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Social media companies became so obsessed about maximizing ROI on short form video content that they stopped being a platform to share with friends and turned into Temu Youtube. You won’t see your friends stuff on any of them because it’s designed to work that way. Group chats are the only way to have a meaningful conversation if you a casual non-technical Internet dweller.
All of that is intentional. There isn't enough money to be made connecting people. Revenue streams are driven by ads attached to media interaction. Connecting people is low engagement. We, as consumers, have rewarded this revenue model by proving that it works. If you don't want to contribute to it then don't use these large platforms.
This is so sadly true. I nostalgically remember early social media with the linear feed of things directly from friends as being a fun and positive place.
Bsky actually uave linear followed accounts only feed.
the business model is to divide and conquer my friend. wakey wakey...
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.

The terminology explains what happened.

The Zuckerberg movie was called The Social Network. At the time we saw the likes of Facebook as networks intended to build 1-1 communications.

Since then, it’s become social Media. It’s now about centralized structures broadcasting messages to subscribers and followers. The only difference from the past is who the broadcasters can be, but it’s no longer about building networks between people.

There is nothing wrong with the bulletin board at the student center

It works

It's kinda sad that members of a club have to share their private details with some remote third party focused on surveillance, data collection and targeting ads in order communicate with other members or potential members. Not to mention the possibility of "age verification"

When used for public notice, the benefits, if any, of "social media" over the bulletin board at the student center are probably not worth the hassles

South African here. Just about all notifications have moved to WhatsApp. Most school classes have a group for the parents, extended family group, immediate family group, residents association group, high school classmates group, gym class group, home town group ... the list goes on. Sounds like a lot but most groups tend to have few messages.
I always hated how everything moved off independent forums and onto facebook. Zuckerberg was right about with his early idiots comment.
Today it's discord, we just don't call it social media because it's private by default with no intent to force you into a networking & self-disclosure hell hole
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.

The other big problem is, group notifications went from 100% success rate, to nearly 0%. I bought a budget model sainsmart/genmitsu cnc thing to goof around with, as a hobby/assist other hobbies, and 98% of their user community is on Facebook, but Facebook doesn't show me their posts most of the time, because sainsmart isn't paying to promote their group. This group would be a wealth of information every time I opened the fb app, but unless I explicitly remember to go visit their "community" by searching for it, I'll never see those posts. There's an enormous Cyclekart (vintage-ish go karts with proportionally correct wheels) community on fb as well but unless that's the ONLY thing you use their app for, they won't show you that stuff.

TL;DR FB is worthless for social networks, because if they showed you the groups you were there to check on, nobody would pay to promote their own things.

Once an avid user, I go 1-2 weeks at a time with the app uninstalled now unless there's something specific I need to check on.

Why not group emails?

There's a guy that runs multiple sports teams at a local recreation center, in multiple adult divisions (wide age/culture rage), and he has been using email to great effect for over a decade that I have known him. I get 2-3 weekly emails about teams that need a sub for a game and those spots continue to fill up quickly. He probably has the majority of regulars (in the hundreds) at that sports center on his various email list. It just works. They tried chat groups once and that was a disaster.

Bulletin boards! They are such a great thing.

When I started doing promotion of public events sponsored by a small nonprofit in rural Virginia (USA), I was handed several pieces of paper with notes like post office, banks, dry cleaners, lumber yard. Over time, I've built a spreadsheet of places to share event and other community information. There's churches, HOAs, social media groups, IRL locations, media outlets, and so on. I am constantly referring people to the list to use (share information and seek information0 and edit. I knew very few people would make edits but I expected a couple of folks to use it for outreach.

About a month ago, I started thinking that my small neck of the woods could use something other than FB to share info. I'd love for electronic discussion groups to fill the void. Of course there are downsides, starting with slow adoption. But I feel like it's a lift anyone can manage given that it's based in email.

Of course, what will be shared is stupid stuff and not what I want (public opinion on state and local policies) and particularly information relevant to people with low incomes.

Google Groups still exists. Easy enough for organizations to use for sharing announcements.
True. Here in Europe WhatsApp is the new social media. Especially WhatsApp groups.

In that sense it was a smart decision of meta to buy it.

Most of my friends are on Instagram too but nobody really communicates there. The chance of missing something important is way too high.

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)

Its simple. Nobody is posting because nobody is going to read your posts. The intense dive into algorithmic feeds over chronological ones sourced from your friends means that nobody is going to see your posts. Nobody is going to comment on them. Nobody is going to acknowledge they even exist. Everyone understands this, at least subconsciously, so nobody's gonna post. Besides, all that stuff moved into group chats anyways.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I stopped using Facebook back in 2021 when the majority of my feed was reshared political content with 20+ comments from my friends fighting about divisive social/political issues. It wasn't fun, and it wasn't fostering community, so I left. A few years later I logged in again to see that most of my Facebook friends had also stopped engaging.
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Social media as it was born touched a novel point of contact that didn't quite exist before. It was a powerful shift from what we had before.

Social media allowed you to be in touch with people in a way that wasn't possible with phone calls, text messages, instant messaging, email, or domain-specific forums.

What I could do in Facebook in 2010 was stay "friends" with selected acquaintances such as old classmates with whom I never was in email terms, messaging terms, or any other terms except having known them in school (or at work or at a hobby or...) I could follow their life via their posts, and I could leave a comment, sometimes, without any expectation that we should ever talk, meet, chat, or become more than old classmates. I haven't sent email to anyone in my school that I didn't know outside of school, as a friend. I don't have their numbers and it would be awkward to even consider calling someone with whom we didn't necessarily even talk much in school. But it was perfectly okay to ask someone to be your friend on Facebook (like, Hey, I know you? and if he did remember he would accept) and follow their postings and maybe (re)kindle something with no pressure to grow it into anything more than that.

We had that. Now... we no longer do. Or we still have Facebook and we can send friend requests to old acquantainces that I'd like to follow but there's nothing to follow because they aren't posting and because Facebook wouldn't show me their posts. So we're back to the point where actually making contact with another person (on Facebook) basically requires sending them a message in Facebook. Which already goes beyond what's expected from an old acquantaince on Facebook.

I recall a site for classmates where you could register to your school years and see your classmates there. But that was before social media and there weren't any posts that you could comment. You could just see your classmates listed there, and one in ten might have written a few words in their profile. And that was classmates only, not ex-work colleagues or other people you've passed behind in your life. Facebook was really good at the time it became a thing.

We still have email, instant messaging, etc. but what's the platform today where I can keep in touch with people I'm not emailing or talking with? Is there one?

It seems like so much of social media is just individuals shouting into the void.
Social media these days is 80% psyop, 20% attention grind. That 55% of Americans stopped posting would be a healthy thing.
I think 2 things happened to social networks / media:

1) companies had a desire to grow everyone's networks. Early numbers said, people more connected have more engagement, and the larger a user's graph is, the better we can advertise to that user.

But at some point it also changes what you want to post, or if you want to post at all. Do I want my mom to see this joke? That party photo? What about that guy I met on exchange 10 years ago?

I have 1000 connections on Facebook, and all _their_ connections can be exposed to my post. It might as well be public.

2) Professionals are better at posting than amateurs. It turns out that we rather watch a funny update from a comedian we don't know, than an update from a friend trying to be funny. Social networks are not social anymore. They are mostly TV, but instead of channel surfing, you are doom-scrolling videos from professional creators, not updates from friends.

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.

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.

Probably a crazy though, but I sometimes wonder if the pandemic/lockdowns did a number on social media activity too. Maybe a lot of people got burnt out on the whole thing after spending 2-3 years stuck inside with social media as their only way to communicate with friends and family.

That seems to be the point where most communities and social sites I'm on lost a lot of their activity/enjoyment, and where people seemed to start fading away.

Of course, increasing polarisation, an increasingly aggressive/selfish population and worries about privacy probably hit hard too.

Its why I built https://terrarose.org. while it only has a couple of users, and a couple of posts. Its a social media platform you have to pay 5 dollars a month for.

No ads, no tracking, no bots (hence the price).

Its just me working on it, but it does work. :)

I think we stopped posting because it's a miserable, unnecessary experience made worse by miserable unnecessary technology
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.

Out of curiosity, I checked my FB profile

my last post is from 2018, the last post I was tagged in is from 2020

6 years of nothing

Discord seems like the way. Sometimes, Signal groups (also popular in the White House).
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.
> Eventually, I left almost all my groups behind, keeping only the ones tied to genuine relationships.

That's why my only social media is WhatsApp, if that's a social media.

Social Networks were for normal people. Social Media is for brands and "influencers". It's RSS with algorithms and monetization metrics.
Really sad. I used to love staying connected with people but now I'm fed content from people I don't follow to keep me on the platform. I'm over it.
I stopped because I was forced to. "Something Happened" - never explained to me - and my FB public commenting was indefinitely suspended. No great loss.
email mailing list should be back - but people's brains have been turned to mush.
Because it's a dead end now. It used to be tons of fun, people were generally happy/positive, and you met a ton of cool people from all over the world.

Now, it's just a weird performative stage. Even worse, the people who are awarded with attention often prove themselves to be utterly clueless and nothing more than a modern day cabaret performer.

Strava is now the preferred app in my social network. And no "status update" is necessary as it does that automatically.
sounds conservative
For better or worse we are on Discord. A mixture of a throwback to IRC days combined with a platform that speaks “Internet” better than most places means a lot more interesting, unrestrained discussion happens. While most people will not go full tilt into 4chan-style right wing diatribes, it’s not like anyone will feign being offended to score “karma” points over what is being said. As a result, there is little incentive to game it. It’s just a chat with little else.