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Anecdotally, I work with teenagers and none of them have a Facebook pages. It's viewed as a place for old people and parents. For me personally, it's almost im

by socrates1998 8y ago

Anecdotally, I work with teenagers and none of them have a Facebook pages. It's viewed as a place for old people and parents. For me personally, it's almost impossible to deal with. Way too many political posts from my friends and family. It's probably best use for me is local events and an occasional major event from a friend/family member. Still, I find myself going there less and less. From a small business standpoint, it's just not worth the time, effort and money to advertise there. It's much more effective to focus on getting referrals with my current clients. I really wish there was a paid social media service that everyone used. I would gladly pay $5-$10 a month for something that didn't sell my data.

gwbas1c 8y ago
> For me personally, it's almost impossible to deal with. Way too many political posts from my friends and family. Bingo, that's what's doing it for me. Before the 2016 presidential election, Facebook was fun. It was also a great way to get news. But now, what I'm finding is that a lot of people on Facebook just don't know how to behave in a public forum. It makes it painful, because someone always knows someone who's a jerk online. I really don't know what changed, to be honest. Did Facebook change, or did too many people come to the party?
- ashelmire 8y ago
  Lots of things changed. Facebook began as an exclusive social network for upper-class students. Gradually it grew to encompass not just all of America, but the entire world. It turns out, many of us well educated people don't really want to network or socialize with poorly educated people. Police started monitoring our activities, so the events all but disappeared. The world changed, too. Facts used to matter; we read books and the newspaper, not 25 reasons to be an idiot on Buzzfeed. Truth used to matter; less of the nation was as polarized. It was easier to get along without people shoving their ignorant political ideas in your face. Then 2016 happened, with the Russian trolls and other psyops used against us, and some of us realized we'd fucked up by buying into and encouraging others to join this network and others like it. I could probably go on for a lot longer, but that's the gist of it.
  - smokeyj 8y ago
    What changed is FB had to make money - and they discovered "outrage" sells. That's the full answer. It has nothing to do with the lower-class crowding up your social network lol.
    - ashelmire 8y ago
      It really does have to do with that. It ceased being useful as a networking and socializing tool. It was a slow descent, but that’s the truth of it.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - Macross8299 8y ago
      All of these complaints about the various superficial reasons for Facebook's decline I think are missing the forest for the trees. The "grow fast monetize later" model that social media companies use, along with the user being the product, inevitably acts as a template for bait and switch. All degradation of user experience stems from that. Of course using a social media platform during its "growth phase" is going to be a lot more of a pleasant experience than using that same platform when it's trying to maximize revenue.
    - Aromasin 8y ago
      Outrage only goes so far though. Using Brexit as an example, when the vote first went through, everyone devoured every bit of content they could regarding it, and the media followed. Then they started printing nothing but outrage until people just gave up and quit following the news. Anecdotal evidence sure, but everyone I know seems to only follow the news in passing now. Every headline. Every article. Every political interview. It all now revolves around this one completely divisive topic. If it's not Brexit it's Trump. It's exhausting. It's no surprise that Facebook also seemed to chase the golden goose, but now that the main page is nothing but outrage or divisive news people are leaving in droves because they're fed up with seeing the same, day after day.
    - 8y ago
- FrivolousWaffle 8y ago
  facebook, twitter, youtube all have gone down hill since gamergate in my opinion. Russia, Nazis, and 4chan learned how to leverage social networks and SEO to spread misinformation and noise.
  - OpenBSD-supreme 8y ago
    Long live gamergate! Long live 4chan! Long live 8chan! Long live /pol/!
  - UnpossibleJim 8y ago
    Wait a second. Did you just lump 4chan in with Russian Intelligence (I assume that's what you meant by Russia and not the entirety of the nation) and Nazis? You should have thrown the Boogie Man and Satan in for good measure. You know, you can go to 4chan and check it out. You won't get turned into "an operative" or anything. It might not be the den of murderers and thieves its been portrayed as.
- sanxiyn 8y ago
  I haven't noticed any change whatsoever since 2016 and Facebook continues to work great for me. But then I don't live in US.
- elliekelly 8y ago
  I feel like the major change was who started using Facebook: people who had never "interneted" before. When it first launched and was limited to .edu emails everyone on the platform had grown up online. Before we had Facebook we said and shared a whole lot of dumb stuff anonymously and figured out the real-world consequences of our online actions. We "trolled" a wikipedia article about elephants with John Stewart and learned about "fake news" from Bonsai Kittens and pop-up ads promising we'd just become millionares. We "socialized" on AIM, LiveJournal, Xanaga and MySpace. For early Facebook users, Facebook was just one of many destinations on the internet. But for most of today's Facebook users Facebook is the internet and they missed out on their internet training wheels. Facebook has merely replaced AOL for a generation of people who will now take any "article" their friend posted at face value, share it with all of their friends, and then angrily complain about "mainstream media" when their phone blows up in the microwave instead of charging like the "news" told them it would.
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    I'm not sure if I buy that. I would say for most young folks today "The Internet" is YouTube, not Facebook.
    - elliekelly 8y ago
      Sorry if I was unclear as I was trying not to malign baby boomers but I was referring to the 50+/not tech savvy crowd on Facebook, not the young internet users of today.
      - rootusrootus 8y ago
        Ah, I misunderstood. Please be careful with the "50+" comments, ha! Not there yet but closer than I'd like to admit, and I grew up during the sweet spot of modern computing. My biased opinion is that Gen X had it best in this regard.
        elliekelly 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- crocal 8y ago
  Same bingo. My hypothesis (at least for the Facebook I see, that is of course a minuscule fraction) is that FB is mostly used now by people with an agenda (self promotion, spreading of an ideology, marketing, political campaign, whatever). Therefore, any disagreement is immediately treated as a threat. Ultimately FB has become a dark forest for casual users. The fun is gone.
spunker540 8y ago
Most people use Facebook these days to keep track of their acquaintances from various stages in life: high school friends, college friends, former coworkers, people you meet at parties etc. In that regard it’s not very useful to teenagers who are already in the same building as their entire network every day (their school). Plus teenagers don’t want to hang out where their parents do. When I was in school part of facebook’s appeal was the fact that parents couldn’t get on even if they wanted due to the .edu email requirement!
p0nce 8y ago
For me, it's the interface. It's just really complicated and slow. And I can't communicate with followers without paying. Advertising on FB is not really worth it, in most cases.
- KajMagnus 8y ago
  And buggy, for example, a chat message I'm writing, getting lost because I switch to another browser tab (and the chat window is there too but empty / not synchronized, eventually causing the lost update bug). And on my wide screen, 30'', the chat window is just like 2x1 cm large. And on the events page, I choose to display today's or tomorrow's events. Then Facebook displays events from not those days.
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
> I would gladly pay $5-$10 a month for something that didn't sell my data. Hmm. Facebook has something like 2 billion profiles. Of course, most of them wouldn't pay $5/month - say that only one percent would. 20 million profiles times $5/month = $100 million/month. It might be worth it for someone to try to build such a thing...
- throwawaymath 8y ago
  I’d be beyond shocked if even one percent of all Facebook users would pay $5/month for it. I think the only population of users who’d consider doing so are the intersection of those who are affluent (by Western standards), are extremely opposed to Facebook ads, and use it enough to consider paying for it. I’d be surprised if you could get 1% of the US population of users to consider it, let alone the global population. You’d realistically be looking at single to very low double digit millions of users at the maximum.
  - cm2012 8y ago
    And no one wants a social network with no friends on it.
- gjs278 8y ago
  except 20 million people would not pay for this. and even if they did, the only reason people join facebook is because all their friends are on it. 20 million people isn't enough spreadout worldwide to convince people to join. you'd have like 2-3 friends top on it.
- davnicwil 8y ago
  An anecdotal story about this - a couple of years ago I built a paid, ad-free privacy-focused social network, did several Show HNs for it and even here, in a community that seems quite receptive to the idea in principle, there was extremely low interest in it. I got probably 50 sign-ups over a few Show HNs, no more than 4/5 upvotes and comments on the most well-received Show HN, and those who came in just posted one or two test posts, found obviously that nobody else was on there and left never to be seen again. Obviously none converted to a paid account (you could get 10 connections for free then afterwards pay $2/month). Bootstrapping any social network, let alone a paid one, is hard. But I did try :-)
LinuxBender 8y ago
Yup, all the teenagers I know of are on Discord and Steam.
michaelchisari 8y ago
Way too many political posts from my friends and family. I love the political posts that are thoughtful, informative and spark real discussion. So, maybe, one or two in the past three years.
pjc50 8y ago
The politics has destroyed the friendliness. Same goes for Twitter, to some extent; even for us political junkies. The constant drip of miserable stupidity of others is just exhausting.
ilovecaching 8y ago
The problem with the non ad driven model is that to you 5$ might be nothing, but some people 5$ is an impossible sum of money to spend a month on entertainment. Ads allow companies to offer first world products to customers who could desperately use technology to help them connect and trade in their local communities. I think the discussion on privacy and ad based platforms should really be orthogonal.
- hopler 8y ago
  Facebook could charge different prices in different geoip zones, like IP licensing does.
  - ilovecaching 8y ago
    That's difficult, because in some cases the barrier to entry is having some way to pay. They might be able to afford 10 cents, but they don't have any means to submit that 10 cents into the system. They don't have a credit or debit card, probably not even a bank account to begin with.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > I think the discussion on privacy and ad based platforms should really be orthogonal. Except that those two things are inseparable. The privacy problems are a direct result of the desire of the advertising industry to be able to target people based on their behavior, which necessitates spying on everyone. If we could somehow eliminate that targeting, then we could discuss the two as separate topics.
  - tjoff 8y ago
    They really aren't though. It's just that that is the stance the big players have. And the reason they have that stance might be because it is the only stance that can motivate their existence. You can still target content rather than users.
    - JohnFen 8y ago
diminoten 8y ago
I just unsubscribed from all of the folks on FB that post political stuff. Maybe they should make that a global option, something like "Hide Political Stories" or something.
- vageli 8y ago
  How would you classify a political story?
  - diminoten 8y ago
    Uses the name of any currently elected representative, maybe? AI to the rescue though, this feels like something you can teach.
toomanybeersies 8y ago
I just started unfollowing (for people I actually interact with, or might need to) or unfriending (for people I will never see again, and don't want to) people who post overly political bullshit. I don't mind a bit of politics, Australia is going to hell in a handcart and the least people can do is raise awareness. But I don't like inflammatory (and often completely fake) bullshit. I can now scroll my newsfeed (which I don't actually do that often) without getting high blood pressure.
macintux 8y ago
> I really wish there was a paid social media service that everyone used. I would gladly pay $5-$10 a month for something that didn't sell my data. There was App.net, which attempted to be a fee-based better Twitter, but of course not everyone used and eventually shut down. The only way to have a social network that everyone uses and is fee-based, would be to take one of the free ones and start charging...but then everyone would leave.
grimgrin 8y ago
Purely anecdotal but when I could have moved to FB I held back because Myspace was more interesting. I eventually moved to FB as I got older, because.. I was older. My interests changed. To some degree this may be an experience with the youth today, in time. Or not, I have no idea
- aylmao 8y ago
  IMO this is part of why Facebook's user base is so resilient. From what I see, younger people experiment more, looking for something that fits their identity, what their friends use, what's new, etc. They also have more time and incentive to explore new apps. By younger people I mean teenagers, high-school and younger. Older people, it seems to me, are more utilitarian. By older people I mean college and up. They use Facebook for events, or because the social world is harder to navigate in college/later in life than when you're in high school and your friends are neighbors or classmates. Perhaps this is just my experience, or maybe I'm just very off on how I read this, but it's a thought. I don't think Facebook is trying to be interesting— I think they're just shooting for useful and "sticky".
freddie_mercury 8y ago
Anecdotally (I don't live in America), every teenager has a Facebook account. Not a single person has WhatsApp. Instagram is used but not nearly as much as Facebook. (When people cross-post pictures you see the FB post has 3x - 10x the number of likes as the Instagram post.) There are zero political posts. Zero. I've never seen one. If my feed were full of political stuff, I'd also be sick of it. But feed is exclusively full of what friends & acquaintances are doing.
- bencollier49 8y ago
  Where do you live?
  - freddie_mercury 8y ago
    I live in Asia.
Anbelly 8y ago
It's expected that people from group age 20+ will be the last active user base. As far as I know, most teens use Discord, Instagram, they have 0 interest in Facebook.
- socrates1998 8y ago
  Snapchat is hands down the number one used app by the teenagers I teach. Then instagram.
tmaly 8y ago
for me, I personally check it less and less due to political posts. I do have a few really great closed groups on there. Groups filled with people helping each other out. These are where I still find value on the platform.

gwbas1c 8y ago

> For me personally, it's almost impossible to deal with. Way too many political posts from my friends and family. Bingo, that's what's doing it for me. Before the 2016 presidential election, Facebook was fun. It was also a great way to get news. But now, what I'm finding is that a lot of people on Facebook just don't know how to behave in a public forum. It makes it painful, because someone always knows someone who's a jerk online. I really don't know what changed, to be honest. Did Facebook change, or did too many people come to the party?

ashelmire 8y ago
Lots of things changed. Facebook began as an exclusive social network for upper-class students. Gradually it grew to encompass not just all of America, but the entire world. It turns out, many of us well educated people don't really want to network or socialize with poorly educated people. Police started monitoring our activities, so the events all but disappeared. The world changed, too. Facts used to matter; we read books and the newspaper, not 25 reasons to be an idiot on Buzzfeed. Truth used to matter; less of the nation was as polarized. It was easier to get along without people shoving their ignorant political ideas in your face. Then 2016 happened, with the Russian trolls and other psyops used against us, and some of us realized we'd fucked up by buying into and encouraging others to join this network and others like it. I could probably go on for a lot longer, but that's the gist of it.
- smokeyj 8y ago
  What changed is FB had to make money - and they discovered "outrage" sells. That's the full answer. It has nothing to do with the lower-class crowding up your social network lol.
  - ashelmire 8y ago
    It really does have to do with that. It ceased being useful as a networking and socializing tool. It was a slow descent, but that’s the truth of it.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - Macross8299 8y ago
    All of these complaints about the various superficial reasons for Facebook's decline I think are missing the forest for the trees. The "grow fast monetize later" model that social media companies use, along with the user being the product, inevitably acts as a template for bait and switch. All degradation of user experience stems from that. Of course using a social media platform during its "growth phase" is going to be a lot more of a pleasant experience than using that same platform when it's trying to maximize revenue.
  - Aromasin 8y ago
    Outrage only goes so far though. Using Brexit as an example, when the vote first went through, everyone devoured every bit of content they could regarding it, and the media followed. Then they started printing nothing but outrage until people just gave up and quit following the news. Anecdotal evidence sure, but everyone I know seems to only follow the news in passing now. Every headline. Every article. Every political interview. It all now revolves around this one completely divisive topic. If it's not Brexit it's Trump. It's exhausting. It's no surprise that Facebook also seemed to chase the golden goose, but now that the main page is nothing but outrage or divisive news people are leaving in droves because they're fed up with seeing the same, day after day.
  - 8y ago
FrivolousWaffle 8y ago
facebook, twitter, youtube all have gone down hill since gamergate in my opinion. Russia, Nazis, and 4chan learned how to leverage social networks and SEO to spread misinformation and noise.
- OpenBSD-supreme 8y ago
  Long live gamergate! Long live 4chan! Long live 8chan! Long live /pol/!
- UnpossibleJim 8y ago
  Wait a second. Did you just lump 4chan in with Russian Intelligence (I assume that's what you meant by Russia and not the entirety of the nation) and Nazis? You should have thrown the Boogie Man and Satan in for good measure. You know, you can go to 4chan and check it out. You won't get turned into "an operative" or anything. It might not be the den of murderers and thieves its been portrayed as.
sanxiyn 8y ago
I haven't noticed any change whatsoever since 2016 and Facebook continues to work great for me. But then I don't live in US.
elliekelly 8y ago
I feel like the major change was who started using Facebook: people who had never "interneted" before. When it first launched and was limited to .edu emails everyone on the platform had grown up online. Before we had Facebook we said and shared a whole lot of dumb stuff anonymously and figured out the real-world consequences of our online actions. We "trolled" a wikipedia article about elephants with John Stewart and learned about "fake news" from Bonsai Kittens and pop-up ads promising we'd just become millionares. We "socialized" on AIM, LiveJournal, Xanaga and MySpace. For early Facebook users, Facebook was just one of many destinations on the internet. But for most of today's Facebook users Facebook is the internet and they missed out on their internet training wheels. Facebook has merely replaced AOL for a generation of people who will now take any "article" their friend posted at face value, share it with all of their friends, and then angrily complain about "mainstream media" when their phone blows up in the microwave instead of charging like the "news" told them it would.
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  I'm not sure if I buy that. I would say for most young folks today "The Internet" is YouTube, not Facebook.
  - elliekelly 8y ago
    Sorry if I was unclear as I was trying not to malign baby boomers but I was referring to the 50+/not tech savvy crowd on Facebook, not the young internet users of today.
    - rootusrootus 8y ago
      Ah, I misunderstood. Please be careful with the "50+" comments, ha! Not there yet but closer than I'd like to admit, and I grew up during the sweet spot of modern computing. My biased opinion is that Gen X had it best in this regard.
      - elliekelly 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
crocal 8y ago
Same bingo. My hypothesis (at least for the Facebook I see, that is of course a minuscule fraction) is that FB is mostly used now by people with an agenda (self promotion, spreading of an ideology, marketing, political campaign, whatever). Therefore, any disagreement is immediately treated as a threat. Ultimately FB has become a dark forest for casual users. The fun is gone.

spunker540 8y ago

Most people use Facebook these days to keep track of their acquaintances from various stages in life: high school friends, college friends, former coworkers, people you meet at parties etc. In that regard it’s not very useful to teenagers who are already in the same building as their entire network every day (their school). Plus teenagers don’t want to hang out where their parents do. When I was in school part of facebook’s appeal was the fact that parents couldn’t get on even if they wanted due to the .edu email requirement!

p0nce 8y ago

For me, it's the interface. It's just really complicated and slow. And I can't communicate with followers without paying. Advertising on FB is not really worth it, in most cases.

KajMagnus 8y ago
And buggy, for example, a chat message I'm writing, getting lost because I switch to another browser tab (and the chat window is there too but empty / not synchronized, eventually causing the lost update bug). And on my wide screen, 30'', the chat window is just like 2x1 cm large. And on the events page, I choose to display today's or tomorrow's events. Then Facebook displays events from not those days.

AnimalMuppet 8y ago

> I would gladly pay $5-$10 a month for something that didn't sell my data. Hmm. Facebook has something like 2 billion profiles. Of course, most of them wouldn't pay $5/month - say that only one percent would. 20 million profiles times $5/month = $100 million/month. It might be worth it for someone to try to build such a thing...

throwawaymath 8y ago
I’d be beyond shocked if even one percent of all Facebook users would pay $5/month for it. I think the only population of users who’d consider doing so are the intersection of those who are affluent (by Western standards), are extremely opposed to Facebook ads, and use it enough to consider paying for it. I’d be surprised if you could get 1% of the US population of users to consider it, let alone the global population. You’d realistically be looking at single to very low double digit millions of users at the maximum.
- cm2012 8y ago
  And no one wants a social network with no friends on it.
gjs278 8y ago
except 20 million people would not pay for this. and even if they did, the only reason people join facebook is because all their friends are on it. 20 million people isn't enough spreadout worldwide to convince people to join. you'd have like 2-3 friends top on it.
davnicwil 8y ago
An anecdotal story about this - a couple of years ago I built a paid, ad-free privacy-focused social network, did several Show HNs for it and even here, in a community that seems quite receptive to the idea in principle, there was extremely low interest in it. I got probably 50 sign-ups over a few Show HNs, no more than 4/5 upvotes and comments on the most well-received Show HN, and those who came in just posted one or two test posts, found obviously that nobody else was on there and left never to be seen again. Obviously none converted to a paid account (you could get 10 connections for free then afterwards pay $2/month). Bootstrapping any social network, let alone a paid one, is hard. But I did try :-)

LinuxBender 8y ago

Yup, all the teenagers I know of are on Discord and Steam.

michaelchisari 8y ago

Way too many political posts from my friends and family. I love the political posts that are thoughtful, informative and spark real discussion. So, maybe, one or two in the past three years.

pjc50 8y ago

The politics has destroyed the friendliness. Same goes for Twitter, to some extent; even for us political junkies. The constant drip of miserable stupidity of others is just exhausting.

ilovecaching 8y ago

The problem with the non ad driven model is that to you 5$ might be nothing, but some people 5$ is an impossible sum of money to spend a month on entertainment. Ads allow companies to offer first world products to customers who could desperately use technology to help them connect and trade in their local communities. I think the discussion on privacy and ad based platforms should really be orthogonal.

hopler 8y ago
Facebook could charge different prices in different geoip zones, like IP licensing does.
- ilovecaching 8y ago
  That's difficult, because in some cases the barrier to entry is having some way to pay. They might be able to afford 10 cents, but they don't have any means to submit that 10 cents into the system. They don't have a credit or debit card, probably not even a bank account to begin with.
JohnFen 8y ago
> I think the discussion on privacy and ad based platforms should really be orthogonal. Except that those two things are inseparable. The privacy problems are a direct result of the desire of the advertising industry to be able to target people based on their behavior, which necessitates spying on everyone. If we could somehow eliminate that targeting, then we could discuss the two as separate topics.
- tjoff 8y ago
  They really aren't though. It's just that that is the stance the big players have. And the reason they have that stance might be because it is the only stance that can motivate their existence. You can still target content rather than users.
  - JohnFen 8y ago

diminoten 8y ago

I just unsubscribed from all of the folks on FB that post political stuff. Maybe they should make that a global option, something like "Hide Political Stories" or something.

vageli 8y ago
How would you classify a political story?
- diminoten 8y ago
  Uses the name of any currently elected representative, maybe? AI to the rescue though, this feels like something you can teach.

toomanybeersies 8y ago

I just started unfollowing (for people I actually interact with, or might need to) or unfriending (for people I will never see again, and don't want to) people who post overly political bullshit. I don't mind a bit of politics, Australia is going to hell in a handcart and the least people can do is raise awareness. But I don't like inflammatory (and often completely fake) bullshit. I can now scroll my newsfeed (which I don't actually do that often) without getting high blood pressure.

macintux 8y ago

> I really wish there was a paid social media service that everyone used. I would gladly pay $5-$10 a month for something that didn't sell my data. There was App.net, which attempted to be a fee-based better Twitter, but of course not everyone used and eventually shut down. The only way to have a social network that everyone uses and is fee-based, would be to take one of the free ones and start charging...but then everyone would leave.

grimgrin 8y ago

Purely anecdotal but when I could have moved to FB I held back because Myspace was more interesting. I eventually moved to FB as I got older, because.. I was older. My interests changed. To some degree this may be an experience with the youth today, in time. Or not, I have no idea

aylmao 8y ago
IMO this is part of why Facebook's user base is so resilient. From what I see, younger people experiment more, looking for something that fits their identity, what their friends use, what's new, etc. They also have more time and incentive to explore new apps. By younger people I mean teenagers, high-school and younger. Older people, it seems to me, are more utilitarian. By older people I mean college and up. They use Facebook for events, or because the social world is harder to navigate in college/later in life than when you're in high school and your friends are neighbors or classmates. Perhaps this is just my experience, or maybe I'm just very off on how I read this, but it's a thought. I don't think Facebook is trying to be interesting— I think they're just shooting for useful and "sticky".

freddie_mercury 8y ago

Anecdotally (I don't live in America), every teenager has a Facebook account. Not a single person has WhatsApp. Instagram is used but not nearly as much as Facebook. (When people cross-post pictures you see the FB post has 3x - 10x the number of likes as the Instagram post.) There are zero political posts. Zero. I've never seen one. If my feed were full of political stuff, I'd also be sick of it. But feed is exclusively full of what friends & acquaintances are doing.

bencollier49 8y ago
Where do you live?
- freddie_mercury 8y ago
  I live in Asia.

Anbelly 8y ago

It's expected that people from group age 20+ will be the last active user base. As far as I know, most teens use Discord, Instagram, they have 0 interest in Facebook.

socrates1998 8y ago
Snapchat is hands down the number one used app by the teenagers I teach. Then instagram.

tmaly 8y ago

for me, I personally check it less and less due to political posts. I do have a few really great closed groups on there. Groups filled with people helping each other out. These are where I still find value on the platform.