Social media is on the decline. Instagram is all ads. No one's posting on BeReal. TikTok is for influencers. The new place for sharing: group chats.
It's not just you — no one is posting on social media anymore::Social media is on the decline. Instagram is all ads. No one's posting on BeReal. TikTok is for influencers. The new place for sharing: group chats.
My big take away is that social media as we know it is likely generational. Like real time broadcast TV, it may just not be a thing at all in the future, at least not with the centrality we’ve become accustomed to.
Polls run here and especially on masto bare this out. Mastodon, for instance, leans x-gen/boomer with some millennial in its demographic. It’s hardly a young persons thing. Once you realise so much of the praise and enjoyment of the Fedi is that it reminds people of the older days of the internet, the generational picture becomes pretty clear. 15 year olds today were born after Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Forums, Usenet, old Twitter are probably like black and white tv to them.
At the moment, I think it’s a major flaw of the Fedi, that it’s fundamentally backwards looking, trying to preserve older big-social designs rather than doing something more diverse or at least different.
An obvious example being private or closed spaces like group chats and the like including public versions if desired. This seems to be a growing form of online interaction, that is in a way more humane or eusocial. But apart from matrix, which sits separately, the Fedi is still stuck redoing Twitter and Reddit.
So this entire article is based on a single person's anecdotal experience, other than this bit:
Bruening isn't alone. Despite the efforts of big incumbents and buzzy new apps, the old ways of posting are gone, and people don't want to go back. Even Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, admitted that users have moved on to direct messages, closed communities, and group chats.
This links to another article from the same site, and the only quote I can find related to any of this is this one:
DMs are also crucial for younger users. "If you look at how teens spend their time on Instagram, they spend more time in DMs than they do in stories, and they spend more time in stories than they do in feed,"
This Instagram head guy says nothing about how "nobody posts on social media anymore", just that teens spend more time in DMs and stories than in the feed. This just in, kids do things differently than previous generations! Mind blown, A fucking plus journalism right there. You'd think you'd be able to properly quote your own god damn article properly lol.
Honestly I don't even give a shit about this content, I'm just so sick of biased opinion articles based on the writer's feelings at the time filling my feed like they've uncovered something revolutionary. Stop giving these lazy clickbait news sites your views and fix the dumb bot that keeps posting this bullshit.
Megalomaniac billionaires ruined social media in their effort to control the narrative and ruin privacy. It was a neat idea when it was just a way to keep up with people you were interested in.
My Fantasy and SF book lovers goup on Facebook has more posts per day than I can read and gets new members every day.
My music groups on Facebook have even more posts and content.
Linkedin has more and more social posts (not a good thing, but hardly on the decline)
Article is clearly written by someone with no initiatve or personality or insight.
I signed up for Facebook for the first time ever, to comment on a local page about a local issue, and was first banned by Facebook for nothing in particular. Had to put in a phone number to reactivate. Also found I wasn't able to post if I included a link, a link to a government website, but I guess that's a very basic spam filter for new accounts. Then made some comments back and forth with no one really talking to me. Then about a week later with no activity, my account had been banned again, and now Facebook wants a photo. I don't even have photos online, and I don't see how they could use that to verify my identity, so that's where I stopped.
That's not true. I post on Lemmy and Mastodon, which I consider social media. I don't think that websites that communication based on algorithms aiming to serve unsocial purposes should be considered social media.
For a long time I’ve posted actively to Facebook and then at the end of the year I have my pictures and top posts printed up in a nice “yearbook.” There’s a service that does this (but I’m not here to advertise them). Anyway I am raising kids through these years so sharing milestones and pictures with faroff friends and family is very rewarding.
But I’ve stopped posting so much that I don’t think there will be a yearbook for this year. It’s just not worth it anymore. Not enough people are going to see my posts, either because they’re no longer visiting or the fucking algorithm has something catchier to show them. Whatever I put up gets the same likes from the same 8 arbitrary people and that’s it.
It’s sad because my kids love those books and leaf through them all the time, like a kind of family album. I guess it’s time for another solution.
Related footnote: the “people you may know” feature is just pure comedy now. It’s been forever since it actually connected me to anyone real. It’s showing me coworkers’ adult children now and my neighbor’s dentist and realtor and shit like that. I still look at it, but only for the laughs.
I quit looking at Facebook so, so long ago and stopped posting anything myself well before I stopped visiting. In my experience the only people still posting are people I didn't want to see anything from or just sponsored content, ads and people pushing their businesses. Everything's so monetized, curated and awful.
Other apps like Dispo, Poparazzi, and Locket have all used various gimmicks to try and recapture social media's halcyon days — each had a moment in the sun at the top of the US Apple app-store charts — but none have truly broken through.
For instance, the content creator Nina Haines launched a group called SapphLit, a self-described "sapphic book club born out of the queer BookTok community."
Victoria Johnston, a 22-year-old software engineer, imagines the ideal social-media platform as a "safe space where people can just connect and you don't feel pressured to have a big following or a presence or be really well known."
And as more users and creator communities migrate toward closed spaces, the behemoths like Instagram are also trying to capitalize on this reality by introducing features like paid-subscription services that offer exclusive group chats.
Lia Haberman, an adjunct professor at UCLA Extension and an advisor for the American Influencer Council, said that Gen Alpha, the age cohort of 13 and younger, are "not embracing traditional social-media platforms and customs."
It's hard to know how the change will affect the online atmosphere over the long term — some evidence suggests the shift will create a healthier digital experience, but it also risks further dividing people into like-minded echo chambers.
The original article contains 2,197 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 90%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I am not suprised in the slightest. They are extremly pointless ,i simply do not really care that somone is on bahamas or whatewers.
The only thing i even used facebook for were a specialized groups and Messenger.
The only real social media i cared about was reddit and similars simply beacuse they encouraged discussion about stuff and provided anonimity ( and anonimity helps massiviely when your opinions arent exatcly popular ).
Don't care, never will. I have abandonned all interest in social media, and centralized platforms that rely on targetted advertisements and that just keep selling your identity to corporates, through lemmy I have learned that MORE control (over your life) an some times bring MORE peace of mind. Right now i have quit fb and instagram, and for it im a happier and more cerene person
I think the reason group chats are gaining is because we are so numbed by all the public platforms. Between doom scrolling and ads noone pays any attention to personal posts anymore.
For me personally I would even go one step further and say that I'm really annoyed by people force-feeding me their peronal life/experiences.
Now they start (ab)using group chats for it:
A group created for organizing rock climbing activities: All of a sudden filled with photos of this summers vacation. OK, we are friends and know each other, but still...
Another one was for a specific training of a mountaineering club, people who just met for this one occasion: Half a year later someone starts posting photos of their latest trip. And then the next, ...
Maybe in my case it's the generation that started sm (lol) with attention seeking extrovert posts that do not get any attention on fb/x anymore, so they go to group chats.
What might still be true for younger people is that with all the noise on the internet a group chat may be a place that gives you a manageable chunk of content with a private touch that makes perosonal involvement worthwile/doable again.
And now let's watch it get abused&destroyed by corporations.
At this point facebook is like a needy ex that won't let go. I haven't posted or logged on there in a long time but it keeps on sending email and push notifications
I know, I can turn that sort of thing off, but omg will it STFU already
Anecdotal evidence, but in my group of friends, the only platform where people, me included, post regurlaly is bereal and I suppose it's because it's more like a group chat when you only watch what your friends post. We are older than teens though.