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Report: People Are Spending Much Less Time On Social Media (cnbc.com)

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.

24 of 151 comments (clear)

  1. Data caps and costs by bobsta22 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Burned by data costs, not playing anymore.

    --
    Gritty.
    1. Re:Data caps and costs by heteromonomer · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Hmmm... more like burned by time wasted, and annoyed by the implicit social requirements.

    2. Re:Data caps and costs by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 4, 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.

    3. Re:Data caps and costs by scatbomb · · 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.

  2. i want to see facebook fold by FudRucker · · Score: 5, Funny

    and become a internet backwater that almost nobody visits anymore, and zuckerberg have a breakdown and lose his mind and starts wandering the streets with a cardboard sign with some silly religious end times comment on it

    --
    Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
    1. Re:i want to see facebook fold by slazzy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm sure most of us will live to see Facebook be the next myspace. By that time we'll all be onto something else.

      --
      Website Just Down For Me? Find out
    2. Re:i want to see facebook fold by eyenot · · 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.

      --
      "Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
  3. Don't get any ideas by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  4. Group chat is killing the social star by sanf780 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As far as I know, group chat does not need privacy options and there is no adverts anywhere to be seen.
    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.

  5. probably lots of reasons for that. by Anonymous Coward · · 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

  6. Hype curve has peaked by Gussington · · Score: 2

    "Social Media" was new and interesting 5-10 years ago, now just like every other type of media it's just mostly noise and ads, so the novelty of having other's opinions rammed down your throat is wearing off.
    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).

  7. Re:people finally realizing their privacy has valu by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 2

    People are just getting bored with it.

  8. Maybe there is a life cycle to these services by zuki · · Score: 2

    One viewpoint: The novelty of it was intoxicating for a good bit, but truthfully why would we keep spending inordinate amounts of time lavishing over other people's mundane, narcissistic and self-referential postings is a good question; that is, outside of the type who religiously buys gossip magazine at the supermarket checkout counter?

    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.

    1. Re:Maybe there is a life cycle to these services by swb · · Score: 4, 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.

  9. Social Media is incompatible with Social Justice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    with the danger of physical violence replaced by being ruined totally and permanently forever

    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.

  10. This surprises who? by U8MyData · · Score: 4, Insightful

    With all of the security, personal, and business issues who is surprised? I've seen this coming for awhile. According to FB I live way down under and it's not Australia. Social Media can kiss my... I recall being criticized by a potential employer for having a big NULL when it comes to my social media behavior. That disturbed me and even led me to a more anti-social media stance. It has all been hijacked by commercial interests.

  11. Re:Social Media is incompatible with Social Justic by chipschap · · Score: 3, 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.

  12. It's like World of Warcraft by ErichTheRed · · Score: 4, 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.

  13. Re:Social Media is incompatible with Social Justic by eyenot · · Score: 2, 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 and undue social scorn.

    Well in the 1980's we had what, maybe a dozen new modem users in a given town, in a year. Outside of business and academic circles, you could expect very few new "faces" on local access BBS's. With the internet, it's more matched to the rate of population growth. So while you could study and isolate this abusive phenomenon fairly easily in the 1980's, from the 90's onward it just becomes the new normalcy.

    So SJW's are nothing more than the flamer crowd from the BBS scene, ruining message bases with arguments that nobody is looking for. As flamers, they're the most likely ones to pull crazy feats of logical fallacy and outright lies in order to vent whatever angst is driving them.

    Now stir in a nice whipped cap of the weird pseudo-Taoist Reality Bites/Friends type people (Wired readers) who believe that the internet is "empowering" and that information has some kind of mystic energy, inject this putrid newage mixture into the veinous growth of the internet and you've got your modern SJW (social junkie waif).

    The other big difference from the 1980's is video. Video used to be expensive and very time consuming to put onto your computer, let alone to transmit to another computer. These days we can thank Youtube for making everyone believe their opinion is utterly fucking important just by virtue of the inflated egos and self-opinions of everybody else *around them*, all because pop culture says that if you have an image then you're important -- and now everybody's dog and baby has an image, shit even peoples' dead birds in their driveways have an image, now.

    --
    "Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
  14. Re: people finally realizing their privacy has va by ewibble · · Score: 3, 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.

  15. Re:Social Media is incompatible with Social Justic by LunaticTippy · · Score: 2

    People don't need a computer to turn into selfish assholes. Many of them successfully turn behind the wheel of a car. I suppose the glass makes them feel anonymous enough to unleash their true selves.

    --
    Man, you really need that seminar!
  16. Won't happen by rsilvergun · · Score: 5, Informative

    Zuck was born a member of the ruling class. It's one of those things that seldom gets brought up. Most of the .com success stories come from guys and gals who had rich parents that had the connections needed to take an idea and turn it into a business. But gotta keep that myth of upward (and downward) mobility alive. The rich don't fall. Regular folk do. But not the rich. They take care of their own. That's why they invented golden parachutes and the like. Me? My parachutes full of holes and my safety net's barb wire.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
  17. Is anyone surprised? by Qbertino · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
    We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
  18. What's wrong with email? by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 2

    I've been using it since the bbs days (early 80's) and works fine for me. The only real improvement that it has ever had was inline addition of content so you don't have to manually uuencode everything yourself. Other than that, vax mail was as close to perfect as you can get.