[spoaceman7777]

None of the numbers I've seen on web usage, platform usage, etc. indicate people are significantly pulling away from online lives. Though, there has been a slight dip in daily social media browsing time in the last couple of years (of course, it also follows the end of the pandemic, and it hasn't ceded back to where it was prior).

That does sound like a rather charmed life though. Could also be a sign that people are reverting to using the social internet apart from their irl acquaintances as well.

Linking up with all of our irl acquaintances through the public web was a terrible mistake imo. Seeking privacy can mean many different things.

[bawolff]

I think the platforms have changed. FB used to be 100% posts by people you know. I opened it today, and maybe 1 out of 50 posts were by someone i know, the rest was "trending" content.

Its essentially an entirely different website now.

[lolive]

For what it is worth, here is my experience with Facebook, [a platform that I have learnt to love after my Twitter ban]: I go to the main page, I immediately click the magnifying lens, so I get the list of unread posts of the 10to20 groups I follow. I read them quickly. Then leave. I do that, on a daily basis. Time spent: usually 20 minutes.

Reddit is 99% search only. I go there only on a purpose. [might be replaced by Gemini, eventually]

HN and Alterslash are probably the only source of random info that I still consume.

May be that information containment is a reaction to my 15+ years of addiction to [the good old] Twitter. Or because I have reached age 50.

But the consequence is that I get the news late, and usually because of a search I did. Not because of a proactive algorithm.

Additional thought: in the end I suppose my information un-déluge is the proof that algorithms eventually failed to deliver [i.e point me at things meaningful to me]. The biggest example is Spotify proposals. That is 1% of my music discovery, whereas traditional non-commercial radios and dedicated podcasts are [human curated and] much more diverse.

[nostrademons]

Would it show up in the numbers on web usage, platform usage, etc? People who do this drop out of the sample - they don't show up in the numbers. As far as your stat gathering is concerned, they don't exist.

If you're actually doing a census of people and asking about their web usage and social habits, it'd show up. So maybe Google or Facebook has the data if they were to do say cohort analysis on Google Analytics or Chrome History or Facebook beacon logs, counting specifically the number of total unique Internet users that used to visit social media but no longer do. But such an analysis would require SVP-level privacy approval (because it joins together personal, non-anonymized data across multiple products), and why would an executive commission a study that potentially tells them that their job is in danger and their employer is making a mistake by employing them? And if they did, why would they ever publicize the results?

AFAIK, most of the major public-facing analytics platforms work by sampling their users. If their users are voluntarily choosing not to engage with the platform that their sampling runs on, they by definition cannot measure that change. They just become a biased sample that excludes specifically the population they're trying to measure.

[gcbirzan]

But they still READ. So, if you 'interact' (and by that I mean do any write-like action, like commenting, posting, liking, whatever) less, that's gonna show up.

[timeon]

Are bots included in those numbers?

[majormajor]

How about distinct public posts per day per user?

My experience is that consumption is as high as ever, but the median person's non-private sharing is down.