9 ms·

Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, Polarization (2025)

212 points by vinnyglennon 8mo ago

treelover 8mo ago
"The U.S. social media landscape is quietly reshaping itself. Between 2020 and 2024, overall platform use slipped, driven by a rise in the population – especially the youngest and oldest – who no longer use social media at all. The old incumbents – Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter/X – have lost ground, while TikTok and Reddit have expanded modestly. The users who remain are slightly older, better educated, and more racially diverse than four years ago. The political balance of social media has shifted just as noticeably. The once-clear Democratic lean of major platforms has declined. Twitter/X, in particular, has seen a radical flip: a space dominated by Democrats in 2020 is now more Republican-aligned, especially among its most active users and posters. Reddit’s remains a Democraic stronghold, but its liberal edge has softened. Across platforms, overall political posting has declined, yet its link with affective polarization persists. Those expressing the strongest partisan animus continue to post most frequently, meaning that visible political discourse remains dominated by the most polarized voices. This leads to a distorted representation of politics, that itself can function as a driver of societal polarization [17, 12]. Overall, the data depict a social media ecosystem in slow contraction and segmentation. As casual users disengage while polarized partisans remain highly active, the tone of online political life may grow more conflictual even as participation declines. The digital public sphere is becoming smaller, sharper, and louder: fewer participants, but stronger opinions. What remains online is a politics that feels more divided – not because more people are fighting, but because the fighters are the ones left talking." Yup, nothing unexpected here.
iugtmkbdfil834 8mo ago
<< As casual users disengage and polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme. It.. feels accurate. I don't frequent FB or other mainstream social spots, but even on HN, the pattern is relatively clear. Vocal minorities tend to drive the conversations to their respective corners, while the middle quietly moves to, at most, watch at a safe distance. Part of me is happy about it. The sooner we get out of the social media landscape, the better the society as a whole will be.. in my opinion anyway. Still, we have already lost so much of the original internet. That loss makes me sad.
- hdgvhicv 8mo ago
  The problem with “the middle” is that’s relative to the Overton window. Federal troops assassinating kneeling protesters didn’t used to be “one side” with “the middle” suggesting they should simply arrest them and lock them up.
  - iugtmkbdfil834 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - rozal 8mo ago
      [dead]
    - nozzlegear 8mo ago
      > edit: and to all the lazy downvoters. argue with me ye bums ( name calling very much intended here ). if you cant even manage that, what are you doing here? Is this irony? You literally just posted about arguments from vocal minorities on HN and other social media driving people away.
      - iugtmkbdfil834 8mo ago
        In the immortal words of the elder Elaine Benice: it means whatever you want it to mean. What I want is for someone to respond to my message as opposed to a lazy button press. But I dream.
    - assimpleaspossi 8mo ago
      [flagged]
    - hobs 8mo ago
      You say socially approved catch phrases and yet people are being shot in my city by federal agents, and I carry a passport knowing that it will do me no good if they decide to crack my head in. When do words have meanings that connect to reality for you personally?
galleywest200 8mo ago
> Across platforms, political posting remains tightly linked to affective polarization, as the most partisan users are also the most active. As casual users disengage and polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme. I keep saying to my internet friends that the vast majority of people do not share political opinions online and you have to apply skepticism about what people actually think about political topics when scrolling through social media “takes”. Seems my intuition was not that far off.
btbuildem 8mo ago
The paper (rightfully) does not address this, but I'd like to speculate about the reasons why, overall, usage has been dropping. I think it's because social media, as a whole, stopped providing any value to its users. In the early days it did bring a novel way to connect, coordinate, stay in touch, discover, and learn. Today, not so much. It seems we are between worlds now, with the wells of the "old order" drying up, and the springs of the "new order" not found / tapped just yet.
- iugtmkbdfil834 8mo ago
  I have a theory, but based only on my observation of younger family members; needless to say, it may be way off in aggregate. Apart from the obvious, I don't really see them posting on legacy social media platfoms ( fb and so on ). TikTok was commonly used, but I can't say if recent US moves actually caused younger people to limits its use. On the other hand, fragmented discords and the like did seem to start be more common.
  - nine_k 8mo ago
    Did you see people mourning the demise of forum software, when neatly maintained places oriented towards specific topics gave way to noisy and all-encompassing places like FB at Twitter? I think these fragmented Discords are the return to the idea of specific, uncrowded, neatly maintained places, with a relatively high barrier to entry for a random person. Subreddits are a bit similar, but less insular.
    - GaryBluto 8mo ago
      One of the only differences between new Reddit and Discord is that Reddit has the courtesy of a public index. I don't know much about Discord (my only experience being some years ago when I joined for an open source project and left soon after I noticed how incredibly use hostile it is) but I do know that if you create a single account it is trivial to join any "server" (which, despite the marketing is just a chatroom hosted on their servers).
aucisson_masque 8mo ago
> As casual users disengage and polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme. I think it's the root cause of all our issues (in democratic society).
- siavosh 8mo ago
  The root cause of our issues is the economic austerity imposed on the public causing disaffection of the masses. Dividing this public and redirecting this anger against each other and scapegoats leads to what you refer to.
  - terminalshort 8mo ago
    Where is this economic austerity you speak of, and who is imposing it?
    - throwerxyz 8mo ago
      Starts with a tax on taxes. The richer you are, the less tax you will pay. This is a cost to the entire nation as most people aren't rich and most people require the benefits of taxes.
    - siavosh 8mo ago
      From the de-industrialization of a country, the privatization of previously public goods, subsidization of the wealthy by everyone else, the decoupling of national wealth from labor, I mean we can go on and on. And lest you think I’m partisan, both parties are complicit, but this is hardly an American phenomenon.
chris_wot 8mo ago
So... people actually converse and have civil debates on social media? I wouldn't know, I'm not on Facebook.
jimmydoe 8mo ago
Shifts in U.S. Society, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, Polarization Social media just reflects the state of its users.
- oceansky 8mo ago
  Reflects or shape it?
  - NegativeK 8mo ago
    Amplifies it, because it's the easier way to profit. Cable news was ramping up sensationalism -- including polarization -- before the internet was a household thing. Social media gave the businesses real-time feedback of how to drive up engagement. So they amplify what keeps people engaged, which means leaning heavily on anger and divisiveness.
jeffbee 8mo ago
This paper came out in October and I read it at the time. It is pretty surprising but it is also totally contradicted by other major surveys, so I am pretty sure it's just flawed. The most peculiar result is the dramatic reduction in reach for YouTube. This guy has YouTube with 60% reach and falling. Pew Americans’ Social Media Use 2025 has YouTube at 84% and rising, and 95% among 18-29 age cohort, which pretty much refutes this paper's core conclusion. "Overall [social media] platform use slipped ... especially the youngest ... who no longer use social media at all" is the kind of wild claim that requires a much more significant investigation than this author undertook.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- bigthymer 8mo ago
  The YouTube numbers surprised me the most. I agree with you. I was expecting a rise in viewership.
adamlgerber 8mo ago
i feel like the underlying thesis of this is maybe wrong. someone closer to the methodology would know better but here is what i see: (1) Meta and Google have seen their growth slow (not shrink) because they reach virtually the entirety of the online population, especially in the US. Meanwhile their time spent metrics continue to rise. (2) Reddit is called out as a modest grower but its usage has more than doubled in the US since 2021 from 90M to 170M (according to emarketer). Doenst mean the conclusions are wrong (i agree with it on polarization) but the growth measures seem to not reflect reality.
- jeffbee 8mo ago
  I think you are right to suspect the methods and the results. If you look at the paper's github, the python notebook was clearly written by a chatbot (the comments are all in the second person). So what you have here is a monograph, unreviewed, unpublished, based on GPT-level understanding of a survey that might not even apply to this subject.
  - chr15m 8mo ago
    And worse, it says something smart people wish was true.
- throwaway94275 8mo ago
  Meta and Google time-spent growth is probably people watching Reels and YouTube. They're both becoming Tiktok and most of the accounts on Tiktok when I was on it for a while did not look like people's real name. So with regard to Meta/Google "growth" idk if there's anything too social about that.
  - adamlgerber 8mo ago
    sure, call it entertainment rather than social. very fair comment, but that is not a distinction this paper is making. the paper is also talking about tiktok too which falls into the same entertainment category.
xvxvx 8mo ago
Social media may have been the biggest disappointment and missed opportunity of the internet era. It’s a literal dumpster fire. People do not get what they want from it. Clearly, the market is not dictated by the customer.
- Ygg2 8mo ago
  The market is dictated by the customer, but the customer is the ad company, not the user.
- nomel 8mo ago
  I'm a bit confused. What's the alternative outcome? We're talking about humans here, most of which have an IQ below 100! For any social thing, more humans literally means more dumb. The only way around it is silos/migration, which is exactly how it was handled in the early internet, and why this place is reasonable. Or, is that what was missed? Better silos, with some sort of semi non-community enforcement for the quality of interaction/comment?
  - II2II 8mo ago
    > What's the alternative outcome? Once upon a time, people saw computers (then the Internet) as a way of lifting people up rather than pushing people down. They saw it as a way of equalizing people's access to knowledge, rather than subjecting them to a fire hose of information. They believed that it would encourage discourse to bring people together, rather than dividing people along ideological lines. Yeah, we were naive.
    - nomel 8mo ago
      People are being given what they flock to. Again, what's the alternative outcome? What does the implementation look like to you? How is the prevention of dopamine driven content generation and willing consumption enforced? How do you keep conversations meaningful, and content "fulfilling" when that's not what most, what we used to call "normies", actually want?
tamimio 8mo ago
The real issue that a lot of people keep forgetting or ignoring is monetization. This alone is responsible for at least 80% of the damage we have in nowadays internet, not just social media. YouTube channels, Twitter accounts, Twitch streamers, podcasts, you name it, are there only as a business to these "influencers", and naturally the more you progress in time the more there's a need to be extreme to get noticed in this exponentially growing domain. So back in 2013 you could get an audience by making some prank on Vine, but in 2025 you have to pretend you are "exposing Somali frauds" to get the same engagement level, and thus the money and popularity, as pretty much no one will care if you made prank videos in 2025 anymore. There are bots running on Twitter as we speak that are actively shilling and grifting on trendy topics, podcasts paid by sponsors, even on HN especially since AI with these wrappers trying to sell subscriptions or asking you to sign up on their blogs. The list goes on. The problem isn't social media. The problem is the oldest issue in history: money and greed. Everyone is trying to monetize anything, including selling used socks or whatever on OF!
- pnexk 8mo ago
  Tangentially, I think that the “excuse” for these platforms that they need to make money enabled a lot of the current dystopian level of ad tracking. Network effects be damned, we should all be a little more willing to pay to be part of platforms hosting digital communities or at least contribute in some way to the infrastructure.
  - terminalshort 8mo ago
    And if we did, what would be the difference? Sure, there would be no ads on the platform (plenty of sponsored content, though), but there would still be an algorithm. And it would be minimally different to the one that exists today. The current ad driven model doesn't allow paying advertisers to drive the algorithm. Rather it lets you drive the algorithm by your revealed preferences and then allows advertisers to target you based on those preferences and insert their ads in the result, which is much more effective. But if we didn't have the ads, the algorithm remains. The question "what does this user want to see?" is equally as relevant to a company that wants to convince a user to keep paying for their subscription as it is to a company that uses it as an advertising vector.
tsunamifury 8mo ago
Worked in the top 3 here Seems false to me. Explosive growth in 2020 during Covid was widely recorded and seeming engagement. Flips of X were associated with massive drops in population and bots. This seems entirely wrong to me
onetokeoverthe 8mo ago
[dead]
Devasta 8mo ago
In the past, I could go onto Facebook and see what my friends were up to, and share updates with them about what I was doing. It was great for arranging nights out. Today, it's a dumpster fire, I can't see what anyone is doing, it's just AI videos and engagement bait. Discord is the replacement for my friends at least.
- carlosjobim 8mo ago
  https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr and https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr Change your Facebook bookmark to one of these.
  - Symbiote 8mo ago
    Unfortunately these don't work on mobile browsers (I do use them on the desktop)
    - everdrive 8mo ago
      This is intentional. It's really not a good idea to browse any sort of content on your phone. In one way or another, it's always worse for the user: - worse tracking / privacy - tilted toward passive consumption / scrolling due to UI and low impulse control threshold - more vendor dark patterns - far worse UI experience - etc ... Using your phone to consume content is always a bad decision.
siavosh 8mo ago
After not logging into Twitter for years I logged back in because I wanted to follow some posts regarding some breaking news. Omg the amount of garbage and fake videos and pictures was overwhelming. My guess is bot content is now so realistic and engagement manipulation is so sophisticated from even a few years ago that people will disengage even more.
- bsaul 8mo ago
  I think that's the number 1 reason. Bot simply drive away useful content. I think musk don't fight against bot because it makes the ads sells more (just like in the first days of SEM, where fake traffic and fake clicks was a source of revenue for second tier ad networks). But ultimately he's going to have to do something against it.
  - CamperBob2 8mo ago
    But ultimately he's going to have to do something against it. Musk: "Why, at this rate, I'll have to shut this place down in... let's see... 684,000 years." He can afford to treat Twitter as a playground for bots, a grooming ground for right-wing radicals, and a cesspool of cut-rate advertising.
    - reverius42 8mo ago
      Not only can he afford to, investors have been chomping at the bit! x.com (Twitter) was acquired by xAI. xAI is to be acquired by SpaceX. And rumor has it, SpaceX will IPO for big money soon.
      - CamperBob2 8mo ago
        On to Mars! Er, ... To the Moon! He is just another Lucy, holding just another football.
  - numpad0 8mo ago
    That and GP are both plain untrue. The system literally hides useful and/or organic contents. There's also no signs of ads doing better than before. The current Twitter algorithm funnel users into divided bubbles of couple hundreds users each, and cap numbers and quality metrics of contents that are allowed to be accessed beyond the bubbles, except for spams, which are artificially kept in the global context. Or something like that. To maintain the facade of a unified timeline, the system picks contents that would have been plausibly popular in the absence of it and push it into global contexts, but those are so out of contexts and out of regular system behaviors that it only brews hostility among the users against the system.
StarterPro 8mo ago
I feel like we're all glossing over the whole "pedophile billionaires colluded to throw the United States into chaos" part.
- 1potatonagger 8mo ago
  [flagged]
gigatexal 8mo ago
Deleting my Facebook account was the best thing I ever did. I did it nearly 10 years ago and never looked back. I don’t miss it or miss out.
skljlasflsf 8mo ago
[dead]
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
smddang 8mo ago
[dead]
terminalshort 8mo ago
The social media cycle: 1. Quality brings success 2. Success brings popularity 3. Popularity brings idiots 4. Idiots destroy quality
- siavosh 8mo ago
  One small change, replace idiots with monetization.
- runlevel1 8mo ago
  "L'enfer, c'est les autres" seems to work on a few levels.
- armchairhacker 8mo ago
  > Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths > Subcultures are dead. I plan to write a full obituary soon... Written in 2015
alexpotato 8mo ago
Been speaking to current college students and recent college grads and this is their general sentiment: 1. "social media" is toxic They may consume video on YouTube etc but the thought is, even amongst smart kids, that there is no net positive to interacting with people you don't know on social media. This is somewhat disheartening given how many wonderful people I've met by just "being myself" on Twitter. 2. There is no central social media network anymore I coached college club sports from the mid-2000s to the early 2010s. It's hard to overstate how EVERYONE in college was on Facebook. We used to have a dedicated forum for one of the teams and the president convinced me to go to Facebook groups b/c: "Everyone is already on it and it has a notification system that people check b/c it's how they find out about college parties" A current club president didn't even know what would be the best way to reach students other than flyers and setting up a table at the student center. (I suggested Reddit and he acknowledged that would probably be one place where you at least knew students from the school might be there and were interested.)
- chasd00 8mo ago
  > “social media" is toxic I have 14 and 16 year old sons and they, and their friends, have the same feeling about social media. Their preferred way to communicate with friends is an iMessage group.
  - alexpotato 8mo ago
    I remember being in college and seeing the start of forums dedicated to a sport or hobby. That's how college paintball grew b/c first there was a forum just for college teams. Google just accelerated this as it made them easier to find. That then got eclipsed by BIG dedicated forums like PBNation.com (with a dedicated college forum) and then it went to FB. That "if I just browse around, I'll find the nexus of what I'm into" seems to not be a thing for teenagers these days.
- brightball 8mo ago
  I graduated just before social media took off, but for us everybody was on AOL Instant Messenger. You left it on on your computer all the time, people updated their status messages for all to see and it showed when you were idle. It was so much better than online by default as we are now.
hsuduebc2 8mo ago
I find the idea of "partisans" eg. affective idiots throwing tantrums over each other's because of some absurd current topic while everybody just leaves quitly somehow little amusing.
steele 8mo ago
Monetization through advertising is urinating in the pool
keyshapegeo99 8mo ago
GPTZero flags every single section of this beyond the introduction as 100% likely to be AI-generated. Looking for recommendations for discussion forums that aren't filled with these slop posts, anyone have any suggestions?
- istjohn 8mo ago
  AI detectors are snake oil.
cal_dent 8mo ago
AI slop or slop adjacent content will be the death knell for social media. Social media got soo big because it provided some pleasure to people and like anything that's plentiful, after a while you get sick of it. AI accelerates the volume of content, and also adds even more low value context into the mixer, and will accelerate how quickly society reaches the boredom phase again. That + regulation means that social media is on the downward curve now I suspect
Lerc 8mo ago
It would be interesting to see if the harms reported from social media go up or down. I can see people who want to make the case that harms are going up, but if use is coming down it would not be correlated. I'm sure someone with a book to peddle will eventually say measured harms going up and use coming down just shows how toxic it is now.
softwaredoug 8mo ago
I wonder if our kids will see social media the way we see cable news: a toxic political cesspool that the older generation gets sucked into.
bad_username 8mo ago
Do you remember how these things were called social NETWORKS, as in something you navigate and explore? Then they gradually became social MEDIA, as in something you consume...
- Aeglaecia 8mo ago
  awesome observation that ill be stealing , thanks for sharing
joelthelion 8mo ago
One factor that I didn't see mentioned is enshittification. The platforms are prioritizing monetization at the expense of everything else. It's making the experience worse and, as a result, people are gradually leaving.
trolleski 8mo ago
SM gives negative value, it is antisocial media and an experiment on human beings no one signed up for.
heavyset_go 8mo ago
This is just manufacturing consent for requiring ID and face scans to use social media. COVID happened, of course the trend will look like this without needing to wring a moral panic out of it.
yieldcrv 8mo ago
I definitely see a bifurcation amongst the younger people I date. Really limited use, professional use, while some fall into addiction but are functionally just like Millennials in use Its kind of like treating social media as an addiction that everyone’s uncles “could give up at any time” I see a parallel to smoking. In one generation everyone did it - at one point thought nothing of it - and in the next generation little kids are like “you know thats bad for you right?” and aren't tempted to use it, looking down on it I like the trend, even stories are shorter form, I do it now too
1970-01-01 8mo ago
Web 2.0 was a mistake fueled by Zuckerberg copycats looking for the same magical user growth hack. Giving users and later bots an entirely free, easy to use platform to focus their agenda onto is a cancer within the network, not a feature. This decade is the result of it. The old fix was filtering via technical chops. Braincells, time, and money was required to have an online opinion. At minimum, your agenda would need to satisfy this large filtering function else it just wouldn't exist. Now that it's entirely free, and the clearly agenda-driven takes can no longer be filtered, the cancer is left to grow until the fuel (advertising, shareholder returns) runs out.
Dantes7 8mo ago
It’s been frustrating for me too to see genuinely good content constantly buried by algorithms, bots, and general noise. I’ve been working on a side project exploring a different approach to finding meaningful conversations and overlooked content. I don’t want to spam the thread — happy to share details if it feels relevant to anyone.

212 points by vinnyglennon 8mo ago

"The U.S. social media landscape is quietly reshaping itself. Between 2020 and 2024, overall platform use slipped, driven by a rise in the population – especially the youngest and oldest – who no longer use social media at all. The old incumbents – Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter/X – have lost ground, while TikTok and Reddit have expanded modestly. The users who remain are slightly older, better educated, and more racially diverse than four years ago. The political balance of social media has shifted just as noticeably. The once-clear Democratic lean of major platforms has declined. Twitter/X, in particular, has seen a radical flip: a space dominated by Democrats in 2020 is now more Republican-aligned, especially among its most active users and posters. Reddit’s remains a Democraic stronghold, but its liberal edge has softened. Across platforms, overall political posting has declined, yet its link with affective polarization persists. Those expressing the strongest partisan animus continue to post most frequently, meaning that visible political discourse remains dominated by the most polarized voices. This leads to a distorted representation of politics, that itself can function as a driver of societal polarization [17, 12]. Overall, the data depict a social media ecosystem in slow contraction and segmentation. As casual users disengage while polarized partisans remain highly active, the tone of online political life may grow more conflictual even as participation declines. The digital public sphere is becoming smaller, sharper, and louder: fewer participants, but stronger opinions. What remains online is a politics that feels more divided – not because more people are fighting, but because the fighters are the ones left talking." Yup, nothing unexpected here.

iugtmkbdfil834 8mo ago

<< As casual users disengage and polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme. It.. feels accurate. I don't frequent FB or other mainstream social spots, but even on HN, the pattern is relatively clear. Vocal minorities tend to drive the conversations to their respective corners, while the middle quietly moves to, at most, watch at a safe distance. Part of me is happy about it. The sooner we get out of the social media landscape, the better the society as a whole will be.. in my opinion anyway. Still, we have already lost so much of the original internet. That loss makes me sad.

hdgvhicv 8mo ago
The problem with “the middle” is that’s relative to the Overton window. Federal troops assassinating kneeling protesters didn’t used to be “one side” with “the middle” suggesting they should simply arrest them and lock them up.
- iugtmkbdfil834 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - rozal 8mo ago
    [dead]
  - nozzlegear 8mo ago
    > edit: and to all the lazy downvoters. argue with me ye bums ( name calling very much intended here ). if you cant even manage that, what are you doing here? Is this irony? You literally just posted about arguments from vocal minorities on HN and other social media driving people away.
    - iugtmkbdfil834 8mo ago
      In the immortal words of the elder Elaine Benice: it means whatever you want it to mean. What I want is for someone to respond to my message as opposed to a lazy button press. But I dream.
  - assimpleaspossi 8mo ago
    [flagged]
  - hobs 8mo ago
    You say socially approved catch phrases and yet people are being shot in my city by federal agents, and I carry a passport knowing that it will do me no good if they decide to crack my head in. When do words have meanings that connect to reality for you personally?

galleywest200 8mo ago

> Across platforms, political posting remains tightly linked to affective polarization, as the most partisan users are also the most active. As casual users disengage and polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme. I keep saying to my internet friends that the vast majority of people do not share political opinions online and you have to apply skepticism about what people actually think about political topics when scrolling through social media “takes”. Seems my intuition was not that far off.

btbuildem 8mo ago

The paper (rightfully) does not address this, but I'd like to speculate about the reasons why, overall, usage has been dropping. I think it's because social media, as a whole, stopped providing any value to its users. In the early days it did bring a novel way to connect, coordinate, stay in touch, discover, and learn. Today, not so much. It seems we are between worlds now, with the wells of the "old order" drying up, and the springs of the "new order" not found / tapped just yet.

iugtmkbdfil834 8mo ago
I have a theory, but based only on my observation of younger family members; needless to say, it may be way off in aggregate. Apart from the obvious, I don't really see them posting on legacy social media platfoms ( fb and so on ). TikTok was commonly used, but I can't say if recent US moves actually caused younger people to limits its use. On the other hand, fragmented discords and the like did seem to start be more common.
- nine_k 8mo ago
  Did you see people mourning the demise of forum software, when neatly maintained places oriented towards specific topics gave way to noisy and all-encompassing places like FB at Twitter? I think these fragmented Discords are the return to the idea of specific, uncrowded, neatly maintained places, with a relatively high barrier to entry for a random person. Subreddits are a bit similar, but less insular.
  - GaryBluto 8mo ago
    One of the only differences between new Reddit and Discord is that Reddit has the courtesy of a public index. I don't know much about Discord (my only experience being some years ago when I joined for an open source project and left soon after I noticed how incredibly use hostile it is) but I do know that if you create a single account it is trivial to join any "server" (which, despite the marketing is just a chatroom hosted on their servers).

aucisson_masque 8mo ago

> As casual users disengage and polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme. I think it's the root cause of all our issues (in democratic society).

siavosh 8mo ago
The root cause of our issues is the economic austerity imposed on the public causing disaffection of the masses. Dividing this public and redirecting this anger against each other and scapegoats leads to what you refer to.
- terminalshort 8mo ago
  Where is this economic austerity you speak of, and who is imposing it?
  - throwerxyz 8mo ago
    Starts with a tax on taxes. The richer you are, the less tax you will pay. This is a cost to the entire nation as most people aren't rich and most people require the benefits of taxes.
  - siavosh 8mo ago
    From the de-industrialization of a country, the privatization of previously public goods, subsidization of the wealthy by everyone else, the decoupling of national wealth from labor, I mean we can go on and on. And lest you think I’m partisan, both parties are complicit, but this is hardly an American phenomenon.

chris_wot 8mo ago

So... people actually converse and have civil debates on social media? I wouldn't know, I'm not on Facebook.

jimmydoe 8mo ago

Shifts in U.S. Society, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, Polarization Social media just reflects the state of its users.

oceansky 8mo ago
Reflects or shape it?
- NegativeK 8mo ago
  Amplifies it, because it's the easier way to profit. Cable news was ramping up sensationalism -- including polarization -- before the internet was a household thing. Social media gave the businesses real-time feedback of how to drive up engagement. So they amplify what keeps people engaged, which means leaning heavily on anger and divisiveness.

jeffbee 8mo ago

This paper came out in October and I read it at the time. It is pretty surprising but it is also totally contradicted by other major surveys, so I am pretty sure it's just flawed. The most peculiar result is the dramatic reduction in reach for YouTube. This guy has YouTube with 60% reach and falling. Pew Americans’ Social Media Use 2025 has YouTube at 84% and rising, and 95% among 18-29 age cohort, which pretty much refutes this paper's core conclusion. "Overall [social media] platform use slipped ... especially the youngest ... who no longer use social media at all" is the kind of wild claim that requires a much more significant investigation than this author undertook.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
bigthymer 8mo ago
The YouTube numbers surprised me the most. I agree with you. I was expecting a rise in viewership.

adamlgerber 8mo ago

i feel like the underlying thesis of this is maybe wrong. someone closer to the methodology would know better but here is what i see: (1) Meta and Google have seen their growth slow (not shrink) because they reach virtually the entirety of the online population, especially in the US. Meanwhile their time spent metrics continue to rise. (2) Reddit is called out as a modest grower but its usage has more than doubled in the US since 2021 from 90M to 170M (according to emarketer). Doenst mean the conclusions are wrong (i agree with it on polarization) but the growth measures seem to not reflect reality.

jeffbee 8mo ago
I think you are right to suspect the methods and the results. If you look at the paper's github, the python notebook was clearly written by a chatbot (the comments are all in the second person). So what you have here is a monograph, unreviewed, unpublished, based on GPT-level understanding of a survey that might not even apply to this subject.
- chr15m 8mo ago
  And worse, it says something smart people wish was true.
throwaway94275 8mo ago
Meta and Google time-spent growth is probably people watching Reels and YouTube. They're both becoming Tiktok and most of the accounts on Tiktok when I was on it for a while did not look like people's real name. So with regard to Meta/Google "growth" idk if there's anything too social about that.
- adamlgerber 8mo ago
  sure, call it entertainment rather than social. very fair comment, but that is not a distinction this paper is making. the paper is also talking about tiktok too which falls into the same entertainment category.

xvxvx 8mo ago

Social media may have been the biggest disappointment and missed opportunity of the internet era. It’s a literal dumpster fire. People do not get what they want from it. Clearly, the market is not dictated by the customer.

Ygg2 8mo ago
The market is dictated by the customer, but the customer is the ad company, not the user.
nomel 8mo ago
I'm a bit confused. What's the alternative outcome? We're talking about humans here, most of which have an IQ below 100! For any social thing, more humans literally means more dumb. The only way around it is silos/migration, which is exactly how it was handled in the early internet, and why this place is reasonable. Or, is that what was missed? Better silos, with some sort of semi non-community enforcement for the quality of interaction/comment?
- II2II 8mo ago
  > What's the alternative outcome? Once upon a time, people saw computers (then the Internet) as a way of lifting people up rather than pushing people down. They saw it as a way of equalizing people's access to knowledge, rather than subjecting them to a fire hose of information. They believed that it would encourage discourse to bring people together, rather than dividing people along ideological lines. Yeah, we were naive.
  - nomel 8mo ago
    People are being given what they flock to. Again, what's the alternative outcome? What does the implementation look like to you? How is the prevention of dopamine driven content generation and willing consumption enforced? How do you keep conversations meaningful, and content "fulfilling" when that's not what most, what we used to call "normies", actually want?

tamimio 8mo ago

The real issue that a lot of people keep forgetting or ignoring is monetization. This alone is responsible for at least 80% of the damage we have in nowadays internet, not just social media. YouTube channels, Twitter accounts, Twitch streamers, podcasts, you name it, are there only as a business to these "influencers", and naturally the more you progress in time the more there's a need to be extreme to get noticed in this exponentially growing domain. So back in 2013 you could get an audience by making some prank on Vine, but in 2025 you have to pretend you are "exposing Somali frauds" to get the same engagement level, and thus the money and popularity, as pretty much no one will care if you made prank videos in 2025 anymore. There are bots running on Twitter as we speak that are actively shilling and grifting on trendy topics, podcasts paid by sponsors, even on HN especially since AI with these wrappers trying to sell subscriptions or asking you to sign up on their blogs. The list goes on. The problem isn't social media. The problem is the oldest issue in history: money and greed. Everyone is trying to monetize anything, including selling used socks or whatever on OF!

pnexk 8mo ago
Tangentially, I think that the “excuse” for these platforms that they need to make money enabled a lot of the current dystopian level of ad tracking. Network effects be damned, we should all be a little more willing to pay to be part of platforms hosting digital communities or at least contribute in some way to the infrastructure.
- terminalshort 8mo ago
  And if we did, what would be the difference? Sure, there would be no ads on the platform (plenty of sponsored content, though), but there would still be an algorithm. And it would be minimally different to the one that exists today. The current ad driven model doesn't allow paying advertisers to drive the algorithm. Rather it lets you drive the algorithm by your revealed preferences and then allows advertisers to target you based on those preferences and insert their ads in the result, which is much more effective. But if we didn't have the ads, the algorithm remains. The question "what does this user want to see?" is equally as relevant to a company that wants to convince a user to keep paying for their subscription as it is to a company that uses it as an advertising vector.

tsunamifury 8mo ago

Worked in the top 3 here Seems false to me. Explosive growth in 2020 during Covid was widely recorded and seeming engagement. Flips of X were associated with massive drops in population and bots. This seems entirely wrong to me

onetokeoverthe 8mo ago

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Devasta 8mo ago

In the past, I could go onto Facebook and see what my friends were up to, and share updates with them about what I was doing. It was great for arranging nights out. Today, it's a dumpster fire, I can't see what anyone is doing, it's just AI videos and engagement bait. Discord is the replacement for my friends at least.

carlosjobim 8mo ago
https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr and https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr Change your Facebook bookmark to one of these.
- Symbiote 8mo ago
  Unfortunately these don't work on mobile browsers (I do use them on the desktop)
  - everdrive 8mo ago
    This is intentional. It's really not a good idea to browse any sort of content on your phone. In one way or another, it's always worse for the user: - worse tracking / privacy - tilted toward passive consumption / scrolling due to UI and low impulse control threshold - more vendor dark patterns - far worse UI experience - etc ... Using your phone to consume content is always a bad decision.

siavosh 8mo ago

After not logging into Twitter for years I logged back in because I wanted to follow some posts regarding some breaking news. Omg the amount of garbage and fake videos and pictures was overwhelming. My guess is bot content is now so realistic and engagement manipulation is so sophisticated from even a few years ago that people will disengage even more.

bsaul 8mo ago
I think that's the number 1 reason. Bot simply drive away useful content. I think musk don't fight against bot because it makes the ads sells more (just like in the first days of SEM, where fake traffic and fake clicks was a source of revenue for second tier ad networks). But ultimately he's going to have to do something against it.
- CamperBob2 8mo ago
  But ultimately he's going to have to do something against it. Musk: "Why, at this rate, I'll have to shut this place down in... let's see... 684,000 years." He can afford to treat Twitter as a playground for bots, a grooming ground for right-wing radicals, and a cesspool of cut-rate advertising.
  - reverius42 8mo ago
    Not only can he afford to, investors have been chomping at the bit! x.com (Twitter) was acquired by xAI. xAI is to be acquired by SpaceX. And rumor has it, SpaceX will IPO for big money soon.
    - CamperBob2 8mo ago
      On to Mars! Er, ... To the Moon! He is just another Lucy, holding just another football.
- numpad0 8mo ago
  That and GP are both plain untrue. The system literally hides useful and/or organic contents. There's also no signs of ads doing better than before. The current Twitter algorithm funnel users into divided bubbles of couple hundreds users each, and cap numbers and quality metrics of contents that are allowed to be accessed beyond the bubbles, except for spams, which are artificially kept in the global context. Or something like that. To maintain the facade of a unified timeline, the system picks contents that would have been plausibly popular in the absence of it and push it into global contexts, but those are so out of contexts and out of regular system behaviors that it only brews hostility among the users against the system.

StarterPro 8mo ago

I feel like we're all glossing over the whole "pedophile billionaires colluded to throw the United States into chaos" part.

1potatonagger 8mo ago
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gigatexal 8mo ago

Deleting my Facebook account was the best thing I ever did. I did it nearly 10 years ago and never looked back. I don’t miss it or miss out.

skljlasflsf 8mo ago

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deleted 8mo ago

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smddang 8mo ago

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terminalshort 8mo ago

The social media cycle: 1. Quality brings success 2. Success brings popularity 3. Popularity brings idiots 4. Idiots destroy quality

siavosh 8mo ago
One small change, replace idiots with monetization.
runlevel1 8mo ago
"L'enfer, c'est les autres" seems to work on a few levels.
armchairhacker 8mo ago
> Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths > Subcultures are dead. I plan to write a full obituary soon... Written in 2015

alexpotato 8mo ago

Been speaking to current college students and recent college grads and this is their general sentiment: 1. "social media" is toxic They may consume video on YouTube etc but the thought is, even amongst smart kids, that there is no net positive to interacting with people you don't know on social media. This is somewhat disheartening given how many wonderful people I've met by just "being myself" on Twitter. 2. There is no central social media network anymore I coached college club sports from the mid-2000s to the early 2010s. It's hard to overstate how EVERYONE in college was on Facebook. We used to have a dedicated forum for one of the teams and the president convinced me to go to Facebook groups b/c: "Everyone is already on it and it has a notification system that people check b/c it's how they find out about college parties" A current club president didn't even know what would be the best way to reach students other than flyers and setting up a table at the student center. (I suggested Reddit and he acknowledged that would probably be one place where you at least knew students from the school might be there and were interested.)

chasd00 8mo ago
> “social media" is toxic I have 14 and 16 year old sons and they, and their friends, have the same feeling about social media. Their preferred way to communicate with friends is an iMessage group.
- alexpotato 8mo ago
  I remember being in college and seeing the start of forums dedicated to a sport or hobby. That's how college paintball grew b/c first there was a forum just for college teams. Google just accelerated this as it made them easier to find. That then got eclipsed by BIG dedicated forums like PBNation.com (with a dedicated college forum) and then it went to FB. That "if I just browse around, I'll find the nexus of what I'm into" seems to not be a thing for teenagers these days.
brightball 8mo ago
I graduated just before social media took off, but for us everybody was on AOL Instant Messenger. You left it on on your computer all the time, people updated their status messages for all to see and it showed when you were idle. It was so much better than online by default as we are now.

hsuduebc2 8mo ago

I find the idea of "partisans" eg. affective idiots throwing tantrums over each other's because of some absurd current topic while everybody just leaves quitly somehow little amusing.

steele 8mo ago

Monetization through advertising is urinating in the pool

keyshapegeo99 8mo ago

GPTZero flags every single section of this beyond the introduction as 100% likely to be AI-generated. Looking for recommendations for discussion forums that aren't filled with these slop posts, anyone have any suggestions?

istjohn 8mo ago
AI detectors are snake oil.

cal_dent 8mo ago

AI slop or slop adjacent content will be the death knell for social media. Social media got soo big because it provided some pleasure to people and like anything that's plentiful, after a while you get sick of it. AI accelerates the volume of content, and also adds even more low value context into the mixer, and will accelerate how quickly society reaches the boredom phase again. That + regulation means that social media is on the downward curve now I suspect

Lerc 8mo ago

It would be interesting to see if the harms reported from social media go up or down. I can see people who want to make the case that harms are going up, but if use is coming down it would not be correlated. I'm sure someone with a book to peddle will eventually say measured harms going up and use coming down just shows how toxic it is now.

softwaredoug 8mo ago

I wonder if our kids will see social media the way we see cable news: a toxic political cesspool that the older generation gets sucked into.

bad_username 8mo ago

Do you remember how these things were called social NETWORKS, as in something you navigate and explore? Then they gradually became social MEDIA, as in something you consume...

Aeglaecia 8mo ago
awesome observation that ill be stealing , thanks for sharing

joelthelion 8mo ago

One factor that I didn't see mentioned is enshittification. The platforms are prioritizing monetization at the expense of everything else. It's making the experience worse and, as a result, people are gradually leaving.

trolleski 8mo ago

SM gives negative value, it is antisocial media and an experiment on human beings no one signed up for.

heavyset_go 8mo ago

This is just manufacturing consent for requiring ID and face scans to use social media. COVID happened, of course the trend will look like this without needing to wring a moral panic out of it.

yieldcrv 8mo ago

I definitely see a bifurcation amongst the younger people I date. Really limited use, professional use, while some fall into addiction but are functionally just like Millennials in use Its kind of like treating social media as an addiction that everyone’s uncles “could give up at any time” I see a parallel to smoking. In one generation everyone did it - at one point thought nothing of it - and in the next generation little kids are like “you know thats bad for you right?” and aren't tempted to use it, looking down on it I like the trend, even stories are shorter form, I do it now too

1970-01-01 8mo ago

Web 2.0 was a mistake fueled by Zuckerberg copycats looking for the same magical user growth hack. Giving users and later bots an entirely free, easy to use platform to focus their agenda onto is a cancer within the network, not a feature. This decade is the result of it. The old fix was filtering via technical chops. Braincells, time, and money was required to have an online opinion. At minimum, your agenda would need to satisfy this large filtering function else it just wouldn't exist. Now that it's entirely free, and the clearly agenda-driven takes can no longer be filtered, the cancer is left to grow until the fuel (advertising, shareholder returns) runs out.

Dantes7 8mo ago

It’s been frustrating for me too to see genuinely good content constantly buried by algorithms, bots, and general noise. I’ve been working on a side project exploring a different approach to finding meaningful conversations and overlooked content. I don’t want to spam the thread — happy to share details if it feels relevant to anyone.