Lifespan and natural death of social media channels

 

Something recently reminded me of the lifespan social media channels seem to live out.  People are familiar with MySpace and Google+ coming and going, but it goes beyond that.  I think Facebook is dying, and text blog posting has been dead for awhile.  I'll cover my thoughts on this, which I've probably written in a similar form here before, or at least parts of this.

My Space and Google+:  what to say; these were replaced by options that worked better.  Facebook killed My Space, and Google+ never really stood much chance.  Google gambled on the social circles function changing everything, and that never worked at all.  Then they gave up.  The sad part is that they really made the communicator function work well; Messenger just is a rip-off of Google's Hangouts, which was an evolved form of their earlier Messenger app or function.  I suppose that was based on Skype, related to the video calling, but it worked well, especially for that time-frame.

It's funny how what seemed to be computer generated image forwarding groups went inactive last on Google+, as if programs had been set up to keep that going, and everyone leaving didn't shut that off.

that's modern AI, but it was pretty similar to that

Facebook:  they shifted from trying to create a new and best case user experience to making the most money possible, and now my feed is mostly ads and promoted content.  It's no wonder that most Reddit users deleted Facebook years ago.  I post to a blog page on Facebook, and that draws some views to here, but in general I'd have to pay them to get people to see it now.  They changed that so suddenly, how their algorithm works, that you could almost tell the exact week that it shifted.  So they deserve the decline that they now experience.

Facebook groups have died in the most dramatic form, as much as inactivity can be called that.  People only want to keep discussing the same themes for so long, and algorithms changes decrease exposure for those groups.  I'm in Hawaii oriented groups as well there, since I live part-time in Waikiki, and those go completely inactive a bit slower.

a group I founded along with a Chinese vendor, and still moderate; it's dormant now

old style forums:  I miss these.  Tea Chat was the main place to discuss tea online at one point, an old forum hosted by Adagio.  They were already dead by the time they replaced the old moderators and ramped up use of marketing promotion of themselves on there.

Their time has came and went.  Someone tried to re-create it all as a new Tea Forum, but it never gained traction.  Expat / foreigner forums also died quite awhile ago, nearly a decade back now.

an interesting topic in a relatively inactive Tea Forum

Quora:  other themed sites come and go, as Quora has.  The question and answer theme only had so much potential, and it took them a half dozen years or so to extract that, and now that has been dead for a half dozen years.  You can say that it was mismanagement that killed it, that whatever approaches and programs didn't work out, and monetization always was a real problem for them.  But those sites seem to have a natural lifespan when they work out, and that form seemed to have an expiration built in.

I started two "groups" on Quora, which they called Spaces.  The site was dying when they rolled that out, as a promising last ditch effort to renew interest.  It absolutely didn't work.  If they had done so about two years earlier it might have.  I still post to those, a little, but it's just to spread out external links, which someone could possibly read there, and to add to the potential of Quora.  But it won't change anything.

Lessons learned:  I'm not so sure about this part.  Every composite thing is subject to dissolution?  That's Buddhism, by the way.  Surely we could dig a little deeper.

The life spans seem to play out in familiar patterns.  Earlier on, when a site or platform is inclined to work, it goes through an expansion phase, and whatever is novel is really developed.  Participation increases quickly.  In a mature phase that stays stable, and functions change, often in ways that don't actually work better.  Maybe that cause and effect goes mostly in one way, and once changes start to be for the worse the writing is on the wall?  

Then there's a drop-off, when it all just falls apart.  This happens quietly.  It's just inactivity, nothing too dramatic or clearly defined.  Let's examine the case of an active site and guess where they might be.

Reddit:  user base is huge in Reddit; r/tea has over a million subscribers.  Oddly that number isn't prominently shown now; I couldn't find it, and used Google to get that vague count.  Why would they hide those follower counts now?  It says there are over 300k active members there (308k weekly visitors), which probably rotate some.

Reddit changed their algorithm in the last half a year or so.  In the past it was a stream of whatever subs you followed, and whatever user posts you follow, and now they show you whatever the algorithm decides you might like, half what you follow, and half whatever else.  Sound familiar?  That's the same change Facebook made many years ago.  You can't easily customize what you see.  If you like or comment on something you're going to see a lot more of that, and there may or may not be any way to manually adjust that process.

As I see it Reddit is in the levelled off phase; functions and form are not changing much, and the changes that do occur aren't positive.  Groups (subs) discussions tend to evolve to repeat in ways that aren't typically positive.  It's easy for sensational content to gain traction, and for other topic discussion to be crowded out by that.  If the pattern holds the owners of Reddit will decide to sell the site at some point, and the new "private equity" owners will make changes to squeeze all of the profit potential available out of it, and essentially kill the site experience and the site.

Somehow on r/tea the participants prior exposure level, where they are on the learning curve for the subject, never changes, and never moves forward.  I suppose people only discuss a subject until they tire of hearing of it, and don't go through a lot of learning curve and still keep participating.  Even in groups where the discussions were advanced, and perspectives were quite mature, there was some sort of natural end point to be experienced.  That Adagio / Tea Chat forum related to real experts joining in, and the Puerh Tea Club on Facebook was based around really developed perspective input, and both are dead now.  Expat--Western foreigners living abroad--forums came and went in a similar way.

Steepster was an interesting different kind of example, a tea discussion and review site.  It worked because people really wanted a place to retain short tea reviews, of their own, and to compare notes with others.  But now they don't?  Shared interest themes sort of play out.

No more Steepster for me.  I had no idea there was ever any issue with there, and haven't checked in on that site in a couple of years.

So it's interesting how Reddit shows how that builds up to an entire site's life and death, as Quora experienced.  People tire of the specific channel form too.  Abstract things "ruin it."  You might expect the pressure of the next catchier, better formatted thing to be a main cause, but it's almost not that, or seems not to be.  Facebook groups may have killed Tea Chat, but Reddit didn't kill them, and Discord tea groups (servers) also didn't, which are now active among younger people.

Discord is sort of something else, but it's not informative to go into that, related to explaining this topic.  It's message-stream discussion groups, like earlier topic forum threads, but set up differently.  It's fine; it works well for people into that format.  It works out to be more social than older style topic threads, maybe trading out the potential for retaining information for reference as a result of the form difference.

Back to the broader perspective, the transitions we all experience build up to these site lifespan transitions.  I don't think it's all about moderators ruining things, or form changes decreasing the site's function and appeal.  There is a general pattern of development where at one point a site or platform host decides to really monetize the activity, and that's always a turning point.  It's like when McDonald's doubles their pricing over several years, while their food quality declines a little; it just doesn't work.

MySpace still exists, and my old profile does.  I was never really active on there.  It's funny that I can pull up MySpace and use it but not Steepster.  I've heard that someone was discussing renewing MySpace, again, to try to bring it back to life.  They could probably copy a lot of the early 2010s Facebook design and it would work better than FB does now.

The natural endpoint of social media groups and platforms

 

A thought just occurred to me that I'll share here, based on noticing yet another disturbing trend in following social media.  It's nothing as dire as AI interaction and fake profiles poisoning the general experience, instead something not troubling at all in comparison.  

It's this:  a lot of types of social media exchange seem to take up repeating, narrow forms, which I'm claiming here could relate to the groups heading towards their own natural end.  

It sounds like pure speculation based on nothing at all, right?  Exactly, but let's go there.

Is there even a need to describe how this relates to Facebook use, and groups?  Essentially all of the subjects I follow, and all the related groups, feel a bit played out.  People have experienced finding shared interest channels and new discussions within the last half dozen years or so, and then those groups evolved to go a bit quieter, or to drift off topic, with lowest common denominator sort of input ruining things, or ads, if moderation didn't adjust for that.  

Lots of what look like interesting news stories on Facebook are really just click-bait ads, where you need to keep scrolling to eventually find out that the title doesn't match the story conclusion.

I'll get back to more FB specifics after considering problematic issues with two other platforms.

Quora

For a platform / site like Quora it's a little more complicated.  That's a question and answer theme site, like an expanded version of the old Yahoo Answers.  Of course the first 10,000 obvious questions have already been asked and answered, in dozens of forms for most.  And monetization attempts have came and went, each negatively impacting the feel of the site more than they seemed to earn the site owners revenue.  

I'm really talking about something else here though, the feel, and natural shifts in forms of use.  Consider this example:

Sean Kernan is the most popular "Quoran," with over a billion content views, 10 million in the last month.  His current profile tagline is Quality over Quantity, and then oddly his last post is about Leonardo DiCaprio dating young women.  This could've been an insightful topic answer 10 to 15 years ago, but almost no one has now failed to already see mention of this subject in social media posts, if they are active anywhere at all.

All of that is fine; the point I'm slow to make here is that his formula for writing popular content has been noticed by many others, and broadly adopted.  It takes up a catchy theme that can be treated in a short space, like this, uses an eye-catching image to draw attention, makes one or two trivially insightful points, and closes with twist ending.  In this case that Reddit chart (mentioned) is the insightful content, and Sean also mentions that women much younger than him probably wouldn't share common perspective with him, and communication might be a problem.

The problem?  As more and more people adopt this form there is less and less to read in feed streams of popular answer posts.  The form gets repetitive, which many people must notice.  These just aren't substantial, informative answers, but they seem to represent the current norm, over subject experts talking about what most people don't already know.  In Sean's next post he answers a question about what he would wish for and it's to be able to fall asleep quickly.  Fine, quite practical, and as always well written, but this is how Quora goes now, not saying much, as Facebook group posts generally don't.  

At least the form is not infuriating, trading off catching interest by triggering contempt, a pervasive form of trolling across all social media now.  Here's an example of that I see from time to time (on Facebook):

Initially posts following this theme about mixed martial arts by comparing less daunting looking fighters with actors and such, but in this case this is just trolling.  Conor McGregor was a UFC champion at 145 and 155 pounds, and Brock Lesner was a heavyweight UFC champion, and stand-out college wrestler.  Conor couldn't beat Brock in any kind of combat competition at all, especially a street fight.  It's a "shitpost," funny because it's not true kind of theme.  Then it could be regarded as funny that most people commenting take it seriously, at least ostensibly.

  

These two forms are example of natural evolutions of communication / post forms that would eventually lead to disinterest in those platforms.

Isn't it clear why?  In one case trivial forms of light communication work to gain notice and viewership, but those would become boring.  In another example posts with no real content, just falsely communicated meaning, would eventually draw no reaction at all, after someone responds to dozens of such posts.

Reddit

Reddit is dying of another cause; let's look into that.

The Joe Rogan sub probably started out as a fan group, people talking about interesting guests or ideas covered on that podcast, but now it has evolved into a Joe Rogan hate group, or mostly related to trolling.  It has a million followers, so a good number, but the top 100 Reddit subs all have at least 11 million followers.

The first post that comes up on pulling up the group feed (just now) is about Akash Singh, a so-so comedian who is really the sidekick of Andrew Schulz.  I do find him a bit annoying, but it must be hard for comedians to carve out their own space in a crowded entertainment segment, so in a sense you can't fault him for being edgy in whatever ways he tries out.  Comments on this recent thread aren't about hating Joe, which are more typical, but all trash Akash instead:

He's not all that funny, as comedians go, but that's fine.  He works well as a podcast co-host, as a sort of straight guy, and some of what he says is insightful.  He seems like an ok guy.

In another clip from that podcast he commented about the social media trend of people randomly punching women, saying that at first they seemed to only be white women, so it was funny, but then it was concerning when applied to other races, since his wife might be involved.  It's a joke; it's supposed to be funny that he is insensitive.  It's not a good joke, but it would be hard to work out material in real time on a podcast, versus trying out jokes and then refining them.

This picture is more typical, Joe Rogan edited down to look much smaller than a guy who fights at 135 pounds (Dominick Cruz), so that Joe would be under 5 feet tall in this edit.  But the comments usually hate on him for his views, for selling out and becoming more conservative, or supporting nonsense for his own gain, like hosting Tucker Carlson.

In one sense I think Joe Rogan has to be free to have his own opinions, and to share them, and shouldn't be held to an unreasonable standard for being well-informed or mostly right, in his role.  In another sense he really has drifted to hold less and less considered and reasonable takes as he moves towards standard and often questionable right-wing thinking.  He should be called out and looked down upon for that, for being influential and losing a normal baseline.  He was essentially an anti-vaxxer during covid; some of those kinds of opinions actually matter, nudging people towards decisions based on low-quality random hearsay.

Not all of the Reddit subs are degrading into a shadow of their former scope and form, of course.  But it seems to me that Reddit gets worse, not better, and people being edgy to draw reactions increases while reasonable discussion drops off.  Whole subs (sub-Reddits or groups) can devolve as a result, and that happens all the time.  

Maybe a different example and problem is a better example for Reddit:  people often copy and paste old posts or posts from elsewhere to draw upvotes, a category of karma, the equivalent of Facebook likes.  If it's interesting content that's not so bad, but as often the same posts re-occur over and over.  Taken together tone or theme shifts in groups and repetitive and low effort posting degrade the Reddit experience.

Returning to the point

Trolling is also problematic, people saying negative things to get attention, and AI programs posting as a person, for whatever purposes.  Aggressive comments are normal.  

Beyond all that patterns of normal interaction seem to become routine, falling into these typical repetitive forms, which are less interesting and contain less actual content than earlier genuine discussion had.

Some of this relates to the same ground having been covered so many times before.  In travel groups, for example, people post the same general questions that others have been posting for years, so that it's hard to not just advise them to search for the other 100 threads covering the same theme.  That same thing comes up in tea groups, or any special interest groups I'm in.  Other groups are more ruined by those negative posting themes, people being edgy to draw a reaction, so that places centered on discussion of philosophy and Buddhism became unpleasant and impossible to follow years ago.

I've co-founded a popular Facebook tea group, and a small local area theme tea group, and created two Quora spaces, and all of them have gone a bit quiet.  Both individual groups and platforms seem to live out life-cycles.  It's possible for mechanisms and themes to trigger renewal, as can occur in an individual real-life life, but in general stagnation and decline set in.  

7600 followers and it's dead quiet; that's normal

Google Plus stopped changing to support renewal and that whole platform died.  Very early in social media history My Space got renewal all wrong and changes killed that platform.  For many years afterward I would go back and look at those two places, virtual ghost-towns, and I think My Space still exists now, while Google Plus doesn't, beyond as an archived subscriber access form.

Short videos / YouTube shorts / Tic-Toc / Instagram and Facebook reels / stories

The latest transition for many platforms is adding short videos as a main feature theme.  Typically an algorithm will emphasize this content, but it's already a popular form without being boosted.  

It's easy to consume 30 seconds or shorter video content.  One strange twist on Tik Tok and YouTube shorts is splitting the video to include a half section of someone playing with kinetic sand, or some other visually stimulating, low-information content.  It's seemingly there to help distract a child so their attention span can last for the full 30 seconds.

this article attributes this as starting on Tik Tok

I don't know what this short video theme means in relation to the rest of what I've been discussing.  Maybe reading in general is on the way out.  One might guess that many main platforms switching to the same content form drops out some distinctiveness among any of them, but then it may just be that it's a popular form now, and there is no other deeper meaning.

Conclusions

Maybe I'm all wrong about this, and platforms and groups don't evolve into repeating communication patterns leading to their decline.  Maybe they just experience a natural lifecycle separate from all that, based on whatever causes, maybe mostly natural transitions in interest.  This is something I've only been noticing and thinking through recently; maybe this take isn't one I'll stick with.

Some of it could be my own burn-out related to these repeating forms, and too much social media contact.  I'm doing a lot with real life lately but still manage to check in online a good bit, and the repetition of forms and content themes are both annoying.

One might expect that for me being a group founder and moderator, and for participating in expat forums a good bit over more than a decade, that these social media lifespan transitions in forms would be more familiar.  They definitely follow typical patterns, but I'm not sure that they have to.  

It's interesting how fast main communication channels for specific topics can switch, or at least could in the past.  Back around 2008-10 I was active in following IT service management process discussions, and those would switch the primary place they took place at least twice a year.  The same people would shift together.  I've been following online tea discussions for much longer, and only over the last 3 to 4 years have those seemed to stabilize, settling into Discord groups and Reddit being active and other places tapering off, with app based communities as a small exception.  

Broad platforms, as I've mostly been discussing, have longer lifespans.  Decline can take many years.