Has social media reached its saturation point?

Social media, when it came on the scene in the form of Facebook, et. al. simply went gangbusters because there wasn't anything like it before (this is arguable, but is beyond the scope of this comment).

On the other hand, lower-reach social communities like forums are still humming along just fine after all these years. Their popularity grows and wanes with trends but there will (probably) always be people on forums.

Social media has broad reach but shallow depth.

Forums, mailing lists, etc. have narrower reach but can be support incredibly deep dives.

Maybe, but it's hard to say because some of social media is trend-based.

People want to connect to each other, but they also want novelty in how they do it.

After they get bored writing on each other's walls, they want to try writing 160-character quips for public consumption. And when they get bored of that, they want to try taking photos and sharing them. And when they get bored of that, they want to try trading short videos of themselves doing stuff. And so on.

So when a given service stops growing, is it because all the users who could have signed up have done so? Or is it because some people moved on to the new thing? Or some combination?

> Twitter is making the transition towards a "free speach" platform

Twitter was originally a free speech platform. It transitioned away from that, much to the chagrin of its co-founder.

"Twitter stands for freedom of expression. We stand for speaking truth to power. And we stand for empowering dialogue." https://twitter.com/jack/status/651003891153108997

The point is to restore the platform's core value and be a neutral, trusted public square. Jack himself said Elon is the only one he trusts to do that.

I think there's plenty of room for improvement in social media. At this point, it's all geared toward maximizing ad revenue, which is not closely aligned with maximizing utility for users.

It's an interesting perspective. I think there's a few things going on that are slightly different maybe? Maybe not.

I tend to think of it more that discrepancies between what the platforms are purported to be, and the actual use patterns and motives are, has grown to a point where it's getting scrutinized and having substantial pushback. Another way of looking at this is the limitations and drawbacks of current platforms are being exposed in unavoidable ways.

Another issue that's gotten some attention but maybe not as much as it deserves is the diversification of social media and generational trends. I think Facebook and Twitter trends older and has become more of a political punching bag, which has led to the sorts of things you're talking about. "Younger" platforms, demographic-wise, have largely gone under the radar and we haven't seen the sort of repositioning and jockeying that we've seen with Twitter and Facebook. So Facebook is trying a sort of pivot (wisely so in my opinion, even though I'm not sure about the nature of that pivot), even as things like TikTok are percolating up into media consciousness. It may not be that social media is saturated it might be that people are migrating, passively or actively, to other platforms that have so far gone unscrutinized by older demographics who tend to use things like Twitter and Facebook.

Who knows though. For me it's interesting to watch. I've never really been involved with either platform, for multiple reasons.

There seems to be growing interested in more decentralized or federated platforms. I'm starting to wonder if these will gain traction sort of slowly and organically as the other platforms churn over time and they're the only things left being stable.

I don't think so, and let me bring up a very tortured analogy to explain why.

It took centuries for the meta-game of chess to develop. With the advent of supercomputers, this process has sped up considerably, but even still, it took a lot of trial and error to discover niche moves for certain scenarios.

MMA is the same way. Some techniques, like the calf kick, have only been recently refined and started to be perfected, despite kicking being more or less a move any human could perform for over 200,00 years. Yet we don't seem to have a history of it.

You see this across the board in many domains. Perhaps it has something to do with the difficulty of optimizing game theory. Or maybe for centuries information just didn't traverse that efficiently and now with the Internet and improved data storage, it just occurs much faster.

At any rate, I suspect social media is similar. We probably don't know what an "optimum" site would look like. Twitter doesn't even have an "Edit" button yet, which is a fairly simple mechanism that would unlock a lot of new interactions.

"Web 1 Socials" were built around for purpose communities; forums, irc, etc where like minded people gathered to discuss common interests.

"Web 2 Socials" were the bundling of for purpose communities into giant super communities; reddit, facebook, twitter, etc.

If this follows everything else that has gone before it on the internet. The next phase will be an unbundling where things go back to for purpose communities again until they get rebundled and the cycle repeats.

https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundli...

Nope. FB would have gone the way of MySpace already if that were the case. Rather than a saturation point, they've hit a plateau in many cases- where will they go next? Zuckerberg is looking to reinvent FB for the next stage of growth. Instead of "moar better FB" he realizes that there needs to be something that's not just more, but different. And if he does it right, everyone will flock to it like so many did in the early FB days. Also, FB Marketplace is the new Craigslist in so many ways. Saturation point? No. Just maturing and ready for the next stage of evolution- whatever that will be.

Social media was not to broaden our relationships, it only allows us to hide from them. It is self censorship for a fragile, trauma plagued humanity.

The platforms are not changing, people are. They are tired of these superficial interactions.

It has to be at the saturation point for at least Facebook. Facebook is old news. Anyone who wants a Facebook account has one, anyone who wants to engage in the platform is already doing so.

However the younger people understand now that posting things on public social media can have consequences, so things like Discord and Telegram are now going to be the future, and classic social media like Facebook is simply going to become more and more inauthentic until it fades away into something 70 year olds preoccupy themselves with out of habit like television.

No, because B2C software companies have no idea how to make money without advertising, or in the gaming industry, enabling micro-transactions and gambling behaviours.

Advertising only delivers profits if users are pulled into algorithmic feeds that massively expand the scope of stuff they actually choose to follow. Twitter has its "this person you follow liked this other person's post" and FB and IG just spam you with posts from groups you're not a member of.

Not enough people will walk away from SM on their own volition. So the cycle will continue.

As long as there is an Internet, we will need someone to run the places people go to talk to each other on it. And while the name for it may change, right now we call that "social media".

There is a right size for a healthy place for people to talk to each other and Facebook and Twitter are both way above this size. I will mourn neither of them when they vanish, for they have both optimized entirely for keeping users on the site as long as possible, without a single care as to whether what they're doing on the site is good for them or not - as long as the company gets to serve more ad views in between you spinning your wheels in an endless flame war, they're happy.

I believe the main improvement of Facebook's "metaverse" is that Facebook hopes to have a thriving marketplace for user-generated content, of which they generously plan to only take a 47% cut. I'm sure they'll still quite happily find a way to take money to shove ads into every corner of your time with their VR helmet on, too.

I think the next big thing is combining reputation/content value into some asset in a decentralized/uncensorable way.

Some combination of decentralized storage, decentralized identity, and some form of (not saying in its current form) crypto-assets (whether blockchain, L"x" scaling, or something entirely different).

The idea is giving control back to where it belongs without a central authority, with a completely-uncensorable platform by design, which also "pays" the creators (and people who host those content) by design automatically instead of relying on YouTube/Instagram etc.

I'm definitely not saying we are there, but I believe it will be the next big thing as technology and ideology evolves, not only for what we currently call social media, but generalized into many other aspects of information technologies such as hosting, IoTs, any kind of resource sharing being some examples.

Mainstream social media may be close but niche interests probably have miles to go. HN and stack overflow have some overlap in user niche but are miles apart in intent/design/usage. Any subset of communication between people or groups has potential to have a niche optimized platform.

Platforms such as Facebook are great aggregators of generic information, but are not very customisable when you want to discuss specific topics i.e. when people want to talk about cars, Twitter or Instagram are limited to comments when in fact you might want to have more features to generate interaction. They also don’t want to discuss it in the same place as their uncle.

I believe this is the point we are now: a lot of people have now discovered the positives of discussing with people alike and are searching for places where they have more of their kind. This is why Reddit, Twitch or Discord are growing strongly, unlike Facebook.

While more and more people are still joining the platforms, the future will bring other smaller places for niches. Social Media is not saturated, it’s fragmented.

This reminds me of an article I read yesterday.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/08/a-brief-history-of-the...

People need to understand what the outputs of some social media companies are. I think Elon is just trying to get governments to pay for using the system to spread, collect, and take action on what is shared.

If say a company like Palantir or Dataminr are connecting in to monitor for some type of activity, Twitter could charge much more for that monitoring. Hedge funds could also monitor or access data on postings to see how a stock is fluctuating.

Twitter has a great concept and high end information based personalities on the platform, but its executed so poorly. Improve the interface, allow most free speech and you have a great population monitoring system that give you real time focus groups essentially.

Facebook/Meta went too big brother, collected way too much information. It was bad. I used to love facebook until 2014 it started turning with all the boomers joining, and the algo changes encouraging conflict.

I think Reddit will really be the next social media platform. It already has, but it uses semi-verified users, and anonymous users (less and less). Its been relatively transparent.

The future of Social Media is no centralized social media entity. Everything these sites/companies do, you can do yourself. No need for a centralized service, just connect directly with your friends, share what you want, directly.

So yes, saturation has been achieved. What comes next is the methods of how we as humans connect. (remember, FB was just a condensed and easy to use version of the Web at large), they just made it really easy to post and share.

Do you really think we'll need a centralized service to do this in the future?

I feel like the hype of social media has peaked a few years ago, at least in America. Numbers probably still are growing but it feels much more "okay" to not use social media at all nowadays versus a feel years ago it would feel pretty taboo to not use social media.

"What? You don't have a facebook account? Is something wrong with you?" - 2017

"Damn, that's a good idea to delete facebook, I wish I could" - 2022

Not even close. The internet is only available in like 60% of the world. While some platforms may now be saturated given their growth(TikTok, Instagram, etc), you will see new platforms that don't take off for a few years and will feel "fresh" because they aren't saturated quite yet.

The old guard of social media may have reached its saturation point, but there's still plenty of innovation to be had.

Not even close? I mean you may be on to something with your hypothesis about the current wave of social media companies, but not if you step back and look at the bigger pictures. People are always looking at ways to connect. The whole premise of social media through the lens of the consumer is to find and stay in contact with ones people - either meatspace friends or newly discovered ones online. So will FB age out? Yes probably at some point. Is Instagram too photo/video centric and lacks any substance? Absolutely. Twitter is the best overall current source for news and information (amazing!) but it's format is both its strength and weakness. The TL DR version of this is - sooner or later some next wave will come along because the core purpose is too central to humans.

We've given everyone who wanted a mediocre social media product, a mediocre social media product.

There are plenty of improvements one can make - but the power positions are all taken and it'll take 20-30 years for those useless idiots to die and/or retire.

The golden age of the internet is over and when they and/or life finally exhausts Elon Musk, there won't be anyone who isn't a useless idiot left that has any power.

We'll be right back where this species loves to be - useless idiots controlling the minds of the idiot masses, while the non-idiots quietly engage in creative pursuits.