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Predictions for social media in 2023 and beyond?
What are your predictions for social media in 2023 and beyond?
My prediction: while Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok will continue to dominate next year, social media will keep fracturing and the there will be more options for folks looking for online communities – and that’s a good thing.
There was a time – pre-2016 – when people who wanted to connect online needed to be on Facebook to stay in touch with friends and family. Facebook also kept you plugged into entertainment, culture and the news. If you wanted to dig in more, there was YouTube, Twitter and eventually Instagram. (Many of the trends and news stories on those networks obviously started here on Reddit and were distributed on other networks, but that’s a different thread.)
And in fairness, those networks are still dominant – Pew reported in September that 82% of U.S. adults use YouTube; Facebook, 70%. (Reddit: 22%.)
But today, just the fact that we’re talking about these other online communities and checking them out represents a pretty significant shift. It’s been reported that there are now more than 1M MAUs on Mastodon servers, and most of those users have joined since Oct. 27. Those aren’t Facebook or Twitter numbers, obviously, but it’s noteworthy.
In the past few months I’ve spent more time on Reddit while also starting an account on a Mastodon server and joining Post. What I’ve found: Mastodon isn’t “hard” to understand, it’s just different and takes some getting used to. (Imagine your experience if you joined Facebook for the first time right now – their UX is overwhelming.) Mastodon users are your typical early adopters – technologists, activists, artists, STEM folks, educators and journalists. If that’s your community, Mastodon can be a ton of fun.
Post is still pretty quiet. Lots of folks broadcasting and distributing, not a lot of discussion. It has 610K users.
Reddit, for the most part, has been great – I’ve learned to re-love the opportunity to have more discussions like these, and I’ve spent my time here replying to or asking honest questions. Not everything’s a trap, as it can be on Facebook and Twitter.
I haven’t been on Hive or then one for news that’s in beta and whose name I can’t remember.
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My predictions:
Facebook, Instagram will fall off heavy.
If US government bans tiktok, that’ll die.
YouTube, reddit, Twitter, discord, telegram will continue to develop and Blossom.
There won’t be a true metaverse in 2023. The attempt on a 3d VR virtual world will die down (again)
What I would love to see is a decentralized social media app, built on a blockchain, that becomes popular.
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One lens is that the largest social media platforms are moving towards being just “media,” rather than “social media.” You’re seeing more videos from strangers, rather than messages from friends. It seems likely that we’ll see the current “social media” continue to take the place of TV in society (broadcasting one-to-many), and then platforms oriented around small groups will rise to fill the social networking need. (In short, agree with your high-level thesis!)
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I’d add that one of the trends I’ll be following closely will be the influence of accounts branded for individuals vs. those that carry the brands of businesses. There’s an old saying in TV: “people watch for people.” I think TikTok has illustrated how that’s true on social as well. Voice always helped attract attention on social, but there was a time when you also could grow a significant user base just with a legacy brand. That might be changing. Developing a unique voice on social is more important than ever for legacy brands, and that’s a challenge for many brands. Meanwhile, individuals often find it easier to develop that voice, and TikTok has allowed individuals with an engaging voice to reach a significant audience without first building a following. Individuals suddenly have more of an advantage over brands.
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Applications that adjust to the trend of having short and but really filled with content videos will die out ie facebook
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I believe you’ll see a strong push to revamp section 230 ( much needed imo).
If that does happen I believe social media will change as we know it. Hopefully for the better. Exactly how that looks I’m not sure , time will tell I guess.
I do agree that TikTok is dying
Facebook & instagram are on borrowed time. -
Facebook hasn’t been dominating for a while, Instagram has been dying
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Facebook usage may certainly shrink in the next 12 months, but the metrics don’t indicate a collapse because users are fleeing. From Meta’s Q3 earnings release: “DAUs were 1.98 billion on average for September 2022, an increase of 3% year-over-year; MAUs were 2.96 billion as of September 30, 2022, an increase of 2% year-over-year.” By comparison Twitter has 211M DAUs — 10% of Facebook’s DAUs — while as of 2020, Reddit had 60M DAUs, 3% of Facebook’s user base.
Are any of those daily active Facebook users here? Unlikely. One of the challenges in discussing Facebook on networks like Reddit is that folks on Facebook tend to not be on Reddit to defend themselves, and the folks on Reddit tend not to be on Facebook.
But it’s hard to argue that Facebook will soon be dead because it’s losing popularity.
That said, as noted, Facebook could certainly shrink in users, and if revenue declines significantly because of increased investment in the metaverse, other changes could certainly occur.
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Live streaming will become 10x more popular
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What do you guys suggest what is the major reason for Instagram to be dying? Should I make a art page for Instagram I wanted to make some content and post what platform would you guys suggest?
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Hey everybody!
I am a content creator from Germany and here things are developing very slow and many people are more consuming than producing on these networks. Still a lot of people here are focusing on Instagram and Facebook, often missing platforms like Twitter, TikTok, and most of the times YouTube.
I mosty use YouTube as it is the biggest video network online, included in most TVs, best anslytics, and owned by Google / Alphabet. If you want to rank on the web, you use YouTube and improve tags and description. It‘s fun to see how many get distracted on all the other platforms that are short term rewarding while YouTube might push your content even in 3-4 years of uploading. The others keep you in the present; they want you to push post or consume more in the moment.
Next to Yt and Twitter I feel Reddit is one of the best networks ever. Subreddits are managed well, people post less ads and are careful because they don‘t want to get deleted. And many platforms keep people more scrolling than engaging.
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