You’re brave to make the admissions you do in this piece, but I believe it’s the only way to address the changing landscape. I’d like to give you an empirical view as a user, as to why we are engaged less. You zeroed in on the content crush, this is part of the problem but not all of it. The social networks have been deliberately loading our feeds with content they want us to see, moving away from what we want to see. They’ve told us how we can tweak things to favour seeing content from certain people first, but it’s really not enough. Facebook for example has been pushing video like there is no tomorrow, but what is that video, is it good? No, for the most part it’s terrible and not something I want to see. As a result as a user I disengage with that network as the us experience gets more frustrating and delivers less of what I want. Twitter. Oh how I used to love Twitter. But no more, why? I feel that it became overloaded with salesy stuff and also Twitter decided they don’t really care about moderation and users became more and more mindless meaning that often the mood of the network was that of an angry playground – not a pleasant place to spend time. Instagram, again… little focus on quality, lots of encouragement towards quantity… but I just don’t have the time or desire to wade through all the mediocre images.
What we collectively see across all the networks I have briefly addressed is a volume problem, the volume of content is too much and the filters are not working. The only logical thing we users can do is withdraw and pull the things we want from different sources. Until the networks see that they are killing the value on their products this will get worse.
