[lenderton]

From what I can tell, highschooler and younger, there's almost a complete abandonment of mainstream social media in favor of self-curated chats like Discord, and it revolves heavily around gaming. A sort of hearkening to the AIM days, which is naturally what you'd expect from individuals who socialize in friendgroups that are developed beyond "work drinking buddies", lol.

But in general, without being too doom-and-gloom about it, and perhaps this is because of the election going on, it does feel like there is a greater trend going on of internet users stepping away from social media.

There's no easy way to divert this weariness back to specialized forums a la the 00's or 90's, though, which is probably where everything should be for the internet to remain useful. This is exacerbated by the fact that 85% or so of internet traffic is phones, resulting in discussions being comprised of back-and-forth thumbtap-quality posts that nobody (including the senders) really seems to care about. It's also exacerbated by the fact that search engines cannot seem to index traditional message boards or wordpresses etc. properly; there are too many of them nowadays to navigate (most being identical templates like vbulletin).

[nunodonato]

Crazy idea: use AI to prevent users from submitting useless comments. Also throttle users submissions to incentivize longer, more thoughtful, posts

[mannymanman]

Do you have any sources to read/learn more about this phenomenon? Would be great to understand why

[lenderton]

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/teens-and-so...

https://influencermarketinghub.com/discord-stats/

Average age is 16 on Discord, average time spent per day is less than 10 minutes, so it's being used as a messaging service (but connected to a greater gaming-type ecosystem). 90% of servers are less than 15 members. 30% of teens use it, which is significantly higher than the rest of the population.

I don't really have anything concrete to point to for my general feeling about American society slowly moving into a post-social media phase. Tiktok falling into relative unuse with most Americans except Hispanics is probably a main point of data. There hasn't been anything emerging to replace it besides (according to studies) the more cordial YouTube, which you cannot really say is a social media site. It is the most widely used of all of them, though, something like 94% penetration.