An alternative worth pondering: maybe social media just has a shelf-life of 5-10 years. You get into it during your hyper-social teen years, and then you get bored of it. That doesn't mean it will die. So long as we keep having young people there will be a market. But the social media apps are definitely delusional if they keep projecting that the entire human population will keep using social media all the time.
I know that this doesn't align with the article, because the article says that Gen Alpha prefers private messaging apps, but I still think there is something to this idea.
A lot of us here are the first generation of mass computer and internet usage and I think that clouds our long-term perspective about what computer usage will be like for future generations born into a world where computers always existed.
The private messaging apps are modern social media. Social media is a service a group of people who know each other in real life communicate about things happening to them in real life. I know that a lot of people take issue with that definition but that is only because the well-known social media companies stopped focusing on social media and started doing publishing.
Posting on Facebook and Instagram is down because people discovered a significantly better social media service: group text threads. Those took off because they have a critical feature that Mark Zuckerburg doesn't believe in: privacy contexts. Good UI and lack of ads also help. So critical is this new social network to young people that adults on HN complain that their kids say that not having an iPhone (and thus a rich texting experience) would be "worse than death."
I don't intend to disagree with your points overall. Indeed, young people like social media more than old people.
They are also part of the first generation of mass computer/internet usage, like us. And they were often slower to adopt a smartphone. So they could very well be going through their "first 5-10 years of internet" experience. The fact that they're old right now might just be a distracting factor.
Or maybe it is indeed a hint that social media is more likely to be used by certain age brackets and we can think of it in waves:
Old people move slowly. They meet fewer new people, they get less enthusiastic about the next big thing, they're less interested in new things, hell, they tend to walk slower, too.
So when a new phenomena springs up, say, a new type of social media, the fast moving teenagers and young adults get in first. The feedback loop between people joining and existing members convincing more people to join blows up the popularity. Once it's popular enough, if it can be easily translated to appeal to older people, the older people will move in. (I say "if", because SnapChat managed to hit the massive growth curve part without ever really getting the old people on-board). The old people being on the site is a downside, so eventually a new novelty springs up to attract young people. The older people, who are slower moving, get left behind.
I know that this doesn't align with the article, because the article says that Gen Alpha prefers private messaging apps, but I still think there is something to this idea.
A lot of us here are the first generation of mass computer and internet usage and I think that clouds our long-term perspective about what computer usage will be like for future generations born into a world where computers always existed.