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

tthunderbong about 6 hours ago 33 commentsRead Article on ca.pcmag.com

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Discussion (33 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

alexpotato•about 2 hours 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.

SkyPuncher•19 minutes ago

I think we’re seeing a similar thing pan out with AI. When the barrier for something is too low, people realize that it’s not actually worth the other party’s effort to communicate it to them.

For me, physical communication is quickly becoming a signal that someone actually put effort into things.

dartharva•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour ago

But which one - SMS/RCS? iMessage? WhatsApp? Signal? Telegram? Discord?

Symbiote•25 minutes ago

When I ran a student society we used an email mailing list.

You can have two if necessary, one only for announcements and one for discussion.

alexpotato•about 1 hour ago

Exactly this.

Plus the notifications for chat groups are basically:

- show me everything

- don't notify me at all

soramimo•about 1 hour ago

E-Mail! :)

TrackerFF•about 4 hours 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•about 4 hours ago

Isn't that how it has been?

reactordev•about 4 hours 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•41 minutes ago

Remember the little dot in the end of the feed when you saw all your friends posts?

halflife•about 5 hours 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•about 5 hours 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•about 2 hours 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.

GenerWork•about 3 hours 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.

insickness•about 5 hours 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.

rightbyte•about 2 hours 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.

Smalltalker-80•about 5 hours 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...

imhoguy•about 2 hours 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.

mherkender•about 5 hours ago

This is an ad for Incogni

reactordev•about 4 hours ago

Like every pcmag article, there’s a corporate sponsor

add-sub-mul-div•about 2 hours 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.

beej71•about 2 hours 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•about 1 hour 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.

kalehmann•about 6 hours 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•about 5 hours 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•about 5 hours 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.

Simulacra•about 5 hours ago

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

HPsquared•about 5 hours ago

It's stochastic communication, sometimes other random voices come back from the void.

znpy•about 5 hours 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.

intrasight•about 1 hour ago

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

ChrisArchitect•about 2 hours ago

url: https://www.pcmag.com/news/death-of-the-status-update-why-55...