I suspect that that what really ate up personal social networking was very simple: private group messaging finally got good enough.

15 years ago, we’d lost touch with old friends and acquaintances because there are a ton of people in our lives that mean something to us but that don’t warrant much 1-to-1 contact through phone calls or messaging.

Myspace and early Facebook reinvigorated those relationships with relaxed, casual networked update blasts, but then iMessage, What’s App, were able to make the same connections more private, more personally shaped, and more collaborative.

So social networks drifted towards public feeds and commercialized feeds, which is what TikTok — as a well-funded latecomer — had the luxury of aiming for directly.