I feel like the linguistic nature of them is more appealing to a broad audience than games or social media.

IMO What makes online games and social media different from LLM chat bots is what’s (supposed to be) on the other end: people. Some people seem to feel it more than others, but human connection is one of the most fundamental facets of human existence. It’s compelling because there’s another human being you’re sharing an experience with, not because there’s a method of generating the text that would result from that. Even when people interact with bots in those other online realms, most of them are only doing so because they think it’s a person.

Meta removed the ai accounts from Instagram because most of the people that even gave the feature a second thought, were just mad because they couldn’t block them. I’ll bet they were NOT cheap to implement, and they were not some nascent bing chat era blunder— it was 2025. I think that’s a harbinger of future ‘socialize with LLMs’ feature adoption.