HN Explorer

Ask HN: What is the future of social media?

3 points by slymerson ↗ HN
What do you guys think is the future of social media?

TikTok is killing it right now in the social space but I was wondering what you guys think comes next?

Could it be more BeReal esque apps?

It's hard to predict what will be the future of social media but if you had to guess, what do you think it would look like?

8 comments

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dfrankle
In the future, I think 90% of the internet will just be bots talking to each other
muzani
As a teenager, my socializing was done by pressing 1 three times to get the letter C, on a Nokia 3310.

Today, I swipe on my touchscreen keyboard to get a bunch of letters out, but it's still slower than a proper keyboard with keys. Instead of typing ":p", I long press the emoji button.

I think in the future, we'll just be selecting sentences that some bot has picked for us and then swiping around to change their content.

smoldesu
ActivityPub is working well. It doesn't have Twitter integration, but down-and-out competitors like Tumblr and Flipboard are starting to integrate with the larger Fediverse. If this goes well, it could end the massive demand for a platform like Twitter with hundreds of other niche, interconnected sites.
bruce511
Twitter is not "social media". Twitter is mostly loved by Old-style-media, because they use it to provide an engagement platform (tweet us @),and as a crowd-sourced news gathering tool.

Frankly the only people who care about twitter at all are the media sites which report endlessly on every happening at Twitter like its the most important thing ever. Twitter is enormously important to _them_ because they've effectively outsourced so much work onto the twitter platform.

By contrast it would seem most people don't care - as evidenced by their DAU. There's a reason they struggle with monetization - there's really not much there worth selling.

dstala
Instagram became popular because of filters. So some revolution of that sort that helps create great videos (with animations or edited stuffs) without much fuzz will capture attention. But I am certain GPT/AI will play a big role in next generation social media application. It already does to a certain extent today under the hoods may be.

Every new generation will move away from their father generation applications. May be younger folks on HN will be able to answer that query better.

johlits
Online video games because they have been working on anti-bot/anti-cheat for ages.
surprisetalk
I think most people will continue to hang out on a major platform (whatever that may be), but I think many will make boutique social networks that have 10-1000 people.
CM30
I think more 'tight knight', private social media spaces are the future here.

You can see this in how a lot of young people prefer stuff like Discord over Twitter and Facebook, and how (in some spaces), Fediverse communities and even traditional forum like ones are taking off again.

As for why this is the case... well, I think a few reasons are key here:

1. People realised that having everyone in the same is a bad idea. People don't all get along with each other, and putting those with opposing values together like on Twitter leads to fights and flame wars. So they want communities of people they share something in common with.

2. Publicly posted content is easier to take out of context, both by their political opponents and the media.