[btbuildem]

The paper (rightfully) does not address this, but I'd like to speculate about the reasons why, overall, usage has been dropping.

I think it's because social media, as a whole, stopped providing any value to its users. In the early days it did bring a novel way to connect, coordinate, stay in touch, discover, and learn. Today, not so much.

It seems we are between worlds now, with the wells of the "old order" drying up, and the springs of the "new order" not found / tapped just yet.

[maqnius]

I guess it's correlated to the commercialization of those platforms. The amount of content which is actually from your friends and families is declining and was replaced by adds and viral content. If facebook would've been from the beginning what it's now, we probably never would have named it 'social media' in the first place.

[altern8]

Big time. I visit once/year and I'm always amazed at how useless Facebook has become.

I could barely find any updates from my friends, my feed is now an endless stream of AI-generated videos.

What's the use for that?

[iugtmkbdfil834]

I have a theory, but based only on my observation of younger family members; needless to say, it may be way off in aggregate. Apart from the obvious, I don't really see them posting on legacy social media platfoms ( fb and so on ). TikTok was commonly used, but I can't say if recent US moves actually caused younger people to limits its use. On the other hand, fragmented discords and the like did seem to start be more common.

[nine_k]

Did you see people mourning the demise of forum software, when neatly maintained places oriented towards specific topics gave way to noisy and all-encompassing places like FB at Twitter?

I think these fragmented Discords are the return to the idea of specific, uncrowded, neatly maintained places, with a relatively high barrier to entry for a random person. Subreddits are a bit similar, but less insular.

[assimpleaspossi]

I've said this for quite a while now. Social media has turned into a bitch fest. It's all you ever read nowadays and I'm tired of it. I'm sure most people are tired of it.

[brightball]

I fixed Facebook on my feed at least. I started aggressively unfollowing people who post or comment about politics constantly (even if I agree with them). Not unfriending, just unfollowing.

What’s left is a feed with pictures of my friends and family, important news about what’s going on in their lives, and trash talking about college football.

It’s great.

[tdb7893]

I'm always surprised that papers don't include some "chat" apps as social media. I don't see Discord mentioned in this paper but I use it almost identically to how I used Facebook in like 2010 and at least among people I know that's very common. I think the use cases from more traditional "social media" has migrated a lot back to chat apps and those still provide a lot of value and are more widely used than ever.

[II2II]

Terminology shifted somewhere along the lines, because the nature of sites like Facebook changed. These sites were called "social networking" in the early days, since they connected people. These sites are called "social media" these days, which I assume is a reflection that the top-down nature of these sites are much more like traditional print/radio/television media.

The treatment of chat applications, online forums, etc. as social media has always felt strange to me for that reason. While the companies that offer those services may control the platform, control of interactions is limited to moderation and the content of those interactions is rarely created by a commercial interest.

[jmyeet]

I read a quote once that went something like (paraphrased): every organizational app has to compete with email and every form of social media has to compete with group texts. And I think that's accurate.

If you pick random people they'll have often very old group texts. Family, friend groups, etc. These are used to organize, disseminate news and so on. 10+ years ago, a lot of people did these things on FAcebook. Group texts work on all platforms. They don't have ads. They're chronological.

From an engagement perspective, algorithmic recommendations and ranking (ie the newsfeed) has "succeeded" but it killed the use cases that people now use group texts for. And I think the two are fundamentally incompatible.

[throwyawayyyy]

If I think about my own use of social media (and I have a facebook account from waaay back in the day, shortly after they dropped the requirement for a US edu email address), I wonder what value it ever had, over and above just emailing those people I'd like to stay in touch with every-so-often (which is what I do now). The reason why facebook switched to an algorithmic feed is because the previous method was failing, people were starting to give up posting. Algorithmic feeds didn't kill social media, they were an attempt at keeping alive what was already moribund. Social media, in the strict sense (so, not just online clubs or societies), never needed to be invented.

[nkoren]

Yes, this.

I miss the old social media. I'd love to have it back. Having moved several times to various corners of the world, I have dear family and friends who are scattered across multiple continents. It's difficult to maintain ongoing 1:1 connections across such distances, but I used to be able to keep up with them and their families -- and them with mine -- via social media. It felt genuinely communal.

And then the posts from them became increasingly interspersed with -- and eventually outright replaced by -- advertisements, rage bait from random people(?) I didn't know, and then eventually AI slop. All with the obvious goal of manipulating my attention and getting me to consume more advertising.

It felt absolutely gross. Not something I wanted my personal life to be associated with. I stopped posting. So did my friends. The end.

But I still miss the old social media, and would use it if it actually existed (not just as a technology or a business model, mind you, but as an actual network with the adoption needed to create those kind of connections).

[dgently7]

real question, how much would you be willing to pay a month for access to a healthy social network? (borrowing another comments clarification on the term vs social media)

healthy as in: has real people that you really know. Has no ads or bots or ai slop. Isn't full of dark patterns that are designed to turn you into a doom scrolling zombie? and maybe even has features that actually help you to stay connected in a real way to other people? oh and you are actually the customer and not the product so won't just be a service to gather bulk data on your "consumer preferences" so other places can target ads...

because while the thing you want isn't a technology or a business model I think if you actually wanted it to exist you need both, and we all mostly agree the old model where the social internet is just ad/data supported is not a path to something good. so the very real question is how much would you be willing pay in dues for that social network? how much would your friends pay? if it existed would you push for them to go there?

its hard to imagine a paid service that is basically the web version of kale being popular enough to get to network effects scale vs tiktok's double fudge oreos, but it would need to start somewhere... and some people do choose kale over oreos.

[sheept]

Based on the time range, the decline of social media use after 2020 could be more strongly related to the decline of Covid and remote school/work

[energy123]

That's a plausible explanation for the whole paper, unfortunately. And not one mention of Covid was made.

[elefanten]

In addition to the factors named by sibling comments, which I largely agree with, there is also the rise of short form entertainment on these platforms.

In 2004, social media was mostly text, images and low-fidelity game experiences like Mafia Wars. Compare to a bottomless scroll of immediate-attention-hook optimized, algorithmically targeted video content found on TikTok / Instagram.

The social behaviors got zombified out of the audience.

[nicbou]

I visited Facebook pretty much only to see my mom's posts. Even as I literally unfollowed everyone and everything, Facebook still wouldn't show me the only content I chose to see.

There are still the Facebook groups, and I really wish we had forums instead of those.

[DauntingPear7]

It’s because social media is no longer primarily about being social

[gentleman11]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A2P06aHpvnQ

I saw this on youtube yesterday. It is some animation directors micro social media website, limited to 50 people.

I dont care for the ethereum. But wouldnt it be cool if major social media platforms were like this?

[MrSkelter]

I proffer it’s because TikTok has advanced the idea social media is about consumption. It’s easier to watch than to create or contribute and as we have more options now to simply watch online, as more people stream as their primary source of media, the options are “work for free” or “watch”.

[softwaredoug]

If you optimize for engagement you create secondary effects that can drive users away.

If social media becomes addictive because it angers you constantly, that’s engaging but you may hate it. Enough people will realize it’s not worth the stress. The social media site just begins to be associated with negativity and anger - not fun.

It’s reasonable we hit peak social media in the US and enough people disengage to make the numbers come down. Though notably 2025 is not in this study.

[ifwinterco]

"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."