As users post less and less to Instagram, new apps have tried to stake their claim as the next big thing. The French social-media app BeReal, which gained popularity for its more authentic experience, peaked at 75 million downloads per analytics firm Sensor Tower and a $630 million valuation. Growth has stalled a year later, with a monthly active user base of 51 million, a sliver of Instagram’s 1.4 billion. Other apps like Dispo, Poparazzi, and Locket have all used various gimmicks to try and recapture social media’s halcyon days — each had a moment in the sun at the top of the US Apple app-store charts — but none have truly broken through. Even ByteDance, which has the same parent company as TikTok, failed to recapture the fading magic with the photo-sharing platform Lemon8.
And now there is Threads, Instagram’s latest play in the space to fill the void that was left as Twitter has undergone so much volatility. While Mosseri has hailed the text-focused platform as a “less angry place for conversations,” Threads’ daily active-user count is down 79% a month after it launched — to 10.3 million daily active users, data from Similarweb found. Even with the backing of Meta, Threads may not have the juice to make it through, because it doesn’t offer users a new way to interact. It follows in the footsteps of other buzzy startups that rise to the top for weeks, even days, before users get bored. The core issue is that these apps don’t solve anything new. They are mostly copycat versions of each other.
[…]
“I’m honestly just tired of social media,” said 23-year-old Walid Mohammed, who works in the creator economy. “I’m tired of consuming content all the time.”
And if Instagram was the bellwether for the rise and fall of the “social” social-media era, it is also a harbinger of this new era. “If you look at how teens spend their time on Instagram, they spend more time in DMs than they do in stories, and they spend more time in stories than they do in feed,” Mosseri said during the “20VC” interview. Given this changing behavior, Mosseri said the platform has shifted its resources to messaging tools. “Actually, at one point a couple years ago, I think I put the entire stories team on messaging,” he said.
[…]
Social media promised to create an intricate web that brought us all closer to one another, but the wave of exposure led to an openness that many people just aren’t interested in. Most people wouldn’t let the first person they stop on the street sift through their camera roll. They want their achievements, failures, and little life moments to be kept sacred. So after a decade of airing our most intimate moments in public, the pendulum is shifting back. People are more selective with their communities and are reverting back to an old-school way of interacting. It’s hard to know how the change will affect the online atmosphere over the long term — some evidence suggests the shift will create a healthier digital experience, but it also risks further dividing people into like-minded echo chambers.
Whatever the result, it’s clear that the Instagram era of social media is over and the new era of “authentic” online sharing is emerging — just without an audience.
Unfortunately, the authors did not specify whom they meant by ‘Influencers, marketers, average users, and even social-media executives agree’, but plausible candidates include Ellis Hamburger, Brian Merchant and Ian Bogost.
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when you don’t let common people have free time and force them to slave away for the bourgeoisie or else they’ll go foodless, homeless; of course they’re not gonna waste time on social media.
also endless, mindless consumption isn’t very healthy for the mind either. breaks every once in a while is good.
Most people wouldn’t let the first person they stop on the street sift through their camera roll. They want their achievements, failures, and little life moments to be kept sacred. So after a decade of airing our most intimate moments in public, the pendulum is shifting back. People are more selective with their communities and are reverting back to an old-school way of interacting. It’s hard to know how the change will affect the online atmosphere over the long term — some evidence suggests the shift will create a healthier digital experience, but it also risks further dividing people into like-minded echo chambers.
The collapsing of US state-affiliated social media platforms’ hegemony is finally upon us. They use these platforms for war (psychological warfare more than anything) and cheating, just like every other channel of influence, and working class people have had enough of being fucked over and manipulated, as well as being enslaved to doom scrolling. I’ve been patiently waiting for over a decade for this. Now, finally, people are pivoting back to high quality discourse and relationship building. We’re also increasingly seizing the means of communication (think Lemmy and other equivalents under the AGPLv3 license), which puts the control of culture firmly in our own hands.
Communism is Inevitable. To try and stop it is utter foolishness.
“What is scientific socialism without the working-class movement? A compass which, if left unused, will only grow rusty and then will have to be thrown overboard. What is the working-class movement without socialism? A ship without a compass which will reach the other shore in any case, but would reach it much sooner and with less danger if it had a compass.”
Unfortunately in the time since Stalin wrote that a lot of reefs and shallows were sailed upon.
but it also risks further dividing people into like-minded echo chambers.
Reddity Lemmyverse liberals see anything that isn’t Reddity as a “like-minded echo chamber.” So in other words I think they share the anxiety tone of this article’s author by worrying about leftists being on the rise.
I think they share the anxiety tone of this article’s author by worrying about leftists being on the rise.
Exactly. Leftists being on the rise in stable spaces where the state cannot easily intervene or back them up (liberal hegemony in crisis). 
We did it!
we made touching grass trendy again!
like how getting on the 'net used to be trendy decades ago
Really good article. Overall things seem to be going in facebook’s favor: ppl are posting less, and consuming / viewing more. FB could care less whether real ppl are actually actively participating, selling ads is their business, and passive / mindless consumption scrolling is high.
I once read an article comparing the number of active users on my space with those of pandemics. So basically social media is like a disease that has now reached global saturation and will only go down from here. Good riddance. It only served to enrich
scammersinfluencers, control public opinion and invade the privacy of everyone. However, if chatrooms become the new way people share information, than this presents new challenges to the left. As spreading misinformation will be even easier, but at the same time, censoring leftist opinions will be much harder.Censoring leftist
opinionsinterests will be much harder.We’re way too dependent on words like “opinions” and “disagreements” which are much, much better replaced with words like “interests” and “disputes”. This way, we can further eliminate the cultural phenomenon of debatebros talking people in circles.
Good take, though.
Honestly based of the zoomers to already be outright saying what we should’ve been years ago.
when did media become consumable? seriously? when did that become an accepted term for reading or watching shit?
in all of history i don’t think anyone has ever said people consume books, and it sounds just as dumb as consuming media does.
it irks me to no end
Ah… Good old burnout
