Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of the widely popular social news aggregation site and forum Reddit, claimed in a conference on Monday that we have hit “peak social”. This ostensibly means that the internet is about as saturated as it can get in terms of connecting people, which means that things are about to change drastically. If what Ohanian is saying is accurate, it means that Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and all other social media sites are going to end up suffering a loss in popularity.
According to Ohanian, these sites are slowly getting old for users, and that newer users are not going to want the same thing as older users. This seems sensible when you think about the life cycle of the internet. He also stated that alternative VoIP and Messaging apps are going to start rising if Facebook genuinely declines the way he is claiming it will.
Two apps that he singled out to be big players in the near future are Discord and Telegram. Both of these are messaging apps with voice call capabilities that offer good alternatives to WhatsApp, Messenger and other traditionally popular messaging app. Discord even has a specific focus on gamers that want to talk to one another while they are playing, which is very interesting when you consider the fact that gamers are a huge subset of the online community.
It seems unlikely that Ohanian’s comments were a jab of some kind because he included his site as one of the sites that are not going to be as relevant as they currently are in the future. If this ends up being an accurate prediction, we could potentially see a huge shift in the way the internet works.
Image: Alexis Ohanian / Facebook
According to Ohanian, these sites are slowly getting old for users, and that newer users are not going to want the same thing as older users. This seems sensible when you think about the life cycle of the internet. He also stated that alternative VoIP and Messaging apps are going to start rising if Facebook genuinely declines the way he is claiming it will.
Two apps that he singled out to be big players in the near future are Discord and Telegram. Both of these are messaging apps with voice call capabilities that offer good alternatives to WhatsApp, Messenger and other traditionally popular messaging app. Discord even has a specific focus on gamers that want to talk to one another while they are playing, which is very interesting when you consider the fact that gamers are a huge subset of the online community.
It seems unlikely that Ohanian’s comments were a jab of some kind because he included his site as one of the sites that are not going to be as relevant as they currently are in the future. If this ends up being an accurate prediction, we could potentially see a huge shift in the way the internet works.
Image: Alexis Ohanian / Facebook
