Fewer People Are Posting on Social Media. 50% Could Leave Or Limit Interactions Within 2 Years

'Billions of people' uses social media every month, notes the Wall Street Journal.. But 'fewer and fewer are actually posting.'

Instead they're favoring 'a more passive experience, surveys of users and research from data-analytics firms say.'

In an October report from data-intelligence company Morning Consult, 61% of U.S. adult respondents with a social-media account said they have become more selective about what they post. The reasons are varied: People say they feel they can't control the content they see. They have become more protective about sharing their lives online. They also say the fun of social media has fizzled. This lurker mentality is widespread, across Meta Platforms' Instagram and Facebook along with X and TikTok....

In a survey conducted in the U.S. this summer, research firm Gartner found more than half of respondents believed the quality of social media has declined in the past five years. They cited misinformation, toxicity and the proliferation of bots as reasons it has gotten worse. 'The less you trust social-media brands, the less of a good experience you're having,' says Gartner analyst Emily Weiss. Users are less likely to share opinions or insight into their lives since the community they are looking for isn't there, she adds. Ads and suggested posts have also sucked the joy out of apps, some users say... The algorithmic spotlight on creators and their hyper-curated content has made some users feel insecure and less likely to share their own photos and videos, says Kevin Tran, media and entertainment analyst at Morning Consult. In turn, some now think of social apps more as sources of entertainment, like YouTube or Netflix.

Gartner estimates that 50% of users will either abandon or significantly limit their interactions with social media in the next two years.

Any threat to interacting is a threat to business, the article notes, adding 'The companies are responding.'

They are investing in more private user experiences like messaging, and making interactions more secure. And encouraging people to post to a more intimate audience — as with Instagram's recently expanded Close Friends feature... Meta responded to user complaints, saying it would continue to work on improving recommendations to help creators reach more people. The company added a snooze button that pauses suggested posts for 30 days at a time, and chronological feeds that temporarily only show posts from accounts people follow... Meta began shifting its resources toward messaging, including efforts to enable end-to-end encryption by default across all of its messaging services... TikTok has also shown signs of investing more in the messaging portion of its app, nudging users to chat with people they haven't messaged in a while.
When the Wall Street Journal posted their article on Threads, Adam Mosseri (head of Instagram) responded that 'People are sharing to feeds less, but to Stories more,' and 'even more still' in Messages ('even photos and videos'). Mosseri also said that Instagram's Notes feature — basically a post where you cab specify a smaller subset of your followers to see it — 'have quickly become a big thing, particularly for young people.

'So it's no so much that people are sharing less,' Mosseri argued, 'but rather than they're sharing differently.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.