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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 netw
by 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 agoPersonal 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.
- matte_black 9y agoThere is no need to go back to that mindset. The goal is to transition everyone to a new, different mindset. This is how a business evolves.
- brain5ide 9y agoYou mean imitates progress?
- Splines 9y agoI think in general this is why Snapchat is (was?) so popular - the ephemeral posts + "it's not my parent's facebook" was what a lot of young people want.
- toomanybeersies 9y agoThese days, my main interaction with Facebook (outside of messenger) is me and my friends tagging each other in memes. It's silly and infantile, but it's sort of funny. Any day-to-day updates that used to go on Facebook, like "look what I had for dinner", go on my insta story or Snapchat. So in many ways, FB is still getting that engagement, it has just shifted to Instagram, rather than Facebook.
- pjc50 9y ago> It definitely, felt safe I do wonder how much the "culture war" has affected this. I'm sure all the fighting over the election was good for "engagement" in the short term but in the long term has left people disillusioned.