Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, Polarization (2025)
arxiv.orgThe paper (rightfully) does not address this, but I'd like to speculate about the reasons why, overall, usage has been dropping.
I think it's because social media, as a whole, stopped providing any value to its users. In the early days it did bring a novel way to connect, coordinate, stay in touch, discover, and learn. Today, not so much.
It seems we are between worlds now, with the wells of the "old order" drying up, and the springs of the "new order" not found / tapped just yet.
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.
Big time. I visit once/year and I'm always amazed at how useless Facebook has become.
I could barely find any updates from my friends, my feed is now an endless stream of AI-generated videos.
What's the use for that?
Facebook has become a community hub for me more than anything. Mountain biking, snowmobiling, contracting, VJing - there are lots of groups out there with very real and human discussion. You couldn't pay me to go back to reddit for that stuff.
You're right though, rarely do people post to their own timeline these days. I think it's the 90:9:1 social media stasis playing out.
Ah, yes--that makes sense.
And it's better than Reddit because it's more personal and you get to meet people or even make friends..?
So the real question is what motivates Facebook decision makers to put their credible stuff behind such a low quality front page, that is seen as a joke by nearly everyone?
It would be like a reputable industry conference putting a troupe of low budget clowns doing carnival tricks in front of their entrances.
The question might be that a huge percentage of people still watch those videos and click on ads.
My mom, for instance, she might just scroll through all the slop and even believe it's all true, and click on an ad every once in a while—perhaps by mistake.
Doom scrolling. For people who get hooked it can be very very addictive.
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.
Did you see people mourning the demise of forum software, when neatly maintained places oriented towards specific topics gave way to noisy and all-encompassing places like FB at Twitter?
I think these fragmented Discords are the return to the idea of specific, uncrowded, neatly maintained places, with a relatively high barrier to entry for a random person. Subreddits are a bit similar, but less insular.
One of the only differences between new Reddit and Discord is that Reddit has the courtesy of a public index.
I don't know much about Discord (my only experience being some years ago when I joined for an open source project and left soon after I noticed how incredibly use hostile it is) but I do know that if you create a single account it is trivial to join any "server" (which, despite the marketing is just a chatroom hosted on their servers).
We're gonna enter a new age/type of "lost media" as Discord remains popular year over year. It's a complete black hole unless you're manually backing things up. No possible Wayback Machine.
It's honestly a good thing. People should have social outlets where things are forgotten, not memorialized for all eternity.
Sure, but it's definitely not the return of forums and the fact it is being used in place of forums will cause trouble down the line.
It's a bad replacement for forums.
The Discords I'm active in are all everyday conversations, like big group chats. Some of them are funny/interesting and occasionally someone gives useful advice, but the vast majority are forgettable.
I think that people should publicly share valuable information (like great conversations or useful advice) and some of their typical conversations (a context summary for outsiders and history). But privacy and ephemeral-ness make people more open. It may be better to have a space for most conversations where they're not expected to be saved, or (because "not expected" in Discord relies on weak evidence and today's norms) guaranteed not to be saved.
It's not really a good thing for technical discussion and support topics though. Information that others might hope to find by searching the web is no longer discoverable that way.
They are forgotten for all useful intents and purposes, but a malicious asshole can and will memorialize everything you say on it.
Without a trusted third party doing something like this on a large scale, it doesn't really matter - because 'nah, that's just a fake.'
My wife and I were recently talking about how we kind of luck boxed into dodging a bullet when we had kids (which was rather late). But it's no wonder so many people had or are having so many issues growing up in a public social media era. It's not only your right, but responsibility, to say, believe, and generally do stupid things as a kid and a young adult. It's an important part of growing up. Nobody should ever have to worry about this period in their life following them around forever.
Yes for social outlets. For niche hobbies? old photos of specific milling machines used in machine shops on board US navy vessels? For 80's european automotive restoration? For repairing and restoring retro-computing devices? Terrible. Terrible Terrible Terrible.
Tbf most old forums seem to have lacked photo hosting so all that’s left is photobucket placeholders
> I do know that if you create a single account it is trivial to join any "server"
Only if it's public. There are many private Discord servers.
The way they do it is that the default set of permissions is basically none, but then there's a server role which actually gives you permissions to see the channels and post in them. So, anyone can join the server, but only people who have been granted this role (e.g. by admin) can do anything on it, or even see others.
Discord is still not the same and in my opinion inferior. It’s mostly synchronous chat with poor searchability, something very different from what forums used to be
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A2P06aHpvnQ
I saw this on youtube yesterday. It is some animation directors micro social media website, limited to 50 people.
I dont care for the ethereum. But wouldnt it be cool if major social media platforms were like this?
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.
I fixed Facebook on my feed at least. I started aggressively unfollowing people who post or comment about politics constantly (even if I agree with them). Not unfriending, just unfollowing.
What’s left is a feed with pictures of my friends and family, important news about what’s going on in their lives, and trash talking about college football.
It’s great.
I tried that too, and wound up unfollowing everyone except the people who never post. Then my page gets filled with "suggested" content.
Isn't it also way too many posts from "suggested" pages, and way too many attention-stealing "reels"?
Didn't work for me. It barely even show me content that my friends create. It's all reaction videos and conspiracy nonsense. Even if you block those channels, another one with a slightly different name pops up.
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.
Terminology shifted somewhere along the lines, because the nature of sites like Facebook changed. These sites were called "social networking" in the early days, since they connected people. These sites are called "social media" these days, which I assume is a reflection that the top-down nature of these sites are much more like traditional print/radio/television media.
The treatment of chat applications, online forums, etc. as social media has always felt strange to me for that reason. While the companies that offer those services may control the platform, control of interactions is limited to moderation and the content of those interactions is rarely created by a commercial interest.
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).
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
That's a plausible explanation for the whole paper, unfortunately. And not one mention of Covid was made.
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.
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.
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.
Do you remember how these things were called social NETWORKS, as in something you navigate and explore? Then they gradually became social MEDIA, as in something you consume...
awesome observation that ill be stealing , thanks for sharing
<< As casual users disengage and polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme.
It.. feels accurate. I don't frequent FB or other mainstream social spots, but even on HN, the pattern is relatively clear. Vocal minorities tend to drive the conversations to their respective corners, while the middle quietly moves to, at most, watch at a safe distance.
Part of me is happy about it. The sooner we get out of the social media landscape, the better the society as a whole will be.. in my opinion anyway. Still, we have already lost so much of the original internet. That loss makes me sad.
The article uses the word "partisan", the opposite of which I think is "independent", not "centrist" or "middle", but to be fair the article seems to conflate the two as well and never uses the word "independent". However to me there is a big difference between being a centrist and being independent. One could be independent with views that are at times deemed extreme right and at times extreme left. Similarly, some people are "centrist" yet somehow deeply partisan in the sense that their party can do no wrong and everything is the fault of the other party.
It is a valid question. I looked at the author's profile and while he is not from US ( Amsterdam ), his studies focus[1] appears to be on subjects that would suggest he should be relatively well acquainted with politics in US along with how they differ in terms of terminology from EU or UK. Sadly, I can't seem to say for sure how term was intended in the article itself. That said, the author does seem to reference individual US parties.
[1]https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/t/o/p.tornberg/k.p.tornberg.ht...
[removed]
Can you elaborate? Do you mean that the final version is not approved by the author/s for publication?
[removed as I don't wish to tank this guy's career. he knows what he's done though]
My point was a little more subtle. Does the human at the end of the process that presses 'submit'/'publish'/'do this thing' bear a responsibility for verbiage, claims and everything in the paper that bears his name regardless of whether or not he wrote it.
Your entire argument is a personal vibe.
Maybe your literacy is not as great as you think it is and unfamiliar written tones are difficult for you. The result is personal discomfort and it's easier to blame external reality rather than your own ignorance and inexperience.
I noticed that ZeroGPT has a high false positive rate. Put the same document in other checkers and it's says zero AI.
The problem with this is that people are particularly bad at judging their own 'independence' of thought, regardless of their political views.
I would say the opposite of partisan would be someone who actively seeks to understand and relate to the views of those who they disagree with, or who are from their out-group. This would also imply independence of thought.
This. Partisanship is going along party lines (agreeing with the Party) where independence is thinking of your own free will. We desperately need more of those people in charge.
Why would the party support them?
Those are the people who do the nost work for the party. People who 'toe the line' are also those who tend not to do the work that gets people elected. People who care enough to think also knock of doors and the other work that gets someone elected. You won't find a thinking person you 100% agree with, but a mostly agree is better than a mostly disagree - and by doing that work you also get to talk to people and perhaps change minds.
For the team? For the influence? There used to be a time when people could work across the aisle.
You can have beliefs, but you also must have heart and a brain to open your world view to other perspectives. This is what being an adult is all about. Not this crap that we see today.
I would suggest that at those times it's when the structure of achieving the same common goal was at stake.
Disagreements on the best day to provide services to the public are still attempting the same common objective.
Disagreements on which people will have their rights removed are not a "let's agree to disagree" sort of thing.
Insisting that truth is always in the middle is a radical ideology on itself.
The problem with “the middle” is that’s relative to the Overton window. Federal troops assassinating kneeling protesters didn’t used to be “one side” with “the middle” suggesting they should simply arrest them and lock them up.
I would usually keep quiet and ignore post like this because they are extreme timesinks, but to give a perfect example: Waco. It happened under the other side. The official story is bunk and half the country that is supposedly anti-authoritarian cheered it on.
I don't care to have the conversation or change anyone's mind but your post is the perfect example why people in the middle disengaged from the loud minority that takes over online spaces.
I'm old enough to remember Waco and there was widespread criticism of Janet Reno's handling of Waco. This idea that the Dems "cheered it on" is ahistorical post facto justification for a position you likely already held.
I see this all the time. It's some combination of "X was hypocrditical" or "X was mean to me", which leads to "and that's why I support [the opposite of X] as [a centrist, a moderate, someone with common sense]". And reaching for a ~30 year old siege is the reachiest of reaches.
This is the Myth of the Moderate. There is no such thing a "moderate" or a "centrist" in the modern day. Ask them about issues and they're just conservatives who are embarrassed about it.
It is a major simplification to put the political spectrum on a single line (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum). If we put it as a triangle, the Overton window can be as far from left to right as left/right is to the middle.
The Overton window is not involved in defining the middle, and the middle definitively do not need to agree 50% with any specific decision done by the left or right.
Federal troops assassinating kneeling protesters is still not within the Overton window though.
Right on cue
What is the point of your three words here? Legitimately I don't get it.
The parent comment was about how the most partisan users post the most on social media and sure enough, the first response was by a partisan user.
Or, you know, they actually have a point, and framing them as just another partisan is an uncharitable response. Which, ironically, is typical of partisans.
Neither the paper nor the original comment said the most partisan commenters are wrong. It found a strong correlation between how partisan a social media user is and how often they post.
You're being uncharitable by assuming the commenter is disagreeing that with the point that the Overton window has moved. Which, I've heard, is typical of partisans.
The problem is that "partisan" doesn't automatically mean "wrong".
People wield "the middle" as if it is some magic incantation that makes them correct or immune to criticism. In fact, it is generally the "middle" or, as I prefer to call them, the "inert" that tend to be wrong since they are always behind the curve rather than ahead of it.
In Milgram's experiment, only the most "partisan" refused to deliver the shocks. The "middle" dutifully continued right to the end and delivered the highest voltages even as their own distress mounted.
You may avoid politics, but politics may not avoid you.
I am ok with being called inert. In the context, this would suggest I am less easily swayed than most.
That just means you cling to your wrong ideas with the same tenacity as your correct ones.
Someone very famous who predates social media had words for you:
"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."
... There are layers to your post that need to be properly disassembled to be properly appreciated. And I assure you that I do appreciate it. Deeply. ...
<< That just means you cling to your wrong ideas with the same tenacity as your correct ones.
It is bold of you to assume that your ideas are correct and, consequently, my ideas are not.
It is not just bold, but also kinda well, not smart, to assume what my ideas are. For all you know, I believe circles are, in fact, round. Are you going to argue against roundness of circles now?
But to top of it all off with a quotable quote that seems like it should mean something, and yet manages to mean nothing, because, apart from it being -- lets say -- misapplied in general, it is also ridiculously wrong in the context.
How does work for an outright rejection?
We can stop talking now. We have no useful thoughts to exchange.
There isn't exactly a "curve" to be behind, just as there isn't one single "history" that you can end up "on the wrong side of". Politics is just the constantly shifting borders in a formalised war for power between different groups, long term there is no single direction of "progress".
>You may avoid politics, but politics may not avoid you.
This is the correct view, in the sense that if you don't belong to some kind of tribe, you'll get ripped off by someone who does. The inert group are not wrong, but by participating less than the others in the battle for their collective self interest, they will end up being the ones taken advantage of.
And you are replying to a partisan user.
Not sure why this is relevant.
The paper says partisanship is strongly correlated with frequency of posting. Are you also pointing out that the commenters here are very partisan and this shows the paper is correct?
It is relevant, reread it.
Best I can tell, you're indicating that more partisan users post more, as the paper found.
They have the most to win/lose.
The rest are just going ‘WTF is this shit?!?’
(De)legitimation is the dominant meta. Much more than arguing on the merits of ideas, folks argue on the legitimate status of their opponents real or perceived stance. A lot of it attempts to play to the audience rather than either side open to changing their minds. That's how I read it at least.
>Federal troops assassinating kneeling protesters didn’t used to be “one side”
This is factually not true. Levels of violence by the state against citizens in the United States is at near historic lows. The state killed dozens of children in Waco in the 90s, bombed domestic buildings in Philadelphia in the 80s, shot protestors Kent State University in the 70s, going back to the early years of the USA where protests and rebellions were put down with private militias and bounties. The shooting by one officer of one protester in a scuffle with officers wouldn't have reached the history books in any other time.
US law enforcement kill over 1000 people every year, way more than any comparable country [1]. The raw data of incidents on Wikipedia has to be broken down by month [2]. And here's a chart showing the number has been going up basically every year for at least a decade [3].
What "historic lows" are you talking about?
[1]: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/policekillings_total.htm...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_killings_by_law_enfor...
[3]: https://www.consumershield.com/articles/how-many-people-are-...
I don't think the social media landscape is inherently bad, but the ways in which it evolved. And I think the shift in social media towards consuming content instead of connecting with others is a direct reflection of the era we live in; one of abundant information.
Social media will stop becoming relevant when we stop treating each person as a mini corporation that needs to provide value, trying to optimize every aspect of your life in a life-long marketing campaign.
You may be onto something. It is a little bit like google when it first started showing ads. Initially, the ads were clearly marked and were promised to be relevant to the user, but that line has been moved slowly in a way to extract more and more value from the user.. while removing value that user already had.
I know social media had some real use cases. CL and FB marketplace are probably one good example of that. But the rest of it.. best I can say, my overall happiness jumped up after first month of going on a media diet.
> Part of me is happy about it. The sooner we get out of the social media landscape, the better the society as a whole will be.. in my opinion anyway. Still, we have already lost so much of the original internet. That loss makes me sad.
While I share the hope, it's probably not going to happen: most folks have moved from FB to use AI chats. Now it's the tool to manipulate opinions and habits. And it's working very well and nuanced. With AI, the society will be more divided, more polarised, and less happy than before.
And there's no way back already! Even if the web search works well one day, the folks desire (and habit!) to outsource thinking is too strong, especially among younger.
> the folks desire (and habit!) to outsource thinking is too strong, especially among younger.
The 'younger' only because they're forming habits in the time of AI. Most all humans tend towards minimising cognitive load; the making hard decisions and consideration of complex topics and situations. It's all about the tools that were available to you at the time you started to need those tools. The core is the same. Low-level, essentially sub-conscious, human behaviour change doesn't happen on a noticeable time frame^.
^ my opinion, not based on research. ie. feel free to critique.
What has changed is the awareness of the hacks that work on the human lizard brain, and therefore pandering to all that makes us weak and powerless in exchange for money and convenience. That's the part that makes it feel, for me, more likely that there's no way back. Those hacks will only get more refined and more streamlined into exploitation.
> With AI, the society will be more divided, more polarised, and less happy than before.
While I agree for less happy, I am not seeing AI chatbot been more divisive and polirised than social media in general. Am I missing something?
A personal information bubble for anyone. All deviations from reality are normalised with "hallucinations is OK for AI".
It's devisive as much as it can be.
As opposed to an information bubble with a small group of humans? It has less personalized hallucinations but more extreme and negative ones, which I think is worse. Ideally people would look at reliable sources and use critical thinking for information, but ChatGPT seems like a better conversation partner than the average Redditor of today (who's probably also a bot...but one trained on drama and negativity).
I mean it’s really not that hard to do a little research to find out that “most” people aren’t leaving Meta properties for ChatgpT
Amusingly I've solved this problem of polarized partisans personally. I have an extraordinarily large blocklist of users (including an auto-hide on the top 1000 commenters by word-count). Annoyingly this has created a new problem: reading HN is a lot more enjoyable so I use it more.
I think a lot of what's happening is that individuals and their in-groups are replacing social media for comms with chat apps, leaving much of the remaining social media use being either reposting crap or for opinion blasts... or in the worst case, thoughtlessly reposting other people's [extreme] opinion blasts.
One thing is true: actual, active socializing is happening in chat apps (and Discord), not FB, X, or IG.
What do you mean exactly by lost so much of the original internet?
To use internet lingo, no normies.
But to be more broad I'll present you the romantic version which is at least partly true. I miss that.
It used to feel like the internet was a place you went to explore and learn. It was harder to use and navigate, so most ordinary people did not spend much time there. Back then, a lot of people believed it would make the world better because everyone could access information and educate themselves.
That optimism did not survive contact with reality. Today you can carry essentially all human knowledge in your pocket, yet much of the internet is funneled through a handful of corporations whose business model is advertising and attention. Instead of helping people discover things, the dominant platforms optimize for keeping you scrolling with outrage, dopamine hits, and low value content. Worst thing is of course politics which moved in here.
The joy of exploring is done, but honestly I think that it atleast partly that the og users got older. Hackernews somehow reminding me the "old Internet", somehow alike people with desire to explore and have honest discussion on genuinely interesting topic.
What makes you think that great stuff still doesn't exist, but you're the one stuck in those 5 corporations bubble that makes it impossible for you to find it?
There's still great stuff out there, it's still as hard to find and navigate as it has always been. It's still as shady and as illegal (if you care about copyright) as it has always been. Most people still don't bother to do it, you just became a part of that category.
Here, let me try snapping you out of that bubble a little bit and make you one of the today's lucky ten thousand: find a category that interests you on fmhy(.)net (SFW, I promise), see how long it takes you to spot something you had no idea existed outside your bubble.
Bring back webrings!
I feel like this misses what's actually going on. The "small, sharp, ideologically extreme" discussions aren't going away, they're just happening elsewhere. From the abstract, the reason for the decline is: "the youngest and oldest Americans increasingly abstaining from social media". The young people are talking in private Discord groups, and the old people are talking in private text groups. These private groups don't show up in social media studies. The paper even states this directly: "everyday communication increasingly migrates from large, open networks to semi-private spaces such as group chats and messaging apps".
> Still, we have already lost so much of the original internet.
Hyper-monetization killed it all
YC does have brakes ... Accounts are rate limited for engaging in conversations that are determined to be beneath the dignity of the platform. It's not clear if the rate limiting is biased against certain perspectives.
FB and Twitter seem to drive heavy political ideological content at the slightest hint of engagement.
I think a problem with loud poles and a quiet middle is the political class takes its queue from the internet discourse. The algorithms drive content, but in a reverse fashion they also poll the electorate, providing signal the political scientists use to calibrate messaging.
> It's not clear if the rate limiting is biased against certain perspectives.
This is unavoidable. "The dignity of the platform" is a euphemism for moral cowardice masquerading as reason and civility.
Someone like Charlie Kirk - a bigoted troll who used "debate" as a weapon - would have fitted right in here, because he couched his bigotry in a civil manner.
MLK is relevant here, in his description of "moderates":
> more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.
Some other references:
"Stop glorifying ‘centrism’. It is an insidious bias favoring an unjust status quo": https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/28/centri...
"Can the Center Hold Any Meaning?": https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/political-centr...
"A Critique of Pure Tolerance": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Critique_of_Pure_Tolerance
Is that the current approach that is being sold?
Status quo and its increasingly damaged institutions are some of the few things that keep events from spiraling out of control.
And I would personally abstain from spitting on Kirk's grave. At the rate things are going, it is hardly a given a newcomer will be willing to talk at all. [edit: overtly antagonizing section removed]
That's the result of excess censorship and PRs on those platform, you can play with people more or less easily but you can't re-program them at such speed. They understand and start rejecting the narrative.
Vocal minorities vary but tend just to excite the others, not to affirm any point.
There is some slight irony talking about a vocal minority in a top comment, heh.
It's worth questioning how much of the polarized rhetoric out there is rooted in reality, and how much of it is just social media selecting and promoting extreme views. The answer seems to be that it really depends on where you are.
As a Canadian, I feel that people on opposite ends of the spectrum, although they might literally call for the deaths of those on the other end, have a huge amount in common with each other. Canada has problems, but its still a pretty great country. If people would step outside of the hyper-partisan identities they've been constructing for themselves online and try to see the concerns of the other side, they'd probably find they're not as horrible or misguided as they might think while reading facebook or reddit. If the reasonable centre that dominates public policy can continue to ween itself off of American social media, there's hope for a strong, unified country that's capable of having adult political discourse between people who disagree on finer points. We clearly have some challenges to face (e.g. separatism) in getting there though.
If you're in the U.S. though, things appear very different. While both political parties seem to have been co-opted by billionaire interests, one party has fallen into what can be described as, if we're being charitable, a cult of personality. Unfortunately, that personality has been doing things that are impossible to dismiss as the online hysteria of the other side. Threatening allies with military invasion. High seas piracy. Kidnapping of a foreign leader (admittedly a not very nice one) from his nation. Betraying allies to cozy up to dictators like Putin. Torching global markets with constantly changing tariffs. The list goes on. Then there's what's going on within U.S. borders. If you're in the U.S., the polarization isn't just online. It's something very real. I feel that somebody opposing what ICE is doing in Minnesota and a die-hard Trump supporter really don't have a lot in common and I don't think removing them from online social media will result in civil discourse between the two. There are very real differences there that are coming to a head.
"The U.S. social media landscape is quietly reshaping itself. Between 2020 and 2024, overall platform use slipped, driven by a rise in the population – especially the youngest and oldest – who no longer use social media at all. The old incumbents – Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter/X – have lost ground, while TikTok and Reddit have expanded modestly. The users who remain are slightly older, better educated, and more racially diverse than four years ago.
The political balance of social media has shifted just as noticeably. The once-clear Democratic lean of major platforms has declined. Twitter/X, in particular, has seen a radical flip: a space dominated by Democrats in 2020 is now more Republican-aligned, especially among its most active users and posters. Reddit’s remains a Democraic stronghold, but its liberal edge has softened.
Across platforms, overall political posting has declined, yet its link with affective polarization persists. Those expressing the strongest partisan animus continue to post most frequently, meaning that visible political discourse remains dominated by the most polarized voices. This leads to a distorted representation of politics, that itself can function as a driver of societal polarization [17, 12].
Overall, the data depict a social media ecosystem in slow contraction and segmentation. As casual users disengage while polarized partisans remain highly active, the tone of online political life may grow more conflictual even as participation declines. The digital public sphere is becoming smaller, sharper, and louder: fewer participants, but stronger opinions. What remains online is a politics that feels more divided – not because more people are fighting, but because the fighters are the ones left talking."
Yup, nothing unexpected here.
Been speaking to current college students and recent college grads and this is their general sentiment:
1. "social media" is toxic
They may consume video on YouTube etc but the thought is, even amongst smart kids, that there is no net positive to interacting with people you don't know on social media.
This is somewhat disheartening given how many wonderful people I've met by just "being myself" on Twitter.
2. There is no central social media network anymore
I coached college club sports from the mid-2000s to the early 2010s. It's hard to overstate how EVERYONE in college was on Facebook. We used to have a dedicated forum for one of the teams and the president convinced me to go to Facebook groups b/c:
"Everyone is already on it and it has a notification system that people check b/c it's how they find out about college parties"
A current club president didn't even know what would be the best way to reach students other than flyers and setting up a table at the student center.
(I suggested Reddit and he acknowledged that would probably be one place where you at least knew students from the school might be there and were interested.)
I graduated just before social media took off, but for us everybody was on AOL Instant Messenger. You left it on on your computer all the time, people updated their status messages for all to see and it showed when you were idle.
It was so much better than online by default as we are now.
When I hear that kids now are leaving public social media sites for private chats with a network of friends, which I personally have never used, I am picturing the AOL IM/icq experience.
> “social media" is toxic
I have 14 and 16 year old sons and they, and their friends, have the same feeling about social media. Their preferred way to communicate with friends is an iMessage group.
I remember being in college and seeing the start of forums dedicated to a sport or hobby. That's how college paintball grew b/c first there was a forum just for college teams. Google just accelerated this as it made them easier to find. That then got eclipsed by BIG dedicated forums like PBNation.com (with a dedicated college forum) and then it went to FB.
That "if I just browse around, I'll find the nexus of what I'm into" seems to not be a thing for teenagers these days.
"Everyone is already on it and it has a notification system that people check b/c it's how they find out about college parties"
In that era I recall several US universities career offices gave students the blanket advice that not having a facebook page would raise an employer's eyebrows.
"(I suggested Reddit and he acknowledged that would probably be one place where you at least knew students from the school might be there and were interested.)"
My impression of the college kids I deal with is that they now all use LinkedIn. (I think? It feels weird even saying that.)
After not logging into Twitter for years I logged back in because I wanted to follow some posts regarding some breaking news. Omg the amount of garbage and fake videos and pictures was overwhelming. My guess is bot content is now so realistic and engagement manipulation is so sophisticated from even a few years ago that people will disengage even more.
I think that's the number 1 reason. Bot simply drive away useful content.
I think musk don't fight against bot because it makes the ads sells more (just like in the first days of SEM, where fake traffic and fake clicks was a source of revenue for second tier ad networks). But ultimately he's going to have to do something against it.
That and GP are both plain untrue. The system literally hides useful and/or organic contents. There's also no signs of ads doing better than before.
The current Twitter algorithm funnel users into divided bubbles of couple hundreds users each, and cap numbers and quality metrics of contents that are allowed to be accessed beyond the bubbles, except for spams, which are artificially kept in the global context. Or something like that. To maintain the facade of a unified timeline, the system picks contents that would have been plausibly popular in the absence of it and push it into global contexts, but those are so out of contexts and out of regular system behaviors that it only brews hostility among the users against the system.
But ultimately he's going to have to do something against it.
Musk: "Why, at this rate, I'll have to shut this place down in... let's see... 684,000 years."
He can afford to treat Twitter as a playground for bots, a grooming ground for right-wing radicals, and a cesspool of cut-rate advertising.
Not only can he afford to, investors have been chomping at the bit!
x.com (Twitter) was acquired by xAI. xAI is to be acquired by SpaceX. And rumor has it, SpaceX will IPO for big money soon.
On to Mars! Er, ... To the Moon!
He is just another Lucy, holding just another football.
I was similarly shocked when I logged back in a couple months ago for the first time to read some news stuff. Then I kept going back once a day for a month or two and the posts have started to look more normal.
I can see how this would change me unwillingly over time. Good wake up call to delete my throwaway account again.
Web 2.0 was a mistake fueled by Zuckerberg copycats looking for the same magical user growth hack. Giving users and later bots an entirely free, easy to use platform to focus their agenda onto is a cancer within the network, not a feature. This decade is the result of it. The old fix was filtering via technical chops. Braincells, time, and money was required to have an online opinion. At minimum, your agenda would need to satisfy this large filtering function else it just wouldn't exist. Now that it's entirely free, and the clearly agenda-driven takes can no longer be filtered, the cancer is left to grow until the fuel (advertising, shareholder returns) runs out.
i feel like the underlying thesis of this is maybe wrong. someone closer to the methodology would know better but here is what i see:
(1) Meta and Google have seen their growth slow (not shrink) because they reach virtually the entirety of the online population, especially in the US. Meanwhile their time spent metrics continue to rise.
(2) Reddit is called out as a modest grower but its usage has more than doubled in the US since 2021 from 90M to 170M (according to emarketer).
Doenst mean the conclusions are wrong (i agree with it on polarization) but the growth measures seem to not reflect reality.
Meta and Google time-spent growth is probably people watching Reels and YouTube. They're both becoming Tiktok and most of the accounts on Tiktok when I was on it for a while did not look like people's real name. So with regard to Meta/Google "growth" idk if there's anything too social about that.
sure, call it entertainment rather than social. very fair comment, but that is not a distinction this paper is making. the paper is also talking about tiktok too which falls into the same entertainment category.
I think you are right to suspect the methods and the results. If you look at the paper's github, the python notebook was clearly written by a chatbot (the comments are all in the second person). So what you have here is a monograph, unreviewed, unpublished, based on GPT-level understanding of a survey that might not even apply to this subject.
And worse, it says something smart people wish was true.
> As casual users disengage and polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme.
I think it's the root cause of all our issues (in democratic society).
The root cause of our issues is the economic austerity imposed on the public causing disaffection of the masses. Dividing this public and redirecting this anger against each other and scapegoats leads to what you refer to.
Where is this economic austerity you speak of, and who is imposing it?
From the de-industrialization of a country, the privatization of previously public goods, subsidization of the wealthy by everyone else, the decoupling of national wealth from labor, I mean we can go on and on. And lest you think I’m partisan, both parties are complicit, but this is hardly an American phenomenon.
Starts with a tax on taxes. The richer you are, the less tax you will pay. This is a cost to the entire nation as most people aren't rich and most people require the benefits of taxes.
The social media cycle:
1. Quality brings success
2. Success brings popularity
3. Popularity brings idiots
4. Idiots destroy quality
One small change, replace idiots with monetization.
"L'enfer, c'est les autres" seems to work on a few levels.
> Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
> Subcultures are dead. I plan to write a full obituary soon...
Written in 2015
This is just manufacturing consent for requiring ID and face scans to use social media.
COVID happened, of course the trend will look like this without needing to wring a moral panic out of it.
It would be interesting to see if the harms reported from social media go up or down. I can see people who want to make the case that harms are going up, but if use is coming down it would not be correlated.
I'm sure someone with a book to peddle will eventually say measured harms going up and use coming down just shows how toxic it is now.
Shifts in U.S. Society, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, Polarization
Social media just reflects the state of its users.
Reflects or shape it?
Amplifies it, because it's the easier way to profit.
Cable news was ramping up sensationalism -- including polarization -- before the internet was a household thing.
Social media gave the businesses real-time feedback of how to drive up engagement. So they amplify what keeps people engaged, which means leaning heavily on anger and divisiveness.
SM gives negative value, it is antisocial media and an experiment on human beings no one signed up for.
> Across platforms, political posting remains tightly linked to affective polarization, as the most partisan users are also the most active. As casual users disengage and polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme.
I keep saying to my internet friends that the vast majority of people do not share political opinions online and you have to apply skepticism about what people actually think about political topics when scrolling through social media “takes”. Seems my intuition was not that far off.
This paper came out in October and I read it at the time. It is pretty surprising but it is also totally contradicted by other major surveys, so I am pretty sure it's just flawed. The most peculiar result is the dramatic reduction in reach for YouTube. This guy has YouTube with 60% reach and falling. Pew Americans’ Social Media Use 2025 has YouTube at 84% and rising, and 95% among 18-29 age cohort, which pretty much refutes this paper's core conclusion.
"Overall [social media] platform use slipped ... especially the youngest ... who no longer use social media at all" is the kind of wild claim that requires a much more significant investigation than this author undertook.
The YouTube numbers surprised me the most. I agree with you. I was expecting a rise in viewership.
Social media may have been the biggest disappointment and missed opportunity of the internet era. It’s a literal dumpster fire. People do not get what they want from it. Clearly, the market is not dictated by the customer.
The market is dictated by the customer, but the customer is the ad company, not the user.
I'm a bit confused. What's the alternative outcome? We're talking about humans here, most of which have an IQ below 100! For any social thing, more humans literally means more dumb. The only way around it is silos/migration, which is exactly how it was handled in the early internet, and why this place is reasonable.
Or, is that what was missed? Better silos, with some sort of semi non-community enforcement for the quality of interaction/comment?
> What's the alternative outcome?
Once upon a time, people saw computers (then the Internet) as a way of lifting people up rather than pushing people down. They saw it as a way of equalizing people's access to knowledge, rather than subjecting them to a fire hose of information. They believed that it would encourage discourse to bring people together, rather than dividing people along ideological lines.
Yeah, we were naive.
AI slop or slop adjacent content will be the death knell for social media. Social media got soo big because it provided some pleasure to people and like anything that's plentiful, after a while you get sick of it. AI accelerates the volume of content, and also adds even more low value context into the mixer, and will accelerate how quickly society reaches the boredom phase again.
That + regulation means that social media is on the downward curve now I suspect
Monetization through advertising is urinating in the pool
One factor that I didn't see mentioned is enshittification. The platforms are prioritizing monetization at the expense of everything else. It's making the experience worse and, as a result, people are gradually leaving.
So... people actually converse and have civil debates on social media? I wouldn't know, I'm not on Facebook.
GPTZero flags every single section of this beyond the introduction as 100% likely to be AI-generated.
Looking for recommendations for discussion forums that aren't filled with these slop posts, anyone have any suggestions?
AI detectors are snake oil.
I wonder if our kids will see social media the way we see cable news: a toxic political cesspool that the older generation gets sucked into.
I find the idea of "partisans" eg. affective idiots throwing tantrums over each other's because of some absurd current topic while everybody just leaves quitly somehow little amusing.
Deleting my Facebook account was the best thing I ever did. I did it nearly 10 years ago and never looked back. I don’t miss it or miss out.
Worked in the top 3 here
Seems false to me. Explosive growth in 2020 during Covid was widely recorded and seeming engagement. Flips of X were associated with massive drops in population and bots.
This seems entirely wrong to me
The real issue that a lot of people keep forgetting or ignoring is monetization. This alone is responsible for at least 80% of the damage we have in nowadays internet, not just social media. YouTube channels, Twitter accounts, Twitch streamers, podcasts, you name it, are there only as a business to these "influencers", and naturally the more you progress in time the more there's a need to be extreme to get noticed in this exponentially growing domain. So back in 2013 you could get an audience by making some prank on Vine, but in 2025 you have to pretend you are "exposing Somali frauds" to get the same engagement level, and thus the money and popularity, as pretty much no one will care if you made prank videos in 2025 anymore. There are bots running on Twitter as we speak that are actively shilling and grifting on trendy topics, podcasts paid by sponsors, even on HN especially since AI with these wrappers trying to sell subscriptions or asking you to sign up on their blogs. The list goes on. The problem isn't social media. The problem is the oldest issue in history: money and greed. Everyone is trying to monetize anything, including selling used socks or whatever on OF!
Tangentially, I think that the “excuse” for these platforms that they need to make money enabled a lot of the current dystopian level of ad tracking.
Network effects be damned, we should all be a little more willing to pay to be part of platforms hosting digital communities or at least contribute in some way to the infrastructure.
And if we did, what would be the difference? Sure, there would be no ads on the platform (plenty of sponsored content, though), but there would still be an algorithm. And it would be minimally different to the one that exists today. The current ad driven model doesn't allow paying advertisers to drive the algorithm. Rather it lets you drive the algorithm by your revealed preferences and then allows advertisers to target you based on those preferences and insert their ads in the result, which is much more effective. But if we didn't have the ads, the algorithm remains. The question "what does this user want to see?" is equally as relevant to a company that wants to convince a user to keep paying for their subscription as it is to a company that uses it as an advertising vector.
When your society is structured around "sell yourself or die", and the people with capital enough to call the shots like it that way... This is what you end up with.
The algorithm has not fundamentally changed. There is no secretive or sinister purpose to it. It is simply a highly imperfect predictor of what you want to see. When the algorithm promotes things you don't like it's because there are millions other people with different taste than you who do want to see that content. Certain categories of content grow and fade over time because things like that grow and fade in popularity over time too just as they always have and the algorithm picks up on that. The algorithm is not driving this, it is responding to it. We are in a prison of our own design.
The algorithm is just what the site owners, and their advertising clients, want you to see. If that means you're going to be shown a dozen BEN SHAPIRO DESTROYS COLLEGE STUDENT WITH NO MEDIA TRAINING videos, well, you're going to be shown those damn videos even if you hate it.
It's a predictor of what you'll click on. This correlates somewhat with what you want to see, but they don't care one whit about what you want, and the two don't always line up well.
In short, the problem is ragebait. I might open up some app because I want to see cat videos, but when I'm presented with "Polly McPoliticianface LIES about FLOWERS" I'm likely to click in anger about Polly's nefarious actions. Do this enough and you end up with something that just tries to make you angry all the time.
This is inevitable. Ragebait is noting inherent to social media or feed algorithms. Cable news is a 24/7 feed of ragebait. The feedback you provide to the social media (or cable news) algorithm is whether or not you chose to watch it, not why. This is not in conflict with what you want. If you didn't want to hate watch, then you wouldn't do it. That you want it for negative reasons doesn't take away from the fact that you do, in fact, want it.
are you having trouble with the idea that people might not want what their behavioral profile implies? Right now you clearly seem to be interacting with people posting wrong takes, from your perspective, on hacker news. Would you glad if all the internet reconfigured itself tomorrow such that all you could do was read people being terribly wrong about this particular topic? pages and pages of it. "how happy terminalshort must be" the algorithm thinks, a job well done. Right up until someone is wrong about something else you care about
Nobody else is obligated to do what I want or show me content that I want
"Want" can get tricky. Does a regretful heroin addict want to take heroin? On one level yes, on another level no.
I definitely see a bifurcation amongst the younger people I date. Really limited use, professional use, while some fall into addiction but are functionally just like Millennials in use
Its kind of like treating social media as an addiction that everyone’s uncles “could give up at any time”
I see a parallel to smoking. In one generation everyone did it - at one point thought nothing of it - and in the next generation little kids are like “you know thats bad for you right?” and aren't tempted to use it, looking down on it
I like the trend, even stories are shorter form, I do it now too
In the past, I could go onto Facebook and see what my friends were up to, and share updates with them about what I was doing. It was great for arranging nights out.
Today, it's a dumpster fire, I can't see what anyone is doing, it's just AI videos and engagement bait.
Discord is the replacement for my friends at least.
https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr
and
https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
Change your Facebook bookmark to one of these.
Unfortunately these don't work on mobile browsers
(I do use them on the desktop)
This is intentional. It's really not a good idea to browse any sort of content on your phone. In one way or another, it's always worse for the user:
- worse tracking / privacy
- tilted toward passive consumption / scrolling due to UI and low impulse control threshold
- more vendor dark patterns
- far worse UI experience
- etc ...
Using your phone to consume content is always a bad decision.
I feel like we're all glossing over the whole "pedophile billionaires colluded to throw the United States into chaos" part.