Over 50 per cent of users may shun social media by 2025 as misinformation, toxicity grow
www.newindianexpress.com
A Gartner survey found that 53 per cent of consumers believe the current state of social media has decayed compared to either the prior year or five years ago.

Over 50 per cent of users may shun social media by 2025 as misinformation, toxicity grow::A Gartner survey found that 53 per cent of consumers believe the current state of social media has decayed compared to either the prior year or five years ago.

      • modifierEnglish
        35·
        6 months ago

        We are all DigitalFrank on this blessed day.

        This reminds me of an interesting dynamic I’ve witness this holiday season.

        Now, to set the stage, most of my extended family and friends know well that I don’t do social media. I left Twitter way back when it was just becoming necessary to grapple with the idea of the blue check, and Trump was still just some reality TV guy with cartoon hair the last time I made a Facebook post. I never got Instagram, TikTok, or any of those 2nd run of social media apps.

        Everyone who knows me knows this about me. But this year when I talk about actually deleting my Facebook, people are aghast. No one is bothered that I haven’t posted there in a decade, but me actually deleting my account is something more akin to actual death to a lot of these people. I don’t get it.

      • cyberpunk007@lemmy.worldEnglish
        24·
        6 months ago

        True, whenever I see “social media” brought up though I’m always picturing Facebook, Twitter, Myspace. This and reddit and forums definitely are a form of though. Even bbs back in the day.

        I tend to divide them based on how much they want to manipulate and sell me shit. Also how much of my personal info they require.

  • qooqie@lemmy.worldEnglish
    713·
    6 months ago

    I think that number will grow as Twitter continues to decay. People clinging to the dead corpse is pretty cringe when it comes to Twitter.

    Facebook is dead already I feel and most people I know using it are only in there for old people who can’t use anything else or for the marketplace. Under the same umbrella, instagram is dead unless you’re selling something.

    Forums like Reddit and lemmy I think will last the longest, but even then when the toxicity grows and transfers over from Reddit to here I probably will stop using it as much

    Also I say dead as in what it originally was has been lost in the wake of “influencers” and companies

    • RobotToaster@mander.xyzEnglish
      301·
      6 months ago

      It’s a shame, facebook used to be great for local stuff, but the algorithm seems to have killed that.

      Tried nextdoor but it’s mostly Karens.

      • wheeldawg@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        14·
        6 months ago

        I got next door, but only care about it as far as looking out for potential missing pets. I live in a fairly red area, and everyone is middle-aged on there, and everything I saw was super conservative people, and some hate for anything mentioning the possibility of non straight people.

        • Socsa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          12·
          6 months ago

          Even in my very very blue area nextdoor is almost entirely crime posting and people posting doorbell cams of brown people on the sidewalk. It’s a complete wasteland.

        • RobotToaster@mander.xyzEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          Pro tip, if there aren’t many “leads” (what nextdoor calls mods) in your area you can usually just e-mail them to volunteer and they will make you one.

        • wheeldawg@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          I’m just now reviewing ancient comments and replies of mine. If you haven’t found out already, think of a site that’s similar to Facebook, but instead of making “friends” as the big draw, it’s all about your neighborhood and surrounding neighborhoods. So it’s filled with people asking about where to find “cheap reliable (insert service here like landscaping, drywalling, etc)”, suspicious people seen around the place which another commenter mentioned, so given the very white, very Karen-like audience is probably just a notice that some racial minority person was here. Like I mentioned, lost pets are a common post, there was recent 2 different companies going around digging fiber lines for Internet service, and then the predictable “has anyone switched, how do you like it?” type posts that follow.

          A lot of these people don’t know each other, so their only common ground seems, at least where I am, to be mostly just where they physically live, and the fact that they all love Trump.

    • MountainGoat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      6 months ago

      Facebook, for me and the people I know, has become a message board where I know all the players. I don’t friend people from school or work, but instead people from conventions and hobbies, of which Facebook groups I also belong to and interact.

      • qooqie@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        6 months ago

        You can directly on it, but a lot of people push links to their own sites. Onlyfans and workout stuff seems to be everywhere

    • Star@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      Under the same umbrella, instagram is dead unless you’re selling something.

      Instagram is far from dead. It is quite popular in South Asia and actually the social media of choice for many teens.

  • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
    66·
    6 months ago

    By 2025 it will all be chatbots posting disinformation for the enjoyment of other bots, while advertising bots pay for it.

  • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
    625·
    6 months ago

    let all social media die in flames.

    its nothing but a cancer on society and counts among the worst ills to befall mankind.

      • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
        274·
        6 months ago

        Because Lemmy is a forum, not social media.

        Forums are a thing from the archaic ages before you kids thought phones were the only way to be online. 👴

        • bcgm3@lemmy.worldEnglish
          121·
          6 months ago

          For what it’s worth, I agree with you about Lemmy (and Reddit) not really qualifying as “social media.” I think of it more as a spectrum than a binary value…

          • Old school forums were very specific to a single topic (though most forums I used did have an “Off Topic” board), and only lightly social – I never knew any forum user outside of their respective forum, and certainly not in real life.
          • On the opposite end, Facebook/Insta/TikTok are very social – there’s a lot of expectation that you’ll be interacting with people that you know personally – and they are more “agnostic” (?) of any one particular topic.
          • Reddit and Lemmy land somewhere in between those two extremes, in terms of both the social and topical aspects. But neither cross the line into “social media,” at least not for me and my personal definition of the term.

          And just to split hairs even a little more, I think Lemmy is more palatable* than Reddit for me, by virtue of the smaller (and generally more tech-savvy) user base.

          E: Spelling (thank you, WelcomeBear!)

          • WelcomeBear@lemmy.worldEnglish
            6·
            6 months ago

            I just wanted to mention that I got a chuckle out of the word “pallettable” because it’s not quite right but I totally see how you got there. I thought you might like to know that the word is “palatable.”
            A palette is the board that a painter uses to hold paint, a pallet is something you pick up with a forklift and a palate is the roof of your mouth/your tasting skill. So something that’s pallettable sounds like something tasty that you’d smear all over a giant board and forklift onto a truck.
            Fucking English, lol

        • danielbln@lemmy.worldEnglish
          106·
          6 months ago

          You kids, ha. I’m hitting 40 soon, and Lemmy is absolutely as much social media as Reddit is, just different scale and technological underpinning. Don’t be high and mighty about it, you can easily burn as much time scrolling through Lemmy communities.

        • Honytawk@lemmy.zipEnglish
          52·
          6 months ago

          Lemmy is a media that allows you to be social.

          Forums are also social media.

            • wolfshadowheart@slrpnk.netEnglish
              41·
              6 months ago

              They are social, a busy bar bathroom? You’ll make a friend for life in there. There’s little media though. Unless they have TVs inside the bathroom/stalls, and I wouldn’t really count music since the focus isn’t the music but doing your business.

        • fosforus@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          2·
          6 months ago

          Stop lying to yourself. Lemmy has the exact same problems as other social media. Just because the overall cost is lower due to people developing and maintaining for free doesn’t it make any less toxic. Granted, “the algorithm” is missing here, which makes it better, but not significantly.

        • DrSteveBrule@mander.xyzEnglish
          21·
          6 months ago

          That’s like saying Twitter isn’t social media because its a microblog. Lemmy is definitely social media. We have profiles, can add each other as friends, send private messages, etc. It’s not structured the same as most other social media websites, but it is social media

        • crackajack@reddthat.comEnglish
          58·
          6 months ago

          No matter how much you rationalise it, forum is still a social media. You are still socialising after all-- in a medium of communication. You can still post pictures in forums if you want, but modern social platforms just have better UI and convenience to post videos and photos than older forums.

      • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        222·
        6 months ago

        You know, when I first started to become active on Internet communities as a preteen in the early-to-mid-2000s, I don’t think anyone really used the term “social media” to describe them. The term may have existed already, but I didn’t think of myself as a user of “social media” at all at the time.

        At the time we had web forums run on software like phpBB. Later I discovered wikis and blogs. I have no idea when people started to insist on using the strange term “social media” which may or may not include all those things. Is Reddit/Lemmy “social media”? It certainly differs from most other “social media” in significant ways: we mostly don’t use our real names, we don’t have followers, we mainly communicate with random strangers rather than the people we know IRL. This is a lot more similar to traditional web forums than to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X/Mastodon, etc.

        • MaximilianKohler@lemmy.worldEnglish
          57·
          6 months ago

          It is still very similar. Reddit and Lemmy are now primarily fluff content. I’ve had to block dozens of fluff subs on Lemmy. And misinformation and toxic/unintelligent users are a problem here too.

      • bh11235@infosec.pubEnglish
        202·
        6 months ago

        Think of this like one of those steam reviews: 4,000 hours played, do not recommend

    • Socsa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      22·
      6 months ago

      That’s probably because you don’t have any deplorable personality traits which can only be validated by other assholes on the Internet.

    • cyberpunk007@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      6 months ago

      It’s a race for external validation and bragging and painting a false image of your life, and for you to keep in touch with anyone you ever met that you never will keep in touch with. If you take a few steps back you see how truly useless it is, unless, of course, you’re meta or Microsoft or whoever is just siphoning all your valuable data and selling you shit that you don’t need by manipulating you.

    • hansl@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      6 months ago

      Even more so when some of my friends are already using AI to fake some of their shares. Good thing I have good friends who clearly didn’t spend their last vacation having dumplings with Jinping or Poutine with Putin. But there is a blurred line there where I’m not sure my colleague who didn’t take a vacation in the last six months at work went cave diving. I’m waiting for those reports, Brian!!

  • AlexWIWA@lemmy.mlEnglish
    42·
    6 months ago

    I wish I could retroactively go back and never use Facebook. That site ruined my life for several years

    • Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.worldEnglish
      261·
      6 months ago

      It debuted when I was living in Japan and when I got back everyone was using it and I had just finished blogging my travels and was like… Nah, doing this for my regular everyday life is way too much to bother with. Facebook continued to became a major thorn in my side for years as every social event under the sun was scheduled through the fucking thing so I missed a bunch of invites because I basically refused to play ball.

      It is odd after so long to be the envy of people after a solid decade and a half of being cursed by them for not being on Facebook.

  • Got_Bent@lemmy.worldEnglish
    442·
    6 months ago

    To the comments of old people on Facebook - I’m fifty one years old. I deactivated but did not delete my Facebook account five years ago.

    This past fall, one of our high school classmates finally succumbed to his addictions. He and I were inseparable back in the day to the extent that if anybody thought of one of us, they automatically thought of the other.

    So I felt compelled to say a few words. I reactivated my account, and said my words. I was shocked at the number of replies I got because I couldn’t believe that many people were still using the platform. I figured everybody would have left by now.

    I left my post up for a week, then deactivated my account again.

    Ten years ago, Facebook was a great way to meet women for people in my age group. Unfortunately, when there’s a contentious breakup and you’ve got hundreds of mutual friends, it could and did turn into a social hell scape. That’s what got me to leave. I think I got out before the rampant disinformation really got going. For this, I am grateful. (Coda to this topic: Ladies, seriously, what drives you to aggressively slide into my DMs when you see I’ve recently been through a horrible breakup? Why would you think this is a good time to pursue me? This happened with several people. I did not understand it and found it horribly off-putting.)

    Unfortunately, without social media, I’ve found it difficult to stay in touch with friends who live far away. But that little downside is not enough for me to go back.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.worldEnglish
    422·
    6 months ago

    Wrong 50%, unfortunately.

    That really doesn’t come out right, does it?

    Just the people with some level of critical thinking will leave, the ones festering in fringe and conspiracy thought patterns will remain, and likely pull more in like them.

  • theyoyomaster@lemmy.worldEnglish
    402·
    6 months ago

    When it changed from “Social Media” to “Social Media” it really went to shit. That and when Google’s new board decided “don’t be evil” was no longer compatible with their goals. Yeah, the internet used to be great…

  • kowcop@aussie.zoneEnglish
    36·
    6 months ago

    I feel it has already happened… people check social media, but I hardly see any created content anymore (status updates etc)… just reposted stuff from gullible people that they thought was magic but was just AI created rubbish.

    The only thing I use social media for is purchasing items from hobby groups and I can’t see that being replicated anywhere anytime soon as eBay is full of fake rubbish

    • triclops6English
      101·
      6 months ago

      Fountain pen user here, and same, I’m in, I browse, I’m out.

      Dodging aunt Mabel’s anti vax bullshit like the matrix

      • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        6 months ago

        Reddit for me: I haven’t yet gotten rid of my account, mostly because r/ukraine requires an account to browse (on phone), but since fuck spez, I refuse to contribute. Obligatory Fuck spez.

  • eronth@lemmy.worldEnglish
    371·
    6 months ago

    I’m somewhat surprised to hear it’d be as high as 50%. Pleased, but surprised.

  • rayyy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    33·
    6 months ago

    Social media today has devolved into a hard-up drunk at closing time telling the drunk woman next to him that she is beautiful and really a great lady.

      • No1@aussie.zoneEnglish
        81·
        6 months ago

        Closing time is the end of the night when everyone is drunk. The guy is lying telling the lady she’s beautiful and a great lady only because he’s desperate and this is his only chance for sex.

        In other words, Facebook etc is the last refuge for sad and desperate people to post lies.

        Of course, lemmy would never be like that …

  • CrowAirbrush@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    6 months ago

    I’m probably leaving for the fact it’s just ads.

    Actual paid for ads, sponsorship ads, giveaway ads to grow, influencer ads, comment ads to grow their reach.

    It’s just one big advertisement.

  • JustinAngel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    30·
    6 months ago

    “Over 50 per cent of heroin addicts will stop using by 2025 as negative, obvious consequences grow”