Even disregarding privacy concerns (which you shouldn't!), I stopped posting on social media largely because I'm too argumentative of a person for it.<p>When arguing is limited to people I see in person, it's a somewhat time-boxed and constrained operation. I typically can only argue with one person for N minutes, and eventually both of us get tired of it and we move on with our lives, but there's <i>always</i> someone wrong on the internet, and a lot of those wrong people love to be wrong publicly on social media. I would always end up arguing with a stupid post that a stupid person on Facebook had, and then someone would chime in in support of me or the person I'd argue with. Before I knew it, a not-insignificant percentage of each day was being dedicated to responding to idiocy on social media.<p>Eventually, it started getting annoying and I deleted my Facebook, and never really looked back. I run a Mastodon instance that I almost never use (but I had to justify the server I bought somehow), I briefly worked at Reddit, and obviously I post a bit on HN which is basically social-media adjacent, but despite all this I never really felt compelled to go back to constantly posting on social media.<p>I suspect a lot of people have come to similar conclusions. I enjoy talking to my friends, and I do pretty liberally on Signal, but I feel that's sort of in a different category than "social media".
I feel like posting has become simply uncool in time for few major reasons:<p>- older gens (50+) getting on socials (cool kids club vanishes)<p>- raise of influencers and post quality (comparison anxiety)<p>- change to algos (fewer people will see it)<p>I can't but think that plain old vBulletin/PhpBB topic-based forums are still the pinnacle of internet discussions.<p>I don't like the fact, e.g. that interesting discussion on hackernews end up in a day and you don't have long threaded discussions.
I often remark to family and friends that the human race wasn't ready for the capacity for instant communication with 'everyone everywhere all at once' but perhaps that was overly pessimistic and we are developing that muscle. Or is the novelty just wearing off and there are movements to other platforms that aren't represented in the article?
Yep. As someone who just tried social media again this summer, mostly as a promotional tool, there’s been a downward usage trend. I think the events of October 7 didn’t help.<p>Too soon to call this good or bad for any singular reason, but what sucks as a result is how hard it is to build an audience now. The network effects are shattered. It’s a shame because I think the Instagram creation tools are kind of neat. If that service was just a digital community bulletin board where every post expired after 30 days or something… idk, could be cool.<p>Or a massive pendulum swing back to more analog, offline groups.
Doing away with chronological, non-curated feeds (by default) has disincentivised posting. Social interaction is no longer a concern for the few big social media companies. To a large extent, it has been optimised out.
Other than IG envy posts a lot of my younger friends seem to be switching to private or mostly private group chats. A lot of them use Discords even for non-gaming stuff probably due to the illusion of a smaller and more authentic community. Tiktok and YT may be replacing others but those seem much more heavily leaning to watching versus posting as the skill and production of what it takes to look good on it is more effort.<p>If I had to guess they're getting annoyed at the rapid enshittification push at some of the big platforms. We may see federated mastodon model become more popular once a few celebrities figure it out.
I agree largely with all of the posts here, but the nagging concern in the back of my mind is always: isn't social media still valuable for businesses? Or rather, are you leaving customers "on the table" by ignoring it?<p>Maybe less so for B2B or "serious" things like WSJ, but for B2C it still sounds like a serious contender. For your dropshipping doohickies or crafted niche fandom doodads, where else do you go? Etsy and Pinterest aren't the norm everywhere. Then there's always the hope of "building a following" around either yourself or your product, or perhaps hitting a viral moment ("use this app to help you ABC 2x faster" by some influencer). Does one just SEO their way around and hope someone with a following gives you a boost or asks for an affiliate program?
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