27 ms·
Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak
- joeblau 8y agoMy main question is: Where are people going? It seems like there is a slight dip in usage across all social media, but I'm trying to figure out where those hours/days/weeks are being spent. Are people turning to more real-life activities, just broadcasting and communicating less, turning to other up and coming platforms, or relying more on private messaging?
- m_ke 8y agoInstagram
- drglitch 8y agoPerhaps they're turning to group chats and imessages? Any meaningful use of instagram, snap, or similar platform introduces ads into your "friend news stream", whereas simplicity of whatsapp or similar platform avoids them, while preserving fluidity of communication.
- Qwertie 8y agoIM is honestly the number 1 social media right now. Its real communication with people you actually care about and not a popularity contest or marketing and no algorithm trying to tell you what you should be looking at.
- spacehome 8y agoI think email is #1. Personally, it's my favorite because I get to pick and choose who sees each post.
- natrik 8y agoWhy can't you pick and choose with IM?
- spacehome 8y agoI guess you can. Email seems to be more popular, though. For any given person, there's a higher likelihood they have email than any particular IM client.
- laken 8y agoI agree that more people have an email address than a particular IM client, however, a lot of people outside of the tech bubble don't use email much anymore for personal communication. iMessage is the solidified IM platform I see most, as if you have an iPhone, you have iMessage.
- Qwertie 8y agoIn Australia SMS is still widely used because of IM fragmentation. A proprietary IM platform will never take over and we will stay in the current mess until one of the open source standards become well used.
- Kurtz79 8y agoNot at a local level. In many countries in Europe, WhatsApp is just about ubiquitous, and used by the average guy way more often than email. The same (from what I understand) for WeChat in China. Yes, if you need to communicate outside of your local circle of family and friends, e-mail is still king (for business communication for example, no contest), but how often does the average guy does it?
- spacehome 8y agoI'm a little shocked at your experience. It doesn't match my experience. Literally everyone I know has an email address.
- marmshallow 8y agoSame with messaging, right? I have a personal vendetta against email.
- AznHisoka 8y agoNetflix, Reddit, Instagram, Spotify, Discord..
- i_am_nomad 8y agoOutside?
- Finnucane 8y agoArts & crafts. They’re all ‘makers’ now.
- King-Aaron 8y agoThis is my thought too. Why do you have to assume that users are choosing a different platform as opposed to just not using their phone/computer?
- jklein11 8y agoI'm going to put my tinfoil hat on for a second and say maybe this is due to social media companies cracking down on fake accounts?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Chazprime 8y agoIn my experience, it seems people are starting to put more emphasis on real-life activities and less on social media apps. Personally, I deleted my Facebook account and switched to Instagram to keep track of friends with... that freed up a lot of mornings.
- saudioger 8y agoInternet forums haha just kidding
- CM30 8y agoI've seen a fair few people and communities move to Slack, Discord and other such chat systems. Perhaps the 'public' side of social media is getting to them, so they're moving more in moderated communities rather than free for alls.
- VLM 8y agoIts the era of the notification and the interruption, now that we've addicted a fraction of the population to endless human-powered interruption we "need" to change all our software to have computer driven interruption. Consider app-spam in android notifications, the completely worthless notifications in the Windows notification bar. The addicts will still get their hit, but much as bad money chases out good money, its too expensive and politically sensitive to have humans generate that attention / interruption rush, so have machines spam the hell out of us. Besides, TV is dying, nobody watches that stuff anymore, and all those "push media" people need work. Expect life in the 2020s to be filled with a lot more interruption, mostly machine generated. Some interesting predictions: going to run into problems with work/life balance because of merging too close and spam explosion, such that even cognitively successful people are going to be much less well informed at work in the future than now due to sheer spam volume. Another novelty is we're in the last decade of the voice telephone call, in the death of the voice phone call era there will be bot armies in the cloud calling you dozens of times per day until you disconnect your voice call service. My guess is federated social media will have to rise when legacy hyper-centralized social media becomes pure propaganda and advertising to the point of being unusable. Possibly the same social factors that led to TV regulation of commercials back when people used to watch TV, might be reimplemented for the internet in a peculiar fashion. It'll be a major social status symbol to be interrupted all the time, much like follower counts used to be a big deal, of course cool people will spend all their time holding their phone to their face, swiping away meaningless notifications.
- Alex3917 8y agoWe might be at a local maximum, but we're nowhere near the peak. What we're seeing is an end of the race to the bottom. What's happened is that most of the major social networks only hire and promote people who make decisions primarily based on analytics. As a result these sites no longer have any real communities or organic content, and have been completely hollowed out by math-friendly refrigerator magnet junkfood. Even though everyone can recognize that most users no longer find these experiences to be compelling, they're all stuck in a one-way spiral. Web 3 is just getting started though, and with new technologies are going to come novel and compelling forms of social interaction.
- logicallee 8y ago>Web 3 is just getting started though, and with new technologies are going to come novel and compelling forms of social interaction. Can you elaborate on this? What do you mean by Web 3, what are examples? What is just getting started?
- chrisvalleybay 8y agoDecentralization is one part of Web 3. ActivityPub could be one technology that is relevant to this story. Edit: Moving things out of silos, re-focusing on the content and its value to people, instead of what's relevant to advertisers – as have been mentioned throughout this thread.
- drb91 8y ago> with new technologies are going to come novel and compelling forms of social interaction. What, Web 3.0 will come with booze? While I am entertained by social media, I can't remember the last time I actually interacted with anyone in a substantive way. I'd much rather hit the bar and admit to myself that social media isn't very social.
- Alex3917 8y ago> Web 1.0 lets individuals create and express ideas > Web 2.0 lets groups create and express ideas > Web 3.0 lets societies create and express ideas It's blockchain. Blockchain is what gets us from web 2.0 to web 3.0. The technology is almost here, and after another few years of basic R&D the stuff we're going to be able to start building is going to transform society in ways that are barely even imaginable today.
- paxy 8y agoSeems like just a Snap peak to me. Article doesn't mention Instagram, its most direct competitor, or tons of other non-Facebook/Twitter social networks that are gaining popularity (Reddit, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitch, even WhatsApp, and many country-specific ones).
- askafriend 8y agoTo add to this, there's also Nextdoor, Discord, YouTube, Telegram, Life360 etc depending on how you define a social network. I'm pretty sure all of these are growing significantly both in the US and abroad. Not to mention all the Asian social networks that are growing like crazy. My theory is that Snap just doesn't have enough differentiation either as a product or as an audience to be sustainable as an independent entity long term (caveat: Snap in today's form). I don't know how long they'll be able to retain their core unique demographic and most loyal users when the action is all happening on Instagram. I get the feeling it'll be one of those shifts that happens slowly at first, and then quickly - especially if the company makes major missteps (like the recent redesign fumble) or becomes too stagnant. However, I believe Snap still has enough time and money to change that trajectory with the right vision and leadership.
- krisroadruck 8y agoGenuine question... how is whatsapp a social website vs just a chat application? Perhaps I've missed something critical about it but the way I've used it and seen anyone else use it is just as a replacement for SMS
- YaxelPerez 8y agoIt technically also has "stories"
- askafriend 8y agoAny proprietary communications platform meant primarily for communicating between humans can be referred to as a social network. It's a pretty broad definition in my mind.
- nickwalter 8y agoOr just that Instagram stories is killing them
- ngngngng 8y agoTo me Snapchat is just instagram with a shit user interface that I don't have the time to learn.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- drb91 8y agoWell, if you're using anything with ads, expect the experience to suck.
- godzillabrennus 8y agoSnap's UI is horrendous and it has nothing to do with ads. Kids can invest innumerable hours to find and utilize all the hidden ways to interact but your average adult is just going to do the basics and will put it down. That's fine. Kids are often the market these social media companies target as they launch anyway.
- ngngngng 8y agoSnaps ui is one step above a text based terminal, I just have to learn all the swipes and taps and menu layouts through trial and error.
- godzillabrennus 8y agoAt least software that ran in a text based terminal would customarily come with a manual. Snap is a lot like that magic bag in Harry Potter that was bigger on the inside. You never knew what was in there till you stuck your hands in and hoped for the best.
- mrweasel 8y agoI've never seen a single ad on Snapchat. Where do they even show up?
- Qwertie 8y ago
- dk1138 8y agoGod, I hope so.
- kwelstr 8y agoThere is nothing of value to read here, so... Let me say just this: click bait.
- dbg31415 8y agoCan't speak for everyone, but personally I just got tired of Snap's bad UX and moved to a different platform. Now a lot of my friends have moved to Discord, WhatsApp, and Slack. Really been digging Discord lately, wish they had some way to make money I believed would work so I knew they were going to be around for a while.
- Qwertie 8y ago>wish they had some way to make money No one wants to pay for things anymore so what we have is a cycle of good tech that runs on investor money and makes none on it's own and then it gets sold to microsoft or whoever and they attempt to turn it in to something that makes money on it's own without charging for the service until everyone gets so sick of the product they move to the next new thing.
- Tloewald 8y agoOr maybe not.
- mtw 8y agoEveryone's moved to WhatsApp and IG these days. If you know asians, WeChat is also very strong. People are just moving on.
- King-Aaron 8y agoI found it interesting when visiting south-east asia that many government style posters - such as reporting vandalism or unclean bathrooms - all had a WeChat number to contact as opposed to any sort of traditional telephone number.
- robjan 8y agoWhich countries in SE Asia? Most of them don't have a particularly strong WeChat penetration.
- King-Aaron 8y agoMainly through Malaysia that I noticed it
- imron 8y agoIf you know 'Asians' you'll know that WeChat is primarily a mainland Chinese thing, and different Asian countries have different chat apps that are dominant.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dosy 8y agoDoes HN qualify as "social media"? We are not anywhere near "Peak Social Media". Otherwise investor valuations would not be what they are. Even discounting they can predict the future, Zuck hasn't even got started on his VR/AR "ready player 1" social network dream yet, decentralized social media hasn't had its try for the title yet, and the non-social big 5 are still waiting for FB weakness for their chance to strike with something new. Not to mention whatever comes out of the BRICS countries that may be some innovation over SV social media tech. This baby still has a lot of miles left in it, I think. Fundamentally, people's desire for distraction / convenient "human connection" has not yet been sated. (Will it ever?)
- randomdata 8y ago> decentralized social media hasn't had its try for the title yet That depends on the answer to your first question. If HN is considered social media, then Usenet needs to be considered social media. In which case decentralized social media already had a good run, but users eventually came to prefer centralized systems.
- jryan49 8y agoInvestor validations of tech before the bubble wasn't super accurate. I mean facebook lost 20% of it's value in a day, how does that not scream speculative bubble?
- slantaclaus 8y agoFacebook’s PE is like 25. Best to stay focused on valuation metrics. Historically it’s a steal, in fact I expect it slide back to 30 in the near term
- Alex3917 8y ago> Does HN qualify as "social media"? Here is a good discussion about how academics who research the Internet define social media: https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/ZZCAfWipRjCjvC9ZzbLf1w/air-definitions-social-media-sites https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/ZZCAfWipRjCjvC9ZzbLf1w/air-def...
- whalesalad 8y agoUsers are jumping ship to Instagram. Once they duplicated the functionality it was the nail in the coffin for snap. If I had a ton of cash lying around I’d short the stock to zero. Insta was Facebooks greatest acquisition.
- scarejunba 8y agoThree thousand dollars will get you options until 2020 that you can cash in for $50k worth. You don't need a ton of cash if you think they're going to zero.
- whytaka 8y agoHow exactly do I do this?
- fwn 8y agoRemember that even Myspace is still around. Betting zero is a radical act.
- westpfelia 8y agoMyspace was never itself a publically traded company. They had the backings of News Corp to not die.
- kypro 8y agoI think he's talking about buying puts far in the future.
- glalonde 8y agohold up, how does that figure? I thought you could only get up to the amount invested back, which is why it is a really not great idea. Investing $3k now might net you up to $3k if the stock hits 0, but it could triple in which case you lose $6k. Bounded upside, infinite downside. I'm sure it's more complicated but what am I missing?
- colordrops 8y agoWhat does this title even mean? We aren't at peak social media until we are embedded in a mechano-biological matrix hive mind. I'm not joking.
- gnode 8y ago"Peak social media" (like "peak oil") doesn't mean maximum theoretically attainable consumption, but the point in time at which consumption is highest, and can thereafter be expected to only ever be less.
- ramshanker 8y agoI am pretty sure 250 million+ people in my country India are still not on SO CALLED social network, they are not even on internet yet. So , we are far away from Peak Social.
- sam0x17 8y agono, this isn't about snaps on linux
- amarant 8y agohaha that was my first thought too, but then I read "social media" and started to realize which "snap" they were talking about
- dionna767675 8y agoGet 24/7 Unlimited Roadside Assistance For As Little As $9.95 a Month Unlimited 24/7 roadside assistance. (Whether you’ve got a flat tire, out of gas, locked out of your car, or need towing, just call us, and we’ll be there in 45 minutes or less) Get reimbursed for calling your own tow company up to $100. If your car is undriveable due to an accident we will cover your rental car up to $500. Or, if you’re far from home, we’ll pay up to $500 for food, lodging or transportation click below for more information https://roadsidekings.com https://roadsidekings.com
- omarforgotpwd 8y agoOr just a bad redesign
- leon_sbt 8y agoI really wish social media would "peak" to towards meeting people in real life semi-spontaneously. No profiles, no media uploads, no digital showboating. The best relationships I have with other people fall in this category. Real life,common interests,no digital uploads. Just add attributes of your geolocation and hobbies [biking, yoga,tensorflow,etc] or let it crawl your digital profile(s) to autobuild your attributes identity. The system will group people with similar personalities/attributes. Every once in a while, "the system" it sends you a text "Free at 9am? Mountain biking at X park for an hour with beer after with 3 new people? Text yes to opt-in" Get revenue by having businesses bid on being the beer spot. Refine the algorithm by having an anonymous rating system after the fact. I like Meetup but it must be taxing to always manage the organization/logistics of a meeting. Yes. I just realized I blended the show Betas,an episode of Black Mirror, and the 2016 movie Nerve together. Edit: Grammar
- CamperBob2 8y agoThis does seem like a powerful idea. The problem of networking friends, family, and co-workers has more or less been solved, but the problem of putting together complete strangers with shared interests and coincident physical locality really hasn't even been attacked except in very constrained use cases (i.e., dating services). It's possible that the next big wave of social networks will be less "Facebook" and more "Spacebook."
- eitally 8y agoThat's not entirely true (your first point). Both my wife & I have met all sorts of acquaintances and what became good friends through interests that started with coincident physical locality: gyms, clubs, church, children's sports & school, etc. I don't think the problem exists completely in the way you seem to think. One potential mental block could be that spontaneity is a key piece of the equation. I argue that the vast majority of humans are not spontaneous and that's a hugely overrated attribute, if so. I 100% agree with your second statement, though, that the future of social networks will focus more on the social and less on the spam & social signaling.
- egfx 8y ago
- dkrich 8y agoHow did this article make the New York Times? It’s awful. I listened to the entire Snap conference call and Spiegel directly attributed the drop in active users to the app redesign, a fact that wasn’t mentioned until 2/3 of the way through the article. Moreover, they gave no guidance for DAU projections, and merely said that historically fewer users are active in the third quarter than the second. This does not equate to a longer trend, it simply implies that fewer people are active in the late summer months than the late spring/early summer which seems to make sense. It seems like the NYT more and more either wants to report negatively on the social media industry or has more success from these sensationalist headlines. What happened to thoughtful fact-based reporting?
- mrweasel 8y ago>Spiegel directly attributed the drop in active users to the app redesign I wouldn't be surprised. Navigation is all over the place in Snapshot. Try sending a snap, and now I'm suddenly view stories from people I don't know, with no clear way of getting out. I can see some users jut giving up on using the app.
- hrrsn 8y agoJust anecdotally, most of my friends stopped using Snapchat after the horrific redesign and moved to Instagram stories. Can't say I blame them
- solaris152000 8y agoThe new Snap design is awful. It's confusing and difficult to use and overly pushes promoted content onto me. I am a young male, I don't care what snap chat stories some women's fashion magazine (or any other 'mainstream media' for that matter) are publishing. Why does Snap try and push it in my face? Snap could have been something amazing, a true rival to Facebook perhaps, but now instagram just does it all better.
- degenerate 8y agoNYT is dead. Their long-form articles on specific topics are still good, but their news reporting is trash.
- rxever 8y agoCouldn’t it be that users are switching more and more to Instagram from Snapchat? For sure my view is biased but all my friends that were using snap a year ago are now primarily pushing content through Instagram and all are ditching Snapchat ...
- ryanwhitney 8y agoSnapchat lost three million users over a quarter. Instagram added 200m+ monthly users over the past year.[1] And the story is that social media is peaking? [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/20/instagram-1-billion-users/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/20/instagram-1-billion-users/
- benjaminjackman 8y agoEverything's a pendulum, especially, (un)fortunately, pendulums. I, personally, doubt social media is really peaking. Maybe it is. Seems like more of the same, people switching providers. Going from that crufty thing the old folks use to something n new. Isn't Instagram the new hotness, spreading like crazy? How are they not even mentioned in the article?!? Seems pretty sloppy, or worse disingenuous but maybe I'm missing something. So, then isn't Snap due for a fall? How does one provider falling signify a collapse of growing, still nascent, medium?
- rblion 8y agoI'm one of them. I deactivated my Facebook in January too. I use Twitter for 5-10 minutes a day to keep up with a few topics of interest. Instagram for 5-10 minutes a day to get some cool nature and travel photos, a few people I genuinely care about. HN and Reddit keep in the loop for all the things I am interested in and allow me to discuss them anonymously with other people who are as into them as I am. I just see my family and friends in person.
- mayankkaizen 8y agoAs compared to the situation 3 years back, now none of my friend (me included) is even slightly active on any social media (except for whatsapp). Even people are getting less active on whatsapp. I am a member of like 12 whatsapp group, and almost 10 of those are silent most of the time. I wonder if this is generally true. May be I (and my friends) am getting older.
- ulfw 8y agoI believe social media fatigue is setting in. Twitter is becoming the political infighting network. If it wasn't for Donald John Trump and the millions following or belittling him - what is there to do for the masses on Twitter? Facebook struggles with revelations about their deep privacy invasions and complete lack of vision/product development for years and it seems Snap having never figured out what they really are or should be is now losing users too. Let's just say, having been a Myspacer back in the day - I know how quickly the tide can turn once user growth starts to staqnate.
- sizzle 8y agoOr it could signal that snap has a weak value proposition that was easily emulated by Instagram and Facebook messenger devs (AR selfie face filters and stickers etc.) Thoughts?
- amarant 8y agooh god yes I sure hope so
- futurix 8y agoAll that happened is that Instagram won the competition. I'm not sure what are the teens doing, but a lot of older, less invested, users moved on (or were on Instagram in the first place and just stuck to it).
- skate22 8y agoSnapchat used to work lag free on my device. Now it lags so much that it takes over a minute to launch the app, take & send 1 pic. Might not be the app's fault, but that's the reason i don't use it much
- Raphmedia 8y agoWe dropped Snap because it moved from being that nice platform to share tidbits of your life with your friends to a platform made to push ads in your face. The "Snapchat" we have today is an entire different app experience to the one we all adopted into our lives. If you build a new app and then skin it to make it pass like something else, users are going to notice and move on. It doesn't help that they keep moving features around. First your friends' stories were on the left swipe screen. Then they moved them among the ads to the right. Then then moved them back left... and now they are back on the right screen with the ads. To be honest, I haven't watched any of my friends' story in age because why bother learning where they are every few months?
- acd 8y agoOne can use Google Trends to analyze Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp.
- wemdyjreichert 8y agoFinally. I hate (most) social media. Everybody ought to go back to email, phone, and in-person. Much more human and much less "how many likes can I get with this glammed-up photo".