Has Social Media reached it's Peak?

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  Posted by Web Diva November 12, 2022 - Filed in Opinion Editorial ~ Op-Ed - #Op-Ed  #social media  #social networking  #return of forums  - 751 views
  

  We’re Witnessing the End of Social Media

  Opinion article written by Ian Bogost originally in the Atlantic and redistributed by MSN.

  Ian Bogost from the  Atlantic wrote:

  It’s over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to shun the platform (or at least to tweet a lot about doing so). It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon.

   

  It's no surprise that Facebook and now Twitter would be in a decline after almost twenty years of dominance after shredding the norm of the go-to message boards vibe of the earliest platforms from the 1990's.  Facebook can also take ownership in destroying many websites that thrived on the message board style of platforms as it grew to predominance on the internet.  If you were online in the earlier years when the message boards websites were king, you likely logged into your favorite "niche" websites and chatted with others that had the same interest as you.  Today, with the destruction of niche websites since Facebook took dominance and Twitter following, as well as other websites such as Discourse, the few websites that are still thriving are websites that had a large member base, and were able to survive the storm because of their specialty, as well. 

  I've actually been speculating on this very topic for a long time, that times change, interests change, and the social experience will also change and evolve, just as it has since the early message boards arrived, inspiring web developers to change, adapt and improve on the current favored version of social interactive styles and experience.

  Now is the time again, for web-developers and webmasters to come together and reclaim their uniqueness on the internet and introduce the already perfect concept of social communication of platforms that are already designed to make your social experience and ease of navigation top rate.  Could the current platforms of today that are available be improved, why yes, they can.  The challenge in making the argument to the current platforms software companies to be willing to take certain leaps while still maintaining their originality.  In other words, the Chevrolet Corvette is always the Chevy Corvette, based on some basic lines that are always maintained in the design, but what changes with every new model is a refinement of the model, but keeping it's character.  This is what I would ask from a message board software platform company.  Keep striving to make it better.

  I started out using vBulletin forum software for my first website.  The reason why I'm not using vBulletin is because vBulletin is not willing to change and embrace new.  Yes, they created vB5 but it was not the powerhouse that vB can become.  Taking away features, rather then adding features, such as the star rating system on threads, doesn't work, when your members really like that feature.  But, I digress, this is not an argument about the best software, it's the argument for reigniting social interaction through niche forums again.

  I believe there's also something to be said for anonymity.  People were able to create fun alternative names for themselves that aligned with the website's topic/niche.  The issue of non-anonymity, is that everything you say and so will follow you and if it's negative.