I’m offline and out on maternity leave, but the internet … never rests. So while I’m away, Links is resurfacing some old gems that you may have missed. This one originally ran in July 2022, and since then it’s only become truer: Several large surveys and polls show that many adults aren’t posting to social media anymore.
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More than 260,000 people have signed a week-old Change.org petition aimed at Instagram, the one-time photo-sharing app now mimicking TikTok as closely as copyright law allows it. Personally, I used to like Instagram for stalking the weddings of distant acquaintances and stockpiling local brunch suggestions. Now every fifth post is a recommended “reel” from some live-laugh-love creatrix whose cleaning hacks and healthy cooking tips could not be less relevant to my interests.
“We just want to see when our friends post” (!!!!), in the words of the petition.
But my friends aren’t posting anymore, and yours probably aren’t either. In a Twitter exchange with Chrissy Teigan, of all people, Instagram head Adam Mosseri explained the TikTokification of Instagram in terms of user behavior. Most people now interact with their friends through direct messages or stories, he said; on both Instagram and Facebook, fewer and fewer users still post new personal content to the feed.
In other words, after more than a decade of Web 2.0 bliss, everyone has gone back to … lurking.
“Lurking” is a word with a deep and intriguing history in digital life, dating back to the days of Usenet and BBS message boards. Historically, it’s not been a complimentary term: People who hang out in online communities, but don’t contribute to them, have long been cast as creeps or free-riders. The advent of social media introduced a new participation imperative: Because social networks needed their users to create content to sell ads against, they introduced all kinds of little psychological nudges to lure people out of the audience and onto the stage. (See, for instance, the “like” button.)
But most people in most communities actually prefer to lurk, an observation so consistent that it’s been codified as “the 1%” or “the 90-9-1” rule. Writing in 1996, well before Instagram, the Danish researcher Jakob Nielsen theorized that within each online community, 1% of users post most content, 9% contribute on and off, and 90% just hang out and read/watch shit. People like to quibble over the exact ratios, but surveys since then have shown the concept is basically sound: On Twitter, for instance, one quarter of users post 97% of the site’s content. On TikTok, only about half of surveyed users in one 2018 report said they posted videos of their own.
Unlike Instagram and Facebook, however, TikTok actively rewards lurkers — you don’t even have to create an account before the app serves you a flood of content. Its algorithms also prize passive signals like watch time pretty highly, removing the need to participate via mechanisms such as follows, likes, saves or comments.
Instagram and Facebook are now updating to cater to lurkers, too; or maybe more accurately, they’re backtracking from the efforts they launched to coax users out of their lurker states over a decade ago. On Thursday, acknowledging the abruptness of that shift, Mosseri said the company would reduce the amount of recommended posts and videos in the Instagram feed while the company tunes its recommendation algorithms.
But the pause is temporary; during a Wednesday earnings call, in which Meta also announced its first-ever revenue drop, Mark Zuckerberg said both the Facebook and Instagram feeds would double down on recommended content in the future. And if you think that’s bad, just wait for what comes next: After personalized AI-recommended content, Facebook’s former VP of product tweeted this week, comes personalized AI-generated content. It’s a lurkers’ web and we’re just whining about it.
This post originally published on July 30, 2022 with the headline “Revenge of the lurkers.” If you’d like to continue your ride on this lil time machine, Links also shared stories on the evolution of American Sign Language and the rise of subtitles that week.
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