Facebook growth numbers haven't been strong lately, but it's still growing [0]. With 2.3B monthly active users 15M isn't much to worry about unless a specifically profitable sub-population is doing the leaving.
Isn't that what it's supposed to be? Facebook has the market of young people captured pretty broadly with Instagram. I doubt they would appeal so much to older people if they focused in appealing to younger people.
Enron and Arthur Anderson weren't going to lie on their quarterly filings either. Not saying it's true or false, but there's also the possibility that user count methodologies can change to create the appearance of growth.
It's rich that you created an account specifically to make this comment. Lying on financial reports is not uncommon and there are high profile examples, so a sweeping appeal to honesty on the part of a multi billion company caught lying in the past is foolish.
Article discusses the differences in measuring what a user counts as, so the numbers are difficult to pin down exactly. Anecdotally, I still _have_ my account, but no longer log in. It has been 2-3 months now, so I ought to be counted as such - that is, not an active user despite having an account. I don't use insta or whatsapp or messenger either - but I still have my FB account.
I wonder how many people there are like me, with nearly dead accounts but could still be 'counted' if you wanted to.
Yeah, I'm late 20s overeducated and I never post nowadays and go to Facebook once a month or so. My feed is almost dead now and none of my friends post like they used to. Decent amount of activity on Instagram though but not like it used to be with Facebook when I was in college. Though probably because we graduated and grew up I don't know.
> How the study was conducted:
A total of 1,500 persons were interviewed to explore Americans’ use of digital platforms and new media. From January 3rd through February 4th, 2019, telephone interviews were conducted with respondents age 12 and older who were selected via Random Digit Dial (RDD) sampling through both landline phones and mobile phones. The survey was offered in both Spanish and English. Data was weighted to national 12+ U.S. population estimates.
I wouldn’t put much faith in this estimate. While facebook’s is probably an overestimate of people actually engaged in their platform, this survey doesn’t seem very useful to me.
I am always sad to see responses like this. Statistics is a very well-defined mathematical discipline, and any good research firm will use weighting techniques to adjust for demographic-based likelihood of response. The results they get from this are very accurate.
If you have concerns about Edison's methodology or application of standard survey weighting then I think that could be a fruitful conversation. But implying that 1,500 responses can't be predictive for a country of 350 million is woefully misinformed.
Phone surveys were accurate when robocalls and cellphones didn't exist. Now you're only sampling the people who aren't discerning enough to reject unknown numbers.
Having concerns about their methodology would imply that they've actually shared it. The closest they get is a hand-wavy answer to the discrepancies between Facebook's data and their own:
> We're saying, "Do you currently use Facebook?" Facebook is probably measuring it on, “Do you ever open the app, or do you ever use it on any level?”
That answer doesn't event make sense. Given that Edison have gone to the press to promote their report and this particular number, you'd expect them to have a good answer on the discrepancies. They should definitely know what the Facebook numbers represent, especially given Facebook publicly disclose their definition of an active user in SEC filings.
Fair. I do commonly do social statistics myself and have to deal with worse. My gripe was moreso that it's a random digit dialing survey (which I think would be full of bias for a purpose like this) instead of the actual usage statistics that facebook provides. Also, sampling is simply a hard thing to do. And their definition of leaving is pretty poor.
Also if we want to get nitpicky, while there is a significant drop between 2017 and 2018, there is no significant drop between 2019 and 2018 (62% -> 61%, p value of .57), despite the headline being 'Facebook Usage Continues to Drop' :)
Also, any methodology problems can be mitigated by the fact that they did the same survey with the same methodology in 2017, and compared their results. You expect to get better accuracy by asking people then and now "do you use Facebook?" than by asking them now "do you use Facebook, and did you use it two years ago?"
Is there a specific reason you doubt the estimate, or is your problem that the sample size is small? Small sample sizes don’t imply incorrect conclusions.
EDIT: To whoever has downvoted this, I politely (but urgently) recommend you read up on statistical significance. The idea that a small sample size implies a study’s findings are unreliable is one of the most widely held misconceptions in modern statistics.
It seems to me that the overall interest in Facebook is decreasing. The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years. It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving.
Still, Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition. We don't see any news about their user base decreasing and news channels don't seem to dislike them. Facebook is doing a good job making sure their biggest three platforms are seem as independent from one another, keeping Instagram and WhatsApp almost free from controversy.
Personally I see no loss for them here. Besides, they will promptly acquire any new players that look promising, or shamelessly copy them as they did with Snapchat.
> The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years.
I actually found some great rugs (owners did not know what they had!) and furniture on the FB marketplace. Much better finds than on craigslist, and easier to verify that the seller is a human.
Indeed. There sure are a lot of accusations of FB lying in these comments, but it seems people have no problem upvoting much more obvious lies like "FB hasn't launched any new features in 2 years".
The point doesn't still stand, but I'll save you all the googling: FB launched Watch on August 9, 2017. You could also say "only in the last year" and it'd be easy to find something else with 2 minutes of googling.
Craigslist was tainted by the unsavory element of prostitution and stolen goods and isn’t a resource that I seek out. Facebook marketplaces seem like what eBay was in the 90s.
If I'm buying a used piece of furniture or whatever, I don't give a shit about prostitution going on elsewhere on the site.
What's really hurt Craigslist is all the scammers. You can't post anything of value on there without some scammer responding and telling you they're going to send you a cashier's check and have a personal assistant pick it up.
You don't have this problem at all on Facebook AFAICT. When someone responds to your ad on Facebook Marketplace, it's a real person who actually wants to buy your old junk.
The scammers aren’t there because of prostitution, both categories are there because Craigslist attracts unsavory parties and does little or nothing to police them.
No, that's not correct at all. The difference is that Craigslist has no real accounts. When you get a response to your CL ad, even if the responder has a CL account, you don't see this, you just get a text message or phone call or email. With FB, everything is through the site because of the way it's centralized, and you can see the account and full name of the person who's contacting you. On CL, it's trivial for scammers to respond to ads with automated programs, but on FB they'd have to create a real-looking fake account in your area, complete with pictures, some kind of history, etc., which is a far greater undertaking.
In short, the formats of the sites make all the difference. CL was created to preserve anonymity and not be a centralized social network, but that feature is also its undoing because it facilitates scamming.
The Page/Group feature is nice, especially if you don't have many friends.
I wish it wasen't though. I don't like the company.
Oh yea, I've never used my real name on FB.
I do have a Page that's getting some traction, but I don't know if I want to use my real name. In all honestly, I think the people who like my Page are just being nice. The "likes" are all comming from one war torn country?
(Oh yea, I'm to lazy to go to my desktop(incognito mode), and see if I'm still shadow banned. Please up-vote/down-vote me if you happen to see this. I must have pissed off the dong? I still think about the email I got from HN. It was basically get lost. I don't think I'm that bad, but I was irritating HN?)
I've been surprised by how good Facebook's local classified ads implementation is, I've been having better success with it than Craigslist.
It's an odd platform. They have a lot of great features for outreach and discovery of local events and groups of people, leveraged by the strong network effect. For contact with local groups of people with similar interests, and for planning events, for group communication, it is an effective tool and one that has enriched my life in substantial ways.
The one thing that I really hate is the front page feed. It was probably a great business decision on their part to emphasize microblogging, as it definitely increased engagement in the platform. It also turned everyone into memelords who just re-share funny cat pictures, pyramid schemes and incendiary political propaganda. I tried just filtering that out with the "see fewer posts like this", but I turns out that people just don't really post anything but image macros and articles anymore.
Instagram is almost unusable due to the ads. Every 3 or 4 posts you see an ad. The only way Instagram isn't obnoxious is on the desktop, in a browser, with an ad-blocker installed.
I love WhatsApp, but they haven't found good ways to monetize it yet and one of these days they'll ruin it.
One feature (limitation) of Instagram is that you can't include clickable links in a post message. So if you're running a business or are a personality of interest, you might share something that your followers might actually care to look into in more depth off-platform.
But then you have to tell them to check your profile for your one allowed link, go to your site, search for the product/blog/video - or you pay for an ad with links enabled.
Integrating the backends of the messaging systems, not the frontends. There will still be separate apps called "Messenger," "Whatsapp," "Instagram," etc., but they'll just be different fixtures set on top of identical plumbing.
... in much the same way that Ford (say) could design one car and then sell it to very different audiences as the Ford Taurus, Mercury Sable, and Lincoln Continental.
I don’t disagree, but there seemed to be a lot of a publicity around a backend tech change, and to me, it is that publicity that undoes the whole idea of keeping businesses separated. As a side example, everyone knows that Coke makes Diet Coke, but many don’t know that they make Sprite. The Sprite model seems to be a better approach than FB’s new Diet Coke approach.
I believe this is a bit more nefarious than a car manufacturer who is trying make you pay for a car slightly more.
This is actively deceiving people into believing their privacy is safe by using products that have nothing to do with facebook.
I deleted my account years ago, but ended up creating a fake account under a fictitious identity for the odd event organized through Facebook. I log in every so often just to see what's up. It appears to be a mixture of paid content and two random friends posting memes.
I have to think people are deriving some value from it, but I cannot imagine what it is.
Just like with twitter, it all depends on who you follow; Some content is dramatically better than others. And just like with twitter, most of the content is essentially garbage.
Agreed. And I think this is one reason I love FB and can't stand Twitter. I kept buying into the "follow important people on Twitter" and it's just crap. I don't care what a noted Icelandic volcanologist retweeted about canaries. I don't care what my favorite F1 driver retweeted about english football. I don't care. I don't follow "influencers" because I don't care what they think, but I thought at least getting things from the horse's mouth, as it were, would be interesting, but it's just not.
I follow friend and family on facebook. If they post crap, it's because they have stupid things to say. I don't have many friends who I think are stupid.
Obviously you can follow celebrities on facebook and only follow friends on twitter but it doesn't feel like they're made for that use case, the 'reverse' of what I use it for.
I feel the same way about twitter. The only time I ever visit is when some service I use isn't working and I want to see if they've said anything about it being down (or it's just me).
Obviously you can follow celebrities on facebook and only follow friends on twitter but it doesn't feel like they're made for that use case, the 'reverse' of what I use it for.
Someone here not long ago on HN opened my eyes to the 'lists' feature of Twitter, it's been a remarkable improvement for me with the platform. "IRL" friends in one list, "Net" friends in another, sports commentary (because that's a thing I'm into), etc. etc. Crap is more or less 'siloed'.
I wish twitter promoted the feature more, to be honest, I think it can help with some of the gripes you have, if not for you maybe for others as it did with my experience on the platform.
Following interesting people generally has nothing to do with following celebrities.
People could post the same stuff on FB, Twitter, or email lists the hard part is finding stuff worth subscribing to. It’s really more about what platform creators use, and Twitter’s lightweight nature means a lot of interesting things end up on it.
You can turn retweets off for the people you follow. I follow maybe 100 people who post regularly but only allow retweets from a handful of them. Since I've done so, the quality of my feed has improved dramatically. Usually, when I follow a new person I leave retweets on initially but turn them off after two or three retweets because I'm only interested in what they say originally.
Incidentally, the iOS Twitter client also shows tweets in your feed which your followers liked. And you can't turn that off. I don't understand that feature at all and it made me switch to a third-party client.
Thanks! I didn't realize that, good advice. Didn't notice the 'likes' .. I mean, I'm sure it's bothered me, I just didn't realize why it was happening, just closed twitter every time i saw too much junk.
Years ago I deleted my Facebook account [the "please everything" request, for what that's worth]. I felt so much better after doing so.
I then soon joined Twitter and consciously curated who I followed. I felt [and still do feel] fine about being on Twitter.
Some months ago I rejoined Facebook. I am consciously curating who I do and don't "friend" or follow. So far, so good. Yes, I am noticing the now-expected targeted ads ... but I prefer them, to be honest. Market me tickets to the Fandango showing of 'Logopolis' please; even if I don't buy, that's much more useful than the usual random jar of some guy's snake oil you'd offer me 20 years ago. Is this me being Institutionalized on tracking? Maybe, but there is an "after the uncanny valley" for tracking/advertising just like there is for robotics and AI. I'm interested to see how that works in relation to echo chambers.
I barely use facebook's website, I don't post anything but keep a account around for family, folks who want to use messenger and the odd event/group. It's a bit like having that hotmail address from highschool for the odd person who has that as your only contact point. I kept AIM and ICQ around for a long time for that reason.
I think younger folks have migrated to Instagram, snapchat, etc. where they actually post/use the platform.
I have to think people are deriving some value from it, but I cannot imagine what it is.
I know a couple of people who don't have any Facebook "friends" connected to their accounts, but they follow brands and companies they're interested in keeping up with.
It's sort of like RSS, but with more companies on board.
This is what I've done as well. Fake name, profile, wildly random answers to profile questions and thumbs up to anything if I remember of have times. I only use the account to follow a couple of local businesses. Facebook is welcome to all the income that account provides them.
If you linked it to your real phone number or any of your real friends who have you in their contacts (which they've most likely shared with Facebook), you're not fooling FB.
Note:- I have been off FB for the past 5 years or so.
As much as I hate FB and its abhorrent privacy policies, there are a very large population who do not care about privacy. I have some in my household who don't and FB's latest financial results prove it.
Everyone cares about privacy. They just aren't keenly aware that they're losing it. If you meet someone who doesn't care about privacy, ask them, can I borrow your phone and browse through your contacts, your conversations, and your pictures? Almost nobody will say yes unless they are very close to and intimate with you.
I think John Oliver did a pretty good job of framing the Snowden revelations in terms of "the NSA can see your penis". That's a good angle to make people care.
I don't think your analogy is very good. it's true that many (maybe even most) people have secrets that they would be embarrassed to share with their friends, family, or coworkers. if you asked them whether they would be okay with letting some stranger who they would never meet look through their phone, they might not do it for free, but I bet a lot of people would do it for $5-10.
That's not it. Offering people 10 bucks won't change that most say "no" when you ask them to borrow their phone and snoop through everything. Instead, it's that the whole loss of privacy is impersonalised. When you see my face, the face of someone who just asked to borrow your phone, when it's clear a person is going to be looking through it, that's when you say "no".
But when Facebook is harvesting data about you, it doesn't feel like a person is doing it. It feels like some abstract machine or algorithm or a faceless corporation is doing it. They even promise that humans aren't individually looking at your data. So people bank on that impersonality. The data may be collected, but who cares, nobody is actually really looking at it, right?
The truth is that people do often look at it, despite all the promises and everything. That's what you have to convey and that's what John Oliver was trying to establish with his angle.
Sure, when you ask people they tell you they care about Privacy. But their actions prove otherwise. And actions are what matter. It’s an unfortunate situation but that’s just the reality of it, like it or not. I don’t.
> Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition
You're not wrong, but I find it a bit frustrating how much resistance I get whenever I try and suggest using Signal instead of Whatsapp. As far as I can tell, it has pretty much all the features of Whatsapp that I use, without all the spying.
I think there's a lot of "chat app fatigue." I've personally had 5 or 6 on my phone in the past year and you'd have to drag me kicking and screaming into installing even one more of the damned things.
No one wants to install ANOTHER app just to talk to you. Most of us already have at least 3 messaging apps they use on a daily basis and probably a whole lot more they use on a weekly basis.
Signal work all right, but it doesn't feel very polished. Notifications are a bit wonky, and the unread message icon never shows up on the home screen icon.
They are end to end encrypted. There's apparently a lot of meta data (like the people one communicates with, etc.) that can still be accessed by Facebook.
It also nudges users to enable cloud backups which in practice means that everyone has them enabled (...which in practice means that all your messages are unencrypted in the other person's cloud storage.)
> It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving.
I'm not much of a user myself, but among my friends that use it heavily I've noted a number of complaints that it has gotten HARDER to use for their primary use: keeping up with friends.
Their issue isn't that FB has become stale or boring, but that it has actively LOST ground relative to their purpose.
It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving.
The problem with Facebook, is that either it's boring, or it's not boring, and in that case it's often far worse. Facebook latched onto the fact that outrage measures as "engagement" then other people latched onto that fact and started to use Facebook for their own outrage mongering purposes.
Still, Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition. We don't see any news about their user base decreasing and news channels don't seem to dislike them. Facebook is doing a good job making sure their biggest three platforms are seem as independent from one another, keeping Instagram and WhatsApp almost free from controversy.
So one company, three brands?
If I were to start my own crowdfunding app, I'd have one app with three "skins" and three different brands, each a different level of "edginess." In the Terms of Service would be the discretion for the site to "shift" your account from one of the three to another. The only effect of this, would be to shift the public information around the creator and subscriptions from one site to another. I would do this, so that "maintaining our brand" would never become an issue in funding creators, even edgy or downright controversial ones.
I wish they'd accommodate news and opinion in the same way. Maybe that way, they could keep their employees out of the business of censoring the internet in line with their particular biases.
> latched onto the fact that outrage measures as "engagement" then other people latched onto that fact and started to use Facebook for their own outrage mongering purposes.
So this must be your assessment of twitter as well? Same current observation, Same predicted outcome?
It seems to me that it takes "energy" to get people to change. Change being one of how they think about something, how they respond to something, or what they spend their time on. As far as I can tell, there are three very well known and very well studied energy pools that can be amplified and then tapped, one is fear, one is anger, and one is reward.
With fear and anger, a process is set up to increase levels in the target, while simultaneously offering a solution vector (ie a change in behavior that will address the fear or anger). I am sure psyche majors can quote all sorts of work here on that aspect of things.
For web companies, if your revenue is derived by ads, and you can only get people to click on your ads if they are looking at your page, it seems using fear and anger to drive people to page after page would be the best strategy to maximize their exposure to ads.
"outrage measures as engagement" is a perfect summary of the effect. The feedback loops are horribly exploitative.
I was never that engaged in Facebook, just checked it once a week. Then I started helping managing a private forum (for Michigan entrepreneurs) and got invited into another one. Now I'm on FB a couple of times a day.
Having the chance to engage with bright people who share my passion was the key. But the majority of my family has never been on Facebook.
This has been a common refrain from a lot of people. Facebook seems to have a lock on community it’s discussion forums for all sorts of small groups.
It works since basically everyone is on it and you don’t have to make people register and create an account as a barrier to entry. People used to have email listservs instead, but I think there is so much email marketing now that the signal to noise ratio on most people’s personal accounts approaches 0.
If someone could create a platform for an online discussion forum that doesn’t require signing up for a new service, will notify you of activity, and is free that would probably help a lot of people move over. NextDoor might have been able to, but they’re too focused on specific geographic neighborhoods and they have a serious racism problem.
This is why I liked Reddit so much when I have discovered it.
You get thematic subreddits for these kind of discussions, and you didn't even need a full-fledged account. Just a nickname. No email confirmation, no phone authentication, no anything.
I have a pseudonym FB account that I am forced to maintain for this reason (specialist interest groups). It's the new phpbb even though it completely sucks as a forum tool. The same questions get asked over and over. But worse is better I guess.
I went to great lengths to keep my account completely anonymized, so the suggested friends list is a hilarious cross-section of global randos. Of course being a pseduonym account I could be banned at any moment.
> you don’t have to make people register and create an account as a barrier to entry
Cool, I had not realized that Facebook now allows non-members to post and participate in their forums. That's really great! Not sure where on Facebook it is one can do that, but I'll be on the look out now that I know they've added this.
>one app with three "skins" and three different brands, each a different level of "edginess."
They aren't a tech company as such but this reminded me of Coca Cola. There's Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Coke No Sugar plus whatever flavored variations they are currently doing. They are all slight variations on more or less the same product but it gives people the feeling that they are making a choice.
I think Coke No Sugar is supposed to be the replacement for Coke Zero. They also aren’t identical as Zero/No Sugar uses stevia as the sweetener while Diet Coke uses Aspartame.
I will bit the rebranding of Zero to No Sugar might have also been an attempt to get ahead of legislation to tax sugary drinks.
I couldn't agree more and don't forget about "aggregator" type accounts that just steal original content from other users. I am predicting that Instagram will last another 2-3 years before people get tired of the non-stop ads and spam.
> It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving
Email hasn't had any new features added in decades, and people still use it.
For me, Facebook is a tool. I use it to organise events and groups, and communicate with people.
There's no other tool that works as well. I can have all my messages, groups, and events in one place. Almost everyone I know uses Facebook as well, so it's centralised.
Speaking of event management, one very useful feature that Facebook has added recently is integrated payments for events. You can set up a Facebook event that has tickets, and people can purchase and pay for tickets through FB without having to go to the external ticket sales platform (moshtix, eventbrite etc.). I'm not sure if you can do ticketing directly through Facebook or if you need an external service, I haven't set up any events with tickets. Anyway, it's a very useful feature as it saves me having to sign up for different ticket platforms.
You may be missing a whole bunch of people like me who refuse to use facebook. And you'll just never know how many. If there's an event that is solely organized through facebook, I just don't go. If that means I miss out, I miss out.
I read your post as you were some sort of event planner or something, not that you were using it in a personal group of friends. Please forgive the misunderstanding. I see a lot of groups/businesses that use facebook exclusively to communicate and organize events (like the local paintball field) and they are missing out on some people (I have no idea how to quantify how many). I'm sure they're reaching more people now (using facebook) than they were using whatever old method they were using.
I actually preferred the simpler design FB had back in 2013 or so before the big redesign. After that everything seemed to get busier and louder. Usability took a hit after that IMO.
I've not used Facebook in any personal capacity but the same thing happened to Twitter, especially in the speed department. Twitter is so slow now that I don't use it.
Every once in a while some random journalist decides to cry foul about the demise of Google Reader and the death of the Open Web, but the 2013 redesigns of Twitter and Facebook seem more likely to be the cause, both in functionality and policies.
It was very clear cut at the time, Twitter did a 180° and left RSS along with lean HTML and got super slow and noisy (so much for adtech.)
Facebook started changing its appearance compulsively and adding random crap. Then it removed itself from search engines for vendor-lock maxima.
Unless Facebook figures out a way to address this, it's the start of a death spiral. The only thing that makes Facebook interesting is the people it can connect you to. If a few of them leave, the place becomes a little more boring than it used to be... which leads a few more of them to get bored and leave, which makes the place a little more boring... which leads more people to get bored and leave, etc. What started as a few snowflakes turns into an avalanche.
It's kind of the photo-negative version of the positive feedback loop Facebook enjoyed on its way up. Back then, each new person who joined created an additional incentive for other people to join, which gave them tremendous upward velocity. But the same dynamic running in reverse could send them downward just as quickly.
I've always wondered that, and is it an inherent 'flaw' with social media platforms, and FB just got so big that the coming decline will be just as catastrophic as MySpace and Friendster, but from a much greater height?
FB has obviously made very very smart acquisitions in WhatsApp and Instagram. I get the feeling these were primarily made because of the excellent data they had through their VPN app tracking service (as you could see the hypergrowth in real time and know exactly who to pick and how aggressively to go after). I'm sure they have or are working very hard on some alternative to this (maybe buy metadata off ISPs or become a network/transit carrier in their own right so they can see the IPs where stuff is going?).
But I do wonder if all social networks just are fads. You have a problem that as the network gets bigger, it starts becoming less interesting to you. Your social circles start overlapping (you don't want to post anything because it may offend someone, coworkers, grandparents, children), which stops everyone posting, which causes the whole thing to grind to a halt and become less interesting.
this happens to MMO servers too, I used to play the game DOFUS years ago and it was one of my favorite places on the internet when first started but then people left the game as they grew up and it was gradually taken over by bots and scammers until it got merged with another server
>The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years.
If I recall, correctly, the last major feature (read: that had any fanfare) was when they added the ability to have hi-res photos (and more of them), which was timed with the release of the Transformers movie? So, yeah, it's been a hot minute since they did anything substantial.
> It seems to me that the overall interest in Facebook is decreasing
Google Trends never lies. Some say that people have learned they don't have to search for Facebook, but the trend for Facebook follows the 'myspace curve of disengagement':
Note that people never type 'whatsapp' into a browser.
I think that social media is always going to be fickle. Google and search is a much better bet for the product being relevant in years to come.
Facebook is also a black hole. It is very rare that something written on Facebook is noteworthy enough to be shared outside of Facebook, here for instance.
I deleted my personal account years ago when it became evident that Facebook was little more than a reprehensible consumer surveillance utility, failing at the original value proposition of keeping in contact with friends.
I maintain a company page through an otherwise content-free account. As a corporate user I find Facebook slow and difficult to navigate.
All social networks die. They either fail to achieve critical mass, or they do and it turns out the mass was mostly composed of bovine scatology.
I realized that the only people I was in contact with were people I didn't really wanted to have contact with... Not all 'friendships' are worth upholding, very few are actually.
I'm gonna try and coin the term: "The facebook parodox"
It's the problem where you have cross-generational social media infused with varying socio-economic levels you find that people online want to align with their tribe BUT ALSO want to be connected with you because of a physical connection.
Prior social networks were already "pre-aligned":
Myspace: Majority School Peers/Friends +-4 years
Twitter: Industry networking/interest based
Facebook is "everything". I've hit this moment where I don't want to add "2nd degree" or "loose" connections on facebook because I don't think it will enhance our relationship, if anything it could drive a wedge between us. I see these people 1-2 a year, and in person, it's great, but online, it's horrible.
The only way I can get along with my friends and family is through the strict community guidelines of HN - we just can't handle the raw exposure of email or SMS, and the algorithmic preprocessing of Facebook makes it even worse. We plan parties by encoding times and dates in the whitespace of our posts about JS frameworks. I found out that my brother was getting married by decoding the carefully placed typos in a post of his about the housing crisis in SF. I know it sounds dystopian, but engagement-maximization strategies are ruining everything else, and direct exposure is simply untenable.
WhatsApp isn't at all free from controversy - it's had its share of "terror attack orchestrated by WhatsApp [and therefore it's some how to blame]" stories.
What's saved it, IMO, is the similar deluge of stories about political in-fighting taking place in WhatsApp groups.
The available conclusions to the reader of the two angles on it are:
1) politicians are organising terror attacks;
2) there is no causal relationship between WhatsApp and terror attacks
... one of which seems eminently more reasonable than the other; so thankfully that's where we are.
Amusingly it also came under fire from politicians in the opposite direction in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal: far from wanting to peek at end-to-end encrypted data (as called for whenever it's used by terror groups) they then wanted assurances that the data hadn't been snooped on or passed to third-parties!
I want to leave Facebook because it seems like a daily chore of unfollowing people who post shit stuff. Instagram is pretty much just personal photos, no stupid news articles, no "forwards from grandma" type stuff. I like seeing pictures of friends kids, new homes, vacations etc and they pretty much exist in exact duplicate across both properties. So why be on Facebook?
I'm not sure losing that age group has much to do with Facebook's scandals.
This is purely anecdotal, but with my daughter and her social group, Facebook stopped being a service of interest to them quite a while back. Not because of data issues, but because (to use my daughter's words) "Facebook is for businesses and old people".
Not parent, but I am a college student at a large university in the US. Instagram is just huge, for the entire [university] population here. Snapchat is still used but not as common - Instagram is eating up Snapchat's userbase. GroupMe is used by the entire population for group chatting, and many males (especially more 'nerdy' guys) use Discord as the preferred general chat application.
Snapchat is the most annoying platform I have ever experienced for messaging. Disappearing messages (with no option for them to stick around) is literally an anti-feature.
Instagram is just annoying, because it's an image sharing platform being used as a messaging platform. I actually get annoyed when people message me on Instagram, because it means that their messages to me are scattered over different platforms.
Steam? Can you please elaborate, I am getting old I didn't even know steam had a social component. (except people leaving reviews, or posting to game forums about parts of the game)
Steam has a pretty robust messaging system including multi-user rooms and voice chat, etc. They're directly competing with Discord on that front now. There's groups and communities and other social components as well, though I'm not as familiar with those.
Oh yeah definitely, it's got nothing to do with privacy, it's just not a platform geared towards younger people, because it's a platform that caters to older people.
Kids these days don't give a shit about privacy. Why would they?
> Kids these days don't give a shit about privacy.
I'm not so sure that's true. At least, it's not true among the kids that I personally know.
What is true is that they have a more pragmatic view of the issue than us oldsters -- they view it as more like a monetary exchange: they understand and care about privacy, but they're willing to pay for a service by giving some of it up if they think the value they're receiving justifies it.
That's not the same as not caring. Just the opposite, it's caring enough to make conscious decisions about how to valuate it.
The kids I know (my teenage siblings) genuinely don't give a shit, and neither do their friends, or their friends' friends.
Nor do the many many kids on YouTube or Twitch.
Not a single one of the children I just mentioned understand, care about, or are willing to pay to keep their privacy, in any form.
And they're right. It doesn't matter, because nothing happens when you lose your privacy on the Internet, not even remotely approaching the risks we take and accept in our daily lives (driving, swimming, walking outside, etc.).
Because their entire history will be a matter of public record, and as we have seen repeatedly over the last few years, a wrong tweet from ten years ago can break an entire career, and I only see this getting worse. The kids who take care of what they expose to the public will spare themselves a lot of potential trouble.
Obviously this should not only be an issue of the kids. In an ideal world parents would be conscious of their kids online behavior.
The headline is disingenuous. I suspect a lot of folks are taking away from the headline that Facebook the company is on the ropes, however looking into the primary source[1] indicates that they are only talking about Facebook the product. The press is not making that distinction here. A vast amount of people leaving "Facebook" are just going to Instagram.
> Regarding social media, the latest study finds the number of current users of Facebook continues to drop. The study shows an estimated 15 million fewer users of Facebook than in the 2017 report. The declines are heavily concentrated among younger people.
I deleted my Facebook more than a year ago and never missed it but I had to go back on Facebook multiple times this week because I created a page for my new business and I was surprised how repelling the whole thing was. I was confused why am I disgusted by it but it was really pushing me away.
Anecdotally, I work with teenagers and none of them have a Facebook pages. It's viewed as a place for old people and parents.
For me personally, it's almost impossible to deal with. Way too many political posts from my friends and family.
It's probably best use for me is local events and an occasional major event from a friend/family member.
Still, I find myself going there less and less.
From a small business standpoint, it's just not worth the time, effort and money to advertise there. It's much more effective to focus on getting referrals with my current clients.
I really wish there was a paid social media service that everyone used. I would gladly pay $5-$10 a month for something that didn't sell my data.
> For me personally, it's almost impossible to deal with. Way too many political posts from my friends and family.
Bingo, that's what's doing it for me.
Before the 2016 presidential election, Facebook was fun. It was also a great way to get news.
But now, what I'm finding is that a lot of people on Facebook just don't know how to behave in a public forum. It makes it painful, because someone always knows someone who's a jerk online.
I really don't know what changed, to be honest. Did Facebook change, or did too many people come to the party?
Facebook began as an exclusive social network for upper-class students. Gradually it grew to encompass not just all of America, but the entire world. It turns out, many of us well educated people don't really want to network or socialize with poorly educated people. Police started monitoring our activities, so the events all but disappeared.
The world changed, too. Facts used to matter; we read books and the newspaper, not 25 reasons to be an idiot on Buzzfeed. Truth used to matter; less of the nation was as polarized. It was easier to get along without people shoving their ignorant political ideas in your face. Then 2016 happened, with the Russian trolls and other psyops used against us, and some of us realized we'd fucked up by buying into and encouraging others to join this network and others like it.
I could probably go on for a lot longer, but that's the gist of it.
What changed is FB had to make money - and they discovered "outrage" sells. That's the full answer. It has nothing to do with the lower-class crowding up your social network lol.
All of these complaints about the various superficial reasons for Facebook's decline I think are missing the forest for the trees.
The "grow fast monetize later" model that social media companies use, along with the user being the product, inevitably acts as a template for bait and switch.
All degradation of user experience stems from that. Of course using a social media platform during its "growth phase" is going to be a lot more of a pleasant experience than using that same platform when it's trying to maximize revenue.
Outrage only goes so far though. Using Brexit as an example, when the vote first went through, everyone devoured every bit of content they could regarding it, and the media followed. Then they started printing nothing but outrage until people just gave up and quit following the news. Anecdotal evidence sure, but everyone I know seems to only follow the news in passing now. Every headline. Every article. Every political interview. It all now revolves around this one completely divisive topic. If it's not Brexit it's Trump. It's exhausting.
It's no surprise that Facebook also seemed to chase the golden goose, but now that the main page is nothing but outrage or divisive news people are leaving in droves because they're fed up with seeing the same, day after day.
The lower-class people are the ones who are hooked on outrage and are still using the site. The upper-class people got sick of all the MAGA posts and left.
I'm not even sure how to properly characterize how condescendingly out of touch your comment is.
I was on Facebook before it opened to the general public, and it wasn't some ivory tower of intelligent thought where the educated could avoid mingling with the dumb. It was full of stupid social media stuff then too.
After Facebook opened up, my "poorly educated" uncle was content using Facebook to simply socialize with family and friends in 2012 when today he does nothing but share right-wing memes.
In the first year or two of Facebook, it was basically just students from the highest ranked / most expensive schools in the US. Part of the allure was the way they rolled that out, like an exclusive club. At the time, I don’t believe features like content previews existed - people weren’t sharing news articles much. It was more “social” and less “media”.
Is it condescending to acknowledge that it was a network for a fairly elite group of young people to start, and that it lost appeal when it became for everyone? Of course there wasn’t much intelligent discussion, everyone was under 25. But it was part tinder, part aim / livejournal, part social calendar; I don’t think it’s been those things for many years now.
If facebook had any notion that their users are also still customers and important in that regard, despite revenue coming from their data consumers, they may have been inclined to care about state-based psyops campaigns victimizing their users. Instead, I think a corporate philosophy of exploitation prevailed.
facebook, twitter, youtube all have gone down hill since gamergate in my opinion. Russia, Nazis, and 4chan learned how to leverage social networks and SEO to spread misinformation and noise.
Wait a second. Did you just lump 4chan in with Russian Intelligence (I assume that's what you meant by Russia and not the entirety of the nation) and Nazis? You should have thrown the Boogie Man and Satan in for good measure.
You know, you can go to 4chan and check it out. You won't get turned into "an operative" or anything. It might not be the den of murderers and thieves its been portrayed as.
I feel like the major change was who started using Facebook: people who had never "interneted" before. When it first launched and was limited to .edu emails everyone on the platform had grown up online. Before we had Facebook we said and shared a whole lot of dumb stuff anonymously and figured out the real-world consequences of our online actions. We "trolled" a wikipedia article about elephants with John Stewart and learned about "fake news" from Bonsai Kittens and pop-up ads promising we'd just become millionares. We "socialized" on AIM, LiveJournal, Xanaga and MySpace. For early Facebook users, Facebook was just one of many destinations on the internet.
But for most of today's Facebook users Facebook is the internet and they missed out on their internet training wheels. Facebook has merely replaced AOL for a generation of people who will now take any "article" their friend posted at face value, share it with all of their friends, and then angrily complain about "mainstream media" when their phone blows up in the microwave instead of charging like the "news" told them it would.
Sorry if I was unclear as I was trying not to malign baby boomers but I was referring to the 50+/not tech savvy crowd on Facebook, not the young internet users of today.
Please be careful with the "50+" comments, ha! Not there yet but closer than I'd like to admit, and I grew up during the sweet spot of modern computing. My biased opinion is that Gen X had it best in this regard.
Same bingo. My hypothesis (at least for the Facebook I see, that is of course a minuscule fraction) is that FB is mostly used now by people with an agenda (self promotion, spreading of an ideology, marketing, political campaign, whatever). Therefore, any disagreement is immediately treated as a threat. Ultimately FB has become a dark forest for casual users. The fun is gone.
Most people use Facebook these days to keep track of their acquaintances from various stages in life: high school friends, college friends, former coworkers, people you meet at parties etc.
In that regard it’s not very useful to teenagers who are already in the same building as their entire network every day (their school). Plus teenagers don’t want to hang out where their parents do. When I was in school part of facebook’s appeal was the fact that parents couldn’t get on even if they wanted due to the .edu email requirement!
For me, it's the interface. It's just really complicated and slow. And I can't communicate with followers without paying. Advertising on FB is not really worth it, in most cases.
And buggy, for example, a chat message I'm writing, getting lost because I switch to another browser tab (and the chat window is there too but empty / not synchronized, eventually causing the lost update bug).
And on my wide screen, 30'', the chat window is just like 2x1 cm large.
And on the events page, I choose to display today's or tomorrow's events. Then Facebook displays events from not those days.
> I would gladly pay $5-$10 a month for something that didn't sell my data.
Hmm. Facebook has something like 2 billion profiles. Of course, most of them wouldn't pay $5/month - say that only one percent would. 20 million profiles times $5/month = $100 million/month. It might be worth it for someone to try to build such a thing...
I’d be beyond shocked if even one percent of all Facebook users would pay $5/month for it. I think the only population of users who’d consider doing so are the intersection of those who are affluent (by Western standards), are extremely opposed to Facebook ads, and use it enough to consider paying for it.
I’d be surprised if you could get 1% of the US population of users to consider it, let alone the global population. You’d realistically be looking at single to very low double digit millions of users at the maximum.
except 20 million people would not pay for this. and even if they did, the only reason people join facebook is because all their friends are on it. 20 million people isn't enough spreadout worldwide to convince people to join. you'd have like 2-3 friends top on it.
An anecdotal story about this - a couple of years ago I built a paid, ad-free privacy-focused social network, did several Show HNs for it and even here, in a community that seems quite receptive to the idea in principle, there was extremely low interest in it.
I got probably 50 sign-ups over a few Show HNs, no more than 4/5 upvotes and comments on the most well-received Show HN, and those who came in just posted one or two test posts, found obviously that nobody else was on there and left never to be seen again. Obviously none converted to a paid account (you could get 10 connections for free then afterwards pay $2/month).
Bootstrapping any social network, let alone a paid one, is hard. But I did try :-)
For a few months now I've been toying with the idea of a "mutual data fund." A social network that collects & anonymizes user data, pools the data on behalf of all users (similar to how a mutual fund pools investor cash), and the data is "invested" (sold to advertisers) by a management company (like an investment adviser) with the data always under the ownership and control of an independent Board of Trustees (same as a mutual fund). Just like a mutual fund, the "returns" from the data would be used to pay the investment adviser for operating costs + some flat % and the rest of the returns would be allocated to users on a pro-rata basis. So the people who use the platform more or share higher-quality content get more "shares" (the investment kind, not the social media kind) of the ad revenue than those who aren't on the site often or share fake news or just annoy the crap out of everyone else.
Most users probably wouldn't make a whole lot of money on the platform but they'd have privacy and ownership of their data and they might end up with $5 or $10 after a year on the platform.
It is super hard to bootstrap, but sites like Facebook and Twitter already have hundreds of millions of users. Can't they run an experiment - something like "no ads/tracking for $5 (or whatever amount) per month" and see if there are any takers? If 20M sign up, that is 100M revenue per month.
Maybe they considered it and then rejected it as not viable?
The politics has destroyed the friendliness. Same goes for Twitter, to some extent; even for us political junkies. The constant drip of miserable stupidity of others is just exhausting.
The problem with the non ad driven model is that to you 5$ might be nothing, but some people 5$ is an impossible sum of money to spend a month on entertainment. Ads allow companies to offer first world products to customers who could desperately use technology to help them connect and trade in their local communities.
I think the discussion on privacy and ad based platforms should really be orthogonal.
That's difficult, because in some cases the barrier to entry is having some way to pay. They might be able to afford 10 cents, but they don't have any means to submit that 10 cents into the system. They don't have a credit or debit card, probably not even a bank account to begin with.
> I think the discussion on privacy and ad based platforms should really be orthogonal.
Except that those two things are inseparable. The privacy problems are a direct result of the desire of the advertising industry to be able to target people based on their behavior, which necessitates spying on everyone.
If we could somehow eliminate that targeting, then we could discuss the two as separate topics.
They really aren't though. It's just that that is the stance the big players have. And the reason they have that stance might be because it is the only stance that can motivate their existence.
Indeed you can. By "inseparable", I don't mean technically inseparable, I mean that the advertising industry has decided that personally targeted ads are the only sort of value. That means that, unless there is some sort of sea change in the industry, the two things are inseparable in practice.
If I see an ad, I can safely assume that it comes with spying. I'll be right far, far more often than I'll be wrong.
The value of ads is related to the spending power of those advertised to. If $5 is an impossible sum to spend for a user, advertising to them is worth very little as well.
The idea behind Facebook isn't to sell ads, it's to build a social platform for everyone. Sure, those people aren't spending a ton of money yet, but they still deserve to have access to the internet and major services.
I just started unfollowing (for people I actually interact with, or might need to) or unfriending (for people I will never see again, and don't want to) people who post overly political bullshit.
I don't mind a bit of politics, Australia is going to hell in a handcart and the least people can do is raise awareness. But I don't like inflammatory (and often completely fake) bullshit.
I can now scroll my newsfeed (which I don't actually do that often) without getting high blood pressure.
> I really wish there was a paid social media service that everyone used. I would gladly pay $5-$10 a month for something that didn't sell my data.
There was App.net, which attempted to be a fee-based better Twitter, but of course not everyone used and eventually shut down.
The only way to have a social network that everyone uses and is fee-based, would be to take one of the free ones and start charging...but then everyone would leave.
Purely anecdotal but when I could have moved to FB I held back because Myspace was more interesting. I eventually moved to FB as I got older, because.. I was older. My interests changed.
To some degree this may be an experience with the youth today, in time. Or not, I have no idea
IMO this is part of why Facebook's user base is so resilient. From what I see, younger people experiment more, looking for something that fits their identity, what their friends use, what's new, etc. They also have more time and incentive to explore new apps. By younger people I mean teenagers, high-school and younger.
Older people, it seems to me, are more utilitarian. By older people I mean college and up. They use Facebook for events, or because the social world is harder to navigate in college/later in life than when you're in high school and your friends are neighbors or classmates.
Perhaps this is just my experience, or maybe I'm just very off on how I read this, but it's a thought. I don't think Facebook is trying to be interesting— I think they're just shooting for useful and
"sticky".
Anecdotally (I don't live in America), every teenager has a Facebook account. Not a single person has WhatsApp. Instagram is used but not nearly as much as Facebook. (When people cross-post pictures you see the FB post has 3x - 10x the number of likes as the Instagram post.)
There are zero political posts. Zero. I've never seen one.
If my feed were full of political stuff, I'd also be sick of it. But feed is exclusively full of what friends & acquaintances are doing.
It's expected that people from group age 20+ will be the last active user base. As far as I know, most teens use Discord, Instagram, they have 0 interest in Facebook.
for me, I personally check it less and less due to political posts.
I do have a few really great closed groups on there. Groups filled with people helping each other out. These are where I still find value on the platform.
I'm shocked by the decrease in twitter usage (compared to other social networks) in 2017.[0] I have seen a huge uptick in friends tweeting, mostly in replies to Trump's tweets, and several times a week news stories come to the top of my feed purely generated by a single tweet of his.
It does feel like social media as a whole may be peaking, or at least nearing full saturation. People can only take so much. And there are a lot of options these days.
Twitter has been shamelessly deleting a lot of interesting right of center accounts (e.g Thomas Wictor, Imperator Rex) for no good reason, so a lot of people have given up on it for political discussions.
Jack Dorsey was on the Joe Rogan podcast with , of all people, his lawyer and got called out for censoring and gave a lot of non-answers.[1] if you read the youtube comments it's almost 100% negative on the direction they've been going with censorship on that platform and Jack's lack of candor as to what exactly they're trying to do.
Edit: Why the downvotes? Did I trigger some sort of HN Godwin's law by mentioning Americans outside the San Francisco/LA political bubble as a possible cause of Twitter's loss of popularity?
You're downvoted because a significant fraction of HN readers live in leftist filter bubbles and are never exposed to serious criticisms of their ideas.
I disabled my Facebook account 4 years or so ago and didn't miss it. That said, I now have a daughter with an extremely rare genetic disorder. Although there are a number of databases out there specifically to help parents find other families with rare genetic disorders, we didn't find anyone until we resorted to Facebook. This is only one anecdote, but from my personal experience thus far, Facebook is still unfortunately the best place to find a needle in a haystack.
(edit: typo) FB has completely swallowed the Groups space. We are new parents and my wife connects with other new parents in a local group specific to our son's age cohort. FB Marketplace is also very useful, as other people have mentioned. I got off FB services a few months ago, but would join again if they had a standalone Groups app.
This is my same experience. Son has JIA. There is a JIA-specific website that connects you to JIA-specific support groups.... but there are none active near me, and I live in a very big city. I expressed this frustration to my wife who uses Facebook often, and she joined an active JIA community in moments.
I guess now we have two anecdotes. That makes us a statistic, I think?
I've blocked ads ever since ad blockers were a thing. Facebook have finally managed to consistently get past uBlock Origin, and seeing ads in my news feed for the first time is really, really annoying me. They look similar enough to real posts that I read them automatically before I realise, which I find really disturbing. It's enough that I'm seriously contemplating not using Facebook any more.
If you use the facebook.com website (not the app) they are _torturing_ HTML to get ads past the blockers. Stuff like putting every letter in a separate span or div, weird encoding tricks, etc.
I can’t wait to see the commodification and decentralization of the services fb provides. Identity, chats, content distribution and subscription, events etc.
My accountant still has an @aol email. I hope to see the same reaction to fb pages, events etc.
Something seemed very off about FB’s metrics in the past 2-3 quarters. It could be my own bias but I expected to see a more pronounced slowdown/contraction based on my own anecdotal evidence.
Good, I hope it dies. I don't use Facebook for the obvious reason (privacy) and my family almost refuses to contact me in any other medium. If I didn't take the initiative to contact them via email or phone, they'd forget I existed.
I've always been so tempted to leave it
Okay so i'll download all my history of data and all that, that's fine
I may just go through and see who I care about and let them know im leaving? idk. I think i stay for my grandpa at this point
I am not denying that! It's just interesting how the core product is really taking a bad hit lately. I am curious to know where FB would be today without them.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] thread[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
FB is turning into a "how to talk to grandma" network.
I wonder how many people there are like me, with nearly dead accounts but could still be 'counted' if you wanted to.
https://www.marketplace.org/2019/03/06/tech/exclusive-look-n...
I wouldn’t put much faith in this estimate. While facebook’s is probably an overestimate of people actually engaged in their platform, this survey doesn’t seem very useful to me.
If you have concerns about Edison's methodology or application of standard survey weighting then I think that could be a fruitful conversation. But implying that 1,500 responses can't be predictive for a country of 350 million is woefully misinformed.
> We're saying, "Do you currently use Facebook?" Facebook is probably measuring it on, “Do you ever open the app, or do you ever use it on any level?”
That answer doesn't event make sense. Given that Edison have gone to the press to promote their report and this particular number, you'd expect them to have a good answer on the discrepancies. They should definitely know what the Facebook numbers represent, especially given Facebook publicly disclose their definition of an active user in SEC filings.
Also if we want to get nitpicky, while there is a significant drop between 2017 and 2018, there is no significant drop between 2019 and 2018 (62% -> 61%, p value of .57), despite the headline being 'Facebook Usage Continues to Drop' :)
EDIT: To whoever has downvoted this, I politely (but urgently) recommend you read up on statistical significance. The idea that a small sample size implies a study’s findings are unreliable is one of the most widely held misconceptions in modern statistics.
It seems to me that the overall interest in Facebook is decreasing. The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years. It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving.
Still, Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition. We don't see any news about their user base decreasing and news channels don't seem to dislike them. Facebook is doing a good job making sure their biggest three platforms are seem as independent from one another, keeping Instagram and WhatsApp almost free from controversy.
Personally I see no loss for them here. Besides, they will promptly acquire any new players that look promising, or shamelessly copy them as they did with Snapchat.
I actually found some great rugs (owners did not know what they had!) and furniture on the FB marketplace. Much better finds than on craigslist, and easier to verify that the seller is a human.
Whatever fits the HN narrative goes, I guess.
Craigslist was tainted by the unsavory element of prostitution and stolen goods and isn’t a resource that I seek out. Facebook marketplaces seem like what eBay was in the 90s.
What's really hurt Craigslist is all the scammers. You can't post anything of value on there without some scammer responding and telling you they're going to send you a cashier's check and have a personal assistant pick it up.
You don't have this problem at all on Facebook AFAICT. When someone responds to your ad on Facebook Marketplace, it's a real person who actually wants to buy your old junk.
In short, the formats of the sites make all the difference. CL was created to preserve anonymity and not be a centralized social network, but that feature is also its undoing because it facilitates scamming.
IME, Facebook Marketplace is far from free of scams and stolen merchandise. That's why some people call it Fencebook.
Thats not a new problem though, is it? I dare you to buy used car parts on ebay.
I wish it wasen't though. I don't like the company.
Oh yea, I've never used my real name on FB.
I do have a Page that's getting some traction, but I don't know if I want to use my real name. In all honestly, I think the people who like my Page are just being nice. The "likes" are all comming from one war torn country?
(Oh yea, I'm to lazy to go to my desktop(incognito mode), and see if I'm still shadow banned. Please up-vote/down-vote me if you happen to see this. I must have pissed off the dong? I still think about the email I got from HN. It was basically get lost. I don't think I'm that bad, but I was irritating HN?)
It's an odd platform. They have a lot of great features for outreach and discovery of local events and groups of people, leveraged by the strong network effect. For contact with local groups of people with similar interests, and for planning events, for group communication, it is an effective tool and one that has enriched my life in substantial ways.
The one thing that I really hate is the front page feed. It was probably a great business decision on their part to emphasize microblogging, as it definitely increased engagement in the platform. It also turned everyone into memelords who just re-share funny cat pictures, pyramid schemes and incendiary political propaganda. I tried just filtering that out with the "see fewer posts like this", but I turns out that people just don't really post anything but image macros and articles anymore.
If you've tried it, how do you think Facebook's classifieds compare to NextDoor's classifieds?
I love WhatsApp, but they haven't found good ways to monetize it yet and one of these days they'll ruin it.
But then you have to tell them to check your profile for your one allowed link, go to your site, search for the product/blog/video - or you pay for an ad with links enabled.
What I think is ad supportted _anything_ turns to crap eventually. It's a toxic business model.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-insta...
[1] https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-speaks-on-whats...
With all the negative press FB has been receiving, it would seem wise to dissociate Whatsapp and Instagram from FB in the minds of the public.
This approach opens up exciting new opportunities for market segmentation via badge engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badge_engineering
... in much the same way that Ford (say) could design one car and then sell it to very different audiences as the Ford Taurus, Mercury Sable, and Lincoln Continental.
I have to think people are deriving some value from it, but I cannot imagine what it is.
I follow friend and family on facebook. If they post crap, it's because they have stupid things to say. I don't have many friends who I think are stupid.
Obviously you can follow celebrities on facebook and only follow friends on twitter but it doesn't feel like they're made for that use case, the 'reverse' of what I use it for.
Someone here not long ago on HN opened my eyes to the 'lists' feature of Twitter, it's been a remarkable improvement for me with the platform. "IRL" friends in one list, "Net" friends in another, sports commentary (because that's a thing I'm into), etc. etc. Crap is more or less 'siloed'.
I wish twitter promoted the feature more, to be honest, I think it can help with some of the gripes you have, if not for you maybe for others as it did with my experience on the platform.
People could post the same stuff on FB, Twitter, or email lists the hard part is finding stuff worth subscribing to. It’s really more about what platform creators use, and Twitter’s lightweight nature means a lot of interesting things end up on it.
Incidentally, the iOS Twitter client also shows tweets in your feed which your followers liked. And you can't turn that off. I don't understand that feature at all and it made me switch to a third-party client.
I then soon joined Twitter and consciously curated who I followed. I felt [and still do feel] fine about being on Twitter.
Some months ago I rejoined Facebook. I am consciously curating who I do and don't "friend" or follow. So far, so good. Yes, I am noticing the now-expected targeted ads ... but I prefer them, to be honest. Market me tickets to the Fandango showing of 'Logopolis' please; even if I don't buy, that's much more useful than the usual random jar of some guy's snake oil you'd offer me 20 years ago. Is this me being Institutionalized on tracking? Maybe, but there is an "after the uncanny valley" for tracking/advertising just like there is for robotics and AI. I'm interested to see how that works in relation to echo chambers.
I think younger folks have migrated to Instagram, snapchat, etc. where they actually post/use the platform.
Always wondered if we could create a lurker account that everyone shares — we share the password and just agree not to change the password, post, etc.
I know a couple of people who don't have any Facebook "friends" connected to their accounts, but they follow brands and companies they're interested in keeping up with.
It's sort of like RSS, but with more companies on board.
As much as I hate FB and its abhorrent privacy policies, there are a very large population who do not care about privacy. I have some in my household who don't and FB's latest financial results prove it.
I think John Oliver did a pretty good job of framing the Snowden revelations in terms of "the NSA can see your penis". That's a good angle to make people care.
But when Facebook is harvesting data about you, it doesn't feel like a person is doing it. It feels like some abstract machine or algorithm or a faceless corporation is doing it. They even promise that humans aren't individually looking at your data. So people bank on that impersonality. The data may be collected, but who cares, nobody is actually really looking at it, right?
The truth is that people do often look at it, despite all the promises and everything. That's what you have to convey and that's what John Oliver was trying to establish with his angle.
You're not wrong, but I find it a bit frustrating how much resistance I get whenever I try and suggest using Signal instead of Whatsapp. As far as I can tell, it has pretty much all the features of Whatsapp that I use, without all the spying.
It also nudges users to enable cloud backups which in practice means that everyone has them enabled (...which in practice means that all your messages are unencrypted in the other person's cloud storage.)
I'm not much of a user myself, but among my friends that use it heavily I've noted a number of complaints that it has gotten HARDER to use for their primary use: keeping up with friends.
Their issue isn't that FB has become stale or boring, but that it has actively LOST ground relative to their purpose.
The problem with Facebook, is that either it's boring, or it's not boring, and in that case it's often far worse. Facebook latched onto the fact that outrage measures as "engagement" then other people latched onto that fact and started to use Facebook for their own outrage mongering purposes.
Still, Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition. We don't see any news about their user base decreasing and news channels don't seem to dislike them. Facebook is doing a good job making sure their biggest three platforms are seem as independent from one another, keeping Instagram and WhatsApp almost free from controversy.
So one company, three brands?
If I were to start my own crowdfunding app, I'd have one app with three "skins" and three different brands, each a different level of "edginess." In the Terms of Service would be the discretion for the site to "shift" your account from one of the three to another. The only effect of this, would be to shift the public information around the creator and subscriptions from one site to another. I would do this, so that "maintaining our brand" would never become an issue in funding creators, even edgy or downright controversial ones.
In a way, it would be like shadowbanning, but more open.
So this must be your assessment of twitter as well? Same current observation, Same predicted outcome?
I sincerely hope so!
And yes it affects Twitter as well.
It seems to me that it takes "energy" to get people to change. Change being one of how they think about something, how they respond to something, or what they spend their time on. As far as I can tell, there are three very well known and very well studied energy pools that can be amplified and then tapped, one is fear, one is anger, and one is reward.
With fear and anger, a process is set up to increase levels in the target, while simultaneously offering a solution vector (ie a change in behavior that will address the fear or anger). I am sure psyche majors can quote all sorts of work here on that aspect of things.
For web companies, if your revenue is derived by ads, and you can only get people to click on your ads if they are looking at your page, it seems using fear and anger to drive people to page after page would be the best strategy to maximize their exposure to ads.
"outrage measures as engagement" is a perfect summary of the effect. The feedback loops are horribly exploitative.
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/02/27/analysis-trumps-faceb...
Having the chance to engage with bright people who share my passion was the key. But the majority of my family has never been on Facebook.
It works since basically everyone is on it and you don’t have to make people register and create an account as a barrier to entry. People used to have email listservs instead, but I think there is so much email marketing now that the signal to noise ratio on most people’s personal accounts approaches 0.
If someone could create a platform for an online discussion forum that doesn’t require signing up for a new service, will notify you of activity, and is free that would probably help a lot of people move over. NextDoor might have been able to, but they’re too focused on specific geographic neighborhoods and they have a serious racism problem.
You get thematic subreddits for these kind of discussions, and you didn't even need a full-fledged account. Just a nickname. No email confirmation, no phone authentication, no anything.
False.
And one of my goals for 2019 is to shut that group down and move the conversation into our app.
I went to great lengths to keep my account completely anonymized, so the suggested friends list is a hilarious cross-section of global randos. Of course being a pseduonym account I could be banned at any moment.
Cool, I had not realized that Facebook now allows non-members to post and participate in their forums. That's really great! Not sure where on Facebook it is one can do that, but I'll be on the look out now that I know they've added this.
They aren't a tech company as such but this reminded me of Coca Cola. There's Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Coke No Sugar plus whatever flavored variations they are currently doing. They are all slight variations on more or less the same product but it gives people the feeling that they are making a choice.
I will bit the rebranding of Zero to No Sugar might have also been an attempt to get ahead of legislation to tax sugary drinks.
Email hasn't had any new features added in decades, and people still use it.
For me, Facebook is a tool. I use it to organise events and groups, and communicate with people.
There's no other tool that works as well. I can have all my messages, groups, and events in one place. Almost everyone I know uses Facebook as well, so it's centralised.
Speaking of event management, one very useful feature that Facebook has added recently is integrated payments for events. You can set up a Facebook event that has tickets, and people can purchase and pay for tickets through FB without having to go to the external ticket sales platform (moshtix, eventbrite etc.). I'm not sure if you can do ticketing directly through Facebook or if you need an external service, I haven't set up any events with tickets. Anyway, it's a very useful feature as it saves me having to sign up for different ticket platforms.
It's inconvenient for me, but I'm happy enough to accomodate them.
I actually preferred the simpler design FB had back in 2013 or so before the big redesign. After that everything seemed to get busier and louder. Usability took a hit after that IMO.
It was very clear cut at the time, Twitter did a 180° and left RSS along with lean HTML and got super slow and noisy (so much for adtech.) Facebook started changing its appearance compulsively and adding random crap. Then it removed itself from search engines for vendor-lock maxima.
Unless Facebook figures out a way to address this, it's the start of a death spiral. The only thing that makes Facebook interesting is the people it can connect you to. If a few of them leave, the place becomes a little more boring than it used to be... which leads a few more of them to get bored and leave, which makes the place a little more boring... which leads more people to get bored and leave, etc. What started as a few snowflakes turns into an avalanche.
It's kind of the photo-negative version of the positive feedback loop Facebook enjoyed on its way up. Back then, each new person who joined created an additional incentive for other people to join, which gave them tremendous upward velocity. But the same dynamic running in reverse could send them downward just as quickly.
FB has obviously made very very smart acquisitions in WhatsApp and Instagram. I get the feeling these were primarily made because of the excellent data they had through their VPN app tracking service (as you could see the hypergrowth in real time and know exactly who to pick and how aggressively to go after). I'm sure they have or are working very hard on some alternative to this (maybe buy metadata off ISPs or become a network/transit carrier in their own right so they can see the IPs where stuff is going?).
But I do wonder if all social networks just are fads. You have a problem that as the network gets bigger, it starts becoming less interesting to you. Your social circles start overlapping (you don't want to post anything because it may offend someone, coworkers, grandparents, children), which stops everyone posting, which causes the whole thing to grind to a halt and become less interesting.
If I recall, correctly, the last major feature (read: that had any fanfare) was when they added the ability to have hi-res photos (and more of them), which was timed with the release of the Transformers movie? So, yeah, it's been a hot minute since they did anything substantial.
Google Trends never lies. Some say that people have learned they don't have to search for Facebook, but the trend for Facebook follows the 'myspace curve of disengagement':
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=f...
Note that people never type 'whatsapp' into a browser.
I think that social media is always going to be fickle. Google and search is a much better bet for the product being relevant in years to come.
Facebook is also a black hole. It is very rare that something written on Facebook is noteworthy enough to be shared outside of Facebook, here for instance.
Telegram is getting popular in some countries where WhatsApp has been very dominant.
I maintain a company page through an otherwise content-free account. As a corporate user I find Facebook slow and difficult to navigate.
All social networks die. They either fail to achieve critical mass, or they do and it turns out the mass was mostly composed of bovine scatology.
P.S.: never seen 'BS' expressed so eloquently...
It should remove features, it has become a bloated abomination with no focus.
It's the problem where you have cross-generational social media infused with varying socio-economic levels you find that people online want to align with their tribe BUT ALSO want to be connected with you because of a physical connection.
Prior social networks were already "pre-aligned":
Myspace: Majority School Peers/Friends +-4 years Twitter: Industry networking/interest based
Facebook is "everything". I've hit this moment where I don't want to add "2nd degree" or "loose" connections on facebook because I don't think it will enhance our relationship, if anything it could drive a wedge between us. I see these people 1-2 a year, and in person, it's great, but online, it's horrible.
I don't feel it's my place to ask them to share the pictures and updates another way, so I'm remain basically a read only FB user.
If there were a simple way to tee those things into some other feed, I'd leave FB as well.
TikTok
What's saved it, IMO, is the similar deluge of stories about political in-fighting taking place in WhatsApp groups.
The available conclusions to the reader of the two angles on it are: 1) politicians are organising terror attacks; 2) there is no causal relationship between WhatsApp and terror attacks
... one of which seems eminently more reasonable than the other; so thankfully that's where we are.
Amusingly it also came under fire from politicians in the opposite direction in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal: far from wanting to peek at end-to-end encrypted data (as called for whenever it's used by terror groups) they then wanted assurances that the data hadn't been snooped on or passed to third-parties!
This is purely anecdotal, but with my daughter and her social group, Facebook stopped being a service of interest to them quite a while back. Not because of data issues, but because (to use my daughter's words) "Facebook is for businesses and old people".
Instagram is just annoying, because it's an image sharing platform being used as a messaging platform. I actually get annoyed when people message me on Instagram, because it means that their messages to me are scattered over different platforms.
Steam and SMS, primarily. WhatsApp, too, but to a lesser degree.
And, probably, something else that I'm not aware of.
Kids these days don't give a shit about privacy. Why would they?
I'm not so sure that's true. At least, it's not true among the kids that I personally know.
What is true is that they have a more pragmatic view of the issue than us oldsters -- they view it as more like a monetary exchange: they understand and care about privacy, but they're willing to pay for a service by giving some of it up if they think the value they're receiving justifies it.
That's not the same as not caring. Just the opposite, it's caring enough to make conscious decisions about how to valuate it.
Nor do the many many kids on YouTube or Twitch.
Not a single one of the children I just mentioned understand, care about, or are willing to pay to keep their privacy, in any form.
And they're right. It doesn't matter, because nothing happens when you lose your privacy on the Internet, not even remotely approaching the risks we take and accept in our daily lives (driving, swimming, walking outside, etc.).
Obviously this should not only be an issue of the kids. In an ideal world parents would be conscious of their kids online behavior.
[1] https://www.edisonresearch.com/infinite-dial-2019/
https://www.edisonresearch.com/infinite-dial-2019/
> Regarding social media, the latest study finds the number of current users of Facebook continues to drop. The study shows an estimated 15 million fewer users of Facebook than in the 2017 report. The declines are heavily concentrated among younger people.
https://www.slideshare.net/webby2001/infinite-dial-2019
Slide 9-14 or so contain the relevant demographic and year-over-year breakout.
https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service
For me personally, it's almost impossible to deal with. Way too many political posts from my friends and family.
It's probably best use for me is local events and an occasional major event from a friend/family member.
Still, I find myself going there less and less.
From a small business standpoint, it's just not worth the time, effort and money to advertise there. It's much more effective to focus on getting referrals with my current clients.
I really wish there was a paid social media service that everyone used. I would gladly pay $5-$10 a month for something that didn't sell my data.
Bingo, that's what's doing it for me.
Before the 2016 presidential election, Facebook was fun. It was also a great way to get news.
But now, what I'm finding is that a lot of people on Facebook just don't know how to behave in a public forum. It makes it painful, because someone always knows someone who's a jerk online.
I really don't know what changed, to be honest. Did Facebook change, or did too many people come to the party?
Facebook began as an exclusive social network for upper-class students. Gradually it grew to encompass not just all of America, but the entire world. It turns out, many of us well educated people don't really want to network or socialize with poorly educated people. Police started monitoring our activities, so the events all but disappeared.
The world changed, too. Facts used to matter; we read books and the newspaper, not 25 reasons to be an idiot on Buzzfeed. Truth used to matter; less of the nation was as polarized. It was easier to get along without people shoving their ignorant political ideas in your face. Then 2016 happened, with the Russian trolls and other psyops used against us, and some of us realized we'd fucked up by buying into and encouraging others to join this network and others like it.
I could probably go on for a lot longer, but that's the gist of it.
The "grow fast monetize later" model that social media companies use, along with the user being the product, inevitably acts as a template for bait and switch.
All degradation of user experience stems from that. Of course using a social media platform during its "growth phase" is going to be a lot more of a pleasant experience than using that same platform when it's trying to maximize revenue.
It's no surprise that Facebook also seemed to chase the golden goose, but now that the main page is nothing but outrage or divisive news people are leaving in droves because they're fed up with seeing the same, day after day.
I was on Facebook before it opened to the general public, and it wasn't some ivory tower of intelligent thought where the educated could avoid mingling with the dumb. It was full of stupid social media stuff then too.
After Facebook opened up, my "poorly educated" uncle was content using Facebook to simply socialize with family and friends in 2012 when today he does nothing but share right-wing memes.
Is it condescending to acknowledge that it was a network for a fairly elite group of young people to start, and that it lost appeal when it became for everyone? Of course there wasn’t much intelligent discussion, everyone was under 25. But it was part tinder, part aim / livejournal, part social calendar; I don’t think it’s been those things for many years now.
https://iandanielstewart.com/2017/06/16/the-golden-age-falla...
Are you speaking for yourself here?
But for most of today's Facebook users Facebook is the internet and they missed out on their internet training wheels. Facebook has merely replaced AOL for a generation of people who will now take any "article" their friend posted at face value, share it with all of their friends, and then angrily complain about "mainstream media" when their phone blows up in the microwave instead of charging like the "news" told them it would.
Please be careful with the "50+" comments, ha! Not there yet but closer than I'd like to admit, and I grew up during the sweet spot of modern computing. My biased opinion is that Gen X had it best in this regard.
I meant the users like my 60 year old father who was recently "Facebook hacked" when he accidentally hit the "insert" button on his keyboard.
In that regard it’s not very useful to teenagers who are already in the same building as their entire network every day (their school). Plus teenagers don’t want to hang out where their parents do. When I was in school part of facebook’s appeal was the fact that parents couldn’t get on even if they wanted due to the .edu email requirement!
And on my wide screen, 30'', the chat window is just like 2x1 cm large.
And on the events page, I choose to display today's or tomorrow's events. Then Facebook displays events from not those days.
Hmm. Facebook has something like 2 billion profiles. Of course, most of them wouldn't pay $5/month - say that only one percent would. 20 million profiles times $5/month = $100 million/month. It might be worth it for someone to try to build such a thing...
I’d be surprised if you could get 1% of the US population of users to consider it, let alone the global population. You’d realistically be looking at single to very low double digit millions of users at the maximum.
I got probably 50 sign-ups over a few Show HNs, no more than 4/5 upvotes and comments on the most well-received Show HN, and those who came in just posted one or two test posts, found obviously that nobody else was on there and left never to be seen again. Obviously none converted to a paid account (you could get 10 connections for free then afterwards pay $2/month).
Bootstrapping any social network, let alone a paid one, is hard. But I did try :-)
Most users probably wouldn't make a whole lot of money on the platform but they'd have privacy and ownership of their data and they might end up with $5 or $10 after a year on the platform.
Maybe they considered it and then rejected it as not viable?
I love the political posts that are thoughtful, informative and spark real discussion.
So, maybe, one or two in the past three years.
I think the discussion on privacy and ad based platforms should really be orthogonal.
Except that those two things are inseparable. The privacy problems are a direct result of the desire of the advertising industry to be able to target people based on their behavior, which necessitates spying on everyone.
If we could somehow eliminate that targeting, then we could discuss the two as separate topics.
You can still target content rather than users.
Indeed you can. By "inseparable", I don't mean technically inseparable, I mean that the advertising industry has decided that personally targeted ads are the only sort of value. That means that, unless there is some sort of sea change in the industry, the two things are inseparable in practice.
If I see an ad, I can safely assume that it comes with spying. I'll be right far, far more often than I'll be wrong.
Maybe they should make that a global option, something like "Hide Political Stories" or something.
AI to the rescue though, this feels like something you can teach.
I don't mind a bit of politics, Australia is going to hell in a handcart and the least people can do is raise awareness. But I don't like inflammatory (and often completely fake) bullshit.
I can now scroll my newsfeed (which I don't actually do that often) without getting high blood pressure.
There was App.net, which attempted to be a fee-based better Twitter, but of course not everyone used and eventually shut down.
The only way to have a social network that everyone uses and is fee-based, would be to take one of the free ones and start charging...but then everyone would leave.
To some degree this may be an experience with the youth today, in time. Or not, I have no idea
Older people, it seems to me, are more utilitarian. By older people I mean college and up. They use Facebook for events, or because the social world is harder to navigate in college/later in life than when you're in high school and your friends are neighbors or classmates.
Perhaps this is just my experience, or maybe I'm just very off on how I read this, but it's a thought. I don't think Facebook is trying to be interesting— I think they're just shooting for useful and "sticky".
There are zero political posts. Zero. I've never seen one.
If my feed were full of political stuff, I'd also be sick of it. But feed is exclusively full of what friends & acquaintances are doing.
I do have a few really great closed groups on there. Groups filled with people helping each other out. These are where I still find value on the platform.
[0] the credited article for the story, linked in the second sentence https://www.marketplace.org/2019/03/06/tech/exclusive-look-n...
Jack Dorsey was on the Joe Rogan podcast with , of all people, his lawyer and got called out for censoring and gave a lot of non-answers.[1] if you read the youtube comments it's almost 100% negative on the direction they've been going with censorship on that platform and Jack's lack of candor as to what exactly they're trying to do.
Edit: Why the downvotes? Did I trigger some sort of HN Godwin's law by mentioning Americans outside the San Francisco/LA political bubble as a possible cause of Twitter's loss of popularity?
[1] https://youtu.be/_mP9OmOFxc4
I'm not. Twitter has degraded quite a lot.
I guess now we have two anecdotes. That makes us a statistic, I think?
You talk the talk but can you walk the walk?
I can’t wait to see the commodification and decentralization of the services fb provides. Identity, chats, content distribution and subscription, events etc.
My accountant still has an @aol email. I hope to see the same reaction to fb pages, events etc.