Social networks have marked the last 20 years of the Internet. His matrices companies, which seemed that they were going to be forgotten, continue Among the most attractive companies. However, it is only necessary to go around their websites or applications to see that, in general, they are still networks, but socially have little, in the sense of continuous and direct relationship with friends, acquaintances or people we choose to follow.
The great social networks today. Goal, who faces to be chopped in the Open judgment against the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), affirms That currently, only 7% of the time we spend on Instagram, and 17% on Facebook, we spend it consuming friends. And falling. The reality?
“Most of the time in both applications is dedicated to watching videos, more and more short format, which are” disconnected “, that is, they do not come from a friend or a followed account,” they tell in the finish line. What remains is the magical word: algorithm, which Meta affirms that they developed to compete with the rise of Tiktok, which was braking their growth.
Interested part. The FTC accuses monopoly goal, and Meta affirms, based on these data, that there is no monopoly because there is no “personal social media service market.” If social networks are increasingly used to consume content of friends, we are not facing a personal social network, but before something else. Or that argue from the legal department of the giant.
What Zuckerberg announced in 2019. That social networks in general, and those of the goal in particular, have become platforms in which we expose and consume less own content and more of influencers and large profiles, has to do with the strategy that Zuckerberg announced before the change of name. Six years ago, the CEO announced that “The future is private“, a shocking phrase after his privacy scandals.
Without announcing that they were going to focus on the users stopped publishing or consuming what their friends saw, they did affirm that the future of their platforms went through closest communications with friends, more ephemeral and privately, in front of what the Tuenti boards, Facebook walls or even Instagram comments. In that sense, on these platforms, an activity that has grown a lot is to send reels or stories to our friends by direct message: they are sent 700,000 reels by private every minute.
Tiktok’s impact still feels. When goal began to turn the most public and perennial content to the stories, the threat was Snapchat. But then, Tiktok arrived, and its impact was huge. Adam Mosseri, CEO of Instagram, affirmed at the trial that the Chinese social network is “the fiercest competition we have faced.” His emergence in the market, he argued, “generated a 23% decrease in the time that users dedicated to Instagram.”
The thing not only ended the Reels launch or its equivalent on Facebook, but with a copy of who already dominated algorithmic consumption: YouTube. Social networks have lived their youtubization. But YouTube also lives it. To compete with Tiktok and the Reels launched the Shorts. The algorithm still is not as advanced as the Chinese, but It is growing 186% compared to the previous yearaccording to the company. TO THE COFUNDADOR DE YOUTUBE He doesn’t like the new model too much.
Social networks in 2025. With the arrival of The locks and the green circles (Google+ saw it first), The photos of family, exit and stay with friends are still where they never left since WhatsApp is WhatsApp: in the groups or in private conversations. They were published by times in Tuenti, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Snapchat, but they were always in private chats.
What did not exist so much at the beginning of the web 2.0 Internet were niche interest groups as what had been experienced since the 90s in the forums. In many cases, these were emptied to move to groups on social networks. There are those who returned to them, but the great successor of all that is Telegram channels and groups, Discord, Reddit, etc
The inconvenience of the first two is that the conversation does not leave there, it does not index or there is a way to access that knowledge if they are not part of them. Reddit’s problem, which is more open, is that we leave all our knowledge in the hands of a single actor. We needed a different social network, which did not arrive.
The future is not very promising. According to the Empty Internet Theory either ‘Dead Internet Theory‘, Much of the content that exists in the network is created by automated bots and algorithms. In X we have come to see cases from this. For example, one in which a comic video was published for its sound but silenced, and yet it went viral and laughed at him (along with the criticisms of many users, who did not understand the joke). They are also being filled with stolen content.
The problem is no longer loose examples, but the flooding of platforms such as YouTube of mass content created by AI, now that Google itself has Integrated I see 3 in the shorts. The impact is such that YouTube is trying to demonet itbut it is not getting preventing that become In a warehouse of ‘Slop‘.
Image | Xataka
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