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 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.
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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.
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this article attributes this as starting on Tik Tok |
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.
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