Abandon Social Media.

On Monday, July 3rd, 2023 at 12:35 pm, Nitrocosm said:

To claim there are no real humans producing Internet content would be laughably false. I will say that at least 60% is at least algorithmically-based and a large portion of that is either generated with A.I. or duplicated from other sites (redundant). I expect the proportion of A.I. content to human-generated content to increase rapidly in the next few years.

As for inflammatory and divisive content by design, it's self-evident but strongly aided by an amplification effect supplied by human users. Escalation tends to happen in emotionally-driven arguments.

Twitter will die. I give it two years. The site will continue to be mismanaged to the point of catastrophic failure.

Facebook will die. It's fallen into disuse already and won't be financially stable due to how many users have been lost. Interest has simply waned. Instagram will probably be fine for a long while.

YouTube is at risk, believe it or not. It's very expensive to run and not enough people are buying their premium service and the ads drive many to use ad blockers, which is financially devastating. Their venture capital may have dried up.

The concept of "social media marketing" is about to crumble. It will just need a decent compilation of statistics regarding sales conversion rates on these sites to seal its fate. Most people don't use social media to shop for things. They use it out of boredom. It's like a habit - a "default" activity people use to distract themselves from unpleasant thoughts or activities or simply when there is nothing else to do. It's all about to shift as people re-discover hobbies and gaming - or just going outside.

This is just my experience but almost everything on social media is "trash content". Either it's spam, personal venting, or people repeating things they've been told to believe by someone else. It isn't useful nor is it entertaining.

On Monday, July 3rd, 2023 at 3:56 pm, Lexica said:

Google / Alphabet, Inc. is in serious financial trouble from the looks of things. When they started shutting down Google Domains (incidentally, I was finally able to move this site off of Google Domains since the 60-day restriction was over today) they lost a LOT of user trust and confidence. Since they shut down services, even paid ones, upon which their users and customers rely, many (including myself) are extremely reluctant to rely on them for anything.

Apparently, money is now much more expensive to borrow and that created a major squeeze on operating capital for these big tech firms that have, for many years, operated very inefficiently. The economy has changed and that time has come to an end. This may very well hasten the demise of a lot of these companies.

As for Twitter, it's completely mismanaged. I think Elon Musk is in a total panic and has no clue as to how Twitter can be made profitable. At this rate, I give Twitter less than a year!

From what I've seen, a lot of people find Twitter to be "chaotic". That probably won't be what leads to its demise because not that many people seem to leave for that reason. They mention it on the platform but continue to use it. Twitter has been chaotic (lot of arguing) for a long time. Some people enjoy that aspect of it.

I see more of a general "fatigue" setting in.

Decentralization will probably be a major theme in terms of web sites over the next few years. Big tech and social media are crumbling (based on what I see in the news).

Small sites and niche forums might just make a comeback after all!

On Monday, July 3rd, 2023 at 3:56 pm, Lexica said:

I think aggressive advertising on social media may have created a doom spiral there. The advertising made people use adblockers, which made social media come up with even more aggressive advertising (e.g. on FB, these days, I've been told, you have to skim through large piles of ads before you see content from your acquaintances), which causes people to use it even less.