If there’s one thing that typified the 2010s, it was social media. While Facebook first got its start in 2004, it wouldn’t actually gain its trademark newsfeed until two years later, and rivals like Instagram, Snapchat, and the ill-fated Google+ all had their beginnings in the early years of the last decade. Put another way, social media is still one of the internet’s youngest offspring – but is it already doomed?
The Chatroom
First things first, social interaction isn’t going anywhere, online or off. Humans have a natural inclination towards talking to each other, something that may have ensured the survival of our earliest ancestors. With this in mind, most of the things we do have some kind of social element built in. The purest example of this is the chatroom, which has been a part of internet discourse since the days of ICQ in 1996.
More modern pursuits, such as online casino games, have taken more elaborate steps to keep people talking. Paddy Power Live Roulette offers an array of camera angles, chat options, and close-ups to make the game seem more like its brick-and-mortar version, which is well-known for its social features. The company has also re-introduced the human dealer to keep players company.
Social media was designed with this kind of philosophy in mind too but it’s hard to view all the layoffs in the industry as anything but a harbinger of disaster. Stricken by cost-cutting measures, Facebook recently began making 4,000 people redundant, in addition to the 11,000 it got rid of last year. Mark Zuckerberg’s flagging social network could sack a further 6,000 in the next few months as well if previous plans are still in place.
TikTok
It’s worth noting that only text-based social platforms seem to be stuck in the doldrums (and Instagram, via its connection to Facebook). The Insider Intelligence website expects video-sharing site TikTok to have 955.3m users by 2025, representing an average growth rate of around 8.2% from the end of 2023. In contrast, Facebook made headlines last year for dropping users for the first time ever.
Inevitably, the fraught status of social media platforms comes down to changing generational tastes. The people who made MySpace and Limp Bizkit popular (i.e. millennials and Gen X) are no longer calling the shots, and younger people prefer short-form videos over still pictures and words. To reinforce that point, it took just ten months of 2022 for Snapchat to add 150m users (600m to 750m).
Overall, we’ve arrived at a bit of an impasse, as social media doesn’t seem to be dying at all – just one part of the wider industry. The oddball in the story is Twitter, which has been hemorrhaging users for what many might consider artificial reasons. The social network had actually been experiencing regular growth up until 2022 when it had 368.4m people onboard. It’s now a shadow of its former self.
Social media is going through a bit of a metamorphosis. Expect more layoffs at legacy firms like Facebook, even as TikTok and Snapchat continue to grow.
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