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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

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.
- DerfNet 9y ago
  >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. These used to be called "forums" and were very popular until Facebook invented groups and murdered them all.
  - colanderman 9y ago
    Forums traditionally have been difficult for non-technical users to set up (requiring at a minimum configuing and paying for a shared web host). Certainly I don't recall any popular "managed forum" service pre-Facebook.
lev99 9y ago
They release some information in their earnings report about user activity. [0] Daily Active Users = 1.40 Billion. Monthly Active Users = 2.13 Billion. It's hard to extract too many statistics out of this. It's just fair to say that if someone used Facebook at all in the last 30 days, they probably (>50% chance) used Facebook today. [0] https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2018/Facebook-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2017-Results/default.aspx https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
- zjaffee 9y ago
  Considering they don't release metrics such as average/median time spent, there is no way to know what degree those users are actually engaging vs simply clicking on some spammy push notification at some point in the last month (which get increasingly spammy the longer you haven't been engaged).
sevilo 9y ago
same, I used to be fairly active on facebook during my highschool and college years, ever since it started filling my feed with politics, ads and junk I've been much less engaged with facebook. I disabled my account for a period of time and now I'm only hanging on to it because 1) it's still the one app that most of the people in my circle have accounts on 2) for organizing events 3) advertisement purpose

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.

DerfNet 9y ago
>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. These used to be called "forums" and were very popular until Facebook invented groups and murdered them all.
- colanderman 9y ago
  Forums traditionally have been difficult for non-technical users to set up (requiring at a minimum configuing and paying for a shared web host). Certainly I don't recall any popular "managed forum" service pre-Facebook.

lev99 9y ago

They release some information in their earnings report about user activity. [0] Daily Active Users = 1.40 Billion. Monthly Active Users = 2.13 Billion. It's hard to extract too many statistics out of this. It's just fair to say that if someone used Facebook at all in the last 30 days, they probably (>50% chance) used Facebook today. [0] https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2018/Facebook-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2017-Results/default.aspx https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

zjaffee 9y ago
Considering they don't release metrics such as average/median time spent, there is no way to know what degree those users are actually engaging vs simply clicking on some spammy push notification at some point in the last month (which get increasingly spammy the longer you haven't been engaged).

sevilo 9y ago

same, I used to be fairly active on facebook during my highschool and college years, ever since it started filling my feed with politics, ads and junk I've been much less engaged with facebook. I disabled my account for a period of time and now I'm only hanging on to it because 1) it's still the one app that most of the people in my circle have accounts on 2) for organizing events 3) advertisement purpose