5 ms·

Daily Facebook users drops for the first time in US

49 points by osrec 9y ago

mantas 9y ago
Good
ryanbertrand 9y ago
Most of the posts on my newsfeed are posted by random parents which have added me over the years. Facebook even sends me text messages and emails to “come back”. I get random notifications about some ‘friend’ I haven’t spoken too in 10 years posted something on Facebook...like that will bring me back to your platform. I haven’t found a way to disable those alerts and notifications. I’m happy with Instagram because it just serves a simple purpose.
- narrowtux 9y ago
  You can disable these notifications by clicking the 3 dots next to them and then selecting "Hide notifications of this kind" or something like that. Granted they'll come up with new kinds of the same thing that will spam you again, but it works for me right now.
osrec 9y ago
Is this the beginning of the end or just natural stabilisation? I would guess the former; the platform is simply boring now.
jsemrau 9y ago
Who else should join ? Don't they have 99% market penetration in the US?
- Axsuul 9y ago
  New people being born and becoming of age.
  - Jaruzel 9y ago
    Ah, but younglings flock to the IM platform-de-jour instead of Facebook. Right now that's SnapChat and WhatsApp. Most 13 year olds have no interest in Facebook as it's considered uncool[1]. This attitude has been in place for a few years now. Couple that with more and more established users leaving the platform, and you start to see the decline that's being reported. --- [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/02/21/why-teens-are-leaving-facebook-its-meaningless/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/02...
  - jsemrau 9y ago
    I know a lot of people that created Facebook accounts for their kids.
franzpeterstein 9y ago
I think social media is dead and Facebook a bubble for parents, fake-politican bots and old poeple.
vuldin 9y ago
Anecdotally, I haven't been on Facebook in months. In spite of that, I wouldn't be surprised if my account is counted somehow in the daily usage for some of those days just because of the extent to which their services have extended throughout many other websites. I've joined, canceled, then joined again, but never really used the site to any large extent. It is a very unnatural (yet at times necessary) way to communicate with people. The decline of Facebook is in no way the decline of technology-enhanced socializing. People will hopefully just find other more natural ways to do so. My hope is on decentralized apps that allow people to own and control access to their own data.
- Libturd 9y ago
  why is it "necessary" to communicate? give them your email/phone number and tell them to fuck off otherwise.
- mrmondo 9y ago
  I moved my account to Ireland (in a somewhat improperly researched attempt to force them to delete my data due to Ireland’s data retention laws), waited a month or so then scripted deletion of all the images and posts on the account, changed all details and disconnected it from everyone and everything, then waited a week or so ‘deleted’ the account. That was about 5 years ago (and it was a great life decision IMO) but - people say they still see me popping up on their feeds with my (fake) birthdate, memories (which I was untagged or had privacy settings disallowing me to be tagged in) and other weird things. I’ve been careful not to mistakenly log in once which I fear my bring the account back from the dead and I’ve also kept an eye to make sure there’s no identity theft / fake account going on. I don’t trust that company one bit, I’m glad I left but I don’t for one second believe my data’s actually been deleted. While I truly hope something open source and decentralised gets momentum, I still truly love twitter - I get a lot out of it and I’ve met and networked with a lot of great people through Twitter.
simias 9y ago
I see many people clamoring for the death of Facebook but don't they own many of the up-and-coming social networks anyway? If people are ditching Facebook for Instagram you might as well switch to cocaine to stop your crack addiction.
- golergka 9y ago
  Chats. Most of my friends and me have most of our social interactions in private chat groups, with silly pictures and pictures, personal stories and drama happening all the time. I've tried most of the big ones (except WeChat and other chinese apps, where I don't have a single peer), and I bet on Telegram. They're moving forward with incredible speed, and from all the competitors, they seem to understand their audience and usage patterns best. Also, it's a platform that's already actively used for commerce. Just like with Bitcoin and darknet, drugs are the primary growth factor (I don't know of any other transactions cryptocurrency is actually used as currency). I expect that after they release their own currency, it will take over all existing crypto from sheer convenience.
  - thejosh 9y ago
    Only reason I use FB is chat as well, simply because friends and family still use it. Only reason I still have a FB account and not simply a messenger account is spotify is tied to it and I can't unlink from FB as the login source..
    - jimmies 9y ago
      Messenger-with-a-phone-number-account is just a Facebook account in disguise. They just don't show you the login credentials. Under circumstances, you can obtain the login token to log in the web interface and it would behave just like a Facebook account with some restrictions. It might look different to most people, but given one still gets a "restricted" Facebook account created behind the scenes with a messenger account, I don't think people understand the privacy implications of that. See my other top-level post for my take on the issue.
    - saiya-jin 9y ago
cx_in_the_chat 9y ago
I wonder when the next "facebook" will come along. I predict people will abandon facebook just as they did with myspace, as soon as something new, cleaner and with less spam will be available to migrate to. Of course after some period of time the new service will also end up filled with memes and ads and the cycle will continue once again.
- dazc 9y ago
  Isn't it more a case of facebook's audience fragmentation towards snapchat, whatsapp, etc?
  - cx_in_the_chat 9y ago
    Perhaps, but snapchat and whatsapp are more specialized services eg. with focus on stories or messaging whereas facebook offers the whole package so to speak. That's something people will always value I think.
- kristianc 9y ago
  The MySpace comparison is a little tired. MySpace felt big, but even at its peak, only had 75m MAUs. Even Pinterest today has over twice as many, between 175m and 200m. Facebook is at 2.2bn, and its DAILY active users are 184m. Extrapolated over a month, this blip accounts for half of MySpace's MAUs. There's some pretty serious network effects there, to the point where building a slightly better mousetrap is not going to work. 2009 was also a loooong time ago: the App Store had just been born, people were just starting to use Twitter, the Android platform was just getting going and 25% of all PC sales in Europe were netbooks. MySpace was barely even accessed by people using smartphones.
  - InclinedPlane 9y ago
    Network effect isn't that relevant since people don't actually have a ton invested in Facebook beyond just the social graph and that social connectivity. It is thus rife for a preference cascade if it turns out a competitor hits all the right buttons with some other compelling reason to switch. All it really takes is for a competitor to be actually superior on the merits (so, not something like google plus that was mostly the same and in many ways actually worse) and then a critical mass to start forming there. Once the "well, I guess I should have an account over there just to keep up with my friends X, Y, and Z every once in a while" cycle starts and that becomes common then a preference cascade becomes possible. Nobody really understands social media very well today, which is odd considering its age, so nobody is really hitting all the right notes with an offering but the potential exists.
maaaats 9y ago
Most of my feed now is friends liking or commenting on pages I have no interest in. If I could remove all that I might check it out more often. Or maybe I would discover none of my friends post anything anymore?
KasianFranks 9y ago
Facebook has always been the next AOL. In comparison, you'll rarely hear someone say "I'm leaving Google search". Social nets vs Search and Search still wins. This is why there's still a large difference in value between them in terms of revenue, users and algorithmic technology.
- fwdpropaganda 9y ago
  I did leave Google search. I so did many others on HN.
  - KasianFranks 9y ago
    Social nets are much more easily duplicated than algorithmic search.
  - minor3rd 9y ago
    So... .000005% of the population?
    - DiThi 9y ago
      Change and growth must start somewhere. I've used DDG for years but only recently I started recommending it to everybody, and endorsing Firefox as well.
      - Outpox 9y ago
        Same here, ditched Chrome for Firefox and Chromium, and Google Search for DDG. Altough I don't see how I could stop using Android, maps, youtube and gmail :-/
        fwdpropaganda 9y ago
        I'm in the exact same spot. Android can be ditched for LineageOS. Gmail is risky because of security; using anything else is a big gamble. Maps is also irreplaceable right now, but over time competitors will get better. You should ditch Chromium as well.
jimmies 9y ago
To "escape" Facebook, in 2017, I tried to maintain a Messenger account with a phone number but without a Facebook account. By accident, I discovered that the Messenger-with-a-phone-number thingie that they have is just a Facebook account that doesn't allow you to log in "traditionally." But if you manage to get the auth token to log in, it allows you to play with a lot of stuff. It allows you to rate places, edit places, see people's profiles, register for events invisibly. It doesn't allow you to interact and post status updates, but it is still very much a Facebook account behind the scenes. If it entertains you, I have a draft here for you to see my 6 months journey working with fb security on that "bug" (disclaimer: it wasn't very fun or exciting... basically, I didn't qualify for their bounty program. They only give out rewards to bugs that could be used to get other people's personal info.) https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSa-LjM5IzyTWJuD1rDj6H9v0gBafi_cNZ7zQZkbpwDf6qIzXXv3jutgfLcDF6jpLfk7CaJKgtLGy5H/pub https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSa-LjM5IzyTWJuD... Edit: I have updated the link to the doc with the proof of concept video removed because the names weren't blurred. Bad taste on my end, my apologies.
tanilama 9y ago
Ad cow is coming to an end.
nukeop 9y ago
Facebook has recently hit 2 billion total users. Given that we have somewhere around 7 billion people on the planet, this seems to be the unbeatable ceiling. Let's estimate generously that half of the world's population has access to internet. That gives us 3.5 billion people. Around 750 million of these people are Chinese - they don't, and can't use Facebook. This leaves us with 2,750,000 people - many of which won't be interested in using Facebook, or can't have an account for a multitude of reasons, such as being too young (let's say under 10), or too old (let's say over 75). Clearly there isn't much room for Facebook to grow now. If there's no room to grow, there is nowhere to go but down. It can be therefore predicted that, subtracting bots, the daily users will start dropping regularly very soon, and will keep on dropping as people move away from this platform due to its diminishing popularity, because of network effects.
- carlmr 9y ago
  For media what they measure their growth in is total time (attention) spent on the platform. Even with 2 billion people signed up being the growth ceiling in terms of number of people. We need to see whether they manage to increase (# people) * (average time spent on Facebook). That number still has a huge upward potential. Declining number of daily visitors is a sign that this growth is negative too though. I don't think that messengers can really replace social media. I don't spend time on a messenger if I'm not messaging someone. Facebook is more about posting something you find interesting, and consuming what other people post (+ adds interspersed). This is a completely different market. Will something replace Facebook? Surely, at some point. But I don't think it will be messengers. It will be another service that makes people feel like they get more of the content they want from their friends.
bantersaurus 9y ago
Im using instagram instead...

49 points by osrec 9y ago

Good

Most of the posts on my newsfeed are posted by random parents which have added me over the years. Facebook even sends me text messages and emails to “come back”. I get random notifications about some ‘friend’ I haven’t spoken too in 10 years posted something on Facebook...like that will bring me back to your platform. I haven’t found a way to disable those alerts and notifications. I’m happy with Instagram because it just serves a simple purpose.

narrowtux 9y ago
You can disable these notifications by clicking the 3 dots next to them and then selecting "Hide notifications of this kind" or something like that. Granted they'll come up with new kinds of the same thing that will spam you again, but it works for me right now.

osrec 9y ago

Is this the beginning of the end or just natural stabilisation? I would guess the former; the platform is simply boring now.

jsemrau 9y ago

Who else should join ? Don't they have 99% market penetration in the US?

Axsuul 9y ago
New people being born and becoming of age.
- Jaruzel 9y ago
  Ah, but younglings flock to the IM platform-de-jour instead of Facebook. Right now that's SnapChat and WhatsApp. Most 13 year olds have no interest in Facebook as it's considered uncool[1]. This attitude has been in place for a few years now. Couple that with more and more established users leaving the platform, and you start to see the decline that's being reported. --- [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/02/21/why-teens-are-leaving-facebook-its-meaningless/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/02...
- jsemrau 9y ago
  I know a lot of people that created Facebook accounts for their kids.

franzpeterstein 9y ago

I think social media is dead and Facebook a bubble for parents, fake-politican bots and old poeple.

vuldin 9y ago

Anecdotally, I haven't been on Facebook in months. In spite of that, I wouldn't be surprised if my account is counted somehow in the daily usage for some of those days just because of the extent to which their services have extended throughout many other websites. I've joined, canceled, then joined again, but never really used the site to any large extent. It is a very unnatural (yet at times necessary) way to communicate with people. The decline of Facebook is in no way the decline of technology-enhanced socializing. People will hopefully just find other more natural ways to do so. My hope is on decentralized apps that allow people to own and control access to their own data.

Libturd 9y ago
why is it "necessary" to communicate? give them your email/phone number and tell them to fuck off otherwise.
mrmondo 9y ago
I moved my account to Ireland (in a somewhat improperly researched attempt to force them to delete my data due to Ireland’s data retention laws), waited a month or so then scripted deletion of all the images and posts on the account, changed all details and disconnected it from everyone and everything, then waited a week or so ‘deleted’ the account. That was about 5 years ago (and it was a great life decision IMO) but - people say they still see me popping up on their feeds with my (fake) birthdate, memories (which I was untagged or had privacy settings disallowing me to be tagged in) and other weird things. I’ve been careful not to mistakenly log in once which I fear my bring the account back from the dead and I’ve also kept an eye to make sure there’s no identity theft / fake account going on. I don’t trust that company one bit, I’m glad I left but I don’t for one second believe my data’s actually been deleted. While I truly hope something open source and decentralised gets momentum, I still truly love twitter - I get a lot out of it and I’ve met and networked with a lot of great people through Twitter.

simias 9y ago

I see many people clamoring for the death of Facebook but don't they own many of the up-and-coming social networks anyway? If people are ditching Facebook for Instagram you might as well switch to cocaine to stop your crack addiction.

golergka 9y ago
Chats. Most of my friends and me have most of our social interactions in private chat groups, with silly pictures and pictures, personal stories and drama happening all the time. I've tried most of the big ones (except WeChat and other chinese apps, where I don't have a single peer), and I bet on Telegram. They're moving forward with incredible speed, and from all the competitors, they seem to understand their audience and usage patterns best. Also, it's a platform that's already actively used for commerce. Just like with Bitcoin and darknet, drugs are the primary growth factor (I don't know of any other transactions cryptocurrency is actually used as currency). I expect that after they release their own currency, it will take over all existing crypto from sheer convenience.
- thejosh 9y ago
  Only reason I use FB is chat as well, simply because friends and family still use it. Only reason I still have a FB account and not simply a messenger account is spotify is tied to it and I can't unlink from FB as the login source..
  - jimmies 9y ago
    Messenger-with-a-phone-number-account is just a Facebook account in disguise. They just don't show you the login credentials. Under circumstances, you can obtain the login token to log in the web interface and it would behave just like a Facebook account with some restrictions. It might look different to most people, but given one still gets a "restricted" Facebook account created behind the scenes with a messenger account, I don't think people understand the privacy implications of that. See my other top-level post for my take on the issue.
  - saiya-jin 9y ago

cx_in_the_chat 9y ago

I wonder when the next "facebook" will come along. I predict people will abandon facebook just as they did with myspace, as soon as something new, cleaner and with less spam will be available to migrate to. Of course after some period of time the new service will also end up filled with memes and ads and the cycle will continue once again.

dazc 9y ago
Isn't it more a case of facebook's audience fragmentation towards snapchat, whatsapp, etc?
- cx_in_the_chat 9y ago
  Perhaps, but snapchat and whatsapp are more specialized services eg. with focus on stories or messaging whereas facebook offers the whole package so to speak. That's something people will always value I think.
kristianc 9y ago
The MySpace comparison is a little tired. MySpace felt big, but even at its peak, only had 75m MAUs. Even Pinterest today has over twice as many, between 175m and 200m. Facebook is at 2.2bn, and its DAILY active users are 184m. Extrapolated over a month, this blip accounts for half of MySpace's MAUs. There's some pretty serious network effects there, to the point where building a slightly better mousetrap is not going to work. 2009 was also a loooong time ago: the App Store had just been born, people were just starting to use Twitter, the Android platform was just getting going and 25% of all PC sales in Europe were netbooks. MySpace was barely even accessed by people using smartphones.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  Network effect isn't that relevant since people don't actually have a ton invested in Facebook beyond just the social graph and that social connectivity. It is thus rife for a preference cascade if it turns out a competitor hits all the right buttons with some other compelling reason to switch. All it really takes is for a competitor to be actually superior on the merits (so, not something like google plus that was mostly the same and in many ways actually worse) and then a critical mass to start forming there. Once the "well, I guess I should have an account over there just to keep up with my friends X, Y, and Z every once in a while" cycle starts and that becomes common then a preference cascade becomes possible. Nobody really understands social media very well today, which is odd considering its age, so nobody is really hitting all the right notes with an offering but the potential exists.

maaaats 9y ago

Most of my feed now is friends liking or commenting on pages I have no interest in. If I could remove all that I might check it out more often. Or maybe I would discover none of my friends post anything anymore?

KasianFranks 9y ago

Facebook has always been the next AOL. In comparison, you'll rarely hear someone say "I'm leaving Google search". Social nets vs Search and Search still wins. This is why there's still a large difference in value between them in terms of revenue, users and algorithmic technology.

fwdpropaganda 9y ago
I did leave Google search. I so did many others on HN.
- KasianFranks 9y ago
  Social nets are much more easily duplicated than algorithmic search.
- minor3rd 9y ago
  So... .000005% of the population?
  - DiThi 9y ago
    Change and growth must start somewhere. I've used DDG for years but only recently I started recommending it to everybody, and endorsing Firefox as well.
    - Outpox 9y ago
      Same here, ditched Chrome for Firefox and Chromium, and Google Search for DDG. Altough I don't see how I could stop using Android, maps, youtube and gmail :-/
      - fwdpropaganda 9y ago
        I'm in the exact same spot. Android can be ditched for LineageOS. Gmail is risky because of security; using anything else is a big gamble. Maps is also irreplaceable right now, but over time competitors will get better. You should ditch Chromium as well.

jimmies 9y ago

To "escape" Facebook, in 2017, I tried to maintain a Messenger account with a phone number but without a Facebook account. By accident, I discovered that the Messenger-with-a-phone-number thingie that they have is just a Facebook account that doesn't allow you to log in "traditionally." But if you manage to get the auth token to log in, it allows you to play with a lot of stuff. It allows you to rate places, edit places, see people's profiles, register for events invisibly. It doesn't allow you to interact and post status updates, but it is still very much a Facebook account behind the scenes. If it entertains you, I have a draft here for you to see my 6 months journey working with fb security on that "bug" (disclaimer: it wasn't very fun or exciting... basically, I didn't qualify for their bounty program. They only give out rewards to bugs that could be used to get other people's personal info.) https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSa-LjM5IzyTWJuD1rDj6H9v0gBafi_cNZ7zQZkbpwDf6qIzXXv3jutgfLcDF6jpLfk7CaJKgtLGy5H/pub https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSa-LjM5IzyTWJuD... Edit: I have updated the link to the doc with the proof of concept video removed because the names weren't blurred. Bad taste on my end, my apologies.

tanilama 9y ago

Ad cow is coming to an end.

nukeop 9y ago

Facebook has recently hit 2 billion total users. Given that we have somewhere around 7 billion people on the planet, this seems to be the unbeatable ceiling. Let's estimate generously that half of the world's population has access to internet. That gives us 3.5 billion people. Around 750 million of these people are Chinese - they don't, and can't use Facebook. This leaves us with 2,750,000 people - many of which won't be interested in using Facebook, or can't have an account for a multitude of reasons, such as being too young (let's say under 10), or too old (let's say over 75). Clearly there isn't much room for Facebook to grow now. If there's no room to grow, there is nowhere to go but down. It can be therefore predicted that, subtracting bots, the daily users will start dropping regularly very soon, and will keep on dropping as people move away from this platform due to its diminishing popularity, because of network effects.

carlmr 9y ago
For media what they measure their growth in is total time (attention) spent on the platform. Even with 2 billion people signed up being the growth ceiling in terms of number of people. We need to see whether they manage to increase (# people) * (average time spent on Facebook). That number still has a huge upward potential. Declining number of daily visitors is a sign that this growth is negative too though. I don't think that messengers can really replace social media. I don't spend time on a messenger if I'm not messaging someone. Facebook is more about posting something you find interesting, and consuming what other people post (+ adds interspersed). This is a completely different market. Will something replace Facebook? Surely, at some point. But I don't think it will be messengers. It will be another service that makes people feel like they get more of the content they want from their friends.

bantersaurus 9y ago

Im using instagram instead...