- Facebook is alive and well, even among the < 20 crowd I know. I love using it.

- Several of my friends use Tumblr, but I don't get it. It looks like a mess to me; I have trouble spotting the content I'm supposed to look at.

- A lot of my friends were on snapchat when it first became popular, and the content they sent me was sometimes hilarious, but mostly boring. Most people I know have lost interest.

- I've never been able to get into Twitter.

- I LOVE reddit. I'm one of those weird people that finds the default front page hilarious (granted, it does get old after a while), but the more time I spend on it, the more I appreciate how it allows me to connect to people I never could have met in real life. For example, I was curious what police officers thought about a recent shooting in my hometown, so I posted to a law enforcement subreddit and got perspectives from all over the world, including from officers in New Zealand where they don't regularly carry firearms. Another time I was discussing SSL on the redditdev sub, and a reddit engineer jumped in and explained why reddit doesn't force https (infrastructure capacity reasons).

Here's the conversation with the NZ officer that responded: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLEO/comments/2ys2cb/is_it_ever_j...

- Tumblr is twitter with better photo/video/audio focus, and no 128 char limit.

- Snapchat is a messaging program with a 'in the moment' or 'hey check out what's going on over here' type focus. Sorta sharing a portal into your current situation with friends.

- Reddit works better if you unsubscribe from the +100,000 subscriber reddits. Signal:Noise degrades with the larger groups. Smaller niche or alternative subreddits work much better.

Yeah, and most people I know really only use it for chat, and only out of convenience.

I will occasionally use FB to post pictures and content to curate my public image in case people want to search for me, and most of the people I see on news feed appear to be doing the same thing. The rest are posting stupid content which they will regret making public in 10 years.

Personally, I'm still trying to find a social networking tool which provides truly transient, private communication which is securely deleted and not logged or mined by the company providing the service. Snapchat seems to come closest to this model, but the fact that it is limited to mobile and it's weak encryption prevent it from being used for actually meaningful conversations.

Facebook is what you make of it. If every person you've ever met is your "Friend" then it'll be noisy. If someone posts stuff too much, block them or even unfriend. It's hard to understand complaints when they literally allow you to manage who you're friends with.

Personally I find niche social sites to be far more valuable than general sites.

HN is social news for technical audiences. Reddit is social news curation across different demographics. GH is social software development. Facebook is Linkdin for my personal life. Tumblr is lazy blogging. Very noisy. Snapchat is faster picture texting. For many people this really is just cereal-bowl-boring. Instagram is photography made easy. I'd probably use this if I had more friends into real photography, but as-is it's just more cereal bowl pics.

There's always noise but niche networks encourages higher quality because people care about the niche. Social noise is much less acceptable there. General sites will always just be "random shit no one wants to hear about in person".

People who use snap chat have more interesting lives than you.

To me I just don't see the point of snapchat, but that's fine. It's quite obvious that im not their intended audience.