I'm extremely surprised by this weird dichotomy. vbulletin era was "low" on tech yet there were a lot of nice chill places.. there was almost nothing special, no ease, few rules, convos were mostly humans and fun. Now there's kilotons of resources (brain and money) trying to make all this go to mars and yet it only creates frailty. Super odd.
Just around that time, I remember seeing facebook and twitter stickers on various stores in malls (with the 'slug' name of the business). I was a bit surprised. Why would you bring your customers to your twitter profile instead of your own homepage? Who says that most people are even using these websites? At the time I never used Twitter and to me Facebook was just a boring place (it still is). At best they were just glorified forums. It would be really strange if a business directed customers to the business profile on a random internet forum.
But I guess for the "normies" it was not just another forum. It was the internet. The internet to them was just facebook and twitter.
People also started using terms like "Social Media" as if it was a new thing. This made no sense to me because the internet was always social. I used to spend a lot of time in forums and chat room in the 2000s. So like, what are these people talking about?
It seems like a giant confidence game to this day. 80% of adults in the US don’t use Twitter, and of those that do, only a much smaller number are regular users, and an even smaller percentage care to follow brands, which most people rightly see as opt-in advertising. The timeline algorithm makes it even less likely that the pointless post from @reebok is going to reach many people, probably nothing close to the amount of free irl advertising that they gave to Twitter and Facebook.
Yes I’ve poked at twitter a few times but never saw the point. Have been drowned by news of them for almost a decade, right? Self promoters and journalists just desperate for “engagement” to their own detriment.
I say the beginning of the end was when the millenials were in enough positions of power to utilize the internet for PR. I feel like in North America, the Obama campaign in 2008 opened a lot of eyes to the power of the internet. Maybe his second term more so. Certainly was a tirefire by the end of his run (Trump).
Just a guess, but that feels to be around the right time that smartphones hit a critical mass of value and usefulness.
I remember the Nexus 4 / Nexus 7 era to really change how financially accessible it felt to get online with consumption-oriented devices that weren't painful performance-wise.
