Technology

AFAIK, these companies are making record revenue.

It was all over when Facebook introduced the algorithmic timeline. It's just taken a while for people to notice how awful it's made everything.

Social media has also done its hardest to try and push people away from using it. Between the culture being awful, and there being an increasing number of roadblocks to using it, that ironically ruins discoverability for anyone who might want to use social media.

For example, if you want to use Reddit, and see a link, there's a lot of posts that you can't see without having an account and logging in. That's a big ask for something that you're not even sure that you want to sign up for, which would only be worse since you couldn't sidestep that using the old reddit interface.

Meanwhile, Twitter not only makes it so that you can't see much of anything without being logged in, but they're trying some new scheme where if you have an account, you need to download the app and give them your biometrics to confirm that you're human before you can use your account.

If you've scarcely used either site, why would you start now? Everything wants you to jump through more and more hoops to verify that you're actually a human, and if you don't have an account, the content that you can see doesn't seem to much of anything interesting. When not logged in, some subreddit and posts are completely inaccessible, and on Twitter, you can only see the tweet, but not the replies, or recent user posts.

Both of those were the main draws for each site. Why would any new user want to use them now? The only thing that they have is their reputation, and that will slowly go away with time.

Once upon a time, for example, Twitter was once the haven for beginner programmers, because they had a nice, free easy-to-use API that anyone could use to make bots and learn how to use APIs in general. Reddit was not far behind that. But that's mostly gone now. Reddit no longer approves API keys for the most part, and is working to shut down the public APIs that it has left, and Twitter has locked theirs behind a paywall.

I have 1200 "friends" on Facebook.

Less than a 10th of them "follow" me.

Therefore it is and was a literal waste of time to spend any time on their site.

Back in the day, I posted on Instagram to share things with my friends and scrolled to see their updates. The chronological feed with no suggested posts was the only way it worked, and now that's impossible. There are no "people" on Instagram anymore.

No mention of centralised versus decentralised social media. The thing that makes the biggest difference. No ads. No algorithm. No lock in, swap networks keeping friends and followers. Tune your timeline to suit you. Calling everything social media is trash journalism when those issues are already solved. Clearly he has no clue about the topic.

Not just America. It's a trend worldwide thanks to the abundance of AI slop taking over any 'social network'.

No one ever answered why anyone ever started.

I dropped off Twitter in 2020 and finally deleted instagram and Facebook by 2025.

I had friends on twitter and really enjoyed talking to people but after COVID hit there was something evil out of that site that hit me real bad and I started losing friends as I was concerned for loved ones health around me and everyone else wasn’t. So I left. There were other things I didn’t like on twitter but I figured it was just me. I guess it wasn’t. Instagram I never posted on but Facebook I was active until late 2020. Active arguments with people through 2020, trying to plead with friends and family to be cautious didn’t do much so I gave up talking and my Facebook on stayed active to talk to my father. Moved him to discord in 2025 and deleted Facebook then.

I’m sure looking back there were more platform specific things that I didn’t like but I know it’s only worse now. My best friend has stated multiple times that twitter doesn’t care about what’s posted anymore so you’ll see illegal videos of death all the time. Once you realize that social media (like that) breeds a kind of conflict with those around you, it’s much less fun.

These days I only have signal and this. Delete discord back in March lol

I mean, I still post to social media every day, but it's pixelfed. It's not toxic, it's just me throwing in my art on the pile with everyone else's art that I also get to flip through and enjoy, in chronological posting order, with no advertisements or other subject matter present.

No one gives a shit what I ate for lunch.

And I still use social media the way many people originally imagined it: as a way to stay connected. My feeds have always been a mix of far-flung relatives, old friends, and high school band chums (because, let’s be honest, band buddies are the best buddies). Most days, I carve out a little time after work to catch up with the people who matter.

The last thing I’d want is for doing so to be...just more work. And yet, more than half of respondents agreed with the statement “Maintaining an online presence feels like work,” with about a third of those checking the “strongly agree” box. Only 16% disagreed, with the rest remaining neutral.

A full 60% of Gen Z respondents feel the pain of maintaining a social presence. Perhaps they have a niggling hope that they might still be discovered as an influencer?

I don't really care about the following-people form of social media, the Twitter family. I'm more interested in the forum sort, the Reddit family. There, I don't need to singlehandedly maintain a flow of content, because people aren't coming to see @tal@lemmy.today, but because they're coming to see what's going on in some community that I only incidentally participate in.