Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, Polarization (2025)

by vinnyglennon • 5 months ago

212 182 5 months ago

treelover• 5 months ago

"The U.S. social media landscape is quietly reshaping itself. Between 2020 and 2024, overall platform use slipped, driven by a rise in the population – especially the youngest and oldest – who no longer use social media at all. The old incumbents – Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter/X – have lost ground, while TikTok and Reddit have expanded modestly. The users who remain are slightly older, better educated, and more racially diverse than four years ago.

The political balance of social media has shifted just as noticeably. The once-clear Democratic lean of major platforms has declined. Twitter/X, in particular, has seen a radical flip: a space dominated by Democrats in 2020 is now more Republican-aligned, especially among its most active users and posters. Reddit’s remains a Democraic stronghold, but its liberal edge has softened.

Across platforms, overall political posting has declined, yet its link with affective polarization persists. Those expressing the strongest partisan animus continue to post most frequently, meaning that visible political discourse remains dominated by the most polarized voices. This leads to a distorted representation of politics, that itself can function as a driver of societal polarization [17, 12].

Overall, the data depict a social media ecosystem in slow contraction and segmentation. As casual users disengage while polarized partisans remain highly active, the tone of online political life may grow more conflictual even as participation declines. The digital public sphere is becoming smaller, sharper, and louder: fewer participants, but stronger opinions. What remains online is a politics that feels more divided – not because more people are fighting, but because the fighters are the ones left talking."

Yup, nothing unexpected here.

iugtmkbdfil8349• 5 months ago

<< As casual users disengage and polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme.

It.. feels accurate. I don't frequent FB or other mainstream social spots, but even on HN, the pattern is relatively clear. Vocal minorities tend to drive the conversations to their respective corners, while the middle quietly moves to, at most, watch at a safe distance.

Part of me is happy about it. The sooner we get out of the social media landscape, the better the society as a whole will be.. in my opinion anyway. Still, we have already lost so much of the original internet. That loss makes me sad.

hdgvhicv• 5 months ago

The problem with “the middle” is that’s relative to the Overton window. Federal troops assassinating kneeling protesters didn’t used to be “one side” with “the middle” suggesting they should simply arrest them and lock them up.

treis• 5 months ago

Right on cue

FiniteField2• 5 months ago

Federal troops assassinating kneeling protesters didn’t used to be “one side”

This is factually not true. Levels of violence by the state against citizens in the United States is at near historic lows. The state killed dozens of children in Waco in the 90s, bombed domestic buildings in Philadelphia in the 80s, shot protestors Kent State University in the 70s, going back to the early years of the USA where protests and rebellions were put down with private militias and bounties. The shooting by one officer of one protester in a scuffle with officers wouldn't have reached the history books in any other time.

belorn• 5 months ago

It is a major simplification to put the political spectrum on a single line (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum). If we put it as a triangle, the Overton window can be as far from left to right as left/right is to the middle.

The Overton window is not involved in defining the middle, and the middle definitively do not need to agree 50% with any specific decision done by the left or right.

noosphr• 5 months ago

I would usually keep quiet and ignore post like this because they are extreme timesinks, but to give a perfect example: Waco. It happened under the other side. The official story is bunk and half the country that is supposedly anti-authoritarian cheered it on.

I don't care to have the conversation or change anyone's mind but your post is the perfect example why people in the middle disengaged from the loud minority that takes over online spaces.

tejohnso• 5 months ago

Federal troops assassinating kneeling protesters is still not within the Overton window though.

engineer_222• 5 months ago

YC does have brakes ... Accounts are rate limited for engaging in conversations that are determined to be beneath the dignity of the platform. It's not clear if the rate limiting is biased against certain perspectives.

FB and Twitter seem to drive heavy political ideological content at the slightest hint of engagement.

I think a problem with loud poles and a quiet middle is the political class takes its queue from the internet discourse. The algorithms drive content, but in a reverse fashion they also poll the electorate, providing signal the political scientists use to calibrate messaging.

antonvs• 5 months ago

It's not clear if the rate limiting is biased against certain perspectives.

This is unavoidable. "The dignity of the platform" is a euphemism for moral cowardice masquerading as reason and civility.

Someone like Charlie Kirk - a bigoted troll who used "debate" as a weapon - would have fitted right in here, because he couched his bigotry in a civil manner.

MLK is relevant here, in his description of "moderates":

more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.

Some other references:

"Stop glorifying ‘centrism’. It is an insidious bias favoring an unjust status quo": https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/28/centri...

"Can the Center Hold Any Meaning?": https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/political-centr...

"A Critique of Pure Tolerance": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Critique_of_Pure_Tolerance

etrvic• 5 months ago

I don't think the social media landscape is inherently bad, but the ways in which it evolved. And I think the shift in social media towards consuming content instead of connecting with others is a direct reflection of the era we live in; one of abundant information.

Social media will stop becoming relevant when we stop treating each person as a mini corporation that needs to provide value, trying to optimize every aspect of your life in a life-long marketing campaign.

iugtmkbdfil8349• 5 months ago

You may be onto something. It is a little bit like google when it first started showing ads. Initially, the ads were clearly marked and were promised to be relevant to the user, but that line has been moved slowly in a way to extract more and more value from the user.. while removing value that user already had.

I know social media had some real use cases. CL and FB marketplace are probably one good example of that. But the rest of it.. best I can say, my overall happiness jumped up after first month of going on a media diet.

geremiiah• 5 months ago

The article uses the word "partisan", the opposite of which I think is "independent", not "centrist" or "middle", but to be fair the article seems to conflate the two as well and never uses the word "independent". However to me there is a big difference between being a centrist and being independent. One could be independent with views that are at times deemed extreme right and at times extreme left. Similarly, some people are "centrist" yet somehow deeply partisan in the sense that their party can do no wrong and everything is the fault of the other party.

reactordev2• 5 months ago

This. Partisanship is going along party lines (agreeing with the Party) where independence is thinking of your own free will. We desperately need more of those people in charge.

iugtmkbdfil8349• 5 months ago

It is a valid question. I looked at the author's profile and while he is not from US ( Amsterdam ), his studies focus[1] appears to be on subjects that would suggest he should be relatively well acquainted with politics in US along with how they differ in terms of terminology from EU or UK. Sadly, I can't seem to say for sure how term was intended in the article itself. That said, the author does seem to reference individual US parties.

[1]https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/t/o/p.tornberg/k.p.tornberg.ht...

watwut• 5 months ago

Insisting that truth is always in the middle is a radical ideology on itself.

MrScruff• 5 months ago

The problem with this is that people are particularly bad at judging their own 'independence' of thought, regardless of their political views.

I would say the opposite of partisan would be someone who actively seeks to understand and relate to the views of those who they disagree with, or who are from their out-group. This would also imply independence of thought.

moffkalast• 5 months ago

There is some slight irony talking about a vocal minority in a top comment, heh.

frankdenbow• 5 months ago

What do you mean exactly by lost so much of the original internet?

hsuduebc23• 5 months ago

To use internet lingo, no normies.

hsuduebc23• 5 months ago

But to be more broad I'll present you the romantic version which is at least partly true. I miss that.

It used to feel like the internet was a place you went to explore and learn. It was harder to use and navigate, so most ordinary people did not spend much time there. Back then, a lot of people believed it would make the world better because everyone could access information and educate themselves.

That optimism did not survive contact with reality. Today you can carry essentially all human knowledge in your pocket, yet much of the internet is funneled through a handful of corporations whose business model is advertising and attention. Instead of helping people discover things, the dominant platforms optimize for keeping you scrolling with outrage, dopamine hits, and low value content. Worst thing is of course politics which moved in here.

The joy of exploring is done, but honestly I think that it atleast partly that the og users got older. Hackernews somehow reminding me the "old Internet", somehow alike people with desire to explore and have honest discussion on genuinely interesting topic.

zx80802• 5 months ago

Part of me is happy about it. The sooner we get out of the social media landscape, the better the society as a whole will be.. in my opinion anyway. Still, we have already lost so much of the original internet. That loss makes me sad.

While I share the hope, it's probably not going to happen: most folks have moved from FB to use AI chats. Now it's the tool to manipulate opinions and habits. And it's working very well and nuanced. With AI, the society will be more divided, more polarised, and less happy than before.

And there's no way back already! Even if the web search works well one day, the folks desire (and habit!) to outsource thinking is too strong, especially among younger.

BLKNSLVR• 5 months ago

the folks desire (and habit!) to outsource thinking is too strong, especially among younger.

The 'younger' only because they're forming habits in the time of AI. Most all humans tend towards minimising cognitive load; the making hard decisions and consideration of complex topics and situations. It's all about the tools that were available to you at the time you started to need those tools. The core is the same. Low-level, essentially sub-conscious, human behaviour change doesn't happen on a noticeable time frame^.

^ my opinion, not based on research. ie. feel free to critique.

What has changed is the awareness of the hacks that work on the human lizard brain, and therefore pandering to all that makes us weak and powerless in exchange for money and convenience. That's the part that makes it feel, for me, more likely that there's no way back. Those hacks will only get more refined and more streamlined into exploitation.

lugu• 5 months ago

With AI, the society will be more divided, more polarised, and less happy than before.

While I agree for less happy, I am not seeing AI chatbot been more divisive and polirised than social media in general. Am I missing something?

raw_anon_1111• 5 months ago

I mean it’s really not that hard to do a little research to find out that “most” people aren’t leaving Meta properties for ChatgpT

kkfx• 5 months ago

That's the result of excess censorship and PRs on those platform, you can play with people more or less easily but you can't re-program them at such speed. They understand and start rejecting the narrative.

Vocal minorities vary but tend just to excite the others, not to affirm any point.

beloch• 5 months ago

It's worth questioning how much of the polarized rhetoric out there is rooted in reality, and how much of it is just social media selecting and promoting extreme views. The answer seems to be that it really depends on where you are.

As a Canadian, I feel that people on opposite ends of the spectrum, although they might literally call for the deaths of those on the other end, have a huge amount in common with each other. Canada has problems, but its still a pretty great country. If people would step outside of the hyper-partisan identities they've been constructing for themselves online and try to see the concerns of the other side, they'd probably find they're not as horrible or misguided as they might think while reading facebook or reddit. If the reasonable centre that dominates public policy can continue to ween itself off of American social media, there's hope for a strong, unified country that's capable of having adult political discourse between people who disagree on finer points. We clearly have some challenges to face (e.g. separatism) in getting there though.

If you're in the U.S. though, things appear very different. While both political parties seem to have been co-opted by billionaire interests, one party has fallen into what can be described as, if we're being charitable, a cult of personality. Unfortunately, that personality has been doing things that are impossible to dismiss as the online hysteria of the other side. Threatening allies with military invasion. High seas piracy. Kidnapping of a foreign leader (admittedly a not very nice one) from his nation. Betraying allies to cozy up to dictators like Putin. Torching global markets with constantly changing tariffs. The list goes on. Then there's what's going on within U.S. borders. If you're in the U.S., the polarization isn't just online. It's something very real. I feel that somebody opposing what ICE is doing in Minnesota and a die-hard Trump supporter really don't have a lot in common and I don't think removing them from online social media will result in civil discourse between the two. There are very real differences there that are coming to a head.

esseph• 5 months ago

Still, we have already lost so much of the original internet.

Hyper-monetization killed it all

eitally• 5 months ago

I think a lot of what's happening is that individuals and their in-groups are replacing social media for comms with chat apps, leaving much of the remaining social media use being either reposting crap or for opinion blasts... or in the worst case, thoughtlessly reposting other people's [extreme] opinion blasts.

One thing is true: actual, active socializing is happening in chat apps (and Discord), not FB, X, or IG.

phendrenad2• 5 months ago

I feel like this misses what's actually going on. The "small, sharp, ideologically extreme" discussions aren't going away, they're just happening elsewhere. From the abstract, the reason for the decline is: "the youngest and oldest Americans increasingly abstaining from social media". The young people are talking in private Discord groups, and the old people are talking in private text groups. These private groups don't show up in social media studies. The paper even states this directly: "everyday communication increasingly migrates from large, open networks to semi-private spaces such as group chats and messaging apps".

arjie• 5 months ago

Amusingly I've solved this problem of polarized partisans personally. I have an extraordinarily large blocklist of users (including an auto-hide on the top 1000 commenters by word-count). Annoyingly this has created a new problem: reading HN is a lot more enjoyable so I use it more.

galleywest200• 5 months ago

Across platforms, political posting remains tightly linked to affective polarization, as the most partisan users are also the most active. As casual users disengage and polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme.

I keep saying to my internet friends that the vast majority of people do not share political opinions online and you have to apply skepticism about what people actually think about political topics when scrolling through social media “takes”. Seems my intuition was not that far off.

btbuildem• 5 months ago

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.

iugtmkbdfil8349• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

brightball2• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

II2II2• 5 months ago

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.

throwyawayyyy• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

jmyeet3• 5 months ago

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.

softwaredoug2• 5 months ago

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.

DauntingPear7• 5 months ago

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

sheept• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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

elefanten• 5 months ago

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.

ifwinterco• 5 months ago

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

maqnius• 5 months ago

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.

altern83• 5 months ago

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?

nicbou• 5 months ago

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.

gentleman11• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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”.

aucisson_masque• 5 months ago

As casual users disengage and polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme.

I think it's the root cause of all our issues (in democratic society).

siavosh4• 5 months ago

The root cause of our issues is the economic austerity imposed on the public causing disaffection of the masses. Dividing this public and redirecting this anger against each other and scapegoats leads to what you refer to.

terminalshort6• 5 months ago

Where is this economic austerity you speak of, and who is imposing it?

chris_wot• 5 months ago

So... people actually converse and have civil debates on social media? I wouldn't know, I'm not on Facebook.

jimmydoe• 5 months ago

Shifts in U.S. Society, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, Polarization

Social media just reflects the state of its users.

oceansky• 5 months ago

Reflects or shape it?

NegativeK• 5 months ago

Amplifies it, because it's the easier way to profit.

Cable news was ramping up sensationalism -- including polarization -- before the internet was a household thing.

Social media gave the businesses real-time feedback of how to drive up engagement. So they amplify what keeps people engaged, which means leaning heavily on anger and divisiveness.

jeffbee2• 5 months ago

This paper came out in October and I read it at the time. It is pretty surprising but it is also totally contradicted by other major surveys, so I am pretty sure it's just flawed. The most peculiar result is the dramatic reduction in reach for YouTube. This guy has YouTube with 60% reach and falling. Pew Americans’ Social Media Use 2025 has YouTube at 84% and rising, and 95% among 18-29 age cohort, which pretty much refutes this paper's core conclusion.

"Overall [social media] platform use slipped ... especially the youngest ... who no longer use social media at all" is the kind of wild claim that requires a much more significant investigation than this author undertook.

bigthymer• 5 months ago

The YouTube numbers surprised me the most. I agree with you. I was expecting a rise in viewership.

adamlgerber2• 5 months ago

i feel like the underlying thesis of this is maybe wrong. someone closer to the methodology would know better but here is what i see:

(1) Meta and Google have seen their growth slow (not shrink) because they reach virtually the entirety of the online population, especially in the US. Meanwhile their time spent metrics continue to rise.

(2) Reddit is called out as a modest grower but its usage has more than doubled in the US since 2021 from 90M to 170M (according to emarketer).

Doenst mean the conclusions are wrong (i agree with it on polarization) but the growth measures seem to not reflect reality.

jeffbee2• 5 months ago

I think you are right to suspect the methods and the results. If you look at the paper's github, the python notebook was clearly written by a chatbot (the comments are all in the second person). So what you have here is a monograph, unreviewed, unpublished, based on GPT-level understanding of a survey that might not even apply to this subject.

chr15m• 5 months ago

And worse, it says something smart people wish was true.

throwaway94275• 5 months ago

Meta and Google time-spent growth is probably people watching Reels and YouTube. They're both becoming Tiktok and most of the accounts on Tiktok when I was on it for a while did not look like people's real name. So with regard to Meta/Google "growth" idk if there's anything too social about that.

adamlgerber2• 5 months ago

sure, call it entertainment rather than social. very fair comment, but that is not a distinction this paper is making. the paper is also talking about tiktok too which falls into the same entertainment category.

xvxvx• 5 months ago

Social media may have been the biggest disappointment and missed opportunity of the internet era. It’s a literal dumpster fire. People do not get what they want from it. Clearly, the market is not dictated by the customer.

Ygg2• 5 months ago

The market is dictated by the customer, but the customer is the ad company, not the user.

nomel2• 5 months ago

I'm a bit confused. What's the alternative outcome? We're talking about humans here, most of which have an IQ below 100! For any social thing, more humans literally means more dumb. The only way around it is silos/migration, which is exactly how it was handled in the early internet, and why this place is reasonable.

Or, is that what was missed? Better silos, with some sort of semi non-community enforcement for the quality of interaction/comment?

II2II2• 5 months ago

What's the alternative outcome?

Once upon a time, people saw computers (then the Internet) as a way of lifting people up rather than pushing people down. They saw it as a way of equalizing people's access to knowledge, rather than subjecting them to a fire hose of information. They believed that it would encourage discourse to bring people together, rather than dividing people along ideological lines.

Yeah, we were naive.

tamimio• 5 months ago

The real issue that a lot of people keep forgetting or ignoring is monetization. This alone is responsible for at least 80% of the damage we have in nowadays internet, not just social media. YouTube channels, Twitter accounts, Twitch streamers, podcasts, you name it, are there only as a business to these "influencers", and naturally the more you progress in time the more there's a need to be extreme to get noticed in this exponentially growing domain. So back in 2013 you could get an audience by making some prank on Vine, but in 2025 you have to pretend you are "exposing Somali frauds" to get the same engagement level, and thus the money and popularity, as pretty much no one will care if you made prank videos in 2025 anymore. There are bots running on Twitter as we speak that are actively shilling and grifting on trendy topics, podcasts paid by sponsors, even on HN especially since AI with these wrappers trying to sell subscriptions or asking you to sign up on their blogs. The list goes on. The problem isn't social media. The problem is the oldest issue in history: money and greed. Everyone is trying to monetize anything, including selling used socks or whatever on OF!

pnexk• 5 months ago

Tangentially, I think that the “excuse” for these platforms that they need to make money enabled a lot of the current dystopian level of ad tracking.

Network effects be damned, we should all be a little more willing to pay to be part of platforms hosting digital communities or at least contribute in some way to the infrastructure.

terminalshort6• 5 months ago

And if we did, what would be the difference? Sure, there would be no ads on the platform (plenty of sponsored content, though), but there would still be an algorithm. And it would be minimally different to the one that exists today. The current ad driven model doesn't allow paying advertisers to drive the algorithm. Rather it lets you drive the algorithm by your revealed preferences and then allows advertisers to target you based on those preferences and insert their ads in the result, which is much more effective. But if we didn't have the ads, the algorithm remains. The question "what does this user want to see?" is equally as relevant to a company that wants to convince a user to keep paying for their subscription as it is to a company that uses it as an advertising vector.

terminalshort6• 5 months ago

The algorithm has not fundamentally changed. There is no secretive or sinister purpose to it. It is simply a highly imperfect predictor of what you want to see. When the algorithm promotes things you don't like it's because there are millions other people with different taste than you who do want to see that content. Certain categories of content grow and fade over time because things like that grow and fade in popularity over time too just as they always have and the algorithm picks up on that. The algorithm is not driving this, it is responding to it. We are in a prison of our own design.

wat100002• 5 months ago

It's a predictor of what you'll click on. This correlates somewhat with what you want to see, but they don't care one whit about what you want, and the two don't always line up well.

In short, the problem is ragebait. I might open up some app because I want to see cat videos, but when I'm presented with "Polly McPoliticianface LIES about FLOWERS" I'm likely to click in anger about Polly's nefarious actions. Do this enough and you end up with something that just tries to make you angry all the time.

heavyset_go2• 5 months ago

The algorithm is just what the site owners, and their advertising clients, want you to see. If that means you're going to be shown a dozen BEN SHAPIRO DESTROYS COLLEGE STUDENT WITH NO MEDIA TRAINING videos, well, you're going to be shown those damn videos even if you hate it.

salawat• 5 months ago

When your society is structured around "sell yourself or die", and the people with capital enough to call the shots like it that way... This is what you end up with.

tsunamifury• 5 months ago

Worked in the top 3 here

Seems false to me. Explosive growth in 2020 during Covid was widely recorded and seeming engagement. Flips of X were associated with massive drops in population and bots.

This seems entirely wrong to me

Devasta• 5 months ago

In the past, I could go onto Facebook and see what my friends were up to, and share updates with them about what I was doing. It was great for arranging nights out.

Today, it's a dumpster fire, I can't see what anyone is doing, it's just AI videos and engagement bait.

Discord is the replacement for my friends at least.

carlosjobim• 5 months ago

https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr

and

https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr

Change your Facebook bookmark to one of these.

Symbiote• 5 months ago

Unfortunately these don't work on mobile browsers

(I do use them on the desktop)

siavosh4• 5 months ago

After not logging into Twitter for years I logged back in because I wanted to follow some posts regarding some breaking news. Omg the amount of garbage and fake videos and pictures was overwhelming. My guess is bot content is now so realistic and engagement manipulation is so sophisticated from even a few years ago that people will disengage even more.

bsaul• 5 months ago

I think that's the number 1 reason. Bot simply drive away useful content.

I think musk don't fight against bot because it makes the ads sells more (just like in the first days of SEM, where fake traffic and fake clicks was a source of revenue for second tier ad networks). But ultimately he's going to have to do something against it.

CamperBob22• 5 months ago

But ultimately he's going to have to do something against it.

Musk: "Why, at this rate, I'll have to shut this place down in... let's see... 684,000 years."

He can afford to treat Twitter as a playground for bots, a grooming ground for right-wing radicals, and a cesspool of cut-rate advertising.

numpad0• 5 months ago

That and GP are both plain untrue. The system literally hides useful and/or organic contents. There's also no signs of ads doing better than before.

The current Twitter algorithm funnel users into divided bubbles of couple hundreds users each, and cap numbers and quality metrics of contents that are allowed to be accessed beyond the bubbles, except for spams, which are artificially kept in the global context. Or something like that. To maintain the facade of a unified timeline, the system picks contents that would have been plausibly popular in the absence of it and push it into global contexts, but those are so out of contexts and out of regular system behaviors that it only brews hostility among the users against the system.

kristo• 5 months ago

I was similarly shocked when I logged back in a couple months ago for the first time to read some news stuff. Then I kept going back once a day for a month or two and the posts have started to look more normal.

I can see how this would change me unwillingly over time. Good wake up call to delete my throwaway account again.

StarterPro• 5 months ago

I feel like we're all glossing over the whole "pedophile billionaires colluded to throw the United States into chaos" part.

gigatexal• 5 months ago

Deleting my Facebook account was the best thing I ever did. I did it nearly 10 years ago and never looked back. I don’t miss it or miss out.

terminalshort6• 5 months ago

The social media cycle:

1. Quality brings success

2. Success brings popularity

3. Popularity brings idiots

4. Idiots destroy quality

siavosh4• 5 months ago

One small change, replace idiots with monetization.

runlevel1• 5 months ago

"L'enfer, c'est les autres" seems to work on a few levels.

armchairhacker3• 5 months ago

Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

Subcultures are dead. I plan to write a full obituary soon...

Written in 2015

alexpotato2• 5 months ago

Been speaking to current college students and recent college grads and this is their general sentiment:

1. "social media" is toxic

They may consume video on YouTube etc but the thought is, even amongst smart kids, that there is no net positive to interacting with people you don't know on social media.

This is somewhat disheartening given how many wonderful people I've met by just "being myself" on Twitter.

2. There is no central social media network anymore

I coached college club sports from the mid-2000s to the early 2010s. It's hard to overstate how EVERYONE in college was on Facebook. We used to have a dedicated forum for one of the teams and the president convinced me to go to Facebook groups b/c:

"Everyone is already on it and it has a notification system that people check b/c it's how they find out about college parties"

A current club president didn't even know what would be the best way to reach students other than flyers and setting up a table at the student center.

(I suggested Reddit and he acknowledged that would probably be one place where you at least knew students from the school might be there and were interested.)

chasd00• 5 months ago

“social media" is toxic

I have 14 and 16 year old sons and they, and their friends, have the same feeling about social media. Their preferred way to communicate with friends is an iMessage group.

alexpotato2• 5 months ago

I remember being in college and seeing the start of forums dedicated to a sport or hobby. That's how college paintball grew b/c first there was a forum just for college teams. Google just accelerated this as it made them easier to find. That then got eclipsed by BIG dedicated forums like PBNation.com (with a dedicated college forum) and then it went to FB.

That "if I just browse around, I'll find the nexus of what I'm into" seems to not be a thing for teenagers these days.

brightball2• 5 months ago

I graduated just before social media took off, but for us everybody was on AOL Instant Messenger. You left it on on your computer all the time, people updated their status messages for all to see and it showed when you were idle.

It was so much better than online by default as we are now.

jasonfarnon2• 5 months ago

When I hear that kids now are leaving public social media sites for private chats with a network of friends, which I personally have never used, I am picturing the AOL IM/icq experience.

buildsjets• 5 months ago

Yuck. We just used .plan and .project files. Finger me for fun!

jasonfarnon2• 5 months ago

"Everyone is already on it and it has a notification system that people check b/c it's how they find out about college parties"

In that era I recall several US universities career offices gave students the blanket advice that not having a facebook page would raise an employer's eyebrows.

"(I suggested Reddit and he acknowledged that would probably be one place where you at least knew students from the school might be there and were interested.)"

My impression of the college kids I deal with is that they now all use LinkedIn. (I think? It feels weird even saying that.)

hsuduebc23• 5 months ago

I find the idea of "partisans" eg. affective idiots throwing tantrums over each other's because of some absurd current topic while everybody just leaves quitly somehow little amusing.

steele• 5 months ago

Monetization through advertising is urinating in the pool

keyshapegeo993• 5 months ago

GPTZero flags every single section of this beyond the introduction as 100% likely to be AI-generated.

Looking for recommendations for discussion forums that aren't filled with these slop posts, anyone have any suggestions?

istjohn• 5 months ago

AI detectors are snake oil.

cal_dent• 5 months ago

AI slop or slop adjacent content will be the death knell for social media. Social media got soo big because it provided some pleasure to people and like anything that's plentiful, after a while you get sick of it. AI accelerates the volume of content, and also adds even more low value context into the mixer, and will accelerate how quickly society reaches the boredom phase again.

That + regulation means that social media is on the downward curve now I suspect

Lerc• 5 months ago

It would be interesting to see if the harms reported from social media go up or down. I can see people who want to make the case that harms are going up, but if use is coming down it would not be correlated.

I'm sure someone with a book to peddle will eventually say measured harms going up and use coming down just shows how toxic it is now.

softwaredoug2• 5 months ago

I wonder if our kids will see social media the way we see cable news: a toxic political cesspool that the older generation gets sucked into.

bad_username• 5 months ago

Do you remember how these things were called social NETWORKS, as in something you navigate and explore? Then they gradually became social MEDIA, as in something you consume...

Aeglaecia• 5 months ago

awesome observation that ill be stealing , thanks for sharing

joelthelion• 5 months ago

One factor that I didn't see mentioned is enshittification. The platforms are prioritizing monetization at the expense of everything else. It's making the experience worse and, as a result, people are gradually leaving.

trolleski• 5 months ago

SM gives negative value, it is antisocial media and an experiment on human beings no one signed up for.

heavyset_go2• 5 months ago

This is just manufacturing consent for requiring ID and face scans to use social media.

COVID happened, of course the trend will look like this without needing to wring a moral panic out of it.

yieldcrv• 5 months ago

I definitely see a bifurcation amongst the younger people I date. Really limited use, professional use, while some fall into addiction but are functionally just like Millennials in use

Its kind of like treating social media as an addiction that everyone’s uncles “could give up at any time”

I see a parallel to smoking. In one generation everyone did it - at one point thought nothing of it - and in the next generation little kids are like “you know thats bad for you right?” and aren't tempted to use it, looking down on it

I like the trend, even stories are shorter form, I do it now too

1970-01-01• 5 months ago

Web 2.0 was a mistake fueled by Zuckerberg copycats looking for the same magical user growth hack. Giving users and later bots an entirely free, easy to use platform to focus their agenda onto is a cancer within the network, not a feature. This decade is the result of it. The old fix was filtering via technical chops. Braincells, time, and money was required to have an online opinion. At minimum, your agenda would need to satisfy this large filtering function else it just wouldn't exist. Now that it's entirely free, and the clearly agenda-driven takes can no longer be filtered, the cancer is left to grow until the fuel (advertising, shareholder returns) runs out.

Dantes7• 5 months ago

It’s been frustrating for me too to see genuinely good content constantly buried by algorithms, bots, and general noise. I’ve been working on a side project exploring a different approach to finding meaningful conversations and overlooked content. I don’t want to spam the thread — happy to share details if it feels relevant to anyone.

Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, Polarization (2025)

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