As users post less and less to Instagram, new apps have tried to stake their claim as the next big thing. The French social-media app BeReal, which gained popularity for its more authentic experience, peaked at 75 million downloads per analytics firm Sensor Tower and a $630 million valuation. Growth has stalled a year later, with a monthly active user base of 51 million, a sliver of Instagram's 1.4 billion. Other apps like Dispo, Poparazzi, and Locket have all used various gimmicks to try and recapture social media's halcyon days — each had a moment in the sun at the top of the US Apple app-store charts — but none have truly broken through. Even ByteDance, which has the same parent company as TikTok, failed to recapture the fading magic with the photo-sharing platform Lemon8.

And now there is Threads, Instagram's latest play in the space to fill the void that was left as Twitter has undergone so much volatility. While Mosseri has hailed the text-focused platform as a "less angry place for conversations," Threads' daily active-user count is down 79% a month after it launched — to 10.3 million daily active users, data from Similarweb found. Even with the backing of Meta, Threads may not have the juice to make it through, because it doesn't offer users a new way to interact. It follows in the footsteps of other buzzy startups that rise to the top for weeks, even days, before users get bored. The core issue is that these apps don't solve anything new. They are mostly copycat versions of each other.

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"I'm honestly just tired of social media," said 23-year-old Walid Mohammed, who works in the creator economy. "I'm tired of consuming content all the time."

And if Instagram was the bellwether for the rise and fall of the "social" social-media era, it is also a harbinger of this new era. "If you look at how teens spend their time on Instagram, they spend more time in DMs than they do in stories, and they spend more time in stories than they do in feed," Mosseri said during the "20VC" interview. Given this changing behavior, Mosseri said the platform has shifted its resources to messaging tools. "Actually, at one point a couple years ago, I think I put the entire stories team on messaging," he said.

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Social media promised to create an intricate web that brought us all closer to one another, but the wave of exposure led to an openness that many people just aren't interested in. Most people wouldn't let the first person they stop on the street sift through their camera roll. They want their achievements, failures, and little life moments to be kept sacred. So after a decade of airing our most intimate moments in public, the pendulum is shifting back. People are more selective with their communities and are reverting back to an old-school way of interacting. It's hard to know how the change will affect the online atmosphere over the long term — some evidence suggests the shift will create a healthier digital experience, but it also risks further dividing people into like-minded echo chambers.

Whatever the result, it's clear that the Instagram era of social media is over and the new era of "authentic" online sharing is emerging — just without an audience.

Unfortunately, the authors did not specify whom they meant by ‘Influencers, marketers, average users, and even social-media executives agree’, but plausible candidates include Ellis Hamburger, Brian Merchant and Ian Bogost.