Facebook lost around 2.8M U.S. users under 25 last year

invite them to join then? mastodon has some great apps. if you have the skills you could even set up an instance or two for your friends/family to meet up on.

it won't work for 100% of the people you know, but it isn't that difficult to get a few friends to try a new app/service.

even if you can't/don't know how to set up an instance, there are hundreds of public servers that you can join. honestly, the only excuse is that you don't want to put yourself out on a limb.

https://joinmastodon.org

GCU-Empiricist2• 8 years ago

The people I want to talk to will probably follow, or can text me.

fenwick67• 8 years ago

Mastodon is pretty active and usable.

Patchwork has some big advantages. It's fully distributed, not federated like Mastodon/diaspora/OStatus, and works offline. But the experience isn't as polished yet. There are still some lingering issues with Patchwork... namely, it only runs on desktop computers, and your identity is tied to one device. But they are actively working on these issues.

Both are really cool and worth checking out.

Raphmedia• 8 years ago

If you want to roll your own for your friend group the easiest is https://buddypress.org/ on some free/cheap hosting + a 25$ theme to make it look modern.

alex_young• 8 years ago

How many users are just hanging on?

I use FB very occasionally for some events, but mostly never login. I get nagging notifications about how much I'm missing, but it doesn't feel like much.

I suspect there is a growing population of people with similar usage patterns. Are we really monthly active users?

ravitation5• 8 years ago

This is exactly how I feel. I go on Facebook less than half a dozen times a month (sometimes zero)... I still have an account, but even that feels like it's only a matter of time before that goes way too...

dralley• 8 years ago

I check about once every one or two days for 10-30 seconds. The only reason I keep my facebook around is in case someone wanted to contact me. I've deleted most of my posts, my pictures, all of the other random information, and deleted a lot of friends recently as well.

jonmb2• 8 years ago

That's how I feel too. I'm not sure if it's because of Facebook itself, or just more about my personal growth and realizing that spending much time on social media in general was a waste of time.

I've found that I just care less what people are posting about than I used to, and I care less about posting my own stuff too. Would rather catch up when I see them next in person. And if I'm never going to see them in person, they're not really a big part of my life anyway.

Facebook's algorithm seems to get worse as time goes on too. It tends to show me the same old posts from around 20% of my friends and ignores what 80% of my other friends post. Maybe I'm technically wrong about this, but that's how it feels.

cpcat• 8 years ago

I keep my profile to use Facebook login everywhere else.

colanderman2• 8 years ago

I have three use cases that keep me there:

1) I'm in a couple specific regional groups that AFAIK have no non-Facebook counterpart (though they easily could). I think Facebook does groups poorly, but they serve the "non-technical community space" use case much better than any other popular offering that I know of.

2) It's the easiest way for me to blast low-key questions/updates/etc. to most of my friends and family. (I don't have everyone's e-mail address and even if I did, e-mail is often too "active" a medium. Like sending a letter vs. posting on a billboard.) Twitter serves a similar purpose but (a) most of my network does not have an active Twitter account, and (b) Twitter and Facebook serve subtly – but importantly – different social purposes.

3) Since the demise of XMPP and subsequent fragmentation of the IM ecosystem into sundry walled gardens, some (a small minority) of my friends are most readily accessible via Messenger. Strangely enough, SMS seems to have regained footing in this space in my network.

DerfNet• 8 years ago

1) I'm in a couple specific regional groups that AFAIK have no non-Facebook counterpart (though they easily could). I think Facebook does groups poorly, but they serve the "non-technical community space" use case much better than any other popular offering that I know of.

These used to be called "forums" and were very popular until Facebook invented groups and murdered them all.

lev99• 8 years ago

They release some information in their earnings report about user activity. [0]

Daily Active Users = 1.40 Billion. Monthly Active Users = 2.13 Billion.

It's hard to extract too many statistics out of this. It's just fair to say that if someone used Facebook at all in the last 30 days, they probably (>50% chance) used Facebook today.

[0] https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

zjaffee• 8 years ago

Considering they don't release metrics such as average/median time spent, there is no way to know what degree those users are actually engaging vs simply clicking on some spammy push notification at some point in the last month (which get increasingly spammy the longer you haven't been engaged).

sevilo• 8 years ago

same, I used to be fairly active on facebook during my highschool and college years, ever since it started filling my feed with politics, ads and junk I've been much less engaged with facebook. I disabled my account for a period of time and now I'm only hanging on to it because 1) it's still the one app that most of the people in my circle have accounts on 2) for organizing events 3) advertisement purpose

ZenoArrow5• 8 years ago

Article claims Facebook is losing market share to Instagram (with individuals under 25). With that in mind, doesn't seem accurate to state they're losing users.

ravitation5• 8 years ago

I mean, it is 1) technically accurate, and 2) still extremely important when thinking about Facebook as a product.

(Especially in comparison to Instagram as a product.)

ng-user• 8 years ago

My thoughts exactly, let's not forget who owns Instagram.

ceejayoz2• 8 years ago

The same will happen (and is happening!) to Instagram. They've recently changed Instagram to non-chronological "curated" feeds, and added a bunch of ads into the mix. What used to be a very pleasant social network has become way less enjoyable in recent months.

They also just (after years of resisting) opened up the posting API to some partners.

ZenoArrow5• 8 years ago

"and is happening!) to Instagram"

That's not what the article suggests. If you have some stats to suggest the volume of Instagram users is already on the decline, by all means post it.

ananab• 8 years ago

Generally, it has become a cesspool of ads and useless posts by narcissists. The site has allowed its fundamental value to be diluted by so many short term money grabbing interests that there's no going back.

searine• 8 years ago

Not surprising. Social networks grow when they are cool, and Facebook is about the farthest thing from cool right now.

It got taken over by old people and companies looking to convert you to brands/religion/politics, all of which might be a liability to social/professional status.

f055• 8 years ago

I'm 34 and Facebook lost me as well. I can't remove my account as I need to use as a developer, but I unfollowed everyone and my newsfeed is empty. It's a bliss. Funny thing is, it's all Facebook's fault. Back in the days, the service was simply brilliant to see what's going on at your friends, at home and abroad. But when Facebook introduced the algorithmic newsfeed, the usefulness ended. I could no longer see all the photos and posts my friends' published. Now I had to rely on some weird algo - some friends were on my news feed, some others that I wanted to see, were not. I saw many more posts from pages that were irrelevant to me, much more reaction posts of my friends on stories that I don't care about, and finally - lots and lots of sponsored stories. Last year I got fed up with this mess, unfollowed everyone and now, if I want to see what's up at my friends, I go to my profile > friends > new posts and go to individual friends' profiles that I'm interested in. It's not a nice experience, but it's better than the algo news feed. Another benefit is that I use Facebook less and less. Interestingly, Twitter feed nowadays became much more interesting for me to read - although I had to unfollow plenty of mass-twitterers as well.

djhworld• 8 years ago

I rarely visit Facebook because of this reason, even when I do return the feed is populated with ads and other garbage that you need to scroll through to "catch up"

jacquesm• 8 years ago

I can't remove my account as I need to use as a developer

Why?

sergiotapia• 8 years ago

If you need to support Facebook oauth, you need an account.

azemetre• 8 years ago

In order to use some developer products and tooling you need a facebook account.

https://developers.facebook.com/

beamatronic3• 8 years ago

I agree that the algo sucks. I want a LinearBook. I want a time-series database for my social network updates.

asymmetric• 8 years ago

Isn’t that what Twitter is?

oldcynic• 8 years ago

This.

Facebook was really useful for keeping up with life events. I could stay connected and updated even with more distant friends and relatives. As soon as the algorithm "knew best" what I looked at I no longer got the occasional, but wanted, updates from those more distant. I would see what FB told me was popular - and some would play to that popularity. It would downplay to the point of censorship updates from someone if I didn't interact enough - whatever "enough" was. The feed is now almost completely beyond my control - no matter how I try to mess with groups and liking random posts to stop people being forgotten.

Once when you got a message and weren't around it would mail you the message. Now you get "Fred sent you a message log in to messenger to see it".

Now it's worse than useless for the reason I signed up in the first place.

Worse because, like a needy ex, it keeps pleading and whining for me to come back by email. I log in maybe 2-4x a year to organise with the few people that still prefer it as main point of contact.

wila2• 8 years ago

If you don't already have an email address for all your spam, get one, then change your email address in Facebook to that one.

While the annoying emails still get send, you are at least no longer bothered with it in your day to day email use. Not ideal, but slightly better.

Of course you can also use email filtering rules, but seperating it physically makes it more likely you do not burn time on it by accident.

ghostbrainalpha• 8 years ago

Similar experience, I think my problem with the algorithm is similar to slowing down to look at the car wreck on the side of the road.

I have a few a"friends" that post horrible stuff. Conspiracy theories, rants, and other posts that are just symptoms of poor mental health.

At first I stopped to read these in HORROR and disgust, because they stood out so much from the rest of my feed. Facebook takes that as a signal that this is the content I enjoy, and begins to feature it more and more heavily.

Looking back, if I had understood what was happening, I could have used Facebook correctly and worked WITH the algorithm. You have to think about the long term consequences of your viewing activity, and think of using your attention like farming to grow a good feed.

Facebook eventually needs to introduce a self-curation tool, so that people can promote the things/people they want, and remove the elements they dislike without Unfriending Grandma. For me it's probably to late. At 34 the college friends that I would like to keep up with haven't interacted with me in 5+ years, and the social awkwardness of rekindling those relationships isn't worth it.

On an unrelated note, I think many social networks will continue to die this way. As people move from PEAK FRIENDS in colleges to having lives where immediate family takes priority, I think the social presence will fade. The networks will take the blame, like MYSPACE, and FRIENDSHIP just are not good tools anymore, when really it was the person who went from having 100+ active relationships to 20.

workthrowaway272• 8 years ago

There is (or at least used to be) a menu next to people's posts that lets you stop following similar posts (or unfollow the person completely while remaining friends).

book_mentioned• 8 years ago

https://www.fbpurity.com extension

opportune3• 8 years ago

Facebook's algorithm almost seems like a quintessential example of why you need to choose good metrics in optimization problems. Maximizing user engagement sounds great - it means people are using your website and enjoying it more, right? Turns out people weren't enjoying it more, they were using it more because Facebook was shoving controversial content (e.g. dubious-quality news, debates, crazy people) down people's throats and they couldn't keep their eyes away.

You know how Facebook tries to get me engaged? It puts photos of my ex-girlfriend and her friends on the top of my feed. Sure you're going to get me to look, but I'm not going to leave the website feeling as good as when I logged on. You bring up a good point about how you have to think about the long term consequences of your viewing, but then I feel that you don't get a genuine experience when you use the platform, and if Facebook wants this, they seem to really over-estimate users' mindfulness wrt what they're actually doing.

If Facebook never figures things out, I hope whatever network comes next doesn't get greedy like they did. In particular, they need to focus on driving engagement with positive interactions and content.

kstrauser• 8 years ago

Looking back, if I had understood what was happening, I could have used Facebook correctly and worked WITH the algorithm.

I wholly disagree. You used Facebook correctly. It's Facebook's fault for poorly interpreting how you used it. Anyone who's ever been stuck in traffic behind rubberneckers creeping past an accident should understand that bursts of attention don't at all mean that you have long term interest in something.

Facebook eventually needs to introduce a self-curation tool, so that people can promote the things/people they want

A million times this. Facebook desperately needs matched like and dislike buttons, not for the purposes of voting content up or down, but so that it can learn what you actually want to see. Most music services grok this concept.

alpha_squared• 8 years ago

I've also done the unfollow-everyone thing about a year ago and I thought I was a pretty rare case, your post leads me to believe that it might not be that rare.

As it stands, I only "follow" brands/pages as sources of news (predominantly non-political) and Facebook is actually moderately useful in that way. My news feed is now just topics I'm interested in and I cut out the friend-filtering algorithm portion, which makes Facebook a lot more pleasant to use. The onus is more on me to follow up with friends on what they've been up to and I'll probably lose touch with some along the way. However, it feels more genuine when I can talk about those things on a more personal level a few weeks/months after the event is posted online and I'm not just contributing another comment/like on a post.

borplk• 8 years ago

I think another factor is also that the internet has lost some of its novelty and innocence that it had back then.

In those early days people were still used to web pages being static lifeless documents. It was magical to be able to interact with it.

It was some time after and in the middle of the Web 2.0 hype and the rush for "web based everything".

Now people have app and internet fatigue. It has become a chore.

commandlinefan• 8 years ago

Add to that the fact that the people who are most likely to think that they're shaping world opinions by arguing with their crazy aunt about Donald Trump on Facebook are also the most active... and therefore the highest-ranking elements of the feed algorithm.

e32u3g42• 8 years ago

It's a huge waste of resources, IMO.

I've setup Raspberry Pi's that sync photos between myself, parents, siblings, and some friends that care.

We can, from our phones, drop them on the local Pi, and SyncThing powers the sharing.

But of course to share cat pictures, we should fire up thousands of machines running 24/7 in data-centers, and rely on tricks of psychology to keep people coming back as justification for keeping those computers on.

Services like FB are akin to a TV show -- not a broadcaster -- novel at first, but the story/characters don't change much (or for the worse in more cases than not), it grows stale for the masses, loses ratings, and eventually it'll end and only die hards will care.

And their real contributions, large scale compute cluster knowledge, is relatively well known and copied by others.

whataretensors3• 8 years ago

Same thing. Removed my facebook now I'm looking for a cryptocurrency backed one that rewards people for contributions.

sosuke• 8 years ago

Maybe like https://steemit.com/?

mrighele2• 8 years ago

But when Facebook introduced the algorithmic newsfeed, the usefulness ended.

What I find funny is that probably according to FB your "engagement" increased with that change. Beforehand, you would check the feed, and then hit something that you already saw and then stop: you saw everything that there was to see. After the change instead, you found yourself seeing again and again the same content, and you would keep scrolling that feed hoping to see something new.

Instead of 5 minutes it takes you 10 (and you still are not sure you saw everything you wanted), you're spending double time on FB, big win ! Who cares if the "productivity" (as in total enjoyment / time spent) decreased , more time = more ads = more money.

Lather, rinse, repeat, until the garbage is so much that one stop using it and the "engagement" drops completely.

code_duck3• 8 years ago

Based on my own experience and the fact that I hear similar complaints often, FB’s News Feed team is seriously out of touch with users and what we actually want to see on there. I can only assume that they’re chasing tiny abstract metrics of engagement, and focusing more on the experience for advertisers than users.

pombrand• 8 years ago

Exactly right. I've gotten around this by using "Facebook Purity" a chrome extension which let's me filter what is shown on the news feed in detail: I only really want to see posts and photos the friends I haven't hidden from the news feed post - not their likes, the events they're going to etc. This is addition to "hide trending" and ublock makes facebook a bit broken but overall usable, not really worth checking in more than once a week though.

Instagram works better for getting a feel for your friends, especially with the temporary "snaps" people post and actually fun creative overlays.

toomanybeersies5• 8 years ago

Instagram stories also have become my primary social media "tool" these days.

I have friends scattered all over the world. Through Insta stories I can keep up with what they're doing and feel closer to them. All my friends have stopped posting on Facebook except for life events. Now everything is on Snapchat or Instagram stories.

relyio• 8 years ago

I had the exact same issues with Quora. Both websites I used to hang out frequently. Facebook to see what was going on within my social circles (not content consumption) and Quora to learn new things from the people I followed.

Both websites became unbearingly bad after they updated their feed algorithm. To this day, this remains for me the quintessential case of bad product thinking meets over-engineering.

Splendor• 8 years ago

Same here. And now they're running Instagram in the same way.

billysielu2• 8 years ago

I do this too. It's really eye-opening when you go to 'new posts', see some 'friends' have new posts, and don't bother clicking through to read their posts.

adreamingsoul• 8 years ago

I'm in my 30s and have also left Facebook. I requested my account to be deleted but I doubt they did.

jasode• 8 years ago

Facebook suffered from 2 waves of "Eternal September"[0]:

wave 1: the addition of everybody outside your immediate friends and close family. You get the goofy uncle, the distant high school acquaintances, and all the work acquaintances from every previous job that submitted a "friend request" that you didn't reject out of politeness. The newsfeed gets polluted by nonsense such as forwarded memes, politics, and other junk.

wave 2: the corporate advertisers filling up the newsfeed that crowds out the desirable posts from your real friends & family.

The 2004 to 2008 period was probably the "magical" time for Facebook from a user standpoint. The initial wave of Harvard students had a beautiful user experience with TheFacebook. As for the new members joining Facebook today in 2018?!? Not so much.

Of course, ads are needed to pay for the datacenters so any social network like Facebook inevitably decays into a worthless waste of time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

CharlesW• 8 years ago

I like this. If I may propose one more…

wave 3: bots[1]

[1] https://mashable.com/2017/11/02/facebook-phony-accounts-admi...

et-al• 8 years ago

I don't encounter bots on Facebook that much, but they're definitely ruining Instagram.

Years ago, I'd be more open to making "Instagram friends". However nowadays when I get a few likes, I go to the user's profile and see that their followers/following ratio is skewed, I know they're fishing for followers with a bot.

Ultimately all interactions on social media will be scripted by bots.

btown2• 8 years ago

Not to mention the erosion of the idea that it is default-safe to share your social experiences with your group of "friends." Adoption by colleagues and family shifts the tone considerably towards LinkedIn, where one's professional image is paramount - and all that does is make the platform more stressful to use.

Facebook does provide tools to segment one's friends into groups to whom content can be privately posted, but from a UX perspective they're deemphasized. I see a lot more social conversations moving to group chats (some on Facebook Messenger, some on GroupMe/WhatsApp and the like), because membership is determinate, you make the choice of target audience before being prompted to make a post, and the context into which you post is not a newsfeed (which we've been trained to think is global to an entire circle of friends) but just that specific chat history. (I'm sure there's some psychology/UX research in that people don't intuit that a "posting destination" can be distinct from the list of content you're viewing.)

Chats are just a "safer space" to be oneself. And if Facebook wants to capture one's true self and preferences, it will need to evolve beyond the idea that a single newsfeed is the place people want to do that.

Pigo• 8 years ago

I know this is one tiny use case, but it's one that's bothered me for some time. I can't change my profile picture without it becoming a huge news story for family and "friends" to comment on. I change a little picture of me, remove the event from my timeline, and I still get hokey comments or messages reminding me how bored and lonely everyone I know must be.

I severely miss when it was just a place to chat up a cute girl you seen in college, or find out who's going to see NIN, etc.

beamatronic3• 8 years ago

Hmm. Most folks I know address the colleague issue with a "no current coworkers" policy.

(Not to imply you should immediately add newly-former coworkers).

rowyourboat• 8 years ago

Exactly. Due to the ever-increasing friend list, I now consider posting to facebook effectively the same as posting something publicly and non-anonymously. Which I never do.

pmart123• 8 years ago

I think Linkedin has the long tail advantage here in that since it was setup as a professional network, it tends to stay that way in regards to typical interactions and people will continue to build their network on Linkedin over their career. Additionally, Linkedin has the benefit that younger people will signup to CONNECT WITH OLDER PEOPLE as networking with those senior people might help them in their career. Facebook suffers from people assuming "hidden landmines" could exist from something they posted or wrote when they were in college, which disincentives someone to maintain and enhance new social or professional connections. So it is interesting to think about what happens when you lose young users, while simultaneously you have mature users no longer keeping their social network up-to-date on Facebook? A long time ago (in tech years), it seemed like part of Facebook's moat was that the switching costs would be high on a social network. Is this still the case? Would a reasonable analogy be what if Netflix stopped creating new content and expected continued viewership relying on only existing content? How long of a lead/lad would there be until a large drop in viewership? Facebook does owns Whatsapp and Instagram though, which provides an argument that the company is well positioned from the prospective of offering the platform for targeting group chats, and still being the epicenter of most people's social experience.

g09980• 8 years ago

What did for me was the influx of the "you won't believe what happens next, this video will make you cry" shares, and then political diatribes (you may call it virtue signaling) by well-meaning friends. Unfriended many people to cull my list to around 100 and FB has been more palatable since.

freehunter4• 8 years ago

I instituted this policy back in the days where people would constantly invite you to play their stupid games, they had to invite you or they wouldn't be able to play. But anyone who invited me to Farmville or Mafia Wars or any nonsense got unfriended. If you wanted me back, you'd have to start to uncheck my name when you clicked "invite".

I also do a soft sort of "if I haven't talked to you in three months" rule to get rid of stale contacts. It's not LinkedIn, I don't need people for future reference. If I haven't talked to them in three months and they aren't someone incredibly important to me, they're gone.

I agree Facebook is awful and they're making it worse every day, but a lot of the problems people have with it are self-made. I don't get people posting awful political opinions because I don't follow anyone who does that. I don't get spammed with memes because I don't follow anyone who does that. I don't see most of the ads because I have an ad blocker. I don't see people I don't know because I unfriend them. I don't see businesses I don't care about because I don't follow businesses I don't care about.

The only problem I have with Facebook as a consumer of Facebook is not seeing things from people I want to see things from. But I rarely see things I don't want to see, because Facebook gives you all the tools you need to stop seeing that kind of stuff.

mrighele2• 8 years ago

I would love an option like "do not show anything from this contact unless it is original content, or at most share of an original content". That would remove 90% of the crap from the feed (i.e. the "viral" part).

btilly• 8 years ago

And the thing is that social networks are not nearly as sticky as they seem.

As https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/metcalfes-law-i... makes clear, multiple lines of evidence suggests that the total possible value out of a social network scales like O(n log(n)). (Yes, I am biased as one of the authors. But what shocked me was how many independent lines of argument the other authors came up with for the same conclusion!) As the experience of Facebook goes down, it takes less and less work for a competitor to make up the O(log(n)) first mover advantage.

I would therefore not bet on Facebook lasting over the long haul...

taurath• 8 years ago

It’ll be a slow chip away and then a mass migration catalyzed by some event. The chip away is already well under way.

dredmorbius• 8 years ago

In a relatively recent discussion, I think on HN, Metcalfe apparently aadmitted his "law" was intentionally overstating the case.

My view is that networks also see an unavoidable per-node cost function, and that this ultimately defines network size. (You can work the relationship backwards to find the actual value.) I've suggested this to Odlyzko. He's not yet invited me to co-author a paper.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1yzvh3/refutat...

IntronExon• 8 years ago

I think a significant portion of the issue is just that people have started to see and experience the downsides of projecting a running tab of their life for all to see, for all time. As people become more technologically literate, the appeal of selling your personal info for the dubious privelage of nothing much has to pale. I imagine the revelations that governments (US especially) are warehousing every scrap of data they can find on us hurts too.

Mostly though, FB is boring and depressing, and eventually even the easily swayed figure that out.

greenhouse_gas• 8 years ago

What I don't understand is what is FB thinking?

Look at it this way:

What do I want to see?

Friend's image/text > Group image/text > Pages I like image/text > Friends of Friends image/text > Memes > Ads.

What does FB want me to see?

Ads > Doesn't matter.

So what do they do?

Ads > Memes > Friends of Friends image/video Pages/Group Image/Video > Friends Image/Video ------------------> Text.

Why? What financial incentive do they have to show me Memes over what I want to see?

manigandham• 8 years ago

They are measuring and reacting. Ads make money so they will always have a certain priority, and everything else is a combination of your interests combined with what's popular as a whole. Memes are popular and/or your friends share a lot of memes so that's what gets shown to you.

gaius3• 8 years ago

What financial incentive do they have to show me Memes over what I want to see?

Because you scroll and scroll and scroll through the feed looking for something you actually wanted to see, and all that extra time spent is "engagement".

ncallaway• 8 years ago

Because if they show you:

Ads > Friend's image/text > Group image/text > Pages I like image/text > Friends of Friends image/text > Memes

Then you'll go through a few and then leave the site.

Ads > Friend's image/text > Group image/text > Leave FB

They optimize how much time you spend on FB, so they can show you more ads. Thus, it makes sense to stick the stuff you really care about at the end. To make it hard to find. Because, then instead of coming to the site and getting what you want, you'll spend an hour trying to dig through the crap to find what you want.

More "engagement" is more ads. Nobody at facebook through about whether it makes sense to measure "engagement" alone, or to try and measure some form of "valuable engagement", or "useful engagement".

Yizahi• 8 years ago

Because in the acronym AI only one letter is true - Artificial, and Intelligence is just buzzword. They just can't do proper tailoring of news feed to you, so as long as ADs are prioritized and the feed is not entirely atrocious they just don't care.

ulfw2• 8 years ago

Because as every big corporation without any creative mind of their own A/B tests shit ad infinitum. Whatever minimal change they made to the feed won an individual A/B test. Unfortunately the reality in life is not necessarily 1000 tiny improvements = 1 huge better product. Especially if there is no consistent thinking about the user experience.

I wholeheartedly agree with you that Facebook lost it's user focus.

arwhatever• 8 years ago

Wave 3: ruthlessly trim your friends list to make feed less annoying

Wave 4: still too annoying, deletes Facebook account altogether.

geoelectric• 8 years ago

I kept the friends list, at least for people with whom I was OK sharing contact info.

I did, however, unfollow around 500 people or so, which shrunk my feed to only a small number of people whose opinion I actually care to read. FB really should make the unfollow option more obvious, because it largely solves the feed noise issue.

oneshot9083• 8 years ago

All true, but the Eternal September for me came when I lost control of my feed to arbitrary ML algorithms attempting to maximize shareholder value whilst alienating the fewest users.

I think someone could recreate early FB on the blockchain and take a huge chunk of interesting people off of the two current awful choices. Because I do remember the time when it was fun to reconnect with people and follow their lives there.

natalyarostova• 8 years ago

Urbit's ambition is to achieve something that fosters that ability.

msangi• 8 years ago

Have a look at Patchwork, which runs over the decentralised Scuttlebot https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork

stanleydrew• 8 years ago

    on the blockchain

Why? Everything else you wrote makes sense to me except for this.

debaserab2• 8 years ago

I think someone could recreate early FB on the blockchain

wtf does this mean?

I'm asking only because this sounds exactly as loaded and buzzwordy as "I lost control of my feed to arbitrary ML algorithms attempting to maximize shareholder value whilst alienating the fewest users" you've just gone the opposite direction with the hyperbole.

fabianhjr2• 8 years ago

There is already SSB / Patchwork that was recently feautred here in HackerNews.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16273096

https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/

makecheck• 8 years ago

I wish the “of course ads are needed” weren’t true. I am waiting for the service that charges me $1/month so that I can demand zero garbage: no unwanted sharing, no ads, no spying; just a useful service for storing photos and updating friends and inviting people to events.

adrianmsmith• 8 years ago

True, but if your friends also needed to pay $1 then many of them wouldn't, and then the service still wouldn't be useful to you (despite paying $1).

justherefortart• 8 years ago

2005 was great for me as an old man taking classes at the University. My classmates said to get on this facebook thing and you could see everything from everyone, everywhere.

Made a bunch of random friends around the world and picked up a few college girls as well. :'-) Good times!

I thought everyone quit after the newsfeed in 2006? Then when grandma could get an account a couple years later.

epberry• 8 years ago

Great reference to "Eternal September" - didn't know about that. I can now think of many examples of this happening to online communities.

tomcooks• 8 years ago

You might also enjoy reading about ancient greek ideas of ἐσωτερικός and ἐξωτερικός

Yhippa2• 8 years ago

Facebook is no longer the best way for me to share content with people I care about. For me that's WhatsApp, Google Photos, and MMS.

ZenoArrow5• 8 years ago

If you're using WhatsApp instead of Facebook, Facebook the company doesn't care, it's still money in the bank to them (selling advertisers a detailed profile of who their users are for targeted ads). The whole idea behind buying Instagram and Whatsapp would've been to stay relevant when the inevitable decline in their flagship product kicked in. Looks like their plan is working.

peferron• 8 years ago

My wife and I use Google Photos to share pictures of our child with our families thousands of miles away. It's unbelievably good. No ads, no bullshit promoted celebrity accounts I should follow, actually no social features at all except the bare minimum: 1) sharing albums with others (no Google account required AFAIK, it's email-based) and 2) leaving simple text-based comments on pictures and videos. No bullshit algorithmic reordering of content either, it's just all there in reverse chronological order. My 75 yo parents can't make sense of the Facebook clutter at all (I barely can myself) but they started using Google Photos as soon as they got the invite email out of the blue. I'm sure that Google is happy that I'm uploading my family life to their servers and they'll make money out of it somehow, but from a UX perspective it's close to perfect.

baby2• 8 years ago

Also, I get invited to "groups" all the time. Because my friends want to win beauty cream and free flights to X. I leave the group, then I get re-invited again. Then I leave, then I get re-invited again. Why is this a thing?

billysielu2• 8 years ago

Is unfriending them the only way to stop it properly?

damontal• 8 years ago

My problem is that I share certain things with friends from college, certain things with my parents, certain things with coworkers. When my friends list contained all of the above and there was no intuitive way to separate what I share to them, I stopped posting.

agorabinary• 8 years ago

We need a social network experience where users own their data, and are presented with a simple and user friendly interface that connects this data with their chosen friends. Currently we have user data mined en masse at great privacy risk and for endless profit, ad infinitum.

Facebook has not decayed because of an influx of new users beginning with this "eternal september", but because of the pointed decisions by its leadership to choose greed over respect for its users. The paramount decision is the decision to go public, necessitating indefinite growth at any cost in order to satisfy investors. It must have been obvious to Facebook's early employees that a Facebook at the behest of investors would increasingly dilute the user experience, and yet only now do they lament what they created.

djsumdog• 8 years ago

Are you running your own Masterdon server yet? I'm working on migrating my blocks to a new docker structure and hope to have mine up this month.

It starts with people like us, in tech, running our own services and connecting with friends or even strangers in our field and growing out from there.

I don't think any one big thing can (or should) replace Facebook. The future of the Internet needs to be diverse and distributed. People need to learn about RSS feeds again and posting their content to a variety of services or hosting it themselves (if they know how).

toomanybeersies5• 8 years ago

Sounds like you're describing Diaspora:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)

bobthepanda• 8 years ago

Snapchat was fine for choosing who to send what to, though their UX is garbage especially with their new experience. Something like that with its separation of concerns, particularly advertising, but not photo-based, would be wonderful.

zamalek• 8 years ago

wave 1

I've found that regular pruning keeps my utility on Facebook very high. I only really have to visit it once a week (as my newsfeed doesn't stream all that fast with only ~50 friends) and it's highly relevant. Apart from the constant nags to friend people that I don't know, that is - Facebook seems to take issue with my succinct friends list.

forwarded memes

People who I give a damn about are posting to my timelines, so even the memes are mostly enjoyable. If they aren't, there is usually something enjoyable soon after precisely because my timeline moves so slowly: the signal to noise ratio is pretty good.

The downfall of Facebook is in limited ways PEBCAK. Facebook encourages degenerate use of the platform, but you don't have to fall for it.

cozzyd• 8 years ago

Yeah I remember being super-annoyed when non-college students were allowed on...

ravitation5• 8 years ago

Facebook is a case study in revenue driven product design, especially in comparison to user and purpose driven product design. It seems to me that Facebook made the mistake of thinking that they were all one and the same.

fwdpropaganda3• 8 years ago

You can't seriously believe that someone like Zuckerberg isn't smart enough to see the difference. My theory is he doesn't care what happens to the company as he's already made his fortune.

ravitation5• 8 years ago

The tone of your comment aside...

Is it so hard for you to believe that a group of corporate leaders can think that doing something (a strategy) can serve their user, their purpose, and their bottom line all at the same time, equally? It's probably one of the most prevalent self delusions in the corporate world...

In fact, I'd argue that the smarter the group of leaders think they are, the more likely they are to fall into said delusion... Since they'll think more of their strategies...

In response to your second point... Considering a large portion of Zuckerberg's wealth is in Facebook stock, and that Facebook also owns one of its chief competitors... I doubt it.

ictoan• 8 years ago

I'm in my 30s and I use FB a lot to keep up with my friends. However, I have notice that my younger cousins in their 20s never post. So... where do young folks go these days? Instagram? Twitter? Snapchat? I guess I need to talk to my cousins more and find out.

pwinnski• 8 years ago

Instagram and Snapchat, for the teens and 20s I know.

hardtke• 8 years ago

My market research (teenage kids) indicates that Instagram is their platform of choice.

utellme• 8 years ago

The question for me is - will Zuckerberg wake up and realize that Facebook is not a Google in terms of diversification and influence? CEO should have strategy about his main asset, he shouldn't rest on his laurels.

paulpauper• 8 years ago

The typical Facebook user is now a middle-aged/older person with a lot of disposable income. that is why the company is doing so well and why this loss of young users is not a big deal. Also, Instagram is filling that niche, so Facebook, which owns Instagram, wins either way.

beamatronic3• 8 years ago

Reading these comments, I have a different perspective. My FB experience is pretty much sharing my kid/pet/food/vacation pictures and looking at everyone else's kid/pet/food/vacation pictures. This will continue until no one in my social network has any of these to share or they start sharing them somewhere else. In other words, my circle of friends will go wherever the "social action" is.

jliptzin2• 8 years ago

Started using FB in 2004 when there were barely a few hundred thousand users. It was great as a college freshman going to a new place not knowing anyone and needing to make friends fast and keep up. In my 30s now and have almost completely stopped using facebook. I check in once every few months, usually when I need to sign in because someone messages me there instead of email. It's actually stunning to me that Facebook is lumped in with other tech giants like Google and Amazon. If the services that google and amazon provide disappeared tomorrow it would have a sudden and devastating impact on many parts of my life and business. If facebook completely disappeared, I honestly wouldn't even realize it for at least a couple months (until the next time I check in) and even then I wouldn't care one bit. In all honestly I think it would be an improvement to society.

roymurdock• 8 years ago

Facebook is used differently outside the US.

When I worked at a telco in Afghanistan in 2014, Facebook was basically its own utility - SMBs and individuals used Facebook (and their precious cellular data) almost exclusively to message each other and conduct business. So much so that the most popular consumer/retail plans for Afghans were "Facebook usage plans" giving you X amount of data per month to be spent exclusively on Facebook. Amazon/google have little to no power over there, facebook has a ton. Ditto whatsapp.

I think you'll find this is true for almost any country where social ties are stronger than the US, and biz is newer, or built around mobile/face-to-face transactions - fbook is much more important than it is here as a photo feed and news consumption hangout.

That said I agree for the US case and deleted my facebook ~2 years ago :)

wyclif2• 8 years ago

I've seen the effect you describe also in the Philippines and other developing countries I've visited. Some Filipinos don't seem to realise that FB is just a walled garden on the internet, not the internet itself.

Also, I think your second point contributes to this: mobile is huge in the Philippines, they send more texts than any other country. And on top of that, social ties are a lot stronger than those in America, especially familial ties, with many siblings, cousins, etc.

toomanybeersies5• 8 years ago

It's not even just in developing countries that this happens. You could substitute New Zealand and you wouldn't be far off the truth.

When I used to work in the restaurant industry, my boss would order wine from one of the wineries using Facebook messenger. There are also social data plans that give you cheaper rates for Facebook, Snapchat, and some other services.

I'd also say that a lot of people I know exclusively get their news from Facebook and it's also very important as a photo sharing application.

jonmb2• 8 years ago

I check in once every few months, usually when I need to sign in because someone messages me there instead of email.

From what I've been hearing from internal teams, Facebook is hoping to take some of email's pie. I expect to see them pushing more people to use Facebook Messenger in place of email. And they're working on new types of ads that interface more with the Messenger. E.g. start a conversation with a company instead of taking you to their web site after clicking the ad.

jliptzin2• 8 years ago

Facebook is perhaps the last company I would trust with my email.

evilduck• 8 years ago

Sounds like 2010 when they gave everyone an @facebook.com email address to try to... take some of email's pie.

ChrisArchitect• 8 years ago

If alot of those users are just hanging out on Instagram, has Facebook really 'lost' them??

padobson• 8 years ago

Whenever I see a post like this on HN, I see the inevitable "the product sucks" posts in the comments.

As an engineer and social media user, I completely agree, but it doesn't seem to be bearing out in the marketplace. Facebook continues to grow[0] (if more slowly).

So what is the HN audience to Facebook? Our we taste makers? A demographic ahead of the product curve, predictive of Facebook's imminent decline?

Or are we simply irrelevant to the mass market? Are we the people going to the art house movie theaters while the masses flood into multiplexes for the latest Marvel sensory overload spectacle?

[0]https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/31/facebook-q4-2017-earnings/

gressquel• 8 years ago

the growth they present is not telling the whole truth. So called MAU and DAU can be for example a person like me who hasnt been on fb.com for 2 months, yet when I visit newspapers and scroll to bottom I see facebook comments section with my profile picture on. Meaning FB will now count me as an DAU/MAU.

Look beyond those selective statistics, FB.com is dead.

RobAtticus• 8 years ago

Look beyond those selective statistics, FB.com is dead.

That's a bit of a strange conclusion when their financials show increasing revenue and increasing profit, quarter over quarter and year over year. From 2016 to 2017 their revenue grew almost 50% as did their Net Income[0].

It's not all roses of course, but it's hardly dead.

[0] https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AFB&fstype=ii&a...

wepple2• 8 years ago

Really interesting question to think about.

My gut instinct is both: HN can spot a tech product in decline faster than the majority of people, and I believe we’ll slowly see more and more people move away, along with a lack of younger folks coming onboard. But not everyone will depart: I think Facebook will decline but not cease to exist. It’s the new “TV” to a certain chunk of the population.

DaiPlusPlus• 8 years ago

I thought the same about MySpace and Digg after they were both eclipsed by Facebook and Reddit respectively - but to my surprise the owners both shut them down and relaunched reinvented versions many years later.

bischofs• 8 years ago

Just like anything - the techies and first adopters tend to set the trends. If the HN crowd thinks its useless then it will start to trickle down to Normies, might take awhile though.

adventured• 8 years ago

I've noticed as a techie that I've actually run behind a batch of what you call normies, that decided to quit or entirely restrict their FB activity many years ago due to unwanted social drama / conflict.

About ~8-10% of my Facebook friends quit over a four or five year span. Typically not long after joining Facebook and beginning to contribute (within a year or so). Those accounts have all just been sitting there quasi-dead with blank images, for many years (although they're still on my friends list, and no doubt counted by FB as a user (but not a MAU)). None of them have ever come back alive.

freehunter4• 8 years ago

The number of folks here and on reddit and even back to Slashdot who had and continue to have negative reactions to incredibly popular things shows that it's really hard for techies to predict what will become a success. I don't think we're irrelevant or out of touch, I just think we really are in a market all our own.

Look at the overwhelmingly negative response to the iPod, which then went on to destroy CD players and every other brand of MP3 player, right up to the point where people just used their iPhone for MP3s, when the techie audience bemoaned the death of the iPod because their music library was too big to fit on a cell phone, at which point the mainstream switched to streaming services so no one noticed. Luckily there are still niche products catering to our needs.

Look at the complaints about the iPhone with no multitasking and no physical keyboard and no user-replaceable battery and no stylus, and the massive success it had which ultimately killed Palm, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry. Luckily there are still niche products catering to our needs.

Look at the complaints about the iPad, which killed the techie-favored netbooks. Luckily there are still niche products catering to our needs.

My rule of thumb is, if HN/Reddit/etc hates it because it doesn't have enough features, it's going to be a massive success in the mainstream market.

starpilot• 8 years ago

And all the HN hate for the MacBook Pro touch bar and keyboard, while it sells incredibly well.

nitwit005• 8 years ago

I suspect you're making the usual mistake of assuming the vocal people are representative. Most of the users post nothing, and many of the rest post very little.

The people you see posting (you and I included) are weird. Betting against the product choices of wierd people is probably at least somewhat effective as an investment strategy.

PricelessValue• 8 years ago

So what is the HN audience to Facebook? Our we taste makers? A demographic ahead of the product curve, predictive of Facebook's imminent decline?

We certainly aren't taste makers. HN is so small that it is irrelevant.

Are we the people going to the art house movie theaters while the masses flood into multiplexes for the latest Marvel sensory overload spectacle?

We are just victims of the ongoing media campaign against facebook and social media. Once facebook gives in, the media will shift their hate to something else. Every time I come on HN, it's the same old facebook story. So just do what I do and click "hide" whenever you see an article about facebook on HN.

I wish HN would offer us the ability to filter our stories. I don't have facebook. Never used it ( I'm a unicorn ). I don't want to read headlines about it every day on HN.

gaius3• 8 years ago

A demographic ahead of the product curve, predictive of Facebook's imminent decline?

I was a FB user when it was still closed to the general public (using my alumni email address) so yes, I would say that I/we are that demographic.

What I see is: everyone is moving to private, carefully curated groups on WhatsApp, where sharing outside the group will get you instantly ostracised.

AgentME• 8 years ago

The product sucking and the product being popular aren't exactly mutually exclusive. Something could make all of the people who use it miserable but still be addictive enough to become and stay popular.

(I don't think it's solely this. I figure it's a mix of this and both things you said.)

overgard2• 8 years ago

I think we're just not the target market. By "we" I don't really mean HN, I mean just developers in general. Sample size of one, but I know in my own social circle, male techies = not really social media users. I think it probably has a lot to do with extraversion vs. introversion, and also if you happen to have some personal traits that tend to be social media friendly (photogenic, popular, etc.)

tim3333• 8 years ago

I'm slightly puzzled by the degree of negativity to facebook for example as I quite like it. My theory is HN folk analyse things more deeply than the public and worry about stuff. For me facebook is something where I can post some pics and see some friends and message them and that's about it.

takeda• 8 years ago

That because Facebook was smart to purchase competing services such as Instagram and WhatsApp.

I believe a lot of comments are about their main site which I also agree that got dramatically worse and no longer provides the same value it once did.

krn1p4n1c2• 8 years ago

The US hasn't been the focus for several years. Africa/India/Asia were far more important than sustaining US numbers.

Slansitartop2• 8 years ago

The US hasn't been the focus for several years. Africa/India/Asia were far more important than sustaining US numbers.

I figured they were only important to keep of the facade of forever increasing user growth. If North America and Western Europe aren't were the bulk Facebook's revenue is coming from (and where most of its focus in placed), I'd be very surprised.

krn1p4n1c2• 8 years ago

They are the bulk of its revenue, but my point was that average daily/monthly were already peaked by most counters and growth markets were a higher priority. Why do you think they paid so much for WhatsApp.

opportune3• 8 years ago

I'd guess that 500-700 million people in the world from $50k+ GDP/capita countries are actually a lot more valuable for advertisers than the billions from $5k GDP/capita countries. Africa/India/Asia may indeed be driving growth but not all users are equally valuable to Facebook

kawfey2• 8 years ago

Facebook still hasn't lost me and my group of 25-something friends, but we have pretty much all turned off notifications, dabble in disabling our profile every now and then, and only rationalize not deleting it for saying hi to grandma, creating and RSVPing to events, and the ubiquity of Facebook Messenger.

The only ones posting (or at least the only posts that facebook shows me) are a mixture of advertising, extremely politically driven posts and links, someone's birthday, and a random smattering of generic posts from friends with whom you don't keep contact.

Our primary social media is group chats, texting, and snapchat, and reddit.

mrguyorama• 8 years ago

My biggest problem in using Facebook is that I simply have nothing worth sharing. I never take pictures, and I talk to all my friends on a regular basis, so posting things would be redundant. I've discounted Facebook as a way to meet people. I purposely avoid using a desktop to access Facebook on the once every few months occasion where I need to copy-paste anything from my group chat with highschool friends. I just don't see any reason to strengthen my account on the platform

swlkr• 8 years ago

I deleted FB a few years ago, I’m surprised how bad it’s gotten. I’m not surprised that more people are either just not logging in anymore or just occasionally.

Caveman_Coder2• 8 years ago

I deleted my FB a few years ago too. I ended up getting back on and only connecting with close family that live out of state. I don't follow any brands or watch any corporate content either. I still find value in it because I can see the cool pictures my sister posts and quickly send out family updates. I'd never connect with casual friends from college or co-workers though.

garganzol• 8 years ago

Never signed up on Facebook. I always treated that offering as a convoluted waste of time. Personal preferences aside, I always wondered what happens to Facebook posts 1 month after publishing. They usually look like something (at Facebook?) scavenges pictures, photos and makes them 404. It moves so fast and breaks so many things, literally.

RandallBrown• 8 years ago

My photos from 13 years ago are all still there.

thestepafter3• 8 years ago

I signed up for Facebook recently after deleting my account 9 years ago. I was banned within 30 minutes after updating my work history and a profile photo. Submitted an appeal with my drivers license and passport. Unbanned in a couple hours. Kept building my profile over the next couple days and was banned 3 more times. Submitted appeals each time with all the requested information. Nothing malicious, political, or sexual posted, just the average guy setting up a Facebook account. Been banned for over a month now, finally just gave up. They never emailed me other than the initial welcome to Facebook email. Just had to try my login every couple hours to see if I was still banned.

rhacker2• 8 years ago

There's no reason why this should be down-voted it's actually probably 5% of the reason people are leaving - bad UX in the security area - they have some bad ML algo that is banning and doing this to people. Only facebook probably knows the true numbers around this problem, but it's significant - it happened to me too.

r00fus• 8 years ago

If the solution is that bad, I presume the problem is leagues worse.

JoshMnem• 8 years ago

You came out ahead -- you are not a user of Facebook, which is far more productive than being a user of Facebook.

RodgerTheGreat• 8 years ago

Sounds like facebook has a pretty effective scam for getting people to give them driver's licenses, passports and untold other treasure troves of personal information.

StanislavPetrov• 8 years ago

Twitter has been using a similar scam for a couple of years now. After several years of Twitter, my account was locked and they demanded my cell number to "verify" my account. No thanks - said goodbye to Twitter and never looked back.

traek• 8 years ago

In what sense do you think a driver’s license is a “treasure trove of personal information”? Especially information which FB does not already have from other sources?

coastal-fiesta• 8 years ago

Do you have an account already? Was this some kind of duplicate account prevention measure?

thestepafter3• 8 years ago

No, I did not already have an existing account.

pentae• 8 years ago

I just went through the same experience trying to set up paid ads. My account was suspended for "suspicious activity" and despite sending in a photo of my credit card with my thumb over the first 12 digits they still denied me. In the end after multiple engagements it was approved.

It lasted 24 hours before it was suspended again and had to do the whole thing all over again with the same copy/pasted responses.

Their fraud system is an absolute joke.

thestepafter3• 8 years ago

Did you get any kind of emails from Facebook during this? I haven’t heard anything from them.

Unkechaug• 8 years ago

How many of these users simply aged out of the demographic? I wouldn't be surprised if it's just a combination of people aging out and not too many new users signing up.

Sohcahtoa82• 8 years ago

That was my first thought, too.

How many of the "users under 25" simply turned 26?

It's like an old article I saw somewhere about teen pregnancy dropping heavily once they reach 20 years old...

pbhjpbhj2• 8 years ago

Let's assume 25% of the USA population is on Facebook (2.2B of ~8B in the World apparently are, it's probably higher). So we have about 80M USA FB users. About 40/320 or 1/8 are in the 20-24 age group; but they're more likely to be represented on FB, so let's say 1:6 of USA FB users are 20-24.

So, back of the napkin we can expect around 13M/5 or ~2.5M Facebook users to age out of the under-25 age-group in USA in a year. It's around the same ball-park.

Disclaimer: I'm recovering from flu.

rajeshpant3• 8 years ago

It is surprising that most folks reading HN are in some kind of bubble. I see people here commenting how they have never used facebook since last X years and they are fearful about facebook and privacy.

Are you kidding me? FB has 2.2Billion Monthly active users.

wepple2• 8 years ago

Really, it surprises you? A website tailored to typically well-educated people with a strong interest in science and technology who all speak or can communicate in English and put some kind of value in online discussion.

That’s already 0.00001% of the population, of course we’re a bubble.

The question is: is HN ahead of the curve with distaste toward FB, or an anomaly? There’s another thread on this post discussing just that.

rajeshpant3• 8 years ago

Not necessarily ahead of curve, most normal people don't care about the feed algorithm. They are happy to see what their friends and family are doing.

randomsearch2• 8 years ago

The problem here is that MAU statistic is extremely suspect.

rajeshpant3• 8 years ago

I agree. but the deviation is not that huge.

rhacker2• 8 years ago

I HAD to sign up for an account - don't ask why. After about 1 hour of usage trying to do what I had to get done, it REQUIRED a phone number for security purposes. Seconds after I entered the phone number (for security purposes) I was blasted by about 400 recommended connections including some ex-girlfriends that I'm sure my wife would LOVE me to be friends with. Go facebook. I'm guessing those people got notified that I was there too, but at least I was able to delete the account.

netsharc• 8 years ago

The other side probably got notified too. I remember seeing a peculiar name on FB's "you might know..." list, I wondered where I saw that name before. I looked in my mail inbox, and it's a guy who sold me something on eBay a few years ago. I never gave Facebook access to my mail account, but what I'm pretty sure happened is that guy did just that. FB saw that we exchanged some emails, and said (probably to both parties): "Hey, be FB-friends with this person!".

I wonder what the security implications are. I think a security researcher added a lot of phone numbers into his phone and let Facebook read it, and Facebook responded with names and faces of those numbers.

x0• 8 years ago

RE the phone number thing, isn't that common knowledge? You can type in any phone number, and if their privacy settings allow it, their profile pops up.

johnpowell• 8 years ago

This happened to me too. There was a guy on Reddit looking for help setting up Plex on a dedicated server. I run a small chat room and helped him out in there.

But we did exchange a few emails. I use fastmail and he uses gmail. A few days later he pops in the people you might know thing. At the time I did not have a cell phone so I am assuming he gave the app access to his contacts or something.

I think it is safe to say Facebook has a pretty detailed profile about you even if you never made an account.

jzl• 8 years ago

You think that's bad? This was a really good expose on the darker side of Facebook's "People You May Know" feature:

https://gizmodo.com/how-facebook-outs-sex-workers-1818861596

chillacy• 8 years ago

Oh it's 2018, being friends with all of your exes is just the norm, so you can constantly live in the past, never letting go..

anilshanbhag• 8 years ago

Well this isn't as bad as it seems. I'm 24; almost my entire friend circle has gone from using Facebook to using Instagram for posting photos and WhatsApp for messaging. Still within Facebook ecosystem.

dvt• 8 years ago

FB seems to be on its deathbed. It's obvious that it's completely lost on young users (18-25), and even young adults (25-35) are just about done with it.

Serious question: is now the time to disrupt? What would the "next" MySpace/FB look like? Ignoring techie "features" like decentralization, what do you think users actually care about?

workthrowaway272• 8 years ago

The only thing I use it for is messaging people whose phone number I don't have and a couple of groups that have events near me.

dtech• 8 years ago

Whatsapp, Instagram and Snapchat are already far in the process of obsoleting Facebook and scooping up leaving and young users.

2 of those 3 are now owned by Facebook

adjkant3• 8 years ago

And how long until Instagram suffers the same fate?

code_duck3• 8 years ago

Also, Snapchat has been neutered by Facebook closely duplicating their features in Instagram.

anigbrowl3• 8 years ago

I wouldn't be so sure about that. It is definitely ripe for disruption (and I've been saying that for a while) but on its deathbed? Far from it.

tayo42• 8 years ago

I don't think it will be disrupted. Facebook is like world of warcraft. I don't think there will be another in the same way again.

BlackjackCF• 8 years ago

I think at this point, between Facebook Messenger and Instagram, I don't really use Facebook for anything else other than events.

If Facebook spun out its own events app, I would probably stop using Facebook core altogether.

dkasper• 8 years ago

They have that. Facebook Local is events + places. https://www.facebook.com/local/

Slansitartop2• 8 years ago

Here's another good HN post from today about Facebook that didn't seem to get enough traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16358148

batmansmk• 8 years ago

eMarketer has been taking this kind of angle for years to get some audience: https://www.recode.net/2017/8/21/16181348/teenagers-millenni...

The thing is that FB is actively tranferring the teens to Instagram and the overall audience is growing so...

etrautmann• 8 years ago

For all of those people saying that FB is dead, perhaps their core product is in decline among younger users, but that does not seem to be true for Instagram or Whatsapp. Those acquisitions seem to extend FB's fingers to the demographics that their core product is losing.

remir• 8 years ago

I guess the next question is; how long until both Instagram and Whatsapp alienate their users and they switch to the "next big thing"?

harlanji• 8 years ago

Funny timing, I am deleting my account now. Decided on messaging, cropped friends, posted notice, and am messaging and unfriending individuals after short convo. It's been kinda fun. Own-domain email setup, and page with my name in meta tags for search engines. I'm 33 and "immature" fwiw

olivermarks• 8 years ago

Regardless of user age, I have no idea what FB is 'for' anymore.

The whole egosphere thing of celebrating your latest life success with posts is only ok for a small social circle. The idea of a captive user being fed 'feeds' has killed off that intimacy amongst friends in an already elderly and visually sterile environment.

I have a FB account and around 1400 'friends'. I rarely post on the account except to post articles about FB's shortcomings and in private groups about old cars I own, which is a sort of useless unsearchable lightweight forum use, a bit like the old AOL groups.

Why post comments about yourself to people you have only ever met online? The only reason I can think of is for the self congratulatory ego boost...and under 25's clearly don't get a hit off doing this on their grandpa's online channel...

anigbrowl3• 8 years ago

I use it for two things, albeit on different accounts. For myself, I keep in touch with a small circle of friends (20/~400) for personal stuff - family news, similar sense of humor etc., and participate in a number of groups, in much the same way I would on HN. Groups are where it's at, really. Oh, and I follow some news pages on specific subjects. FB is generally a terrible way to get news but an OK way to filter it to pick up high-quality content that might otherwise get lost int he shuffle.

My other accounts are purely for research, social network analysis and so on.

rmajere• 8 years ago

I never post on fb because it insists on posting my every move to the world+grandma

If only it were a little less social

jedisct1• 8 years ago

Facebook is about sharing memories, and "static" content. One can use Facebook to read the same "group" that has been around forever, or to looks at memories from the day/week/month/year.

As a result, it's a good fit for people who are only occasionally online.

Everybody else wants to live share what's happening right now. Whatsapp is great for this, as it allows instant group chats with ephemeral ad-hoc groups.

Instagram is great to share what just happened, without a UI polluted with older and unrelated content.

graeme5• 8 years ago

Facebook should watch out with Instagram. It feels considerably more draining now than it used to. There are messages, stories, suggested posts everywhere. On the search feed I often end up in auto-scrolling videos.

These increase engagement and metrics. But, they produce an unwanted feeling of compulsion where instagram didn't before. I've uninstalled the app for a bit.

I never felt like that about Instagram before, but I remember first feeling like that about Facebook years ago. If I'm right, what I'm feeling about instagram is a prelude to others feeling the same. Instagram usage will first go up, then down.

I don't yet have that feeling about snapchat, though the new design is annoying. (Mixing in stories and messages)

Oddly enough, it has nothing to do with ads. I used to see them, back when instagram felt fun. Now I don't.

adjkant3• 8 years ago

Bingo. They're going to pull the same drain and rake in money in the short term. They'll buy their next competitor and rinse/repeat.

mschuster912• 8 years ago

I don't yet have that feeling about snapchat, though the new design is annoying.

I tried to try it out but even on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 when it came out it was unbearably slow and even not using the camera drained the battery (IIRC it is/was because Snapchat kept the camera on during the time the app was open in order to avoid the 1-2s lag of camera setup). I can't understand why and how kids and young people like it so much.

freehunter4• 8 years ago

I can't understand why and how kids and young people like it so much.

That. That right there is why they like it so much. Because you're not on it. Their parents and grandparents are on Facebook, but those parents and grandparents can't figure out how to use Snapchat or don't see why kids like it, and that is exactly why kids like it.

It's the "adults can't see why kids love Cinnamon Toast Crunch" or "Trix is for kids" of their generation.

graeme5• 8 years ago

MKBHD had a good take on Android snapchat, in passing on this video where he announced he's leaving the platform for instagram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-DfipidnOE

Basically, it's far worse than the iOS version, due to Android fragmentation and Snapchat's failure to code for the different camera of at least the high end android devices.

freehunter4• 8 years ago

I have the same experience with Instagram. It used to show me interesting stuff, now it shows me interesting stuff from a few days ago. And a few days from right now, it will show me the interesting stuff that was posted right now. No amount of checking Instagram seems to make the delay go away. Every time I log in, the top of my feed is from 2 days ago. And I scroll for miles and still seeing days-old content that I didn't see days ago.

delecti2• 8 years ago

Scroll until you see the first thing you saw the last time you checked the app. Do that every time you open the app and you'll never see things from before the last time you checked.

It's absurd that it's necessary, but it works 100% of the time for me since they moved to non-chronological sorting.

PorkBoneSoup• 8 years ago

I'm using it far less as it keeps showing me stuff I don't care about from 5 or so days ago instead of linear timeline.

It annoys me because no one ever asked for non-chronological & there's no setting to change it. Instead it shows you stuff it ‘thinks’ you want to see but so far it has been way off the mark for me. And I've missed local bar promos as a result.

I'll give it credit though; it has encouraged me to unfollow a large amount of people it kept showing me repeats of.

I definitely feel less urge to engage on Instagram now than I used to as well.

ivm• 8 years ago

I have been using Instagram from 2011, with less than 100 subscriptions (mostly friends). Uninstalled it last month because of the compulsive story checks and the new messy algorithmic feed. Now I get there from iPad once a week.

graeme5• 8 years ago

Yeah. I just checked it from Flume on Macos. Not a bad experience, devoid of most of the growth hacking stuff.

Interesting you've had the same experience despite not growing your friends list. I had wondered if my own distate was simply because my list grew. Sounds like not.

I agree on the stories. They stole a march on Snapchat, but they may have destroyed what made Instagram enjoyable and stress free.

driverdan• 8 years ago

Instagram is so frustrating. I want to see all the stuff in my feed but they actively make it hard to do so.

All I want is a complete chronological feed of media. No terrible sorting algo, no held back stuff to show me later, no suggestions.

dmix2• 8 years ago

I don't know why Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, etc can't have a simple toggle between chronological and the default algorithmic feed... I've seen everyone complain about this for years online and it seems like such a simple problem to solve.

Much like searching for Tweets, Twitter provides a "New" vs "Top" filter which does that same...

It has nothing to do with advertising as both views can include ads.

ben_jones• 8 years ago

Is this for deleted users or a marked drop in user activity. Because it takes concerted effort to actually delete a profile and have it remain deleted, it would be a much stronger signal of the platform's decline.

Six years ago when my classmates and I applied to college we were changing our profiles to make them not appear on potential searches by admissions offices. This including faking names, pictures, etc. To me that was the moment Facebook became something I didn't want to be a part of, fake etc.

MikeTLive• 8 years ago

Facebook stopped being about friends and has become groups. Sharing is not between friends but between interest-groups.

the worst is when your friends share garbage, and you view it, you start to see more garbage suggested to you. you can't "un-see" anything. the algorithm knows.

heedlessly2• 8 years ago

Facebook for my peers is now used for official announcements by users.

1. just got married/engaged

2. accepted to MBA/Law/Medical/other grad school

3. job offer from prestigious company such as McKinsey/Bain/ Google/FB/Apple

4. DSLR photos of exotic vacations

either that or passive aggresive political viewpoints.

Snapchat serves a completely different purpose and has the daily "realness" going for it

Apocryphon• 8 years ago

Snapchat is micro-vlogging/live-streaming, Facebook is personal LinkedIn

propman• 8 years ago

A commenter here told me that it's now possible to delete Facebook while keeping messenger, so that's what I did. Don't miss it at all.

Agree with other posters that it's annoying how anything you like or comment on is broadcasted to your entire feed. Makes you not want to comment or like amything.

RafiqM2• 8 years ago

Time and time again I see the complaint that people want a 'Most Recent' news feed instead of algorithm-chosen and that's why they don't use Facebook anymore.

This type of feed would be unusable for the vast majority of users.

Why? Because of Page Likes.

I struggled to find quantitative data on this, but I myself like over 600 pages, and I'm selective. Many people like over 1000.

With a Most Recent news feed, those hundreds of pages would be posting multiple times a day vying for your attention.

100% reach, organic and zero cost? It's a marketers dream come true.

Add to that, I really only want to see posts from maybe 20% of my 'friends', and I believe this to be representative of the average user.

"Curate your friends list and page likes!", I hear you say.

No. I'm not bothered unliking hundreds of pages and neither is the average user. Not to mention, I did chose to hear from these pages for a reason. For friends, it's mostly socially unacceptable to unfriend people even if you haven't talked to them for a few years.

Hence, the algorithm that does the curating for me, because there's really no other way around it.

ps. I'm taking some liberties here speaking for an average user. I welcome data that shows I'm incorrect. The best I could find was from 2013 so is irrelevant.

gaius3• 8 years ago

With a Most Recent news feed, those hundreds of pages would be posting multiple times a day vying for your attention

Then people would simply only "like" things that they really liked and really wanted to see. This is a non-issue.

RafiqM2• 8 years ago

They already like too many things. The action has already happened, your suggestion would only apply for new users. And as I mentioned, I don't believe people will curate their feed by going to the effort of removing hundreds of page likes and friends. They'll just stop using it because that's too much work.

AndrewKemendo• 8 years ago

Didn't they plan for this with the acquisitions of Instagram, Whatsapp, and most recently tbh?

They know the particular property of facebook.com can't last forever, so they go where the users are going. Last I checked Instagram is the hottest app out there for anyone 35 or under. As of last year at least Facebook, messenger and Instagram were each still in the top 5-10 most used apps.

I feel like people somehow don't see facebook as the digital conglomerate that they are and focus on what is happening on facebook.com as though it's a harbinger of the rest of the company.

Also, IMO they have the best Machine Learning (specifically vision) team on the planet and are consistently making amazing tools open source. That alone is worth a lot.

wyclif2• 8 years ago

That explains why Snapchat and Instagram, which offer features for sharing photos and videos that disappear, are growing in popularity among this demographic

Instagram is owned by Facebook. That's why I don't think Facebook is worried about migration off the parent app, they can just spin off endless trendy social apps and market them to target demographics under new names.

habosa• 8 years ago

I'm 25, so right on the edge of the demographic mentioned here. I have been using Facebook for 10+ years now, and I was pretty closed to quitting entirely about 2 months ago.

And then suddenly ... my Facebook has been fixed. I had recently started "unfollowing" people who annoyed me and also un-liking all brands. Facebook has also done some recently algorithm changes.

A year ago my Facebook was a randomly-ordered stream of nonsense that was 80% branded content and 20% of my most antagonistic "friends".

Now it's a seemingly chronological view of what my Facebook friends are doing. If I leave Facebook and come back an hour later, it's basically the same feed with ~5 new posts on top. This makes it something I can actually check and not a black hole.

I hope they continue in this direction. They've got fantastic ad targeting and if they keep users around they can probably keep their ARPU really high.

olfactory• 8 years ago

Facebook clings to dark patterns that surely appear to be "working" in the sense of generating engagement and ad spend.

The problem is, younger users have a much better intuitive sense of those dark patterns because they must develop street smarts about how they can be misused (cyber bullying, revenge porn, deepfakes, etc.)

I don't see how any responsible parent could put a video of his/her kid on Facebook when it's just a simple download away from being turned into someone's perverted deepfake, bullying fodder during junior high, etc.

In fact I'd argue that it's irresponsible stewardship of a child's future online autonomy for a parent to post any pictures or data that could be easily misused/abused by his/her own Facebook network. This means pretty much all pics and videos.

If this sounds silly, consider that Facebook makes deleting pictures one has uploaded a significant chore that requires 10x the number of clicks it ought to.

When I think about deleting some of the old pics I've uploaded to FB that I'd rather take down, the thought of dealing with all the dark pattern speed bumps trying to make it difficult underscores the outright hostility Facebook feels toward its users.

Recently Facebook had a bug where any Instagram account that had been linked to a Facebook account magically got the Facebook user's profile photo. Even this is a crass disregard for user privacy. Instagram is used much, much differently than Facebook and it's completely unreasonable to expect a user to wish to use the same profile photo.

Young people are just a bit more savvy than the rest of us because their peers/foes/etc are more likely to have had the time and inclination to do minor mischief that Exploits Facebook's defaults. Younger users prefer Instagram or Snap largely because the privacy settings are less opaque and fewer dark patterns are used.

This is probably why Facebook bought Instagram, and why Facebook has allowed the younger users to leave... The revenue generated by milking the older users must outweigh the value of having the younger users. After all, Facebook could easily create a linked Facebook account for all Instagram users and role out a new privacy pattern geared at the preferences of younger users if doing so would result in profit.

But as it stands, younger users are happy to engage with Instagram and Whatsapp and Facebook is not throwing away any of the behavioral profiling data, so eventually when the platforms change/evolve Facebook has lost nothing.

Analogously, Facebook isn't wasting time feeling hurt about users not loving its namesake platform. The company is far broader and more encompassing than the namesake app. If you are using a Facebook owned product and generating data in it, you are helping move ad inventory and doing your part to help Facebook make money.

oblib2• 8 years ago

"12- to 17-year-old demographic declined by 9.9 percent in 2017"

I'll offer those numbers are related to their parents already being there. Those kids will probably sign up or come back when they get a bit older.

err4nt• 8 years ago

Why would they sign up…ever? What's the value proposition? Will their parents have left in a few years?

When I joined Facebook (~2006/7) there was a very clear value to me: my and my college classmates could send messages, collaborate, and organize events.

Now it seems like a wasteland, I really have no idea how I could put Facebook to work for me, and since not everybody I need to collaborate with it is on Facebook (some are very opposed to it) it's useless as a platform for organizing events compared to other event-planning platforms. Why would anybody ever need Facebook?

anigbrowl3• 8 years ago

Groups. there are tons of groups, open, private, and secret, and it's easy and handy to build/organize a small community on there than through X or Y private forum website that people have to log in separately to. People frequently try to build groups up to a critical mass and then move them off FB for privacy and/or profit, but most people are in multiple groups and there's no discernible advantage in moving to a different platform for semi-casual socialization. That's why lots of other social networks for subgroups launch to great fanfare and are then deserted 6 months to a year later. They just don't have enough critical mass to overcome Facebook's network effect on a permanent basis so people keep going back to FB because that's where everyone else is for many practical purposes.

oblib2• 8 years ago

"Why would they sign up…ever?"

They grow up. When you're a teen, or even young adult, you don't want your parents snooping on you, but as you grow a bit older you find that you do want to keep in touch with family.

jostmey• 8 years ago

I log into Facebook about 6 times a year. Each time it is a waste of my time

dboreham• 8 years ago

Facebook is becoming like how things would look if you did the wrong thing in SimCity: a dark gently smoking urban wasteland.

jonbarker• 8 years ago

Basically all social networks with real names are an extension of one's professional brand. This is not good for facebook in its efforts to attract kids because 1) what parent wants to sign their kid up for a permanent professional brand and 2) what kid is thinking about their professional brand anyway?

internetman55• 8 years ago

hmmm I don't really look at facebook more than once every few months for like 2min. I have fb messenger to talk to my friends and I don't really care about what goes on on the real site

cowmix• 8 years ago

My kids who are 19 and 15 barely care about Facebook. My oldest uses Messenger, but that's about it.

Twitter OTOH seems to appeal to both of them, still.

DenisM• 8 years ago

Facebook will have lost the game when no one here will care enough to comment whether Facebook has lost the game.

poisonarena• 8 years ago

sucks, cuz it was a good idea in the beginning.. also got me some girlfriends over the years..

medyadaily• 8 years ago

Facebook is one of the companies that banned the word Kurdistan on the request of Turkish government. that means for Kurds in Iraq and Iran which unlike Turkey, the word kurdistan is not only not banned but also legally is an official federal region and official province name, we could not choose Kurdistan as our hometown in the profile. I personally spent more than 10 years reporting this "bug" but it was never solved. later I found out it was an internal guidance from facebook to ban the word Kurdistan. I am glad to see such evil organization is going down the tube.

overgard2• 8 years ago

I'm 32. I'm at the point where I'll update my facebook about once a month just so it doesn't look like a total ghost town if someone adds me, but otherwise I just stay away from it.

I find that the structure of it encourages people to post things that just appeal to the lowest common denominator. My feed is full of trite positivity memes and cute girls taking selfies and saying stuff like "Coffee with friends!" It's.. fine? I just don't feel any connection to other people when I'm on there, and I don't really feel free to actually state real ideas or opinions, so it barely even feels particularly "social" to me. It's just a lot of people acting as their own PR department mixed with a lot of people patting each other on the back.

temporallobe• 8 years ago

This just demonstrates FBs switch to a different demographic. The user base has actually increased according to TFA, but it doesn't say which age group. I am betting the over 55 crowd, judging by the number of political and religious posts on my feed.

Yes, I still have an account but I have removed all personal information, pictures, and deleted all my posts. I also go months between using it. I can't bring myself to totally remove my account though.

anonytrary• 8 years ago

Ha! They lost me when I was 18. I dunno about your moms, but my mom taught be not to share all of personal information with everybody in the world.

mettamage• 8 years ago

Facebook has usefulness to me in three ways:

1. As a public opinion board. I post a question on my wall and people answer.

2. Chatting with my friends.

3. One Facebook group where me and my friends are in.

This is my setup to not get completely sucked into Facebook:

1. I changed my real accounts name to a fictional name that is related to my name. I changed my lastname to a French version of it (my lastname is a noun) and then I swapped my first and lastname. So anyone who Google's me on my real name can't find me.

2. I created a fake account with my real name and a modicum amount of friends (at random) in order to not get detected by Facebook that it is a fake account. I put the best pictures of me on this account. Now when people Google me, they see nice pictures.

3. My main browser has my fake account on auto-login. But it has my actual account on the auto-login of Messenger. This means when I go to Messenger, I can actually chat. And when I get nonsense (e.g. login with Facebook or sucked into some feature of Facebook) I get my fake account. Since it has a modicum of friends that I don't care about and nothing on it, there is not much I can do.

4. I set my main Facebook account on auto-login on my second browser. In this way I can still write wall posts and post/read about stuff in my Facebookgroup. Also, I installed a wall eridactor plugin.

I don't think I'll ever be able to completely get away from Facebook, but I am trying my best to keep its use to the things I want to do with it.

leke• 8 years ago

Facebook to me is that place where everyone is. I love reddit and have been there about a decade, but I'm the only person I know there. If I meet someone new, or join a local group, I can always catch up, or connect with them on Facebook.

I think Facebook in general acts like a greedy business with data gathering and over advertising. It's toxic in that respect. It's a shame something as "open" as Diaspora didn't take off. I still think a new social platform might still arise from something like a chat app (like WhatsApp), but ultimately risk getting bought by FaceBook as they fear losing their stronghold in the market.

yummybear• 8 years ago

It's a good start, but there's a long way to go.

johnnydoe9• 8 years ago

This explains the text message me and a friend received today.

https://i.imgur.com/ErvNLOc.jpg

pgt• 8 years ago

An ex-Facebook employee told me that to stay productive, developers unfollow everyone and only use Facebook for events - it's too addictive otherwise.

My advice was: sell your shares, because developers are canaries for customers.

RandomCSGeek• 8 years ago

The masses generally follow whatever is trendy. People initially followed facebook, and when Whatsapp and Instagram came, they followed them. FB is going through it's natural life cycle, and we will see it desperately trying to survive as it's stats get negative and shares dwindle.

This is problem with any service where users care about userbase. For netflix, userbase is not a concern for users. Hence such services are more likely to survive long term, as long as they keep themselves relevant.

FB, Whatsapp and Instagram however, are destined to die very soon(I'd bet a lifecycle of 2 decades). Users are eventually going to move on.

ktaube• 8 years ago

I wonder how many users are still on Facebook just because it's the only way to authenticate in Tinder.

gerardnll• 8 years ago

A friend of mine, cancelled the account 2 weeks ago. For months I was also thinking about closing it too, so I finally did it after him. Few days after having talked about it with an ex colleague, he also closed his account too.

The amount of useless information, the irrelevance of it, ads, privacy concerns, the fact that you just care about your most intimate friends, and not about that ones you connected in the beggining when you though 'oh look, my friend from primary school!', most people does no longer provide interesting content, just conversations about politics (not always sane debates), photos to generate envy/pose... and realizing that Facebook just does not give you anything good, just depression or low self steem... Also the fact that when you are bored you just check social media instead of doing something useful... All of this made me realize I had got to close it.

And I feel better, and I'm sure I would feel even better if I also close my Instagram account. Nowadays I just keep the Instagram app on my phone. I also got tired of toxic comments on Twitter and I check it much less often now.

I feel, one of the reasons we registered on Facebook was to be more social but that ended up being the opposite and now we want to feel 'contact' again, and you can only get that by physical interaction and real conversation, because a postcard or a call has never been the same than a real conversation and a hug.

This is just the beggining. I've been on Facebook for 10 years, and I'm sure a lot of millenials are starting to close their accounts, or at least they don't even use it.

iddan• 8 years ago

These analytics are really dumb considered Facebook Inc. still holds these users in Instagram...

nicky0• 8 years ago

Facebook is indispensable for me because of groups. A group for my running club, a group for my cycling club, other local groups. All activities are coordinate using FB & Messenger.

However I also have a zero friend policy on Facebook. Having zero friends, plus the "only friends of friends can send me a friend request" setting, means nobody can send a friend request. I suggest you try it, it's glorious.

mcs_• 8 years ago

Over 36 here.

I keep post my position in this kind of news. I never used it. I will never use it. It will close before I will use it.

I could consider to use it if hired or paid to test it.

aws_ls• 8 years ago

Yep. My anecdotal example. My elder one, created an account as soon as they turned 13. The younger one, couldn't care less. Meanwhile sometime few years ago, I also deleted my FB account. My God, there are only a few tech products, I hate as much.

Lot of solutions on offer. But IMHO, only one thing will fix it. Forcing it to open its protocol. A mail++ (for social) which will just allow all the products to compete in the open. They can compete on UI, the feed sort algorithm etc, among other things. Nobody will hate on Facebook as much. Its market cap will go down, but Zuck can sleep better.[1]

[1] “I don’t think he sleeps well at night,” from https://www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-...

oflannabhra• 8 years ago

I have a theory: Facebook's biggest problem is that it gives people what they want, but what people want is not what makes them happy. Algorithmic recommendations are tailored to capture people for as long as possible, but the short-sightedness of "engagement" erodes the long-term benefit for the user. I think this applies to YouTube as well, or other algorithmically generated "feeds".

marcodave3• 8 years ago

Facebook [...] gives people what they want, but what people want is not what makes them happy

I have a feeling that Facebook is following the same decline of generalistic TV, which, similarly to Facebook - contains mostly ads and crappy/shocking/debatable content - its userbase is becoming more and more elderly - teens start to snob it and move on to the next cool thing - people get bored of it and decide not to bother with it anymore

petraeus• 8 years ago

Facebook has turned into a platform to spam you with ads no wonder their losing marketshare

pankajdoharey• 8 years ago

I hope this is the beginning of the end, of an era.

Facebook lost around 2.8M U.S. users under 25 last year

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