[swsieber]

Somewhere between a third and a half of all the people on Earth see enough value in social networks to have signed up for one at some point.

Somewhere between a third and a half of all the people on Earth use a product designed to addict them.

I agree in general though - they can be useful, and they can fill a real purpose.

[mayniac]

I think a better argument is that between a third and a half of all people on Earth see enough value in some elements of social networks to sign up for them.

A lot of people I know only use Facebook for messenger. Some only use it for private groups. Some for events. Some for the newsfeed. Those people use twitter, instagram, whatsapp, snapchat, or discord for the features they don't use on Facebook.

IMO instead of looking for a service which could distribute the back-end servers of a single social network we should be encouraging the distribution of features, and make sure they can interact with each other smoothly.

[onion2k]

Somewhere between a third and a half of all the people on Earth see enough value in social networks to have signed up for one at some point.

I was referring to daily- and monthly-active-users numbers. That's people who sign in and interact with their accounts at least once a day or a month respectively. Those are the important numbers, and they're a fairly accurate representative of the number of people who currently use social media. I think it's fair to say people who stop seeing any positive value in their accounts stop being monthly active users.