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Maybe I live in a bubble, but I just assumed that Facebook would be on a decline trajectory by now. Their website is almost meaningless to my day-to-day life a

Maybe I live in a bubble, but I just assumed that Facebook would be on a decline trajectory by now. Their website is almost meaningless to my day-to-day life at this point. I login once every couple of weeks, upload some pics of my kids for Grandma to look at, and then log off. I don't personally know anyone who still uses it regularly as we did back in 2007. I don't know a tactful way to put this... but it seems like mostly older people and Walmart shoppers, posting angry bumper sticker nonsense about Obama or Trump. Am I just COMPLETELY out of touch? Or it is an Eternal September situation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September), where the unwashed masses are still coming on board faster than people like me are leaving? Even if it's the latter, aren't they near a saturation point by now? Once everybody's signed up, where's the growth come from? How do you squeeze out additional monetization from a platform once there are no new members coming in, and old ones trickle away because the content is so poor?

mslate 9y ago
Instagram is huge by engagement and advertising spend. They have absolutely cannibalized what Snapchat might have been.
confounded 9y ago
> I login once every couple of weeks, upload some pics of my kids for Grandma to look at, and then log off Pretty much proves the point: Even people who actively dislike the company and product exhibit engagement and retention that other consumer apps would kill for. It sounds like you've been using it for a decade! It's less of a 'product' than a globalized, cross-generation, ubiquitous social norm.
- dcre 9y ago
  Exactly right. OP is a monthly active user every month!
- diminish 9y ago
  Also mundane communication among family members, friends, coworkers and relatives have been brought online and monetized the very first time on a massive scale of billions of people. So your mom says "happy birthday" to you and FB monetizes. You check that person you were curious, and FB monetizes you.
jamesmcintyre 9y ago
I believe Facebook is very perfected form of Dopamine delivery and it's leveraging the attention deficit behavior of entire generations. Could it fizzle out the way you anticipate? We have seen it before but if you look at Zuckerberg's ambitious vision for Facebook and the new verticals he plans to enter/trail-blaze then there's reason to assume the goal is not to ride on Facebook's success but to continue aiming at the next place the population will look for it's fix. If you look at some of early data and research about the effect fake news spread via Facebook has had you can see Facebook has itself firmly planted in millions of American's everyday life to the extent where it's platform can distort the very perception it's citizens have of themselves. Certainly not all but healthy chunk, large enough chunk for there to be real effects. As far as market saturation, again I'd point to Zuckerberg's heavy investment in VR and plans to invest in more emerging verticals going forward. Not to mention that Google has been at market saturation, especially in America, for many years and we do not see it's ad revenue waning in any substantial way. And Google took that ad revenue and put it into various risky forms of R&D that has now clearly lead to potentially enormous new growth verticals like Waymo. I'm not an avid Facebook user but I get roped back in by push notifications of someone mentioning me or tagging me in a picture. In addition, about a year ago I got so tired of only seeing "mostly older people and Walmart shoppers, posting angry bumper sticker nonsense about Obama or Trump" that I searched for my favorite tech, science and political media sources on Facebook and followed them so now my feed is of more utility to me but still not ideal.
- cryoshon 9y ago
  >to the extent where it's platform can distort the very perception it's citizens have of themselves yes. and that's why it has to fall. some power can't be used responsibly, and facebook has shown that they don't give a single care about their users so long as they are producing money, as evinced by their non-consensual experimentation a couple years back.
- drewmol 9y ago
  >"mostly older people and Walmart shoppers I know your quoting a parent post, but I sometimes wonder if sometime in the distant future people will say thing like: "mostly older people and Amazon shoppers" Or "mostly older people and Facebook users" etc.
exolymph 9y ago
> Maybe I live in a bubble Correct. > Am I just COMPLETELY out of touch? Yes. > Even if it's the latter, aren't they near a saturation point by now? Once everybody's signed up, where's the growth come from? New markets like India.
- adventured 9y ago
  > Once everybody's signed up, where's the growth come from? > New markets like India. Even without much further user expansion (such as via India), once 2 billion are signed up, that's when the real money starts pouring in. From zero to 2 billion monthly users, is nothing compared to how much money they'll print as they slowly climb from 2 billion to 2.5 billion or similar. From 0 to 2 billion over ~13 years, cumulative $15-16? billion in profit. Which is likely to be about what they earn just in 2017. Their money printing machine is just about to get interesting. With 2 billion users, Facebook can start pressing their monopoly in all sorts of lucrative directions if they see fit. They could buy up PayPal and Shopify, integrate them into the core Facebook platform, enable real ecommerce directly within Facebook, and go after Amazon etc with an attack more like Alibaba (no inventory, a platform that makes money via ads).
calvinbhai 9y ago
Are you truly logged off? Are you sure you don't see ads based on your online behaviour? It's easy for FB to still make money from a user who uses FB rarely. Your action (of uploading photos) leads to your grandma providing engagement for Facebook. To show banner ads, video ads etc. Even I was thinking FB will be down any time soon, but it looks like they are doing a good job, milking more and more money from the market!
evincarofautumn 9y ago
I’m 26 and still visit the site every day, as do many of my friends (ages 20–30 or so), and we do most day-to-day communication via Messenger. It all depends on what happened to gain traction and retention with your friend group, I guess. There’s certainly a lot of political bickering on public posts—good lord, look at the comments on Donald Trump’s page—and I think FB is the go-to place for older people to do that, but it’s not something I engage in, so you just don’t see my part of the iceberg.
rconti 9y ago
Yes, that out of touch. I use it every day and so does virtually everyone I know. I started college a few years late in life, and it launched when I was in school. No major complaints about it.
ams6110 9y ago
I'm 50 and have never used Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Google+, Myspace, or any of it.
dbbk 9y ago
To be fair, your behaviour does count you in the MAU. I'm from the UK and just left university. Everything social at university is organised on Facebook still, through Groups and Events. Weirdly, I can't even think of any competing service that societies and sports clubs would move to.
- lmm 9y ago
  Meetup has some traction but it charges the organiser directly.
2_listerine_pls 9y ago
> Maybe I live in a bubble Maybe?
agotterer 9y ago
One of the reasons Facebook (and Google) are working on bringing internet to third world countries and remote locations is to increase access to new users.
greggman 9y ago
I don't know if you're out of touch and I don't believe my usage is typical but I get lots out of facebook. First of, messenger is my most common form of communication with friends and family. I use both the messenger app and messenger.com The next biggest concrete use is event planning. Pretty much all my friends use facebook events to plan their events so I get invited to the event on facebook. I probably wouldn't not get invited otherwise. That's not because my friends aren't thoughtful, rather it's because it's the path of least resistance. Create an event, look at your friend list, add everyone you hope will come, done. Also if it's an open event it makes it easier for friends to add friends. I also found out about tons of activities. If a friend is going to or has shown interest in an event facebook will often show that to me so I found out about several activities I wouldn't have attended otherwise. Friends also directly accounts events they're promoting so I find out about those. A simple example, the Tokyo Indies (indie gamedev) meetup is announced on facebook (among other places but I don't use those other places) Then, even if I were to ignore all my friends my mother and my sister post semi-regular updates. A few things that help though 1. I've aggressively unfollowed tons of people. Anyone I don't really care about. Anyone I probably won't see again in my life. Anyone who posts too much (except my sister). Anyone who posts too much political stuff (just don't want to frustration). Anyone who used to be kind of part of life but no longer really is. 2. If FB shows me something I don't want to see I always tell it "hide post", "show me less of this". Their algos suck unfortunately but it helps a little 3. I'm running FBPurity to filter out lots of inane posts. Any "so-and-so commented on" or "so-and-so replied to a post" or "so-and-so was mentioned in a comment" and lots of others. I will say the more FB tries to tempt me to interact the more I think I'll eventually have to quit. The latest is the popups for comments. I get that it would be useful for people but it's just such a distraction for me I want it off.
1024core 9y ago
> Maybe I live in a bubble, but I just assumed that Facebook would be on a decline trajectory by now. It's coming. Every time I open the FB app, I see mainly "Sponsored" items or "Suggested" items (most of them videos) and fewer and fewer updates from friends. As a result, my usage of FB has declined by about 80% in the past month or two, and it's only going to get worse. My wife recently uninstalled the app.
- philh 9y ago
  > It's coming. I take it you plan to short the stock, to take advantage of what you know that the market doesn't?
  - 1024core 9y ago
    "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"
    - philh 9y ago
      I don't suggest putting in enough money to risk insolvency. If you're confident that the decline will happen in, say, five years, then I expect you could buy a few put options and make some healthy profit.
MarkMc 9y ago
Check out this graph of monthly active users: https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/26/facebook-earnings-q2-2017/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/26/facebook-earnings-q2-2017/ Over the past two years, the number of users has grown by around 30%. Rich areas like US and Europe have only grown 13%. So if revenue per user was static then I would expect Facebook's total revenue growth to be around 20%. Instead revenue has grown more than 100%, which suggests that Facebook is extracting much more $ per user.

mslate 9y ago

Instagram is huge by engagement and advertising spend. They have absolutely cannibalized what Snapchat might have been.

confounded 9y ago

> I login once every couple of weeks, upload some pics of my kids for Grandma to look at, and then log off Pretty much proves the point: Even people who actively dislike the company and product exhibit engagement and retention that other consumer apps would kill for. It sounds like you've been using it for a decade! It's less of a 'product' than a globalized, cross-generation, ubiquitous social norm.

dcre 9y ago
Exactly right. OP is a monthly active user every month!
diminish 9y ago
Also mundane communication among family members, friends, coworkers and relatives have been brought online and monetized the very first time on a massive scale of billions of people. So your mom says "happy birthday" to you and FB monetizes. You check that person you were curious, and FB monetizes you.

jamesmcintyre 9y ago

I believe Facebook is very perfected form of Dopamine delivery and it's leveraging the attention deficit behavior of entire generations. Could it fizzle out the way you anticipate? We have seen it before but if you look at Zuckerberg's ambitious vision for Facebook and the new verticals he plans to enter/trail-blaze then there's reason to assume the goal is not to ride on Facebook's success but to continue aiming at the next place the population will look for it's fix. If you look at some of early data and research about the effect fake news spread via Facebook has had you can see Facebook has itself firmly planted in millions of American's everyday life to the extent where it's platform can distort the very perception it's citizens have of themselves. Certainly not all but healthy chunk, large enough chunk for there to be real effects. As far as market saturation, again I'd point to Zuckerberg's heavy investment in VR and plans to invest in more emerging verticals going forward. Not to mention that Google has been at market saturation, especially in America, for many years and we do not see it's ad revenue waning in any substantial way. And Google took that ad revenue and put it into various risky forms of R&D that has now clearly lead to potentially enormous new growth verticals like Waymo. I'm not an avid Facebook user but I get roped back in by push notifications of someone mentioning me or tagging me in a picture. In addition, about a year ago I got so tired of only seeing "mostly older people and Walmart shoppers, posting angry bumper sticker nonsense about Obama or Trump" that I searched for my favorite tech, science and political media sources on Facebook and followed them so now my feed is of more utility to me but still not ideal.

cryoshon 9y ago
>to the extent where it's platform can distort the very perception it's citizens have of themselves yes. and that's why it has to fall. some power can't be used responsibly, and facebook has shown that they don't give a single care about their users so long as they are producing money, as evinced by their non-consensual experimentation a couple years back.
drewmol 9y ago
>"mostly older people and Walmart shoppers I know your quoting a parent post, but I sometimes wonder if sometime in the distant future people will say thing like: "mostly older people and Amazon shoppers" Or "mostly older people and Facebook users" etc.

exolymph 9y ago

> Maybe I live in a bubble Correct. > Am I just COMPLETELY out of touch? Yes. > Even if it's the latter, aren't they near a saturation point by now? Once everybody's signed up, where's the growth come from? New markets like India.

adventured 9y ago
> Once everybody's signed up, where's the growth come from? > New markets like India. Even without much further user expansion (such as via India), once 2 billion are signed up, that's when the real money starts pouring in. From zero to 2 billion monthly users, is nothing compared to how much money they'll print as they slowly climb from 2 billion to 2.5 billion or similar. From 0 to 2 billion over ~13 years, cumulative $15-16? billion in profit. Which is likely to be about what they earn just in 2017. Their money printing machine is just about to get interesting. With 2 billion users, Facebook can start pressing their monopoly in all sorts of lucrative directions if they see fit. They could buy up PayPal and Shopify, integrate them into the core Facebook platform, enable real ecommerce directly within Facebook, and go after Amazon etc with an attack more like Alibaba (no inventory, a platform that makes money via ads).

calvinbhai 9y ago

Are you truly logged off? Are you sure you don't see ads based on your online behaviour? It's easy for FB to still make money from a user who uses FB rarely. Your action (of uploading photos) leads to your grandma providing engagement for Facebook. To show banner ads, video ads etc. Even I was thinking FB will be down any time soon, but it looks like they are doing a good job, milking more and more money from the market!

evincarofautumn 9y ago

I’m 26 and still visit the site every day, as do many of my friends (ages 20–30 or so), and we do most day-to-day communication via Messenger. It all depends on what happened to gain traction and retention with your friend group, I guess. There’s certainly a lot of political bickering on public posts—good lord, look at the comments on Donald Trump’s page—and I think FB is the go-to place for older people to do that, but it’s not something I engage in, so you just don’t see my part of the iceberg.

rconti 9y ago

Yes, that out of touch. I use it every day and so does virtually everyone I know. I started college a few years late in life, and it launched when I was in school. No major complaints about it.

ams6110 9y ago

I'm 50 and have never used Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Google+, Myspace, or any of it.

dbbk 9y ago

To be fair, your behaviour does count you in the MAU. I'm from the UK and just left university. Everything social at university is organised on Facebook still, through Groups and Events. Weirdly, I can't even think of any competing service that societies and sports clubs would move to.

lmm 9y ago
Meetup has some traction but it charges the organiser directly.

2_listerine_pls 9y ago

> Maybe I live in a bubble Maybe?

agotterer 9y ago

One of the reasons Facebook (and Google) are working on bringing internet to third world countries and remote locations is to increase access to new users.

greggman 9y ago

I don't know if you're out of touch and I don't believe my usage is typical but I get lots out of facebook. First of, messenger is my most common form of communication with friends and family. I use both the messenger app and messenger.com The next biggest concrete use is event planning. Pretty much all my friends use facebook events to plan their events so I get invited to the event on facebook. I probably wouldn't not get invited otherwise. That's not because my friends aren't thoughtful, rather it's because it's the path of least resistance. Create an event, look at your friend list, add everyone you hope will come, done. Also if it's an open event it makes it easier for friends to add friends. I also found out about tons of activities. If a friend is going to or has shown interest in an event facebook will often show that to me so I found out about several activities I wouldn't have attended otherwise. Friends also directly accounts events they're promoting so I find out about those. A simple example, the Tokyo Indies (indie gamedev) meetup is announced on facebook (among other places but I don't use those other places) Then, even if I were to ignore all my friends my mother and my sister post semi-regular updates. A few things that help though 1. I've aggressively unfollowed tons of people. Anyone I don't really care about. Anyone I probably won't see again in my life. Anyone who posts too much (except my sister). Anyone who posts too much political stuff (just don't want to frustration). Anyone who used to be kind of part of life but no longer really is. 2. If FB shows me something I don't want to see I always tell it "hide post", "show me less of this". Their algos suck unfortunately but it helps a little 3. I'm running FBPurity to filter out lots of inane posts. Any "so-and-so commented on" or "so-and-so replied to a post" or "so-and-so was mentioned in a comment" and lots of others. I will say the more FB tries to tempt me to interact the more I think I'll eventually have to quit. The latest is the popups for comments. I get that it would be useful for people but it's just such a distraction for me I want it off.

1024core 9y ago

> Maybe I live in a bubble, but I just assumed that Facebook would be on a decline trajectory by now. It's coming. Every time I open the FB app, I see mainly "Sponsored" items or "Suggested" items (most of them videos) and fewer and fewer updates from friends. As a result, my usage of FB has declined by about 80% in the past month or two, and it's only going to get worse. My wife recently uninstalled the app.

philh 9y ago
> It's coming. I take it you plan to short the stock, to take advantage of what you know that the market doesn't?
- 1024core 9y ago
  "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"
  - philh 9y ago
    I don't suggest putting in enough money to risk insolvency. If you're confident that the decline will happen in, say, five years, then I expect you could buy a few put options and make some healthy profit.

MarkMc 9y ago

Check out this graph of monthly active users: https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/26/facebook-earnings-q2-2017/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/26/facebook-earnings-q2-2017/ Over the past two years, the number of users has grown by around 30%. Rich areas like US and Europe have only grown 13%. So if revenue per user was static then I would expect Facebook's total revenue growth to be around 20%. Instead revenue has grown more than 100%, which suggests that Facebook is extracting much more $ per user.