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Note: personal opinion bellow It seems to me that the overall interest in Facebook is decreasing. The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added t

Note: personal opinion bellow It seems to me that the overall interest in Facebook is decreasing. The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years. It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving. Still, Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition. We don't see any news about their user base decreasing and news channels don't seem to dislike them. Facebook is doing a good job making sure their biggest three platforms are seem as independent from one another, keeping Instagram and WhatsApp almost free from controversy. Personally I see no loss for them here. Besides, they will promptly acquire any new players that look promising, or shamelessly copy them as they did with Snapchat.

simonsarris 8y ago
> The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years. I actually found some great rugs (owners did not know what they had!) and furniture on the FB marketplace. Much better finds than on craigslist, and easier to verify that the seller is a human.
- oooooooooo000 8y ago
  Indeed. There sure are a lot of accusations of FB lying in these comments, but it seems people have no problem upvoting much more obvious lies like "FB hasn't launched any new features in 2 years". Whatever fits the HN narrative goes, I guess.
  - rhcom2 8y ago
    Slightly pedantic but Facebook Marketplace was launched in 2016 so the point could still stand.
    - oooooooooo000 8y ago
      The point doesn't still stand, but I'll save you all the googling: FB launched Watch on August 9, 2017. You could also say "only in the last year" and it'd be easy to find something else with 2 minutes of googling.
      - jessaustin 8y ago
        Oh Zuck, don't feel bad. You still have lots of money and a beautiful family.
      - barbecue_sauce 8y ago
        He said interesting feature.
  - asveikau 8y ago
    Relax dear facebook employee, go treat yourself to a burrito at Teddy's or something from the Sweet Shop.
- jdfellow 8y ago
  I'll second the notion of Facebook Marketplace being a good new feature. You can even pay the seller in-app, which is handy.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  Agreed. Craigslist was tainted by the unsavory element of prostitution and stolen goods and isn’t a resource that I seek out. Facebook marketplaces seem like what eBay was in the 90s.
  - magduf 8y ago
    If I'm buying a used piece of furniture or whatever, I don't give a shit about prostitution going on elsewhere on the site. What's really hurt Craigslist is all the scammers. You can't post anything of value on there without some scammer responding and telling you they're going to send you a cashier's check and have a personal assistant pick it up. You don't have this problem at all on Facebook AFAICT. When someone responds to your ad on Facebook Marketplace, it's a real person who actually wants to buy your old junk.
    - Spooky23 8y ago
      The scammers aren’t there because of prostitution, both categories are there because Craigslist attracts unsavory parties and does little or nothing to police them.
      - magduf 8y ago
        No, that's not correct at all. The difference is that Craigslist has no real accounts. When you get a response to your CL ad, even if the responder has a CL account, you don't see this, you just get a text message or phone call or email. With FB, everything is through the site because of the way it's centralized, and you can see the account and full name of the person who's contacting you. On CL, it's trivial for scammers to respond to ads with automated programs, but on FB they'd have to create a real-looking fake account in your area, complete with pictures, some kind of history, etc., which is a far greater undertaking. In short, the formats of the sites make all the difference. CL was created to preserve anonymity and not be a centralized social network, but that feature is also its undoing because it facilitates scamming.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    Craigslist was tainted by the unsavory element of prostitution and stolen goods and isn’t a resource that I seek out. IME, Facebook Marketplace is far from free of scams and stolen merchandise. That's why some people call it Fencebook.
- shadowbannedtoo 8y ago
  The Page/Group feature is nice, especially if you don't have many friends. I wish it wasen't though. I don't like the company. Oh yea, I've never used my real name on FB. I do have a Page that's getting some traction, but I don't know if I want to use my real name. In all honestly, I think the people who like my Page are just being nice. The "likes" are all comming from one war torn country? (Oh yea, I'm to lazy to go to my desktop(incognito mode), and see if I'm still shadow banned. Please up-vote/down-vote me if you happen to see this. I must have pissed off the dong? I still think about the email I got from HN. It was basically get lost. I don't think I'm that bad, but I was irritating HN?)
- DanTheManPR 8y ago
  I've been surprised by how good Facebook's local classified ads implementation is, I've been having better success with it than Craigslist. It's an odd platform. They have a lot of great features for outreach and discovery of local events and groups of people, leveraged by the strong network effect. For contact with local groups of people with similar interests, and for planning events, for group communication, it is an effective tool and one that has enriched my life in substantial ways. The one thing that I really hate is the front page feed. It was probably a great business decision on their part to emphasize microblogging, as it definitely increased engagement in the platform. It also turned everyone into memelords who just re-share funny cat pictures, pyramid schemes and incendiary political propaganda. I tried just filtering that out with the "see fewer posts like this", but I turns out that people just don't really post anything but image macros and articles anymore.
  - drdeadringer 8y ago
    > I've been surprised by how good Facebook's local classified ads implementation is, I've been having better success with it than Craigslist. If you've tried it, how do you think Facebook's classifieds compare to NextDoor's classifieds?
bad_user 8y ago
Instagram is almost unusable due to the ads. Every 3 or 4 posts you see an ad. The only way Instagram isn't obnoxious is on the desktop, in a browser, with an ad-blocker installed. I love WhatsApp, but they haven't found good ways to monetize it yet and one of these days they'll ruin it.
- marssaxman 8y ago
  I found the instagram app to be unusable as you describe, but https://www.instagram.com https://www.instagram.com works fine on my phone using firefox with an adblocker.
  - CamelCaseName 8y ago
    Interestingly enough, direct messaging is only available in app. A workaround had to be created by an ex-Instagram employee.
    - marssaxman 8y ago
      I guess that explains why I don't think of Instagram as a messaging service. What is the workaround?
- itsthewrongway 8y ago
  I use the Instagram website on my iPhone with safari and no ad-blocker installed and have never seen an ad once.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  > but they haven't found good ways to monetize it yet and one of these days they'll ruin it. What I think is ad supportted _anything_ turns to crap eventually. It's a toxic business model.
- hnick 8y ago
  One feature (limitation) of Instagram is that you can't include clickable links in a post message. So if you're running a business or are a personality of interest, you might share something that your followers might actually care to look into in more depth off-platform. But then you have to tell them to check your profile for your one allowed link, go to your site, search for the product/blog/video - or you pay for an ad with links enabled.
MR4D 8y ago
I thought FB was integrating their messaging platforms? That seemed to make all the news rounds a month ago. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-messenger.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-insta... [1] https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-speaks-on-whatsapp-instagram-messenger-merger/ https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-speaks-on-whats...
- mykowebhn 8y ago
  When I read that I immediately thought it was a bad decision on Facebook's part. With all the negative press FB has been receiving, it would seem wise to dissociate Whatsapp and Instagram from FB in the minds of the public.
- smacktoward 8y ago
  Integrating the backends of the messaging systems, not the frontends. There will still be separate apps called "Messenger," "Whatsapp," "Instagram," etc., but they'll just be different fixtures set on top of identical plumbing. This approach opens up exciting new opportunities for market segmentation via badge engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badge_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badge_engineering ... in much the same way that Ford (say) could design one car and then sell it to very different audiences as the Ford Taurus, Mercury Sable, and Lincoln Continental.
  - MR4D 8y ago
    I don’t disagree, but there seemed to be a lot of a publicity around a backend tech change, and to me, it is that publicity that undoes the whole idea of keeping businesses separated. As a side example, everyone knows that Coke makes Diet Coke, but many don’t know that they make Sprite. The Sprite model seems to be a better approach than FB’s new Diet Coke approach.
  - prolepunk 8y ago
    I believe this is a bit more nefarious than a car manufacturer who is trying make you pay for a car slightly more. This is actively deceiving people into believing their privacy is safe by using products that have nothing to do with facebook.
time0ut 8y ago
I deleted my account years ago, but ended up creating a fake account under a fictitious identity for the odd event organized through Facebook. I log in every so often just to see what's up. It appears to be a mixture of paid content and two random friends posting memes. I have to think people are deriving some value from it, but I cannot imagine what it is.
- kristopolous 8y ago
  Just like with twitter, it all depends on who you follow; Some content is dramatically better than others. And just like with twitter, most of the content is essentially garbage.
  - rconti 8y ago
    Agreed. And I think this is one reason I love FB and can't stand Twitter. I kept buying into the "follow important people on Twitter" and it's just crap. I don't care what a noted Icelandic volcanologist retweeted about canaries. I don't care what my favorite F1 driver retweeted about english football. I don't care. I don't follow "influencers" because I don't care what they think, but I thought at least getting things from the horse's mouth, as it were, would be interesting, but it's just not. I follow friend and family on facebook. If they post crap, it's because they have stupid things to say. I don't have many friends who I think are stupid. Obviously you can follow celebrities on facebook and only follow friends on twitter but it doesn't feel like they're made for that use case, the 'reverse' of what I use it for.
    - zf00002 8y ago
      I feel the same way about twitter. The only time I ever visit is when some service I use isn't working and I want to see if they've said anything about it being down (or it's just me).
    - dvtrn 8y ago
      Obviously you can follow celebrities on facebook and only follow friends on twitter but it doesn't feel like they're made for that use case, the 'reverse' of what I use it for. Someone here not long ago on HN opened my eyes to the 'lists' feature of Twitter, it's been a remarkable improvement for me with the platform. "IRL" friends in one list, "Net" friends in another, sports commentary (because that's a thing I'm into), etc. etc. Crap is more or less 'siloed'. I wish twitter promoted the feature more, to be honest, I think it can help with some of the gripes you have, if not for you maybe for others as it did with my experience on the platform.
victor106 8y ago
Note:- I have been off FB for the past 5 years or so. As much as I hate FB and its abhorrent privacy policies, there are a very large population who do not care about privacy. I have some in my household who don't and FB's latest financial results prove it.
- jordigh 8y ago
  Everyone cares about privacy. They just aren't keenly aware that they're losing it. If you meet someone who doesn't care about privacy, ask them, can I borrow your phone and browse through your contacts, your conversations, and your pictures? Almost nobody will say yes unless they are very close to and intimate with you. I think John Oliver did a pretty good job of framing the Snowden revelations in terms of "the NSA can see your penis". That's a good angle to make people care.
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    I don't think your analogy is very good. it's true that many (maybe even most) people have secrets that they would be embarrassed to share with their friends, family, or coworkers. if you asked them whether they would be okay with letting some stranger who they would never meet look through their phone, they might not do it for free, but I bet a lot of people would do it for $5-10.
    - jordigh 8y ago
      That's not it. Offering people 10 bucks won't change that most say "no" when you ask them to borrow their phone and snoop through everything. Instead, it's that the whole loss of privacy is impersonalised. When you see my face, the face of someone who just asked to borrow your phone, when it's clear a person is going to be looking through it, that's when you say "no". But when Facebook is harvesting data about you, it doesn't feel like a person is doing it. It feels like some abstract machine or algorithm or a faceless corporation is doing it. They even promise that humans aren't individually looking at your data. So people bank on that impersonality. The data may be collected, but who cares, nobody is actually really looking at it, right? The truth is that people do often look at it, despite all the promises and everything. That's what you have to convey and that's what John Oliver was trying to establish with his angle.
tombert 8y ago
> Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition You're not wrong, but I find it a bit frustrating how much resistance I get whenever I try and suggest using Signal instead of Whatsapp. As far as I can tell, it has pretty much all the features of Whatsapp that I use, without all the spying.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
  I'm having some pretty good success getting people to switch to Signal in my family. Keep up the good fight!
- nategri 8y ago
  I think there's a lot of "chat app fatigue." I've personally had 5 or 6 on my phone in the past year and you'd have to drag me kicking and screaming into installing even one more of the damned things.
- jjrh 8y ago
  No one wants to install ANOTHER app just to talk to you. Most of us already have at least 3 messaging apps they use on a daily basis and probably a whole lot more they use on a weekly basis.
  - sm4rk0 8y ago
    But why WhatsApp is one of those 3 and Signal is ANOTHER app? Not so long ago WhatsApp was ANOTHER. Now it's not. What changed?
    - schwap 8y ago
      I don't remember WhatsApp ever being ANOTHER. It was the first cross-platform messaging app I ever used.
      - sm4rk0 8y ago
        Wikipedia says it was released in January 2009. Google Talk started in August 2005. For a GTalk user, it was "another".
ergothus 8y ago
> It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving. I'm not much of a user myself, but among my friends that use it heavily I've noted a number of complaints that it has gotten HARDER to use for their primary use: keeping up with friends. Their issue isn't that FB has become stale or boring, but that it has actively LOST ground relative to their purpose.
- ArtDev 8y ago
  Fb needs you to be able to filter the news feed.
stcredzero 8y ago
It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving. The problem with Facebook, is that either it's boring, or it's not boring, and in that case it's often far worse. Facebook latched onto the fact that outrage measures as "engagement" then other people latched onto that fact and started to use Facebook for their own outrage mongering purposes. Still, Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition. We don't see any news about their user base decreasing and news channels don't seem to dislike them. Facebook is doing a good job making sure their biggest three platforms are seem as independent from one another, keeping Instagram and WhatsApp almost free from controversy. So one company, three brands? If I were to start my own crowdfunding app, I'd have one app with three "skins" and three different brands, each a different level of "edginess." In the Terms of Service would be the discretion for the site to "shift" your account from one of the three to another. The only effect of this, would be to shift the public information around the creator and subscriptions from one site to another. I would do this, so that "maintaining our brand" would never become an issue in funding creators, even edgy or downright controversial ones.
- b1r6 8y ago
  I find that to be a really intriguing idea. Offering a gradient instead of platform ultimatums. Could this scale, is the question?
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    Could this scale, is the question? In a way, it would be like shadowbanning, but more open.
  - 1stcity3rdcoast 8y ago
    YouTube has YouTube Kids plus different levels of content filtering available to users. Similar concept, in a way.
    - stcredzero 8y ago
      I wish they'd accommodate news and opinion in the same way. Maybe that way, they could keep their employees out of the business of censoring the internet in line with their particular biases.
darpa_escapee 8y ago
From what I've seen, Instagram is nearly 60% marketing/bot activity and ads are ruining the experience.
- president 8y ago
  I couldn't agree more and don't forget about "aggregator" type accounts that just steal original content from other users. I am predicting that Instagram will last another 2-3 years before people get tired of the non-stop ads and spam.
aylmao 8y ago
To be fair they added dating. It hasn't been released in the US, but it's out in Thailand, Colombia and Canada.
agumonkey 8y ago
maybe snapchat use case is so trivial and defined it doesn't need to change §
toomanybeersies 8y ago
> It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving Email hasn't had any new features added in decades, and people still use it. For me, Facebook is a tool. I use it to organise events and groups, and communicate with people. There's no other tool that works as well. I can have all my messages, groups, and events in one place. Almost everyone I know uses Facebook as well, so it's centralised. Speaking of event management, one very useful feature that Facebook has added recently is integrated payments for events. You can set up a Facebook event that has tickets, and people can purchase and pay for tickets through FB without having to go to the external ticket sales platform (moshtix, eventbrite etc.). I'm not sure if you can do ticketing directly through Facebook or if you need an external service, I haven't set up any events with tickets. Anyway, it's a very useful feature as it saves me having to sign up for different ticket platforms.
- saberworks 8y ago
  You may be missing a whole bunch of people like me who refuse to use facebook. And you'll just never know how many. If there's an event that is solely organized through facebook, I just don't go. If that means I miss out, I miss out.
  - toomanybeersies 8y ago
    I know exactly how many of my friends don't use Facebook, because I specifically remember which ones they are, so I can message them separately. It's inconvenient for me, but I'm happy enough to accomodate them.
    - saberworks 8y ago
      I read your post as you were some sort of event planner or something, not that you were using it in a personal group of friends. Please forgive the misunderstanding. I see a lot of groups/businesses that use facebook exclusively to communicate and organize events (like the local paintball field) and they are missing out on some people (I have no idea how to quantify how many). I'm sure they're reaching more people now (using facebook) than they were using whatever old method they were using.
Chazprime 8y ago
Agree on the lack of features front. I actually preferred the simpler design FB had back in 2013 or so before the big redesign. After that everything seemed to get busier and louder. Usability took a hit after that IMO.
- lancesells 8y ago
  I've not used Facebook in any personal capacity but the same thing happened to Twitter, especially in the speed department. Twitter is so slow now that I don't use it.
  - cherrypepsi 8y ago
    Every once in a while some random journalist decides to cry foul about the demise of Google Reader and the death of the Open Web, but the 2013 redesigns of Twitter and Facebook seem more likely to be the cause, both in functionality and policies. It was very clear cut at the time, Twitter did a 180° and left RSS along with lean HTML and got super slow and noisy (so much for adtech.) Facebook started changing its appearance compulsively and adding random crap. Then it removed itself from search engines for vendor-lock maxima.
smacktoward 8y ago
> It's becoming boring Unless Facebook figures out a way to address this, it's the start of a death spiral. The only thing that makes Facebook interesting is the people it can connect you to. If a few of them leave, the place becomes a little more boring than it used to be... which leads a few more of them to get bored and leave, which makes the place a little more boring... which leads more people to get bored and leave, etc. What started as a few snowflakes turns into an avalanche. It's kind of the photo-negative version of the positive feedback loop Facebook enjoyed on its way up. Back then, each new person who joined created an additional incentive for other people to join, which gave them tremendous upward velocity. But the same dynamic running in reverse could send them downward just as quickly.
- martinald 8y ago
  I've always wondered that, and is it an inherent 'flaw' with social media platforms, and FB just got so big that the coming decline will be just as catastrophic as MySpace and Friendster, but from a much greater height? FB has obviously made very very smart acquisitions in WhatsApp and Instagram. I get the feeling these were primarily made because of the excellent data they had through their VPN app tracking service (as you could see the hypergrowth in real time and know exactly who to pick and how aggressively to go after). I'm sure they have or are working very hard on some alternative to this (maybe buy metadata off ISPs or become a network/transit carrier in their own right so they can see the IPs where stuff is going?). But I do wonder if all social networks just are fads. You have a problem that as the network gets bigger, it starts becoming less interesting to you. Your social circles start overlapping (you don't want to post anything because it may offend someone, coworkers, grandparents, children), which stops everyone posting, which causes the whole thing to grind to a halt and become less interesting.
- crunchiebones 8y ago
  this happens to MMO servers too, I used to play the game DOFUS years ago and it was one of my favorite places on the internet when first started but then people left the game as they grew up and it was gradually taken over by bots and scammers until it got merged with another server
renholder 8y ago
>The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years. If I recall, correctly, the last major feature (read: that had any fanfare) was when they added the ability to have hi-res photos (and more of them), which was timed with the release of the Transformers movie? So, yeah, it's been a hot minute since they did anything substantial.
Theodores 8y ago
> It seems to me that the overall interest in Facebook is decreasing Google Trends never lies. Some say that people have learned they don't have to search for Facebook, but the trend for Facebook follows the 'myspace curve of disengagement': https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=facebook,instagram,whatsapp,myspace,snapchat https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=f... Note that people never type 'whatsapp' into a browser. I think that social media is always going to be fickle. Google and search is a much better bet for the product being relevant in years to come. Facebook is also a black hole. It is very rare that something written on Facebook is noteworthy enough to be shared outside of Facebook, here for instance.
tinyhouse 8y ago
"Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition" Telegram is getting popular in some countries where WhatsApp has been very dominant.
inopinatus 8y ago
I deleted my personal account years ago when it became evident that Facebook was little more than a reprehensible consumer surveillance utility, failing at the original value proposition of keeping in contact with friends. I maintain a company page through an otherwise content-free account. As a corporate user I find Facebook slow and difficult to navigate. All social networks die. They either fail to achieve critical mass, or they do and it turns out the mass was mostly composed of bovine scatology.
- maze-le 8y ago
  I realized that the only people I was in contact with were people I didn't really wanted to have contact with... Not all 'friendships' are worth upholding, very few are actually. P.S.: never seen 'BS' expressed so eloquently...
pmlnr 8y ago
> The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years. It should remove features, it has become a bloated abomination with no focus.
lbotos 8y ago
I'm gonna try and coin the term: "The facebook parodox" It's the problem where you have cross-generational social media infused with varying socio-economic levels you find that people online want to align with their tribe BUT ALSO want to be connected with you because of a physical connection. Prior social networks were already "pre-aligned": Myspace: Majority School Peers/Friends +-4 years Twitter: Industry networking/interest based Facebook is "everything". I've hit this moment where I don't want to add "2nd degree" or "loose" connections on facebook because I don't think it will enhance our relationship, if anything it could drive a wedge between us. I see these people 1-2 a year, and in person, it's great, but online, it's horrible.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  The only way I can get along with my friends and family is through the strict community guidelines of HN - we just can't handle the raw exposure of email or SMS, and the algorithmic preprocessing of Facebook makes it even worse. We plan parties by encoding times and dates in the whitespace of our posts about JS frameworks. I found out that my brother was getting married by decoding the carefully placed typos in a post of his about the housing crisis in SF. I know it sounds dystopian, but engagement-maximization strategies are ruining everything else, and direct exposure is simply untenable.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tyingq 8y ago
I'm still hanging on, solely because it's the easiest way to see new pictures and updates from far flung family members. I don't feel it's my place to ask them to share the pictures and updates another way, so I'm remain basically a read only FB user. If there were a simple way to tee those things into some other feed, I'd leave FB as well.
rcpt 8y ago
> Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition TikTok
OJFord 8y ago
WhatsApp isn't at all free from controversy - it's had its share of "terror attack orchestrated by WhatsApp [and therefore it's some how to blame]" stories. What's saved it, IMO, is the similar deluge of stories about political in-fighting taking place in WhatsApp groups. The available conclusions to the reader of the two angles on it are: 1) politicians are organising terror attacks; 2) there is no causal relationship between WhatsApp and terror attacks ... one of which seems eminently more reasonable than the other; so thankfully that's where we are. Amusingly it also came under fire from politicians in the opposite direction in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal: far from wanting to peek at end-to-end encrypted data (as called for whenever it's used by terror groups) they then wanted assurances that the data hadn't been snooped on or passed to third-parties!
giarc 8y ago
I want to leave Facebook because it seems like a daily chore of unfollowing people who post shit stuff. Instagram is pretty much just personal photos, no stupid news articles, no "forwards from grandma" type stuff. I like seeing pictures of friends kids, new homes, vacations etc and they pretty much exist in exact duplicate across both properties. So why be on Facebook?

simonsarris 8y ago

> The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years. I actually found some great rugs (owners did not know what they had!) and furniture on the FB marketplace. Much better finds than on craigslist, and easier to verify that the seller is a human.

oooooooooo000 8y ago
Indeed. There sure are a lot of accusations of FB lying in these comments, but it seems people have no problem upvoting much more obvious lies like "FB hasn't launched any new features in 2 years". Whatever fits the HN narrative goes, I guess.
- rhcom2 8y ago
  Slightly pedantic but Facebook Marketplace was launched in 2016 so the point could still stand.
  - oooooooooo000 8y ago
    The point doesn't still stand, but I'll save you all the googling: FB launched Watch on August 9, 2017. You could also say "only in the last year" and it'd be easy to find something else with 2 minutes of googling.
    - jessaustin 8y ago
      Oh Zuck, don't feel bad. You still have lots of money and a beautiful family.
    - barbecue_sauce 8y ago
      He said interesting feature.
- asveikau 8y ago
  Relax dear facebook employee, go treat yourself to a burrito at Teddy's or something from the Sweet Shop.
jdfellow 8y ago
I'll second the notion of Facebook Marketplace being a good new feature. You can even pay the seller in-app, which is handy.
Spooky23 8y ago
Agreed. Craigslist was tainted by the unsavory element of prostitution and stolen goods and isn’t a resource that I seek out. Facebook marketplaces seem like what eBay was in the 90s.
- magduf 8y ago
  If I'm buying a used piece of furniture or whatever, I don't give a shit about prostitution going on elsewhere on the site. What's really hurt Craigslist is all the scammers. You can't post anything of value on there without some scammer responding and telling you they're going to send you a cashier's check and have a personal assistant pick it up. You don't have this problem at all on Facebook AFAICT. When someone responds to your ad on Facebook Marketplace, it's a real person who actually wants to buy your old junk.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    The scammers aren’t there because of prostitution, both categories are there because Craigslist attracts unsavory parties and does little or nothing to police them.
    - magduf 8y ago
      No, that's not correct at all. The difference is that Craigslist has no real accounts. When you get a response to your CL ad, even if the responder has a CL account, you don't see this, you just get a text message or phone call or email. With FB, everything is through the site because of the way it's centralized, and you can see the account and full name of the person who's contacting you. On CL, it's trivial for scammers to respond to ads with automated programs, but on FB they'd have to create a real-looking fake account in your area, complete with pictures, some kind of history, etc., which is a far greater undertaking. In short, the formats of the sites make all the difference. CL was created to preserve anonymity and not be a centralized social network, but that feature is also its undoing because it facilitates scamming.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  Craigslist was tainted by the unsavory element of prostitution and stolen goods and isn’t a resource that I seek out. IME, Facebook Marketplace is far from free of scams and stolen merchandise. That's why some people call it Fencebook.
shadowbannedtoo 8y ago
The Page/Group feature is nice, especially if you don't have many friends. I wish it wasen't though. I don't like the company. Oh yea, I've never used my real name on FB. I do have a Page that's getting some traction, but I don't know if I want to use my real name. In all honestly, I think the people who like my Page are just being nice. The "likes" are all comming from one war torn country? (Oh yea, I'm to lazy to go to my desktop(incognito mode), and see if I'm still shadow banned. Please up-vote/down-vote me if you happen to see this. I must have pissed off the dong? I still think about the email I got from HN. It was basically get lost. I don't think I'm that bad, but I was irritating HN?)
DanTheManPR 8y ago
I've been surprised by how good Facebook's local classified ads implementation is, I've been having better success with it than Craigslist. It's an odd platform. They have a lot of great features for outreach and discovery of local events and groups of people, leveraged by the strong network effect. For contact with local groups of people with similar interests, and for planning events, for group communication, it is an effective tool and one that has enriched my life in substantial ways. The one thing that I really hate is the front page feed. It was probably a great business decision on their part to emphasize microblogging, as it definitely increased engagement in the platform. It also turned everyone into memelords who just re-share funny cat pictures, pyramid schemes and incendiary political propaganda. I tried just filtering that out with the "see fewer posts like this", but I turns out that people just don't really post anything but image macros and articles anymore.
- drdeadringer 8y ago
  > I've been surprised by how good Facebook's local classified ads implementation is, I've been having better success with it than Craigslist. If you've tried it, how do you think Facebook's classifieds compare to NextDoor's classifieds?

bad_user 8y ago

Instagram is almost unusable due to the ads. Every 3 or 4 posts you see an ad. The only way Instagram isn't obnoxious is on the desktop, in a browser, with an ad-blocker installed. I love WhatsApp, but they haven't found good ways to monetize it yet and one of these days they'll ruin it.

marssaxman 8y ago
I found the instagram app to be unusable as you describe, but https://www.instagram.com https://www.instagram.com works fine on my phone using firefox with an adblocker.
- CamelCaseName 8y ago
  Interestingly enough, direct messaging is only available in app. A workaround had to be created by an ex-Instagram employee.
  - marssaxman 8y ago
    I guess that explains why I don't think of Instagram as a messaging service. What is the workaround?
itsthewrongway 8y ago
I use the Instagram website on my iPhone with safari and no ad-blocker installed and have never seen an ad once.
Gibbon1 8y ago
> but they haven't found good ways to monetize it yet and one of these days they'll ruin it. What I think is ad supportted _anything_ turns to crap eventually. It's a toxic business model.
hnick 8y ago
One feature (limitation) of Instagram is that you can't include clickable links in a post message. So if you're running a business or are a personality of interest, you might share something that your followers might actually care to look into in more depth off-platform. But then you have to tell them to check your profile for your one allowed link, go to your site, search for the product/blog/video - or you pay for an ad with links enabled.

MR4D 8y ago

I thought FB was integrating their messaging platforms? That seemed to make all the news rounds a month ago. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-messenger.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-insta... [1] https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-speaks-on-whatsapp-instagram-messenger-merger/ https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-speaks-on-whats...

mykowebhn 8y ago
When I read that I immediately thought it was a bad decision on Facebook's part. With all the negative press FB has been receiving, it would seem wise to dissociate Whatsapp and Instagram from FB in the minds of the public.
smacktoward 8y ago
Integrating the backends of the messaging systems, not the frontends. There will still be separate apps called "Messenger," "Whatsapp," "Instagram," etc., but they'll just be different fixtures set on top of identical plumbing. This approach opens up exciting new opportunities for market segmentation via badge engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badge_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badge_engineering ... in much the same way that Ford (say) could design one car and then sell it to very different audiences as the Ford Taurus, Mercury Sable, and Lincoln Continental.
- MR4D 8y ago
  I don’t disagree, but there seemed to be a lot of a publicity around a backend tech change, and to me, it is that publicity that undoes the whole idea of keeping businesses separated. As a side example, everyone knows that Coke makes Diet Coke, but many don’t know that they make Sprite. The Sprite model seems to be a better approach than FB’s new Diet Coke approach.
- prolepunk 8y ago
  I believe this is a bit more nefarious than a car manufacturer who is trying make you pay for a car slightly more. This is actively deceiving people into believing their privacy is safe by using products that have nothing to do with facebook.

time0ut 8y ago

I deleted my account years ago, but ended up creating a fake account under a fictitious identity for the odd event organized through Facebook. I log in every so often just to see what's up. It appears to be a mixture of paid content and two random friends posting memes. I have to think people are deriving some value from it, but I cannot imagine what it is.

kristopolous 8y ago
Just like with twitter, it all depends on who you follow; Some content is dramatically better than others. And just like with twitter, most of the content is essentially garbage.
- rconti 8y ago
  Agreed. And I think this is one reason I love FB and can't stand Twitter. I kept buying into the "follow important people on Twitter" and it's just crap. I don't care what a noted Icelandic volcanologist retweeted about canaries. I don't care what my favorite F1 driver retweeted about english football. I don't care. I don't follow "influencers" because I don't care what they think, but I thought at least getting things from the horse's mouth, as it were, would be interesting, but it's just not. I follow friend and family on facebook. If they post crap, it's because they have stupid things to say. I don't have many friends who I think are stupid. Obviously you can follow celebrities on facebook and only follow friends on twitter but it doesn't feel like they're made for that use case, the 'reverse' of what I use it for.
  - zf00002 8y ago
    I feel the same way about twitter. The only time I ever visit is when some service I use isn't working and I want to see if they've said anything about it being down (or it's just me).
  - dvtrn 8y ago
    Obviously you can follow celebrities on facebook and only follow friends on twitter but it doesn't feel like they're made for that use case, the 'reverse' of what I use it for. Someone here not long ago on HN opened my eyes to the 'lists' feature of Twitter, it's been a remarkable improvement for me with the platform. "IRL" friends in one list, "Net" friends in another, sports commentary (because that's a thing I'm into), etc. etc. Crap is more or less 'siloed'. I wish twitter promoted the feature more, to be honest, I think it can help with some of the gripes you have, if not for you maybe for others as it did with my experience on the platform.

victor106 8y ago

Note:- I have been off FB for the past 5 years or so. As much as I hate FB and its abhorrent privacy policies, there are a very large population who do not care about privacy. I have some in my household who don't and FB's latest financial results prove it.

jordigh 8y ago
Everyone cares about privacy. They just aren't keenly aware that they're losing it. If you meet someone who doesn't care about privacy, ask them, can I borrow your phone and browse through your contacts, your conversations, and your pictures? Almost nobody will say yes unless they are very close to and intimate with you. I think John Oliver did a pretty good job of framing the Snowden revelations in terms of "the NSA can see your penis". That's a good angle to make people care.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  I don't think your analogy is very good. it's true that many (maybe even most) people have secrets that they would be embarrassed to share with their friends, family, or coworkers. if you asked them whether they would be okay with letting some stranger who they would never meet look through their phone, they might not do it for free, but I bet a lot of people would do it for $5-10.
  - jordigh 8y ago
    That's not it. Offering people 10 bucks won't change that most say "no" when you ask them to borrow their phone and snoop through everything. Instead, it's that the whole loss of privacy is impersonalised. When you see my face, the face of someone who just asked to borrow your phone, when it's clear a person is going to be looking through it, that's when you say "no". But when Facebook is harvesting data about you, it doesn't feel like a person is doing it. It feels like some abstract machine or algorithm or a faceless corporation is doing it. They even promise that humans aren't individually looking at your data. So people bank on that impersonality. The data may be collected, but who cares, nobody is actually really looking at it, right? The truth is that people do often look at it, despite all the promises and everything. That's what you have to convey and that's what John Oliver was trying to establish with his angle.

tombert 8y ago

> Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition You're not wrong, but I find it a bit frustrating how much resistance I get whenever I try and suggest using Signal instead of Whatsapp. As far as I can tell, it has pretty much all the features of Whatsapp that I use, without all the spying.

JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
I'm having some pretty good success getting people to switch to Signal in my family. Keep up the good fight!
nategri 8y ago
I think there's a lot of "chat app fatigue." I've personally had 5 or 6 on my phone in the past year and you'd have to drag me kicking and screaming into installing even one more of the damned things.
jjrh 8y ago
No one wants to install ANOTHER app just to talk to you. Most of us already have at least 3 messaging apps they use on a daily basis and probably a whole lot more they use on a weekly basis.
- sm4rk0 8y ago
  But why WhatsApp is one of those 3 and Signal is ANOTHER app? Not so long ago WhatsApp was ANOTHER. Now it's not. What changed?
  - schwap 8y ago
    I don't remember WhatsApp ever being ANOTHER. It was the first cross-platform messaging app I ever used.
    - sm4rk0 8y ago
      Wikipedia says it was released in January 2009. Google Talk started in August 2005. For a GTalk user, it was "another".

ergothus 8y ago

> It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving. I'm not much of a user myself, but among my friends that use it heavily I've noted a number of complaints that it has gotten HARDER to use for their primary use: keeping up with friends. Their issue isn't that FB has become stale or boring, but that it has actively LOST ground relative to their purpose.

ArtDev 8y ago
Fb needs you to be able to filter the news feed.

stcredzero 8y ago

It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving. The problem with Facebook, is that either it's boring, or it's not boring, and in that case it's often far worse. Facebook latched onto the fact that outrage measures as "engagement" then other people latched onto that fact and started to use Facebook for their own outrage mongering purposes. Still, Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition. We don't see any news about their user base decreasing and news channels don't seem to dislike them. Facebook is doing a good job making sure their biggest three platforms are seem as independent from one another, keeping Instagram and WhatsApp almost free from controversy. So one company, three brands? If I were to start my own crowdfunding app, I'd have one app with three "skins" and three different brands, each a different level of "edginess." In the Terms of Service would be the discretion for the site to "shift" your account from one of the three to another. The only effect of this, would be to shift the public information around the creator and subscriptions from one site to another. I would do this, so that "maintaining our brand" would never become an issue in funding creators, even edgy or downright controversial ones.

b1r6 8y ago
I find that to be a really intriguing idea. Offering a gradient instead of platform ultimatums. Could this scale, is the question?
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Could this scale, is the question? In a way, it would be like shadowbanning, but more open.
- 1stcity3rdcoast 8y ago
  YouTube has YouTube Kids plus different levels of content filtering available to users. Similar concept, in a way.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    I wish they'd accommodate news and opinion in the same way. Maybe that way, they could keep their employees out of the business of censoring the internet in line with their particular biases.

darpa_escapee 8y ago

From what I've seen, Instagram is nearly 60% marketing/bot activity and ads are ruining the experience.

president 8y ago
I couldn't agree more and don't forget about "aggregator" type accounts that just steal original content from other users. I am predicting that Instagram will last another 2-3 years before people get tired of the non-stop ads and spam.

aylmao 8y ago

To be fair they added dating. It hasn't been released in the US, but it's out in Thailand, Colombia and Canada.

agumonkey 8y ago

maybe snapchat use case is so trivial and defined it doesn't need to change §

toomanybeersies 8y ago

> It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving Email hasn't had any new features added in decades, and people still use it. For me, Facebook is a tool. I use it to organise events and groups, and communicate with people. There's no other tool that works as well. I can have all my messages, groups, and events in one place. Almost everyone I know uses Facebook as well, so it's centralised. Speaking of event management, one very useful feature that Facebook has added recently is integrated payments for events. You can set up a Facebook event that has tickets, and people can purchase and pay for tickets through FB without having to go to the external ticket sales platform (moshtix, eventbrite etc.). I'm not sure if you can do ticketing directly through Facebook or if you need an external service, I haven't set up any events with tickets. Anyway, it's a very useful feature as it saves me having to sign up for different ticket platforms.

saberworks 8y ago
You may be missing a whole bunch of people like me who refuse to use facebook. And you'll just never know how many. If there's an event that is solely organized through facebook, I just don't go. If that means I miss out, I miss out.
- toomanybeersies 8y ago
  I know exactly how many of my friends don't use Facebook, because I specifically remember which ones they are, so I can message them separately. It's inconvenient for me, but I'm happy enough to accomodate them.
  - saberworks 8y ago
    I read your post as you were some sort of event planner or something, not that you were using it in a personal group of friends. Please forgive the misunderstanding. I see a lot of groups/businesses that use facebook exclusively to communicate and organize events (like the local paintball field) and they are missing out on some people (I have no idea how to quantify how many). I'm sure they're reaching more people now (using facebook) than they were using whatever old method they were using.

Chazprime 8y ago

Agree on the lack of features front. I actually preferred the simpler design FB had back in 2013 or so before the big redesign. After that everything seemed to get busier and louder. Usability took a hit after that IMO.

lancesells 8y ago
I've not used Facebook in any personal capacity but the same thing happened to Twitter, especially in the speed department. Twitter is so slow now that I don't use it.
- cherrypepsi 8y ago
  Every once in a while some random journalist decides to cry foul about the demise of Google Reader and the death of the Open Web, but the 2013 redesigns of Twitter and Facebook seem more likely to be the cause, both in functionality and policies. It was very clear cut at the time, Twitter did a 180° and left RSS along with lean HTML and got super slow and noisy (so much for adtech.) Facebook started changing its appearance compulsively and adding random crap. Then it removed itself from search engines for vendor-lock maxima.

smacktoward 8y ago

> It's becoming boring Unless Facebook figures out a way to address this, it's the start of a death spiral. The only thing that makes Facebook interesting is the people it can connect you to. If a few of them leave, the place becomes a little more boring than it used to be... which leads a few more of them to get bored and leave, which makes the place a little more boring... which leads more people to get bored and leave, etc. What started as a few snowflakes turns into an avalanche. It's kind of the photo-negative version of the positive feedback loop Facebook enjoyed on its way up. Back then, each new person who joined created an additional incentive for other people to join, which gave them tremendous upward velocity. But the same dynamic running in reverse could send them downward just as quickly.

martinald 8y ago
I've always wondered that, and is it an inherent 'flaw' with social media platforms, and FB just got so big that the coming decline will be just as catastrophic as MySpace and Friendster, but from a much greater height? FB has obviously made very very smart acquisitions in WhatsApp and Instagram. I get the feeling these were primarily made because of the excellent data they had through their VPN app tracking service (as you could see the hypergrowth in real time and know exactly who to pick and how aggressively to go after). I'm sure they have or are working very hard on some alternative to this (maybe buy metadata off ISPs or become a network/transit carrier in their own right so they can see the IPs where stuff is going?). But I do wonder if all social networks just are fads. You have a problem that as the network gets bigger, it starts becoming less interesting to you. Your social circles start overlapping (you don't want to post anything because it may offend someone, coworkers, grandparents, children), which stops everyone posting, which causes the whole thing to grind to a halt and become less interesting.
crunchiebones 8y ago
this happens to MMO servers too, I used to play the game DOFUS years ago and it was one of my favorite places on the internet when first started but then people left the game as they grew up and it was gradually taken over by bots and scammers until it got merged with another server

renholder 8y ago

>The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years. If I recall, correctly, the last major feature (read: that had any fanfare) was when they added the ability to have hi-res photos (and more of them), which was timed with the release of the Transformers movie? So, yeah, it's been a hot minute since they did anything substantial.

Theodores 8y ago

> It seems to me that the overall interest in Facebook is decreasing Google Trends never lies. Some say that people have learned they don't have to search for Facebook, but the trend for Facebook follows the 'myspace curve of disengagement': https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=facebook,instagram,whatsapp,myspace,snapchat https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=f... Note that people never type 'whatsapp' into a browser. I think that social media is always going to be fickle. Google and search is a much better bet for the product being relevant in years to come. Facebook is also a black hole. It is very rare that something written on Facebook is noteworthy enough to be shared outside of Facebook, here for instance.

tinyhouse 8y ago

"Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition" Telegram is getting popular in some countries where WhatsApp has been very dominant.

inopinatus 8y ago

I deleted my personal account years ago when it became evident that Facebook was little more than a reprehensible consumer surveillance utility, failing at the original value proposition of keeping in contact with friends. I maintain a company page through an otherwise content-free account. As a corporate user I find Facebook slow and difficult to navigate. All social networks die. They either fail to achieve critical mass, or they do and it turns out the mass was mostly composed of bovine scatology.

maze-le 8y ago
I realized that the only people I was in contact with were people I didn't really wanted to have contact with... Not all 'friendships' are worth upholding, very few are actually. P.S.: never seen 'BS' expressed so eloquently...

pmlnr 8y ago

> The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years. It should remove features, it has become a bloated abomination with no focus.

lbotos 8y ago

I'm gonna try and coin the term: "The facebook parodox" It's the problem where you have cross-generational social media infused with varying socio-economic levels you find that people online want to align with their tribe BUT ALSO want to be connected with you because of a physical connection. Prior social networks were already "pre-aligned": Myspace: Majority School Peers/Friends +-4 years Twitter: Industry networking/interest based Facebook is "everything". I've hit this moment where I don't want to add "2nd degree" or "loose" connections on facebook because I don't think it will enhance our relationship, if anything it could drive a wedge between us. I see these people 1-2 a year, and in person, it's great, but online, it's horrible.

whatshisface 8y ago
The only way I can get along with my friends and family is through the strict community guidelines of HN - we just can't handle the raw exposure of email or SMS, and the algorithmic preprocessing of Facebook makes it even worse. We plan parties by encoding times and dates in the whitespace of our posts about JS frameworks. I found out that my brother was getting married by decoding the carefully placed typos in a post of his about the housing crisis in SF. I know it sounds dystopian, but engagement-maximization strategies are ruining everything else, and direct exposure is simply untenable.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

tyingq 8y ago

I'm still hanging on, solely because it's the easiest way to see new pictures and updates from far flung family members. I don't feel it's my place to ask them to share the pictures and updates another way, so I'm remain basically a read only FB user. If there were a simple way to tee those things into some other feed, I'd leave FB as well.

rcpt 8y ago

> Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition TikTok

OJFord 8y ago

WhatsApp isn't at all free from controversy - it's had its share of "terror attack orchestrated by WhatsApp [and therefore it's some how to blame]" stories. What's saved it, IMO, is the similar deluge of stories about political in-fighting taking place in WhatsApp groups. The available conclusions to the reader of the two angles on it are: 1) politicians are organising terror attacks; 2) there is no causal relationship between WhatsApp and terror attacks ... one of which seems eminently more reasonable than the other; so thankfully that's where we are. Amusingly it also came under fire from politicians in the opposite direction in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal: far from wanting to peek at end-to-end encrypted data (as called for whenever it's used by terror groups) they then wanted assurances that the data hadn't been snooped on or passed to third-parties!

giarc 8y ago

I want to leave Facebook because it seems like a daily chore of unfollowing people who post shit stuff. Instagram is pretty much just personal photos, no stupid news articles, no "forwards from grandma" type stuff. I like seeing pictures of friends kids, new homes, vacations etc and they pretty much exist in exact duplicate across both properties. So why be on Facebook?