Comment by nostrademons
21 hours ago
Would it show up in the numbers on web usage, platform usage, etc? People who do this drop out of the sample - they don't show up in the numbers. As far as your stat gathering is concerned, they don't exist.
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.
But they still READ. So, if you 'interact' (and by that I mean do any write-like action, like commenting, posting, liking, whatever) less, that's gonna show up.
They don't, at least not necessarily. I look at my HN history and it's 13 hours ago, 6 days ago, 8 days ago, 13 days ago. Fifteen years ago I was #2 on the leaderboard (itself now gone, it listed users by total comment karma) and would post about 4-5 times a day. Now when I'm not posting, I'm actually not on the site and not reading replies. I just don't have time.
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.