Report: People Are Spending Much Less Time On Social Media (cnbc.com) 151
An anonymous reader writes from a report via CNBC: According to a new study from marketing intelligence firm SimilarWeb, people are spending less time on social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. The company analyzed Android users' daily time spent on these social networks from January to March 2016 with the same period in 2015, which included data from the U.S., UK, Germany, Spain, Australia, India, South Africa, Brazil and Spain. Instagram usage was down 23.7 percent this year, Twitter usage was down 23.4 percent, Snapchat usage was down 15.7 percent, and Facebook usage was down 8 percent. Daily usage was down even more in the U.S. for most of the apps. In the U.S., Instagram usage was down 36.2 percent, Twitter was down 27.9 percent, Snapchat was down 19.2 percent but Facebook only fell 6.7 percent. Current installs for the four big social networks were down nine percent year over year. Meanwhile, Facebook's messaging apps, WhatsApp and Messenger increased their installs by 15 percent and 2 percent respectively.
Data caps and costs (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Data caps and costs (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm... more like burned by time wasted, and annoyed by the implicit social requirements.
Re: (Score:2)
Hmmm... more like burned by time wasted, and annoyed by the implicit social requirements.
In my case, burned by the constantly changing privacy and sharing settings. Decided the best option was to abstain. Don't regret the decision at all.
Re: (Score:2)
Hmmm... more like burned by time wasted, and annoyed by the implicit social requirements.
That's sooooo facebook
Re: (Score:2)
Hmmm... more like burned by time wasted, and annoyed by the implicit social requirements.
It's not cool now that all your parents and relatives are on there constantly posting their crappy "updates" and inviting you to play crappy games.
There's only so much of that a person can sit through before they start drifting away. Facebook? It's over.
Re: (Score:1)
Yes, the entire world has finals week at the same time.
Re:Data caps and costs (Score:5, Insightful)
Burned by the realization that online social is just as bad as f2f social, with the danger of physical violence replaced by being ruined totally and permanently forever.
Social Media is incompatible with Social Justice (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a very important point.
Despite claiming to be against bullying, we've repeatedly seen the Social Justice crowd use shaming and online character attacks in order to bring harm to anyone who dares express an idea that the Social Justice crowd does not agree with.
Much like everything else it touches, Social Justice absolutely destroys the viability and value of Social Media.
The chilling effect that Social Justice has on free thought and free expression means that Social Media sites of any popularity quickly degrade to a politically correct Social Justice "circle-jerk".
Aside from a small number of academics who take Social Justice seriously and the militant leftists who use Social Justice as a means to attack and control others, normal people want nothing to do with such bland, pathetic, useless discussion.
It doesn't surprise me at all that we're seeing people losing interest in Social Media now that the Social Justice crowd has ruined it.
It also doesn't surprise me that we're seeing the decline of Social Media just as we're seeing the rise of President Trump.
Both are caused by the same thing: Social Justice and the negative impact it has on normal people, driving these normal people to change their behavior to try to deflect the wrath of Social Justice.
Re:Social Media is incompatible with Social Justic (Score:4, Insightful)
The inherent rightness of equality and fairness for everyone is a no-brainer. That also implies tolerance and being willing to listen respectfully to one another, two attributes not present in the SJW camp.
Re: (Score:2)
Those terms are subject to a lot of different interpretations, so of which I'm guessing you don't mean.
I'm not arguing against virtues per se, just that the terms you used are perhaps too vague for your intentions.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And *I'd* say guilt, guilt all around. Since when is it sociable or any other effective human virtue to ruin people from behind a screen?
I've been using computer communications since the early 1980's and this trend will not go away: people get online, they feel the power of either distance or anonymity, and they abuse it. Most users will abuse distance or anonymity at least once in their online life, to say things that they wouldn't say IRL or F2F, or to cast calumny on someone and ruin their life with lies
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, the glass combined with the locking doors and movement of the vehicle.
Re: (Score:2)
What if that person were some modern-day Pol Pot, or Hitler, or Stalin? Where ruining their reputation from behind a screen is the only obvious way to save many lives without risking yourself being tortured to death?
Or what if that person were a serial child molester, about whom the parents of his future would-be victims were ignorant?
(Note: I'm just testing the boundarie
Re: (Score:1)
Don't tempt him, sanctimonious bullshit is what SJWs do best.
Re: (Score:1)
Sanctimonious bullshit is what the whackos who call people SJWs do best. Old chickenshit white guys who are terrified of change, inventing some bizarre cant with its own specialized nomenclature. Is SJW supposed to be so similar to saying "Jew"?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You don't see literal nazis backing Sanders or Clinton (with the exception of one particularly transparent false flag attempt); but you do see the klan and the nazis backing Trump. I can only assume that some trump voters are good people, but the vast majority of them are outright, literal racists.
Well, that sounds outright like an abuse of statistics and probabilistic reasoning. And I'm saying that as someone who thinks that Trump is a moron (that, or a brilliant troll).
Re: Social Media is incompatible with Social Just (Score:1)
Well, ggp dropped a clue, referring to false flag operations, but only accrediting that to elements around Clinton.
Pretty much ALL the nazis and clansmen at this point in the US are fringe lunatics with virtually no support from anybody outside their tiny subcultures. It isn't 1933 in Indiana anymore, the brownshirts and clansmen are just a nasty flavor of cosplayers who take themselves too seriously. Nobody else should, and few do.
Re: (Score:2)
And the much-feared anonymity is not really causing the problem. Example: facebook.
Re: (Score:1)
Burned by how many right-wing hotheads that don't even run their memes past Snopes.com before posting. Let's do another study on a non-election year.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I would say that Facebook's apps have lost their charm. It used to be that everyone played Farmville, then Candy Crush. Now, there there are not many people spending cash or asking for invites so they can get their cow over the fence.
The problem is that Facebook can't really sell something to its audience, as its audience are the product, not the customer. It can only sling enough ads, and suck up only a certain amount of data. They also don't have anything else specific to them except being the popular
Re: (Score:1)
Long term, once the advertising bubble hits a wall (i.e. there isn't anything to suck out on users to sell, especially in a recession), social networks will not a viable business model. Instead, what is viable, will be going back to a decentralized ISP model, similar to how E-mail is done.
decentralized ISP model, like USENET? Now that would be sweet, because it solves hordes of issues, especially if you layer such a system on top of TOR to allow direct messaging.
Re: (Score:2)
If one thinks about it, for messages and groups, USENET is ideal, when combined with websites to handle larger binary files. NNTP has quietly worked for decades now, and the only real thing it might need would be having an ISP sign messages just to make spam more difficult.
With E-mail for persistant messages, the Web for one's Wall, web forums or newsgroups for group discussion, XMPP or IRC for messaging, what is the point of a social network when we have existing tech doing the same exact thing for decade
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Leonard Nimoy died - no point in going to Twitter anymore.
people finally realizing their privacy has value (Score:1)
Imagine that!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
You are being censored because your message is unwanted. The overwhelming majority have no patience for your views and opinions. You are welcome to them, just don't expect anyone else too and if you try to express them here, yeah, this is our way of telling you to stop posting hate speech or leave. You are firmly in the wrong on this and you aren't changing anyone's mind.
Re: people finally realizing their privacy has va (Score:4, Insightful)
Your view wasn't suppressed, people can still read it no matter how bigoted it is. You have absolutely every right to state your opinions, and people have absolutely every right to call you a moron for having them. The rating is what the majority of people think of your opinion.
Maybe if your had any evidence to support it apart from people are using social media less implies people are tired of not being racist because you say so, you may have been rated higher.
Your argument makes no sense what so ever, in the first post you say you want to ban other races from social media, then you say censorship is bad, but you want stop other races from making posts. Oh right you probably think other races aren't people. So you should have no problem with them thinking you aren't a person either, and it is OK to kill you. I guess logic isn't your strong suit is it.
In fact since you where modded down implies that most people on slashdot disagree with you, since slashdot moderation is a form voting.
I for one do not use social media, because it is a huge waste of time. If it actually exposed me to more foreign people and their opinions I might use it more.
Re: (Score:2)
Your view wasn't suppressed, people can still read it no matter how bigoted it is. You have absolutely every right to state your opinions, and people have absolutely every right to call you a moron for having them.
They get much butt hurt when others don't agree with them. I haven't seen a post actually deleted from Slashdot since I've been here. So the only thing left is wailing about the mod level.
One of the interesting things about haveing the testicular fortitude to post as at least a pseudonym, is that aside from the free points, you can get email announcements of moderation actions. I always know I'm on to something when I get modded back and forth on some posts. Some times its like a little war zone.
But ev
Re: (Score:1)
I for one do not use social media, because it is a huge waste of time.
He said on /. ;-)
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry I meant social media in which people tell me what, they have done today, and post pictures of cats, or themselves.
Like the ones referred to in the article e.g. Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook. Although slashdot is social media, to me it is different in the fact it is a "news" on which you comment, as opposed to "news" coming from individuals.
Wikipedia is also technically social media, and I use that too, but it is worlds apart from Facebook.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
As I expected, Slashdot's community standards that you call moderation, which is a form of censorship by the masses, has relegated my post to -1. It's a shame that people have a hard time handling the truth and feel the need to try to punish people who speak it. When Facebook exhibits bias in their selection of trending stories, it's widely criticized as a form of censorship. Yet in the endless hypocrisy of Slashdot users, the use of moderation to suppress certain views isn't considered censorship. Neither is a first amendment issue but both are forms of censorship and deserve similar levels of criticism.
Why lookie there - your censored post in all it's glory. Who knew that we had magical powers to dig up things that were censored, therefore not able to be seen.
Your problem such as it is, that you demand agreement, and any time someone disagrees with you, your hurt feelings scream out "CENSORSHIP!"
The intersting part of that is that far right wing kooks, and flaming liberal Social Justice Warriers are identical in this respect. Both consider any disagreement as an affront to their freedom of speech.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
People are just getting bored with it.
For sure. Don't forget folks, that little slide bar at the top of the Lepage, for when the AC's get a little too derpish.
i want to see facebook fold (Score:5, Funny)
Re:i want to see facebook fold (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
I comfort myself with the tree fundamental constants in the internet, Trolls, cats and porno
Feels just like home
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder what is next. I still remember Friendster was a hot place. What about LinkedIn? That has been around way longer than them so far.
Re: (Score:2)
And yet, myspace is still around, having found a pretty good niche for itself as a place musicians go and promote themselves.
Hell, remember when Second Life was supposed to be the be-all and end-all of social media, with everyone falling over themselves to establish presences on Second LIfe? (Heck, Donald Trump is on Second Life and apparently has a campaign there).
Re:i want to see facebook fold (Score:5, Funny)
It would be funny if Zuckerberg was wandering around with his "End Of Data" sign hanging from his neck, and all people would do in response is to walk past him with their thumbs-up sticking out. Or just say yell "LIKE!" at him. Or hand him pictures of their cats/babies/dogs/concerts/bathrooms.
Re: i want to see facebook fold (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Eh, I'd be amazed if he hadn't diversified billions away from Facebook by this point. So, lose his mind, maybe. But wandering the streets... probably not.
Won't happen (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
What makes somebody a member of the "ruling class"? My definition is somebody who runs powerful institutions like banks, big businesses, and government. Most Silicon Valley founders do not come from families like that.
Zuck was born to a dentist and a psychiatrist. Craig Newmark (from Craigslist) was born to an insurance salesman. Sergey Brin (Google cofounder) was born to a math professor and researcher. His cofounder, Larry Page, was born to teachers. Elon Musk was born to a model and an engineer.
They may
There's one exception to the rule (Score:2)
It's not an absolute (Score:2)
It's a statistical rule, not an absolute. Individual examples are useless, it's all in the numbers.
Second, even if there was a 100% turnover in the circle of billionaires, what would that change? Nothing! It would still be just es exclusive and heavily luck-based.
"All vs. Any": *Anyone* can become a millionaire in the lottery, but what does that doe for *everyone*?
SM was just a fad? (Score:1)
And nothing of value was lost...
Re: (Score:2)
.. he said on a discussion site that rates your comments.
Don't get any ideas (Score:2, Interesting)
This has nothing to do with the FUD that's being spread about alleged privacy invasions. It's more likely that the change in how stories are presented in news feeds and, in some cases, the amount of spam drive down the amount of time people spend on social media. Also, after awhile, the appeal of social media networks, like anything else, will wear off. People just aren't as interested in using social media now than they were.
Re: (Score:2)
must be new here
Like all fashions (Score:1)
Well, it was just a matter of time to get this kind of trending, after all, the social media it's just another form of fashion.
And the content was still (Score:1)
devoid of all meaningful value.
Group chat is killing the social star (Score:5, Interesting)
Privacy is a bitch, with HHRR matching public Facebook profiles to CVs. Nobody wants to try to keep up with the latest tweaks to the policy settings.
Adverts also take a considerable portion of the screen, something you do not have on a mobile phone. Aand to make things worse, FB introduced a new policy of not showing all of your posts to your followers. Now, if you are a paying customer, that is another story.
I have not hear if any IM application that has these two issues. Well, many apps might share instantaneous information like location, but not your posts with strangers.
probably lots of reasons for that. (Score:2, Insightful)
It is not new anymore.
People realize it is a sinkhole for their time.
There is a limit to how long people can delude themselves into believing they have so many 'friends'.
v1 was great. v2 tries to be more, but is isn't.
Ever more demanding of personal data.
It is not about contact between people anymore. It is 'celebrity' accounts managed by agencies, corporate accounts managed by Image consultants and those awful web-care teams.
Everyone is truing to sell either some goods or themselves.
etc, etc
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm. This just does not match my social media usage pattern at all. I realize it's mostly a sinkhole for time, but sometimes you just wanna blow off steam and goof around with friends who can't be in the same room as you. I really do know pretty much everybody in my friends list (though I see them IRL to more or less degree). I don't follow any celebrities, I don't "like" pages, I pretty much ignore all the event notices. I use an ad blocker on my PC and it still seems to work pretty well.
I guess it's no wo
Hype curve has peaked (Score:3)
Like newspapers, tv and other media sources, "social media" will slowly dilute while the kids will find something newer and shinier to waste their time on (probably also labelled social media, but will actually be something other than FB and Twitter).
Re: Hype curve has peaked (Score:1)
Im expecting IRC to make a comeback anytime now.
Re: (Score:1)
IRC never went anywhere, it's still here and efnet is still dying.
Re: (Score:2)
Old folks are getting in to it now to act hip.
My broadcasts her life on FB and has zero clue regarding how much they're using her.
Idiocracy.
Re: (Score:2)
The kids are mostly on SnapChat now. SnapChat solves the problem of having something you posted 5 years ago come back to haunt you. I'm glad to see a younger generation starting to care about privacy again.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but the social consensus is that, if you do that, you're the one in the wrong, not the person pictured. And that's all the difference in the world.
Plus, that sort of thing is unlikely to surface when an employer 10 years from now googles your name. You're college drunken revelry won't follow you.
Maybe there is a life cycle to these services (Score:3)
Arguably these mega-networks have killed off many specialized community boards and once-thriving discussion groups. Perhaps some of them will make a comeback, safely outside of the constant fake stimuli that could drive anyone to ADD by being subjected to the never-ending barrage of unwanted information, "The Assault Of Status Updates"?
Other more likely viewpoint: I personally doubt the above; more probably and since there are a finite number of people on the planet, and given their massive sizes, it's just that the statistics indicate that they are slowly starting to run out of new customers.
Re:Maybe there is a life cycle to these services (Score:5, Insightful)
It was actually more interesting when it was random narcissistic comments about the minutiae of people's lives.
Facebook made it too easy to share and reshare clickbait and ideological crap. People stopped being even remotely clever and turned it into a recycle bin of garbage data.
Maybe (Score:2)
correlated with disrespect? (Score:2)
i would be interested in seeing how this decrease correlates with the dirty tricks that sites pull and the level of bullshit/advertisements people are exposed to or shunned for blocking. i suspect a strong correlation between disrespecting your members and people spending less time using your service.
This surprises who? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Meh, I'm a 103 year old Afghani woman according to my facebook.
It's like World of Warcraft (Score:5, Interesting)
I never got into it, but I do know a bunch of people who poured way more than a healthy amount of time into World of Warcraft when it was cool in the late 2000s. Granted, there's still a whole cadre of totally hardcore players out there, but that number is way down. Not surprisingly the same thing is happening with social media - people are getting tired of the new toy and want their lives back. I think more people realize they're being tracked and advertised to, the useful-to-crap ratio is going down, and maybe just maybe people are getting tired of staring at their phones all day long. So kind of like WoW...lots of people figured out there was little point to keep grinding and leveling up characters in a world that doesn't really exist.
I don't really want to see Dotcom Bubble 2.0 bust the same way 1.0 did, but I do feel it's getting toward that time. I just hope it'll go slower and not take so much of a toll. Hopefully it'll happen soon and some of the idiotic unicorn VC money can get poured into something useful that isn't just "X service on your phone" instead. Not looking forward to the "AngularJS Engineers" and "Cloud Infrastructure Architects" who will no doubt be flooding the job marketing like the "HTML Programmers" did last time.
This is why... (Score:2)
Facebook bought Oculus. Zuckerberg saw this coming and knew he needed to diversify.
Re: This is why... (Score:1)
Or the Zuck saw Oculus as a life vest to snatch and hold onto to keep afloat in the big waves of irrelevancy he found his little world sinking in.
Shame when that happens and a rich fuck ruins something that seemed promising.
Election Spam (Score:1)
Everyone is missing that its an election cycle in the US with a lot of vitriol between the left and right sides. It's why im not on FB much anymore.
The growing Facebook hacking problem (Score:2)
I only use my Facebook account for commenting on organization pages and communicating with a few people who don't use email, and I'm thinking of deleting my account and abandoning it completely.
Every few weeks, I get that flurry of anguished messages from my FB friends that means my page has been cloned again. My friends start getting ads and invitations for various kinds of scammery. There is a simple process for reporting clone pages to management, but a few weeks later, it happens again. Cloning seems to
But what about the actual websites? (Score:2)
Go do this (Score:2)
My usage is the same (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Is anyone surprised? (Score:3)
Any computer expert in the whole world will tell you that he has a hard time seeing the point in "social media" "services" we see today and still constantly popping up left, right and center. MySpace, Twitter, Periscope, Meerkat, Facebook, ... etc. All of these are glorified proprietary online dependant versions of IRC, ICQ, Usenet, Fidonet and so forth and to me it's of no surprise that their utilisation is dimishing.
In recent years there was a lot of talk about building an open source facebook killer. All that would need is a redo of Email. If E-Mail weren't so bad and outdated, Facebook wouldn't stand a chance.
Same goes for messaging. Microblogging Twitter style is beyond pointless in my book. The stuff it tries to cover had already been done with RSS and faded into the background as Twitter came on to the market. I remember looking into Twitter back when it started, ditching it after 3 minutes and never using it again. It may have been neat as a conclusion of the "unified messaging" craze back in 2001, with the possiblity to relay messages over SMS for no costs - just as that was the only mass-relyable way to do mobile message broadcasting, but ever since I consider Twitter to be a silly joke and cannot believe how anybody can seriously percieve it as useful.
I do see the point in blogs and I see the point in zero-fuss encrypted cross-plattform messaging with a useful browser account access (Jabber, Web IRC) just as I see a point in communities like Slashdot. But those are things that very long since have been perfected, are as secure as it gets with todays protocols and cost next to nothing to set up and run without some megacorp watching your every move.
I personally hope that all these proprietary protocols for catpictures, foodporn, collective self-indulgeance, vanity and pretensciousness die if a fire as they get replaced by sophisticated FOSS alternatives and we all can finally get on with building a better society, fixing the environment or healing cancer or something.
My 2 cents.
What's wrong with email? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
So, what you're saying is that computer experts have a hard time understanding what non-computer-experts see in easy-to-use systems that combine numerous facilities into an integrated whole?
Facebook is considerably more than an email system. It has relatively easy friend location. I've found friends and relatives on Facebook that I wouldn't have found email addresses to. Heck, it allows me to get around without knowing people's email addresses at all. It allows wide broadcasts. It has persistence, w
I heard that FB internally estimates (Score:2)
I heard that FB internally estimates that any given social service has 7 years of usable life. So they always look for the next thing that they could move their enormous horde of users to. So far the next thing seems to be group chat. I'm sure they'll come up with something â" there's way too much money riding on this
android users (Score:2)
nobody cares what poor people do with their phones
Re: (Score:2)
Why just Android? (Score:2)
...and how exactly are they monitoring the apps' usage?
Gonna go against the grain. And then quote jwz (Score:1)