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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off topic, but recently I got to interact with a group of about 40 college students and took the opportunity to ask them what social media they used. Here are some results that if I was Zuckerberg I would find concerning:

- Facebook: 2 of 40 have accounts. One said he does not use it at all. The other said she uses it to pull up her baby pictures because that’s where her mom put them.

- Instagram. 3 of 4. Use it for its messenger capabilities, do not post.

- Snapchat. Nobody.

- TikTok. 1 of 40 knew somebody who posts videos.

- Twitter. 5-6 of 40 use it but said they are worried about what it will be in the future.

- Discord. A little over half said they use it routinely. I should have asked more about this.

College kids are often strong indicators of what will be considered cool by the next generation and it sounds to me like Facebook/Instagram is a walking corpse.

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As another point of (less rigorous) annecdata from a group of ~50 or so college students in Northern Eu:

- Facebook: they all use it for messenger only

- Discord: only a small few use it

- TikTok: a couple of them post, but all watch and pass them around

- Instagram: Most of them use it and post occasionally

- Snapchat: They all use it daily and they all see each other's real-time location. This is mind blowing to me as it generates a lot of drama: "Why was my ex at your house at 3am?"

> - Snapchat: They all use it daily and they all see each other's real-time location.

"They" are only the very beginning of a long list who see that.

Jesus wept.

This might change from place to place, but here in Italy whatsapp has effectively 100% market penetration. I don't know anybody except very elderly people who doesn't use it.

Not that I'm a fan of it, it's kind of garbage actually, but I take it as a fact of life.

Define social media though.

WhatsApp is only messaging. I don't see any ads really.

It has 100% penetration because companies have still limited number of sms and mms, so nobody use those

I'm surprised to not see WhatsApp on this list. In my country, it is currently ubiquitous (not just all acquaintances except 2, but stuff like "send us the message you want on WA and we'll print it on this bouquet" for florists, or for printer offices, "send us the doc on WA at this number").

I didn’t specifically ask about it.

I guess I don’t know what social media is. I think of whatsapp as akin to an instant messenger. Do those count as social media? Or maybe whatsapp has social media features I’m not aware of.

In the sense of “it has a feed and ads” then no. In the sense of “platform people use to interact with friends” Facebook and WhatsApp compete for the same market.

Based on how you phrase it, I'm either a heavy social media user or I am no social media user. Unless you count linkedin which I use to host my resume.

Weird.

I don't see WhatsApp as very different from Discord from this point of view, that's why I'm asking about it (also because GP was saying that they use Instagram for chat).

I wonder if there is somethink like Facebook, before Facebook became bad. A place to put up a personal profile, a few pictures, the bands you like, and then tell people to "add me there". A messaging feature, a "how I'm doing" status feature, and thats about it. No social media, no feed.

I seems like you should be able to strap a Django CRUD app, an ActivityStream library, and a XMPP (or Matrix?) client together and get a decent early Facebook clone in the Fediverse.

You can clone early facebook’s features pretty easily, but you can’t clone the usage.

Almost everyone I know has been switching to discord, the exception is about half of my family (including parents and grandmother) who has switched to Telegram for interactions.

How does that work? Do friend groups and families have their own discord servers?

Pretty much. I am a part of about a half dozen servers like that.

Yep. I have a couple "Family" telegram channels, and I'm in several discord servers for friend groups.

For a while I was living out of telegram, even using it to read Hacker News (front page items would end up in a telegram channel). I've since moved to RSS as it's less distracting though.

> - Discord. A little over half said they use it routinely. I should have asked more about this.

People have been using Discord to host chats for student societies, classes, to complete group work, and other school related messaging threads (seems to replace school subreddits).

There are some school provided class chat boards from things like Blackboard, but those are monitored by the instructors and TAs. The discussions tend to be more open and frank in Discord.

I wonder about how younger people have access to more distributed services these days, like Minecraft, selecting servers, there are more opportunities for interacting with services like Discord -- essentially things that are less consolidated than say FB or IG. So there becomes a preference/familiarity with the concept of distributed services and affinity for them (federation)...perhaps?

Here is the thing that Discord got right:

1. Signing up and joining a server is dead simple. Anyone from 6 to 86 can figure it out in a minute.

2. Discord mimics our social circles instead of trying to redefine them. Remember the panic college kids who first joined FB felt when they realized their parents and employers were on there as well? Discord doesn’t have that problem. Google Plus circles was a similar idea except it was overthought and way too engineered. Discord is just group chat where you get to define your groups. It can use a few more features in terms of moderation, etc. but it really just works for the use case of talking to your coworkers, family, D&D group, and sky diving club without having to mix them all into one feed. It’s the equivalent of SMS group messages without the hassle of exchanging phone numbers between all parties so everyone knows who everyone is.

That’s it.

#2 is the killer app.

I find the concept of servers really hard to explain to anybody...

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