The private messaging apps are modern social media. Social media is a service a group of people who know each other in real life communicate about things happen

The private messaging apps are modern social media. Social media is a service a group of people who know each other in real life communicate about things happening to them in real life. I know that a lot of people take issue with that definition but that is only because the well-known social media companies stopped focusing on social media and started doing publishing. 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.