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Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

The article is supposed to be about the "downfall of social networks" but somehow manages to ignore the fact that Facebook, Instagram and Tik Tok are all still thriving with no end in sight. It's basically trying to say that because Reddit is struggling with profitability and Twitter is struggling with being bought by a petty jackass, social networks are in precipitous decline? But I barely think of Reddit or Twitter as social networks. I use the former as a resource for niche topics and I avoid the latter at all costs because it's full of bots and repetitive political crybabies. Yet me and everyone I know engages with some combo of FB/Insta/TikTok several times every day, just like we have for years and years.

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And wishing Twitter dead is just the wishful thinking of the people who write for newspapers and outlets like the Verge, because they spent 24 hours a day on it and it catered to them.

For people who aren't angry about politics, Twitter is just as appealing as it ever was (other than the transition pains.) Among people who are angry about politics, it became less appealing to people who think certain ideas should disqualify you from speaking, and more appealing to those who either don't think that, or who think that an entirely different set of ideas than the recent status quo should be the ones that disqualify you from speaking.

Twitter is losing users fast. Even Facebook, which everyone wants to pretend is dying, is still gaining users every single year. And Twitter should be losing users - it's virtually indistinguishable from any other whiny, hate-filled internet comment section, only less anonymous.

I guess we’ll see now with the 600 tweets limit unless you pay.

Facebook instagram and tiktok, as you say, do not have the same searchable level of useful information in super niche subjects, which turns out to be the crucial difference afaic, the rest is noise.

While you are right, I believe searchability is not a criterion for earning to be be called a "social network".

In my view it is a criterion for "useful", but you're right, it's not as relevant to the idea of socializing itself.

I don't see Facebook (the core, original product) thriving. At least when it comes to actual engagement, I haven't seen any in years. None of my hundreds of "friends" posts anything anymore and we've been there since the Stanford days.

The number of active users continues to rise year to year, currently up to around 3 BILLION.

From what I understand TikTok is not currently financially sustainable and is supported by money infusions. I can't remember the numbers exactly but they price user time at something like 20% of what Facebook, YouTube and other financially stable social media do. When TikTok is forced to become economically viable, the cycle will repeat where some new company gets a license to burn cash and undercuts them at the same time TikTok's forced to make the site less pleasing to users. It's pretty easy to view TikTok as an economic weapon aimed at FAANG (similar to steel dumping).

I agree, i also think Tiktok is used by China in a way as to vacuum ap any available information and maybe even to weaken the big US social networks. And for doing that they have to massively subsidise it.

"When TikTok is forced to become economically viable"

Tik Tok is China's greatest soft power accomplishment. It's not going anywhere unless the CCP wills it so. Profitability is entirely irrelevant.

I think FB is not thriving, and actually is suffering to attract new people.

Insta and tiktok are not searchable so they are useless as archives.

FB is still adding new active users year-to-year and is up to around 3 BILLION monthly active users. Just because it's popular to imagine FB is in decline does not make it true.

Mm. Interesting. I highly doubt Facebook has that amount of users and still growing. No genz is there so that's that. I'm millennial and I don't know anyone using Facebook. Instagram is used mainly for business and sharing photos is going down since fb ruined. TikTok is currently growing without any any sign of slowing down.

Now, how many of those fb accounts are truly active? My parents have FB but they don't use it since all our photos, etc... Are being shared through chat. Are they part of the 3B mau?

> I use [Reddit] as a resource for niche topics

This is honestly the best way to use Reddit. I feel a lot of the hate is from people that haven't found subreddits useful/relevant to their needs, or are just plain ignorant. And look, I understand there's not enough time in the world to try out everything, but when people like you and I tell them that they can be useful tools, it'd behoove people to take a look before speaking from ignorance a second time.

I agree fully. This is how I used Reddit, but with the caveat that it was fairly well exclusively with third party apps. There’s a functional argument to this conversation in my view.

My workflow was essentially one of the following:

1. Read through my topic-specific subs; 2. Append “site:reddit.com” to Google searches to make Google return results that weren’t a waste of my time. Reddit links opened in my client(s).

Unfortunately for me, the official app and the new site are both absolute garbage. Wasted space, poor user experience, more ads than content, harassment to use the app, and they’re both just so _slow_ to perform basic operations. None of that has to be that way. Good design isn’t antithetical to ad revenue. I’d argue it’s the opposite.

I don’t really have an enjoyable way to engage with Reddit anymore, and that’s my biggest “pedestrian” gripe. Though I do take exception to Steve Huffman and Tim Rathschmidt’s absolutely asinine handling of the API changes outwardly. But since I have no enjoyable way to enjoy Reddit, my ideological disagreements are effectively immaterial.

Reddit is a content network. TikTok is similar but the mechanism for discovery and selection is vastly catered towards casual users.

Instagram, Facebook and Twitter all remain social. For business it’s a content network, but for most users it’s still social.

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