Every once in a while, we hear of a new social network. Remember Google+? Friendster? ICQ? Apparently, it’s very difficult to get one up and running, not so much because of the technical challenges, but because you need a large enough group of users who would be interested in talking to each other.
When Google+ came out (and pushed heavily by Google) there was much excitement, but the search volume for it told otherwise. People were not excited.
Recently, there’s been a lot of talk of the demise of Twitter (X) on my social media feeds (including, ironically, on X). I have to admit that most of the academic content I used to have on X is gone, and now it’s mostly news (broadly defined). However, is my feed correct? To test this, I compared the search volume (on Google Trends) of X and Reddit. As you can see in Figure 1, X is indeed going down, but Reddit has only recently caught on to it and is also going down.
What about the places that people on my feed mention? Here’s a few: As you can see, only Meta Threads is inching upwards. Bluesky, which had its heyday in November 2024 is quickly decaying, and Mastodon never really caught on.
I intentionally didn’t show Bluesky and X on the same graph. On the month of peak Bluesky activity it’s search volume was 14 times smaller than that of X and last month it was around 85 times smaller (!).
There’s also a clear geographic division among the social networks. First, here’s Reddit and X.
As one can see, X is popular in the south and east of the globe, while Reddit is firmly in USA, Canada, Australia and parts of Europe.
For the smaller social networks, the same happens. Bluesky is similar to Reddit, while Threads is more similar to X. I wonder if they are indeed replacements on a user-level.
My takeaway is, don’t write the obituary for X (or Reddit) yet. Your echo chamber might be misleading…