A visual review of the biggest tech trends of 2018: sentiment toward Amazon's HQ2 search, the plateau of social media use, Facebook's trust betrayals, and more
Rani Molla / Recode : Tweets: @ranimolla and @ranimolla . Thanks: @ranimolla Tweets: Rani Molla / @ranimolla : Want to know what happened in 2018? I've got charts for that! https://www.recode.net/... pic.twitter.com/ag3haCXBOD Rani Molla / @ranimolla : RIP social media growth in the U.S. http://twitter.com/... Thanks: @ranimolla
Context & Ripple Effects
Recode's chart roundup closes out a year whose shape was already visible at midyear: Mary Meeker's annual trends deck showed time online still rising even as smartphone shipments stagnated — the backdrop against which U.S. social media use flatlined rather than compounded.
The other two threads the charts trace — public sentiment turning on Amazon's HQ2 search and Facebook's sequence of trust betrayals — are the same threads the following year's coverage picks up as antitrust investigations and consumer protests, with later polling showing Facebook's favorability sliding further.
First-order effects
- Facebook ends 2018 with its trust problem now documented in data rather than headlines alone — the charts turn a reputational narrative into a measurable trend line.
- Amazon's HQ2 search, run as a competitive auction among cities, is shown to have cost it public goodwill, changing the calculus for how it stages future expansions.
Second-order effects
- With U.S. social media growth plateaued, platforms shift from competing on user acquisition to competing on engagement and monetization of the users they already have.
- The trust deficits the charts quantify give regulators and politicians a popular mandate — the ground the 2019 antitrust investigations stand on.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry's defining metric flips from growth to legitimacy: platform power gets contested through regulation and public opinion rather than network expansion, which is exactly how the 2019 year-end review frames the follow-on year.
- Facebook's trajectory in these charts anticipates durable favorability erosion — by 2021, surveyed favorability had fallen further, suggesting trust losses compound rather than recover on their own.
The trend: U.S. consumer tech crossed from a growth story to an accountability story in 2018, with stalled social media adoption and eroding platform trust setting up the antitrust era that followed.