Ask HN: Are we observing the death of social networks? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are we observing the death of social networks?

5 pointsfullstacking6 comments

I have a theory that we are seeing a huge sociological shift from peer engagement, and while it seems easy to blame AI I have a suspicion its more complex than that. Regardless it would seem to me that people are less interested in engaging with other people more so now than ever. It's like people are burned out on society.

I do see the irony of this post, anyhow what do think?

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This actually reminds me of an article https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2025/12/ai-companionshi.... "“We believe that there is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.” In this same spirit, Zuckerberg began to suggest the idea that AI chatbots could fill in some of the socialization that people are missing."

I'l probably have to think about this more to see if there's any logic behind it but maybe there's a connection with us oscillating between social media and social networking...?

also you know how Mirror Theory...or maybe Plato's Cave where the shadows are what we see of real objects...is about how our "realities" are heavily filtered representations of the external world? maybe we somehow feel that, as a bottom line, it doesn't matter what the representations of social connection are? and if we perceive AI as a source of social connection...

I would argue that social networks died a decade or more ago, and were replaced by social media. When I joined Facebook in 2006 a big part of it was finding and connecting with friends from school. It was cool to see their vacation photos or kids' graduation pics. But now it seems that friends have been replaced with followers, and instead of peer to peer connections of a social network, we have one to many broadcast of social media.

On most social networks, each post is met with flame bait and off-hand cynicism. Even the most benign post is dragged down with comments about how stupid/boring/etc the poster is. Why people insist on being so unpleasant, I'll never know. But they are very loud about it.

Then there is the endless stream of AI spam, GOP and foreign propaganda, tracking and advertising. It would be nice if the ads weren't nearly all fake products and snake oil. It seems the real product advertisers don't want any part of it either.

People are given ample incentives to leave it all behind and focus more on real life instead.

"But they are very loud about it." haha yes. Social media seems to be largely centered around ego today- it is interesting to see how our need for validation has somewhat shifted from at least presenting ourselves as uprighteous to aggressively calling attention upon ourselves by being rude.

Could this be "social network" in the generic sense and not just the electronic sense?

My theory is that the pandemic and lockdowns had a big effect on this. When those were in play, social media was basically the only way to communicate. People were stuck on these platforms almost 24/7, since there was no legitimate way to meet up with anyone in person.

But this burnt a lot of people out on these services. They grew tired of using social media as their only form of communication, and took the chance to get back into real world activities the minute it became available.

Social media was fun when the amount of time you could spend there was limited by other factors and other alternatives were available, but got tiresome when you were basically stuck on it all the time.

In addition to that, I think a few other factors to note here might be:

1. More and more people seem to have realised how unhealthy these sites are, and how using them too much destroys your mental health. I suspect at least a few people realised how bad these services were for them, and decided to mostly quit cold turkey.

2. LLMs meant that spammy and rage-bait inducing content flooded them to a ridiculous degree, and drowned out legitimate discussions in favour of automated slop.

3. The ever more extreme political situation in many countries meant that those not looking for a fight were put off from posting on sites like Twitter or Reddit.

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