No. I think you're overestimating how much bad press Facebook is actually getting outside the tech bubble.
Facebook is going to get done in by the fact that the younger generation doesn't like it, but that process has been underway for a few years now, and it will take many more years to complete (obviously offering Zuckerberg many chances to turn the ship around).
Indeed, I've had almost strangers at the bar even start to talk about how bad facebook is now. I don't ever remember this happening before. I don't think its just in the tech bubble, this definitely appears to me to be outside the tech bubble now. I also notice people texting more often lately in my friend groups. It definitely feels more mainstream.
Yeah, it's definitely not just in the tech bubble at all. My parents in Tennessee, as well as my sisters and friends, all dislike Facebook for one reason or another-- the lack of privacy, the constant barrage of low-quality posts and annoying ads, the near-complete lack of content you actually care about, etc.
Indeed, he is killing his darling before someone else can.
No interest in working there personally because I despise both PHP and working in an open office, but I don't think the Zuckerberg brand of fine social content is going away any time soon.
I live in the U.S. I use Whatsapp to connect with family members in another country. I have a Facebook account just for my informal HOA community posts. I have zero fb friends. I hope my HOA finds another means to communicate.
> No. I think you're overestimating how much bad press Facebook is actually getting outside the tech bubble.
If you think Facebook is only getting hammered inside the tech bubble, you probably are living inside the tech bubble.
People are waking up to the harm caused by Facebook everywhere. My non-technical friends' raging against Facebook sounds similar to what I've been hearing from my technical friends for the past 5 years.
I think the watershed moment was the election of Donald Trump. While it may not have been the determining factor, the deluge of fake news claiming Trump is the only one who could save us from Obama the secret Kenyan Muslim certainly couldn't have hurt his chances of winning.
Nobody ever questioned the value of giving the uneducated this much power and amplification.
> People are waking up to the harm caused by Facebook everywhere.
If you think people are "waking up everywhere", you're probably inside a bubble. Where I'm from (outside the US) Facebook is just doing business as usual. If anything its new features are growing (anecdotally, Marketplace).
Having a bad rap inside the tech bubble affects them in relation to recruiting and retention though. If the tech zeitgeist turns against Facebook as a "cool place to work" that's pretty bad news for them.
No way, lots of companies get negative press and thrive. Facebook has lots of capital to throw at buying up smaller social networks (see: Instagram, which is still on the up and up for monthly users)
Many people honestly don't care about this data scandal or the other things Facebook does.
I keep thinking about this article[1] whenever I see bad press about FB lately.
Relevant portion: "Murdoch hosted Zuckerberg at his Sun Valley, Idaho, villa and expressed discontent with Facebook's News Feed algorithm and its handling of news.
He requested Facebook consult publishing partners and be more generous sharing digital ad revenue, or he vowed, News Corp executives would take their dislike of Facebook public. He also hinted that News Corp lobbyists would take a more aggressive stand against Facebook with U.S. regulators, as the company had done against Google in Europe.
News Corp denied it would mobilize its journalists against Facebook, although unnamed Facebook executives said they believed at the time that would happen."
It definitely seems that someone(s) is grinding their axes against FB, much like the flurry of negative news that came out against Uber a year or so again.
"Fox News declares war on Facebook" would at least help toward restoring Facebook's image, at least among those who are most upset about Cambridge Analytica.
Trying to decide who I dislike more out I News Corp and Facebook. I think News Corp have actively done a good deal more "evil" than FB, while FB have mostly been just sort of clueless or ambivalent about their negative effect on the world.
As Truman said: "If we see Germany is winning, we should do everything we can to help Russia, and if we see Russia is winning, we should help Germany. Better to let them wear each other out."
This is Facebook we’re talking about, not some mom and pop shop vulnerable to “bad press.” I really don’t see what sort of legitimate threat Murdoch could pose to Facebook outside of any threats they already face on a daily basis. If the threat of Murdoch “going public” with his feelings on Facebook were sufficient to threaten its very existence, Facebook would have gone out of business a long time ago.
And the point of my tongue-in-cheek comment was that Murdoch did buy MySpace, and utterly failed to compete with Facebook, or even to grow what little traffic MySpace had before he bought it.
Most of the recent bad press about Facebook involves its light-touch handling over causes very near and dear to Murdoch's heart, so I don't know if I buy into Murdoch being the one to put the screws to FB. If so, wow, talk about having your cake and eating it too.
Interesting information, thank you. The knives do seem to be out for FB right now, but equally it is the douchiest of douchebag business models, essentially: we'll give you a means to engage with the world, but we're going to watch how you do it, in order to manipulate your preferences. It's like the Stasi but in corporate form. Essentially, it will die because it's the Harvey Weinstein of corporate America - and because all the #metoo victims find their voice, with a little help from the other studio heads which would like to see the monster disappear.
> Essentially, it will die because it's the Harvey Weinstein of corporate America - and because all the #metoo victims find their voice, with a little help from the other studio heads which would like to see the monster disappear.
What exactly are you trying to say about Facebook with this forced metaphor?
I'm not the original poster, but the metaphor clearly seems to be that Facebook is the dirty old man that many people don't want to get in bed with but feel they have to.
The negative press sure talks about evils of Facebook and some people might be tempted to delete their accounts etc. But the question is - Does Average Jane/Joe own the problem (or care) enough to delete Facebook? My opinion is they don't. Facebook is still a way for them to connect with each other.
There are lot of bots in all the social media apps. So, Facebook might report deletion of large number of fake accounts to show they are doing something.
What is the competitor threat or new rising star that will usurp Facebook's position as a people-connector? LinkedIn? WeChat? Facebook was in super growth mode by the time MySpace stagnated.
Or does "end" mean something else, if not measured in users? Is it the year people realize that the idealized image of themselves and their thousands of friends not worth maintaining or checking?
Maybe it gets replaced by "micro-networks". Craigslist used to be the place to go all my classifieds needs. Now it's a cesspool of spam, garbage, and scams.
This is one of the things that has me split about Facebook. There is essentially no anonymity on the platform, and some people even report needing to verify their names with state IDs, which is a little much IMO (I was one of those users).
Yet, this also means very little spam and garbage. There seem to be little bots in the platform as far as I can see, and the few that send me friend requests seem to be taken down within hours, as opposed to Twitter for example.
It would be great if SSB [1] or something like it took off as the next-gen platform, but I just have a hard time seeing people actively change their online habits.
I think this is how it will end up. Rather than everyone sitting on facebook all day (like we used to back in the noughties), people will keep their accounts active, but only login occasionally, or for very specific purposes (e.g. setting up events).
Facebook started off as twitter, then added the kitchen sink. People thought they wanted the kitchen sink, but realised it wasn't worth the noise and/or privacy/security risks. Twitter itself has suffered 'feature creep', but to much less an extent. Facebook does have the 'monopoly' advantage, so I can imagine a lot of people will hang around out of inertia, but I also think that other competitors to very specific subsets will arrive, just as twitter did, and some will prefer to jump ship.
Anecdotally, this year and last is the first I've noticed where a lot of my friends have stopped using it altogether, and the ones who do basically never post any updates whatsoever or otherwise interact with it.
One way or another it seems they have lost user engagement in a big way.
Libtards used social media and internet for their propaganda since the internet came to being, when conservatives also started using it for the same purpose, they lost their shit.
It's the end of young-people-facebook. FB isn't cool and hasn't been for awhile now.
Old-people-facebook will cling to life because it is part of the media-ecosystem now. So I won't expect a steep dropoff, but rather a slow gradual decline in users as they literally die off.
I love Instagram. It's the only social network I use regularly. I like Twitter, but I use it in a read-only way and only check it maybe once or twice a month.
Instagram though, is fantastic, at least for now. They are starting to ruin it with ads though. I wish I could pay for an ad-free version.
The only thing still keeping me on FB is keeping updated and in touch with my cats' breeders. They like seeing photos of their kittens that we post, and I like keeping up to date with what they're doing. We're not close enough to send personal mails regularly, but are close enough to keep up with each other's public posts on FB. If I can ever bring myself to sever this one connection I'll take the step to delete my account. Until then I'll probably just try to delete as much non-cat-related personal information as I can.
Poor analogy. Most people with Windows computers can’t simply switch to Linux and expect their lives to be the same - they have file formats and IT department setups to maintain - while most people could quit Facebook and see no significant change in their lives, except perhaps for the better.
And yes, people do care. I work at a top tier U.S. university, and in our college at least we have so far refused to update or support our Windows machines past 7. Microsoft’s Windows 10 stumbles do matter.
No silver bullet to my knowledge, although it helps to know that we aren’t the only ones who don’t trust 8 or 10, so Microsoft will either have to support 7 for a while or stabilize their later versions. Either way there’ll be hell to pay if Microsoft ditches 7 without adequately stabilizing later versions.
I don't think it's a poor analogy. We all can cite anecdotes of people being fed up with something, but it won't lead to its death. Your IT dept anecdote is just OP's "I know people that quit Facebook."
Also, look at how people use Facebook. Quitting it would absolutely require a change in their social habits and opportunities.
Too many HNers look at Facebook through the lens of their own slowing social life. Long out of university, aren't meeting people regularly. Yes, makes sense that you could delete Facebook with a skip and a hop.
> Poor analogy. Most people with Windows computers can’t simply switch to Linux and expect their lives to be the same - they have file formats and IT department setups to maintain - while most people could quit Facebook and see no significant change in their lives, except perhaps for the better.
The only way I keep up with a dozen or so people is via facebook: I don't have any other communication line to them. And I am tech savvy.
A lot of people wouldn't know where to begin without that platform there.
When I think about most people I know, they could switch to GNU/Linux very easily, and many do, because what they need from a computer is: Google Docs, LibreOffice, YouTube, and—especially—Facebook.
Switching their operating system is almost completely inconsequential, like they might not even notice after one day of getting used to the new icon for the trash bin. But cut them off from Facebook and they lose context in their organizations, ability to do their job (social media customer relations is a big part of businesses like cafés, cinemas, festivals, etc), easy contact with their family and friends, access to cheap local marketplaces, information about local events, and so on ad nauseum.
Facebook is extremely important for the real lives of hundreds of millions of people. Like, more important than Wikipedia, Google, and Twitter combined.
It's worth keeping in mind that most Americans are not news-addicts and do not regularly read the news. For negative press to filter to the less-engaged public, you would need continuous press for months at a time. (This is also why it's a key political strategy to identify one bad news story about a politician and beat it until it's past dead.) Until that happens, I am not convinced this is bad for facebook.
The real question should be: do I believe Facebook will decline more than I believe Facebook will sort of muddle through (like Twitter) or Facebook stages some sort of recovery and return to grace.
MySpace declined because Facebook offered a viable alternative at the time. Today, out of all the alternatives the most attractive to the public is Instagram, which is owned by Facebook Inc.
Besides, just as others said the impact of bad press is not that pronounced. There's always bad press about it, and so far Facebook continues to dominate the social network market.
Proper answer: I just saw their stock plunged 10%. And I use the word plunged, because it created a gap (which I am super fool not to have taken advantage from this and short their stock since I knew of the 50m users fiasco way before NYSE opening). And although I do not appreciate, nor use FB, I do undertstand that they serve a purpose, and as many note, the average Jo/Jane doesn't care for privacy violations as "they got nothing to hide", and for as long people abandon(ed) their right to privacy, then Facebook will be growing stronger.
No. I can tell you speaking to my family and friends that are part of the "younger generation", while Snapchat and Instagram have grown in popularity (both Facebook companies) every person within their social network still owns their own Facebook profile. Furthermore it is still the standard to connect people around the world. Ask any person who has made a non-professional acquaintance while traveling to another country and I guarantee they will use Facebook to stay connected.
No. In fact now is a good time to pick up some more FB stock as it will almost certainly rebound to the 190s when their latest “fiasco” is out of the public spotlight.
FB can easily open new lines of business beyond social networking.
I doubt this very much. Google has proven that success at dominating and monetizing one thing doesn't translate easily to dominating and monetizing another thing.
Both are ad companies. Google got lucky with buying YouTube and Android on search ad money. They haven't been able to translate that success into anything else.
Facebook probably got lucky with WhatsApp and Instagram. Only time will tell if they can do it again once those two start to collapse.
One also has to remember Facebook is about a third the size of Google (25,105 vs 73,992), according to Wikipedia [1][2]. So if anything, unless it grows more or focuses better it'd be hard to move into drastically different ventures.
Its maybe a turning point around transparency and accountability, but surely not the end. Facebook is so dominant in many areas (remember they own Instagram, Whatsapp, Oculus) that we will have them around for the foreseeable future. Even when talking about a potential replacement, nothing comes to mind - in some sense it the perfect opportunity for a startup. Just gotta have that great idea on how you make the user the user, and not the product.
I confess my first reaction on reading this comment was "You mean the way Mastodon emerged a year ago and made Twitter completely irrelevant?"
It's possible that Facebook will be disrupted (although I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Facebook is operating at such an unprecedented scale that it's hard to apply traditional "rules of thumb" to them), and it's possible that what disrupts them will be a nonprofit competitor--but it's not going to disrupt them because it's nonprofit. Bluntly, idealism isn't sufficient; I don't see much indication that it's even necessary. Wikipedia "won" in its space against early competitors largely because of the features that its competitors perceived as its big weakness, e.g., not only can anyone read it for free, anyone can edit it for free, without even making an account.
A rule of thumb that I do think will prove to hold up: whatever replaces Facebook will be at least as difference from FB as FB was from MySpace. We're seeing that to some degree in the interest shift from FB to Instagram and SnapChat. (Of course, FB owns Instagram; another thing that's going to make them really difficult to disrupt as a corporation rather than a service is that they're big enough to throw money at potential disruptors until they sell out.) I think it's also going to be very difficult for a nonprofit to disrupt them for that reason, though, honestly; remember, even as huge as Wikipedia is, they're constantly struggling for money, and their infrastructure is way less resource-intensive than something like FB's is. Thing That Replaces FB may solve that by being fully decentralized and distributed, but it needs to be just as easy to use as FB is (and again, provide a more compelling reason to use it rather than "it's not FB").
The problem isn't Facebook. The problem is us. People. Humans. We're too prone to addictive behaviors. We're too prone to believe what we want to believe. And at least some of us are too willing to exploit a medium to manipulate the behavior of others.
A non-profit won't change any of that. People will still become addicted to it; it will still propagate fake news; and people will still use it to manipulate others.
True enough. And if it's less addictive, so people are on it less, then maybe there is less incentive for people to try to exploit it to manipulate users...
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadFacebook is going to get done in by the fact that the younger generation doesn't like it, but that process has been underway for a few years now, and it will take many more years to complete (obviously offering Zuckerberg many chances to turn the ship around).
It's at the tipping point where grandparents are starting to talk about the "snooping" and data gathering of Facebook.
Well mainstream news 'in the UK' seems to focus on most things that are not in the UK, so no surprises there.
All the younger generation I know are big users of Instagram and WhatsApp - both FB properties.
No interest in working there personally because I despise both PHP and working in an open office, but I don't think the Zuckerberg brand of fine social content is going away any time soon.
Instagram is fairly popular as well but WhatsApp never really went mainstream.
If you think Facebook is only getting hammered inside the tech bubble, you probably are living inside the tech bubble.
People are waking up to the harm caused by Facebook everywhere. My non-technical friends' raging against Facebook sounds similar to what I've been hearing from my technical friends for the past 5 years.
Nobody ever questioned the value of giving the uneducated this much power and amplification.
If you think people are "waking up everywhere", you're probably inside a bubble. Where I'm from (outside the US) Facebook is just doing business as usual. If anything its new features are growing (anecdotally, Marketplace).
And I can say that Facebook is receiving negative coverage from all of them. It's standard mainstream fare now.
And it has been so for at least the last 3 months.
Many people honestly don't care about this data scandal or the other things Facebook does.
Relevant portion: "Murdoch hosted Zuckerberg at his Sun Valley, Idaho, villa and expressed discontent with Facebook's News Feed algorithm and its handling of news.
He requested Facebook consult publishing partners and be more generous sharing digital ad revenue, or he vowed, News Corp executives would take their dislike of Facebook public. He also hinted that News Corp lobbyists would take a more aggressive stand against Facebook with U.S. regulators, as the company had done against Google in Europe.
News Corp denied it would mobilize its journalists against Facebook, although unnamed Facebook executives said they believed at the time that would happen."
It definitely seems that someone(s) is grinding their axes against FB, much like the flurry of negative news that came out against Uber a year or so again.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/12/facebook-rupert-murdoch-thre...
Sometimes clueless, sometimes willfully ignorant.
Both FB and NewsCorp have done immeasurable harm to our system of government.
http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims...
Neither murdoch nor Zuckerberg are admirable characters.
And the point of my tongue-in-cheek comment was that Murdoch did buy MySpace, and utterly failed to compete with Facebook, or even to grow what little traffic MySpace had before he bought it.
What exactly are you trying to say about Facebook with this forced metaphor?
That is a reasonable interpretation, though, so thanks.
There are lot of bots in all the social media apps. So, Facebook might report deletion of large number of fake accounts to show they are doing something.
Or does "end" mean something else, if not measured in users? Is it the year people realize that the idealized image of themselves and their thousands of friends not worth maintaining or checking?
Fortunately for Facebook they own both.
Yet, this also means very little spam and garbage. There seem to be little bots in the platform as far as I can see, and the few that send me friend requests seem to be taken down within hours, as opposed to Twitter for example.
[1]: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/
Think about how many times you see a post like this on HN: "I barely use facebook. I just keep it for <some random purpose>".
Facebook started off as twitter, then added the kitchen sink. People thought they wanted the kitchen sink, but realised it wasn't worth the noise and/or privacy/security risks. Twitter itself has suffered 'feature creep', but to much less an extent. Facebook does have the 'monopoly' advantage, so I can imagine a lot of people will hang around out of inertia, but I also think that other competitors to very specific subsets will arrive, just as twitter did, and some will prefer to jump ship.
One way or another it seems they have lost user engagement in a big way.
Cry harder faggots.
Old-people-facebook will cling to life because it is part of the media-ecosystem now. So I won't expect a steep dropoff, but rather a slow gradual decline in users as they literally die off.
The new time waste machine is Facebook again, but with a different name: Instagram.
I love Instagram. It's the only social network I use regularly. I like Twitter, but I use it in a read-only way and only check it maybe once or twice a month.
Instagram though, is fantastic, at least for now. They are starting to ruin it with ads though. I wish I could pay for an ad-free version.
No, nobody cared. I mean, it was a meme that everyone made jokes about, even late night talk shows. But nobody cared.
And yes, people do care. I work at a top tier U.S. university, and in our college at least we have so far refused to update or support our Windows machines past 7. Microsoft’s Windows 10 stumbles do matter.
> refused to update or support our Windows machines past 7
What's your long term strategy?
Is there a silver bullet?
Also, look at how people use Facebook. Quitting it would absolutely require a change in their social habits and opportunities.
Too many HNers look at Facebook through the lens of their own slowing social life. Long out of university, aren't meeting people regularly. Yes, makes sense that you could delete Facebook with a skip and a hop.
The only way I keep up with a dozen or so people is via facebook: I don't have any other communication line to them. And I am tech savvy.
A lot of people wouldn't know where to begin without that platform there.
Switching their operating system is almost completely inconsequential, like they might not even notice after one day of getting used to the new icon for the trash bin. But cut them off from Facebook and they lose context in their organizations, ability to do their job (social media customer relations is a big part of businesses like cafés, cinemas, festivals, etc), easy contact with their family and friends, access to cheap local marketplaces, information about local events, and so on ad nauseum.
Facebook is extremely important for the real lives of hundreds of millions of people. Like, more important than Wikipedia, Google, and Twitter combined.
The real question should be: do I believe Facebook will decline more than I believe Facebook will sort of muddle through (like Twitter) or Facebook stages some sort of recovery and return to grace.
What is the statement based on? Could you provide a citation for this or any corroborating evidence that this is fact?
Besides, just as others said the impact of bad press is not that pronounced. There's always bad press about it, and so far Facebook continues to dominate the social network market.
Proper answer: I just saw their stock plunged 10%. And I use the word plunged, because it created a gap (which I am super fool not to have taken advantage from this and short their stock since I knew of the 50m users fiasco way before NYSE opening). And although I do not appreciate, nor use FB, I do undertstand that they serve a purpose, and as many note, the average Jo/Jane doesn't care for privacy violations as "they got nothing to hide", and for as long people abandon(ed) their right to privacy, then Facebook will be growing stronger.
FB can easily open new lines of business beyond social networking.
Both are ad companies. Google got lucky with buying YouTube and Android on search ad money. They haven't been able to translate that success into anything else.
Facebook probably got lucky with WhatsApp and Instagram. Only time will tell if they can do it again once those two start to collapse.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
This isn't my idea, & I expect to see one of these emerge and take over in the next 1-3 years.
It's possible that Facebook will be disrupted (although I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Facebook is operating at such an unprecedented scale that it's hard to apply traditional "rules of thumb" to them), and it's possible that what disrupts them will be a nonprofit competitor--but it's not going to disrupt them because it's nonprofit. Bluntly, idealism isn't sufficient; I don't see much indication that it's even necessary. Wikipedia "won" in its space against early competitors largely because of the features that its competitors perceived as its big weakness, e.g., not only can anyone read it for free, anyone can edit it for free, without even making an account.
A rule of thumb that I do think will prove to hold up: whatever replaces Facebook will be at least as difference from FB as FB was from MySpace. We're seeing that to some degree in the interest shift from FB to Instagram and SnapChat. (Of course, FB owns Instagram; another thing that's going to make them really difficult to disrupt as a corporation rather than a service is that they're big enough to throw money at potential disruptors until they sell out.) I think it's also going to be very difficult for a nonprofit to disrupt them for that reason, though, honestly; remember, even as huge as Wikipedia is, they're constantly struggling for money, and their infrastructure is way less resource-intensive than something like FB's is. Thing That Replaces FB may solve that by being fully decentralized and distributed, but it needs to be just as easy to use as FB is (and again, provide a more compelling reason to use it rather than "it's not FB").
The problem isn't Facebook. The problem is us. People. Humans. We're too prone to addictive behaviors. We're too prone to believe what we want to believe. And at least some of us are too willing to exploit a medium to manipulate the behavior of others.
A non-profit won't change any of that. People will still become addicted to it; it will still propagate fake news; and people will still use it to manipulate others.
But when the incentives are aligned differently, the overall behavior of such a system could indeed affect humans differently.
Right now, the goal is eyeballs glued to the page, and thus the algorithms deep down find the most clicky/sticky things to put in front of your eyes.
If the goals were different, such a network might instead encourage different behaviors, like actually not using the site very much, etc.
Probably the best thinking I've seen on this topic is from Tristan Harris: http://www.tristanharris.com More info there.