6 ms·

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 me

• 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).
      • Andrex 8mo ago
        We're gonna enter a new age/type of "lost media" as Discord remains popular year over year. It's a complete black hole unless you're manually backing things up. No possible Wayback Machine.
        • zhivota 8mo ago
          It's honestly a good thing. People should have social outlets where things are forgotten, not memorialized for all eternity.
          • GaryBluto 8mo ago
            Sure, but it's definitely not the return of forums and the fact it is being used in place of forums will cause trouble down the line.
            • armchairhacker 8mo ago
              It's a bad replacement for forums. The Discords I'm active in are all everyday conversations, like big group chats. Some of them are funny/interesting and occasionally someone gives useful advice, but the vast majority are forgettable. I think that people should publicly share valuable information (like great conversations or useful advice) and some of their typical conversations (a context summary for outsiders and history). But privacy and ephemeral-ness make people more open. It may be better to have a space for most conversations where they're not expected to be saved, or (because "not expected" in Discord relies on weak evidence and today's norms) guaranteed not to be saved.
          • calvinmorrison 8mo ago
            Yes for social outlets. For niche hobbies? old photos of specific milling machines used in machine shops on board US navy vessels? For 80's european automotive restoration? For repairing and restoring retro-computing devices? Terrible. Terrible Terrible Terrible.
            • 8mo ago
    • wrxd 8mo ago
      Discord is still not the same and in my opinion inferior. It’s mostly synchronous chat with poor searchability, something very different from what forums used to be
• assimpleaspossi 8mo ago
  I've said this for quite a while now. Social media has turned into a bitch fest. It's all you ever read nowadays and I'm tired of it. I'm sure most people are tired of it.
  • brightball 8mo ago
    I fixed Facebook on my feed at least. I started aggressively unfollowing people who post or comment about politics constantly (even if I agree with them). Not unfriending, just unfollowing. What’s left is a feed with pictures of my friends and family, important news about what’s going on in their lives, and trash talking about college football. It’s great.
    • badc0ffee 8mo ago
      Isn't it also way too many posts from "suggested" pages, and way too many attention-stealing "reels"?
    • Meekro 8mo ago
      I tried that too, and wound up unfollowing everyone except the people who never post. Then my page gets filled with "suggested" content.
    • Double_a_92 8mo ago
      Didn't work for me. It barely even show me content that my friends create. It's all reaction videos and conspiracy nonsense. Even if you block those channels, another one with a slightly different name pops up.
• tdb7893 8mo ago
  I'm always surprised that papers don't include some "chat" apps as social media. I don't see Discord mentioned in this paper but I use it almost identically to how I used Facebook in like 2010 and at least among people I know that's very common. I think the use cases from more traditional "social media" has migrated a lot back to chat apps and those still provide a lot of value and are more widely used than ever.
  • II2II 8mo ago
    Terminology shifted somewhere along the lines, because the nature of sites like Facebook changed. These sites were called "social networking" in the early days, since they connected people. These sites are called "social media" these days, which I assume is a reflection that the top-down nature of these sites are much more like traditional print/radio/television media. The treatment of chat applications, online forums, etc. as social media has always felt strange to me for that reason. While the companies that offer those services may control the platform, control of interactions is limited to moderation and the content of those interactions is rarely created by a commercial interest.
• throwyawayyyy 8mo ago
  If I think about my own use of social media (and I have a facebook account from waaay back in the day, shortly after they dropped the requirement for a US edu email address), I wonder what value it ever had, over and above just emailing those people I'd like to stay in touch with every-so-often (which is what I do now). The reason why facebook switched to an algorithmic feed is because the previous method was failing, people were starting to give up posting. Algorithmic feeds didn't kill social media, they were an attempt at keeping alive what was already moribund. Social media, in the strict sense (so, not just online clubs or societies), never needed to be invented.
• nkoren 8mo ago
  Yes, this. I miss the old social media. I'd love to have it back. Having moved several times to various corners of the world, I have dear family and friends who are scattered across multiple continents. It's difficult to maintain ongoing 1:1 connections across such distances, but I used to be able to keep up with them and their families -- and them with mine -- via social media. It felt genuinely communal. And then the posts from them became increasingly interspersed with -- and eventually outright replaced by -- advertisements, rage bait from random people(?) I didn't know, and then eventually AI slop. All with the obvious goal of manipulating my attention and getting me to consume more advertising. It felt absolutely gross. Not something I wanted my personal life to be associated with. I stopped posting. So did my friends. The end. But I still miss the old social media, and would use it if it actually existed (not just as a technology or a business model, mind you, but as an actual network with the adoption needed to create those kind of connections).
  • dgently7 8mo ago
    real question, how much would you be willing to pay a month for access to a healthy social network? (borrowing another comments clarification on the term vs social media) healthy as in: has real people that you really know. Has no ads or bots or ai slop. Isn't full of dark patterns that are designed to turn you into a doom scrolling zombie? and maybe even has features that actually help you to stay connected in a real way to other people? oh and you are actually the customer and not the product so won't just be a service to gather bulk data on your "consumer preferences" so other places can target ads... because while the thing you want isn't a technology or a business model I think if you actually wanted it to exist you need both, and we all mostly agree the old model where the social internet is just ad/data supported is not a path to something good. so the very real question is how much would you be willing pay in dues for that social network? how much would your friends pay? if it existed would you push for them to go there? its hard to imagine a paid service that is basically the web version of kale being popular enough to get to network effects scale vs tiktok's double fudge oreos, but it would need to start somewhere... and some people do choose kale over oreos.
• jmyeet 8mo ago
  I read a quote once that went something like (paraphrased): every organizational app has to compete with email and every form of social media has to compete with group texts. And I think that's accurate. If you pick random people they'll have often very old group texts. Family, friend groups, etc. These are used to organize, disseminate news and so on. 10+ years ago, a lot of people did these things on FAcebook. Group texts work on all platforms. They don't have ads. They're chronological. From an engagement perspective, algorithmic recommendations and ranking (ie the newsfeed) has "succeeded" but it killed the use cases that people now use group texts for. And I think the two are fundamentally incompatible.
• softwaredoug 8mo ago
  If you optimize for engagement you create secondary effects that can drive users away. If social media becomes addictive because it angers you constantly, that’s engaging but you may hate it. Enough people will realize it’s not worth the stress. The social media site just begins to be associated with negativity and anger - not fun. It’s reasonable we hit peak social media in the US and enough people disengage to make the numbers come down. Though notably 2025 is not in this study.
• DauntingPear7 8mo ago
  It’s because social media is no longer primarily about being social
• sheept 8mo ago
  Based on the time range, the decline of social media use after 2020 could be more strongly related to the decline of Covid and remote school/work
  • energy123 8mo ago
    That's a plausible explanation for the whole paper, unfortunately. And not one mention of Covid was made.
• elefanten 8mo ago
  In addition to the factors named by sibling comments, which I largely agree with, there is also the rise of short form entertainment on these platforms. In 2004, social media was mostly text, images and low-fidelity game experiences like Mafia Wars. Compare to a bottomless scroll of immediate-attention-hook optimized, algorithmically targeted video content found on TikTok / Instagram. The social behaviors got zombified out of the audience.
• ifwinterco 8mo ago
  "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."
• maqnius 8mo ago
  I guess it's correlated to the commercialization of those platforms. The amount of content which is actually from your friends and families is declining and was replaced by adds and viral content. If facebook would've been from the beginning what it's now, we probably never would have named it 'social media' in the first place.
  • altern8 8mo ago
    Big time. I visit once/year and I'm always amazed at how useless Facebook has become. I could barely find any updates from my friends, my feed is now an endless stream of AI-generated videos. What's the use for that?
    • stefanfisk 8mo ago
      Doom scrolling. For people who get hooked it can be very very addictive.
    • joenot443 8mo ago
      Facebook has become a community hub for me more than anything. Mountain biking, snowmobiling, contracting, VJing - there are lots of groups out there with very real and human discussion. You couldn't pay me to go back to reddit for that stuff. You're right though, rarely do people post to their own timeline these days. I think it's the 90:9:1 social media stasis playing out.
      • altern8 8mo ago
        Ah, yes--that makes sense. And it's better than Reddit because it's more personal and you get to meet people or even make friends..?
      • MichaelZuo 8mo ago
        So the real question is what motivates Facebook decision makers to put their credible stuff behind such a low quality front page, that is seen as a joke by nearly everyone? It would be like a reputable industry conference putting a troupe of low budget clowns doing carnival tricks in front of their entrances.
• nicbou 8mo ago
  I visited Facebook pretty much only to see my mom's posts. Even as I literally unfollowed everyone and everything, Facebook still wouldn't show me the only content I chose to see. There are still the Facebook groups, and I really wish we had forums instead of those.
• gentleman11 8mo ago
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A2P06aHpvnQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A2P06aHpvnQ I saw this on youtube yesterday. It is some animation directors micro social media website, limited to 50 people. I dont care for the ethereum. But wouldnt it be cool if major social media platforms were like this?
• MrSkelter 8mo ago
  I proffer it’s because TikTok has advanced the idea social media is about consumption. It’s easier to watch than to create or contribute and as we have more options now to simply watch online, as more people stream as their primary source of media, the options are “work for free” or “watch”.