Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak | Hacker News

Western social apps also rely much more heavily on advertising revenue. The lifeblood of their income statement is traffic to the feed. This means feed relevance is paramount. Anywhere one's social graph drifts from one's interests, boring content invades the feed. The signal to noise ratio shifts the wrong direction. Instead of pruning and tuning ... See more

In addition, perhaps there is a general limit to how far a single feed of random content arranged algorithmically can go before we suffer pure consumption exhaustion. Perhaps seeing curated snapshots from everyone will finally push us all to the breaking point of jealousy and FOMO and, across a large enough number of users, an asymptote will emerge... See more

On the deflation side, social networks can get less cool as more people join. The canonical example here is what happened to Facebook when parents started joining: all the young people left for Instagram and Snapchat. Social networks need to be analyzed based on more than their network effects... There are three axes for analyses: Social Capital, U... See more