Pretty much. People have X hours where they are awake during the day - if they are spending Y less time on social networks that doesn't mean they're migrating Y to new social networks. It just means they're focusing on something else.
You are assuming it needs to be replaced at all. These services are vapid additions to your life and once they are gone I think people will realize they didn't need to exist in the first place.
You're seriously generalizing. I only met my wife because of services like this; we met on Instagram and got to know each other over Twitter. I have other friends I similarly met and keep in contact with mainly over Twitter. I'm very glad the services exist.
There are alcoholics who have dozens of drinks a week and there are people who responsibly augment a night of socializing with a drink or two. Alcohol isn't fundamentally irredeemable because some people develop problems, and neither is social media.
My point was not that meeting people is at all related to alcohol(ism). My point was that both social media and alcohol can be used responsibly in beneficial ways.
Are you being sarcastic (serious question). Alcohol itself is chemically addictive and there are likely orders or magnitudes more people in the alcohol industry trying to make their alcoholic beverages more attractive (and thus spreading addictive substances further into the population) to consumers. It's an industry that easily tops over 1,000 Billion dollars globally.
I know what you're saying, but there's plenty of marketing behind alcohol, and it's already addictive to the point that withdrawal can literally kill you.
marketing doesn't make the product itself more addictive. Alcohol is physically addictive, but so is the dopamine hit you get from many social networking features. The point I was trying to make is that AFAIK no-one's trying to make alcohol the product more addictive, where there are many very intelligent people working to make Facebook the product more addictive.
Alcopops are a recent example of the alcohol industry finding a way to make their product more addictive (by adding sugar, another addictive substance).
Take my own changing habits, for example: over a span of 15 years, I "migrated" from MySpace to Tumblr to Reddit and a few news websites. I have only ever used Facebook except to promote a website. I think tens of millions of people, mostly young guys, prefer playing videos games over any form of social networking or even writing comments in response to ANY type of content.
And Discord really don't much power over their userbase unlike Facebook (have massive networking effect) and Twitter (have popular personalities). If Discord ever going to mess with things like censorship or forcing people into paid plans users could migrate really fast.
* Gamers are either tech-savvy or always have friends who are.
* Gamers stick to their small communities and leaders. If you superstar and announce that you're leaving Facebook nobody will follow, but gamers always follow their group / clan / whatever leaders.
* Also there is at least few companies like Valve, Blizzard, Epic Games who hold huge part of the market and have extremely loyal customers. They could certainly manage to set competition for Discord if there will be opening.
you are assuming that people only use these services for vapid interactions. plenty of people that live in censored countries use twitter to find out what is going on around them
I live in the US and I use Twitter to find out what is going on around me. For example, when I lose electrical power, my utility company posts updates on Twitter. My local TV stations and newspapers also post breaking news there.
The only reason those services use Twitter is because that's where all the people are. I'm not saying this isn't a beneficial use case, but Twitter isn't necessary for these kinds of services. I would even go so far as to say that corporate entities using Twitter to provide their users a service (outage reports) they should pay for the privilege or be forced to set up their own notification networks.
As one of those ex-MAUs: Nowhere. I used to have Twitter and Tumblr on my phone (Tumblr mostly for following a bunch of webcomics). One day, I noticed how much time I spend in those apps, so I deleted both of them and while I was at times tempted to reinstall them, I never gave in.
I left Facebook entirely earlier this year, and haven't replaced it with any other service. I'm wondering now about my Twitter account. It's a good source for infosec and test automation news, but nothing I couldn't live without.
Me too. I noticed something yesterday on the train - which made me sad. The carriage had over 100 people; yet 95% had their heads down and looking at their phone.
Most people didn't lookup throughout the whole 20 minute train ride.
For social media making everyone connected, it sure has made everyone else more isolated with each other.
A common observation, yet how have things really changed? When I was riding subways, buses, and commuter trains back in the 80s-90s, everyone had their faces in books or magazines the entire ride, and there was zero interaction with their fellow riders. Maybe in some non-East Coast region, people do/did interact more; I wouldn't know.
I would further observe that in a way, people have more of a shared experience today because of social media & internet in general.
We're still social creatures, just in a different way today. Admittedly, it's different from the days of yore, when people would hang out at the general store (or bar) and chat with the general community of people who passed through. But those days ended long before the Internet came along.
I wonder if the Snapchat generation are going to grow up and uses Snapchat for business. Like now when everyone uses either WeChat or WhatsApp for business.
GDPR could be a factor since it required shutting down accounts of people aged 13-16 that did not have parental consent. Getting parental consent required having parents sign a form and send it in.
That's not true. Consent is only one basis for processing. If they stick to using it for legitimate interest reasons then they don't need consent. Even ads can be a legitimate interest, and probably are in twitter's case, though the user is always allowed to opt out of that. There's also nothing that requires parental consent to involve signing a form.
Instagram will have its own moment to shine. All the 40 somethings trying to be like 20 somethings with their before and after pictures is not going to last once they realize that they are simply models on steriods. Usage will drop.
