I'm always surprised people still talk about social media in terms of replacement tbh. Usually I take it as a sign someone either wasn't very engaged with a spe

I'm always surprised people still talk about social media in terms of replacement tbh. Usually I take it as a sign someone either wasn't very engaged with a specific platform or that they just aren't that in tune with the mainstream in general. People lurk because they realize that's the actual experience they cared about. I know lots of people on Twitter/X but most don't tweet or even share their account because it's mainly a curated feed for them. Reddit is similar, it's a web forum replacement and if you're someone who likes interacting on forums still then great but for the most part the appeal is parsing the dialogue not contributing to it (or else they'd be somewhere like Discord talking to people they share any amount of greater social proximity to). I can see the appeal of writing off the platforms as dying or suffering because they failed in some fashion but imo it's mostly that as more social media platforms emerge and go mainstream the things they did well to achieve that mainstream appeal become elements of old platforms that people stop using but they still turn to the older platforms for the parts of the experience that haven't been replaced. Twitter and Reddit still lack good replacements for their niches (in the real way, not the "good enough" or "if more people used this competitor" way).