Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media
ca.pcmag.com
ca.pcmag.com
On the desktop version of the website, click on the "Friends" "Feed" (and there might have been a sort by date as well you had to then click on).
You don't get sorting options for that Feed. And depending on your luck that might be three clicks off the home page to even that (See More > Feeds > Friends).
Out of ten items on your feed, five would be adverts, three are reposts of some crappy influencer’s video or a meme or something, one is a friend’s marketplace listing, and if you’re lucky, the last one is a photo actually taken by a friend who you actually know.
The natural monopoly of networks is what brought us all to social networks, and I suspect it is why they will fail. Niche networks run by a small team (which is what social networks were when we were the early adopters) seem like they can trivially sustain themselves.
The explosion of podcasting is exactly this, but for nontechnical people.
We started out using forum software to co-ordinate what we were doing but eventually (2008-ish) switched to Facebook as the president of the club pointed out "Alex, everyone is already on Facebook and the notifications from us are in the middle of the notifications for when the next party is" etc.
Fast forward to today and the club is rebooting again. I asked the current club president "What social network is everyone on these days?" His response: "Really there is no one place where everyone goes anymore." I then asked him how clubs share their info etc and he says "The bulletin board at the student center?"
While social media definitely has its downsides (echo chambers, extremism etc) I do feel like it's a bit of a net loss to not have a "commons". That model makes it super easy to start up new organizations, get the word out etc.
Part of me hopes that we got back to the late 1990s dedicated websites/forums. That seems to be the Discord model but let's see.
Plus the notifications for chat groups are basically:
- show me everything
- don't notify me at all
You can have two if necessary, one only for announcements and one for discussion.
I don't see how that would work as in many jurisdictions, email is an accepted legal way to communicate between a company and a customer. So when you don't year your email that's like not reading your snail mail in the 90s. It might go well for some time, until you miss that one message about a late payment or something...
Ignoring email works just fine, as evidenced by the fact that the majority of people I know don't check email unless it is for their work. Zero impact on their lives. It is the same with snail mail. I think I check my snail mail 6-8 times per year mostly so that the letter box doesn't physically overflow with junk.
No one cares about the actual choice, only that it is made.
If the actual choice requires me to install an app then I care quite a lot and will probably decline to join in.
I don't think that I am the only one who feels this way.
Unless they are chosing something super obscure and sketchy, most club members are going to be fine with the leader just saying, we're picking whatsapp, either join or dont.
Never occurred to me that Americans wouldn't have a common group chat app everyone uses. Do Americans not all use iMessage, since pretty much everybody has an iPhone there?
I'm Irish and travel back and forth a lot. First, not everyone has iPhones, Android has 40% of the market.
Older generations use Facebook to manage their clubs. I'm increasingly seeing Whatsapp and occasionally Signal for younger and more tech-savvy social circles. Facebook is non-existent in sub 35 year olds. Its just taking longer to switch over (or away from) Facebook given how tech savvy older folks are here compared to Ireland.
Or just iMessage with fallback to SMS for those not on iPhones. Unlike most of the rest of the world, iPhones dominate in the USA.
Apple has famously made its strategy to use iMessage to enforce exclusivity. If you want to reach everyone, it's not iMessage. And Whatsapp in the US is worse, closer to 1/3.
WhatsApp does not solve any problems for the typical American user. Most Americans don't install WhatsApp unless they spend a lot of time overseas some place where it is required to do anything. Even international group chats seem to be more Discord-based in recent years.
I use Signal with some groups but that is a minority. I use WhatsApp daily but only people overseas use it. Many Americans have no idea what WhatsApp is.
The practical reality is that iMessage is a legitimately superior experience to other messaging apps, and the penetration is high enough in the US that many group chats never fall back to RCS or SMS. You can’t control that but as an observation that is commonly the case. Even when it does fallback to SMS/RCS, it mostly works for many use cases.
I’ve used every messaging app under the sun, having spent a lot of time overseas. But I totally understand why Americans don’t bother with WhatsApp (or Signal) even though I do. The value-add is non-existent in the US since almost no one else uses it and the alternatives just work.
* pretty early on the vast majority of phone plans started bundling unlimited text messaging, which IIRC was a big motivator for using messaging apps abroad
* because of the vast scale of the country, domestic coverage results in no roaming for the places Americans spend most of their time, unlike in Europe where there are multitudes of countries you'd be passing in a one to two hour flight. Roaming charges in the EU were only abolished in 2022, late enough that everybody has settled on apps as the best way to manage that now.
* many American plans extend unlimited messaging to Canada and Mexico, the two likeliest places that Americans would go to abroad
- Doctors offices and official services use SMS.
- Some of my close family and friends use Signal (on my pressure).
- The distant boomers use Facebook Messenger
- With the younger people they use Snapchat.
- Almost everyone else in the country uses Whatsapp as that's the dominant messaging app.
- My friends who live in Berlin use Telegram
- Online communities for tinkering and foss projects require Discord.
God I miss the 2000s.
Exactly! Having to check 27 different places for messages (also add individual sites like linkedin, etc, where people message), it is completely ridiculous.
Just send me email. It's universal, standard, no corporation owns it (thus no corportation can shut me out unlike facebook or all the proprietary solutions).
For me, physical communication is quickly becoming a signal that someone actually put effort into things.
The Zuckerberg movie was called The Social Network. At the time we saw the likes of Facebook as networks intended to build 1-1 communications.
Since then, it’s become social Media. It’s now about centralized structures broadcasting messages to subscribers and followers. The only difference from the past is who the broadcasters can be, but it’s no longer about building networks between people.
There's a proposal to add privacy to the protocol (private posts, private groups), but I don't think anyone has solved the real root problem with trying to implement privacy in a federated system (as opposed to P2P), which is the bad administrator problem. The proposal I saw still relied on trustworthy app administrators to respect a post's privacy settings. And that's a huge flaw.
Friendica and Diaspora both have the same problem, and to my knowledge don't have a good solution for it. They both just sort of hand wave it away.
I'm waiting to see if someone comes up with a good solution for the unsafe admin problem, but so far I haven't seen one.
ATProto is trying to implement privacy on top of global public pub/sub which just obviously doesn't work.
Well, thanks for lobbying, that's got regulated away. One must be mad today to run a forum.
There's a guy that runs multiple sports teams at a local recreation center, in multiple adult divisions (wide age/culture rage), and he has been using email to great effect for over a decade that I have known him. I get 2-3 weekly emails about teams that need a sub for a game and those spots continue to fill up quickly. He probably has the majority of regulars (in the hundreds) at that sports center on his various email list. It just works. They tried chat groups once and that was a disaster.
Part of it is just how emails work, part of it is how each clients work, part of it is people not knowing/caring.
You'll have:
- the guy that don't use the group email address as recipient, but personal email address
- the guy that change the subject which starts a new thread/discussion
- the guy that include all previous emails in their answer
- the guy with a signature that takes two screens to scroll
- the guy with an awful text font/color
- the guy that CC their whole address book, including the group email address, for personal stuff
- ...
But because subject lines are more work and people who love sending email tend to love it because it is very low effort, the venn of email senders and those who write subject lines is small.
(¹yes, it seems like you can work around it by going to the URL de novo, … but IDK, doesn't seem worth it.)
For hackerspaces, tech meetups, book clubs, cycling clubs, city cleanup volunteer groups…
It works fine.
Don’t let your bad experience ruin it for everyone. Especially with an administrative backend, email-based distribution and comms works great for smaller groups!
There's always someone mis-using it, and the same applies to every other platform. There's always someone hijacking forum threads, or asking questions in comments instead of starting a new topic. None of this is exclusive to email.
Yes, email is the absolute best for opimal reach. All the proprietary platforms are inherently fragmented and gatekeeped by their corporations. Trying to find a common denominator is hard. Email is standard, not owned by anyone and thus universal.
Email is a push technology. And the receiver has to manage their inbox for the sender’s enthusiasm.
2-3 weekly emails
A web page could update in real time. It would be more work for the sender. And less work for everyone else.
I have a WhatsApp account and the app on my phone with zero contacts in it. Nobody here uses it. But every time I leave the country I need it for some service or business or who knows what. It seems like the rest of the world all agreed to use this app and Canada (and I think the US) just said “naw thanks…” and have no common app or method.
Most importantly, if you show up as a “green bubble” person you will be lightly teased about it, including on a date.
The commons became the commons again, instead of being partially or completely trapped on Facebook,
and you’re upset?
Bulletin boards are awesome.
Physical assembly is awesome.
In that sense it was a smart decision of meta to buy it.
Most of my friends are on Instagram too but nobody really communicates there. The chance of missing something important is way too high.
It works
It's kinda sad that members of a club have to share their private details with some remote third party focused on surveillance, data collection and targeting ads in order communicate with other members or potential members. Not to mention the possibility of "age verification"
When used for public notice, the benefits, if any, of "social media" over the bulletin board at the student center are probably not worth the hassles
* Can send out updates quickly, e.g. changing rooms when you discover your secretary forgot to book the usual one that week 5 minutes before the club meeting.
* Folks can see/post updates without going in to the student center in person. This is particularly helpful if there's any club members who live further away and/or down come by the student center regularly and/or aren't highly engaged enough to go check a board.
* An archive of messages can be valuable. I have dug though club archives to find the name of a guest speaker from several years prior. Physical records make this difficult, especially in a college club where leadership changes frequently and papers get lost.
Of course... email can do all of that. The lesson is to be judicious with technology, not abandon it entirely.
In fact the suggestion is not to abandon the bulletin board in the student center
As usual, there will be HN replies that adhere to "all-or-nothing", "black and white", etc. thinking, e.g., believing there is an "either-or" choice between use of a computer system and another method
However it's possible to use a bulletin board in the student center and a computer system. This is not an either-or choice, there is no requirement to choose one or the other
For example, getting contact details from the bulletin board then using a smartphone to make a phone call or send a text message, using a laptop to send an email, etc.
Further, there is no suggestion in the comment that one or the other, bulletin board in student center or computer system, is without benefits
In fact, the comment suggests the bulletin board is useful: "It works"
The question raised by the comment is whether the benefits of sending data to a remote third party, namely a "social media" company, outweigh the costs ("hassles")
This is obviously more narrow than "using a computer system". We can use computer systems without involving "social media" companies
TL;DR FB is worthless for social networks, because if they showed you the groups you were there to check on, nobody would pay to promote their own things.
Once an avid user, I go 1-2 weeks at a time with the app uninstalled now unless there's something specific I need to check on.
Dunno: people in my circles all have Telegram (Europe here but I think they have 1 billion MAU now: they're not just successful in Europe).
I've got Telegram groups depending on my interests.
I just got invited to try ball trap (clay pidgeon shooting) tomorrow. Then another group set up a beer after work on wednesday. And on thursday, another group, another after-work meetup. It's not because we don't use WhatsApp that we use SMSes: nope, we're all on Telegram.
People can lament Telegram is proprietary, russian (is it, I forgot?), etc. but at least it's not the Zuck's FaceBook/Instagram/WhatsApp exploitative ecosystem. And people love that fact.
I have some extremely useful Discords and Signal group chats, but not everything ought to be an always on chatterbox.
Nothing deserves to an "always-on-chatterbox" unless the end-user truly chooses it because that is what they want or need.
This is part of the larger problem. How many "always-on-chatterboxes" competing for one's attention before it becomes close-to-impossible to concentrate on anything that requires some actual thinking.
When I started doing promotion of public events sponsored by a small nonprofit in rural Virginia (USA), I was handed several pieces of paper with notes like post office, banks, dry cleaners, lumber yard. Over time, I've built a spreadsheet of places to share event and other community information. There's churches, HOAs, social media groups, IRL locations, media outlets, and so on. I am constantly referring people to the list to use (share information and seek information0 and edit. I knew very few people would make edits but I expected a couple of folks to use it for outreach.
About a month ago, I started thinking that my small neck of the woods could use something other than FB to share info. I'd love for electronic discussion groups to fill the void. Of course there are downsides, starting with slow adoption. But I feel like it's a lift anyone can manage given that it's based in email.
Of course, what will be shared is stupid stuff and not what I want (public opinion on state and local policies) and particularly information relevant to people with low incomes.
All my “social” life just moved to direct communication in WhatsApp (meta owned as well)
2013-2014 the algorithm got more foused on non-friend posts aswell as making the prioritzation less about "likes" from friends and instead some opaque engagement metrics. Groups had to "promote" post to get their prior reach to subscribers.
Also videos started to be posted around that time?
This switch does appear to have put off a lot of smart, thinking people as the newsfeed degenerated into a torrent of dopamine-spiking diarrhea. But those people don't tend to be the ones that click on ads.
[1] https://time.com/collections/the-cloud/3950525/facebook-news... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/15/facebook-... [3] https://www.supersummary.com/the-chaos-machine/summary/ - the whole "Chaos Machine" book is excellent
As for connecting to people, you drag and drop the connect button into a folder name which you want their posts to show in. For example, You can create custom folders for friends, family, coworkers etc. After that, you drag the connect button into that folder. And each folder creates a custom feed from only those people for you.
I am open to brainstorming more ideas.
Before that a popular article could be shared among different friends networks to like total exposure to like everyone logged in that were somewhat interested in the article.
I was kinda a journalist then it was a really obvious flip.
Makes one wonder what it would be like if someone else had built and maintained it who really belived in the vision of connecting communities instead of sucking them dry.
I want to fire off a quick quip and have a conversation.
Reddit is probably the only place where this works any more, but you have to be prompted by the right thread and early.
So people throw up their hands and go, "why bother?"
Like saying - I am too good for this thing.
Your disapproval of something is supposed to show your standards are high, and you got some elite taste.
BTW you can see some variations of that here also.
Social media allowed you to be in touch with people in a way that wasn't possible with phone calls, text messages, instant messaging, email, or domain-specific forums.
What I could do in Facebook in 2010 was stay "friends" with selected acquaintances such as old classmates with whom I never was in email terms, messaging terms, or any other terms except having known them in school (or at work or at a hobby or...) I could follow their life via their posts, and I could leave a comment, sometimes, without any expectation that we should ever talk, meet, chat, or become more than old classmates. I haven't sent email to anyone in my school that I didn't know outside of school, as a friend. I don't have their numbers and it would be awkward to even consider calling someone with whom we didn't necessarily even talk much in school. But it was perfectly okay to ask someone to be your friend on Facebook (like, Hey, I know you? and if he did remember he would accept) and follow their postings and maybe (re)kindle something with no pressure to grow it into anything more than that.
We had that. Now... we no longer do. Or we still have Facebook and we can send friend requests to old acquantainces that I'd like to follow but there's nothing to follow because they aren't posting and because Facebook wouldn't show me their posts. So we're back to the point where actually making contact with another person (on Facebook) basically requires sending them a message in Facebook. Which already goes beyond what's expected from an old acquantaince on Facebook.
I recall a site for classmates where you could register to your school years and see your classmates there. But that was before social media and there weren't any posts that you could comment. You could just see your classmates listed there, and one in ten might have written a few words in their profile. And that was classmates only, not ex-work colleagues or other people you've passed behind in your life. Facebook was really good at the time it became a thing.
We still have email, instant messaging, etc. but what's the platform today where I can keep in touch with people I'm not emailing or talking with? Is there one?
They don't show you what your friends actually post. Someone saying "hey - I'm in the parking lot at some place, I need help moving this thing" 5 minutes ago? You might see it on your feed in a week
They engage in reputational decay https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1775182 (see also, photo tagging)
They've cut off access to your friends https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433
It's a company involved in lots of OTHER things which don't make it a good netizen https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 (oh and their own cryptocurrency in Libra, that's fun)
"Dumb fucks" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
Edit: You get banned at any time while the obviously horrible thing you report doesn't get taken down. That's not sustainable. It's not a thing where you can actually physically keep in touch with people, either nominally strangers or the best of friends
1) companies had a desire to grow everyone's networks. Early numbers said, people more connected have more engagement, and the larger a user's graph is, the better we can advertise to that user.
But at some point it also changes what you want to post, or if you want to post at all. Do I want my mom to see this joke? That party photo? What about that guy I met on exchange 10 years ago?
I have 1000 connections on Facebook, and all _their_ connections can be exposed to my post. It might as well be public.
2) Professionals are better at posting than amateurs. It turns out that we rather watch a funny update from a comedian we don't know, than an update from a friend trying to be funny. Social networks are not social anymore. They are mostly TV, but instead of channel surfing, you are doom-scrolling videos from professional creators, not updates from friends.
So yeah, no wonder that social media is dying. People are just catching up to the fact that the best way not to lose is to just not play the game.
I think you get bad emotions when you have high expectations about social media and it is your main source of social life. Where positive happen when you have low expectations about social media and it is just addon to your life.
Example of gaps is being lonely, low self esteem, low self worth, no work network, no business network. So you stay glued to FB to build your life, to keep online friends, because you may have not many in life. Or you have no real work network so you need to stay current on LI because your next job is there.
That seems to be the point where most communities and social sites I'm on lost a lot of their activity/enjoyment, and where people seemed to start fading away.
Of course, increasing polarisation, an increasingly aggressive/selfish population and worries about privacy probably hit hard too.
No ads, no tracking, no bots (hence the price).
Its just me working on it, but it does work. :)
Lately I feel more value in connecting with them personally, talking and letting them now, that I am still interested in what's going on for them.
I suppose the app will then mostly be full of throwaway comments in the form of "Cool" or "Wow". But maybe add a modifier that if the poster doesn't have any meaningful reply to a commenter's (let's name him Elon) comment, then the poster's next content will not be shared with Elon next time.
Social media is how I keep vaguely aware of what's going on with my friends who now live scattered across the planet and get to see in person once per decade or so.
At most, you can call them professional contacts whom you hope to get some value out of in the future, and in that sense I’d agree — social media makes it possible to keep in touch with people whom you have a transactional relationship with.
And all of them are relationships with someone I already know, can ve safer around then random and some of them grow again into more active friendships in right situation.
And yes, that friendship happens again thing is real.
my last post is from 2018, the last post I was tagged in is from 2020
6 years of nothing
That's why my only social media is WhatsApp, if that's a social media.
Now, it's just a weird performative stage. Even worse, the people who are awarded with attention often prove themselves to be utterly clueless and nothing more than a modern day cabaret performer.