I've seen a lot of movement on Reddit in the past couple of years. More memes, less discussion type posts are making it to /r/all (though tbf all has mostly been memes the 8 years I've been around).
There are a few large-ish communities that I frequent that seem to draw a lot of "normies", one of them being /r/fasting. I constantly see comments that are made by obviously tech-illiterate people. A quick google search would answer their questions, but they are content to post a comment and maybe get a response in 6 hours when someone takes pity on their ignorance. To me, this means those users are either very young, or trending older without an obvious career revolving around technology.
There's nothing wrong with those demographics, but as I think we've all seen with the rise and fall of various social media platforms over the past decade, when you reach mass adoption, things change.
For the next few years, I see Instagram continuing to take off. It's a lot easier to ignore the hateful comments or miss them entirely, instead focusing on simply looking at pictures. If FB deems engagement to be too low if/when the masses move off FB proper, I'd be interested to see if they start to include more text alongside those images in users' feeds to drive that same engagement they fomented on Facebook.
Discord is still rapidly growing in gamer circles, with almost every group of friends making their own servers. Heck, my wife is part of one with a few of her friends and she is by no means a "gamer". They just use comms while playing Stardew Valley co-op.
Public Slack groups I fear are going the way of the dodo now that Salesforce has acquired them. They've already been declining in popularity since Slack closed the invite via API loophole.
I am seeing a lot of new movement on Discourse forums. A new bank I'm trying out has one to discuss features and build community support with users, as well as my Home Automation platform of choice. Panic just started one for their new Nova text editor for plugin development discussion. Etc. Really like Discourse and I appreciate that the feature set seems to be standardized across most installations. I'm curious what kind of plugin ecosystem exists for Discourse and if that will grow moving forward. So far, it doesn't seem like many sites are utilizing it.
Thanks for taking time to share your thoughts on the topic.
Totally. Now I realize that Instagram is here to stay at least for a while. Posts & stories is a perfect combination in their case. As a result we don't see as much spam in the feed like on Twitter. Want to post more? Just do stories.
Your thoughts on Discourse are also interesting. Added it to my notes. Will give it a try when there is a moment.
There are a few large-ish communities that I frequent that seem to draw a lot of "normies", one of them being /r/fasting. I constantly see comments that are made by obviously tech-illiterate people. A quick google search would answer their questions, but they are content to post a comment and maybe get a response in 6 hours when someone takes pity on their ignorance. To me, this means those users are either very young, or trending older without an obvious career revolving around technology.
There's nothing wrong with those demographics, but as I think we've all seen with the rise and fall of various social media platforms over the past decade, when you reach mass adoption, things change.
For the next few years, I see Instagram continuing to take off. It's a lot easier to ignore the hateful comments or miss them entirely, instead focusing on simply looking at pictures. If FB deems engagement to be too low if/when the masses move off FB proper, I'd be interested to see if they start to include more text alongside those images in users' feeds to drive that same engagement they fomented on Facebook.
Discord is still rapidly growing in gamer circles, with almost every group of friends making their own servers. Heck, my wife is part of one with a few of her friends and she is by no means a "gamer". They just use comms while playing Stardew Valley co-op.
Public Slack groups I fear are going the way of the dodo now that Salesforce has acquired them. They've already been declining in popularity since Slack closed the invite via API loophole.
I am seeing a lot of new movement on Discourse forums. A new bank I'm trying out has one to discuss features and build community support with users, as well as my Home Automation platform of choice. Panic just started one for their new Nova text editor for plugin development discussion. Etc. Really like Discourse and I appreciate that the feature set seems to be standardized across most installations. I'm curious what kind of plugin ecosystem exists for Discourse and if that will grow moving forward. So far, it doesn't seem like many sites are utilizing it.