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

Compared with the fragmented, D.I.Y. Web I knew, social media felt strangely predictable. User profiles on new sites like LinkedIn or Flickr were templated and surrounded by ads. They offered preset options from categories and drop-down menus—age, location, institutional affiliation—and quantified influence through friend and follower counts. The n... See more

You could say that social media isn’t exactly dying, but bifurcating. Apps like Twitter—which don’t really offer the ability to split status updates and broadcast capacities or switch to short-form video posting—and Facebook—which are essentially so rotted out by network decay—are not fertile ground for this kind of consumption shift.

The internet is still so young that it’s still momentous to see a social network of some scale and lifespan suddenly lose its vitality. The regime change to Elon and his brain trust and the drastic changes they’ve made constitute a natural experiment we don’t see often. Usually, social networks are killed off by something exogenous, usually another... See more

Like every human endeavour, every social network is there for a limited duration and will be useful to a limited niche of people. That niche may grow to the point of being huge, like Facebook and WhatsApp. But, to this day, there are more people in the world without an account on Facebook than people with one. Every single social network is only re... See more

Modern ‘Social Apps’ look more and more like consumable fashion vs. enduring networks…. It isn’t just downloads, engagement alone is no longer enough.

the most important new social networks of the last few years have been notable for not really being social networks at all.

I’m referring to the TikTok-ization of user-generated content: the reason why TikTok was such a blindspot for Facebook is that, unlike Snapchat, it doesn’t depend on network effects, but rather abundance.