I guess it's correlated to the commercialization of those platforms. The amount of content which is actually from your friends and families is declining and was replaced by adds and viral content. If facebook would've been from the beginning what it's now, we probably never would have named it 'social media' in the first place.

I visited Facebook pretty much only to see my mom's posts. Even as I literally unfollowed everyone and everything, Facebook still wouldn't show me the only content I chose to see.

There are still the Facebook groups, and I really wish we had forums instead of those.

I have a theory, but based only on my observation of younger family members; needless to say, it may be way off in aggregate. Apart from the obvious, I don't really see them posting on legacy social media platfoms ( fb and so on ). TikTok was commonly used, but I can't say if recent US moves actually caused younger people to limits its use. On the other hand, fragmented discords and the like did seem to start be more common.

I've said this for quite a while now. Social media has turned into a bitch fest. It's all you ever read nowadays and I'm tired of it. I'm sure most people are tired of it.

In addition to the factors named by sibling comments, which I largely agree with, there is also the rise of short form entertainment on these platforms.

In 2004, social media was mostly text, images and low-fidelity game experiences like Mafia Wars. Compare to a bottomless scroll of immediate-attention-hook optimized, algorithmically targeted video content found on TikTok / Instagram.

The social behaviors got zombified out of the audience.

Based on the time range, the decline of social media use after 2020 could be more strongly related to the decline of Covid and remote school/work

I'm always surprised that papers don't include some "chat" apps as social media. I don't see Discord mentioned in this paper but I use it almost identically to how I used Facebook in like 2010 and at least among people I know that's very common. I think the use cases from more traditional "social media" has migrated a lot back to chat apps and those still provide a lot of value and are more widely used than ever.

If I think about my own use of social media (and I have a facebook account from waaay back in the day, shortly after they dropped the requirement for a US edu email address), I wonder what value it ever had, over and above just emailing those people I'd like to stay in touch with every-so-often (which is what I do now). The reason why facebook switched to an algorithmic feed is because the previous method was failing, people were starting to give up posting. Algorithmic feeds didn't kill social media, they were an attempt at keeping alive what was already moribund. Social media, in the strict sense (so, not just online clubs or societies), never needed to be invented.

Yes, this.

I miss the old social media. I'd love to have it back. Having moved several times to various corners of the world, I have dear family and friends who are scattered across multiple continents. It's difficult to maintain ongoing 1:1 connections across such distances, but I used to be able to keep up with them and their families -- and them with mine -- via social media. It felt genuinely communal.

And then the posts from them became increasingly interspersed with -- and eventually outright replaced by -- advertisements, rage bait from random people(?) I didn't know, and then eventually AI slop. All with the obvious goal of manipulating my attention and getting me to consume more advertising.

It felt absolutely gross. Not something I wanted my personal life to be associated with. I stopped posting. So did my friends. The end.

But I still miss the old social media, and would use it if it actually existed (not just as a technology or a business model, mind you, but as an actual network with the adoption needed to create those kind of connections).

It’s because social media is no longer primarily about being social

If you optimize for engagement you create secondary effects that can drive users away.

If social media becomes addictive because it angers you constantly, that’s engaging but you may hate it. Enough people will realize it’s not worth the stress. The social media site just begins to be associated with negativity and anger - not fun.

It’s reasonable we hit peak social media in the US and enough people disengage to make the numbers come down. Though notably 2025 is not in this study.

"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."

I read a quote once that went something like (paraphrased): every organizational app has to compete with email and every form of social media has to compete with group texts. And I think that's accurate.

If you pick random people they'll have often very old group texts. Family, friend groups, etc. These are used to organize, disseminate news and so on. 10+ years ago, a lot of people did these things on FAcebook. Group texts work on all platforms. They don't have ads. They're chronological.

From an engagement perspective, algorithmic recommendations and ranking (ie the newsfeed) has "succeeded" but it killed the use cases that people now use group texts for. And I think the two are fundamentally incompatible.