>This article makes me wonder if we'll ever see another social network ever again. My somewhat controversial take is that the era of social media being used as

>This article makes me wonder if we'll ever see another social network ever again. My somewhat controversial take is that the era of social media being used as a tool to connect people is over. "Social networking" (as it's still called) will predominantly be used to connect people to brands/influencers, but it won't be used to connect people that actually know each other. Younger people fled from Facebook, as it became increasing curated and infested with news, ads, etc. As Facebook declined, Instagram became the primary social network to keep up with friends. Instagram surpassed Facebook's popularity, until users fled Instagram for many of the same reasons they fled Facebook. But what's different this time is that there isn't some brand new social network emerging to take up Instagram's mantle as the primary social network to connect people. Instagram's relevance has faded, and it's been replaced by nothing. For the reasons you discussed, I don't think we'll ever see another social network reach the prominence of Instagram. Yes, TikTok exists, but it's more of a YouTube competitor, and makes no attempt to connect people, as Facebook and Instagram once did. Also there is a general cynicism around social media, which will make it challenging for new social networks to emerge. What comes after social networking? I'd say messaging will replace social networking as the primary means to connect people over the web. Privacy is less of a concern with messaging, as users directly control who their information is shared with. Messaging has fewer of the negative psychological effects we see with social networking (eg, brigading, obsessing over likes, etc...). And perhaps most importantly, messaging enables users to avoid the algorithmic "curation" (aka advert optimizations) we see on social networking. Discord and WhatsApp are the two most prominent examples of messaging services that could effectively replace social networks as a medium to connect people. Clubhouse itself is also a messaging app (just auditory, rather than textual). iMessage could be another huge player in the space if Apple makes the right moves.