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

• GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
  Anybody know a worthwhile open source social network alternative?
  • prudhvis 9y ago
    I think a better alternative should be, a de-centralized distributed open source social network.
    • dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
      You mean Diaspora - I think it's clear by now why this concept can't work.
      • deaddodo 9y ago
        I haven't really followed up on diaspora much, but why is that? Isn't the idea behind diaspora something similar to sub-reddit's/facebook groups? You find a "pod" of interest/relation and join up. Thus a focus on the social/community aspects.
    • NickBusey 9y ago
      Like Mastodon? https://mastodon.social/about https://mastodon.social/about
      • wetpaws 9y ago
        How is this different from twitter aside from decentralized part?
        • Crespyl 9y ago
          Open source and open standards are the other big draws. Otherwise it does seem to be closely based on twitter style interaction.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • konschubert 9y ago
    I like the idea of Mastodon.
  • kome 9y ago
    try Mastodon.
  • kawfey 9y ago
    Patchwork: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16273096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16273096
  • anonyx69 9y ago
    Steemit is interesting.
  • askafriend 9y ago
    A viable alternative requires your friends and family to be on it. So there is no viable alternative for most people - decentralized or otherwise.
    • randomsearch 9y ago
      WhatsApp was the only viable alternative. Which is why Facebook bought it. Should that have been legal?
    • xj9 9y ago
      invite them to join then? mastodon has some great apps. if you have the skills you could even set up an instance or two for your friends/family to meet up on. it won't work for 100% of the people you know, but it isn't that difficult to get a few friends to try a new app/service. even if you can't/don't know how to set up an instance, there are hundreds of public servers that you can join. honestly, the only excuse is that you don't want to put yourself out on a limb. https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org
      • askafriend 9y ago
        > invite them to join then? I'm sorry but I'm not going to spend my personal time convincing hundreds of my contacts to move over to a random service called Mastodon. I've got better things to do with my life. I'm going to use Facebook as a tool and move on - as I'm sure the less vocal majority are doing. There is a philosophical viewpoint and a practical one. I choose the practical one.
        • xj9 9y ago
          > hundreds lmao ok like this is an all or nothing situation. my response should have been prefixed with if you care about promoting alternative networks you could... (which is what OP was asking for), mastodon is the largest one right now. i think SSB has a brighter future, but it isn't production ready quite yet. "practical" as in, what you think is best. it is practical for me to invite people to promote decentralized social networks because my community is competing with the facebooks of the world for attention. your "impractical approach" is my "guerilla marketing strategy".
  • fenwick67 9y ago
    Mastodon is pretty active and usable. Patchwork has some big advantages. It's fully distributed, not federated like Mastodon/diaspora/OStatus, and works offline. But the experience isn't as polished yet. There are still some lingering issues with Patchwork... namely, it only runs on desktop computers, and your identity is tied to one device. But they are actively working on these issues. Both are really cool and worth checking out.
  • Raphmedia 9y ago
    If you want to roll your own for your friend group the easiest is https://buddypress.org/ https://buddypress.org/ on some free/cheap hosting + a 25$ theme to make it look modern.
• alex_young 9y ago
  How many users are just hanging on? I use FB very occasionally for some events, but mostly never login. I get nagging notifications about how much I'm missing, but it doesn't feel like much. I suspect there is a growing population of people with similar usage patterns. Are we really monthly active users?
  • ravitation 9y ago
    This is exactly how I feel. I go on Facebook less than half a dozen times a month (sometimes zero)... I still have an account, but even that feels like it's only a matter of time before that goes way too...
  • dralley 9y ago
    I check about once every one or two days for 10-30 seconds. The only reason I keep my facebook around is in case someone wanted to contact me. I've deleted most of my posts, my pictures, all of the other random information, and deleted a lot of friends recently as well.
  • jonmb 9y ago
    That's how I feel too. I'm not sure if it's because of Facebook itself, or just more about my personal growth and realizing that spending much time on social media in general was a waste of time. I've found that I just care less what people are posting about than I used to, and I care less about posting my own stuff too. Would rather catch up when I see them next in person. And if I'm never going to see them in person, they're not really a big part of my life anyway. Facebook's algorithm seems to get worse as time goes on too. It tends to show me the same old posts from around 20% of my friends and ignores what 80% of my other friends post. Maybe I'm technically wrong about this, but that's how it feels.
  • cpcat 9y ago
    I keep my profile to use Facebook login everywhere else.
  • colanderman 9y ago
    I have three use cases that keep me there: 1) I'm in a couple specific regional groups that AFAIK have no non-Facebook counterpart (though they easily could). I think Facebook does groups poorly, but they serve the "non-technical community space" use case much better than any other popular offering that I know of. 2) It's the easiest way for me to blast low-key questions/updates/etc. to most of my friends and family. (I don't have everyone's e-mail address and even if I did, e-mail is often too "active" a medium. Like sending a letter vs. posting on a billboard.) Twitter serves a similar purpose but (a) most of my network does not have an active Twitter account, and (b) Twitter and Facebook serve subtly – but importantly – different social purposes. 3) Since the demise of XMPP and subsequent fragmentation of the IM ecosystem into sundry walled gardens, some (a small minority) of my friends are most readily accessible via Messenger. Strangely enough, SMS seems to have regained footing in this space in my network.
• ZenoArrow 9y ago
  Article claims Facebook is losing market share to Instagram (with individuals under 25). With that in mind, doesn't seem accurate to state they're losing users.
  • ravitation 9y ago
    I mean, it is 1) technically accurate, and 2) still extremely important when thinking about Facebook as a product. (Especially in comparison to Instagram as a product.)
  • ng-user 9y ago
    My thoughts exactly, let's not forget who owns Instagram.
  • ceejayoz 9y ago
    The same will happen (and is happening!) to Instagram. They've recently changed Instagram to non-chronological "curated" feeds, and added a bunch of ads into the mix. What used to be a very pleasant social network has become way less enjoyable in recent months. They also just (after years of resisting) opened up the posting API to some partners.
    • ZenoArrow 9y ago
      > "and is happening!) to Instagram" That's not what the article suggests. If you have some stats to suggest the volume of Instagram users is already on the decline, by all means post it.
      • ceejayoz 9y ago
        The same suckification cycle is happening (increasingly intrusive ads, algorithm tweaks, "here's a pic from someone you don't follow", etc.). The user decline happens later on in that cycle.
        • ZenoArrow 9y ago
          In other words, they're at the "will happen" stage rather than the "is happening" stage (bearing in mind we're talking about their user base).
• ananab 9y ago
  Generally, it has become a cesspool of ads and useless posts by narcissists. The site has allowed its fundamental value to be diluted by so many short term money grabbing interests that there's no going back.
• searine 9y ago
  Not surprising. Social networks grow when they are cool, and Facebook is about the farthest thing from cool right now. It got taken over by old people and companies looking to convert you to brands/religion/politics, all of which might be a liability to social/professional status.
• f055 9y ago
  I'm 34 and Facebook lost me as well. I can't remove my account as I need to use as a developer, but I unfollowed everyone and my newsfeed is empty. It's a bliss. Funny thing is, it's all Facebook's fault. Back in the days, the service was simply brilliant to see what's going on at your friends, at home and abroad. But when Facebook introduced the algorithmic newsfeed, the usefulness ended. I could no longer see all the photos and posts my friends' published. Now I had to rely on some weird algo - some friends were on my news feed, some others that I wanted to see, were not. I saw many more posts from pages that were irrelevant to me, much more reaction posts of my friends on stories that I don't care about, and finally - lots and lots of sponsored stories. Last year I got fed up with this mess, unfollowed everyone and now, if I want to see what's up at my friends, I go to my profile > friends > new posts and go to individual friends' profiles that I'm interested in. It's not a nice experience, but it's better than the algo news feed. Another benefit is that I use Facebook less and less. Interestingly, Twitter feed nowadays became much more interesting for me to read - although I had to unfollow plenty of mass-twitterers as well.
  • djhworld 9y ago
    I rarely visit Facebook because of this reason, even when I do return the feed is populated with ads and other garbage that you need to scroll through to "catch up"
  • jacquesm 9y ago
    > I can't remove my account as I need to use as a developer Why?
    • sergiotapia 9y ago
      If you need to support Facebook oauth, you need an account.
      • Promarged 9y ago
        Exactly. I was removing my account yesterday and they pulled this trick. After some careful analysis it turned out that of all my integrations (Github, Twitter, Facebook) Facebook was rarely used, so I removed support for it in my site, removed the app at developers.facebook.com and the account.
• adreamingsoul 9y ago
  I'm in my 30s and have also left Facebook. I requested my account to be deleted but I doubt they did.
• jasode 9y ago
  Facebook suffered from 2 waves of "Eternal September"[0]: wave 1: the addition of everybody outside your immediate friends and close family. You get the goofy uncle, the distant high school acquaintances, and all the work acquaintances from every previous job that submitted a "friend request" that you didn't reject out of politeness. The newsfeed gets polluted by nonsense such as forwarded memes, politics, and other junk. wave 2: the corporate advertisers filling up the newsfeed that crowds out the desirable posts from your real friends & family. The 2004 to 2008 period was probably the "magical" time for Facebook from a user standpoint. The initial wave of Harvard students had a beautiful user experience with TheFacebook. As for the new members joining Facebook today in 2018?!? Not so much. Of course, ads are needed to pay for the datacenters so any social network like Facebook inevitably decays into a worthless waste of time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
  • CharlesW 9y ago
    I like this. If I may propose one more… wave 3: bots[1] [1] https://mashable.com/2017/11/02/facebook-phony-accounts-admission/ https://mashable.com/2017/11/02/facebook-phony-accounts-admi...
    • et-al 9y ago
      I don't encounter bots on Facebook that much, but they're definitely ruining Instagram. Years ago, I'd be more open to making "Instagram friends". However nowadays when I get a few likes, I go to the user's profile and see that their followers/following ratio is skewed, I know they're fishing for followers with a bot. Ultimately all interactions on social media will be scripted by bots.
      • taftster 9y ago
        Et-al's Law: "All interactions on social media will be scripted by bots" If you add Atwood's Law to this, all social media interactions will be scripted by bots written in Javascript. Then the brain-bender: What if you are that bot?
      • 9y ago
• ravitation 9y ago
  Facebook is a case study in revenue driven product design, especially in comparison to user and purpose driven product design. It seems to me that Facebook made the mistake of thinking that they were all one and the same.
  • fwdpropaganda 9y ago
    You can't seriously believe that someone like Zuckerberg isn't smart enough to see the difference. My theory is he doesn't care what happens to the company as he's already made his fortune.
    • ravitation 9y ago
      The tone of your comment aside... Is it so hard for you to believe that a group of corporate leaders can think that doing something (a strategy) can serve their user, their purpose, and their bottom line all at the same time, equally? It's probably one of the most prevalent self delusions in the corporate world... In fact, I'd argue that the smarter the group of leaders think they are, the more likely they are to fall into said delusion... Since they'll think more of their strategies... In response to your second point... Considering a large portion of Zuckerberg's wealth is in Facebook stock, and that Facebook also owns one of its chief competitors... I doubt it.
      • fwdpropaganda 9y ago
        My point wasn't about whether the were doing it (I'm sure they were) but about whether they were confused about it.
        • ravitation 9y ago
          Huh? Whether they were doing what?
          • fwdpropaganda 9y ago
            Optimising for revenue at the expense of everything else. They knew what they were doing, they just didn't care.
• ictoan 9y ago
  I'm in my 30s and I use FB a lot to keep up with my friends. However, I have notice that my younger cousins in their 20s never post. So... where do young folks go these days? Instagram? Twitter? Snapchat? I guess I need to talk to my cousins more and find out.
  • pwinnski 9y ago
    Instagram and Snapchat, for the teens and 20s I know.
    • hardtke 9y ago
      My market research (teenage kids) indicates that Instagram is their platform of choice.
• utellme 9y ago
  The question for me is - will Zuckerberg wake up and realize that Facebook is not a Google in terms of diversification and influence? CEO should have strategy about his main asset, he shouldn't rest on his laurels.
• paulpauper 9y ago
  The typical Facebook user is now a middle-aged/older person with a lot of disposable income. that is why the company is doing so well and why this loss of young users is not a big deal. Also, Instagram is filling that niche, so Facebook, which owns Instagram, wins either way.
• beamatronic 9y ago
  Reading these comments, I have a different perspective. My FB experience is pretty much sharing my kid/pet/food/vacation pictures and looking at everyone else's kid/pet/food/vacation pictures. This will continue until no one in my social network has any of these to share or they start sharing them somewhere else. In other words, my circle of friends will go wherever the "social action" is.
• jliptzin 9y ago
  Started using FB in 2004 when there were barely a few hundred thousand users. It was great as a college freshman going to a new place not knowing anyone and needing to make friends fast and keep up. In my 30s now and have almost completely stopped using facebook. I check in once every few months, usually when I need to sign in because someone messages me there instead of email. It's actually stunning to me that Facebook is lumped in with other tech giants like Google and Amazon. If the services that google and amazon provide disappeared tomorrow it would have a sudden and devastating impact on many parts of my life and business. If facebook completely disappeared, I honestly wouldn't even realize it for at least a couple months (until the next time I check in) and even then I wouldn't care one bit. In all honestly I think it would be an improvement to society.
  • roymurdock 9y ago
    Facebook is used differently outside the US. When I worked at a telco in Afghanistan in 2014, Facebook was basically its own utility - SMBs and individuals used Facebook (and their precious cellular data) almost exclusively to message each other and conduct business. So much so that the most popular consumer/retail plans for Afghans were "Facebook usage plans" giving you X amount of data per month to be spent exclusively on Facebook. Amazon/google have little to no power over there, facebook has a ton. Ditto whatsapp. I think you'll find this is true for almost any country where social ties are stronger than the US, and biz is newer, or built around mobile/face-to-face transactions - fbook is much more important than it is here as a photo feed and news consumption hangout. That said I agree for the US case and deleted my facebook ~2 years ago :)
    • wyclif 9y ago
      I've seen the effect you describe also in the Philippines and other developing countries I've visited. Some Filipinos don't seem to realise that FB is just a walled garden on the internet, not the internet itself. Also, I think your second point contributes to this: mobile is huge in the Philippines, they send more texts than any other country. And on top of that, social ties are a lot stronger than those in America, especially familial ties, with many siblings, cousins, etc.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• ChrisArchitect 9y ago
  If alot of those users are just hanging out on Instagram, has Facebook really 'lost' them??
• padobson 9y ago
  Whenever I see a post like this on HN, I see the inevitable "the product sucks" posts in the comments. As an engineer and social media user, I completely agree, but it doesn't seem to be bearing out in the marketplace. Facebook continues to grow[0] (if more slowly). So what is the HN audience to Facebook? Our we taste makers? A demographic ahead of the product curve, predictive of Facebook's imminent decline? Or are we simply irrelevant to the mass market? Are we the people going to the art house movie theaters while the masses flood into multiplexes for the latest Marvel sensory overload spectacle? [0]https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/31/facebook-q4-2017-earnings/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/31/facebook-q4-2017-earnings/
  • gressquel 9y ago
    the growth they present is not telling the whole truth. So called MAU and DAU can be for example a person like me who hasnt been on fb.com for 2 months, yet when I visit newspapers and scroll to bottom I see facebook comments section with my profile picture on. Meaning FB will now count me as an DAU/MAU. Look beyond those selective statistics, FB.com is dead.
    • RobAtticus 9y ago
      >Look beyond those selective statistics, FB.com is dead. That's a bit of a strange conclusion when their financials show increasing revenue and increasing profit, quarter over quarter and year over year. From 2016 to 2017 their revenue grew almost 50% as did their Net Income[0]. It's not all roses of course, but it's hardly dead. [0] https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AFB&fstype=ii&authuser=0&hl=en&ei=9_OBWtiJD4at2AaO_YiwBQ https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AFB&fstype=ii&a...
      • cycrutchfield 9y ago
        They are squeezing every last drop out of their userbase, but the numbers do not lie. Decreasing DAU/MAU in their most profitable demographics means that their revenue numbers will eventually suffer.
• krn1p4n1c 9y ago
  The US hasn't been the focus for several years. Africa/India/Asia were far more important than sustaining US numbers.
  • Slansitartop 9y ago
    > The US hasn't been the focus for several years. Africa/India/Asia were far more important than sustaining US numbers. I figured they were only important to keep of the facade of forever increasing user growth. If North America and Western Europe aren't were the bulk Facebook's revenue is coming from (and where most of its focus in placed), I'd be very surprised.
    • krn1p4n1c 9y ago
      They are the bulk of its revenue, but my point was that average daily/monthly were already peaked by most counters and growth markets were a higher priority. Why do you think they paid so much for WhatsApp.
  • opportune 9y ago
    I'd guess that 500-700 million people in the world from $50k+ GDP/capita countries are actually a lot more valuable for advertisers than the billions from $5k GDP/capita countries. Africa/India/Asia may indeed be driving growth but not all users are equally valuable to Facebook
• kawfey 9y ago
  Facebook still hasn't lost me and my group of 25-something friends, but we have pretty much all turned off notifications, dabble in disabling our profile every now and then, and only rationalize not deleting it for saying hi to grandma, creating and RSVPing to events, and the ubiquity of Facebook Messenger. The only ones posting (or at least the only posts that facebook shows me) are a mixture of advertising, extremely politically driven posts and links, someone's birthday, and a random smattering of generic posts from friends with whom you don't keep contact. Our primary social media is group chats, texting, and snapchat, and reddit.
• mrguyorama 9y ago
  My biggest problem in using Facebook is that I simply have nothing worth sharing. I never take pictures, and I talk to all my friends on a regular basis, so posting things would be redundant. I've discounted Facebook as a way to meet people. I purposely avoid using a desktop to access Facebook on the once every few months occasion where I need to copy-paste anything from my group chat with highschool friends. I just don't see any reason to strengthen my account on the platform
• fg8qfg8fg8 9y ago
  good.
• swlkr 9y ago
  I deleted FB a few years ago, I’m surprised how bad it’s gotten. I’m not surprised that more people are either just not logging in anymore or just occasionally.
  • Caveman_Coder 9y ago
    I deleted my FB a few years ago too. I ended up getting back on and only connecting with close family that live out of state. I don't follow any brands or watch any corporate content either. I still find value in it because I can see the cool pictures my sister posts and quickly send out family updates. I'd never connect with casual friends from college or co-workers though.
• garganzol 9y ago
  Never signed up on Facebook. I always treated that offering as a convoluted waste of time. Personal preferences aside, I always wondered what happens to Facebook posts 1 month after publishing. They usually look like something (at Facebook?) scavenges pictures, photos and makes them 404. It moves so fast and breaks so many things, literally.
  • RandallBrown 9y ago
    My photos from 13 years ago are all still there.
• thestepafter 9y ago
  I signed up for Facebook recently after deleting my account 9 years ago. I was banned within 30 minutes after updating my work history and a profile photo. Submitted an appeal with my drivers license and passport. Unbanned in a couple hours. Kept building my profile over the next couple days and was banned 3 more times. Submitted appeals each time with all the requested information. Nothing malicious, political, or sexual posted, just the average guy setting up a Facebook account. Been banned for over a month now, finally just gave up. They never emailed me other than the initial welcome to Facebook email. Just had to try my login every couple hours to see if I was still banned.
  • rhacker 9y ago
    There's no reason why this should be down-voted it's actually probably 5% of the reason people are leaving - bad UX in the security area - they have some bad ML algo that is banning and doing this to people. Only facebook probably knows the true numbers around this problem, but it's significant - it happened to me too.
    • r00fus 9y ago
      If the solution is that bad, I presume the problem is leagues worse.
  • JoshMnem 9y ago
    You came out ahead -- you are not a user of Facebook, which is far more productive than being a user of Facebook.
  • RodgerTheGreat 9y ago
    Sounds like facebook has a pretty effective scam for getting people to give them driver's licenses, passports and untold other treasure troves of personal information.
    • StanislavPetrov 9y ago
      Twitter has been using a similar scam for a couple of years now. After several years of Twitter, my account was locked and they demanded my cell number to "verify" my account. No thanks - said goodbye to Twitter and never looked back.
• Unkechaug 9y ago
  How many of these users simply aged out of the demographic? I wouldn't be surprised if it's just a combination of people aging out and not too many new users signing up.
  • Sohcahtoa82 9y ago
    That was my first thought, too. How many of the "users under 25" simply turned 26? It's like an old article I saw somewhere about teen pregnancy dropping heavily once they reach 20 years old...
  • pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    Let's assume 25% of the USA population is on Facebook (2.2B of ~8B in the World apparently are, it's probably higher). So we have about 80M USA FB users. About 40/320 or 1/8 are in the 20-24 age group; but they're more likely to be represented on FB, so let's say 1:6 of USA FB users are 20-24. So, back of the napkin we can expect around 13M/5 or ~2.5M Facebook users to age out of the under-25 age-group in USA in a year. It's around the same ball-park. Disclaimer: I'm recovering from flu.
• rajeshpant 9y ago
  It is surprising that most folks reading HN are in some kind of bubble. I see people here commenting how they have never used facebook since last X years and they are fearful about facebook and privacy. Are you kidding me? FB has 2.2Billion Monthly active users.
  • wepple 9y ago
    Really, it surprises you? A website tailored to typically well-educated people with a strong interest in science and technology who all speak or can communicate in English and put some kind of value in online discussion. That’s already 0.00001% of the population, of course we’re a bubble. The question is: is HN ahead of the curve with distaste toward FB, or an anomaly? There’s another thread on this post discussing just that.
    • rajeshpant 9y ago
      Not necessarily ahead of curve, most normal people don't care about the feed algorithm. They are happy to see what their friends and family are doing.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • randomsearch 9y ago
    The problem here is that MAU statistic is extremely suspect.
    • rajeshpant 9y ago
      I agree. but the deviation is not that huge.
• rhacker 9y ago
  I HAD to sign up for an account - don't ask why. After about 1 hour of usage trying to do what I had to get done, it REQUIRED a phone number for security purposes. Seconds after I entered the phone number (for security purposes) I was blasted by about 400 recommended connections including some ex-girlfriends that I'm sure my wife would LOVE me to be friends with. Go facebook. I'm guessing those people got notified that I was there too, but at least I was able to delete the account.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • netsharc 9y ago
    The other side probably got notified too. I remember seeing a peculiar name on FB's "you might know..." list, I wondered where I saw that name before. I looked in my mail inbox, and it's a guy who sold me something on eBay a few years ago. I never gave Facebook access to my mail account, but what I'm pretty sure happened is that guy did just that. FB saw that we exchanged some emails, and said (probably to both parties): "Hey, be FB-friends with this person!". I wonder what the security implications are. I think a security researcher added a lot of phone numbers into his phone and let Facebook read it, and Facebook responded with names and faces of those numbers.
    • x0 9y ago
      RE the phone number thing, isn't that common knowledge? You can type in any phone number, and if their privacy settings allow it, their profile pops up.
    • johnpowell 9y ago
      This happened to me too. There was a guy on Reddit looking for help setting up Plex on a dedicated server. I run a small chat room and helped him out in there. But we did exchange a few emails. I use fastmail and he uses gmail. A few days later he pops in the people you might know thing. At the time I did not have a cell phone so I am assuming he gave the app access to his contacts or something. I think it is safe to say Facebook has a pretty detailed profile about you even if you never made an account.
• harlanji 9y ago
  Funny timing, I am deleting my account now. Decided on messaging, cropped friends, posted notice, and am messaging and unfriending individuals after short convo. It's been kinda fun. Own-domain email setup, and page with my name in meta tags for search engines. I'm 33 and "immature" fwiw
• anilshanbhag 9y ago
  Well this isn't as bad as it seems. I'm 24; almost my entire friend circle has gone from using Facebook to using Instagram for posting photos and WhatsApp for messaging. Still within Facebook ecosystem.
• dvt 9y ago
  FB seems to be on its deathbed. It's obvious that it's completely lost on young users (18-25), and even young adults (25-35) are just about done with it. Serious question: is now the time to disrupt? What would the "next" MySpace/FB look like? Ignoring techie "features" like decentralization, what do you think users actually care about?
  • workthrowaway27 9y ago
    The only thing I use it for is messaging people whose phone number I don't have and a couple of groups that have events near me.
  • dtech 9y ago
    Whatsapp, Instagram and Snapchat are already far in the process of obsoleting Facebook and scooping up leaving and young users. 2 of those 3 are now owned by Facebook
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • adjkant 9y ago
      And how long until Instagram suffers the same fate?
      • code_duck 9y ago
        They have already been decreasing of the charm of Instagram by adding more and more features… Basically, turning it into Facebook. In the large circle of artists that I work in, a slogan that is being oft repeated lately is “make Instagram chronological again”. I do use Facebook, but I don’t post much content as when I do, it’s almost useless because they don’t show my content to anyone. Instagram is increasingly the same way.
      • dannyr 9y ago
        I think demise of Instagram is bit far off. I'm traveling the world right now and observing people on the street and a lot of people browse Instagram more than any other apps.
• BlackjackCF 9y ago
  I think at this point, between Facebook Messenger and Instagram, I don't really use Facebook for anything else other than events. If Facebook spun out its own events app, I would probably stop using Facebook core altogether.
  • dkasper 9y ago
    They have that. Facebook Local is events + places. https://www.facebook.com/local/ https://www.facebook.com/local/
• Slansitartop 9y ago
  Here's another good HN post from today about Facebook that didn't seem to get enough traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16358148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16358148
• olivermarks 9y ago
  Regardless of user age, I have no idea what FB is 'for' anymore. The whole egosphere thing of celebrating your latest life success with posts is only ok for a small social circle. The idea of a captive user being fed 'feeds' has killed off that intimacy amongst friends in an already elderly and visually sterile environment. I have a FB account and around 1400 'friends'. I rarely post on the account except to post articles about FB's shortcomings and in private groups about old cars I own, which is a sort of useless unsearchable lightweight forum use, a bit like the old AOL groups. Why post comments about yourself to people you have only ever met online? The only reason I can think of is for the self congratulatory ego boost...and under 25's clearly don't get a hit off doing this on their grandpa's online channel...
  • anigbrowl 9y ago
    I use it for two things, albeit on different accounts. For myself, I keep in touch with a small circle of friends (20/~400) for personal stuff - family news, similar sense of humor etc., and participate in a number of groups, in much the same way I would on HN. Groups are where it's at, really. Oh, and I follow some news pages on specific subjects. FB is generally a terrible way to get news but an OK way to filter it to pick up high-quality content that might otherwise get lost int he shuffle. My other accounts are purely for research, social network analysis and so on.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• batmansmk 9y ago
  eMarketer has been taking this kind of angle for years to get some audience: https://www.recode.net/2017/8/21/16181348/teenagers-millennials-users-facebook-instagram-snapchat-emarketer https://www.recode.net/2017/8/21/16181348/teenagers-millenni... The thing is that FB is actively tranferring the teens to Instagram and the overall audience is growing so...
• etrautmann 9y ago
  For all of those people saying that FB is dead, perhaps their core product is in decline among younger users, but that does not seem to be true for Instagram or Whatsapp. Those acquisitions seem to extend FB's fingers to the demographics that their core product is losing.
  • remir 9y ago
    I guess the next question is; how long until both Instagram and Whatsapp alienate their users and they switch to the "next big thing"?
• rmajere 9y ago
  I never post on fb because it insists on posting my every move to the world+grandma If only it were a little less social
• jedisct1 9y ago
  Facebook is about sharing memories, and "static" content. One can use Facebook to read the same "group" that has been around forever, or to looks at memories from the day/week/month/year. As a result, it's a good fit for people who are only occasionally online. Everybody else wants to live share what's happening right now. Whatsapp is great for this, as it allows instant group chats with ephemeral ad-hoc groups. Instagram is great to share what just happened, without a UI polluted with older and unrelated content.
• graeme 9y ago
  Facebook should watch out with Instagram. It feels considerably more draining now than it used to. There are messages, stories, suggested posts everywhere. On the search feed I often end up in auto-scrolling videos. These increase engagement and metrics. But, they produce an unwanted feeling of compulsion where instagram didn't before. I've uninstalled the app for a bit. I never felt like that about Instagram before, but I remember first feeling like that about Facebook years ago. If I'm right, what I'm feeling about instagram is a prelude to others feeling the same. Instagram usage will first go up, then down. I don't yet have that feeling about snapchat, though the new design is annoying. (Mixing in stories and messages) Oddly enough, it has nothing to do with ads. I used to see them, back when instagram felt fun. Now I don't.
  • adjkant 9y ago
    Bingo. They're going to pull the same drain and rake in money in the short term. They'll buy their next competitor and rinse/repeat.
  • mschuster91 9y ago
    > I don't yet have that feeling about snapchat, though the new design is annoying. I tried to try it out but even on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 when it came out it was unbearably slow and even not using the camera drained the battery (IIRC it is/was because Snapchat kept the camera on during the time the app was open in order to avoid the 1-2s lag of camera setup). I can't understand why and how kids and young people like it so much.
    • freehunter 9y ago
      >I can't understand why and how kids and young people like it so much. That. That right there is why they like it so much. Because you're not on it. Their parents and grandparents are on Facebook, but those parents and grandparents can't figure out how to use Snapchat or don't see why kids like it, and that is exactly why kids like it. It's the "adults can't see why kids love Cinnamon Toast Crunch" or "Trix is for kids" of their generation.
      • 9y ago
• bearbearbear 9y ago
  Because they turned 26..?
• ben_jones 9y ago
  Is this for deleted users or a marked drop in user activity. Because it takes concerted effort to actually delete a profile and have it remain deleted, it would be a much stronger signal of the platform's decline. Six years ago when my classmates and I applied to college we were changing our profiles to make them not appear on potential searches by admissions offices. This including faking names, pictures, etc. To me that was the moment Facebook became something I didn't want to be a part of, fake etc.
• MikeTLive 9y ago
  Facebook stopped being about friends and has become groups. Sharing is not between friends but between interest-groups. the worst is when your friends share garbage, and you view it, you start to see more garbage suggested to you. you can't "un-see" anything. the algorithm knows.
• heedlessly2 9y ago
  Facebook for my peers is now used for official announcements by users. 1. just got married/engaged 2. accepted to MBA/Law/Medical/other grad school 3. job offer from prestigious company such as McKinsey/Bain/ Google/FB/Apple 4. DSLR photos of exotic vacations either that or passive aggresive political viewpoints. Snapchat serves a completely different purpose and has the daily "realness" going for it
  • Apocryphon 9y ago
    Snapchat is micro-vlogging/live-streaming, Facebook is personal LinkedIn
• propman 9y ago
  A commenter here told me that it's now possible to delete Facebook while keeping messenger, so that's what I did. Don't miss it at all. Agree with other posters that it's annoying how anything you like or comment on is broadcasted to your entire feed. Makes you not want to comment or like amything.
• RafiqM 9y ago
  Time and time again I see the complaint that people want a 'Most Recent' news feed instead of algorithm-chosen and that's why they don't use Facebook anymore. This type of feed would be unusable for the vast majority of users. Why? Because of Page Likes. I struggled to find quantitative data on this, but I myself like over 600 pages, and I'm selective. Many people like over 1000. With a Most Recent news feed, those hundreds of pages would be posting multiple times a day vying for your attention. 100% reach, organic and zero cost? It's a marketers dream come true. Add to that, I really only want to see posts from maybe 20% of my 'friends', and I believe this to be representative of the average user. "Curate your friends list and page likes!", I hear you say. No. I'm not bothered unliking hundreds of pages and neither is the average user. Not to mention, I did chose to hear from these pages for a reason. For friends, it's mostly socially unacceptable to unfriend people even if you haven't talked to them for a few years. Hence, the algorithm that does the curating for me, because there's really no other way around it. ps. I'm taking some liberties here speaking for an average user. I welcome data that shows I'm incorrect. The best I could find was from 2013 so is irrelevant.
  • gaius 9y ago
    With a Most Recent news feed, those hundreds of pages would be posting multiple times a day vying for your attention Then people would simply only "like" things that they really liked and really wanted to see. This is a non-issue.
    • RafiqM 9y ago
      They already like too many things. The action has already happened, your suggestion would only apply for new users. And as I mentioned, I don't believe people will curate their feed by going to the effort of removing hundreds of page likes and friends. They'll just stop using it because that's too much work.
• AndrewKemendo 9y ago
  Didn't they plan for this with the acquisitions of Instagram, Whatsapp, and most recently tbh? They know the particular property of facebook.com can't last forever, so they go where the users are going. Last I checked Instagram is the hottest app out there for anyone 35 or under. As of last year at least Facebook, messenger and Instagram were each still in the top 5-10 most used apps. I feel like people somehow don't see facebook as the digital conglomerate that they are and focus on what is happening on facebook.com as though it's a harbinger of the rest of the company. Also, IMO they have the best Machine Learning (specifically vision) team on the planet and are consistently making amazing tools open source. That alone is worth a lot.
• dboreham 9y ago
  Facebook is becoming like how things would look if you did the wrong thing in SimCity: a dark gently smoking urban wasteland.
• wyclif 9y ago
  That explains why Snapchat and Instagram, which offer features for sharing photos and videos that disappear, are growing in popularity among this demographic Instagram is owned by Facebook. That's why I don't think Facebook is worried about migration off the parent app, they can just spin off endless trendy social apps and market them to target demographics under new names.
• habosa 9y ago
  I'm 25, so right on the edge of the demographic mentioned here. I have been using Facebook for 10+ years now, and I was pretty closed to quitting entirely about 2 months ago. And then suddenly ... my Facebook has been fixed. I had recently started "unfollowing" people who annoyed me and also un-liking all brands. Facebook has also done some recently algorithm changes. A year ago my Facebook was a randomly-ordered stream of nonsense that was 80% branded content and 20% of my most antagonistic "friends". Now it's a seemingly chronological view of what my Facebook friends are doing. If I leave Facebook and come back an hour later, it's basically the same feed with ~5 new posts on top. This makes it something I can actually check and not a black hole. I hope they continue in this direction. They've got fantastic ad targeting and if they keep users around they can probably keep their ARPU really high.
• olfactory 9y ago
  Facebook clings to dark patterns that surely appear to be "working" in the sense of generating engagement and ad spend. The problem is, younger users have a much better intuitive sense of those dark patterns because they must develop street smarts about how they can be misused (cyber bullying, revenge porn, deepfakes, etc.) I don't see how any responsible parent could put a video of his/her kid on Facebook when it's just a simple download away from being turned into someone's perverted deepfake, bullying fodder during junior high, etc. In fact I'd argue that it's irresponsible stewardship of a child's future online autonomy for a parent to post any pictures or data that could be easily misused/abused by his/her own Facebook network. This means pretty much all pics and videos. If this sounds silly, consider that Facebook makes deleting pictures one has uploaded a significant chore that requires 10x the number of clicks it ought to. When I think about deleting some of the old pics I've uploaded to FB that I'd rather take down, the thought of dealing with all the dark pattern speed bumps trying to make it difficult underscores the outright hostility Facebook feels toward its users. Recently Facebook had a bug where any Instagram account that had been linked to a Facebook account magically got the Facebook user's profile photo. Even this is a crass disregard for user privacy. Instagram is used much, much differently than Facebook and it's completely unreasonable to expect a user to wish to use the same profile photo. Young people are just a bit more savvy than the rest of us because their peers/foes/etc are more likely to have had the time and inclination to do minor mischief that Exploits Facebook's defaults. Younger users prefer Instagram or Snap largely because the privacy settings are less opaque and fewer dark patterns are used. This is probably why Facebook bought Instagram, and why Facebook has allowed the younger users to leave... The revenue generated by milking the older users must outweigh the value of having the younger users. After all, Facebook could easily create a linked Facebook account for all Instagram users and role out a new privacy pattern geared at the preferences of younger users if doing so would result in profit. But as it stands, younger users are happy to engage with Instagram and Whatsapp and Facebook is not throwing away any of the behavioral profiling data, so eventually when the platforms change/evolve Facebook has lost nothing. Analogously, Facebook isn't wasting time feeling hurt about users not loving its namesake platform. The company is far broader and more encompassing than the namesake app. If you are using a Facebook owned product and generating data in it, you are helping move ad inventory and doing your part to help Facebook make money.
• oblib 9y ago
  "12- to 17-year-old demographic declined by 9.9 percent in 2017" I'll offer those numbers are related to their parents already being there. Those kids will probably sign up or come back when they get a bit older.
  • err4nt 9y ago
    Why would they sign up…ever? What's the value proposition? Will their parents have left in a few years? When I joined Facebook (~2006/7) there was a very clear value to me: my and my college classmates could send messages, collaborate, and organize events. Now it seems like a wasteland, I really have no idea how I could put Facebook to work for me, and since not everybody I need to collaborate with it is on Facebook (some are very opposed to it) it's useless as a platform for organizing events compared to other event-planning platforms. Why would anybody ever need Facebook?
    • anigbrowl 9y ago
      Groups. there are tons of groups, open, private, and secret, and it's easy and handy to build/organize a small community on there than through X or Y private forum website that people have to log in separately to. People frequently try to build groups up to a critical mass and then move them off FB for privacy and/or profit, but most people are in multiple groups and there's no discernible advantage in moving to a different platform for semi-casual socialization. That's why lots of other social networks for subgroups launch to great fanfare and are then deserted 6 months to a year later. They just don't have enough critical mass to overcome Facebook's network effect on a permanent basis so people keep going back to FB because that's where everyone else is for many practical purposes.
    • oblib 9y ago
      "Why would they sign up…ever?" They grow up. When you're a teen, or even young adult, you don't want your parents snooping on you, but as you grow a bit older you find that you do want to keep in touch with family.
• jostmey 9y ago
  I log into Facebook about 6 times a year. Each time it is a waste of my time
• jonbarker 9y ago
  Basically all social networks with real names are an extension of one's professional brand. This is not good for facebook in its efforts to attract kids because 1) what parent wants to sign their kid up for a permanent professional brand and 2) what kid is thinking about their professional brand anyway?
• overgard 9y ago
  I'm 32. I'm at the point where I'll update my facebook about once a month just so it doesn't look like a total ghost town if someone adds me, but otherwise I just stay away from it. I find that the structure of it encourages people to post things that just appeal to the lowest common denominator. My feed is full of trite positivity memes and cute girls taking selfies and saying stuff like "Coffee with friends!" It's.. fine? I just don't feel any connection to other people when I'm on there, and I don't really feel free to actually state real ideas or opinions, so it barely even feels particularly "social" to me. It's just a lot of people acting as their own PR department mixed with a lot of people patting each other on the back.
• internetman55 9y ago
  hmmm I don't really look at facebook more than once every few months for like 2min. I have fb messenger to talk to my friends and I don't really care about what goes on on the real site
• cowmix 9y ago
  My kids who are 19 and 15 barely care about Facebook. My oldest uses Messenger, but that's about it. Twitter OTOH seems to appeal to both of them, still.
• DenisM 9y ago
  Facebook will have lost the game when no one here will care enough to comment whether Facebook has lost the game.
• poisonarena 9y ago
  sucks, cuz it was a good idea in the beginning.. also got me some girlfriends over the years..
• medyadaily 9y ago
  Facebook is one of the companies that banned the word Kurdistan on the request of Turkish government. that means for Kurds in Iraq and Iran which unlike Turkey, the word kurdistan is not only not banned but also legally is an official federal region and official province name, we could not choose Kurdistan as our hometown in the profile. I personally spent more than 10 years reporting this "bug" but it was never solved. later I found out it was an internal guidance from facebook to ban the word Kurdistan. I am glad to see such evil organization is going down the tube.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• temporallobe 9y ago
  This just demonstrates FBs switch to a different demographic. The user base has actually increased according to TFA, but it doesn't say which age group. I am betting the over 55 crowd, judging by the number of political and religious posts on my feed. Yes, I still have an account but I have removed all personal information, pictures, and deleted all my posts. I also go months between using it. I can't bring myself to totally remove my account though.
• anonytrary 9y ago
  Ha! They lost me when I was 18. I dunno about your moms, but my mom taught be not to share all of personal information with everybody in the world.
• mettamage 9y ago
  Facebook has usefulness to me in three ways: 1. As a public opinion board. I post a question on my wall and people answer. 2. Chatting with my friends. 3. One Facebook group where me and my friends are in. This is my setup to not get completely sucked into Facebook: 1. I changed my real accounts name to a fictional name that is related to my name. I changed my lastname to a French version of it (my lastname is a noun) and then I swapped my first and lastname. So anyone who Google's me on my real name can't find me. 2. I created a fake account with my real name and a modicum amount of friends (at random) in order to not get detected by Facebook that it is a fake account. I put the best pictures of me on this account. Now when people Google me, they see nice pictures. 3. My main browser has my fake account on auto-login. But it has my actual account on the auto-login of Messenger. This means when I go to Messenger, I can actually chat. And when I get nonsense (e.g. login with Facebook or sucked into some feature of Facebook) I get my fake account. Since it has a modicum of friends that I don't care about and nothing on it, there is not much I can do. 4. I set my main Facebook account on auto-login on my second browser. In this way I can still write wall posts and post/read about stuff in my Facebookgroup. Also, I installed a wall eridactor plugin. I don't think I'll ever be able to completely get away from Facebook, but I am trying my best to keep its use to the things I want to do with it.
  • leke 9y ago
    Facebook to me is that place where everyone is. I love reddit and have been there about a decade, but I'm the only person I know there. If I meet someone new, or join a local group, I can always catch up, or connect with them on Facebook. I think Facebook in general acts like a greedy business with data gathering and over advertising. It's toxic in that respect. It's a shame something as "open" as Diaspora didn't take off. I still think a new social platform might still arise from something like a chat app (like WhatsApp), but ultimately risk getting bought by FaceBook as they fear losing their stronghold in the market.
• iddan 9y ago
  These analytics are really dumb considered Facebook Inc. still holds these users in Instagram...
• yummybear 9y ago
  It's a good start, but there's a long way to go.
• johnnydoe9 9y ago
  This explains the text message me and a friend received today. https://i.imgur.com/ErvNLOc.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ErvNLOc.jpg
• pgt 9y ago
  An ex-Facebook employee told me that to stay productive, developers unfollow everyone and only use Facebook for events - it's too addictive otherwise. My advice was: sell your shares, because developers are canaries for customers.
• RandomCSGeek 9y ago
  The masses generally follow whatever is trendy. People initially followed facebook, and when Whatsapp and Instagram came, they followed them. FB is going through it's natural life cycle, and we will see it desperately trying to survive as it's stats get negative and shares dwindle. This is problem with any service where users care about userbase. For netflix, userbase is not a concern for users. Hence such services are more likely to survive long term, as long as they keep themselves relevant. FB, Whatsapp and Instagram however, are destined to die very soon(I'd bet a lifecycle of 2 decades). Users are eventually going to move on.
• ktaube 9y ago
  I wonder how many users are still on Facebook just because it's the only way to authenticate in Tinder.
• gerardnll 9y ago
  A friend of mine, cancelled the account 2 weeks ago. For months I was also thinking about closing it too, so I finally did it after him. Few days after having talked about it with an ex colleague, he also closed his account too. The amount of useless information, the irrelevance of it, ads, privacy concerns, the fact that you just care about your most intimate friends, and not about that ones you connected in the beggining when you though 'oh look, my friend from primary school!', most people does no longer provide interesting content, just conversations about politics (not always sane debates), photos to generate envy/pose... and realizing that Facebook just does not give you anything good, just depression or low self steem... Also the fact that when you are bored you just check social media instead of doing something useful... All of this made me realize I had got to close it. And I feel better, and I'm sure I would feel even better if I also close my Instagram account. Nowadays I just keep the Instagram app on my phone. I also got tired of toxic comments on Twitter and I check it much less often now. I feel, one of the reasons we registered on Facebook was to be more social but that ended up being the opposite and now we want to feel 'contact' again, and you can only get that by physical interaction and real conversation, because a postcard or a call has never been the same than a real conversation and a hug. This is just the beggining. I've been on Facebook for 10 years, and I'm sure a lot of millenials are starting to close their accounts, or at least they don't even use it.
• nicky0 9y ago
  Facebook is indispensable for me because of groups. A group for my running club, a group for my cycling club, other local groups. All activities are coordinate using FB & Messenger. However I also have a zero friend policy on Facebook. Having zero friends, plus the "only friends of friends can send me a friend request" setting, means nobody can send a friend request. I suggest you try it, it's glorious.
• mcs_ 9y ago
  Over 36 here. I keep post my position in this kind of news. I never used it. I will never use it. It will close before I will use it. I could consider to use it if hired or paid to test it.
• aws_ls 9y ago
  Yep. My anecdotal example. My elder one, created an account as soon as they turned 13. The younger one, couldn't care less. Meanwhile sometime few years ago, I also deleted my FB account. My God, there are only a few tech products, I hate as much. Lot of solutions on offer. But IMHO, only one thing will fix it. Forcing it to open its protocol. A mail++ (for social) which will just allow all the products to compete in the open. They can compete on UI, the feed sort algorithm etc, among other things. Nobody will hate on Facebook as much. Its market cap will go down, but Zuck can sleep better.[1] [1] “I don’t think he sleeps well at night,” from https://www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-2-years-of-hell/ https://www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-...
• oflannabhra 9y ago
  I have a theory: Facebook's biggest problem is that it gives people what they want, but what people want is not what makes them happy. Algorithmic recommendations are tailored to capture people for as long as possible, but the short-sightedness of "engagement" erodes the long-term benefit for the user. I think this applies to YouTube as well, or other algorithmically generated "feeds".
  • marcodave 9y ago
    > Facebook [...] gives people what they want, but what people want is not what makes them happy I have a feeling that Facebook is following the same decline of generalistic TV, which, similarly to Facebook - contains mostly ads and crappy/shocking/debatable content - its userbase is becoming more and more elderly - teens start to snob it and move on to the next cool thing - people get bored of it and decide not to bother with it anymore
• petraeus 9y ago
  Facebook has turned into a platform to spam you with ads no wonder their losing marketshare
• pankajdoharey 9y ago
  I hope this is the beginning of the end, of an era.