[omeze]

I agree, TikTok is the only platform that has maintained my interest to some degree because of the novelty of the content (built for discovery). But Twitter, FB, etc are the same old boring news cycles (even worse, sometimes reflexive topics like the popularization of The Current Thing meme, which is just a meta-news cycle but a news cycle all the same). I visit a few particular subreddits to keep up with stuff I care about but generally just socialize with my friends privately.

Fwiw, the platforms are aware of this shift (people shifting to preferring private content), and its behind a lot of changes like Instagram’s. But social media as we knew it (big public info dumps) were likely in an “attention bubble” over the past 15 years because of their sheer novelty.

[notacoward]

I feel I have to push back on that a bit. "Novelty of the content" is not the be-all and end-all for everyone. Fine if it is for you, but some people might actually like seeing stuff from people they know on Facebook and that's fine too. (The fact that Facebook drifted away from that is one of its biggest flaws IMO and it's good to see that they're drifting back.) Some people might like following particular subreddits, or particular people on Tumblr, because of a certain non-algorithmic taste in content, and that's fine too. Not everyone wants or should want the same thing from social media. Overgeneralizing from one's own experiences or preferences to the entire rest of the world is a plague. Let's not spread it. Celebrate diversity and choice instead.