, among my friends and family. Now it's a complete wasteland.
I don't dispute that their numbers "across the general population" are good but I just don't see where it's coming from. What's the age group still using FB? For what? Doing what?
WhatsApp and Instagram, sure, people are using that a huge lot: I see that all around me. But FB? Who's still using FB? I just don't see it. Among my friends and family across several groups of age it's as good as dead.
Once in a very rare while (once a year?) I log in to see if I got a private message. Then I check various long lost friends to see if they posted anything new and I see the same old picture they posted years and years ago: nothing new since. If anything people actively remove old pictures.
I don't see people around me just abandoning FB: I see them abandoning it in drones and covering their tracks by deleting past posts / pictures.
Now I'm not worried for FB the company: with WhatsApp and Instagram I'm sure they're doing fine.
> This sounds more representative of your bubble using different platforms
Sure but we're quite some to have our "bubbles" behaving the same way.