Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats

> HN is like that.

HN is the only place that is not a pub: jokes are frowned upon, and even moderated out. Post Valuable Content, or GTFO. You can joke and feel belonging literally everywhere else, catpost half drunk and high, noone cares really, from the small subreddits and discord servers and fb groups to the big subreddits, discord servers, fb groups.

> But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonalds: a generic commercial space built around spending money.

We must have a different internet, every other place I know is full of personality and total unique, people repeat the same sets of inside jokes over and over. HN is way the driest and most soulless.

In giga-networks like Twitter, you might get some vague sense of a belonged-to community, but the boundaries are fuzzy at best and when posts find their way beyond those boundaries, context is lost and you end up with scores of randos whose full-time job is seemingly to surf the service searching for posts to clout farm with by either replying to them with their entirely uninformed (often inflammatory) opinion or quote-tweet with similarly uninformed ridicule, which can turn disastrous for the quoted poster if it goes viral. The posts that rise to the top are the ones that are the most flame-baity and controversial. It's a much more negative experience overall.

I have been on the internet for a while, and I always loved online communities because I did not have access early in my life to resources that I was interested in, and those communities gave me a sense of belonging and intuitive resources that fulfilled my life.

While this was great, for the last 6 years I have stuck to nurturing small communities with no more than 20 people because even gated communities (especially big ones in Reddit and Slack) are not fun anymore.

Several behaviors that I noticed in those small communities were:

- status game with participants receiving attention and dictating the "discourse" more based on social status than content

- Safeticism: tons of artificial rules that contradict even local and national laws

- Tons of non-contributing people are shitting on the water and pushing great contributors away.A lot of great contributors are leaving, creating the dead sea effect on the community.

They're both highly-controlled and highly-curated venues.

Environments like those just encourage conformity. That, in turn, results in interaction/discussion that's rather bland, homogeneous, and sterile.

I definitely find this site to be like that. The "showdead" setting very slightly mitigates it, but even then, I almost never find any sort of truly thought-provoking discussion here.

Those venues seem to exhibit a false sense of community to me. There's interaction, but the participants are either ruthlessly conforming, or they're walking on eggshells.

Low barrier to entry. Convenience. Ease of use. Sign-up and now you can talk to your friends from across the world!

Now, you have to be force-fed shit ads along the way.

I don’t think anyone who values their social life would like it if you put it like that, but inertia and the gravity of network effects are a bitch.

The real problem is these private platforms have the power of public utilities, and we treat them like public utilities until they pull the rug from under us, and siphon our data to profit psychopathic overlords.

Furthermore, these companies don’t just throw ads at you, they also aid the surveillance state which can compromise your basic rights to privacy and fair elections. Malicious foreign governments use it to influence elections with false information and propaganda. Malicious domestic government can use it as a easy spying tool by buying or scraping data.

No one will be safe on these things until we get proper government regulation. The EU’s GDPR is a step in the right direction but more work needs to be done.

I would maybe add early Facebook for the social, but not funniest part.

Some discord servers do a good job at recreating the vacuum of IRC (albeit every single one of them has always way too many channels) but the vacuum of forums is just not well replaced.

How'd we get here, well the inflection point was removing the timeline and putting algo feed instead, which was probably a response to dipping engagement as social media became less cool. The cool places nowadays are group chats.

Because sharing personal stuff privately, on group chats, groups made up of close friends, family etc., is the normal thing to do, sharing our personal stuff on FB, IG and the like was the exception. No, it was definitely not ok to share photos of one's unborn baby on FB/IG for almost anyone to see, that was creepy.

Glad that things are returning to a sort of normal.

- Part of that is age, of course 20's people will have less time to microblog than their teenage counterpart.

- Part of it is novelty. We're far past the point where sending messages to people everywhere is a hot new thing. So we simply won't talk as much once that wears off

- And lastly, part of it is societal. We are also far past the point where people WANT to post everything for the internet's view forever. Hearing about job opportunities lost because of FB posts made over a decade ago or being cancelled online over some twitter flame war means that talking is dangerous. You don't want to leave everything in your mind out to the public. So you either close down your privacy settings, or talk less. Why take unnecessary risk on stuff you may not even stand by later on?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law

Shareholders, product managers, business people. Unlimited growth.

That's how these companies become shells of their former selfs.

Optimization.

You've seen SEO, this is Social Media Optimization.

It’s that the platforms have been invaded by professionals coupled with an expanded “suggested for you” posts with a little bit of platforms pushing users to grow their graphs endlessly.

This creates a combination where posting isn’t really for your friends, it’s for everyone and do you really want to share with everyone? While at the same time the platforms are pushing towards being a content delivery platform and not a content creation platform.

> First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

(Source: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/)

Do you mean that the context here is not user/business, but personal/curated?

Small Discord communities can generate a lot of discussion, a lot of user generated content. Discord is also a poor place to do stealth advertising; if you post fake messages about how good your product is, those messages will just get buried and will never show up in a search result; it's not very effective.

Things changed this year. We saw the rise of LLMs and the fall of Twitter and Reddit and the rise of federated social networks. I think the Twitter / Mastodon format is more robust for both small and large user bases; the Reddit format is dying. Real-time chat rooms still have a place, especially with the right tooling / notifications. LLMs threaten to replace all of them and end the online network effect altogether.

> Then the advertisers, professionals, and hucksters will swoop in, do their thing, and slowly overshadow the old "normal" users.

It's more insidious than that. Corporations demand special treatment, favorable algorithms and censorship. In the past, when breaking news occurred, I checked youtube, reddit, etc to get more raw news from ordinary people. Now it's all censored on these platforms. Similar to how 'you' can't use bad words on youtube, but corporate entities can. The scales have been tipped overwhelmingly to one side. But I guess that was inevitable.

https://www.freedomsphoenix.com/News/225933-2017-09-22-faceb...

As a user (in particular as a non-paying one), you never make the platform your own. This feeling is pure entitlement.

If you want to make a platform your own, set up your own web platform.

Social media is both a platform and a set of communities using it. If the health of public communities is not good, people will migrate away. I do think that the past decade of intensification of the "culture war" on social media has contributed to its destruction; people are simply exhausted, and new users (kids) who've grown up in a high-surveillance environment are less keen to post about themselves because it's an attack surface.

Early Digg was pretty good.

Early Reddit had a lot of good help guides and interesting perspectives.

Now on HN. And crossing fingers.

(Slashdot seemed to go through the cycle, bottom out, and is ok again?)

Cool kids do their own thing (art, music, whatever), some people notice and like what they're doing and enjoy it genuinely. They spread the word and more people join the scene. Then posers come in and try to imitate the cool kids, but can't really capture the same spark.

Scene grows and an eternal September commences where the original intent of the cool kids and genuine interest of the original fans is lost, as newcomers are there just to be part of the scene. Eventually they dominate the scene.

Finally advertisers and capitalists see a money making opportunity and they monetize the whole thing, ruining it for everyone.

Technology continued to push this trend, reproducing art through photography and printing in books and newspapers let it move even further to meet people in their own homes.

These current patterns you are seeing are an extension of this, the relationship between art and viewer has inverted, art is now expected to come to us, the focus has moved to within ourselves.

Marshall McLuhan also expanded on this and the idea of technology as extensions of us with his work "Understanding Media: The Extension of Man" if you'd like to read more.

> How will a world in which Things Come to Us and We Dont Go to Things anymore affect us cognitively long-term?

As you touched on your yourself this was probably the default before the last couple of decades. There was a short period around 2010 where people (especially the youth) were quite divergent in interests and political views.

Today it seems people increasingly have shared opinions and interests. This is is a shift that's been quite alien to me since I grew up during the early internet when it was the norm for people to play different games, watch different films and listen to different music. There was no social media network effects and little to no recommendation algorithms or ads online.

Today this seems to have changed. Try finding a Gen Z who doesn't have an iPhone and isn't wear a pair of Nikes, for example. They are the result of the trend you describe, I believe. They like things not because they sought them out neutral platforms but because these things were pushed on them either by the network effects of social media or the recommendation algorithms and ads that litter the internet today.

Tools are things that you use to accomplish tasks. They behave predictably, and you can become skilled in using it more effectively.

Non-tools are things that try to adapt to you. They're optimized for first-time users, or to create an "experience". You cannot go fast with them, even with familiarity. They don't act in your best interests.

A hammer is a tool. Excel is a tool. Google search used to be a tool, but it's been more non-tool for the better part of a decade.

Sometimes people want non-tools. It varies with person and task. But in general, long-term users tend to prefer tool-like uses.

Content they feed you just has to be enough to keep you from leaving.

The first category is what every "channel" invests in but hates to do so. It's expensive, the creators get expensive, and diva-ish. The second category is what all the execs love to successfully get away with making.

Comic book movies are perfect second-category content.

It's strange that TV / Streaming seems to produce better content high points than movies these days, considering you have to physically go to the initial screening of movies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast

I've been reading older books on computing on open library, like "The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit" written in 1984 by Sherry Turkle and it's fascinating to see the questions people were asking back them. My favorite quote from that so far is this:

"That question is not what will the computer be like in the future, but instead, what will we be like? What kind of people are we becoming?"

> Phones are an extension of our organ senses now. How will a world in which Things Come to Us and We Dont Go to Things anymore affect us cognitively long-term?

This may be looking at it backwards. Rampant smartphone addiction and overuse begins to shape all things in a "medium is the message" type of effect. The less need there is to physically "Go to the Thing" - whether the thing is the television room, office, movie theater, mailbox, rental store, newsstand, grocer, etc - the more natural it becomes to sit in place and let Things Come to You. If we accept everyone using their phone all the time as "the way things are now", the vicious cycle will continue.

Examples are things like LineageOS on your phone and/or not actevily using it as an extension but as a tool, illegally downloading content (still thrives), it actually seems a lot easier these days to download music from lesser known to virtually unknown bands (even if it's just via YouTube) and I still find this like I used to i.e. mainly by going to shows or looking at who's playing and finding related bands like that, choosing anything but Google/Bing/... as principal search provider and using multiple search engines, ...

So, I'm personally not heavily affected by that steering but I do indeed fear that it might become a lot harder in the future. On the other hand we shouldn't forget that for a lot of humanity out there the previous decades they just got their information from 1 or 2 TV channels, radio, cinema, and a newspaper. If they wouldn't actively seek value they'd be basically in almost the same boat. Except that today's boat is a lot more pushy.

It's like the world needs librarians again and maybe all the nerds who used to staff video and record stores, poorly paid but passionate purveyors of information who had no incentive to sell you anything because they were going to get the same shit wage no matter what. Except I guess we need to figure out a way to also pay them.

Goodbye serendipity.

Probably goodbye creativity.

I don't want to push a value judgement upon creativity vs consumption, but I do think people should take it upon themselves to look critically at their own values, and what they want to spend their life doing - particularly how much of a balance they want between bringing something into this world vs. taking what they can get from it.

In creative pursuits, you want to "go" to the stuff that will be a tool or enabler of what you aspire to do. (And sure, you'll want some inspiration to "come to you".) You have to decide for yourself if you value "the machine" bringing everything to you more than you might value some individual pursuit.

This is because "recommendations" are a big business. For example YouTube generates billions of views from recommended videos and God knows how much revenue. But I think recommendation algorithms are counterproductive from the business point of view because you will sell less ads if your platform content creators figured out how to get recommended by recommendation algorithms.

On the other hand recommendations are good for users because they will hopefully discover new content that they like. Platforms just need to be more flexible and offer their users tools to tweak recommendation algorithms according to their preferences.

I think what you’re talking about is sort of like the recreation of the one-way channel within a two-way channel. Technically we can respond, but the amount of power our voice has has been lessened dramatically over the years.

I talked to one of the members of the videofreex recently (which is how I know about them), and his attitude was the classic “bittersweet nostalgia for my overly idealistic youth” attitude. He still thought he had a point, but he also felt like he underestimated A) the amount of problems that would come from disinformation and B) the amount of control that the old powers would still retain. I think he saw the structure of the media as reinforcing the social hierarchy, but now it’s looking like the structure of the social hierarchy was what was reinforcing the structure of the media… or maybe just a little feedback loop between the two… anyway the point I’m making is that just cause the media changed doesn’t mean the social hierarchy has.

I think the cognitive effects are already visible. We become lazy, addicted, complacent, distracted and anxious.

Experiences come to you instead of you going to experiences.

Potato.horse is a work of art. How do you syndicate to Instagram and Twitter? I'd love to do something similar. I like your art and the way you chose to present it.

I also met a lot of people through my work, including close friends. I love when people reach out and I try to reward it whenever it happens. What you describe seems like being a participant in a small community, instead of a person on a soapbox.

I'm travelling for a week come tomorrow, but when I am back in town I'll book something.

Cheers

If I e.g. comment on a photo that my brother posted, I absolutely don't want any of his other random acquaintances to also see that. And also the other way around, if my friends comment something on my photo I don't want my brother to see that.

Private groups are the only way to avoid that. Or maybe a system like G+ had with the Circles, so I could e.g. share tech things only with my techie friends without bothering my aunt with it.

Since you can't avoid having these ads/brand placed in your preferred social media platform (the users are the product (to be sold to advertisers) and not the customers), the next best thing that you can do as a user is to subvert the undesired brands that you see in your social media stream (e.g. by posting something that makes fun of an ad that you see) to make the social media platform a less desirable place for the respective undesired advertiser.

Allowing Z people to keep X people out of their groups and vice versa.

No doubt a lot of it is filler. But a lot of it isn't. I spent last night learning a bunch of cooking techniques on YouTube. Quite valuable for me!

Grew up listening to brother's albums, and laughed realizing chair-squeaks are music, too =P

This is so good. Perfect. I love it.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rembrandt-Wolpert/publi...

Precisely, it's signal vs. noise imo. There's an illusion that with more viewers you're more likely to find interesting people, but in practice it's mostly a distraction.

It feels it's a pattern that develops in social media, tourism, products, etc., something fresh appears which gets overextended and bores us out in the end, the laggards missed the magic. Rinse and repeat.

It used to be my friends. Now it's a bunch of **s trying to piss me off for engagement clicks, or scam me.

I feel worst for the vulnerable - older or less cynical people, who get caught in the layers and layers of bullshit that constitute the poisoned well. There are people who live and die warped by it.

The bots are like tourists. The population of Venice is in steep decline, but the streets are congested.

Posting on Facebook and Instagram is down because people discovered a significantly better social media service: group text threads. Those took off because they have a critical feature that Mark Zuckerburg doesn't believe in: privacy contexts. Good UI and lack of ads also help. So critical is this new social network to young people that adults on HN complain that their kids say that not having an iPhone (and thus a rich texting experience) would be "worse than death."

I don't intend to disagree with your points overall. Indeed, young people like social media more than old people.

I think what Google+ got wrong is that connections are a 2-way street, you may not realize your new friend _wants_ the day-to-day updates and soccer game invites, because to you they may just be someone you met at work.

Imagine if you could have a list of feeds to follow, personal, professional, etc. And when adding someone you could follow whichever feeds you wanted, and unfollow certain ones at any point. Some could be private, so you'd have to be approved to follow.

Then I wouldn't feel the need to remove old acquaintances from fb, I would just unfollow their feeds. I would feel comfortable posting stuff related to my job/networking because I know only people following my professional feed would see it. And I'd be comfortable posting personal stuff to my personal feed if it was locked and I was the maintainer of who could follow it.

They could pretty easily implement this in facebook and I could imagine it breathing life back into the platform.

My idea is that a profile should indeed be sliced. Personal, professional, specific niches (cooking, tech, whatever) and that we have a reliable labeling system that accurately detects the "channel", preferably fully automated. The signal to noise ratio would improve drastically and you could once again get value out of a social network.

Likewise I propose the same for moderation. Let me pick my comfort level. Ranging from "give it to me raw" to "I need to call my therapist because I saw a micro aggression" and everything in between.

So my friend list organically went through cycles of growth and shrink and probably stayed roughly constant, with the only long term growth being people that "sticked around" in my life.

As much as the Reddit website and app and overall experience is garbage the communities can be good

Please come true!

Social Media's organizational principle is the user page, while Forums are organized by community and discussion topic. Reddit is also not social media, despite having some algorithmic features, because it is organized by community/thread, not by social network. You go to a subreddit to read the posts there, not to a user page to follow them.

I don't feel sorry at all for commercial grifters, but there's also genuine publishers. Institutes that just want to share a message and get it out to the public, as a service. That model is now quite broken.

I do not share anything digitally that would backlash if revealed. Also not in private digital spaces. Not in work chat. Not even on a private device in a note. Nowhere.

Digitally, I do not gossip. I have no political opinion on divisive topics. I have no nudes. I don't swear in game chat. There is no smoking gun to be found at all even if you get full access to my entire digital life.

Also, Circles was the only good thing about Google+. The rest was average to bad, and the forced integration into all kinds of Google services, the forced realnames, and the lack of third-party integrations killed any kind of goodwill/benefit-of-doubt anyone might have had.

They are simply digging trenches for survival and domination. That is why I believe brands with profits above average should be banned from spending on ads. They polute the market and decrease competition