There’s a concept circulating in Platformer, the Reuters Institute, and Nieman Lab: the text-based social networks that defined the last 15 years of public communication may be in irreversible decline. Apptopia reports that Bluesky’s daily users are down 96% from January 2024; Threads has lost users in seven of the past eight months (down 61% from its October 2024 peak); and X has been “culturally altered.” At its peak, was Twitter less a replicable product category than a unique moment in media history? The mass audience has moved to short-form video, algorithmic feeds reward attention over the social graph, and platforms increasingly refuse to be referral engines.

Text still thrives in newsletters, Reddit, Discord, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and AI chat interfaces — what’s collapsing isn’t text, but giant algorithmic public feeds. Neville and Shel look at what this means for communicators: the promise of scale is giving way to relevance, trust, and consistency — a shift that requires a different approach to brand presence on social. Get details in this not-so-short midweek FIR episode.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 25.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Neville: Hi everybody, and welcome to For Immediate Release episode 514. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel: And I’m Shel Holtz. Communicators devote a fair amount of time to social media management. It’s no different where I work. We’re a smaller team in the construction industry, so we don’t have any dedicated social media resources. But whether it’s a company like mine, where it’s part of the job that somebody does, or a global brand like Wendy’s or Starbucks with a full-blown team, everyone’s trying to make an impact on social network users. The strategy behind those efforts may need an overhaul, though, to address the decline of text-based social networks. Platformer’s Casey Newton wrote about this recently, focusing on Threads, Bluesky, and X — but I think it’s fair to throw Facebook into the mix. Depending on whose numbers you believe, Threads has lost momentum, Bluesky never became the Twitter replacement that political journalists or media folks had hoped it would be, and X is, well, shall we say, culturally altered.

Meta and Bluesky dispute some of this third-party data, so I don’t want to overstate the precision of the numbers, but we shouldn’t shrug off the larger point. This isn’t about whether Threads beats X or whether Bluesky can recover, but rather about whether that old Twitter model can be rebuilt at all. And increasingly, the answer looks like probably not. Twitter at its peak was a real-time public layer for news, commentary, expert reaction, and professional visibility. Journalists, politicians, academics, CEOs, and PR people were all there reacting to each other in public. That gave communicators something we had never really had before: a live dashboard of what influential people were saying, what stories were breaking, and how publics were interpreting events in real time. The problem is that this depended on a specific set of conditions — a text-first interface, a public follow graph, a tolerance for public argument, and a shared assumption that this was where you went to see what was going on. Even with a small subscriber base compared to Facebook and a lot of other networks, Twitter was where news broke, and it was frequently cited in the mainstream media’s reporting.

Well, those conditions have changed. The mass audience has moved heavily toward video. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are now the primary discovery platforms for younger users in particular. News and commentary arrive as video, personality, remix, and clip. In fact, I was talking about this recently with someone I work with who said she doesn’t watch Saturday Night Live — she watches 10 or 15 of the clips that Saturday Night Live shares on YouTube so she can catch the funniest bits.

At the same time, the logic of the feed has changed. The old social feed was built around who you followed. The new algorithmic feed is built around what holds attention. A post on early Twitter spread because of the social graph. A video on TikTok spreads because the system thinks it’ll keep people watching. Now that changes the incentives. It rewards performance, emotion, personality, and visual fluency.

It’s also why the link-in-the-post model is fading. Social platforms don’t want to be referral engines. They want the content consumed inside the platform. You can’t conflate social engagement and site traffic anymore. For brands, this requires a pretty significant rethink. Today, social is less about sending people somewhere else and more about creating native moments of value right there, inside the feed.

The implication for communicators is that we can’t just ask, “What should we post?” We have to ask, “What role does each of these platforms play in our communication ecosystem?” Some platforms are for discovery, some for reputation, some are mostly listening posts — environmental scanning, sentiment tracking, intelligence gathering. Some platforms may not be worth the effort at all anymore. We also need more human voices.

The logo account is not adequate anymore. Trust attaches to people — experts, leaders, practitioners, analysts. That doesn’t mean every executive needs to be dancing on TikTok. In fact, please, no. But organizations do have to get better at helping credible people communicate in platform-native ways. The decline of the old public square forces us to build more durable relationships. What matters? Newsletters, podcasts, owned communities. LinkedIn still matters for professional audiences. So I’d resist the lazy conclusion that text is dying. Text is everywhere — in newsletters (which, by the way, is where I latched onto this story, in Casey Newton’s Platformer), in captions, in scripts, in search results. What’s dying is something more specific: the idea that a text-first social network can serve as the default global town square.

Twitter may have been less a replicable product category than a unique moment in media history. For communicators, the job is no longer to master the town square. The job is to understand the map after that square has gone to seed. Neville, is this what you’re saying?

Neville: It’s a lot. There’s a lot going on here to kind of zero in on a handful of potential responses, I suppose. But one thing does seem to be quite clear from all that you’ve outlined, which I believe is the case: Twitter probably was historically unique. And I think the issue, or an issue, is that everyone doesn’t think like that. They think it’s repeatable, it’s replicable. And it’s not. I think you could also see AI maybe accelerating the decline. Content abundance — so much of it. Authenticity is getting really difficult to judge. And everywhere is noisy. And that’s not what many people want.

So I guess, to crystallize it in a sense — you know, we’ve got all these elements you mentioned. The paradox of Bluesky: it hasn’t grown. Threads has got scale, but it doesn’t really have a big identity. It’s kind of part of Meta. What does it all mean for communicators? We’ll come back to that, I’m sure, in a bit. But I wonder — the thought that keeps recurring in my mind from everything I’ve read about this is that the decline may not be about text at all. That’s not to say it’s because they’ve all migrated to YouTube and video platforms. I don’t believe that’s the case either. I think, as you pointed out, and that’s obvious to all of us, the text itself isn’t disappearing. People talk about the decline of text-based social networks. But the audience hasn’t vanished. They’re just dispersed. They’re elsewhere. They’re not in a central place. There is no public square — no global public square.

No matter what the likes of Silicon Valley folks seem to think, there is no global public square. Or rather, there are places online that are accessible globally, but they’re not controlled by big platforms solely. Text isn’t disappearing. It thrives in the examples you mentioned — newsletters, Reddit, LinkedIn comments, Discords, WhatsApp, AI chat interfaces — probably 20 more examples you could give. So perhaps people still want text, but they don’t want giant algorithmic public feeds. I think that plays a big role in this. They don’t want the manipulation of algorithms to tell them, “This is what we think you want to read.” And that is still very strong on most big platforms today. They want to keep you on the site. They want to keep you engaged. They want you to keep doomscrolling, or whatever it might be. I think that shifts the conversation we should be having. It’s not about the decline of text — it’s that people don’t want giant algorithmic public feeds. What do they want? Well, they don’t know what they want, do they? They don’t.

You mentioned LinkedIn — definitely the interesting exception. I think there are multiple reasons why it remains one of the stronger environments for text discussion. I guess I’ll put it as questions, basically. Is it because having something like this — that’s kind of affixed to your professional identity — changes behavior, or rather reinforces “corporate” behavior that is different to how it would be on Facebook or on TikTok or other video platforms? Accountability is higher, reputational stakes are visible, audiences are contextual rather than anonymous. It works, I think, partly because people behave differently when attached to their real professional identity. Hence — you know, I saw one today, someone complaining about Facebook-like posts being published on LinkedIn: “Please stop doing that. This is a professional place.” That kind of comment. So I suppose you could say a useful contrast — to this point about people behaving differently — is outrage-driven engagement everywhere else compared to reputation-aware participation on LinkedIn. I thought that was quite a good contrast to make.

Outrage-driven engagement is very strong everywhere you look, but not on LinkedIn. People really don’t put up with that. So I think you have these elements that take part in all of this — that maybe smaller communities may be replacing mass audiences. And I think there’s a lot to be said in that. The smaller communities that would comprise, for example, niche communities, private groups, curated networks, newsletters, podcasts, creator ecosystems, if you like — much more than these algorithmically driven giant public feeds. I don’t follow much on the other traditional social networks. I prefer my own discovery on things like that. So maybe we’re moving from broadcast social media to relationship-based digital communities. And maybe this is just the start of that — which clearly has major implications for communicators and publishers. We can get into that, I suppose, in a bit. That broadly is what it looks like to me.

I’ve read the Reuters Institute’s report, I’ve read Nieman’s report, which actually are much wider than just talking about the decline of text-based networks, but there’s very much in there. There was an interesting article in Fast Company which looked at Bluesky’s limitations. I thought that was intriguing — what they wrote. The contradiction, they said, was that journalists and intellectual communities (and they define what they mean by that) still love Bluesky, but broader mainstream adoption remains elusive. And that is absolutely true. Little blips here and there of this group or that group moving away from X. Good example in the media: Deutsche Welle, the German broadcaster, announced, I think last week or the week before, that they have multiple — maybe 20 or 30 — Twitter handles, and they’re all going to shut down, and they’re moving it all to Bluesky. And I think — brave. Reality: X is still the place where significant public announcements are made. Look at what’s happening, for instance, in Iran — in the Iran war with Israel and the US — the propaganda battle between the two is taking place on X, mostly.

Trump, well, he’s got his Truth Social network, but I see people on X quoting Trump a lot. So governments, big corporations — but large groups tend to still be on X, in spite of what many, me included, would see as that being definitely a place not to be because of its toxicity. Deaf ears for that message, frankly, to people who are invested big in a place like that.

But what does it all mean for communicators? Well, you’ve touched on a few things, and maybe that’s something that we could explore a bit. But broadly, that’s what I’m seeing.

Shel: Well, I agree with you about the dispersion. I’m going to stick with the idea that the text-based social networks are in decline. You mentioned the German magazine that is sending all of their handles over to Bluesky.

Neville: Well, no — they are the big broadcasting and media organization, not a magazine.

Shel: Well, I’m sure Bluesky is going to be very happy about that. According to the Platformer article, Apptopia said that Bluesky has effectively collapsed as a competitive threat, with daily users down 96% from January of last year. That’s a pretty steep decline. If you look at Threads, which is turning three years old in July, Casey Newton writes that daily active users on the platform have declined in seven of the past eight months. After peaking in October 2024, just before the US presidential election, daily users are down 61%, and global monthly users have held up better at 388 million, but that’s still down from an estimated 400 million at the beginning of January of this year. So these are declining.

Elon Musk took over Twitter and turned it into X, and people saw what he was doing with it. They talked about, “I’m going to Threads,” or “I’m going to Bluesky.” A lot of them were saying they were going to Bluesky, and they ended up being the left-leaning people who couldn’t tolerate the rise of hate speech and rage-baiting on X. So they went to Bluesky and effectively turned it into a left-leaning echo chamber, with left-leaning people arguing among themselves. Meanwhile, one of the people Casey quoted in Platformer said on X that the extreme right is pulling everybody else further to the right because there’s nobody from the left there to argue with them. So that’s what’s happening in the text-based social networks. They are losing monthly and daily active users at a pretty alarming rate.

Where are they going? Well, the numbers for Instagram and TikTok and YouTube Shorts — the video platforms — are all on the rise. This is where people are going, and in particular, young people. I think one of the reasons LinkedIn is succeeding, in addition to the fact that it has a focus on business, is the fact that their algorithm, at least in part, focuses on who you follow. Whenever I log into LinkedIn, I see people that I know — not everybody who’s posted, but I do see people that I know. When I’m scrolling through Instagram, it’s a couple, but really, it’s trying to send me stuff it thinks I’m going to stick with rather than things from people I have connected with. So that makes me less interested in scrolling through Instagram. But I do find myself, when I see something — a video that’s in Reels and I tap it, it takes me over to Reels (this is on Facebook too, by the way) — I’ll find myself stuck there for a while as I’m looking at more of those short video clips. So they’re onto something in terms of what’s going to grab attention. But what does it mean for the public square? I think that — and we talked about that a lot in the early days of social media — you may remember the book Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. I loved that book. It was so optimistic about the public square and about the ability for people to connect with each other. And I just think that’s fading. That’s not what social media is about anymore. And I think the algorithms have driven a lot of that.

Neville: I have a copy. Well, I think you’re right. Indeed, as far as Casey Newton’s piece goes, that same argument — Twitter traffic has collapsed effectively. Many other people are saying the same thing. The Reuters Institute talks about that. Nieman talks about that. Fast Company doesn’t quite say it in the same words, but talks about the tensions there. I totally agree with that. So I think, though, that it has more to do with the shifts in how people see public spaces to connect with other people. I think it reinforces some views you see about users turning their backs on social media. We’re seeing that a lot, and much of it generational, I’m sure. Commentary about fewer platforms and deeper relationships — I think they mean to say fewer platforms that interest people, or that matter to many people.

Industry reporting is showing that short-form video is dominating attention, as you mentioned — TikTok, for instance, and YouTube Shorts, stuff like that. Great, I get all that. But I think much of it might depend on how you use these networks yourself. And I’m not a big fan of algorithmically driven content at all. And, you know, I use LinkedIn maybe not the same as you. Indeed, my whole approach to it is different to what it was even two years ago, where it was important to connect with others and have people like your content and share it widely and all that. Those things aren’t important to me anymore. What is important to me, using LinkedIn as an example, is to connect with a handful of people whose opinions I really do value. And they are literally a handful — maybe two handfuls. I don’t really care about, you know, stuff getting shared 50 times and all that. So I pay attention to some of the metrics, but not a lot.

And I think, you know, Bluesky — I’m there since the beginning. Threads — I’m there since the beginning. And I’ve definitely noticed a change. I look at it this way, Shel: great, less noise, because there are fewer people in there now, which is wonderful — and new people. In fact, I use Bluesky in particular as a way to surface new people to connect with. Threads, that’s a different crowd entirely. And in fact, Threads is far more of a burgeoning community, let’s say, than other places are. But I think, you know, you kind of pause and look at the big picture and say, “Is this getting wider attention around, you know, for everyone?” Well, of course it’s not. It has very high attention amongst tech journalism, in the media and publishing industry — although both of their needs are different. Tech journalists, and I see this myself, actively discussing Bluesky, Threads, X fragmentation. You see a lot of commentary about that. We’ve just been talking about that. Media publishing industry — they’re concerned about traffic collapse and discovery. Comms professionals — attention is growing. And so our conversation today might be quite timely, especially among people who relied on Twitter professionally, says one bit of research that I pulled up. The general public — it’s very low. Yes, of course it is, because this is not mainstream. It will get there eventually, I suspect. Most users migrate without discussing the macro trend. They just move out of Twitter and go someplace else, or whatever it is. Academia and research are beginning to grow around Bluesky behavior and community structures elsewhere.

So people feel the change, but they’re not talking about it in a way outside these niche areas. Insiders are analyzing the change. That’s what a lot of the discussion is now. But generally speaking, no one’s really fully named the change yet. Is it a decline of text? Is it a decline of social network interest? Is it — whatever, whatever, whatever you think it might be. So I think the question, or rather the focus, isn’t or shouldn’t be on whether Threads or Bluesky are failing or collapsing. That’s the wrong perspective. It’s more, as we’ve mentioned earlier: were Twitter and others like it unique historical moments that you cannot recreate? In which case, are we looking at, you know, swathes of people looking for a home to go to? No, I don’t think so. I think most have found a place.

There is no longer a single place that’s a giant public square. There are multiple, and they’re all small. So are we going to see a kind of movement of thousands, maybe millions, of teeny niche communities? You could actually argue: what a nightmare for communicators. So that’s where your audience goes. But that’s what it looks like to me a bit, Shel, frankly. What I hear some people talk about, what I read — my own behavior, even — I’ve navigated myself to small communities. So I’m still a member of a number of LinkedIn groups, although, to be honest, most of them have really diminished in quality of content. A lot of people pimping their wares, full of consultants doing that kind of stuff. No value there at all. It’s almost like Facebook in that sense, where every other post you get interrupted by ads and stuff like that. So that’s going on too, by the way.

So is it fatigue? I think it could well be generational. I mean, I’m not looking right now at any research that supports that opinion, but it seems to me that, you know, if you’ve got migrations to video channels that are typically the home of younger-oriented people — younger-oriented communicators, I’d say — that’s where it is. I take a look at TikTok now and again. I’ve been on TikTok forever and I don’t contribute. I watch. It’s not my cup of tea, the kind of stuff there. The new successor to Vine, called eVine — I’ve got an account. I haven’t yet posted anything, because I couldn’t figure out what I want to say there. But I’ve looked, and there’s lots of interesting stuff. So I’ll keep that kind of perspective. On those, I’m a consumer as opposed to a creator and a sharer. On others, I create, and most of that’s text-based content. I don’t believe that’s always because I’m a boomer — far from it. That’s my preference. But I frequent these other places as well. Is that typical? I have no idea. I don’t think it might be. But who knows?

But I think this is definitely a conversation to have in terms of what it means for communicators more than anything. So, you know, audience building is going to become harder for communicators. That’s how I see it. Owned channels are becoming far more important. Trust matters more. We know that from all the conversations we’ve been having and what we can observe ourselves. Community matters more than reach. I believe that. Personality matters more than scale — I don’t see evidence of that, but maybe that is true. Consistency matters more than virality. I think that’s going to become increasingly more important, and that’s connected with trust.

So the old social media promise was scale, right? The emerging model may be relevance and trust. Are we seeing an emerging model? I’m not sure, but that’s where the direction of travel looks like it’s going, it seems to me.

Shel: Well, it starts with, I think, brands needing to adopt the philosophy that you just articulated with your subscription to eVine — not posting anything because you haven’t figured out what to post there. I think a lot of people in social media create content, they reformat it appropriately for each channel, and throw the same piece of content into all those platforms. That won’t work anymore. I think you need to look at each platform, look at the people who are there, and figure out what you want to share that’s relevant, that will resonate, that will produce some kind of movement of the needle. And for those where you can’t answer that question, maybe it’s time to abandon those networks as a brand. As an individual, go where your people are. We’re not talking about what network you like personally. For people who love being on Bluesky, I’m not suggesting that you stop. Go wild. Have a great time on Bluesky. But is it a place to share the content that you’re sharing from your organization? Is there a way that you can craft content that’s going to work there? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s time to reevaluate that based on these trends.

Neville: Yeah, I think so. I think so. I mean, I think things like human voice, the individual voice, the demonstration of judgment — making judgments about something, your own lived experience and the intentional participation you exhibit by being on a certain platform — I think are increasing. Not scaled. I mean, this is small beer compared to the scaling that used to be the important thing. But they’re all connected with what we’ve been talking about: trust, authenticity, oversight, the evolving role of communicators in AI-shaped environments, to quote a phrase. I mean, it’s all in there too. Whatever — we think communicators need to be paying close attention to this in a macro sense, and indeed maybe the micro sense without getting into the weeds or anything — just be aware. So I pay attention to a lot of this stuff. I may not read every Reuters Institute report or Nieman report — not all. I’ll read the executive summaries. It’s a bit like, you know, the TikTok clips — I’ll look at the clips to get interesting stuff out of it and reflect. Do I think this is something that people I’m connected with will be interested in knowing? And that drives a lot of what I write about on the blog, for instance, which is AI-heavy these days. I think this is important to pay attention to. Perhaps public social networking is in decline. Maybe it is. But the social behaviors in small groups are definitely not. And that’s the thing to keep in mind — those two contrasts.

Shel: Yeah, and that requires a whole different approach than we’ve been taking — to this blasting this content out. And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

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