Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

https://ca.pcmag.com/social-media/16790/the-death-of-the-status-update-why-55-of-americans-stopped-posting-on-social-media

by thunderbong • 11 days ago

174 186 11 days ago

ca.pcmag.com

kalehmann• 11 days ago

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.

brunoarueira• 11 days ago

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. At the very least, it should be used occasionally to post things as a kind of "public memory," not to expose your entire life just for likes and exhibitionism.

netsharc• 10 days ago

I wonder what would happen if: if I post 2 pieces of content, my friend would have to comment on the first one to see the next one.

I suppose the app will then mostly be full of throwaway comments in the form of "Cool" or "Wow". But maybe add a modifier that if the poster doesn't have any meaningful reply to a commenter's (let's name him Elon) comment, then the poster's next content will not be shared with Elon next time.

AndrewDucker• 10 days ago

That's great if you're cultivating a very small group of friends who are local.

Social media is how I keep vaguely aware of what's going on with my friends who now live scattered across the planet and get to see in person once per decade or so.

rTX5CMRXIfFG2• 10 days ago

I’m gonna break it to you bud, the people you see only once a decade or so aren’t your friends. Those are shallow acquaintances that you’re letting drag on for too long. They’re not a part of your life and you’re not a part of theirs.

At most, you can call them professional contacts whom you hope to get some value out of in the future, and in that sense I’d agree — social media makes it possible to keep in touch with people whom you have a transactional relationship with.

znpy• 11 days ago

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.

halflife• 11 days ago

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)

rimeice• 10 days ago

2015 for me too. I wonder if there was some early day over juicing of the attention mechanism that put people off in that year, before they tuned it to reduce churn…

beardedetim• 10 days ago

Tinfoil hat time but I think they definitely did _something_ at that time that "changed" the system. It's the Cambridge Analytica/Trump time and I believe that FB definitely "changed" at the same time.

rightbyte2• 10 days ago

Yeah but I think it just took some year for ppl to notice.

2013-2014 the algorithm got more foused on non-friend posts aswell as making the prioritzation less about "likes" from friends and instead some opaque engagement metrics. Groups had to "promote" post to get their prior reach to subscribers.

Also videos started to be posted around that time?

weberer• 10 days ago

I remember I left around that time too because they started aggressively trying to defeat adbockers. I'd rather just leave the platform completely than see a single ad.

cvwright• 10 days ago

It was a big year for the culture war. People who had previously been cordial suddenly needed to fight each other over politics and other controversies of the day. The rest of us watched this happen, then slowly backed away.

garethsprice• 9 days ago

2014-15 was when the news feed switched from static, human-written code to machine learning models optimized to maximize ad revenue[1], the models discovering "user attention time" was a far better metric to optimize for than clicks, likes or shares[2]. And what people spent the most "attention time" on was content that triggered raw moral outrage, fear and tribal hostility[3].

This switch does appear to have put off a lot of smart, thinking people as the newsfeed degenerated into a torrent of dopamine-spiking diarrhea. But those people don't tend to be the ones that click on ads.

[1] https://time.com/collections/the-cloud/3950525/facebook-news... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/15/facebook-... [3] https://www.supersummary.com/the-chaos-machine/summary/ - the whole "Chaos Machine" book is excellent

baby2• 10 days ago

We really need a real facebook app again, something we only use with close friends or people we meet irl to become friends

busymom0• 10 days ago

I am currently building something where you can post once per day. If you want to post again within the 24 hour window, the prior post gets replaced with the new one and it also shows at the old post's timestamp in the chronological feed.

As for connecting to people, you drag and drop the connect button into a folder name which you want their posts to show in. For example, You can create custom folders for friends, family, coworkers etc. After that, you drag the connect button into that folder. And each folder creates a custom feed from only those people for you.

I am open to brainstorming more ideas.

Simulacra• 11 days ago

It seems like so much of social media is just individuals shouting into the void.

HPsquared• 10 days ago

It's stochastic communication, sometimes other random voices come back from the void.

jerlam• 10 days ago

Social media is a skinner box for likes and reposts. You don't even want replies unless it's an opportunity to get more likes.

asdff5• 10 days ago

It would be better if it was that. It is like for any given topic there is a bullet point of a couple takes you will find anywhere about that topic. Just parroting bots I guess since that probably snowballs engagement from other bots.

mherkender• 10 days ago

This is an ad for Incogni

reactordev2• 10 days ago

Like every pcmag article, there’s a corporate sponsor

fwn• 9 days ago

It is pretty obvious, but as far as I can see, this article has not been disclosed as advertising or sponsored content. I'm in Europe, and I'm no expert on FTC advertising requirements, but this specific content arrangement doesn't feel super legal to me. My ad blocker did not pick it up either.

insickness• 10 days ago

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.

Smalltalker-80• 10 days ago

Like the writer I'm also a 'boomer' still keeping connected to an older friend group using Facebook and Instagram. For Facebook, I use the plugin "FB Purity" to filter out the generated cr*p posts and force chronological order. It's shocking too see how few posts are left, by agressive algorithm filtering and FB then deciding that "You're all caught up", refusing to show more posts. So my FB time is about 20 seconds every day...

derwiki3• 10 days ago

That’s Reddit for me: I subscribe to the sub for my city, and that’s it. It’s a finite scroll that usually takes 5 minutes, and then I move on

rightbyte2• 10 days ago

"Viral content" got nerfed to oblivion in 2013-2014 something when Facebook made companies pay up for group exposure. (Promoted post)

Before that a popular article could be shared among different friends networks to like total exposure to like everyone logged in that were somewhat interested in the article.

I was kinda a journalist then it was a really obvious flip.

bamboozled• 10 days ago

Yes because people no longer post they realised they need to show you their “explore” feed.

Morromist• 10 days ago

Fb is clearly hated by its owners, Meta. Its been monitized to the max and deeply neglected. They desperately want to move on to virtual reality or AI - ANYTHING to escape from having to make their money off fb.

Makes one wonder what it would be like if someone else had built and maintained it who really belived in the vision of connecting communities instead of sucking them dry.

TrackerFF• 10 days ago

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.

chistev• 10 days ago

Isn't that how it has been?

reactordev2• 10 days ago

No, it used to be a shuffled timeline of the posts and likes your connections/friends have made but I guess when half your platform are bots, you don’t want to store that metadata anymore.

skybrian• 10 days ago

It’s often very good at finding posts that I might theoretically want to read, except that I never want to read them on Facebook, because it would get in the way of seeing posts from friends.

GenerWork• 10 days ago

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.

tayo42• 10 days ago

Instagram stories seems to be dieing too, except for the professional and business accounts I follow

CamelCaseName• 10 days ago

The bar is just so high, everywhere.

I want to fire off a quick quip and have a conversation.

Reddit is probably the only place where this works any more, but you have to be prompted by the right thread and early.

So people throw up their hands and go, "why bother?"

beej71• 10 days ago

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.

ivanjermakov• 10 days ago

Idea of keeping up with friends while being public to the whole world does not resonate with me. Internet was a different place indeed.

asdff5• 10 days ago

No one really had a public account though. Last thing you wanted was parents seeing you holding a solo cup in pictures.

ChrisArchitect• 10 days ago

url: https://www.pcmag.com/news/death-of-the-status-update-why-55...

imhoguy• 10 days ago

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.

alexpotato2• 10 days ago

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.

dartharva• 10 days ago

I tried hard but am failing to see how what you say couldn't just be fulfilled by a chat group today (or even back then).

ericbarrett• 10 days ago

But which one - SMS/RCS? iMessage? WhatsApp? Signal? Telegram? Discord?

SkyPuncher• 10 days ago

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.

adjejmxbdjdn• 10 days ago

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.

Eric_WVGG• 10 days ago

This is what the Bluesky “AT Protocol” is meant to solve, though I fear it might be a bit too late.

dbingham• 10 days ago

Except AT Protocol can't do the very thing that made Facebook the commons: privacy.

There's a proposal to add privacy to the protocol (private posts, private groups), but I don't think anyone has solved the real root problem with trying to implement privacy in a federated system (as opposed to P2P), which is the bad administrator problem. The proposal I saw still relied on trustworthy app administrators to respect a post's privacy settings. And that's a huge flaw.

Friendica and Diaspora both have the same problem, and to my knowledge don't have a good solution for it. They both just sort of hand wave it away.

I'm waiting to see if someone comes up with a good solution for the unsafe admin problem, but so far I haven't seen one.

varispeed2• 10 days ago

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.

Well, thanks for lobbying, that's got regulated away. One must be mad today to run a forum.

jafitc• 10 days ago

"thanks to lobbying". if you use "for" it sounds like you are adressing the OP and he did the lobbying that you don't like.

inigyou5• 8 days ago

Believe it or not, police do not show up and take you to jail because someone on your forum is a terrorist. They may show up and ask you questions.

rustcleaner• 10 days ago

I always hated how everything moved off independent forums and onto facebook. Zuckerberg was right about with his early idiots comment.

tim-projects• 9 days ago

It's a friction thing. Managing a messaging perform takes effort and technical understanding. Facebook groups won by default ten years ago.

1659447091• 10 days ago

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.

wiether• 10 days ago

I've never seen "group emails" working, even when amongst technical people.

Part of it is just how emails work, part of it is how each clients work, part of it is people not knowing/caring.

  You'll have:

  - the guy that don't use the group email address as recipient, but personal email address 
  - the guy that change the subject which starts a new thread/discussion
  - the guy that include all previous emails in their answer
  - the guy with a signature that takes two screens to scroll
  - the guy with an awful text font/color
  - the guy that CC their whole address book, including the group email address, for personal stuff
  - ...

I can go on. I went through this mess many times during the years, in various contexts; always the same result.

jjav3• 10 days ago

Why not group emails?

Yes, email is the absolute best for opimal reach. All the proprietary platforms are inherently fragmented and gatekeeped by their corporations. Trying to find a common denominator is hard. Email is standard, not owned by anyone and thus universal.

guerby• 10 days ago

discourse combines web forum and email, people can use either one as they see fit.

https://github.com/discourse/discourse

brudgers3• 10 days ago

Why not group emails?

Email is a push technology. And the receiver has to manage their inbox for the sender’s enthusiasm.

2-3 weekly emails

A web page could update in real time. It would be more work for the sender. And less work for everyone else.

mmsimanga• 10 days ago

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.

kimos2• 10 days ago

Canadian here.

I have a WhatsApp account and the app on my phone with zero contacts in it. Nobody here uses it. But every time I leave the country I need it for some service or business or who knows what. It seems like the rest of the world all agreed to use this app and Canada (and I think the US) just said “naw thanks…” and have no common app or method.

cjrp• 9 days ago

Ditto in the UK.

DANmode2• 10 days ago

The commons became the commons again, instead of being partially or completely trapped on Facebook,

and you’re upset?

Bulletin boards are awesome.

Physical assembly is awesome.

bobthepanda3• 10 days ago

for events specifically, Partiful seems to be the thing in my area finally displacing the Facebook events model, and it's a lot less bloated.

fragmede5• 10 days ago

It comes from Palantir though, so some people don't want to use it for that reason.

kevin_thibedeau• 10 days ago

Google Groups still exists. Easy enough for organizations to use for sharing announcements.

wolvoleo3• 10 days ago

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.

zug_zug• 10 days ago

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

1vuio0pswjnm72• 10 days ago

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

sysworld• 10 days ago

I love bulletin boards. We had one in the apartment I used to live in. There is something about getting help/helping out super local people.

advisedwang• 9 days ago

Some reasons why a computer system is beneficial:

* Can send out updates quickly, e.g. changing rooms when you discover your secretary forgot to book the usual one that week 5 minutes before the club meeting.

* Folks can see/post updates without going in to the student center in person. This is particularly helpful if there's any club members who live further away and/or down come by the student center regularly and/or aren't highly engaged enough to go check a board.

* An archive of messages can be valuable. I have dug though club archives to find the name of a guest speaker from several years prior. Physical records make this difficult, especially in a college club where leadership changes frequently and papers get lost.

Of course... email can do all of that. The lesson is to be judicious with technology, not abandon it entirely.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 9 days ago

Nowhere in the comment is it suggested to "abandon" anything entirely

In fact the suggestion is not to abandon the bulletin board in the student center

As usual, there will be HN replies that adhere to "all-or-nothing", "black and white", etc. thinking, e.g., believing there is an "either-or" choice between use of a computer system and another method

However it's possible to use a bulletin board in the student center and a computer system. This is not an either-or choice, there is no requirement to choose one or the other

For example, getting contact details from the bulletin board then using a smartphone to make a phone call or send a text message, using a laptop to send an email, etc.

Further, there is no suggestion in the comment that one or the other, bulletin board in student center or computer system, is without benefits

In fact, the comment suggests the bulletin board is useful: "It works"

The question raised by the comment is whether the benefits of sending data to a remote third party, namely a "social media" company, outweigh the costs ("hassles")

This is obviously more narrow than "using a computer system". We can use computer systems without involving "social media" companies

hadlock• 10 days ago

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.

soco• 10 days ago

I have Facebook and follow about a dozen of journalist accounts. Almost daily I'm asked "should we show you more of this" for their posts - darnit that's THE reason I'm here, why asking me continuously??? And what's the alternative, bimbos doing little content creator dances?

frollogaston• 9 days ago

I was in college at the time when people had stopped using Facebook to post random personal stuff and started using it for pages, groups, events, and messaging. I had avoided it before, but it was actually useful then.

TacticalCoder• 9 days ago

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.

Dunno: people in my circles all have Telegram (Europe here but I think they have 1 billion MAU now: they're not just successful in Europe).

I've got Telegram groups depending on my interests.

I just got invited to try ball trap (clay pidgeon shooting) tomorrow. Then another group set up a beer after work on wednesday. And on thursday, another group, another after-work meetup. It's not because we don't use WhatsApp that we use SMSes: nope, we're all on Telegram.

People can lament Telegram is proprietary, russian (is it, I forgot?), etc. but at least it's not the Zuck's FaceBook/Instagram/WhatsApp exploitative ecosystem. And people love that fact.

coffeefirst• 9 days ago

Better yet, maybe a bulletin board and an email list is all you need?

I have some extremely useful Discords and Signal group chats, but not everything ought to be an always on chatterbox.

tanseydavid2• 9 days ago

> but not everything ought to be an always on chatterbox

Nothing deserves to an "always-on-chatterbox" unless the end-user truly chooses it because that is what they want or need.

This is part of the larger problem. How many "always-on-chatterboxes" competing for one's attention before it becomes close-to-impossible to concentrate on anything that requires some actual thinking.

susiecambria• 9 days ago

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.

inigyou5• 8 days ago

Discord, it's Discord.

add-sub-mul-div• 10 days ago

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.

intrasight• 10 days ago

Strava is now the preferred app in my social network. And no "status update" is necessary as it does that automatically.

slowmovintarget• 10 days ago

Social media these days is 80% psyop, 20% attention grind. That 55% of Americans stopped posting would be a healthy thing.

fleventynine• 10 days ago

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.

CM30• 10 days ago

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.

derwiki3• 10 days ago

Where did pandemic restrictions stay in effect for 2-3 years? SF took restrictions fairly seriously and by March 2022 they seemed non-existent

homeonthemtn• 10 days ago

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

journal• 10 days ago

sounds conservative

valeg• 10 days ago

Discord seems like the way. Sometimes, Signal groups (also popular in the White House).

rickcarlino• 10 days ago

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.

0x53• 10 days ago

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.

watwut3• 10 days ago

Bsky actually uave linear followed accounts only feed.

mbirth• 10 days ago

Twitter has it, too.

rationalist• 10 days ago

Facebook has it too, or at least they did as of last year when I last used Facebook.

On the desktop version of the website, click on the "Friends" "Feed" (and there might have been a sort by date as well you had to then click on).

OhSoHumble• 10 days ago

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.

scoofy• 9 days ago

I suspect there is plenty of money there, just not enough to support a multinational conglomerate.

The natural monopoly of networks is what brought us all to social networks, and I suspect it is why they will fail. Niche networks run by a small team (which is what social networks were when we were the early adopters) seem like they can trivially sustain themselves.

The explosion of podcasting is exactly this, but for nontechnical people.

4ffad• 9 days ago

the business model is to divide and conquer my friend. wakey wakey...

pmontra• 10 days ago

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.

yason• 10 days ago

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?

alex1138• 10 days ago

I consider Facebook to be the worst of all worlds. Frankly

They don't show you what your friends actually post. Someone saying "hey - I'm in the parking lot at some place, I need help moving this thing" 5 minutes ago? You might see it on your feed in a week

They engage in reputational decay https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1775182 (see also, photo tagging)

They've cut off access to your friends https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433

It's a company involved in lots of OTHER things which don't make it a good netizen https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 (oh and their own cryptocurrency in Libra, that's fun)

"Dumb fucks" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122

Edit: You get banned at any time while the obviously horrible thing you report doesn't get taken down. That's not sustainable. It's not a thing where you can actually physically keep in touch with people, either nominally strangers or the best of friends

sumolessons• 10 days ago

I think this is really well said. Instagram is probably the closest for me though I use it far less.

FireBeyond2• 10 days ago

Meanwhile IG has hugely alienated -its- original target audience. My feed: "Reels. Suggested for you. Ad. Threads. Suggested for you. Ad. Followee. Ad. Threads." and 90% of it is short form video content, and even more annoying still content which is for some reason a 10s video.

ChadMoran• 10 days ago

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.

howard941• 10 days ago

I stopped because I was forced to. "Something Happened" - never explained to me - and my FB public commenting was indefinitely suspended. No great loss.

dzonga• 10 days ago

email mailing list should be back - but people's brains have been turned to mush.

CoolestBeans• 10 days ago

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.

wise_blood• 10 days ago

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

wodenokoto• 9 days ago

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.

dimitar• 9 days ago

I remember Google+ had groups called "circles" which could be used to choose with whom you share a post; it is a very common sense feature which I haven't seen since. And your reason 1 is a good explanation why.

henry2023• 9 days ago

WhatsApp has this “circles” features implemented so well people don’t even think about it.

Melatonic• 9 days ago

Exactly - amazing it never caught on

tangenter• 9 days ago

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.

rglover• 9 days ago

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.

al_borland• 9 days ago

Social Networks were for normal people. Social Media is for brands and "influencers". It's RSS with algorithms and monetization metrics.

arkwin• 8 days ago

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. :)

Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

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