That seems to be how social media services die. Too many ads, fewer users, revenue drop, more ads to boost revenue, still fewer users, irrelevance. This is called "pulling a Myspace".
1. The growing social media platform balances the needs of two user groups: the consumer’s need for fresh content and the neophyte producer’s need for a slowly ramping trickle of validation. This is possible because the people don’t know how to produce content in the new format yet.
2. The mature social media platform has picked winners. We know who the successful youtubers are, the successful twitch streamers, etc., and they know how to create the optimal media for their platform. At this point we’re maximally satisfying consumer demand, but we’re actively repelling the neophyte producers because the bar is now too high. They form a growing untapped market for the next social media platform.
3. Decay. A competing platform has stolen the limelight by restoring the dynamism of the consumer/producer balance. The successful producers of the platform start flexing out to the new upstart, though they’re unlikely to repeat their successes there, they’re too late to the game and bound to old habits. Chasing feature parity with the new platform does nothing because now you’re just upsetting the existing balance but that’s not suddenly going to pull new people into the game, they’ve already written you off.
There should be a way to speed up this cycle to make them fail faster. These corporations are making way too much money selling off our attention to the highest bidder as if it was their property.
One way is to consciously leach off them. Use their resources while blocking all of their user tracking and display of advertising. A strategy somewhat stymied however by people who consider it their 'moral duty' to allow themselves to be brainwashed by advertising so as to 'support' these companies.
I just checked right now, I scrolled through 10 posts of accounts that I follow, which took 30 seconds, before getting "You're all caught up" and having literally only spam posts.
And I don't even go on Instagram every day.
I didn't realize how big an impact that had, till I tried Mastodon. No ads, no patterns to try to keep you online longer. Just posts from who you follow.
What's worse is apparently cell and bluetooth tracking of all customers in realtime is becoming more common. So retailers can optimize their floor layouts so you have to go through as much of the store as possible to get what you want. Trying to stretch out the experience, show you the most ads/products, and lower the signal to noise down close to zero, just like ad driven social media.
Well, I certainly will never ever miss FB but those contacts would be nice to preserve somehow...
Maybe that's "pulling a Tom from MySpace"
There seems to be a thing that some people hate "fedoras". I think it's to do with the "Fedora guy" meme. The hat Jerry Messing appears in is not a fedora; it's a trilby.
A trilby is a hat with a quite narrow brim, and stiffened; it's often woven and patterned. It can be made of just about anything (such as leather). You can't really mess with the brim; it's flipped up at the back and down at the front, and it stays that way.
A fedora is a soft felt hat with a wide brim. The hats worn by both the cops and the robbers in 30's gangster movies are all fedoras. Felt hats are not woven; they're felted, and that means they have to be made of wool or fur (I guess a panama fedora is an exception, but then I think a panama fedora is just a panama hat that is the same shape as a real fedora).
Where I come from, a trilby is associated with racecourse bookies and the criminal fraternity, as well as tacky seaside "kiss-me-quick" hats, made of something like cardboard. Fedoras, on the contrary, are stylish.
They're also very functional. They shed rain like an umbrella, without dumping it down your neck. The only thing wrong with them is that they make a good aerofoil - you have to "hold onto your hats" if it's windy.
For those who want to try the fedora, I recommend the “Indiana Jones” look (https://herbertjohnson.co.uk/collections/indiana-jones-colle...). I had one of these but unfortunately the parent’s comment about them being aerofoils is true: lost it to a gust in the Grand Canyon. It fell tantalizingly close to the fence, re-creating the “Let it go!” scene :-)
TikTok is a platform with huge growth potential. IG is perceptibly declining. But Facebook has proven itself fairly durable, mostly to people outside tech and media bubbles. It’d be wise to not call it over just yet.
Biggest predictor for Facebook and IG use among my sample of friends is whether they’re married and have families, or in many cases, pets. In my sample, many own homes or property. Not where the growth is, but not worthless from a revenue standpoint.
But I would say ‘fairly durable’ is an apt description of an 18 year old service still operating at its scale. Exciting, maybe less than it once was. But fairly durable, certainly.
The underlying thesis behind FB - that people want to connect with people that they know - is eroding.
Following people isn't that interesting since most content creators that hit it big are One Hit Wonders. After they hit that big growth spike, they either follow the herd with the latest dance or trend, or they keep doing the same thing that made em famous with slight variations.
How long can you milk the same dance routine by switching out which celebrity does the silly little dance?
There were a few interesting educational channels for a while, but most people just don't have that many interesting things to keep posting about at the rate which is expected of a platform like TikTok. Quality content takes time to produce.
TikTok really only has a few buckets of content types. Some examples include thirst traps from sex workers that are looking to promote their OnlyFans and cute animals doing cute things.
Instagram isn't that different. I mostly use the app to see cute pictures of people's pets and the occasional human picture.
YouTube has better and more content than ever. Twitter also has the best and most relevant content, provided you curate your feed. All the stuff happening on academic Twitter, for instance, is hard to find elsewhere.
Reddit also seems to be going down the path of irrelevancy. The content is increasingly mediocre and hivemind-ish.
If you're just looking at the 'popular front page', sure, but there's a reason people now search Reddit from Google: there's value in a 'centralized hub' for communities versus Twitter's loosely coupled social graphs.
Reddit replaced all vBulletin-backed forums. You could argue Discord might usurp Reddit but Discord isn't searchable from the web and is logged in a terribly inconducive format.
I follow MMA, and the MMA reddit is the biggest forum for MMA on the English-speaking internet, especially for live events, there's no substitute, and I'm sure its like that with a lot of niches.
Reddit's irrelevance is only a matter of time. They're jacking up the advertising and banning anything that offends the advertisers.
Consider also how imageboards managed to remain relevant to this day.
Nope, frankly given how long reddit's been around and how it continues to gain in popularity I expect it will outlive everything on that list except for youtube. It's the webs default forum and there will always be a demand for a forum on the web.
While TikTok is growing quickly, we still don’t know its long term potential, how ‘sticky’ it is. I’d predict it has a trajectory more like Twitter and less like Snapchat. But it could well become a YouTube. All we can do is wait and find out.
Some bands were one hit wonders, but some were able to transition to a career, usually help behind them - writers, producers, and everything else from the record label. Chubby Checker always makes me laugh with the song Let’s Twist Again.
Something similar happened with Youtube, I think. Especially with media for kids. Popular channels turned into a productions, but usually it was much slower.
TikTok will be like Youtube/Radio Hybrid. Some people will take their one hit wonder and transition to a career, but not without the help of something like a record label or production company.
And if there’s payola, it’s going to click farms.
Can you explain the joke? I don't get it.
Some smaller social media networks have maybe kinda sorta survived more than one generation to some extent but it's debatable. Twitter seems like it has the most staying power so far but the present situation is evolving rapidly.
My Facebook feed turned from updates from my friends and family to garbage filled with politics, ads, suggested pages, and I stopped using it.
My Instagram feed turned from photos of my family and friends to garbage: again ads, recommended pages, later videos. Eventually I deleted it.
Twitter was close to that when they introduces algorithmic feed which showed stuff I didn't want to see and I was close to deleting the app, thankfully there's a way to still have the chronological feed without all the "likes" and "recommendations".
I keep using Reddit because I still can use it the same way as years ago - join communities that interest me and not see the stuff I don't want (even though they regularly push some more useless stuff to show me)
I believe social media can last long, but they need to find balance between monetization, innovation, and staying true to their users. Facebook and Instagram went way too far in alienating their users, and while they're still popular, they're declining.
With Reddit meanwhile you can easily select the subjects you are interested in and there’s a bottomless pit of people who can post and comment on that. While it being mostly text based will probably limit how big it can get compared to something like TikTok I suspect there’s a better slow and steady business model with less churn.
I also really like that they offer a monthly sub at a fair price that removes the ad problem. I really wish more companies would take this sort of approach.
Reddit is kind of a notable standout. Maybe that and Twitter's features are what guarantees a sustained viewership. I don't know, this is all kind of new.
At least for photo and video sharing sites, it seems like these tend to be trendy and have a population boom and bust cycle. But then again I don't want to speak authoritatively. But looking at FB it reported it's first decline in daily visits this year and the decline among teens and younger generations is even more pronounced. Certainly looks like a population peak.
The fediverse won't be like that though.
YouTube is the second visited site in the US and FB is the third - and they've been at the top for over a decade. E-mail is not a social network but has stuck around for 20 years. I've used Reddit since 2010. I've been on Instagram for six years now and probably use it more now than I ever have. Even Snapchat which to me seemed like a fad - is massively popular among teens.
I think it is true there are lots of smaller sites like Vine or Digg or YikYak which peter out but it seems like if you hit the critical mass then you can maintain popularity for decades.
A mostly usable, generally accessible, and fairly easily discoverable video hosting platform. I can think of a lot of worse product pitches.
This was so ridiculously judgmental that I couldn’t keep reading.
A 20yo guy cannot afford to spend $5K a day for a beautiful girl that has posted scantly clad pics exactly for this purpose. They are not the market. The market is middle age wealthy men and the women they pay for their "time." Then the women they pay go back to Instagram to find things to buy for "bragging rights" which satisfies the advertisers.
I also think TikTok has serious risks going forward re Chinese government. Already a lot of grumbling from lawmakers in US about banning it as CCP growing more belligerent in recent years whereas Facebook products aren't at all influenced by it.
Youtube is long addictive videos.
Instagram and facebook is still primarily focused on content from people you know, though they are also trying to copy some of TikTok’s randos content via the Reels feature.
At the end of the day they just want to get attention by giving content, whether using friends or essentially crowdsourcing.
I prefer Netflix, because I’m paying them and they are not just manipulating me to show ads.
The Three Trends:
1. Medium: text -> images -> video -> 3D graphics -> VR
2. AI: time -> rank -> recommend -> generate
3. UI: click -> scroll -> tap -> swipe -> autoplay
TikTok is at the video/recommend/swipe stage.
I predict the next advancement will be pure AI generated content, just a continuous adversarial attack on the human brain programmed to maximize viewing time for each individual. This could be packaged as things like virtual friends (Replika) or games with constantly evolving game play punctuated with ads or even as something that looks like TikTok.
Pure refined 200 proof addictive emptiness is the logical apex of “free” mass media. We will look back on TV and early generation social media as high culture compared to what’s coming.
Sorry to break it to you but Netflix is absolutely manipulating their audience in trying to convince everyone to watch Netflix productions.
When Netflix came into the market they had a unique platform and were burning money to get good content in. Now studios realized there is money in streaming and are squeezing Netflix prices.
Making their own productions means it is all vertical for them, less risk and more profitable.
By the end of it you're stuck watching something, just not exactly what you wanted in the first place.
It additionally makes me bullish on federated deals like Activitypub/Mastodon.
It's funny that the above presently tend to be "lefty-crunchy-hippie" -- because, I think if corporations get it through their hiveminds that the above enables them to have their own "official source of truth," thus preventing doofiness like blue check marks, this would all take off in a beneficial way.
I hope that independent web communities return, and that people start making their own web sites, tracking music and entertainment across multiple platforms and dealing with their content payola schemes and repetitive marketing is ruining everything fun and useful about the Internet.
Instagram isn't over. It's still the most popular social media app on both App Store and Google Play in the US.
For the past couple of years you always see articles popping up about Facebook being dead, then you look at the actual data and people are using Facebook more than ever.
Look at the last report from Meta, more people on a daily and monthly basis are using Facebook and Instagram than ever both.
Nearly 3b people use their apps on the daily basis. It going to take on hell of a long time before they become over.
It's more nuanced than that.
If you're losing traction where it matters - in younger generations & high-value markets like the US that have higher future cash flows - it doesn't matter if you're making up for it with usage from old people or people in poor countries without good advertising infra.
Facebook is definitely not looking rosy for the future.
And Instagram seems like it's on a similar path to Facebook 4 or 5 years ago. It doesn't look bad, but it also doesn't look great...
People in their 30s and 40s earn more money than college students and new grads in their 20s, and they are spending that money right now. Facebook groups for home decorating, design, cars, fitness, parenting, all of those are really popular. You can go on Facebook and find a large community dedicated to literally any style of home decor you can imagine, and those people are quite willing to spend money.
Same with the parenting groups. DINKs don't spend money at anything near the rate parents do. DINKs have higher free cash flow, but that is because they have free cash, parents are buying stuff all the time.
Honestly, 5 years ago I barely used Facebook, now that I am older I am using it a lot more.
Also, with that entire population decline thing, each new generation is, at best, the same size as the generation that came before it. If constant double digit growth is desired, sure, need to get that next generation on board, but at some point Facebook may have to be happy with "just" earning hard to imagine amounts of money each year and only seeing single digit growth in revenue.
Group chats have been slowly growing for the last decade, and now have become completely dominant. I wonder how much of it is fear of cancellation leading to defaulting to private communication.
Where is Anecdotal vs Actual Usage Data rage?
Ah, that's right, it doesn't fit their narrative. So, everyone is happy to Fox-News this.
Twitter first rode this trend, but TikTok really exploited it specifically with the medium of video and their algorithm to serve content.
Networks effects were once seen as the ultimate moat and one reason why FB could never be taken down. But it turns out if the content people “trade” on their “marketplace” is poor, all the network effects in the world won’t save you.
Influencers (aka personalities) are only entertaining for a short period of time. They have constantly churn out new content to keep engaging users. It is because user don’t know them and are less attached.
Therefore as long as TikTok has influencers that can continue to make new content, it will keep attracting new users. But I suspect that this is also not long term sustainable. People, both influencers and users, will get burned out eventually.
Your argument that network model dies because of broadcast model is just one part. My argument still stands that eventually people will get tired of a social media product and move on to the next ones.
Not sure how my observations are lazy though considering your does not provide anymore insight that others didn’t already know… it’s already been reported on Rolling Stone, Venture Beat, etc back in July. Aren’t you just regurgitating their idea with offhand keywords?
The situation is quite different in open source world. The only factors that matter for an open source platform are having enough people who are willing to develop it, run servers, and post content. Once the platform reaches enough users to be sustainable then it can exist indefinitely without need for growth or any significant funding.
We can look at Mastodon as a case study. It builds on top of all the work done by GNU Social and the OStatus protocol. GNU Social languished in obscurity for many years, but Mastodon was able to build on this work and create a much larger social network. Now, there's a whole federation of different platforms using ActivityPub protocol that grew out of OStatus. Fediverse will likely outlive every single commercial social media platform in existence today.
Some categories of brands can be long lived. Coca Cola and Disney.
Some categories of brands are mayflies. Pop music, TV, fast fashion.
My hunch is the average lifecycle of social media brands and MMORPG properties are roughly the same. Say 5-10 years?
Its predictable and not entirely private like a close friend group chat on iMessage or WhatsApp. Plus of course the way it integrates with feeds of photo/videos you’re already looking at casually.
The same way FB used to be.
If you think about it, the whole concept really does stick out nowadays. The idea of this unique, static (or at least not easily changeable), non-descript identifier tied only to you and your physical device is very much a product of its time.
Phone numbers only continue to exist by momentum – if a similar thing were to be implemented today, it would never catch on so universally.
Even before that on forums etc. there were many more lurkers than posters.
17 year old me didn't wanted to be compared to all the others "perfect" lives.
Maybe I'm naive but I bet that hasn't fundamentally changed.
I loathe reels and the recommended posts but their recent addition a mode for only viewing people you follow has more or less solved the other problems; I just wish they'd put a bit more of effort into the basic functionality.
I want an “OC Only” toggle.
Edit: And the above was referring only to Stories. I haven’t looked at the feed regularly in over a year.
Like everyone you care about having a copy of your data, and the copy always being up to date, perhaps encrypted so only those family you want to consume the content have access to those pictures too via user control.
Anyhow it's sad that Facebook has so much of my family's lives hostage... Only there can I see what's up.
I wish I could see a 'family' feed.
I'm not the social media kind of people, but I have some friends and family members, that my last words were through facebook. So as a communication tool, I see its value. Said that, I don't have the app installed anywhere. Just messages notifications via email.
A "youth-culture consultant" trying to predict the future? How scientific
Since this whole article is just one big hot take, here's another hot take: eponymous social media as a whole is on the way out. The only stuff anyone can put on eponymous social media is personal brand stuff (think LinkedIn), never anything actually genuine
It's impossible for people to have real engagements under eponymous social media because anything they can say could be turned against them
IG is predominantly just marketing, whether it's people showing off (like LinkedIn), pages trying to build a following with e.g. pet videos so they can make money from ads, annoying influencer "content", or actual overt ads
Why not let your shiny new social network UI parse any dumb input into a fancy thread format? Zero adoption friction. Federation baked in.
Example: You run a mastodon-like service that can receive email. When it gets an email, it publishes a twirt with the contents. Truncates as needed.
If it's a new email address, spin up new user with email username. No password needed, cause it came from the email address you own.
Conversely, in the fancy interface, you can @soandso@gmail.com and it will email them for you. Doesn't matter if they've "joined twartordon." So it has a dumb-simple user growth model baked in.
I've been promoting this idea for years in the man-yells-at-clouds format, but folks don't seem to get why it's so powerful...
When you're blocking 99.93% of incoming messages as spam you'll learn to be more selective.
I have two Instagram accounts: one that only follows friends and family. Another that follows brands, influencers, and such. It completely fixed my Instagram experience. I can choose the (low volume) social network of friends, or endless scrolling and discovery. Never do they intermix. The friends-only feed is so low traffic, I never get sucked into sponsored or suggested posts. Highly recommend.
Instagram it's not over, and I bet will win the battle against TikTok
(verb): change course by swinging a fore-and-aft sail across a following wind.
(noun): an act or instance of jibing.
GP believes that the Atlantic article constitutes an instance of changing course by swinging a sail across a following wind, presumably metaphorically.
I understand that modern IG may not be the greatest, but engagement wise their choices, at least for the 25+ tier, have paid off imho.
Fundamentally, these old apps that are built on the "create an account and manually follow users" model cannot compete with TikTok right now, and I don't think they'll be able to change to be competitive with TikTok in the future.
Granted, I am a bit older, a millennial (as much as it hurts me to admit) and an older one at that, but I regularly take the tram in my city at times when all the teenagers are going to school or coming from school, and you can see a damn lot of whatsapp on all those phone screens, a lot of tiktok, and a good amount of discord.
A social network that forces you to wedge your content in images and short videos, while on Facebook you could share YouTube videos, music, interesting links, write-ups, you name it. How can anyone in their right mind prefer something as limiting as Instagram? Even its instant messenger is limited compared to Facebook's.
I miss the pre-pandemic Instagram. Now, it feels like it's transformed into a more general-purpose, Facebook-like social network. Which I guess should have been predictable!
Performative or commercial accounts make the experience worse though, and from what I understand these are being prioritized in the timeline.
There is simply far too much stuff on the Internet that's not memberwalled or paywalled.
I opened up Facebook (the desktop version), scrolled down 40 times, and categorized every post I saw in my timeline. The result was roughly 30% ads, 30% "suggested" posts of random memes, 30% updates to pages I'm subscribed to by necessity (local clubs and such), and only 10% "real" content published by friends. An that last 10% was mostly people sharing or commenting on random pages I don't care about, not anything about their life.
So Facebook, which is still marketed a social network and a way to stay in touch with friends, is now to me 90% irrelevant (or mostly irrelevant) garbage. I'm only using it as a mailing list for the few communities I'm still subscribed to, and despite having close to 200 "friends" I have not interacted with any of them through Facebook in years, save for the occasional birthday wish. Maybe I would if my timeline had some of their content, but either it's being pushed at the bottom of the algorithm or maybe like me they just don't bother posting anything at all anymore.
It wasn't always like this. I'm old enough to remember Facebook's rise but young enough to have joined it when it was "hype", in my final years of high school. It looked nothing like today, your home feed was a constant buzzing of people sharing updates about their life and interacting organically. Yes, there were privacy concerns already, but it also tremendously helped me broaden my social circle and feel part of a community. It was very effective at the "social" part of "social network".
But then came the engagement maximization algorithms, the ads, the brands, the sponsored content, the atrocious UI updates...and slowly but surely people started leaving, because it was becoming harder and harder to parse signal from noise. I'm sure there's a generational rift element too (teenagers pretty much ignored Facebook after their parents started to join), but even people who grew up with it are leaving because it's a fundamentally different platform than it was back in 2010.
Seems like Instagram is taking a similar route. Makes you wonder if it's the fate of every social network to eventually decrepit and die.
1) The focus of the Social Network is normal people, doing anything it might be interesting to others. Which is pretty much the contrary of Instagram which focus on Celebrities and "Friends".
2) Tiktok has an amazing fine-tuned Algorithm. Its like even a mirror of your subconscious, it tries very much to play anything you desire to see.
3) Instagram, Youtube and Twitter are full of ads. It just breaks the user experience. Youtube experience sucks too because they show Videos with higher probability of views which in turn are tipically big youtubers playing sponsored content.
Pick friends and who you follow well and it's a great experience. Pictures and video are equally supported, discovery is good, search is the best of any social network IMO.
And pro-tip: if your discovery is too full of stuff you don't want, click stuff you don't want and click "not interested". It'll then remove similar posts from your discovery page in the future.
Maybe it is, but it will be a death by 500 million cuts, not a max exodus. There is no clear successor.
Successor to what? As if it serves some purpose? This is like wondering what will "successfully replace" a tumor that's to be removed...
(And, yes, you can have millions of users without service a purpose, at least not any useful one. All kinds of crap has).
I guess one reason could be - even if someone wants to give it a shot they pretty much know that one of these behemoths will copy and drive them out, or buy them out but for that they need to have audience which is locked in vast corporate silos.
No one uses it because no one posts > No one posts because they don't expect interaction > No one expects interaction because no one uses it
And then brands or influencers don't join because there's no potential to make money.
Part of the history of these big incumbents is that people were discovering a more user-friendly way to use the web through them; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube all were "Hey, we can now do something we could do before, much easier, in a more accessible way that I can show to my normie friends/my parents."
Alternatives that DO come up, like 500px or Vimeo, end up needing to become more for enthusiasts (people who care about fidelity, rather than novelty), turning away normies in the process. That's fine for them, as long as their goal isn't to "be an alternative YouTube/Flickr."
Tell me you are willing to pay $1/month, and I will stop postponing it and finally add it to https://communick.com
I tried using Peer Tube recently, felt like I was on 2005 YouTube...absolute no man’s land
It recently passed the mom test. My 70-something mom signing up for something is a strong signal it has peaked.
Protip: interact with a couple ads you like and you'll see mostly those instead of rando
https://instagram.com/p/ClCFeRSjOXo
if you hit refresh 5 times, even slowly, you get blocked until you login. I shouldn't have to login just to view a post.
What will be the next one?
A: hand drawn postcards
We've been using Instagram more than any of the other social networks. Not making a TikTok account. YouTube lost me forever with their invasive ad push. Facebook lost me with its over the top moderation and irrelevant & useless ads. My Twitter account was suspended for a SNL quote.
Instagram currently has relevant and generally well done ads, if anything. The videos are also captivating and addictive and currently not littered with ads. I think that if they put ads in the Reels, they'd drive away a lot of traffic. Right now you almost don't notice some of the ads, and the ones you do notice are generally well done. That's a big difference right there, in my opinion.
Instagram has a lot of fun educational content & accounts. TikTok seems to lack that - it's a pool of misinformation more than education in my experience.
Definitely going to disagree with The Atlantic here.
