[einpoklum]

Nitpick:

> * it was the beginnings of social media in the early 2010s*

- IRC + NNTP newsgroups were already popular by 1989.

- Myspace was quite popular by 2004.

- Facebook was popular by... 2006 I guess?

and that's just a few platforms I can mention.

[aikinai]

Your perspective of “popular” is incredibly far off. Popular among people in your circle of socioeconomics and interests is not that same as popular among the general population.

[edejong]

Your position is indeed supported by the data presented here: https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media

[jasonfarnon]

quite the opposite. look at the almost exactly linear growth of the 2 biggest sites, fb and youtube. there is nothing special about the early 2010s, no acceleration in growth.

[jasonfarnon]

sites that myspace and orkut, which were already moribund by 2010, were popular under any normal definition eg alexa ranking. FB had 500mm users and a hollywood movie about it come out by 2010, a year or 2 later it had a billion users. She doesn't know what she's talking about. Sure it got steadily more popular, so what she means is "It was the early 2010s, and social media reached the point that it was replacing all social interactions..."