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Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

174 points by thunderbong 3mo ago

kalehmann 3mo ago
Not sure if I see a bad thing in this. I'd like too know what old friends are currently up to and checking their social media has been a way to do so during the golden age of facebook. Lately I feel more value in connecting with them personally, talking and letting them now, that I am still interested in what's going on for them.
- brunoarueira 3mo ago
  Yeah, I couldn't agree more. At the very least, it should be used occasionally to post things as a kind of "public memory," not to expose your entire life just for likes and exhibitionism.
- netsharc 3mo ago
  I wonder what would happen if: if I post 2 pieces of content, my friend would have to comment on the first one to see the next one. I suppose the app will then mostly be full of throwaway comments in the form of "Cool" or "Wow". But maybe add a modifier that if the poster doesn't have any meaningful reply to a commenter's (let's name him Elon) comment, then the poster's next content will not be shared with Elon next time.
- AndrewDucker 3mo ago
  That's great if you're cultivating a very small group of friends who are local. Social media is how I keep vaguely aware of what's going on with my friends who now live scattered across the planet and get to see in person once per decade or so.
  - rTX5CMRXIfFG 3mo ago
    I’m gonna break it to you bud, the people you see only once a decade or so aren’t your friends. Those are shallow acquaintances that you’re letting drag on for too long. They’re not a part of your life and you’re not a part of theirs. At most, you can call them professional contacts whom you hope to get some value out of in the future, and in that sense I’d agree — social media makes it possible to keep in touch with people whom you have a transactional relationship with.
    - fragmede 3mo ago
      "Drag on for too long" Who are you to dictate how other people connect. The word friend is not well defined, but a person I know from my past that I'm able to keep in contact with, thanks to the magic of technology, that I want to have some communication with, is a something.
      - rTX5CMRXIfFG 3mo ago
        Everything is not well defined as long as you don’t think about it hard enough. With that attitude, you can dismiss any genuinely thoughtful question with potentially painful answers, which is why a lot of people like it.
    - watwut 3mo ago
      They dont drag me. They add positive stuff to my life, once in a while, and that is super cool. And they dont ask much in exchange, just for me to not be a jerk in that situation. And all of them are relationships with someone I already know, can ve safer around then random and some of them grow again into more active friendships in right situation. And yes, that friendship happens again thing is real.
znpy 3mo ago
Social media mostly polarise people (both women and men, in different ways) and generally speaking what you post will be used against you at some point. So yeah, no wonder that social media is dying. People are just catching up to the fact that the best way not to lose is to just not play the game.
halflife 3mo ago
Back to 2015, I stopped posting on Facebook when I noticed that it’s no longer about connecting with my friends, but a never ending stream of boring posts from groups and people that I don’t know or care to follow. All my “social” life just moved to direct communication in WhatsApp (meta owned as well)
- rimeice 3mo ago
  2015 for me too. I wonder if there was some early day over juicing of the attention mechanism that put people off in that year, before they tuned it to reduce churn…
  - beardedetim 3mo ago
    Tinfoil hat time but I think they definitely did _something_ at that time that "changed" the system. It's the Cambridge Analytica/Trump time and I believe that FB definitely "changed" at the same time.
    - jmpman 3mo ago
      After Cambridge Analytica, my "intelligent" friends basically abandoned the platform, while my distant conspiracy inclined uncles started posting baseless slop.
  - rightbyte 3mo ago
    Yeah but I think it just took some year for ppl to notice. 2013-2014 the algorithm got more foused on non-friend posts aswell as making the prioritzation less about "likes" from friends and instead some opaque engagement metrics. Groups had to "promote" post to get their prior reach to subscribers. Also videos started to be posted around that time?
  - weberer 3mo ago
    I remember I left around that time too because they started aggressively trying to defeat adbockers. I'd rather just leave the platform completely than see a single ad.
Simulacra 3mo ago
It seems like so much of social media is just individuals shouting into the void.
- HPsquared 3mo ago
  It's stochastic communication, sometimes other random voices come back from the void.
  - jerlam 3mo ago
    Social media is a skinner box for likes and reposts. You don't even want replies unless it's an opportunity to get more likes.
- asdff 3mo ago
  It would be better if it was that. It is like for any given topic there is a bullet point of a couple takes you will find anywhere about that topic. Just parroting bots I guess since that probably snowballs engagement from other bots.
mherkender 3mo ago
This is an ad for Incogni
- reactordev 3mo ago
  Like every pcmag article, there’s a corporate sponsor
  - fwn 3mo ago
    It is pretty obvious, but as far as I can see, this article has not been disclosed as advertising or sponsored content. I'm in Europe, and I'm no expert on FTC advertising requirements, but this specific content arrangement doesn't feel super legal to me. My ad blocker did not pick it up either.
insickness 3mo ago
To keep people engaged, social media platforms have shifted from showing you content from people you know to prioritizing viral content. The algorithms know viral content offers an endless stream of entertainment that keeps people scrolling longer.
- Smalltalker-80 3mo ago
  Like the writer I'm also a 'boomer' still keeping connected to an older friend group using Facebook and Instagram. For Facebook, I use the plugin "FB Purity" to filter out the generated cr*p posts and force chronological order. It's shocking too see how few posts are left, by agressive algorithm filtering and FB then deciding that "You're all caught up", refusing to show more posts. So my FB time is about 20 seconds every day...
  - derwiki 3mo ago
    That’s Reddit for me: I subscribe to the sub for my city, and that’s it. It’s a finite scroll that usually takes 5 minutes, and then I move on
- rightbyte 3mo ago
  "Viral content" got nerfed to oblivion in 2013-2014 something when Facebook made companies pay up for group exposure. (Promoted post) Before that a popular article could be shared among different friends networks to like total exposure to like everyone logged in that were somewhat interested in the article. I was kinda a journalist then it was a really obvious flip.
- bamboozled 3mo ago
  Yes because people no longer post they realised they need to show you their “explore” feed.
- Morromist 3mo ago
  Fb is clearly hated by its owners, Meta. Its been monitized to the max and deeply neglected. They desperately want to move on to virtual reality or AI - ANYTHING to escape from having to make their money off fb. Makes one wonder what it would be like if someone else had built and maintained it who really belived in the vision of connecting communities instead of sucking them dry.
TrackerFF 3mo ago
I noticed last year that FB did some change to their recommendations engine, that they’ll show posts by random people based things you’ve searched. A friend was diagnosed with cancer last year, I searched extensively, and now I’m exclusively getting posts from random people with cancer on my feed.
- chistev 3mo ago
  Isn't that how it has been?
  - reactordev 3mo ago
    No, it used to be a shuffled timeline of the posts and likes your connections/friends have made but I guess when half your platform are bots, you don’t want to store that metadata anymore.
    - yard2010 3mo ago
      Remember the little dot in the end of the feed when you saw all your friends posts?
      - asdff 3mo ago
        The days of scrolling 10-15 mins and done with social media for the day because you caught up.
- skybrian 3mo ago
  It’s often very good at finding posts that I might theoretically want to read, except that I never want to read them on Facebook, because it would get in the way of seeing posts from friends.
GenerWork 3mo ago
I've noticed that a lot of my friends switched from text based status updates (Facebook) to image based status updates (Instagram stories). Personally, I got tired of going on Facebook because it was all rage baiting political stuff, and that was all from friends, not even ads.
- tayo42 3mo ago
  Instagram stories seems to be dieing too, except for the professional and business accounts I follow
  - CamelCaseName 3mo ago
    The bar is just so high, everywhere. I want to fire off a quick quip and have a conversation. Reddit is probably the only place where this works any more, but you have to be prompted by the right thread and early. So people throw up their hands and go, "why bother?"
    - fragmede 3mo ago
      Reddit is so negative though. There was an event I went to, and according to Reddit it was a shit show, but checking my Facebook, everyone that went had a wonderful time!
      - wtfHN26 3mo ago
        With Reddit it's sort of a status signaling thing. Like saying - I am too good for this thing. Your disapproval of something is supposed to show your standards are high, and you got some elite taste. BTW you can see some variations of that here also.
slipperybeluga 3mo ago
[dead]
beej71 3mo ago
We're all in small groups on discord or in signal now. FB feed is just not the best medium for keeping up with friends.
- ivanjermakov 3mo ago
  Idea of keeping up with friends while being public to the whole world does not resonate with me. Internet was a different place indeed.
  - asdff 3mo ago
    No one really had a public account though. Last thing you wanted was parents seeing you holding a solo cup in pictures.
ChrisArchitect 3mo ago
url: https://www.pcmag.com/news/death-of-the-status-update-why-55-americans-stopped-posting-social-media https://www.pcmag.com/news/death-of-the-status-update-why-55...
imhoguy 3mo ago
Emotions experienced chart - that is insightful and matches my anecdata. I think you get bad emotions when you have high expectations about social media and it is your main source of social life. Where positive happen when you have low expectations about social media and it is just addon to your life. Example of gaps is being lonely, low self esteem, low self worth, no work network, no business network. So you stay glued to FB to build your life, to keep online friends, because you may have not many in life. Or you have no real work network so you need to stay current on LI because your next job is there.
alexpotato 3mo ago
Back in 2005-ish era, I helped reboot a college club (I was the coach/advisor). We started out using forum software to co-ordinate what we were doing but eventually (2008-ish) switched to Facebook as the president of the club pointed out "Alex, everyone is already on Facebook and the notifications from us are in the middle of the notifications for when the next party is" etc. Fast forward to today and the club is rebooting again. I asked the current club president "What social network is everyone on these days?" His response: "Really there is no one place where everyone goes anymore." I then asked him how clubs share their info etc and he says "The bulletin board at the student center?" While social media definitely has its downsides (echo chambers, extremism etc) I do feel like it's a bit of a net loss to not have a "commons". That model makes it super easy to start up new organizations, get the word out etc. Part of me hopes that we got back to the late 1990s dedicated websites/forums. That seems to be the Discord model but let's see.
- dartharva 3mo ago
  I tried hard but am failing to see how what you say couldn't just be fulfilled by a chat group today (or even back then).
  - ericbarrett 3mo ago
    But which one - SMS/RCS? iMessage? WhatsApp? Signal? Telegram? Discord?
    - alexpotato 3mo ago
      Exactly this. Plus the notifications for chat groups are basically: - show me everything - don't notify me at all
      - gregdaniels421 3mo ago
        Discord is a bit better about that with "pings"
    - soramimo 3mo ago
add-sub-mul-div 3mo ago
Twitter and Reddit went hostile to their users in 2023 with their respective API and other changes. A small percentage of leaders sought out newer and better options and this time the followers stayed where they were, not wanting to start over again. But everyone talks about hating social media now and they're going slowly inactive. It's the most expected outcome.
intrasight 3mo ago
Strava is now the preferred app in my social network. And no "status update" is necessary as it does that automatically.
slowmovintarget 3mo ago
Social media these days is 80% psyop, 20% attention grind. That 55% of Americans stopped posting would be a healthy thing.
- tangenter 3mo ago
  [flagged]
fleventynine 3mo ago
I stopped using Facebook back in 2021 when the majority of my feed was reshared political content with 20+ comments from my friends fighting about divisive social/political issues. It wasn't fun, and it wasn't fostering community, so I left. A few years later I logged in again to see that most of my Facebook friends had also stopped engaging.
CM30 3mo ago
Probably a crazy though, but I sometimes wonder if the pandemic/lockdowns did a number on social media activity too. Maybe a lot of people got burnt out on the whole thing after spending 2-3 years stuck inside with social media as their only way to communicate with friends and family. That seems to be the point where most communities and social sites I'm on lost a lot of their activity/enjoyment, and where people seemed to start fading away. Of course, increasing polarisation, an increasingly aggressive/selfish population and worries about privacy probably hit hard too.
- derwiki 3mo ago
  Where did pandemic restrictions stay in effect for 2-3 years? SF took restrictions fairly seriously and by March 2022 they seemed non-existent
  - onetokeoverthe 3mo ago
    [dead]
homeonthemtn 3mo ago
I think we stopped posting because it's a miserable, unnecessary experience made worse by miserable unnecessary technology
journal 3mo ago
sounds conservative
valeg 3mo ago
Discord seems like the way. Sometimes, Signal groups (also popular in the White House).
rickcarlino 3mo ago
Social media companies became so obsessed about maximizing ROI on short form video content that they stopped being a platform to share with friends and turned into Temu Youtube. You won’t see your friends stuff on any of them because it’s designed to work that way. Group chats are the only way to have a meaningful conversation if you a casual non-technical Internet dweller.
- 0x53 3mo ago
  This is so sadly true. I nostalgically remember early social media with the linear feed of things directly from friends as being a fun and positive place.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- watwut 3mo ago
  Bsky actually uave linear followed accounts only feed.
  - mbirth 3mo ago
    Twitter has it, too.
    - asdff 3mo ago
      So does instagram actually but it is sort of hidden.
    - watwut 3mo ago
      Mine stopped working that way some time after Musk tool over - I started to get complete crap from people I did not followed.
      - tpm 3mo ago
        it still works in the web app - following -> recent - though I think I've got some browser extension to force that to be the default, otherwise it tended to revert to other tabs and ordering.
pmontra 3mo ago
> Eventually, I left almost all my groups behind, keeping only the ones tied to genuine relationships. That's why my only social media is WhatsApp, if that's a social media.
yason 3mo ago
Social media as it was born touched a novel point of contact that didn't quite exist before. It was a powerful shift from what we had before. Social media allowed you to be in touch with people in a way that wasn't possible with phone calls, text messages, instant messaging, email, or domain-specific forums. What I could do in Facebook in 2010 was stay "friends" with selected acquaintances such as old classmates with whom I never was in email terms, messaging terms, or any other terms except having known them in school (or at work or at a hobby or...) I could follow their life via their posts, and I could leave a comment, sometimes, without any expectation that we should ever talk, meet, chat, or become more than old classmates. I haven't sent email to anyone in my school that I didn't know outside of school, as a friend. I don't have their numbers and it would be awkward to even consider calling someone with whom we didn't necessarily even talk much in school. But it was perfectly okay to ask someone to be your friend on Facebook (like, Hey, I know you? and if he did remember he would accept) and follow their postings and maybe (re)kindle something with no pressure to grow it into anything more than that. We had that. Now... we no longer do. Or we still have Facebook and we can send friend requests to old acquantainces that I'd like to follow but there's nothing to follow because they aren't posting and because Facebook wouldn't show me their posts. So we're back to the point where actually making contact with another person (on Facebook) basically requires sending them a message in Facebook. Which already goes beyond what's expected from an old acquantaince on Facebook. I recall a site for classmates where you could register to your school years and see your classmates there. But that was before social media and there weren't any posts that you could comment. You could just see your classmates listed there, and one in ten might have written a few words in their profile. And that was classmates only, not ex-work colleagues or other people you've passed behind in your life. Facebook was really good at the time it became a thing. We still have email, instant messaging, etc. but what's the platform today where I can keep in touch with people I'm not emailing or talking with? Is there one?
- alex1138 3mo ago
  I consider Facebook to be the worst of all worlds. Frankly They don't show you what your friends actually post. Someone saying "hey - I'm in the parking lot at some place, I need help moving this thing" 5 minutes ago? You might see it on your feed in a week They engage in reputational decay https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1775182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1775182 (see also, photo tagging) They've cut off access to your friends https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 It's a company involved in lots of OTHER things which don't make it a good netizen https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 (oh and their own cryptocurrency in Libra, that's fun) "Dumb fucks" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122 Edit: You get banned at any time while the obviously horrible thing you report doesn't get taken down. That's not sustainable. It's not a thing where you can actually physically keep in touch with people, either nominally strangers or the best of friends
ChadMoran 3mo ago
Really sad. I used to love staying connected with people but now I'm fed content from people I don't follow to keep me on the platform. I'm over it.
howard941 3mo ago
I stopped because I was forced to. "Something Happened" - never explained to me - and my FB public commenting was indefinitely suspended. No great loss.
dzonga 3mo ago
email mailing list should be back - but people's brains have been turned to mush.
CoolestBeans 3mo ago
Its simple. Nobody is posting because nobody is going to read your posts. The intense dive into algorithmic feeds over chronological ones sourced from your friends means that nobody is going to see your posts. Nobody is going to comment on them. Nobody is going to acknowledge they even exist. Everyone understands this, at least subconsciously, so nobody's gonna post. Besides, all that stuff moved into group chats anyways.
wise_blood 3mo ago
Out of curiosity, I checked my FB profile my last post is from 2018, the last post I was tagged in is from 2020 6 years of nothing
wodenokoto 3mo ago
I think 2 things happened to social networks / media: 1) companies had a desire to grow everyone's networks. Early numbers said, people more connected have more engagement, and the larger a user's graph is, the better we can advertise to that user. But at some point it also changes what you want to post, or if you want to post at all. Do I want my mom to see this joke? That party photo? What about that guy I met on exchange 10 years ago? I have 1000 connections on Facebook, and all _their_ connections can be exposed to my post. It might as well be public. 2) Professionals are better at posting than amateurs. It turns out that we rather watch a funny update from a comedian we don't know, than an update from a friend trying to be funny. Social networks are not social anymore. They are mostly TV, but instead of channel surfing, you are doom-scrolling videos from professional creators, not updates from friends.
- dimitar 3mo ago
  I remember Google+ had groups called "circles" which could be used to choose with whom you share a post; it is a very common sense feature which I haven't seen since. And your reason 1 is a good explanation why.
  - henry2023 3mo ago
    WhatsApp has this “circles” features implemented so well people don’t even think about it.
  - Melatonic 3mo ago
    Exactly - amazing it never caught on
tangenter 3mo ago
For better or worse we are on Discord. A mixture of a throwback to IRC days combined with a platform that speaks “Internet” better than most places means a lot more interesting, unrestrained discussion happens. While most people will not go full tilt into 4chan-style right wing diatribes, it’s not like anyone will feign being offended to score “karma” points over what is being said. As a result, there is little incentive to game it. It’s just a chat with little else.
rglover 3mo ago
Because it's a dead end now. It used to be tons of fun, people were generally happy/positive, and you met a ton of cool people from all over the world. Now, it's just a weird performative stage. Even worse, the people who are awarded with attention often prove themselves to be utterly clueless and nothing more than a modern day cabaret performer.
al_borland 3mo ago
Social Networks were for normal people. Social Media is for brands and "influencers". It's RSS with algorithms and monetization metrics.
arkwin 3mo ago
Its why I built https://terrarose.org https://terrarose.org. while it only has a couple of users, and a couple of posts. Its a social media platform you have to pay 5 dollars a month for. No ads, no tracking, no bots (hence the price). Its just me working on it, but it does work. :)

174 points by thunderbong 3mo ago

Not sure if I see a bad thing in this. I'd like too know what old friends are currently up to and checking their social media has been a way to do so during the golden age of facebook. Lately I feel more value in connecting with them personally, talking and letting them now, that I am still interested in what's going on for them.

brunoarueira 3mo ago
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. At the very least, it should be used occasionally to post things as a kind of "public memory," not to expose your entire life just for likes and exhibitionism.
netsharc 3mo ago
I wonder what would happen if: if I post 2 pieces of content, my friend would have to comment on the first one to see the next one. I suppose the app will then mostly be full of throwaway comments in the form of "Cool" or "Wow". But maybe add a modifier that if the poster doesn't have any meaningful reply to a commenter's (let's name him Elon) comment, then the poster's next content will not be shared with Elon next time.
AndrewDucker 3mo ago
That's great if you're cultivating a very small group of friends who are local. Social media is how I keep vaguely aware of what's going on with my friends who now live scattered across the planet and get to see in person once per decade or so.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 3mo ago
  I’m gonna break it to you bud, the people you see only once a decade or so aren’t your friends. Those are shallow acquaintances that you’re letting drag on for too long. They’re not a part of your life and you’re not a part of theirs. At most, you can call them professional contacts whom you hope to get some value out of in the future, and in that sense I’d agree — social media makes it possible to keep in touch with people whom you have a transactional relationship with.
  - fragmede 3mo ago
    "Drag on for too long" Who are you to dictate how other people connect. The word friend is not well defined, but a person I know from my past that I'm able to keep in contact with, thanks to the magic of technology, that I want to have some communication with, is a something.
    - rTX5CMRXIfFG 3mo ago
      Everything is not well defined as long as you don’t think about it hard enough. With that attitude, you can dismiss any genuinely thoughtful question with potentially painful answers, which is why a lot of people like it.
  - watwut 3mo ago
    They dont drag me. They add positive stuff to my life, once in a while, and that is super cool. And they dont ask much in exchange, just for me to not be a jerk in that situation. And all of them are relationships with someone I already know, can ve safer around then random and some of them grow again into more active friendships in right situation. And yes, that friendship happens again thing is real.

znpy 3mo ago

Social media mostly polarise people (both women and men, in different ways) and generally speaking what you post will be used against you at some point. So yeah, no wonder that social media is dying. People are just catching up to the fact that the best way not to lose is to just not play the game.

halflife 3mo ago

Back to 2015, I stopped posting on Facebook when I noticed that it’s no longer about connecting with my friends, but a never ending stream of boring posts from groups and people that I don’t know or care to follow. All my “social” life just moved to direct communication in WhatsApp (meta owned as well)

rimeice 3mo ago
2015 for me too. I wonder if there was some early day over juicing of the attention mechanism that put people off in that year, before they tuned it to reduce churn…
- beardedetim 3mo ago
  Tinfoil hat time but I think they definitely did _something_ at that time that "changed" the system. It's the Cambridge Analytica/Trump time and I believe that FB definitely "changed" at the same time.
  - jmpman 3mo ago
    After Cambridge Analytica, my "intelligent" friends basically abandoned the platform, while my distant conspiracy inclined uncles started posting baseless slop.
- rightbyte 3mo ago
  Yeah but I think it just took some year for ppl to notice. 2013-2014 the algorithm got more foused on non-friend posts aswell as making the prioritzation less about "likes" from friends and instead some opaque engagement metrics. Groups had to "promote" post to get their prior reach to subscribers. Also videos started to be posted around that time?
- weberer 3mo ago
  I remember I left around that time too because they started aggressively trying to defeat adbockers. I'd rather just leave the platform completely than see a single ad.

Simulacra 3mo ago

It seems like so much of social media is just individuals shouting into the void.

HPsquared 3mo ago
It's stochastic communication, sometimes other random voices come back from the void.
- jerlam 3mo ago
  Social media is a skinner box for likes and reposts. You don't even want replies unless it's an opportunity to get more likes.
asdff 3mo ago
It would be better if it was that. It is like for any given topic there is a bullet point of a couple takes you will find anywhere about that topic. Just parroting bots I guess since that probably snowballs engagement from other bots.

mherkender 3mo ago

This is an ad for Incogni

reactordev 3mo ago
Like every pcmag article, there’s a corporate sponsor
- fwn 3mo ago
  It is pretty obvious, but as far as I can see, this article has not been disclosed as advertising or sponsored content. I'm in Europe, and I'm no expert on FTC advertising requirements, but this specific content arrangement doesn't feel super legal to me. My ad blocker did not pick it up either.

insickness 3mo ago

To keep people engaged, social media platforms have shifted from showing you content from people you know to prioritizing viral content. The algorithms know viral content offers an endless stream of entertainment that keeps people scrolling longer.

Smalltalker-80 3mo ago
Like the writer I'm also a 'boomer' still keeping connected to an older friend group using Facebook and Instagram. For Facebook, I use the plugin "FB Purity" to filter out the generated cr*p posts and force chronological order. It's shocking too see how few posts are left, by agressive algorithm filtering and FB then deciding that "You're all caught up", refusing to show more posts. So my FB time is about 20 seconds every day...
- derwiki 3mo ago
  That’s Reddit for me: I subscribe to the sub for my city, and that’s it. It’s a finite scroll that usually takes 5 minutes, and then I move on
rightbyte 3mo ago
"Viral content" got nerfed to oblivion in 2013-2014 something when Facebook made companies pay up for group exposure. (Promoted post) Before that a popular article could be shared among different friends networks to like total exposure to like everyone logged in that were somewhat interested in the article. I was kinda a journalist then it was a really obvious flip.
bamboozled 3mo ago
Yes because people no longer post they realised they need to show you their “explore” feed.
Morromist 3mo ago
Fb is clearly hated by its owners, Meta. Its been monitized to the max and deeply neglected. They desperately want to move on to virtual reality or AI - ANYTHING to escape from having to make their money off fb. Makes one wonder what it would be like if someone else had built and maintained it who really belived in the vision of connecting communities instead of sucking them dry.

TrackerFF 3mo ago

I noticed last year that FB did some change to their recommendations engine, that they’ll show posts by random people based things you’ve searched. A friend was diagnosed with cancer last year, I searched extensively, and now I’m exclusively getting posts from random people with cancer on my feed.

chistev 3mo ago
Isn't that how it has been?
- reactordev 3mo ago
  No, it used to be a shuffled timeline of the posts and likes your connections/friends have made but I guess when half your platform are bots, you don’t want to store that metadata anymore.
  - yard2010 3mo ago
    Remember the little dot in the end of the feed when you saw all your friends posts?
    - asdff 3mo ago
      The days of scrolling 10-15 mins and done with social media for the day because you caught up.
skybrian 3mo ago
It’s often very good at finding posts that I might theoretically want to read, except that I never want to read them on Facebook, because it would get in the way of seeing posts from friends.

GenerWork 3mo ago

I've noticed that a lot of my friends switched from text based status updates (Facebook) to image based status updates (Instagram stories). Personally, I got tired of going on Facebook because it was all rage baiting political stuff, and that was all from friends, not even ads.

tayo42 3mo ago
Instagram stories seems to be dieing too, except for the professional and business accounts I follow
- CamelCaseName 3mo ago
  The bar is just so high, everywhere. I want to fire off a quick quip and have a conversation. Reddit is probably the only place where this works any more, but you have to be prompted by the right thread and early. So people throw up their hands and go, "why bother?"
  - fragmede 3mo ago
    Reddit is so negative though. There was an event I went to, and according to Reddit it was a shit show, but checking my Facebook, everyone that went had a wonderful time!
    - wtfHN26 3mo ago
      With Reddit it's sort of a status signaling thing. Like saying - I am too good for this thing. Your disapproval of something is supposed to show your standards are high, and you got some elite taste. BTW you can see some variations of that here also.

slipperybeluga 3mo ago

[dead]

beej71 3mo ago

We're all in small groups on discord or in signal now. FB feed is just not the best medium for keeping up with friends.

ivanjermakov 3mo ago
Idea of keeping up with friends while being public to the whole world does not resonate with me. Internet was a different place indeed.
- asdff 3mo ago
  No one really had a public account though. Last thing you wanted was parents seeing you holding a solo cup in pictures.

ChrisArchitect 3mo ago

url: https://www.pcmag.com/news/death-of-the-status-update-why-55-americans-stopped-posting-social-media https://www.pcmag.com/news/death-of-the-status-update-why-55...

imhoguy 3mo ago

Emotions experienced chart - that is insightful and matches my anecdata. I think you get bad emotions when you have high expectations about social media and it is your main source of social life. Where positive happen when you have low expectations about social media and it is just addon to your life. Example of gaps is being lonely, low self esteem, low self worth, no work network, no business network. So you stay glued to FB to build your life, to keep online friends, because you may have not many in life. Or you have no real work network so you need to stay current on LI because your next job is there.

alexpotato 3mo ago

Back in 2005-ish era, I helped reboot a college club (I was the coach/advisor). We started out using forum software to co-ordinate what we were doing but eventually (2008-ish) switched to Facebook as the president of the club pointed out "Alex, everyone is already on Facebook and the notifications from us are in the middle of the notifications for when the next party is" etc. Fast forward to today and the club is rebooting again. I asked the current club president "What social network is everyone on these days?" His response: "Really there is no one place where everyone goes anymore." I then asked him how clubs share their info etc and he says "The bulletin board at the student center?" While social media definitely has its downsides (echo chambers, extremism etc) I do feel like it's a bit of a net loss to not have a "commons". That model makes it super easy to start up new organizations, get the word out etc. Part of me hopes that we got back to the late 1990s dedicated websites/forums. That seems to be the Discord model but let's see.

dartharva 3mo ago
I tried hard but am failing to see how what you say couldn't just be fulfilled by a chat group today (or even back then).
- ericbarrett 3mo ago
  But which one - SMS/RCS? iMessage? WhatsApp? Signal? Telegram? Discord?
  - alexpotato 3mo ago
    Exactly this. Plus the notifications for chat groups are basically: - show me everything - don't notify me at all
    - gregdaniels421 3mo ago
      Discord is a bit better about that with "pings"
  - soramimo 3mo ago

add-sub-mul-div 3mo ago

Twitter and Reddit went hostile to their users in 2023 with their respective API and other changes. A small percentage of leaders sought out newer and better options and this time the followers stayed where they were, not wanting to start over again. But everyone talks about hating social media now and they're going slowly inactive. It's the most expected outcome.

intrasight 3mo ago

Strava is now the preferred app in my social network. And no "status update" is necessary as it does that automatically.

slowmovintarget 3mo ago

Social media these days is 80% psyop, 20% attention grind. That 55% of Americans stopped posting would be a healthy thing.

tangenter 3mo ago
[flagged]

fleventynine 3mo ago

I stopped using Facebook back in 2021 when the majority of my feed was reshared political content with 20+ comments from my friends fighting about divisive social/political issues. It wasn't fun, and it wasn't fostering community, so I left. A few years later I logged in again to see that most of my Facebook friends had also stopped engaging.

CM30 3mo ago

Probably a crazy though, but I sometimes wonder if the pandemic/lockdowns did a number on social media activity too. Maybe a lot of people got burnt out on the whole thing after spending 2-3 years stuck inside with social media as their only way to communicate with friends and family. That seems to be the point where most communities and social sites I'm on lost a lot of their activity/enjoyment, and where people seemed to start fading away. Of course, increasing polarisation, an increasingly aggressive/selfish population and worries about privacy probably hit hard too.

derwiki 3mo ago
Where did pandemic restrictions stay in effect for 2-3 years? SF took restrictions fairly seriously and by March 2022 they seemed non-existent
- onetokeoverthe 3mo ago
  [dead]

homeonthemtn 3mo ago

I think we stopped posting because it's a miserable, unnecessary experience made worse by miserable unnecessary technology

journal 3mo ago

sounds conservative

valeg 3mo ago

Discord seems like the way. Sometimes, Signal groups (also popular in the White House).

rickcarlino 3mo ago

Social media companies became so obsessed about maximizing ROI on short form video content that they stopped being a platform to share with friends and turned into Temu Youtube. You won’t see your friends stuff on any of them because it’s designed to work that way. Group chats are the only way to have a meaningful conversation if you a casual non-technical Internet dweller.

0x53 3mo ago
This is so sadly true. I nostalgically remember early social media with the linear feed of things directly from friends as being a fun and positive place.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
watwut 3mo ago
Bsky actually uave linear followed accounts only feed.
- mbirth 3mo ago
  Twitter has it, too.
  - asdff 3mo ago
    So does instagram actually but it is sort of hidden.
  - watwut 3mo ago
    Mine stopped working that way some time after Musk tool over - I started to get complete crap from people I did not followed.
    - tpm 3mo ago
      it still works in the web app - following -> recent - though I think I've got some browser extension to force that to be the default, otherwise it tended to revert to other tabs and ordering.

pmontra 3mo ago

> Eventually, I left almost all my groups behind, keeping only the ones tied to genuine relationships. That's why my only social media is WhatsApp, if that's a social media.

yason 3mo ago

Social media as it was born touched a novel point of contact that didn't quite exist before. It was a powerful shift from what we had before. Social media allowed you to be in touch with people in a way that wasn't possible with phone calls, text messages, instant messaging, email, or domain-specific forums. What I could do in Facebook in 2010 was stay "friends" with selected acquaintances such as old classmates with whom I never was in email terms, messaging terms, or any other terms except having known them in school (or at work or at a hobby or...) I could follow their life via their posts, and I could leave a comment, sometimes, without any expectation that we should ever talk, meet, chat, or become more than old classmates. I haven't sent email to anyone in my school that I didn't know outside of school, as a friend. I don't have their numbers and it would be awkward to even consider calling someone with whom we didn't necessarily even talk much in school. But it was perfectly okay to ask someone to be your friend on Facebook (like, Hey, I know you? and if he did remember he would accept) and follow their postings and maybe (re)kindle something with no pressure to grow it into anything more than that. We had that. Now... we no longer do. Or we still have Facebook and we can send friend requests to old acquantainces that I'd like to follow but there's nothing to follow because they aren't posting and because Facebook wouldn't show me their posts. So we're back to the point where actually making contact with another person (on Facebook) basically requires sending them a message in Facebook. Which already goes beyond what's expected from an old acquantaince on Facebook. I recall a site for classmates where you could register to your school years and see your classmates there. But that was before social media and there weren't any posts that you could comment. You could just see your classmates listed there, and one in ten might have written a few words in their profile. And that was classmates only, not ex-work colleagues or other people you've passed behind in your life. Facebook was really good at the time it became a thing. We still have email, instant messaging, etc. but what's the platform today where I can keep in touch with people I'm not emailing or talking with? Is there one?

alex1138 3mo ago
I consider Facebook to be the worst of all worlds. Frankly They don't show you what your friends actually post. Someone saying "hey - I'm in the parking lot at some place, I need help moving this thing" 5 minutes ago? You might see it on your feed in a week They engage in reputational decay https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1775182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1775182 (see also, photo tagging) They've cut off access to your friends https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 It's a company involved in lots of OTHER things which don't make it a good netizen https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 (oh and their own cryptocurrency in Libra, that's fun) "Dumb fucks" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122 Edit: You get banned at any time while the obviously horrible thing you report doesn't get taken down. That's not sustainable. It's not a thing where you can actually physically keep in touch with people, either nominally strangers or the best of friends

ChadMoran 3mo ago

Really sad. I used to love staying connected with people but now I'm fed content from people I don't follow to keep me on the platform. I'm over it.

howard941 3mo ago

I stopped because I was forced to. "Something Happened" - never explained to me - and my FB public commenting was indefinitely suspended. No great loss.

dzonga 3mo ago

email mailing list should be back - but people's brains have been turned to mush.

CoolestBeans 3mo ago

Its simple. Nobody is posting because nobody is going to read your posts. The intense dive into algorithmic feeds over chronological ones sourced from your friends means that nobody is going to see your posts. Nobody is going to comment on them. Nobody is going to acknowledge they even exist. Everyone understands this, at least subconsciously, so nobody's gonna post. Besides, all that stuff moved into group chats anyways.

wise_blood 3mo ago

Out of curiosity, I checked my FB profile my last post is from 2018, the last post I was tagged in is from 2020 6 years of nothing

wodenokoto 3mo ago

I think 2 things happened to social networks / media: 1) companies had a desire to grow everyone's networks. Early numbers said, people more connected have more engagement, and the larger a user's graph is, the better we can advertise to that user. But at some point it also changes what you want to post, or if you want to post at all. Do I want my mom to see this joke? That party photo? What about that guy I met on exchange 10 years ago? I have 1000 connections on Facebook, and all _their_ connections can be exposed to my post. It might as well be public. 2) Professionals are better at posting than amateurs. It turns out that we rather watch a funny update from a comedian we don't know, than an update from a friend trying to be funny. Social networks are not social anymore. They are mostly TV, but instead of channel surfing, you are doom-scrolling videos from professional creators, not updates from friends.

dimitar 3mo ago
I remember Google+ had groups called "circles" which could be used to choose with whom you share a post; it is a very common sense feature which I haven't seen since. And your reason 1 is a good explanation why.
- henry2023 3mo ago
  WhatsApp has this “circles” features implemented so well people don’t even think about it.
- Melatonic 3mo ago
  Exactly - amazing it never caught on

tangenter 3mo ago

For better or worse we are on Discord. A mixture of a throwback to IRC days combined with a platform that speaks “Internet” better than most places means a lot more interesting, unrestrained discussion happens. While most people will not go full tilt into 4chan-style right wing diatribes, it’s not like anyone will feign being offended to score “karma” points over what is being said. As a result, there is little incentive to game it. It’s just a chat with little else.

rglover 3mo ago

Because it's a dead end now. It used to be tons of fun, people were generally happy/positive, and you met a ton of cool people from all over the world. Now, it's just a weird performative stage. Even worse, the people who are awarded with attention often prove themselves to be utterly clueless and nothing more than a modern day cabaret performer.

al_borland 3mo ago

Social Networks were for normal people. Social Media is for brands and "influencers". It's RSS with algorithms and monetization metrics.

arkwin 3mo ago

Its why I built https://terrarose.org https://terrarose.org. while it only has a couple of users, and a couple of posts. Its a social media platform you have to pay 5 dollars a month for. No ads, no tracking, no bots (hence the price). Its just me working on it, but it does work. :)