[evo]

I feel like there’s a natural adoption curve to social media:

1. The growing social media platform balances the needs of two user groups: the consumer’s need for fresh content and the neophyte producer’s need for a slowly ramping trickle of validation. This is possible because the people don’t know how to produce content in the new format yet.

2. The mature social media platform has picked winners. We know who the successful youtubers are, the successful twitch streamers, etc., and they know how to create the optimal media for their platform. At this point we’re maximally satisfying consumer demand, but we’re actively repelling the neophyte producers because the bar is now too high. They form a growing untapped market for the next social media platform.

3. Decay. A competing platform has stolen the limelight by restoring the dynamism of the consumer/producer balance. The successful producers of the platform start flexing out to the new upstart, though they’re unlikely to repeat their successes there, they’re too late to the game and bound to old habits. Chasing feature parity with the new platform does nothing because now you’re just upsetting the existing balance but that’s not suddenly going to pull new people into the game, they’ve already written you off.

[pmontra]

Some social media are like that, others are not. When I read “It’s that I don’t see my actual friend’s posts and they don’t see mine.” I thought that my friends do see my posts and viceversa because we use channels on WhatsApp and Telegram. If all I want is keeping in touch with friends, why should I use media like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok?

[jinushaun]

The original idea is that you can share this same photo to all your friends and family at once. That’s why it’s superior to 1:1 messaging apps.

The problem is you start following strangers which causes the app to transforms itself to promote strangers over friends and family to meet monthly usage goals. It’s a viscous cycle.

[pixl97]

Because in the US almost no one uses WhatsApp and Telegram.

[ProZsolt]

You can use Messenger or iMessage the same way.

[_hypx]

Agreed. I can't help but feel that many current social media platforms are on step 3 right now.