Its essentially an entirely different website now.
Reddit is 99% search only. I go there only on a purpose. [might be replaced by Gemini, eventually]
HN and Alterslash are probably the only source of random info that I still consume.
May be that information containment is a reaction to my 15+ years of addiction to [the good old] Twitter. Or because I have reached age 50.
But the consequence is that I get the news late, and usually because of a search I did. Not because of a proactive algorithm.
Additional thought: in the end I suppose my information un-déluge is the proof that algorithms eventually failed to deliver [i.e point me at things meaningful to me]. The biggest example is Spotify proposals. That is 1% of my music discovery, whereas traditional non-commercial radios and dedicated podcasts are [human curated and] much more diverse.
It's a much less sticky place, now.
Why does that look familiar?
Some web wrappers forFB on Android must use that or similar.
If you're actually doing a census of people and asking about their web usage and social habits, it'd show up. So maybe Google or Facebook has the data if they were to do say cohort analysis on Google Analytics or Chrome History or Facebook beacon logs, counting specifically the number of total unique Internet users that used to visit social media but no longer do. But such an analysis would require SVP-level privacy approval (because it joins together personal, non-anonymized data across multiple products), and why would an executive commission a study that potentially tells them that their job is in danger and their employer is making a mistake by employing them? And if they did, why would they ever publicize the results?
AFAIK, most of the major public-facing analytics platforms work by sampling their users. If their users are voluntarily choosing not to engage with the platform that their sampling runs on, they by definition cannot measure that change. They just become a biased sample that excludes specifically the population they're trying to measure.
I think a decent-sized subset of Millennials have basically aged out of the time-surplus years of the early 20s and are now busy with kids and careers and families. And they aren't being replaced by the new 20-somethings, at least not on social media of the same form. The kids are still on text messages and Whatsapp and Discord and Roblox and Google Docs (!!), but they aren't interested in getting on the public Internet, and if they are, their parents won't let them.
My experience is that consumption is as high as ever, but the median person's non-private sharing is down.
That does sound like a rather charmed life though. Could also be a sign that people are reverting to using the social internet apart from their irl acquaintances as well.
Linking up with all of our irl acquaintances through the public web was a terrible mistake imo. Seeking privacy can mean many different things.