23 ms·

Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

262 points by dismal2 9y ago

chollida1 9y ago
Some notes from the results they just released: Revenues: - 4Q revenue $12.97 billion, estimate $12.55 billion (range $12.15 billion to $12.91 billion) (Bloomberg data) - 4Q EPS $1.44 - 4Q daily active users 1.40 billion, estimate 1.41 billion (Bloomberg News) (3 estimates) - 4Q monthly active users 2.13 billion, estimate 2.13 billion (BN) (3 estimates) - 4Q mobile ad revenue as percentage of ad revenue 89% - 4Q advertising rev. $12.78 billion General: - increased headcount: it was 25,105 as of December 31, 2017, an increase of 47% year-over-year. - This is the first-ever decline Facebook has had in North American users. Daily active users growth in US & Canada fell to 184 million, compared to 185 million in Q3. Related to new US Tax Plan - There's a one-time mandatory transition tax on accumulated foreign earnings and a reduction of the corporate income tax rate to 21 percent, effective Jan. 1, 2018. Facebook's provision for income taxes increased by $2.27 billion and its diluted EPS decreased by $0.77 for both the fourth quarter and full year 2017.
- bigheadpercoli 9y ago
  In another thread here we are learning how much of this "daily active users" is actually bots run by corporations. I for myself have shown myself out of Facebook and enjoy real live interactions with human beings like it's the '90s.
  - pfarnsworth 9y ago
    But in the 90s we were all watching 4-6 hrs of TV a day.
    - mtkd 9y ago
      It was a generic 4-6, not targeted, neither was it profiling you while you watched it
      - jlardinois 9y ago
        Television programming has been profiled and targeted for decades. It just wasn't as granular and accurate as it is on the web.
        IntronExon 9y ago
        While true, that kind of understatement seems calculated to miss the point. FB is targeting the individual, tv targeted entire demographics. It is a poor comparison.
        askafriend 9y ago
        Counterpoint: I'd rather see Ads about things I'm interested in than things I'm not interested in. So by that metric, Facebook is far better than generic Ads I see on TV.
        IntronExon 9y ago
        That’s a non sequitor, not a counterpoint to the matter of how manipulative and effective from the POV of the advertiser ads are today vs on tv.
        DashRattlesnake 9y ago
        > I'd rather see Ads about things I'm interested in than things I'm not interested in. You're not going to see more ads about the things you're interested in, you're going to see ads that have a higher potential to manipulate you into commercially profitable behavior. There's a big but subtle difference between those things. You are definitely not going to see ads for your interests that bring you more joy but aren't easily monetizeable. The coarseness of TV targeting meant people had more opportunity to assert their own priorities against the less effective manipulation.
        askafriend 9y ago
        Is your argument that if an ad works I am being manipulated, and if it doesn't work then I am not being manipulated? I'm telling you right now that I don't mind seeing Ads on Instagram. They're great and I've found out about niche products that I otherwise would not have. If this means that small brands are able to rise up against the mega corps (Dollar Shave Club vs Gillette, as a classic example), then all the better for the market. The other reason I don't mind is that they're visually appealing and seem to fit the Instagram ethos. Compare that to shitty banner Ads that disrupt the flow of content by being so different and so jarring in comparison. Now, my opinion isn't meant to be generalized. Others may have a far different experience on Instagram (just because of how the product is designed to work). I'm sure there is someone who will chime in and say they hate Instagram Ads because they are completely ineffective. We could both be right in opposite directions since our feeds are probably very different.
    - bigheadpercoli 9y ago
      I surely wasn't. I fondly remember my Quake 2 LAN Parties.
      - drharby 9y ago
        D O U B L E KIILLLL
    - AznHisoka 9y ago
      It was good family TV though! Like Family Matters and Full House!
      - jsemrau 9y ago
        ...and no need to be stressed if your comment will receive "likes"
      - jedberg 9y ago
        If you enjoyed Full House you'll love Fuller House on Netflix.
flunhat 9y ago
Surely this has something to do with the sheer number of users they have, right? There's only like 8 billion people on Earth and Facebook has 2 billion monthly active users. If you take away 1.5 billion people in China who can't/don't use Facebook, this means that it has 2 billion out of like ~6.5 billion possible users. And many of those people are either children (<13 years old), don't have reliable access to internet, and/or have no use for social media. So it really doesn't seem that bad to me (unless I'm missing something important).
- jsemrau 9y ago
  I have a company page/account where I daily automatically post updates. I guess that counts into this number.
  - underwater 9y ago
    Pages are not counted as a user in their DAU counts.
    - jsemrau 9y ago
      Sure, but there is a user who is the admin for the page. This "admin" is entirely a bot.
      - underwater 9y ago
        You have a bot that logs in as a regular user? I’d be surprised if that is common, there are APIs for automation that wouldn’t count against DAU. And you would run the risk of getting your admin account blocked.
- rgbrenner 9y ago
  I think this is spot on.. but you've actually understated FB's market penetration, because only 1/2 of the world population is on the internet.. as of 2016: 3.4B. 750m of those are in China.. so 2.7B. (of course it'll be a bit higher than this, because it has certainly grown somewhat since 2016.) And from that, now you can exclude children, reliable access, and people who dont want to use it, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
pfarnsworth 9y ago
Maybe it's slowing because they hit over 1.4B people? I doubt people are concerned about societal impact, regardless of what the media would love you to believe.
SheinhardtWigCo 9y ago
What could they possibly be doing with 25,000 staff? That is insane.
- j4ship 9y ago
  They could be international ... thats the kind of staff you need.
- CGamesPlay 9y ago
  Building the thing called Facebook, to be sure, but also building Oculus VR, Onavo (data collection company), WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, as well as their open source stuff like React, Flux, Relay, and myriad other JS/Haskell/OCaml/C++ projects, and don't forget the people building out Internet.org and content for Facebook Watch.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
j4ship 9y ago
when you already have a large percentage of the online user base you are going to have to 1) wait for that underlying user base to grow 2) offer something new to capture people you dont have with your current product They have reached the point where its a lot easier to lose someone then gain someone. I dont think its societal impact ... its people getting older and dropping off while at the same time its really hard to replenish that use base when already have so many of the young people already on your site. So maybe they need to understand user rentention vs aging , I think that would be a place to look, societal impact ... no one uses or drops a product becuase of societal impact. How many diamonds and how many electronics or clothes do we use that have a dubious labor practices. Its the product quality that speaks loudest.
tn_ 9y ago
This is a chance before the U.S mid-terms for them to prove to the public they've learned from their mistakes.. 1). prevent the spread of fake news.. they need a better solution than the user-tagging bs if an article is valid or not. there was a scientologist that had an account that wasn't active for 5+ years, that started posting how puerto rico wasn't that bad when the storm first hit. why is this account not being banned or suspended when people are reporting it and they're reposting pictures from texas claiming it to be all good. 2). prevent outside interference with elections. the first baby step is if they're accepting rubles for political ads targetted at americans, ban it. simple as that. then it'll get more complex and interesting handling proxies doing the dirty deed. the hearing w/ congress was pathetic and makes fb even more untrustworthy. 3). ban fake accounts / tie in a real human behind the account. 100000 fake users means a lot less to me if i'm an advertiser than 10 real people. even though pretty much everyone i know is on facebook, i'm itching for another platform with better integrity to jump ship to.
- volkk 9y ago
  > 3). ban fake accounts / tie in a real human behind the account. 100000 fake users means a lot less to me if i'm an advertiser than 10 real people. so i posted this in another thread in response to twitter, and it got kind of drowned out but with regards to authoritative/oppressive governments subpoenaing facebook to get a user's identity for voicing an opinion that isn't in line with the regime's. how do you solve this while giving every account an identity? anonymity on facebook/twitter seems to be one way to practice freedom of speech in countries where there isn't really any
  - cheschire 9y ago
    In German there's a term called Eierlegende wollmilchsau. A wool pig that gives milk and lays eggs. A reason that term exists is because there's a tendency for Germans to wait to commit to, or outright dismiss choices because they do not meet ALL of a list of requirements. I bring it up because I do not believe that it is possible to have an identity and anonymity concurrently while the service achieves all of its goals. Either the service caters to anonymity, or it caters to identity. Trying to sit on the fence too long results in more specialized services dividing the customer base.
olivermarks 9y ago
I would shorten this to 'Facebook User Growth Slows'
istorical 9y ago
Respect for journalism is as much about avoiding headlines like this that sneakily imply some sort of baseless causation via - in this case - the word "After" as it is about bad science in Fox News coverage of global warming. When we let poor journalism like this headline go uncontested we erode public trust.
- coolso 9y ago
  Headlines are why I rarely read online news articles anymore, and typically just view the comment sections, either here on HN, or Slashdot, etc. It never used to be this bad. One would think that with public trust in the media at an all time low, they would make an effort to be less sneaky and clickbaity, at the very least with their headlines, but....... nope.
  - sebleon 9y ago
    > public trust in the media at an all time low Is that a fact or opinion? Likely they're seeing ad-revenue increasing with the clickbait titles, giving them a data-driven reason to pursue this (short-sighted) strategy. Long-term, they may lose their readership once they catch on.
    - coolso 9y ago
      Looks like it hit the absolute bottom in 2016 [0], with a slight uptick in 2017 according to some [1][2], but still, overall, according to various studies it's been at an all-time low during these last couple of years. [0] http://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks-new-low.aspx http://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-medi... [1] https://www.poynter.org/news/poynter-releases-new-study-examining-trust-media https://www.poynter.org/news/poynter-releases-new-study-exam... [2] https://www.fastcompany.com/40503393/americans-are-more-trusting-of-the-media-in-2017-but-theres-a-catch https://www.fastcompany.com/40503393/americans-are-more-trus...
- 111_1_111 9y ago
  This is all journalism. Have you read the washington post recently? Every single headline is misleading.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
perseusprime11 9y ago
The title makes it seem like the growth slowed after the questions on societal impact were raised. I think the growth stalled years ago and has been declining even before the questions were raised.
- spyspy 9y ago
  If that was the case, FB has been lying on every single earnings release since they went public, which seems unlikely.
  - perseusprime11 9y ago
    The updated title is much better! Thanks.
  - saas_co_de 9y ago
    > seems unlikely I can't imagine why anyone would lie when they stand to make billions of dollars from it. What an odd idea. That aside, there is a gray area between lies and not really digging into truths that you don't want to know the answer to, like how many of your accounts are actually fake.
JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
The only people I know that still use Facebook are people over 50 years old, and to them it is crack cocaine that consumes their whole life. I think not growing up with things like this their whole life, they have been ill prepared for it when it breaches their world.
- burlesona 9y ago
  That pretty much sums it up for me too.
dc_gregory 9y ago
I feel they have crossed several lines in their constant push for engagement, to the point where, previously, a notification from Facebook was generally worth my time (and directly related to an action a friend has taken), whereas now, most of the notifications are irrelevant, effectively short term boosting engagement at the cost of mid/long term engagement drop. I have flat out disabled notifications from Facebook at this point.
- empath75 9y ago
  I deleted the Facebook app on my phone a few months ago and only use it for messenger. My life has been improved so much.
- thomyorkie 9y ago
  I used to feel this way until I started telling FB to hide or stop certain notifications. Now, most all my notifications are useful.
tanilama 9y ago
Why is this article so certain this related to fake news correction?
Spooky23 9y ago
I don’t think anyone really cares about societal impact. IMO, Facebook is a faddish activity that many people have turned into a defacto obligation. People are getting Facebook fatigue. In my social circle, Facebook use seems to have switched to Instagram. Personally, I check on it once a week now to keep up with a few friends who I don’t see anymore. It’s an effort, because Facebook refuses to show me what I want to see, and I need to specifically search for people.
- bnolsen 9y ago
  I'm seeing some of that Instagram move as well. Having a service that's more about what's happening in people's lives is better than the mess that's facebook.
jwalton 9y ago
> Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that those changes have already reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours a day. Or, to put this another way, people have saved 50 million hours that they formerly spent scrolling past stupid videos and memes they'd already seen on Reddit.
nickysielicki 9y ago
I am effectively banned from facebook. I was on the platform a few years ago, but deleted my account and didn't miss it at all. Then, a couple months ago, I became interested in a new Chinese amateur radio transceiver, and the best source of English information was through a Facebook group of a couple hundred owners. So naturally, I joined facebook, joined the group, and had several weeks of a really enjoyable experience. I didn't add any friends or pictures or anything like that; I had no interest in really using Facebook with people I knew in real life, and as a result my newsfeed was an endless list of really great discussions about amateur satellites, straight key century club, Xiegu transceivers, etc. I think what set it apart from something like Reddit is the civility that comes when you make hams post with their real name. Then, all of a sudden, "You Can't Log In Right Now". I was actually forced to upload an image of my face to get back into the site. This was a sort of funny thing to ask, because I didn't have any images of myself on the site up to that point-- so how are they supposed to know what I look like, anyway? (I'm being sarcastic here, I'm sure that Facebook has my face profiled in their databases somewhere.) So I uploaded my photo, a handful of days went by, and then I was allowed back in, and again started using Facebook as an awesome discussion platform full of meaningful interactions with people that shared a common interest with me. A couple weeks go by, and yet again, "You Can't Log In Right Now". I upload my face again, but this time I've never been unbanned. I think it's been this way for over a month now. I still get email notifications with subject lines like, "See what people are talking about in your group AMSAT North America", but when I click "Read Post", I'm not able to view the content. (I also can't unsubscribe from the emails, as editing email settings is hidden behind a login prompt, which I am obviously not able to get through. I also can't file a bug report about the lack of ability to unsubscribe... because that, too, is hidden behind a login prompt.) It's just so incredibly ironic that as soon as I started using facebook for content I was interested in, instead of seeing political posts from people I went to middle school with, I get permabanned on suspicion of being a fake account.
- mythrwy 9y ago
  Geeze. For some reason I never bothered to make a Facebook account, and as time went by I bothered even less so this might be less shocking to the seasoned, but to me that sounds absolutely horrendous. What legitimate reason (in my interest) would Facebook have in me uploading a picture? It's not a transaction where I need to prove identity. They aren't a government issuing ID's (yet). So no fucking way! And why would anyone? I don't get it.
Firebrand 9y ago
Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter usage are all down. People are just spending less time on social media apps for some reasons these days. https://www.similarweb.com/blog/social-media-usage https://www.similarweb.com/blog/social-media-usage
- tanilama 9y ago
  That is interesting. Too much noise , too much distraction?
  - adventured 9y ago
    It's a cesspool, imo. My Facebook is overwhelmed by extremely ugly political obnoxiousness these days, which makes it almost worthless (I'd have to hide 3/4 of the conversations/posts by friends). Between that and the junk content and general corporate spam, maybe 3-5% of what I've seen on FB in the last year has been legitimately valuable social content. The majority of people I know hate Facebook as a product now. They don't just not want to use it, they hate it. Facebook knows what their product has become, it's so bad now they stopped trying to pretend otherwise. They're basically facing their Microsoft Internet tsunami moment, they either quickly adapt or fade from here. If they fade, what will happen is a dozen new social competitors will spring up and begin stripping fringe corners off the core FB network, amounting to tens of millions of users in eg North America. It'll simply break up at the edges, and retain a large foundational user base that will be a lot less engaged.
    - bnolsen 9y ago
      All the political stuff just ends up making me mad and probably ends up pissing off certain acquaintances if I jump into a thread. Why would I want to continuously look at that stuff?
    - jimmies 9y ago
      I've been thinking about how much I hate Facebook as a product. I think the idea might not be wrong and centralization of trust might not be a horrible idea. Implementation is important. There just needs a GNU or Wikipedia of Facebook to exist. A place that has a great code of conduct and not-for-profit agenda.
NicoJuicy 9y ago
I wonder if the cause really is the news feed. What if it was the first decline ever and then they made some quick algorithm changes. Then they went public with it, before releasing the numbers
- cycrutchfield 9y ago
  This is the most likely explanation.
  - thomyorkie 9y ago
    Based on what?
    - cycrutchfield 9y ago
      Engagement numbers are averaged across Q4 2017, I assume. Zuck announced the news feed algorithm changes in mid-January 2018. Now, they were likely A/B testing it for part of the past quarter, but it seems quite likely that these changes were not 100% live for all of North America for the entirety of the past quarter. Therefore, speculatively, engagement in Q4 was likely flat or declining across NA already. What is more uncertain is the order of operations here. Did they publicly announce these changes in advance of the earnings report to get ahead of bad numbers?
firasd 9y ago
From my readings, something Facebook has been struggling with for a couple years is getting people to post more personal updates. Thus their Newsfeed changes de-prioritizing articles, and thus (I figure) their experiments such as showing short posts in large font sizes, and enabling MySpace-like gradient backgrounds on text posts... This dynamic makes me recall something: Anyone remember how back in the day (like 2006) Facebook had a feature called 'Wall-to-Wall' conversations? You would go to a friend's profile and just write a message, they would go to your 'wall' and reply, and mutual friends could see the conversation. These days between the Newsfeed, comments on posts, and Messenger, the only reason I would post on another friend's profile is to wish them a happy birthday. That whole ethos of just having informal personal conversations with college friends on Facebook is gone.
- fossuser 9y ago
  That was prior to chat though, and more of a desperate attempt to chat in an interface that didn't do a good job supporting it. When chat and then messenger came along there was no need to do that anymore.
  - firasd 9y ago
    Yeah but what I'm suggesting is that the semi-public nature of wall-to-wall conversations gave Facebook a more personal vibe. I could see my friends talking and my friends could see me talking with other friends, sharing jokes, saying "I had fun at the party", stuff like that... I think Facebook wants people to log on and post things like "It's a tough day at work but I'm looking forward to watching Black Panther" instead of just posting another link about "check out how the primaries were rigged!11". And I think the way the Newsfeed works with highly-specific posts and comments is part of the problem. There's less opportunity for laid back semi-public chatter.
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    Most of the people who used facebook in 2004–2006 had (and used) other ways to chat via their computers or cellphones. Most people’s profiles listed their phone numbers, email addresses and various chat service handles. Facebook wall conversations were not used as a poor imitation of private chat, but a separate form of quasi-public communication.
matwood 9y ago
Since the newsfeed changes I noticed that I spent a bit more time on my FB feed. Normally I would see one of those idiotic posts, and wonder WTF was I doing on the site. Now I actually see stuff from friends (pics and stories), and I linger a bit more to see what's going on. Clearly I'm not the real FB demographic though.
- henrikschroder 9y ago
  I'm with you. I love the changes they did to the newsfeed, because now I'm seeing way less viral shit, and way more actual interesting posts and updates by my friends. And since everyone gets the same interesting content promoted to them, there's also more comments on that content, making it better. Love it, love it, love it.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
JoshTko 9y ago
Main problem is that Facebook is too public in that most friends are actually acquaintances. People are less likely to share intimate updates with acquaintances and instead will only post generic neutral, non-controversial things which dont’t drive deep engagement.
- analogic 9y ago
  basically. guess thats what the whole g+ circles thing was, and im sure fb can do too now, but if i have to spend basically any effort thinking about who's going to see it I'm just not gonna post. (or worry about who won't see it because of the black-box algorithm) I'm prob not the target market anyway, as im paranoid and social media and human interaction in general is strange and frightening to me, but that's a major part of the reason i never post anything.
  - Terr_ 9y ago
    IMO Google+ circles were a step in the right direction, but Google shot themselves in the foot with their "one real-name account to rule them all" bullshit. People don't just want to separate their "lists of other people", people also act a different role in different contexts. In other words, humans want to maintain different identities too. That doesn't always mean pseudonyms, but the single human behind "Bob from the Accounting Department" probably wants to use a completely different set of contact-information and profile-pictures when he's in the role of "Bob, Death Metal Biker" or "Bob, Single Parent Looking For Love."
    - jimmies 9y ago
      When Google forced the real name bullshit on Youtube and Places reviews, I knew I had it enough. I just wanted to leave a stupid, lighthearted comment on a video talking about a socially taboo topic, and I can't. I just wanted to leave an honest negative review on a business that fucked me over, and I can't. biker139 is different than John M Businessman. I don't want people reading that review to know I'm John.
aresant 9y ago
From the analyst covering "They’ve warned about a decline in one of the basic fundamental financial drivers." which was "changes in the fourth quarter that cut the number of viral videos in people’s news feeds. Those tweaks, and others, have already reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours a day, he noted." I am going to assume that FB is smart enough to have figured out how to trim the 50m hour engagement # from an ad cohort that is likely not that profitable or important. Because guess what - the brand advertisers that elevate overall CPM already don't want to be in your shitty viral cat video, or your stupid publishers-gaming-FB with autogenerated content. I would go a step further and predict that within this quarter we see an internal FB study for advertisers suggesting that their algorithm that trimmed that 50m in hours has actually IMPROVED the value of the advertising by a commiserate level.
- MarkMc 9y ago
  Well the average price per Facebook ad rose 43% in Q4 2017 (and only 3% in Q4 2016): https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-earnings-stock-touches-record-after-massive-ad-price-increase-2018-01-31 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-earnings-stock-to... That increase more than offsets the decline in the amount of time users spent on Facebook. So it looks like the value of advertising has improved.
alkonaut 9y ago
My preference would be to never see anything, ever, that was shared more than say 50 times. As soon as something is “viral” It’s usually just a timekill. It’s not relevant to me. So a simple tweak to the news feed would be to just stop showing me what my friends “like” or “re-share”. Just show me what they say, or post or show directly. That’s it. For a really dramatic change: remove the ability to pass on content alltogether.
- ClassyJacket 9y ago
  This is what I want from a service like facebook - posts my friends, groups, and pages explicitly post, IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER, and nothing else. No "John commented on this" or "Melanie liked that". No algorithms. No out-of-order, unless I ask for it. (If 10 friends all reshare the same post, sure, collapse it into one.) But, of course, if they do that, they make it too easy for people to see posts they want without pages they follow paying for ads. So they put in an "algorithm" and say they're "making the news feed more personal".
  - acchow 9y ago
    If your content stream includes every post your friends make, every comment they add, every post they like, every event they're interested in or join in on and it was sorted chronologically then you would never be able to scroll past the immediate present. It would just constantly generate new content as quickly as you can scroll. I'm glad they sort by relevance and time is just one small factor in relevance.
    - salvar 9y ago
      True, but what are the other relevance factors? It's a black box, and basically ends up being "whatever Facebook deems to be the most profitable content to show you".
product50 9y ago
The stock has already recovered and is above $190 now (up 3.6% vs. close).
- matte_black 9y ago
  Will probably hit $200 tomorrow
ComputerGuru 9y ago
I didn’t see anyone else mention this, but to me it is a problem of facebook’s own making. They drove personal content off the site when they pushed videos and pictures by “viral marketing” firms onto it. They replaced groups (inherently personal) with pages, then scrambled to try and bring groups back years later. They turned the wall to spam from various garbage apps that were given permission to crap all over it by default interspersed with ads and machine-generated content (“a picture of you from three years ago”). In their zeal to gain IM users, they replaced messages with chat, removing the inhibition that kept people from using messages for one liners. Then they made you always online, supplanting Facebook itself entirely with something that could be replaced by any other real-time communication app. Once phones became nicer to use and there were alternatives to the lag and limitations of SMS, people had no reason to log into Facebook to chat with their friends because Facebook has trained non-IMers to IM and they no longer needed Facebook to do it. Users would have killed for high-resolution photos (Facebook would make pictures so tiny and so low resolution that they’d become unrecognizable and all talent that went into composing them or editing them would be lost, and they couldn’t contain text or captions because that would be compressed away) or the ability to create albums. A dozen apps existed to shoehorn that functionality in via the Flickr api. Then they had to go buy Instagram to win those users back. Now people just post major life events to share with people they didn’t bother communicating them to via another, more personal means of communication once a year or so.
- rconti 9y ago
  Agreed. I've always enjoyed and found great value in Facebook, which was helped by the fact that I was in college when it launched so everyone I knew back then was on it, and everyone I know today is on it (minus 2 or 3 holdouts). I was getting frustrated with all the junk, but still used it regularly. Now when I get that dopamine craving and am flipping through app screens on my phone looking for something novel, I often completely forget that Facebook is even there. The changes they made are absolutely in the direction I want them to go, but perhaps it's too late?
- btilly 9y ago
  Worse yet, do you know how frustrating it is to be told that there are no more updates available while you know that you a missing life events from friends that actually posted them. After a while you realize that there is no point in posting your own because they will similarly not show up for friends. Cutting back on FB has become ever easier over time.
redmaverick 9y ago
Posting on Facebook, right now, is like updating your resume (like LinkedIn) for personal life. It just feels too "public". Sure, you can tweak your social network into different privacy levels. But, that just doesn't feel intuitive or effortless. The exclusivity factor which initially propelled the network is simply not there. At the peak of the facebook madness, you had a need to post whenever anything happened. Now, its just the big ticket items. I think people login more due to habit than to post personal updates. I doubt the current college going kids even login at all. Today, you update facebook only on special occasions like marriage, birth of a child, graduation or when people go out to visit places etc. Previously, like 7 to 8 years back, people used to post very personal things, knowing that only their friends are on the network. It definitely, felt safe. It Again, maybe my gen aged a bit during the last 8 years, I don't know. If anyone posts anything too personal right now, it feels like a violation of social norms. Like crying in public with everyone watching. No matter how many tweaks Facebook makes to their Newsfeed, I doubt quality engagement from what I saw 7 to 8 years back will return. People just shifted to mobile apps like Whatsapp and have different social groups there. This feels very natural and organic. You have a few small groups of maybe 10 to 15 people max per group who all know you intimately and maybe a couple of larger groups with 50 plus members. This usually an alumni group of some kind. Even the larger groups get tiring if there are too updates and many frequently opt out after a tiff. I just feel the era of publicly sharing personal information on web based social networks is over. If there is somekind of a decentralized privacy oriented mobile app that has the same functionality as whatsapp and it gets widely adopted, then it might be game over for the big companies in the social networking space. Even though Whatsapp is owned by facebook. It feels very safe and personal to share updates.
- rogy 9y ago
  Personal opinion that this is all again unintentionally there own doing. They drove people to stop posting personal content by making personal content so rare to come by (with ads, news,pages,sponsored posts..) that it was percieved that people don’t post those kind of things anymore. Going to be very tough to get people back into that mindset.
  - 9y ago
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jacksmith21006 9y ago
Hope Google shares latest YouTube hours tomorrow and we can compare. Last quarter Google shared "As I mentioned in the last earnings call, YouTube now has over 1.5 billion users. On average, these users spend 60 minutes a day on mobile. " Which I guess means 1.5 billion hours a day of YT use daily. Be interesting to compare to FB.
narrator 9y ago
I think with all the high profile hyperpoliticization of who and what gets into the Facebook feed of the average person, the idea that Facebook is a private space where friends create their own private worlds together has been destroyed. Now it's just another public space like Twitter and that essentially makes people not want to post personal stuff on it. This has also led to the opening in the market that Snapchat filled and a bit of a revival of twitter.
- burlesona 9y ago
  Yes, like Twitter, but the late night infomercials version of Twitter where some guy is trying to sell you miracle tanning cream.
amasad 9y ago
Instead of Facebook flailing about trying to come up with the best news feed algorithm to please everyone they should just give the consumer a choice. Imagine an "algorithm store" that lets developers build and publish ranking algorithms that users can buy and use.
- DashRattlesnake 9y ago
  That's won't happen. The mistake you're making is assuming that Facebook wants to "please everyone." It doesn't. It only cares about pleasing itself, and it does that through manipulating the algorithm to attempt to get its users to do what it wants. Giving up control of the algorithm means giving up control of its user-products, and it's not going to do that.
nytesky 9y ago
It feels like Facebook started out as Geocities and has ended up as your cranky aunts forwarded chain e-mail.
Puer 9y ago
For people using uBlock Origin who want to hide all of the noise on their Facebook and truly see what their friends are posting, here are some useful filters: facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ commented on this./) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ replied to a /) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ liked this post from /) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ liked this./) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ commented on a post from /) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ reacted to this./) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/'s cover photo./) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ likes /) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ are now friends./) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ is interested in an event./) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/Sponsored/) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/Suggested Post/) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/A video you may like/) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ shared /) !facebook.com##u_fetchstream !facebook.com##._4-u2[id*="u_fetchstream"] I got tired of seeing seemingly hundreds of, "Your friends reacted to this ad page 5 months ago" or "Here's another advertisement disguised as a page you might be interested in." I realized after I implemented these that I see maybe 2 or 3 new posts a day from my 500 friends, and of these posts the majority of them are political in nature and don't interest me. The only reason I still continue to use FB is for the messenger app as I still think it's the most convenient compared to other platforms. Here's what my feed looks like with the rules implemented (they aren't FULLY currently up to date either because FB continually updates the phrases, but good enough for me). I also hid a lot of the junk on the sidebar with the element picker. I have no interest in using FB as a platform for buying and selling and the "News Ticker" (if you can call it "News") is just tabloid garbage. I have 4 posts in the past day before I get the "There are no more posts to show right now" message. https://i.imgur.com/AbBnPo3.png https://i.imgur.com/AbBnPo3.png
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  Thanks, I might use some of those to tweak my newsfeed.
- apearson 9y ago
  Thank you for that filter, work amazingly well
itissid 9y ago
I wonder if we as humans at some future point would evolve to understand and consume only sane and specialized content based on lessons of Facebook? History and behavioral psychology tells us people don't learn from the past just because they simply can't recall it. BUT perhaps what might work, and only hope, is a spectacular fall of this kind of interaction model(and the business) so that no one touches it with a 10 ft pole for some time. Like the terrible Nazi stuff of WWII. Hopes of healthy competition in the industry and the democratization of quality content in a way that precludes brand loyalty, will probably never happen as long as Facebook lives. It will just acquire and buy its way to monopolize everything.
dwighttk 9y ago
There are like 3 of my friends who I like and want to hear things from, but they post about 10x per day. Facebook has decided that because of this volume ALL I WANT TO SEE IS THESE 3 FRIENDS' POSTS. It's irritating. I wish I could fall back on Twitter to show me everything, but now between "tweets you may have missed" and randomly showing me posts (4 or 5 times) that other people have liked, it's feeling more and more like Facebook, just with different people.
misterbowfinger 9y ago
It feels like they want to move towards being more "useful", a la WeChat: http://blog.ycombinator.com/lessons-from-wechat/ http://blog.ycombinator.com/lessons-from-wechat/
f4rker 9y ago
Could we be the problem? No, it's the users.
freyir 9y ago
> "We made changes to show fewer viral videos to make sure people's time is well spent. In total, we made changes that reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours every day." Weren't the changes to the news feed just announced? This sounds like spin. They planned all along for people to stop using our service. Right.
ridgeguy 9y ago
It seems like nobody at Facebook is allowed to play the long game. In the long game, quality wins. In the long game, an organization that puts quality of information at top priority persists and becomes a long-lived resource for civilization. Like Google has become a persistent Web search resource, setting aside its short-lived ancillary forays into more clickable, trivial services. So long as Facebook prioritizes viral clickbait, so long will it be in danger of collapse, irrelevance, and extinction. That's ok with me.
- rdruxn 9y ago
  Except their moves and announcements in recent weeks suggest that they're in fact prioritizing higher quality content e.g. local news (https://www.axios.com/facebook-to-prioritize-local-news-in-news-feed-1517258545-f4b20fdf-6f6d-4511-abec-d5bf334ebca1.html https://www.axios.com/facebook-to-prioritize-local-news-in-n...)
- bonniemuffin 9y ago
  Identifying "quality" content algorithmically seems like a hard problem to me. If Facebook wanted to play the long game by promoting high quality content in the feed, how would you propose they identify it in order to promote it?
  - blacksite_ 9y ago
    if content.is_quality(): content.promote() else: content.demote() Four lines, Facebook...
  - ridgeguy 9y ago
    Your question is excellent and gets to the heart of the matter. How could Facebook, in a neutral way, cull crap and promote quality? I wish I had robust answers. All I have at the moment is opinions. • Algorithmic methods can't deliver near term solutions. Algorithms embody the biases of their human coders. I doubt we currently know how to algorithmically evaluate inputs for quality in the Facebook or "fake news" context. We need more time and effort to learn how to do this. • Promoting quality currently requires humans, who are expensive. If Facebook really prioritizes feed quality, we'll see serious hiring. If we don't, then evidence of commitment is lacking. • I believe (no proof to offer, mainly intuition) quality can eventually be algorithmically determined, but it's a hard problem. It will take years, lots of smart people and $ to figure out how to make it work at scale. • I don't think Facebook's announced path, which is to solicit those who are arguably more susceptible to "fake news" to be arbitrators of quality, will succeed. Facebook, like others, is caught between maximizing 90 day quarterly profits and becoming a persistent human resource. I don't envy Zuckerberg at all. I hope he can do the right thing. We'll see.
beedogs 9y ago
Good. The less people use Facebook, the better and healthier society becomes.
jokermatt999 9y ago
Am I the only one who views Facebook by Most Recent? They don't make it easy, and I don't think you can default to it, but I just point all my bookmarks to https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr Still though, Facebook could be so much better. The problem is that a profit-driven social media site is always going to have different goals than its users. Free ones seem to never gain traction. Currently, most of my friend groups are switching to Discord, but that's basically just going back to IRC without having to understand NickServ and such. As many others have pointed out though, Facebook got bland when everyone's parents joined. Private groups somewhat help, but it really does need to be more directly baked in to the design. It's far too late for that now, but I dream one day someone will finally make the Facebook killer. Until then, I use Facebook, because it benefits me more than not using it. Shallow interaction, peoples kids, etc? That can easily be fixed. For me, the boost in mood I get from reconnecting to old friends makes it worth all the pain. I was a hold out too, and didn't join until ~5 years ago? I think the problem is it's almost a utility at this point. Most everyone I know (non-techy crowd) is on it. If you aren't, you truly do miss out, which sucks. But do you know anyone who doesn't work, or want to work at Facebook who would say "I love Facebook!" Tweak all you want, but it's too much a behemoth to love.
- AndrewKemendo 9y ago
  Wow thanks for that link, it totally transformed what I was shown on the feed.
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  Even that link only shows a pruned, algorithmically decided subset of the most recent posts of your total friends list.
- gaius 9y ago
  Am I the only one who views Facebook by Most Recent? Do you think most recent really is everything in reverse chronological order, or just a slightly different algorithm?
  - jokermatt999 9y ago
ehnto 9y ago
I think both time on site and engagement are narrow metrics to judge a site's usefulness and effectiveness. Reduced engagement on Facebook is probably a good thing for society, but it could arguably mean it's also achieving it's goals as a social platform more succinctly. As an advert stream of course, that's bad. But I suspect an amount of truth in Zuckerberg's somewhat altruistic new vision.
Robotbeat 9y ago
Okay, that ship is sinking. Time to burn it; Facebook has long outlived the usual online social network lifetime. What's the next one we jump to this time? http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=3240 http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=3240
qwerty456127 9y ago
Who and why uses Facebook today anyway? All my friends use messenger apps like WhatsApp or Telegram to communicate to people they know in real life, sites like Reddit and HN to communicate to random crowd sharing their interests and Instagram to share pictures they take. I personally feel like Facebook is a concept fading into the past. UPDATE: The only thing I used to use Facebook for a couple of years ago when I had more spare time was finding events to attend for fun. Does anybody know a good alternative? There probably is a special app just for this. Another useful feature of Facebook seems to be the groups directory: there are groups in WhatsApp and Telegram but they are harder to find - isn't there a project building a directory of them already?
- nora4 9y ago
  I wonder what will happen to the Facebook the company as this progresses. It would be quite funny if the main product of Facebook becomes Instagram -- and the original product fades. One thing we might be discounting though is other nations. (I assume you live in N.A.) I don't know how widespread Facebook is elsewhere. It could be that Facebook gives up on N.A. market and let Insta handles their interest there and focus itself on emerging markets.
  - qwerty456127 9y ago
    A probable role Facebook may take in future is providing digital "passport" kind of identity. The Chinese Facebook clone is doing it already and the Russian Facebook clone does too though in much smaller degree. I live in Europe, not N.A. We use messengers a lot here and many people still use Facebook. I've heard that people use SMS and MMS much more actively in the USA (I have never used MMS and have stopped using SMS years ago).
    - asclepi 9y ago
      That's what we call "texting", but very often texting isn't done using SMS. With the iOS market share hovering slightly below 50% in the US, it's iMessage that is the main messenger, at least where I live. The iOS Messages app seamlessly switches over to SMS when the receiver doesn't have iMessage - and shows a visual distinction - but in my case, that's a minority of the people I text with. I don't use Whatsapp nor was I ever invited by someone to use it, but I heard it's basically the iMessage equivalent in the EU and in other places where the iOS market share is lower.
MarkMc 9y ago
From the article: "Yes, the time spent on Facebook in the quarter declined by 5 percent, but it was by Facebook’s design, executives said, in order to promote a higher quality experience. Yes, there was a dip in North American user numbers for the first time ever, but only because Facebook is already so dominant in the region.” Can someone explain why a 'higher quality experience' didn't lead to more active monthly users in North America? I would have thought there were people who hadn't checked out Facebook for a few months, but now start using it more regularly.
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indubitable 9y ago
As an aside here, I would be cautious of attributing declining growth on Facebook to pretty much anything. They are the first company in the history of our species to take market saturation to such extremes. They have more than 2 billion active monthly users, and growing. The issue they have is that there are only 3-4 billion internet users in the entire world. Their growth is predictably going to hit an asymptote at some point in the near future - they are simply running out of people. That also poses an interesting issue from a company perspective. We still live in a world where endless growth is expected. But with a ad-driven service the only way to make more money is to get users to view/click and otherwise interact with even more ads, or to otherwise increase the efficiency of ads. And that in general achieves little other creating a worse user experience, no matter how clever the packaging and delivery.
ccachor 9y ago
Encourage more personal photos. And ban links from Newsfeed. It's really that simple.
tomkinson 9y ago
1- charge advertisers more, for less. Pay to get back what you had. 2- sink the fb fangs deeper into users by promoting 'engagement' content i.e. stuff with better hooks. 3- market the increase in time spend on site, Q418 to the very advertisers. Brand cryptonite. He holds the poison and the medicine. Depending on public sentiment they dish out the doses of each accordingly.

262 points by dismal2 9y ago

Some notes from the results they just released: Revenues: - 4Q revenue $12.97 billion, estimate $12.55 billion (range $12.15 billion to $12.91 billion) (Bloomberg data) - 4Q EPS $1.44 - 4Q daily active users 1.40 billion, estimate 1.41 billion (Bloomberg News) (3 estimates) - 4Q monthly active users 2.13 billion, estimate 2.13 billion (BN) (3 estimates) - 4Q mobile ad revenue as percentage of ad revenue 89% - 4Q advertising rev. $12.78 billion General: - increased headcount: it was 25,105 as of December 31, 2017, an increase of 47% year-over-year. - This is the first-ever decline Facebook has had in North American users. Daily active users growth in US & Canada fell to 184 million, compared to 185 million in Q3. Related to new US Tax Plan - There's a one-time mandatory transition tax on accumulated foreign earnings and a reduction of the corporate income tax rate to 21 percent, effective Jan. 1, 2018. Facebook's provision for income taxes increased by $2.27 billion and its diluted EPS decreased by $0.77 for both the fourth quarter and full year 2017.

bigheadpercoli 9y ago
In another thread here we are learning how much of this "daily active users" is actually bots run by corporations. I for myself have shown myself out of Facebook and enjoy real live interactions with human beings like it's the '90s.
- pfarnsworth 9y ago
  But in the 90s we were all watching 4-6 hrs of TV a day.
  - mtkd 9y ago
    It was a generic 4-6, not targeted, neither was it profiling you while you watched it
    - jlardinois 9y ago
      Television programming has been profiled and targeted for decades. It just wasn't as granular and accurate as it is on the web.
      - IntronExon 9y ago
        While true, that kind of understatement seems calculated to miss the point. FB is targeting the individual, tv targeted entire demographics. It is a poor comparison.
        askafriend 9y ago
        Counterpoint: I'd rather see Ads about things I'm interested in than things I'm not interested in. So by that metric, Facebook is far better than generic Ads I see on TV.
        IntronExon 9y ago
        That’s a non sequitor, not a counterpoint to the matter of how manipulative and effective from the POV of the advertiser ads are today vs on tv.
        DashRattlesnake 9y ago
        > I'd rather see Ads about things I'm interested in than things I'm not interested in. You're not going to see more ads about the things you're interested in, you're going to see ads that have a higher potential to manipulate you into commercially profitable behavior. There's a big but subtle difference between those things. You are definitely not going to see ads for your interests that bring you more joy but aren't easily monetizeable. The coarseness of TV targeting meant people had more opportunity to assert their own priorities against the less effective manipulation.
        askafriend 9y ago
        Is your argument that if an ad works I am being manipulated, and if it doesn't work then I am not being manipulated? I'm telling you right now that I don't mind seeing Ads on Instagram. They're great and I've found out about niche products that I otherwise would not have. If this means that small brands are able to rise up against the mega corps (Dollar Shave Club vs Gillette, as a classic example), then all the better for the market. The other reason I don't mind is that they're visually appealing and seem to fit the Instagram ethos. Compare that to shitty banner Ads that disrupt the flow of content by being so different and so jarring in comparison. Now, my opinion isn't meant to be generalized. Others may have a far different experience on Instagram (just because of how the product is designed to work). I'm sure there is someone who will chime in and say they hate Instagram Ads because they are completely ineffective. We could both be right in opposite directions since our feeds are probably very different.
  - bigheadpercoli 9y ago
    I surely wasn't. I fondly remember my Quake 2 LAN Parties.
    - drharby 9y ago
      D O U B L E KIILLLL
  - AznHisoka 9y ago
    It was good family TV though! Like Family Matters and Full House!
    - jsemrau 9y ago
      ...and no need to be stressed if your comment will receive "likes"
    - jedberg 9y ago
      If you enjoyed Full House you'll love Fuller House on Netflix.

flunhat 9y ago

Surely this has something to do with the sheer number of users they have, right? There's only like 8 billion people on Earth and Facebook has 2 billion monthly active users. If you take away 1.5 billion people in China who can't/don't use Facebook, this means that it has 2 billion out of like ~6.5 billion possible users. And many of those people are either children (<13 years old), don't have reliable access to internet, and/or have no use for social media. So it really doesn't seem that bad to me (unless I'm missing something important).

jsemrau 9y ago
I have a company page/account where I daily automatically post updates. I guess that counts into this number.
- underwater 9y ago
  Pages are not counted as a user in their DAU counts.
  - jsemrau 9y ago
    Sure, but there is a user who is the admin for the page. This "admin" is entirely a bot.
    - underwater 9y ago
      You have a bot that logs in as a regular user? I’d be surprised if that is common, there are APIs for automation that wouldn’t count against DAU. And you would run the risk of getting your admin account blocked.
rgbrenner 9y ago
I think this is spot on.. but you've actually understated FB's market penetration, because only 1/2 of the world population is on the internet.. as of 2016: 3.4B. 750m of those are in China.. so 2.7B. (of course it'll be a bit higher than this, because it has certainly grown somewhat since 2016.) And from that, now you can exclude children, reliable access, and people who dont want to use it, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...

pfarnsworth 9y ago

Maybe it's slowing because they hit over 1.4B people? I doubt people are concerned about societal impact, regardless of what the media would love you to believe.

SheinhardtWigCo 9y ago

What could they possibly be doing with 25,000 staff? That is insane.

j4ship 9y ago
They could be international ... thats the kind of staff you need.
CGamesPlay 9y ago
Building the thing called Facebook, to be sure, but also building Oculus VR, Onavo (data collection company), WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, as well as their open source stuff like React, Flux, Relay, and myriad other JS/Haskell/OCaml/C++ projects, and don't forget the people building out Internet.org and content for Facebook Watch.
deleted 9y ago
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j4ship 9y ago

when you already have a large percentage of the online user base you are going to have to 1) wait for that underlying user base to grow 2) offer something new to capture people you dont have with your current product They have reached the point where its a lot easier to lose someone then gain someone. I dont think its societal impact ... its people getting older and dropping off while at the same time its really hard to replenish that use base when already have so many of the young people already on your site. So maybe they need to understand user rentention vs aging , I think that would be a place to look, societal impact ... no one uses or drops a product becuase of societal impact. How many diamonds and how many electronics or clothes do we use that have a dubious labor practices. Its the product quality that speaks loudest.

tn_ 9y ago

This is a chance before the U.S mid-terms for them to prove to the public they've learned from their mistakes.. 1). prevent the spread of fake news.. they need a better solution than the user-tagging bs if an article is valid or not. there was a scientologist that had an account that wasn't active for 5+ years, that started posting how puerto rico wasn't that bad when the storm first hit. why is this account not being banned or suspended when people are reporting it and they're reposting pictures from texas claiming it to be all good. 2). prevent outside interference with elections. the first baby step is if they're accepting rubles for political ads targetted at americans, ban it. simple as that. then it'll get more complex and interesting handling proxies doing the dirty deed. the hearing w/ congress was pathetic and makes fb even more untrustworthy. 3). ban fake accounts / tie in a real human behind the account. 100000 fake users means a lot less to me if i'm an advertiser than 10 real people. even though pretty much everyone i know is on facebook, i'm itching for another platform with better integrity to jump ship to.

volkk 9y ago
> 3). ban fake accounts / tie in a real human behind the account. 100000 fake users means a lot less to me if i'm an advertiser than 10 real people. so i posted this in another thread in response to twitter, and it got kind of drowned out but with regards to authoritative/oppressive governments subpoenaing facebook to get a user's identity for voicing an opinion that isn't in line with the regime's. how do you solve this while giving every account an identity? anonymity on facebook/twitter seems to be one way to practice freedom of speech in countries where there isn't really any
- cheschire 9y ago
  In German there's a term called Eierlegende wollmilchsau. A wool pig that gives milk and lays eggs. A reason that term exists is because there's a tendency for Germans to wait to commit to, or outright dismiss choices because they do not meet ALL of a list of requirements. I bring it up because I do not believe that it is possible to have an identity and anonymity concurrently while the service achieves all of its goals. Either the service caters to anonymity, or it caters to identity. Trying to sit on the fence too long results in more specialized services dividing the customer base.

olivermarks 9y ago

I would shorten this to 'Facebook User Growth Slows'

istorical 9y ago

Respect for journalism is as much about avoiding headlines like this that sneakily imply some sort of baseless causation via - in this case - the word "After" as it is about bad science in Fox News coverage of global warming. When we let poor journalism like this headline go uncontested we erode public trust.

coolso 9y ago
Headlines are why I rarely read online news articles anymore, and typically just view the comment sections, either here on HN, or Slashdot, etc. It never used to be this bad. One would think that with public trust in the media at an all time low, they would make an effort to be less sneaky and clickbaity, at the very least with their headlines, but....... nope.
- sebleon 9y ago
  > public trust in the media at an all time low Is that a fact or opinion? Likely they're seeing ad-revenue increasing with the clickbait titles, giving them a data-driven reason to pursue this (short-sighted) strategy. Long-term, they may lose their readership once they catch on.
  - coolso 9y ago
    Looks like it hit the absolute bottom in 2016 [0], with a slight uptick in 2017 according to some [1][2], but still, overall, according to various studies it's been at an all-time low during these last couple of years. [0] http://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks-new-low.aspx http://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-medi... [1] https://www.poynter.org/news/poynter-releases-new-study-examining-trust-media https://www.poynter.org/news/poynter-releases-new-study-exam... [2] https://www.fastcompany.com/40503393/americans-are-more-trusting-of-the-media-in-2017-but-theres-a-catch https://www.fastcompany.com/40503393/americans-are-more-trus...
111_1_111 9y ago
This is all journalism. Have you read the washington post recently? Every single headline is misleading.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

perseusprime11 9y ago

The title makes it seem like the growth slowed after the questions on societal impact were raised. I think the growth stalled years ago and has been declining even before the questions were raised.

spyspy 9y ago
If that was the case, FB has been lying on every single earnings release since they went public, which seems unlikely.
- perseusprime11 9y ago
  The updated title is much better! Thanks.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  > seems unlikely I can't imagine why anyone would lie when they stand to make billions of dollars from it. What an odd idea. That aside, there is a gray area between lies and not really digging into truths that you don't want to know the answer to, like how many of your accounts are actually fake.

JohnJamesRambo 9y ago

The only people I know that still use Facebook are people over 50 years old, and to them it is crack cocaine that consumes their whole life. I think not growing up with things like this their whole life, they have been ill prepared for it when it breaches their world.

burlesona 9y ago
That pretty much sums it up for me too.

dc_gregory 9y ago

I feel they have crossed several lines in their constant push for engagement, to the point where, previously, a notification from Facebook was generally worth my time (and directly related to an action a friend has taken), whereas now, most of the notifications are irrelevant, effectively short term boosting engagement at the cost of mid/long term engagement drop. I have flat out disabled notifications from Facebook at this point.

empath75 9y ago
I deleted the Facebook app on my phone a few months ago and only use it for messenger. My life has been improved so much.
thomyorkie 9y ago
I used to feel this way until I started telling FB to hide or stop certain notifications. Now, most all my notifications are useful.

tanilama 9y ago

Why is this article so certain this related to fake news correction?

Spooky23 9y ago

I don’t think anyone really cares about societal impact. IMO, Facebook is a faddish activity that many people have turned into a defacto obligation. People are getting Facebook fatigue. In my social circle, Facebook use seems to have switched to Instagram. Personally, I check on it once a week now to keep up with a few friends who I don’t see anymore. It’s an effort, because Facebook refuses to show me what I want to see, and I need to specifically search for people.

bnolsen 9y ago
I'm seeing some of that Instagram move as well. Having a service that's more about what's happening in people's lives is better than the mess that's facebook.

jwalton 9y ago

> Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that those changes have already reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours a day. Or, to put this another way, people have saved 50 million hours that they formerly spent scrolling past stupid videos and memes they'd already seen on Reddit.

nickysielicki 9y ago

I am effectively banned from facebook. I was on the platform a few years ago, but deleted my account and didn't miss it at all. Then, a couple months ago, I became interested in a new Chinese amateur radio transceiver, and the best source of English information was through a Facebook group of a couple hundred owners. So naturally, I joined facebook, joined the group, and had several weeks of a really enjoyable experience. I didn't add any friends or pictures or anything like that; I had no interest in really using Facebook with people I knew in real life, and as a result my newsfeed was an endless list of really great discussions about amateur satellites, straight key century club, Xiegu transceivers, etc. I think what set it apart from something like Reddit is the civility that comes when you make hams post with their real name. Then, all of a sudden, "You Can't Log In Right Now". I was actually forced to upload an image of my face to get back into the site. This was a sort of funny thing to ask, because I didn't have any images of myself on the site up to that point-- so how are they supposed to know what I look like, anyway? (I'm being sarcastic here, I'm sure that Facebook has my face profiled in their databases somewhere.) So I uploaded my photo, a handful of days went by, and then I was allowed back in, and again started using Facebook as an awesome discussion platform full of meaningful interactions with people that shared a common interest with me. A couple weeks go by, and yet again, "You Can't Log In Right Now". I upload my face again, but this time I've never been unbanned. I think it's been this way for over a month now. I still get email notifications with subject lines like, "See what people are talking about in your group AMSAT North America", but when I click "Read Post", I'm not able to view the content. (I also can't unsubscribe from the emails, as editing email settings is hidden behind a login prompt, which I am obviously not able to get through. I also can't file a bug report about the lack of ability to unsubscribe... because that, too, is hidden behind a login prompt.) It's just so incredibly ironic that as soon as I started using facebook for content I was interested in, instead of seeing political posts from people I went to middle school with, I get permabanned on suspicion of being a fake account.

mythrwy 9y ago
Geeze. For some reason I never bothered to make a Facebook account, and as time went by I bothered even less so this might be less shocking to the seasoned, but to me that sounds absolutely horrendous. What legitimate reason (in my interest) would Facebook have in me uploading a picture? It's not a transaction where I need to prove identity. They aren't a government issuing ID's (yet). So no fucking way! And why would anyone? I don't get it.

Firebrand 9y ago

Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter usage are all down. People are just spending less time on social media apps for some reasons these days. https://www.similarweb.com/blog/social-media-usage https://www.similarweb.com/blog/social-media-usage

tanilama 9y ago
That is interesting. Too much noise , too much distraction?
- adventured 9y ago
  It's a cesspool, imo. My Facebook is overwhelmed by extremely ugly political obnoxiousness these days, which makes it almost worthless (I'd have to hide 3/4 of the conversations/posts by friends). Between that and the junk content and general corporate spam, maybe 3-5% of what I've seen on FB in the last year has been legitimately valuable social content. The majority of people I know hate Facebook as a product now. They don't just not want to use it, they hate it. Facebook knows what their product has become, it's so bad now they stopped trying to pretend otherwise. They're basically facing their Microsoft Internet tsunami moment, they either quickly adapt or fade from here. If they fade, what will happen is a dozen new social competitors will spring up and begin stripping fringe corners off the core FB network, amounting to tens of millions of users in eg North America. It'll simply break up at the edges, and retain a large foundational user base that will be a lot less engaged.
  - bnolsen 9y ago
    All the political stuff just ends up making me mad and probably ends up pissing off certain acquaintances if I jump into a thread. Why would I want to continuously look at that stuff?
  - jimmies 9y ago
    I've been thinking about how much I hate Facebook as a product. I think the idea might not be wrong and centralization of trust might not be a horrible idea. Implementation is important. There just needs a GNU or Wikipedia of Facebook to exist. A place that has a great code of conduct and not-for-profit agenda.

NicoJuicy 9y ago

I wonder if the cause really is the news feed. What if it was the first decline ever and then they made some quick algorithm changes. Then they went public with it, before releasing the numbers

cycrutchfield 9y ago
This is the most likely explanation.
- thomyorkie 9y ago
  Based on what?
  - cycrutchfield 9y ago
    Engagement numbers are averaged across Q4 2017, I assume. Zuck announced the news feed algorithm changes in mid-January 2018. Now, they were likely A/B testing it for part of the past quarter, but it seems quite likely that these changes were not 100% live for all of North America for the entirety of the past quarter. Therefore, speculatively, engagement in Q4 was likely flat or declining across NA already. What is more uncertain is the order of operations here. Did they publicly announce these changes in advance of the earnings report to get ahead of bad numbers?

firasd 9y ago

From my readings, something Facebook has been struggling with for a couple years is getting people to post more personal updates. Thus their Newsfeed changes de-prioritizing articles, and thus (I figure) their experiments such as showing short posts in large font sizes, and enabling MySpace-like gradient backgrounds on text posts... This dynamic makes me recall something: Anyone remember how back in the day (like 2006) Facebook had a feature called 'Wall-to-Wall' conversations? You would go to a friend's profile and just write a message, they would go to your 'wall' and reply, and mutual friends could see the conversation. These days between the Newsfeed, comments on posts, and Messenger, the only reason I would post on another friend's profile is to wish them a happy birthday. That whole ethos of just having informal personal conversations with college friends on Facebook is gone.

fossuser 9y ago
That was prior to chat though, and more of a desperate attempt to chat in an interface that didn't do a good job supporting it. When chat and then messenger came along there was no need to do that anymore.
- firasd 9y ago
  Yeah but what I'm suggesting is that the semi-public nature of wall-to-wall conversations gave Facebook a more personal vibe. I could see my friends talking and my friends could see me talking with other friends, sharing jokes, saying "I had fun at the party", stuff like that... I think Facebook wants people to log on and post things like "It's a tough day at work but I'm looking forward to watching Black Panther" instead of just posting another link about "check out how the primaries were rigged!11". And I think the way the Newsfeed works with highly-specific posts and comments is part of the problem. There's less opportunity for laid back semi-public chatter.
- jacobolus 9y ago
  Most of the people who used facebook in 2004–2006 had (and used) other ways to chat via their computers or cellphones. Most people’s profiles listed their phone numbers, email addresses and various chat service handles. Facebook wall conversations were not used as a poor imitation of private chat, but a separate form of quasi-public communication.

matwood 9y ago

Since the newsfeed changes I noticed that I spent a bit more time on my FB feed. Normally I would see one of those idiotic posts, and wonder WTF was I doing on the site. Now I actually see stuff from friends (pics and stories), and I linger a bit more to see what's going on. Clearly I'm not the real FB demographic though.

henrikschroder 9y ago
I'm with you. I love the changes they did to the newsfeed, because now I'm seeing way less viral shit, and way more actual interesting posts and updates by my friends. And since everyone gets the same interesting content promoted to them, there's also more comments on that content, making it better. Love it, love it, love it.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

JoshTko 9y ago

Main problem is that Facebook is too public in that most friends are actually acquaintances. People are less likely to share intimate updates with acquaintances and instead will only post generic neutral, non-controversial things which dont’t drive deep engagement.

analogic 9y ago
basically. guess thats what the whole g+ circles thing was, and im sure fb can do too now, but if i have to spend basically any effort thinking about who's going to see it I'm just not gonna post. (or worry about who won't see it because of the black-box algorithm) I'm prob not the target market anyway, as im paranoid and social media and human interaction in general is strange and frightening to me, but that's a major part of the reason i never post anything.
- Terr_ 9y ago
  IMO Google+ circles were a step in the right direction, but Google shot themselves in the foot with their "one real-name account to rule them all" bullshit. People don't just want to separate their "lists of other people", people also act a different role in different contexts. In other words, humans want to maintain different identities too. That doesn't always mean pseudonyms, but the single human behind "Bob from the Accounting Department" probably wants to use a completely different set of contact-information and profile-pictures when he's in the role of "Bob, Death Metal Biker" or "Bob, Single Parent Looking For Love."
  - jimmies 9y ago
    When Google forced the real name bullshit on Youtube and Places reviews, I knew I had it enough. I just wanted to leave a stupid, lighthearted comment on a video talking about a socially taboo topic, and I can't. I just wanted to leave an honest negative review on a business that fucked me over, and I can't. biker139 is different than John M Businessman. I don't want people reading that review to know I'm John.

aresant 9y ago

From the analyst covering "They’ve warned about a decline in one of the basic fundamental financial drivers." which was "changes in the fourth quarter that cut the number of viral videos in people’s news feeds. Those tweaks, and others, have already reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours a day, he noted." I am going to assume that FB is smart enough to have figured out how to trim the 50m hour engagement # from an ad cohort that is likely not that profitable or important. Because guess what - the brand advertisers that elevate overall CPM already don't want to be in your shitty viral cat video, or your stupid publishers-gaming-FB with autogenerated content. I would go a step further and predict that within this quarter we see an internal FB study for advertisers suggesting that their algorithm that trimmed that 50m in hours has actually IMPROVED the value of the advertising by a commiserate level.

MarkMc 9y ago
Well the average price per Facebook ad rose 43% in Q4 2017 (and only 3% in Q4 2016): https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-earnings-stock-touches-record-after-massive-ad-price-increase-2018-01-31 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-earnings-stock-to... That increase more than offsets the decline in the amount of time users spent on Facebook. So it looks like the value of advertising has improved.

alkonaut 9y ago

My preference would be to never see anything, ever, that was shared more than say 50 times. As soon as something is “viral” It’s usually just a timekill. It’s not relevant to me. So a simple tweak to the news feed would be to just stop showing me what my friends “like” or “re-share”. Just show me what they say, or post or show directly. That’s it. For a really dramatic change: remove the ability to pass on content alltogether.

ClassyJacket 9y ago
This is what I want from a service like facebook - posts my friends, groups, and pages explicitly post, IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER, and nothing else. No "John commented on this" or "Melanie liked that". No algorithms. No out-of-order, unless I ask for it. (If 10 friends all reshare the same post, sure, collapse it into one.) But, of course, if they do that, they make it too easy for people to see posts they want without pages they follow paying for ads. So they put in an "algorithm" and say they're "making the news feed more personal".
- acchow 9y ago
  If your content stream includes every post your friends make, every comment they add, every post they like, every event they're interested in or join in on and it was sorted chronologically then you would never be able to scroll past the immediate present. It would just constantly generate new content as quickly as you can scroll. I'm glad they sort by relevance and time is just one small factor in relevance.
  - salvar 9y ago
    True, but what are the other relevance factors? It's a black box, and basically ends up being "whatever Facebook deems to be the most profitable content to show you".

product50 9y ago

The stock has already recovered and is above $190 now (up 3.6% vs. close).

matte_black 9y ago
Will probably hit $200 tomorrow

ComputerGuru 9y ago

I didn’t see anyone else mention this, but to me it is a problem of facebook’s own making. They drove personal content off the site when they pushed videos and pictures by “viral marketing” firms onto it. They replaced groups (inherently personal) with pages, then scrambled to try and bring groups back years later. They turned the wall to spam from various garbage apps that were given permission to crap all over it by default interspersed with ads and machine-generated content (“a picture of you from three years ago”). In their zeal to gain IM users, they replaced messages with chat, removing the inhibition that kept people from using messages for one liners. Then they made you always online, supplanting Facebook itself entirely with something that could be replaced by any other real-time communication app. Once phones became nicer to use and there were alternatives to the lag and limitations of SMS, people had no reason to log into Facebook to chat with their friends because Facebook has trained non-IMers to IM and they no longer needed Facebook to do it. Users would have killed for high-resolution photos (Facebook would make pictures so tiny and so low resolution that they’d become unrecognizable and all talent that went into composing them or editing them would be lost, and they couldn’t contain text or captions because that would be compressed away) or the ability to create albums. A dozen apps existed to shoehorn that functionality in via the Flickr api. Then they had to go buy Instagram to win those users back. Now people just post major life events to share with people they didn’t bother communicating them to via another, more personal means of communication once a year or so.

rconti 9y ago
Agreed. I've always enjoyed and found great value in Facebook, which was helped by the fact that I was in college when it launched so everyone I knew back then was on it, and everyone I know today is on it (minus 2 or 3 holdouts). I was getting frustrated with all the junk, but still used it regularly. Now when I get that dopamine craving and am flipping through app screens on my phone looking for something novel, I often completely forget that Facebook is even there. The changes they made are absolutely in the direction I want them to go, but perhaps it's too late?
btilly 9y ago
Worse yet, do you know how frustrating it is to be told that there are no more updates available while you know that you a missing life events from friends that actually posted them. After a while you realize that there is no point in posting your own because they will similarly not show up for friends. Cutting back on FB has become ever easier over time.

redmaverick 9y ago

Posting on Facebook, right now, is like updating your resume (like LinkedIn) for personal life. It just feels too "public". Sure, you can tweak your social network into different privacy levels. But, that just doesn't feel intuitive or effortless. The exclusivity factor which initially propelled the network is simply not there. At the peak of the facebook madness, you had a need to post whenever anything happened. Now, its just the big ticket items. I think people login more due to habit than to post personal updates. I doubt the current college going kids even login at all. Today, you update facebook only on special occasions like marriage, birth of a child, graduation or when people go out to visit places etc. Previously, like 7 to 8 years back, people used to post very personal things, knowing that only their friends are on the network. It definitely, felt safe. It Again, maybe my gen aged a bit during the last 8 years, I don't know. If anyone posts anything too personal right now, it feels like a violation of social norms. Like crying in public with everyone watching. No matter how many tweaks Facebook makes to their Newsfeed, I doubt quality engagement from what I saw 7 to 8 years back will return. People just shifted to mobile apps like Whatsapp and have different social groups there. This feels very natural and organic. You have a few small groups of maybe 10 to 15 people max per group who all know you intimately and maybe a couple of larger groups with 50 plus members. This usually an alumni group of some kind. Even the larger groups get tiring if there are too updates and many frequently opt out after a tiff. I just feel the era of publicly sharing personal information on web based social networks is over. If there is somekind of a decentralized privacy oriented mobile app that has the same functionality as whatsapp and it gets widely adopted, then it might be game over for the big companies in the social networking space. Even though Whatsapp is owned by facebook. It feels very safe and personal to share updates.

rogy 9y ago
Personal opinion that this is all again unintentionally there own doing. They drove people to stop posting personal content by making personal content so rare to come by (with ads, news,pages,sponsored posts..) that it was percieved that people don’t post those kind of things anymore. Going to be very tough to get people back into that mindset.
- 9y ago

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jacksmith21006 9y ago

Hope Google shares latest YouTube hours tomorrow and we can compare. Last quarter Google shared "As I mentioned in the last earnings call, YouTube now has over 1.5 billion users. On average, these users spend 60 minutes a day on mobile. " Which I guess means 1.5 billion hours a day of YT use daily. Be interesting to compare to FB.

narrator 9y ago

I think with all the high profile hyperpoliticization of who and what gets into the Facebook feed of the average person, the idea that Facebook is a private space where friends create their own private worlds together has been destroyed. Now it's just another public space like Twitter and that essentially makes people not want to post personal stuff on it. This has also led to the opening in the market that Snapchat filled and a bit of a revival of twitter.

burlesona 9y ago
Yes, like Twitter, but the late night infomercials version of Twitter where some guy is trying to sell you miracle tanning cream.

amasad 9y ago

Instead of Facebook flailing about trying to come up with the best news feed algorithm to please everyone they should just give the consumer a choice. Imagine an "algorithm store" that lets developers build and publish ranking algorithms that users can buy and use.

DashRattlesnake 9y ago
That's won't happen. The mistake you're making is assuming that Facebook wants to "please everyone." It doesn't. It only cares about pleasing itself, and it does that through manipulating the algorithm to attempt to get its users to do what it wants. Giving up control of the algorithm means giving up control of its user-products, and it's not going to do that.

nytesky 9y ago

It feels like Facebook started out as Geocities and has ended up as your cranky aunts forwarded chain e-mail.

Puer 9y ago

For people using uBlock Origin who want to hide all of the noise on their Facebook and truly see what their friends are posting, here are some useful filters: facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ commented on this./) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ replied to a /) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ liked this post from /) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ liked this./) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ commented on a post from /) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ reacted to this./) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/'s cover photo./) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ likes /) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ are now friends./) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ is interested in an event./) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/Sponsored/) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/Suggested Post/) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/A video you may like/) facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ shared /) !facebook.com##u_fetchstream !facebook.com##._4-u2[id*="u_fetchstream"] I got tired of seeing seemingly hundreds of, "Your friends reacted to this ad page 5 months ago" or "Here's another advertisement disguised as a page you might be interested in." I realized after I implemented these that I see maybe 2 or 3 new posts a day from my 500 friends, and of these posts the majority of them are political in nature and don't interest me. The only reason I still continue to use FB is for the messenger app as I still think it's the most convenient compared to other platforms. Here's what my feed looks like with the rules implemented (they aren't FULLY currently up to date either because FB continually updates the phrases, but good enough for me). I also hid a lot of the junk on the sidebar with the element picker. I have no interest in using FB as a platform for buying and selling and the "News Ticker" (if you can call it "News") is just tabloid garbage. I have 4 posts in the past day before I get the "There are no more posts to show right now" message. https://i.imgur.com/AbBnPo3.png https://i.imgur.com/AbBnPo3.png

toomanybeersies 9y ago
Thanks, I might use some of those to tweak my newsfeed.
apearson 9y ago
Thank you for that filter, work amazingly well

itissid 9y ago

I wonder if we as humans at some future point would evolve to understand and consume only sane and specialized content based on lessons of Facebook? History and behavioral psychology tells us people don't learn from the past just because they simply can't recall it. BUT perhaps what might work, and only hope, is a spectacular fall of this kind of interaction model(and the business) so that no one touches it with a 10 ft pole for some time. Like the terrible Nazi stuff of WWII. Hopes of healthy competition in the industry and the democratization of quality content in a way that precludes brand loyalty, will probably never happen as long as Facebook lives. It will just acquire and buy its way to monopolize everything.

dwighttk 9y ago

There are like 3 of my friends who I like and want to hear things from, but they post about 10x per day. Facebook has decided that because of this volume ALL I WANT TO SEE IS THESE 3 FRIENDS' POSTS. It's irritating. I wish I could fall back on Twitter to show me everything, but now between "tweets you may have missed" and randomly showing me posts (4 or 5 times) that other people have liked, it's feeling more and more like Facebook, just with different people.

misterbowfinger 9y ago

It feels like they want to move towards being more "useful", a la WeChat: http://blog.ycombinator.com/lessons-from-wechat/ http://blog.ycombinator.com/lessons-from-wechat/

f4rker 9y ago

Could we be the problem? No, it's the users.

freyir 9y ago

> "We made changes to show fewer viral videos to make sure people's time is well spent. In total, we made changes that reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours every day." Weren't the changes to the news feed just announced? This sounds like spin. They planned all along for people to stop using our service. Right.

ridgeguy 9y ago

It seems like nobody at Facebook is allowed to play the long game. In the long game, quality wins. In the long game, an organization that puts quality of information at top priority persists and becomes a long-lived resource for civilization. Like Google has become a persistent Web search resource, setting aside its short-lived ancillary forays into more clickable, trivial services. So long as Facebook prioritizes viral clickbait, so long will it be in danger of collapse, irrelevance, and extinction. That's ok with me.

rdruxn 9y ago
Except their moves and announcements in recent weeks suggest that they're in fact prioritizing higher quality content e.g. local news (https://www.axios.com/facebook-to-prioritize-local-news-in-news-feed-1517258545-f4b20fdf-6f6d-4511-abec-d5bf334ebca1.html https://www.axios.com/facebook-to-prioritize-local-news-in-n...)
bonniemuffin 9y ago
Identifying "quality" content algorithmically seems like a hard problem to me. If Facebook wanted to play the long game by promoting high quality content in the feed, how would you propose they identify it in order to promote it?
- blacksite_ 9y ago
  if content.is_quality(): content.promote() else: content.demote() Four lines, Facebook...
- ridgeguy 9y ago
  Your question is excellent and gets to the heart of the matter. How could Facebook, in a neutral way, cull crap and promote quality? I wish I had robust answers. All I have at the moment is opinions. • Algorithmic methods can't deliver near term solutions. Algorithms embody the biases of their human coders. I doubt we currently know how to algorithmically evaluate inputs for quality in the Facebook or "fake news" context. We need more time and effort to learn how to do this. • Promoting quality currently requires humans, who are expensive. If Facebook really prioritizes feed quality, we'll see serious hiring. If we don't, then evidence of commitment is lacking. • I believe (no proof to offer, mainly intuition) quality can eventually be algorithmically determined, but it's a hard problem. It will take years, lots of smart people and $ to figure out how to make it work at scale. • I don't think Facebook's announced path, which is to solicit those who are arguably more susceptible to "fake news" to be arbitrators of quality, will succeed. Facebook, like others, is caught between maximizing 90 day quarterly profits and becoming a persistent human resource. I don't envy Zuckerberg at all. I hope he can do the right thing. We'll see.

beedogs 9y ago

Good. The less people use Facebook, the better and healthier society becomes.

jokermatt999 9y ago

Am I the only one who views Facebook by Most Recent? They don't make it easy, and I don't think you can default to it, but I just point all my bookmarks to https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr Still though, Facebook could be so much better. The problem is that a profit-driven social media site is always going to have different goals than its users. Free ones seem to never gain traction. Currently, most of my friend groups are switching to Discord, but that's basically just going back to IRC without having to understand NickServ and such. As many others have pointed out though, Facebook got bland when everyone's parents joined. Private groups somewhat help, but it really does need to be more directly baked in to the design. It's far too late for that now, but I dream one day someone will finally make the Facebook killer. Until then, I use Facebook, because it benefits me more than not using it. Shallow interaction, peoples kids, etc? That can easily be fixed. For me, the boost in mood I get from reconnecting to old friends makes it worth all the pain. I was a hold out too, and didn't join until ~5 years ago? I think the problem is it's almost a utility at this point. Most everyone I know (non-techy crowd) is on it. If you aren't, you truly do miss out, which sucks. But do you know anyone who doesn't work, or want to work at Facebook who would say "I love Facebook!" Tweak all you want, but it's too much a behemoth to love.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago
Wow thanks for that link, it totally transformed what I was shown on the feed.
ghostcluster 9y ago
Even that link only shows a pruned, algorithmically decided subset of the most recent posts of your total friends list.
gaius 9y ago
Am I the only one who views Facebook by Most Recent? Do you think most recent really is everything in reverse chronological order, or just a slightly different algorithm?
- jokermatt999 9y ago

ehnto 9y ago

I think both time on site and engagement are narrow metrics to judge a site's usefulness and effectiveness. Reduced engagement on Facebook is probably a good thing for society, but it could arguably mean it's also achieving it's goals as a social platform more succinctly. As an advert stream of course, that's bad. But I suspect an amount of truth in Zuckerberg's somewhat altruistic new vision.

Robotbeat 9y ago

Okay, that ship is sinking. Time to burn it; Facebook has long outlived the usual online social network lifetime. What's the next one we jump to this time? http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=3240 http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=3240

qwerty456127 9y ago

Who and why uses Facebook today anyway? All my friends use messenger apps like WhatsApp or Telegram to communicate to people they know in real life, sites like Reddit and HN to communicate to random crowd sharing their interests and Instagram to share pictures they take. I personally feel like Facebook is a concept fading into the past. UPDATE: The only thing I used to use Facebook for a couple of years ago when I had more spare time was finding events to attend for fun. Does anybody know a good alternative? There probably is a special app just for this. Another useful feature of Facebook seems to be the groups directory: there are groups in WhatsApp and Telegram but they are harder to find - isn't there a project building a directory of them already?

nora4 9y ago
I wonder what will happen to the Facebook the company as this progresses. It would be quite funny if the main product of Facebook becomes Instagram -- and the original product fades. One thing we might be discounting though is other nations. (I assume you live in N.A.) I don't know how widespread Facebook is elsewhere. It could be that Facebook gives up on N.A. market and let Insta handles their interest there and focus itself on emerging markets.
- qwerty456127 9y ago
  A probable role Facebook may take in future is providing digital "passport" kind of identity. The Chinese Facebook clone is doing it already and the Russian Facebook clone does too though in much smaller degree. I live in Europe, not N.A. We use messengers a lot here and many people still use Facebook. I've heard that people use SMS and MMS much more actively in the USA (I have never used MMS and have stopped using SMS years ago).
  - asclepi 9y ago
    That's what we call "texting", but very often texting isn't done using SMS. With the iOS market share hovering slightly below 50% in the US, it's iMessage that is the main messenger, at least where I live. The iOS Messages app seamlessly switches over to SMS when the receiver doesn't have iMessage - and shows a visual distinction - but in my case, that's a minority of the people I text with. I don't use Whatsapp nor was I ever invited by someone to use it, but I heard it's basically the iMessage equivalent in the EU and in other places where the iOS market share is lower.

MarkMc 9y ago

From the article: "Yes, the time spent on Facebook in the quarter declined by 5 percent, but it was by Facebook’s design, executives said, in order to promote a higher quality experience. Yes, there was a dip in North American user numbers for the first time ever, but only because Facebook is already so dominant in the region.” Can someone explain why a 'higher quality experience' didn't lead to more active monthly users in North America? I would have thought there were people who hadn't checked out Facebook for a few months, but now start using it more regularly.

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indubitable 9y ago

As an aside here, I would be cautious of attributing declining growth on Facebook to pretty much anything. They are the first company in the history of our species to take market saturation to such extremes. They have more than 2 billion active monthly users, and growing. The issue they have is that there are only 3-4 billion internet users in the entire world. Their growth is predictably going to hit an asymptote at some point in the near future - they are simply running out of people. That also poses an interesting issue from a company perspective. We still live in a world where endless growth is expected. But with a ad-driven service the only way to make more money is to get users to view/click and otherwise interact with even more ads, or to otherwise increase the efficiency of ads. And that in general achieves little other creating a worse user experience, no matter how clever the packaging and delivery.

ccachor 9y ago

Encourage more personal photos. And ban links from Newsfeed. It's really that simple.

tomkinson 9y ago

1- charge advertisers more, for less. Pay to get back what you had. 2- sink the fb fangs deeper into users by promoting 'engagement' content i.e. stuff with better hooks. 3- market the increase in time spend on site, Q418 to the very advertisers. Brand cryptonite. He holds the poison and the medicine. Depending on public sentiment they dish out the doses of each accordingly.