Snapchat and Instagram are in a traffic jam for third place, with the ephemeral messaging app used by 60% of respondents and opened every day by 58%.
Interesting. When I was in high school 6 years ago everybody had snapchat, and most people had instagram. And I mean everybody. Everybody I knew had me as a friend on snapchat and your clique was whose snapchat group chat you were in.
Snapchat is still a thing? The novelty wore off for me literally a decade ago!
I was surprised by this as well. Apparently it’s had a bit of a renaissance and it’s a hot thing again. No idea why.
@bermuda When Snapchat was popular, I had a shitty phone that I could not even upgrade WhatsApp on. This lasted for a few months to a year. Insta was already quite popular beforehand, but since I had no smartphone, I got late to the game. So my account was inactive for quite a bunch of time. Later I got in college and got a Huawei P8 Lite, and I used it for a while, with my friends, but more for the camera effects. We weren’t really chatting there. But there were more people posting stories there indeed. Now almost everyone is on Instagram.
Snapchat made me realize I’m basically my dad now. Still trying to figure out the purpose of it.
I was a bit surprised to find that YouTube has the top spot. Probably preferable from American point of view than TikTok.
I mean, TikTok is comparable to YouTube Shorts rather than regular YouTube. I think that YouTube is useful, but don’t like TikTok or YouTube Shorts, the model where the service has a recommendation engine and just chooses a collection of short clips of videos to constantly feed you, one after the other. Apparently there are people who do like it, but…
I personally find them both useful. Well, Tiktok specifically not youtube shorts.
My thing with tiktok is that their content recommendation algorithm is best-in-class at knowing what sort of content I want, and it starts edging away from what I want, just marking stuff as “not interested” a few times will bring it back in line. By modulating my behaviours on certain types of content (i.e. making choices over whether to watch or skip, mark as “not interested”, view comments, comment myself), I can customize an algorithmic feed that delivers what I want.
Granted this is quite an amount of work to use a “social media app”, unlike the other platforms, it’s possible and it’s good.
Youtube (long-form) I think is extremely useful when I’m looking for something in-particular, especially if it’s something that doesn’t age very much. Guides and tutorials, let’s plays, retrospectives, etc. They both fit better with the long-form content, and are much easier to find on Youtube than Tiktok.
The content recommendation algorithm of Tiktok is what makes me use it, while the discovery of specific content and access to longer form content is what makes me use Youtube.
I find YouTube unfortunately to be the best at grabbing my attention
They’ve cracked the code with their UX to make it as addictive as humanly possible
Open YouTube to watch a long form video, get shown about 5 shorts per one video and inevitably end up seeing something interesting in a short, then end up scrolling for way too long on your very own skinner box
Yeah, it’s happened to me a couple times and I hate it so much when I finally wrest myself out, on top of the anti-adblock shit, that I’ve basically stopped browsing YT altogether. If I get a link I’ll watch a video but the quality of the experience has dropped so drastically since the early days. I actually lament the fact that because of how the algorithms are tuned, it is impossible to get to the weird part of YouTube organically - You have to already know about the weird shit in order to see it.
Not 100% related, but Chrome is crashing my computer. Started happening like a month ago, I would be dinking around on the net and everything would suddenly become unresponsive, can’t even open task manager, have to power cycle. This would happen anywhere between three days or thirty minutes apart. Nothing shows up in the event viewer before any of the crashes, all the hardware I can test comes back clean. I have a friend who said he was having the same issue, he switched to Firefox, hasn’t had it since. I’ve had a week of uptime now since I did the same. I’m beginning to think Alphabet just makes bad products now.
People, and especially teens, still use Snapchat? That’s surprising. I remember when that was super popular in the late 00s/early 20teens with my friends (I never really used it). I don’t think anyone that I know my age (mid 30s) uses it anymore. Which I suppose makes it “cool” again.
Yeah it had a bit of a comeback recently