I suspect that that what really ate up personal social networking was very simple: private group messaging finally got good enough.
15 years ago, we’d lost touch with old friends and acquaintances because there are a ton of people in our lives that mean something to us but that don’t warrant much 1-to-1 contact through phone calls or messaging.
Myspace and early Facebook reinvigorated those relationships with relaxed, casual networked update blasts, but then iMessage, What’s App, were able to make the same connections more private, more personally shaped, and more collaborative.
So social networks drifted towards public feeds and commercialized feeds, which is what TikTok — as a well-funded latecomer — had the luxury of aiming for directly.
I completely agree. In my view group chats on apps like WhatsApp much more accurately mirror how humans actually communicate in real life. That is to say it's more like a spontaneous conversation rather than social media which is more like a narcissistic advertising board for your life.
My dad frequently shares jokes in real life, some of them I've heard more than once during all these years. When I was younger, late teens, early 20s, I thought them cumbersome, "come on, dad! you've told me that joke countless times", now, when I'm in early 40s, I cherish those retellings of jokes.
> When I was younger, late teens, early 20s, I thought them cumbersome, "come on, dad! you've told me that joke countless times", now, when I'm in early 40s, I cherish those retellings of jokes.
Reminds me of:
Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.
Yep. I think it is useful to have a list of people you know incase you ever need to connect them, which is basically Facebook Messenger.
The blasting life updates at everyone know ever knew part of it though is just so unnatural. It was a novelty for a while but that stage is well over now. Facebook eventually got features to allow people to be more granular about updates but they have never really pushed them.
At one point I would use Skype with friends which was terrible. Discord now though is basically everything I could ever want for group messaging.
I think it's because of a critical mass of users. I can communicate with my parents and my entire circle of friends on WhatsApp, they weren't there 10 years ago.
15 years ago, we’d lost touch with old friends and acquaintances because there are a ton of people in our lives that mean something to us but that don’t warrant much 1-to-1 contact through phone calls or messaging.
Myspace and early Facebook reinvigorated those relationships with relaxed, casual networked update blasts, but then iMessage, What’s App, were able to make the same connections more private, more personally shaped, and more collaborative.
So social networks drifted towards public feeds and commercialized feeds, which is what TikTok — as a well-funded latecomer — had the luxury of aiming for directly.