History of The rise and Decline of Social Media
The title of this article is a little misleading. The article doesn't say that social media is old as a concept.It rather describes a typical social media lifecycle and will show how most major social medias are now old (even if the concept they represent continues to be of actuality) and they have nothing to say anymore.
After years of using and observing popular platoforms, I have managed to recognize the pattern that their life cycle is typically divided into three stages:
- Startup and scaling
- Settlement and consolidation and
- Decline.
This said, I'm not talking about their level of success, nor to their ability to generate income. For example, Facebook is very decadent, yet it is generating more income today than ever before. So what's the problem? If they continue to generate high income, they are anything but decadent! Yes, of course, they continue to fulfill their purpose, but what about you as a user?
When I talk about ascension, settlement, and decline, I mean the value that the platform has to offer to the user, regarding, in particular, the user experience and perception. I am referring to their usefulness, to their level of contribution to us as users, our enthusiasm, their real utility, and not their profitability.
To talk about Facebook once again, in the beginning, it was a craze. People were fanatical and addicted, no one dared to criticize it. Today, although people continue to use it, Facebook is a source of more criticism than praise. People now look at it with distrust, partly due to the legal issues and scandals that the company has generated over the past few years, and people use it simply because « there's nothing else ». If there were more balanced competition, if there were popular alternatives, it would be a different story. But let discuss about the detailed description of the 3 stages.
- Stage 1: Startup and Scaling. In many respects and for many social media, this is the best stage. It's where the social media is eager to grow, to demonstrate that it has quality, to assert itself, to gain users. It is the stage where the user is best valued, and as the social media is new, all its functionalities are also a novelty. The only possible outcomes are to succeed or not, therefore if the platform has positive reactions in the audience, these reactions will be exclusively positive. Everything is new, everything is fresh, the desire to do things and become big is is great. Who doesn't remember Facebook from 2005-2009? Or Badoo from 2005-2007?
- Stage 2: Settlement and Consolidation. By reaching this stage, the social media is finally established, popular, and fully recognized, it has reached its degree of maturity and definitive success. In this stage, the first difficulties for the user generally begin to arise, the first criticisms, the first obstacles, the point where we can finally determine when the social media will decline and how quickly it will. This is also the stage where most fatal errors are made by the social media and they will inevitably lead it to the stage of decline. Not all social media commit these errors, but most do. At this stage, it is when algorithms come into play and decide what it should be seen or not. It is also at this stage when some platforms end up being bought by larger companies. Its duration is variable.
- Stage 3: Decline. The social media has already made all its mistakes, things begin to stagnate and saturate, and generally, the platform has already lost its initial essence. Sometimes, it continues to be successful and generate income, some others it will fall (like Yahoo! or MySpace), but it no longer has anything new to offer the user, not even from the UI point of view. It's when the content begins to repeat and the user is less valued. In this stage, the founders no longer have the initial thirst for success and are generally either focused on new projects or simply feel apathetic. That state is when the user matters the least. It is when they care less about having more users and less value is placed on the content generated by them. At that stage, what should be viral and what should have zero audience, becomes fully algorithmically determined, according to the political vision and the commercial interests of the social media. That's why Twitter banned Donald Trump in 2020, or Facebook closes or moderate the accounts of anyone speaking badly of Israel or the Harvard University (or at least, it did), or Quora bans your account just because you put a link in your answers, it does not matter if you did this in response to a specific question and with the genuine intention of helping others. It is when Badoo forces you to solve a captcha that is very difficult to understand even for humans, or when Google puts a dead link on the first page of its search results, just because the webmaster purchased an expired domains that belonged to the government, regardless of whether that search result is relevant or not.
The examples illustrating a decadent stage from a social media or another big online player are endless, but here, we will only illustrate three cases to clearly express the idea we want to transmit you.
Three Case Studies: Facebook, Badoo, and Quora.
I chose these three sites to illustrate my points using case studies. My selection is based on the fact that these 3 platforms are diverse enough and share very different business models, showing that the specific niche is not the problem and these problems are, instead, common, due to the nature of social media itself, as we know it today. I have evidence to show how each three social media has gone through these three stages, each in a different but similar way according to its specific content and user experiences. You will recognize yourself what I'm talking about, because this is not a secret. You surely noticed it too in all of them.
Case 1: Facebook
Startup and Scaling Stage:
As I have already mentioned, in the beginning, Facebook was a craze. There were no groups, no channels, no videos, no stories, simply each person shared their things and all their friends, without exclusion, saw what the user shared. It was the time when each person really shared everything with their real friends and acquaintances they knew in real life. Perhaps with some exception, but the rule was clear. I'm not saying that forging a « friendship » with strangers on social media is inherently bad, but this was Facebook's most important policy: that users, at least in theory, could only connect with people they actually knew. This purpose is interesting, but very difficult to enforce. However, Facebook made a considerable effort but eventually failed at it. The most important thing was that Facebook had a single purpose: users were there to share things with their real contacts. At most, they were occasionally entertained with quizzes or various games, which users themselves could develop using the nascent API. But the social media had a unitary purpose and it achieved it well.
Consolidation Stage:
The first obstacles for the user now begin. There is no longer a news wall, there is now a news feed where the visibility of all posts is determined algorithmically. People can no longer share what they want. If you violate a copyright, they delete the post, even if you have put 10 seconds of a song that you want to share with your friends, Facebook will leave your video without audio. Something that does not violate absolutely any right nor undermine anyone's profit, but FB does not understand this. Likewise, they start penalizing you for asking for friendship from people you don't know. I remember that once, they limited my account for that very reason, just for having asked for friendship from too many people that Facebook itself suggested but I didn't know in real life. At the same period, with the adding of groups for selling things, pages of public figures, and other unrelated stuff, the original purpose is already being lost, we are talking about the time that goes from 2012 to 2017. Now, to make yourself viral, you must pay, you must boost your post, they say, if you put a link in a post, you are automatically shadow banned, Facebook changes its original layout to make it more similar to Twitter, we are already in 2017, and to beat the competition and compete with the recently bought Instagram, Facebook integrates short videos, reels, stories, in a meaningless minestrone that will precipitate the social media to its stage of decline. Not to mention the numerous scandals that concern the sale of users' personal data without their consent. In addition, the CEO and creator Mark Zuckerberg, who since 2012 has been actively working to become a celebrity, is now viewed with much distrust by most users.
Decline Stage:
At that stage, Facebook has already completely lost its original purpose. People now use it more out of habit than for pleasure or to broadcast or watch lives. Too many fake profiles, while young people, who are the cutting edge of trends, are now on Instagram, where their parents and grandparents can't see what they do, like on Facebook. First Instagram, then TikTok (because Instagram rocks less, at least apparently, I don't like at all the spy actitude from TikTok). Parents, grandparents, fake profiles, pornographic material, illegal videos, scams, marketplaces, censorship, forced advertising, Facebook now wants to be all-encompassing and it's nothing. Meta made of Facebook the most hypocrite social media in the world, where you may get banned for a strong word, or because you criticized LGBT+, but they silently tolerate criminal videos or spam. Zuckerberg realizes all this and changes the name of his firm which is now called Meta and is promoting the Metaverse, a virtual reality that is nothing more than a woke dictatorship that wants to dehumanize people with its single thought and is a total failure. With a decadent Facebook and a Metaverse that is going nowhere, do we have to pity Zuckerberg? Not at all. He is today the second or third richest man in the world, and even if he is doing very badly, I would like to share only 1% of his misfortunes.
No my friends, we don't have to pity Zuckerberg, we have to pity ourselves who continue to use his products. I have nothing against Facebook, though, after all, this phenomenal is common to most social media, but by now, Facebook, an entity more powerful than ever, a social media that is today the most used in the world, has already died conceptually, its sense of marketing has committed harakiri, and it has already lost all significance as a social media that once - and I say once because I would question even this - was iconic.
Case 2: Badoo
Startup and Scaling Stage:
Badoo had a strong start, not only because it imported its entire user base from a pre-existing dating website, but also because it was practically one of the first free dating platforms for meeting people. It also combined, at least in the social sense of that era, the characteristics of a social media with those of a dating site. Also known as Yamky (or such), Badoo offered all its services for free. Women appeared in order of signup; there were no algorithms influencing your ability to find people. It even had innovative and avant-garde features, such as the ability to move to the top of the list of search results every 24 hours for free. It was a great promise and a serious threat to established dating platforms like Match.com or the then-famous Meetic.com.
Consolidation Stage:
This stage coincides with the period when Badoo began introducing paid services to the platform, which, at the time, were the so-called « super powers ». This isn't to say that introducing paid services was a mistake, nor that it was a bad idea. We know perfectly well that a dating platform requires considerable investment in resources, development, and scalability. In the long run, it's impossible for such a platform to sustain itself without proper monetization. Badoo's mistake was more about marketing; its method of making money after being free like Facebook didn't sit well with people. Furthermore, constant changes and inconsistencies in data (searching for someone in Mexico resulted on getting results in Dominican Republic or Spain, due to various cities having the same name across different countries), that Badoo has never fixed due to negligence or inabilityBadoo never fixed meant Badoo never knew how to, or didn't care to, did not do justice to it. Another serious mistake during this stage was the lack of consideration and empathy for users, especially male users. Many fake accounts, scams with no control, many low-quality profiles, and a significant gender imbalance all contributed to people's disappointment. Soon, Badoo became the junk food of online dating, and its bad reputation only grew over time.
Decline Stage:
This stage began when Badoo progressively tried to imitate Tinder's model, losing its original essence and even functionality. This Tinder-style functionality, called « Encounters », gradually deteriorated until the 2023 site/app update. Now, users can't write a personal description longer than 500 characters, upload more than six photos, or change their default profile picture with ease. It's no longer possible to vote or comment on photos, and the desktop version practically doesn't work without GPS (though I believe they fixed that later). The Super Powers have become a Premium Subscription, which is essentially the same thing because Badoo realized how unpopular they were. The algorithms make that only the Encounters section shows interesting people, but there's an ad every 5 swipes. In the Discover or Nearby People section, you only see people with profiles scored similar to yours. That is, if your profile has a low score (which is the case for most men), you'll only see low-scoring profiles, mimicking Tinder again. This means only ugly women for most men (algorithmically speaking). But the peak of decline came when Badoo merged with Bumble, a decidedly feminist site. This merge was clearly a great move for its founders but a conceptual disaster for users. Now, Badoo has not only completely lost its original concept, but many believe its association with Bumble is nothing more than a prelude to its ultimate demise (referring, of course, as always, to a conceptual destruction, not necessarily the commercial destruction of the business). The large number of hurdles to creating new Badoo accounts—requiring a mobile phone number, photo verification using still unreliable methods, and nearly impossible CAPTCHAs, even for humans, result in few new users. The platform is stagnant and has nothing new to offer.
Case 3: Quora
Startup and Scaling Stage:
Quora began with the idea of improving upon an existing platform: Yahoo! Answers. Created by a former Facebook employee, Quora aimed to create a Q&A social media platform that was far more serious than Yahoo! Answers, which was rife with low-quality questions, disrespect, and insults. But, Quora was designed to be a social media platform where experts shared their knowledge by satisfying the curiosity of anyone who wanted to ask something about a particular field. For example, did you have a question about legal, medical, scientific, or general matters? An expert was there to provide a real, straightforward answer. The quality of the answers was obviously the platform's main draw, and initially, to encourage a Q&A with high quality answers, Quora was attributing points to ask question, so when points got depleted, users had to answer a certain number of questions before they could ask again. As if that weren't enough, Quora launched a loyalty program that stimulated writers' vanity (calling those who wrote answers « writers » to begin with), and their greed, as for a time, Quora offered payment for answers, and top contributors received titles like « Featured Writer » or even « Top Writer ». Beyond this, Quora implemented the BNBR (Be Nice, Be Respectful) policy to moderate heated discussions that would likely have devolved into the same kind of disrespect seen on Yahoo! Answers. But, as with everything in life, even Quora, the intellectual social media platform, eventually deteriorated into utter decline.
Consolidation Stage:
Things began to change when Quora stopped financially compensating its contributors and started practicing censorship, favoring content aligned with its Democrat-woke and pro-Israel political agenda. Anything that didn't pass the filter of Californian Democrat Political Correctness (CDPC) was shadow-banned, meaning it wouldn't get visibility, like selling soft drinks in the desert, very valuable for everyone but nobody would find them. Soon, the intellectual social media, which was supposed to cater to users' interests, implemented an algorithm that decided, based on the platform's commercial and CDPC interests, what content should or shouldn't be seen. Furthermore, the BNBR policy quickly became a double-edged sword and a censorship tool. Users couldn't disrespect anyone, not even in self-defense, not even after being mistreated by someone else.
In the midst of all this came the infamous Quora Partner Program (QPP), which instead of valuing the effort of those who wrote encyclopedic quality answers, paid pennies to those who wrote low-quality questions. This led to an abuse of poor-quality questions, created solely in the hope of going viral and earning more money. The main problem wasn't so much the move of paying people to ask questions (absurd, because the real value lies in the answers, even if acceptable), the biggest mistake was prioritizing quantity over quality. The payments were too low for people to focus on creating high-quality content. Quora should have been more selective, paying for fewer questions but allowing anyone to earn at least $5 or $10 a day—a bare minimum of decency. Quora should have recognized the QPP as a legitimate part-time job, not a mockery. The most clever users were forced to translate the most popular answers because when you translated an answer, you also translated the question (it worked like this), and that question also counted towards the QPP. This was the only way to earn something approaching a decent amount. However, Quora soon began to boycott even these attempts, imposing various penalties.
Another problem of that stage is that Quora no longer allows to further expliain questions. They also reduced the length of each question. By doing this, they have mediocrized them. Some questions need to be longer to be truly clear, and many need an explanation, a bit of context. Don't tell me there are comments, nobody read them. Not allowing questions to be explained and also reducing the permitted length is a serious error that encourages superficiality and has nothing to do with the topic of expert advice.
In short, through censorship, deceptive and opportunistic algorithms, and an abundance of low-quality questions and poorly translated answers, Quora fell to almost the vulgar level of Yahoo! Answers, losing its original purpose of seeking expert opinions on specific questions. On top of this, the visual aspects and user interface remained stuck in a 2011 development style. For a long time, the Quora app was nothing more than a slow reproduction of the website in web view mode (despite they had millions to invest to a more native and user friendly mobile app). The site was clunky, the user interface absolutely mediocre and outdated, and even the legal content of the Quora website was poorly translated using automatic translators. But that wasn't the worst of it; the worst was yet to come.
Decline Stage:
Around 2022, I believe in April if I remember correctly, amidst the general disappointment, exhaustion, and boredom of most of its users, Quora finally removed the QPP, and, a few time after, also the feature to translate questions and answers. This wasn't because Quora finally recognized its mistake; it happened because artificial intelligence and ChatGPT began to emerge into the public eye, and Quora started launching the Quora Prompt Generator (QPG), a bot that automatically generates questions, and Poe, a bot that uses AI to answer questions.
Result: What can you expect from a Q&A website that generates its own questions using QPG and answers them itself using Poe? Quora no longer needs users, and in fact, real and original content is increasingly scarce. When opening a Quora account today, you basically see the same questions and answers appearing all the time in a repetitive rotation. Quora is also exhausted, with its inadequate interface, its lack of respect and consideration for its users, and its increasingly aggressive censorship policy (you can't post links in your answers, as said, even in response to a question and its context, because several people have had their accounts permanently closed just for posting a link that wasn't from Wikipedia or another recognized reputable or notable website. And there were valuable accounts, with thousand of useful answers, who brought a lot of value to the platform). And finally they removed completely the ability to modify topics about a question and Qurora continues to do mistakes in doing so automatically, despite they have IA. Quora is now a genuine relic that continues to generate money like a machine, but like all the other social media sites mentioned, it has nothing left to offer the user.
Conclusion
Following the history of each of these case studies, while some subjectivity may be present in the narrative, one automatically wonders: Is this type of decline the inevitable end for all social media platforms? Well, obviously nothing lasts forever. Social media platforms are no exception. Everything, even if profitable, eventually tires people, especially if fatal mistakes like the ones we've seen are made. However, if you analyze these mistakes carefully, it's easy to see that they all have a common root: the success of a social media platform always marks the beginning of its decline, and the cause is always the same. Once a social media platform is successful, nothing can stop its success, and users cease to be important. This is the common mistake made by Facebook, Badoo, and Quora, each one in different manner, but not only them, it's actually common to the vast majority of platforms. How can it be avoided? Very simply: never stop considering users. Prioritize them from the beginning, establishing from the outset a policy where the user is as important as the client.
What? Is the user not the client? This may surprise most people, but no, the user is not the customer! In social media, the user is a product. Clients pay, they buy. But in a social media, user accesses these services for free because the user is actually a vector that provides the platform with an indirect source of income from investors — those who pay to have their advertisements published, tailored to the user's preferences. If a user, through their interactions on social media, shows interest in certain types of topics or products, they will find advertising tailored to those tastes and interests. If, as a user, I like water sports, for example, the social media platform will almost always show me advertisements for services, products, or activities related to water sports. It's rare for a user to be interested in only one thing. Users normally have a wide range of interests. And all the advertising visible on social media platforms is designed to reflect these interests. They are tailored, custimized ads for each user. Commercial practice has shown that these marketing strategies work and bring social media platforms enormous profits, in addition to the trade in users' personal data, which, despite everything you might read and all the laws that exist, are only severely applied to punish small businesses and websites. A platform like Facebook, however, will never stop violating these laws nor will it ever pay for these violations, just like all the large social media platforms, which have the legal right to send spam every day.
However, the user is a business actor who could have a more active role, be a little less of a product and a little more of a customer, enjoy greater importance and consideration because, ultimately, the user is the engine of everything. They attract advertisers and ultimately buy the products. Therefore, without users attracting businesses and without businesses generating income for the platforms, success wouldn't be possible or would not last for long. That's why it's crucial to never stop considering the end-user. In this way, it's possible to avoid most of the mistakes social media platforms make between the consolidation and decline stages, and to avoid or delay this decline as much as possible. Ultimately, everyone benefits from this. Social media platforms still in their launch phase should take this into account.
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