9 ms·

Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

213 points by abalog 15y ago

zitterbewegung 15y ago
I see their numbers. How can I trust them? Mostly I see a lot of stuff trying to sell to you their service but I don't see how they actually collect their data.
- anthony_franco 15y ago
  As someone else mentioned, they use Facebook's own advertising tool to estimate the numbers. And their could be many things wrong with it. But if you put that number in the context of other metrics, such as Google trends (http://www.google.com/trends?q=facebook&ctab=0&geo=us&date=all&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends?q=facebook&ctab=0&geo=u...), then the numbers make sense. Now the question is, are they gonna have slow sustained growth from now on like Skype (http://www.google.com/trends?q=skype&ctab=0&geo=us&geor=all&date=all&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends?q=skype&ctab=0&geo=us&#...) or fall off a cliff like MySpace (http://www.google.com/trends?q=myspace&ctab=0&geo=us&geor=all&date=all&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends?q=myspace&ctab=0&geo=us...)? Remains to be seen.
  - zitterbewegung 15y ago
    I guess the real question is if they have reached market saturation or not.
  - nikcub 15y ago
    that Google Trends result is filtered to show the USA only, yet the 'top languages' are, in order, Turkish, Spanish, Italian, French and then English in fifth. makes me very skeptical about their numbers
olihb 15y ago
They don't say why or where those users are going. If the users aren't going anywhere else, they just decided that Facebook weren't for them. This might be alright for Facebook because I guess they want committed users that log on the site several times per day, not users that log once in a while.
- noarchy 15y ago
  Where else would they go, at this point? I don't know of any competitors that are live and able to target Facebook refugees. Diaspora is still in Alpha, for example, and I suspect that the buzz on that one has been fading for some time.
  - jordan0day 15y ago
    Yeah, I'm not sure there's really such a thing as a "Facebook refugee" yet. That is, someone who leaves Facebook and is looking for something better. My guess is that those leaving Facebook are those saying "This whole thing is dumb", and are not looking to continue to engage in online social networking... at least in the way it's been presented so far.
    - zenspunk 15y ago
      Anecdotal: yes, that's exactly the thinking of my friends and I who have given up Facebook. It's turned us off the very concept.
  - WiseWeasel 15y ago
    Flickr and meetup, or similar services. Sharing photos and organizing events are pretty much the only real uses for FB in any case.
- SwellJoe 15y ago
  The "social graph" is more valuable when it has everybody in it. One of the reasons facebook has such a tremendously high valuation is that social graph concept; the notion that the way people are connected and the way they interact is valuable information. I'm not sure that the revenue they've begun to generate (which is reportedly sizable) is actually coming from that magical "social graph" rather than just plain old advertising (and quite spammy advertising at that), but that was the premise for huge valuations in the past. So, facebook gets value from occasional users, and having occasional users go away does hurt them in the long run, since I guess the long bet with facebook is still the "social graph". Regardless of that, negative growth in their most lucrative markets is a horrible sign for a company like facebook. Slow growth is one thing...but losing people by the millions? That indicates significant breakage. I don't know enough to know what kind of breakage, as I'm not really a facebook user (I login maybe once a month).
jordan0day 15y ago
Does anyone have any good guesses as to what the "next" Facebook will be? I mean, in my experience, it basically went Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebook. While Facebook is certainly in the drivers seat to a much greater extent than MySpace was five or six years ago, history indicates they'll eventually be knocked off their throne. However, I haven't seen or heard of any serious newcomers in that space. I've personally seen enthusiasm for Facebook diminishing over the past year or two, but will Facebook be end up being the ultimate "social network"? Is that basically settled?
- politician 15y ago
  My hope is that people have simply tired of the concept. The privacy implications are staggering.
  - JoshTriplett 15y ago
    I don't see anything wrong with a general social network that supports sharing information with people you know. Regardless of how far people have stretched and abused the concept of "people you know" (and "information"), the infrastructure seems useful. So I don't want to see social networking go away; I want to see it entirely decentralized, such that each person's social network goes through that person's personal site.
    - gnosis 15y ago
      By their very nature, centralized social networking sites like Facebook force you to share information not only with the people you know, but also with the owners of site. Some people don't mind this, but I for one don't want Facebook, MySpace, or any other social networking site knowing who my friend are or what I'm sharing with them. It's simply none of their business. The only hope I see for a truly privacy-respecting social network is a distributed, peer-to-peer network. That way you'd be communicating only with those you know, at least in principle. But even there there are major problems, such as the need for information to travel over untrusted hops to get to its destination. Encryption can help with some of it, but would still be subject to traffic analysis. Maybe a social network could be created over TOR. I don't know.
mscarborough 15y ago
If true, this is pretty interesting in the context of the privacy and other mishaps from Facebook over the last few months. I wonder what the breakdown would be for the reasons for quitting.
pointillistic 15y ago
I don't think this is just Facebook, perhaps the so-called social media jumped the shark. I think it jumped the shark a year ago for both Twitter and Facebook (CNN, Ashton Kutcher contest) but the numbers are starting to catch up now. Also don't discount the Linkedin IPO where some would argue the social media was exposed.
noonespecial 15y ago
We're two of those deserters here. It seemed too much like tv, in reverse. Everybody transmits and nobody watches.
- jcitme 15y ago
  This is a problem inherent in any form of social media. Unfortunately, it's not easily fixed. You need to find a way to strike a balance between rewarding content creation and punishing spam, and the line in thin.
  - windsurfer 15y ago
    Reddit seems to do a great job.
    - sin7 15y ago
      Don't kid yourself. Reddit has gotten to the point where reposts continue to make the front page because even if a lot of people have seen it, not all have. And I have noticed that the same comments will garner karma. The problem with websites like Reddit is that they suffer from the so called black swans. A good post can garner karma in the thousands, but a bad one will only have a negative one or two. So, reposting is a great strategy especially when new content is so hard to come by.
      - Locke1689 15y ago
        The real problem with Reddit is that the community sucks.
  - ChrisArchitect 15y ago
    people bring this stuff on themselves by treating fb as a massive 'who I know or am related to' index instead of following who they are interested in. I suppose fb brought some of this on themselves when they went down the twitter-emulation path a few years ago.
moultano 15y ago
Anyone know their methodology? I clicked around a bit and couldn't find any information. Without knowing more my prior would attribute it to a bug.
- teej 15y ago
  The methodology is basically using the Facebook Ad Tool. The tool let's you target a set of users for your ads and tells you the size of that population. The article clearly discloses the inherent issues at play. > Going forward, we’ll be watching closely to see what longer-term trends emerge. Bugs in the Facebook advertising tool that we draw this information from, seasonal changes like college graduations, and other short-term factors, can influence numbers month to month and obscure what’s really happening.
  - Padraig 15y ago
    Other factors like Facebook finding and removing spam accounts, users enabling privacy features, etc. seem like a much more likely cause. I could see people getting bored / busy and not bothering to use it any more, but it's unbelievable that 1.5 million would delete their accounts in one month.
ddkrone 15y ago
The only reason I still have my fake profile is because pretty much every site out there has 'connect with facebook' so it makes it super easy to get access to content that's only viewable by registered users. I basically provide 0 value to facebook in terms of my activities since I never visit my actual profile. I wonder how many of those millions of users are like me.
bemmu 15y ago
It could be that the churn just exceeded new users for the first time because most possible users in USA have been reached already. Some decline is inevitable if everyone is already using your product. There's always churn. Even as FB was growing, a part of those new users were always churning out. Each user makes their own decisions about staying in the system, they are not a sentient whole except as far as media or changes to the system might affect larger groups at once. I imagine your tendency to leave the system to be some sort of a graph. Maybe you are 30% likely to leave and never ever come back after your first day on Facebook. After using it for a week, maybe that gets reduced to 20%. After a month, maybe you are even more unlikely to leave. If they had for example 1 million people joining per day, then 300k would be quitting per day. If the next day all of USA had been tapped out and only 200k people joined, that would look like a sudden -100k turn to decline, even though the trend was same as always. What happens now will depend on what that churn graph looks like. Maybe it's sticky enough that they'll be able to keep a big part of the users they got and over time make it even stickier to keep even more. There will be improvements to get those users to be more active on the site. Even if there was no more user growth in the USA, there could be growth in the amount of time and money the existing userbase spends on the site.
- pessimizer 15y ago
  That this is true is a bit of a tautology. Assuming the graph is monotonically decreasing sounds unlikely to me, though; I think there's likely to be multiple peaks - like the proverbial "7-year itch" for marriages. Another graph that would be relevant would be the likelihood of people who have been exposed to facebook through their friends, media saturation and advertising, yet still haven't joined, to be tempted to join later. In other words - facebook has already saturated the internet world's radar, and people who haven't joined already are completely aware of its existance, function, and benefits, and still not joining. Those will be very expensive users to get, so IMO retention should be their major focus. I stayed through the "6-month updates-full-of-farmville problem", because they fixed it, they barely kept me through the "1-and-1/2-year privacy panic" after backing off on some portion of their stridency (and profitability per user), and they lost me completely, along with a number of other people I know, after the "2-year bored-to-shit-with-people-I-went-to-HS-with-telling-me-where-they-went-to-lunch-and-what-they-think-of-Obama lull" which I'm not sure they can do anything about. If a large cohort of similarly aged users hit some peak that facebook is unable or unwilling to iron out at the same time, and there's no supply of cheap "Wow, there's a place on the internet where I can keep track of all of my college buddies!" users to replace them, there could be a precipitous fall.
nhangen 15y ago
I don't think any single service will kill Facebook. Hell, I don't think you can do anything but diminish them at this point. My bet is that the micro-niche makes a comeback and is what catches on going forward. We dont' care about high school friends we never talked to, or family members that blab about their dinner. What we care about are the things that interest us...HN is a great example. As more people move to avoid the noise, they'll find solace in mini-communities, and I think that's the way forward. Not just one service, but hundreds.
- abalog 15y ago
  I concur with you.
- pointillistic 15y ago
  Technically speaking it takes to much "gardening" to run HN-like site. There are millions of niche forums there already. But it's the platform and the interface that makes HN different. I don't know if there is a technical expertise to similarly run other communities there. Unless of course the HN platform is released as an open source project.
  - paulitex 15y ago
    > Unless of course the HN platform is released as an open source project. 1. go to http://arclanguage.org/install http://arclanguage.org/install 2. download, untar arc3.tar 3. see news.arc (hn source)
- evgen 15y ago
  Unless of course Facebook figures out a useful and effective way to provide the same focused view of a niche community within the larger Facebook expanse. At some point they may come up with a way to easily and intuitively allow users to expose different facets of their interests and persona to different groups; if they figure this out the niche sites (even HN) are toast.
  - rhizome 15y ago
nrao123 15y ago
I have long believed that Facebook/MySpace is like a TV show. Once the "content" becomes less interesting, people will slowly tune out. I am personally seeing fewer and less interesting updates from my friends. In fact, the general theory of mine is that any business whose key metric is "time spent per user", is basically a time sink AND in the media business and needs to keep up with new ways to entertain people. Those businesses have shorter shelf lives. On the other hand, Google/Microsoft are in the productivity/time saving business and they have more durable advantages since they don't have to keep coming up ways to make people stick around. People stick around and use their service, because people save time. Watch out for Twitter to do to Facebook what, Facebook did to Myspace and what Myspace did to Friendster. Twitter on the other hand may not exactly be like a TV show as much as TV channel with each mega Twitter star (e.g. Charlie Sheen) a TV show within that channel.
- jamesteow 15y ago
  'Once the "content" becomes less interesting, people will slowly tune out. I am personally seeing fewer and less interesting updates from my friends.' Same here. Most of my friends who have something interesting to say will contact me via IM/e-mail or I'll read it via Twitter. So I'm left with a lot of status updates that... really don't resonate (except from a handful of key people).
  - Arro 15y ago
    'except from a handful of key people' Agreed. If I was only facebook friends with the 10 people I really am interested in, I'd hardly notice the difference. I don't want to go through and remove all the loose friends I met in college one-by-one, though. Twitter is much more relevant to me; I'm only following around 50 people, all of which I deliberately chose.
- dkarl 15y ago
  Same here. I'm getting more and more bored with it. What was most interesting about Facebook for me was learning about certain people. This guy I work with likes cheesy movies, goes out to Irish bars with his wife, and likes to tweet quotes from whatever movie he's watching when he's drunk. Learning that was interesting. Seeing the same pattern every day is horribly boring. Same thing with most of my high-volume friends. A close high school friend's wife, whom I haven't had a chance to get to know in person, loves mariachi music, can't write a coherent sentence to save her life, goes to la pulga (the flea market) every weekend, enjoys drama with her coworkers, and is constantly sharing coupon deals. Fascinating to know, boring as shit to see every day. And of course the highest volume people are the most boring. All my friends seem to have about the same volume of inanity, funny stuff, somewhat interesting comments, worthwhile content, and vital life updates to share. They just vary in what their sharing threshold is. If I could tune out everything below "worthwhile content" then Facebook would be great. I'd also only need to look at it once a day for two minutes to keep up with everybody. Alas, there is no "setLogLevel" method on my Facebook feed.
jerrya 15y ago
"Most prominently, the United States lost nearly 6 million users..." You know who else lost nearly 6 million users? Yep. AOL.
cheez 15y ago
Twitter for me. One of the things I wanted out of Facebook is to talk to people I knew regarding various topics. I found out that most people just play Farmville, post happy birthday notes and pictures of their kids. While catching up with old flames was fun, the interest is gone. On Twitter, I can search the entire world for people who have the same interests as me, read their thoughts and correspond with them. So basically I left Facebook because I really wanted to connect with people on an intellectual level. Turns out, I don't know anyone who I can correspond with in that manner. By left, I mean I deleted the account, whatever that means in FB land.
grandalf 15y ago
Suppose you're in a room with 5 close friends having a conversation. You're comfortable, animated, energetic, outgoing. In the midst of this engrossing conversation 400 other acquaintances silently enter the room. Suddenly you notice them and realize they can all hear every word you're saying. Most people find this scenario a bit socially uncomfortable and clam right up. Facebook's growth has created this scenario for a lot of people. The basic currency of Facebook (voyeurism) relies upon a loose security model that prevents a person from walling off his/her 5-10 closest friends and using FB for the bulk of their online socializing. Eavesdropping is essential to the business model. The problem is, thusfar most FB users are not really aware just how intricately engineered this voyeurism is and how publicly their lives are being broadcast.
- noarchy 15y ago
  You can wall off groups of people within Facebook, but the effort required to do this is beyond the motivation level that I'd expect most Facebook users (myself included) to have. Like privacy, making Facebook more tolerable to use is an opt-in thing, requiring proactive measures by the user.
  - r00fus 15y ago
    If walling off your group is equivalently difficult to creating a yahoo/google group, then yeah. Facebook's entire premise is that people LIKE being heard/seen and LIKE seeing/hearing others, in their social graph. What is really needed is multiple distinct social graphs per user with distinct walls between them, done elegantly... this isn't an easy problem to solve. There was a really nice presentation from a Googler (who subsequently moved to Facebook) which described this problem eloquently... but I can't seem to find the link.
    - grandalf 15y ago
      Interesting. I'd love to see the presentation if you (or anyone else) end(s) up finding the link. It's interesting to consider the threshold for the sort of social discomfort I described above. In my case it hit around 2/3 of my current friend count.
btilly 15y ago
In related news for the first time ever, LinkedIn trumped Facebook in a survey about which social networks people care about. http://www.bnet.com/blog/business-research/linkedin-trumps-facebook-in-popularity-contest/1660 http://www.bnet.com/blog/business-research/linkedin-trumps-f... Apparently helping get you sucked in to Farmville is not as valuable to people as helping you get a job and stay connected with what is happening with old co-workers. Go figure.
- tintin 15y ago
  I'm not sure you could call LinkedIn a social network. It can be nice to find out about an old friend, but most of it is pure business. So I'm not surprised about the survey.
  - hessenwolf 15y ago
    I agree with your point about the survey results being due to it being pure business, but I still think it is a 'social network'; it's just not one that is made to spend a long time on. I take a gander at it circa once a month. (Their new feature that shows everybody that I looked at their profile though really concerns me.)
  - bad_user 15y ago
    The best thing about LinkedIn for me is their recommendations system. Whenever I'm looking at people's profiles on LinkedIn, I'm looking at their work history and their recommendations, the other stuff being basically useless. And mostly I value recommendations coming from people I know. So it's a social network and I think it is more pure and valuable than the Facebook graph since on LinkedIn you only want a thousand connections if you're an HR person, not because you need friends for Zynga games, so most people on LinkedIn have between 10-200 connections representing old colleagues.
    - pagekalisedown 15y ago
      Aren't people giving out recommendations like it's going out of style?
abbasmehdi 15y ago
I'm still not sure why FB has not figured out an easy way to segment and categorize friends. FB puts me in the same room with my mom, coworkers, school buddies, and nephews. Awkward.
- ern 15y ago
  It allows you to group/categorize your friends, and set privacy for each group for most actions. If you wanted to hide everything from your mom, you could. If you need to share an update with your nephews, but not your school friends that's easy. Perhaps having separate Walls for different groups is the next step.
  - zb 15y ago
    That's true for a certain category of content - wall posts, photo albums, notes - although they don't make it especially easy. For comments, you not only can't control the privacy setting (it's controlled by whoever posted the original content), you can't really even tell what it is. For other things - likes, your friend list - you can't control it at all.
  - abbasmehdi 15y ago
    It’s too difficult, and too much work, and too much to remember, and even then fails. What if I wanted to share some posts with some friends, some with other, some with all. Have some activity visible to some, some to others, and some to all? What if I wanted to share some friends with some, some with others, some to all. FB does a terrible job at mimicking real-life social interactions. How comfortable would you feel if everyone whose number you added to your phonebook could see all your other contacts in the phone? Well FB does that. They let new friends see all friends without any relevancy guard or protections.
auganov 15y ago
As any other social site ever created it seems to be following the same path. Each month what I'm seeing on my landing page is getting less relevant and more annoying (even without growing my friend base too much and having around 20 friends, I cannot imagine what happens to those over 100). Most of that spam is generated by few active friends, while the rest does pretty much nothing. Most of communication that I see taking place is very very meaningless, somebody posts a video: "lol", "haha", "nice one", that's pretty much it. For me it's a socially filtered spam [funny stuff?] site. If some site can encourage people to have meaningful communication again it will take on Facebook, no doubt. Get 3 of my important friends on the site and I'm sold. Then Facebook just becomes a big contact list. And at that point I'm not sure where it goes. It might be a contact-list site for a long long time. Facebook might not die as a website, but competitors will definitely takeaway a lot of value from it. And so far I don't see it becoming much more than a contact-list. And keep in mind that the less engaged the users are the less ad revenue there will be. I have no doubt that as we're speaking right now users are less and less engaged with the site. Growth is still fast so the revenue is rising, but once that stops it will crumble. The will have to get more aggressive with ads or people will simply stop to notice them at all. Or perhaps start selling more of the user data. At this point there's not much you can do. Also the growth they see outside of the western world might be very much junk. I'm in Poland, Facebook craze is already old news here yet I get english ads? It's great that AT&T has high speed internet for 20$, but I'm sorry, I cannot purchase that here. Everybody knows ad revenue is tricky. Facebook is no different. Nobody is going bankrupt, I'm not saying that. Facebook is here and it will stay for few more years for sure, but to compare it to google is crazy. Google can be conquered too I'm sure, but Facebook definitely makes for a far more fragile target. Personally I'd say it will simply decay and we might not see another social site being that big in a long time to come. Facebook has half of the world on there, cool, but guess what, I am not connecting with those people and never will. Facebook managed to get a lot of people registered in one place, but has it managed to truly connect a lot of people? Not at all.
SebMortelmans 15y ago
I don't have figures to back it up, but Facebook in Belgium also feels like it's declining. Not necessary new users, that may be still even rising. But mainly active users becoming inactive. Im daring to bet that's declining big in Belgium.
nextparadigms 15y ago
I felt this was bound to happen. Too many "friends", too much spam, and it became too "mainstream", which means the early adopters would want to move on to something else. If there actually was "something else" right now, a paradigm shifting social network, the decay of Facebook would've been even faster, but unfortunately there isn't much to replace it right now, but I think there will be by the end of the year.
indigoviolet 15y ago
134 points, 76 comments, and maybe 3 of them critically examining the methodology :/
ashcairo 15y ago
I blame teenybopper exams.
oldpond 15y ago
And what do you know, The Social Network came out on cable around the same time. Coincidence?
threejay 15y ago
I deleted facebook about six months ago because it was a huge stressor that added very little value to my life. I have too many subsets of friends, which makes it impossible to maintain one personality without offending someone. This just isn't how human's interact and I think it will eventually kill off facebook, unless they find some way to mitigate it. For reference: 1) Highschool friends and family who are incredibly religious/right wing/etc 2) Friends from skiing, many of whom make a living on the mountain, who are about as vile as one can imagine 3) Friends from college or work, which consists mostly of PharmD's, MD's, and nurses. 4) Other random friends from startup stuff, partys, etc
- chriserin 15y ago
  I think humans inherently want to nurture each of their relationships, whether close or not, individually. Along with tailoring our communication to each person, we exclude large parts of our lives and minds from people that we want to be friends with. Doing that naturally and through different contexts is one thing, but having to electronically do that for each relationship is just impossible.
golgo13 15y ago
I am personally seeing the growth from Mexico. In the past month, a large chunk of my cousins have added me. But like others have said, most of their updates are from the Spanish version of Farmville, etc.
Shenglong 15y ago
China is really a stumbling block. I've actually been thinking about the best way to penetrate the Chinese market... I'm thinking the strategy is to start young, and keep good relations with their government. I guess this is tricky, especially if the founders can't speak Chinese, and have no family ties.
- jamesteow 15y ago
  Well Mark Zuckerberg is into Asian girls so I suppose that's his in.
dhughes 15y ago
It's trendy to hate Facebook these days but I think it's more than that. People want to stay connected especially people 20 to 30 years-old and how do they do that now? Smartphones, iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices. Facebook hasn't lost the battle it's just become obsolete.
int3rnaut 15y ago
To quote the Disney Hipster meme, "it's too mainstream". Perhaps I have an obscure point of view, but Facebook lost it's luster for a lot of people when the older crowd started to really embrace it. It's not as cool as it once was. This is a big problem for a lot of companies, not just social media.
- jocote 15y ago
  This. Was pretty cool at first connecting with classmates and writing messages about papers, projects, and planning stuff for the weekend. Now it's some gossipy aunt you haven't talked to in months and your seven year old niece sending a friend request.

213 points by abalog 15y ago

I see their numbers. How can I trust them? Mostly I see a lot of stuff trying to sell to you their service but I don't see how they actually collect their data.

anthony_franco 15y ago
As someone else mentioned, they use Facebook's own advertising tool to estimate the numbers. And their could be many things wrong with it. But if you put that number in the context of other metrics, such as Google trends (http://www.google.com/trends?q=facebook&ctab=0&geo=us&date=all&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends?q=facebook&ctab=0&geo=u...), then the numbers make sense. Now the question is, are they gonna have slow sustained growth from now on like Skype (http://www.google.com/trends?q=skype&ctab=0&geo=us&geor=all&date=all&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends?q=skype&ctab=0&geo=us&#...) or fall off a cliff like MySpace (http://www.google.com/trends?q=myspace&ctab=0&geo=us&geor=all&date=all&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends?q=myspace&ctab=0&geo=us...)? Remains to be seen.
- zitterbewegung 15y ago
  I guess the real question is if they have reached market saturation or not.
- nikcub 15y ago
  that Google Trends result is filtered to show the USA only, yet the 'top languages' are, in order, Turkish, Spanish, Italian, French and then English in fifth. makes me very skeptical about their numbers

olihb 15y ago

They don't say why or where those users are going. If the users aren't going anywhere else, they just decided that Facebook weren't for them. This might be alright for Facebook because I guess they want committed users that log on the site several times per day, not users that log once in a while.

noarchy 15y ago
Where else would they go, at this point? I don't know of any competitors that are live and able to target Facebook refugees. Diaspora is still in Alpha, for example, and I suspect that the buzz on that one has been fading for some time.
- jordan0day 15y ago
  Yeah, I'm not sure there's really such a thing as a "Facebook refugee" yet. That is, someone who leaves Facebook and is looking for something better. My guess is that those leaving Facebook are those saying "This whole thing is dumb", and are not looking to continue to engage in online social networking... at least in the way it's been presented so far.
  - zenspunk 15y ago
    Anecdotal: yes, that's exactly the thinking of my friends and I who have given up Facebook. It's turned us off the very concept.
- WiseWeasel 15y ago
  Flickr and meetup, or similar services. Sharing photos and organizing events are pretty much the only real uses for FB in any case.
SwellJoe 15y ago
The "social graph" is more valuable when it has everybody in it. One of the reasons facebook has such a tremendously high valuation is that social graph concept; the notion that the way people are connected and the way they interact is valuable information. I'm not sure that the revenue they've begun to generate (which is reportedly sizable) is actually coming from that magical "social graph" rather than just plain old advertising (and quite spammy advertising at that), but that was the premise for huge valuations in the past. So, facebook gets value from occasional users, and having occasional users go away does hurt them in the long run, since I guess the long bet with facebook is still the "social graph". Regardless of that, negative growth in their most lucrative markets is a horrible sign for a company like facebook. Slow growth is one thing...but losing people by the millions? That indicates significant breakage. I don't know enough to know what kind of breakage, as I'm not really a facebook user (I login maybe once a month).

jordan0day 15y ago

Does anyone have any good guesses as to what the "next" Facebook will be? I mean, in my experience, it basically went Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebook. While Facebook is certainly in the drivers seat to a much greater extent than MySpace was five or six years ago, history indicates they'll eventually be knocked off their throne. However, I haven't seen or heard of any serious newcomers in that space. I've personally seen enthusiasm for Facebook diminishing over the past year or two, but will Facebook be end up being the ultimate "social network"? Is that basically settled?

politician 15y ago
My hope is that people have simply tired of the concept. The privacy implications are staggering.
- JoshTriplett 15y ago
  I don't see anything wrong with a general social network that supports sharing information with people you know. Regardless of how far people have stretched and abused the concept of "people you know" (and "information"), the infrastructure seems useful. So I don't want to see social networking go away; I want to see it entirely decentralized, such that each person's social network goes through that person's personal site.
  - gnosis 15y ago
    By their very nature, centralized social networking sites like Facebook force you to share information not only with the people you know, but also with the owners of site. Some people don't mind this, but I for one don't want Facebook, MySpace, or any other social networking site knowing who my friend are or what I'm sharing with them. It's simply none of their business. The only hope I see for a truly privacy-respecting social network is a distributed, peer-to-peer network. That way you'd be communicating only with those you know, at least in principle. But even there there are major problems, such as the need for information to travel over untrusted hops to get to its destination. Encryption can help with some of it, but would still be subject to traffic analysis. Maybe a social network could be created over TOR. I don't know.

mscarborough 15y ago

If true, this is pretty interesting in the context of the privacy and other mishaps from Facebook over the last few months. I wonder what the breakdown would be for the reasons for quitting.

pointillistic 15y ago

I don't think this is just Facebook, perhaps the so-called social media jumped the shark. I think it jumped the shark a year ago for both Twitter and Facebook (CNN, Ashton Kutcher contest) but the numbers are starting to catch up now. Also don't discount the Linkedin IPO where some would argue the social media was exposed.

noonespecial 15y ago

We're two of those deserters here. It seemed too much like tv, in reverse. Everybody transmits and nobody watches.

jcitme 15y ago
This is a problem inherent in any form of social media. Unfortunately, it's not easily fixed. You need to find a way to strike a balance between rewarding content creation and punishing spam, and the line in thin.
- windsurfer 15y ago
  Reddit seems to do a great job.
  - sin7 15y ago
    Don't kid yourself. Reddit has gotten to the point where reposts continue to make the front page because even if a lot of people have seen it, not all have. And I have noticed that the same comments will garner karma. The problem with websites like Reddit is that they suffer from the so called black swans. A good post can garner karma in the thousands, but a bad one will only have a negative one or two. So, reposting is a great strategy especially when new content is so hard to come by.
    - Locke1689 15y ago
      The real problem with Reddit is that the community sucks.
- ChrisArchitect 15y ago
  people bring this stuff on themselves by treating fb as a massive 'who I know or am related to' index instead of following who they are interested in. I suppose fb brought some of this on themselves when they went down the twitter-emulation path a few years ago.

moultano 15y ago

Anyone know their methodology? I clicked around a bit and couldn't find any information. Without knowing more my prior would attribute it to a bug.

teej 15y ago
The methodology is basically using the Facebook Ad Tool. The tool let's you target a set of users for your ads and tells you the size of that population. The article clearly discloses the inherent issues at play. > Going forward, we’ll be watching closely to see what longer-term trends emerge. Bugs in the Facebook advertising tool that we draw this information from, seasonal changes like college graduations, and other short-term factors, can influence numbers month to month and obscure what’s really happening.
- Padraig 15y ago
  Other factors like Facebook finding and removing spam accounts, users enabling privacy features, etc. seem like a much more likely cause. I could see people getting bored / busy and not bothering to use it any more, but it's unbelievable that 1.5 million would delete their accounts in one month.

ddkrone 15y ago

The only reason I still have my fake profile is because pretty much every site out there has 'connect with facebook' so it makes it super easy to get access to content that's only viewable by registered users. I basically provide 0 value to facebook in terms of my activities since I never visit my actual profile. I wonder how many of those millions of users are like me.

bemmu 15y ago

It could be that the churn just exceeded new users for the first time because most possible users in USA have been reached already. Some decline is inevitable if everyone is already using your product. There's always churn. Even as FB was growing, a part of those new users were always churning out. Each user makes their own decisions about staying in the system, they are not a sentient whole except as far as media or changes to the system might affect larger groups at once. I imagine your tendency to leave the system to be some sort of a graph. Maybe you are 30% likely to leave and never ever come back after your first day on Facebook. After using it for a week, maybe that gets reduced to 20%. After a month, maybe you are even more unlikely to leave. If they had for example 1 million people joining per day, then 300k would be quitting per day. If the next day all of USA had been tapped out and only 200k people joined, that would look like a sudden -100k turn to decline, even though the trend was same as always. What happens now will depend on what that churn graph looks like. Maybe it's sticky enough that they'll be able to keep a big part of the users they got and over time make it even stickier to keep even more. There will be improvements to get those users to be more active on the site. Even if there was no more user growth in the USA, there could be growth in the amount of time and money the existing userbase spends on the site.

pessimizer 15y ago
That this is true is a bit of a tautology. Assuming the graph is monotonically decreasing sounds unlikely to me, though; I think there's likely to be multiple peaks - like the proverbial "7-year itch" for marriages. Another graph that would be relevant would be the likelihood of people who have been exposed to facebook through their friends, media saturation and advertising, yet still haven't joined, to be tempted to join later. In other words - facebook has already saturated the internet world's radar, and people who haven't joined already are completely aware of its existance, function, and benefits, and still not joining. Those will be very expensive users to get, so IMO retention should be their major focus. I stayed through the "6-month updates-full-of-farmville problem", because they fixed it, they barely kept me through the "1-and-1/2-year privacy panic" after backing off on some portion of their stridency (and profitability per user), and they lost me completely, along with a number of other people I know, after the "2-year bored-to-shit-with-people-I-went-to-HS-with-telling-me-where-they-went-to-lunch-and-what-they-think-of-Obama lull" which I'm not sure they can do anything about. If a large cohort of similarly aged users hit some peak that facebook is unable or unwilling to iron out at the same time, and there's no supply of cheap "Wow, there's a place on the internet where I can keep track of all of my college buddies!" users to replace them, there could be a precipitous fall.

nhangen 15y ago

I don't think any single service will kill Facebook. Hell, I don't think you can do anything but diminish them at this point. My bet is that the micro-niche makes a comeback and is what catches on going forward. We dont' care about high school friends we never talked to, or family members that blab about their dinner. What we care about are the things that interest us...HN is a great example. As more people move to avoid the noise, they'll find solace in mini-communities, and I think that's the way forward. Not just one service, but hundreds.

abalog 15y ago
I concur with you.
pointillistic 15y ago
Technically speaking it takes to much "gardening" to run HN-like site. There are millions of niche forums there already. But it's the platform and the interface that makes HN different. I don't know if there is a technical expertise to similarly run other communities there. Unless of course the HN platform is released as an open source project.
- paulitex 15y ago
  > Unless of course the HN platform is released as an open source project. 1. go to http://arclanguage.org/install http://arclanguage.org/install 2. download, untar arc3.tar 3. see news.arc (hn source)
evgen 15y ago
Unless of course Facebook figures out a useful and effective way to provide the same focused view of a niche community within the larger Facebook expanse. At some point they may come up with a way to easily and intuitively allow users to expose different facets of their interests and persona to different groups; if they figure this out the niche sites (even HN) are toast.
- rhizome 15y ago

nrao123 15y ago

I have long believed that Facebook/MySpace is like a TV show. Once the "content" becomes less interesting, people will slowly tune out. I am personally seeing fewer and less interesting updates from my friends. In fact, the general theory of mine is that any business whose key metric is "time spent per user", is basically a time sink AND in the media business and needs to keep up with new ways to entertain people. Those businesses have shorter shelf lives. On the other hand, Google/Microsoft are in the productivity/time saving business and they have more durable advantages since they don't have to keep coming up ways to make people stick around. People stick around and use their service, because people save time. Watch out for Twitter to do to Facebook what, Facebook did to Myspace and what Myspace did to Friendster. Twitter on the other hand may not exactly be like a TV show as much as TV channel with each mega Twitter star (e.g. Charlie Sheen) a TV show within that channel.

jamesteow 15y ago
'Once the "content" becomes less interesting, people will slowly tune out. I am personally seeing fewer and less interesting updates from my friends.' Same here. Most of my friends who have something interesting to say will contact me via IM/e-mail or I'll read it via Twitter. So I'm left with a lot of status updates that... really don't resonate (except from a handful of key people).
- Arro 15y ago
  'except from a handful of key people' Agreed. If I was only facebook friends with the 10 people I really am interested in, I'd hardly notice the difference. I don't want to go through and remove all the loose friends I met in college one-by-one, though. Twitter is much more relevant to me; I'm only following around 50 people, all of which I deliberately chose.
dkarl 15y ago
Same here. I'm getting more and more bored with it. What was most interesting about Facebook for me was learning about certain people. This guy I work with likes cheesy movies, goes out to Irish bars with his wife, and likes to tweet quotes from whatever movie he's watching when he's drunk. Learning that was interesting. Seeing the same pattern every day is horribly boring. Same thing with most of my high-volume friends. A close high school friend's wife, whom I haven't had a chance to get to know in person, loves mariachi music, can't write a coherent sentence to save her life, goes to la pulga (the flea market) every weekend, enjoys drama with her coworkers, and is constantly sharing coupon deals. Fascinating to know, boring as shit to see every day. And of course the highest volume people are the most boring. All my friends seem to have about the same volume of inanity, funny stuff, somewhat interesting comments, worthwhile content, and vital life updates to share. They just vary in what their sharing threshold is. If I could tune out everything below "worthwhile content" then Facebook would be great. I'd also only need to look at it once a day for two minutes to keep up with everybody. Alas, there is no "setLogLevel" method on my Facebook feed.

jerrya 15y ago

"Most prominently, the United States lost nearly 6 million users..." You know who else lost nearly 6 million users? Yep. AOL.

cheez 15y ago

Twitter for me. One of the things I wanted out of Facebook is to talk to people I knew regarding various topics. I found out that most people just play Farmville, post happy birthday notes and pictures of their kids. While catching up with old flames was fun, the interest is gone. On Twitter, I can search the entire world for people who have the same interests as me, read their thoughts and correspond with them. So basically I left Facebook because I really wanted to connect with people on an intellectual level. Turns out, I don't know anyone who I can correspond with in that manner. By left, I mean I deleted the account, whatever that means in FB land.

grandalf 15y ago

Suppose you're in a room with 5 close friends having a conversation. You're comfortable, animated, energetic, outgoing. In the midst of this engrossing conversation 400 other acquaintances silently enter the room. Suddenly you notice them and realize they can all hear every word you're saying. Most people find this scenario a bit socially uncomfortable and clam right up. Facebook's growth has created this scenario for a lot of people. The basic currency of Facebook (voyeurism) relies upon a loose security model that prevents a person from walling off his/her 5-10 closest friends and using FB for the bulk of their online socializing. Eavesdropping is essential to the business model. The problem is, thusfar most FB users are not really aware just how intricately engineered this voyeurism is and how publicly their lives are being broadcast.

noarchy 15y ago
You can wall off groups of people within Facebook, but the effort required to do this is beyond the motivation level that I'd expect most Facebook users (myself included) to have. Like privacy, making Facebook more tolerable to use is an opt-in thing, requiring proactive measures by the user.
- r00fus 15y ago
  If walling off your group is equivalently difficult to creating a yahoo/google group, then yeah. Facebook's entire premise is that people LIKE being heard/seen and LIKE seeing/hearing others, in their social graph. What is really needed is multiple distinct social graphs per user with distinct walls between them, done elegantly... this isn't an easy problem to solve. There was a really nice presentation from a Googler (who subsequently moved to Facebook) which described this problem eloquently... but I can't seem to find the link.
  - grandalf 15y ago
    Interesting. I'd love to see the presentation if you (or anyone else) end(s) up finding the link. It's interesting to consider the threshold for the sort of social discomfort I described above. In my case it hit around 2/3 of my current friend count.

btilly 15y ago

In related news for the first time ever, LinkedIn trumped Facebook in a survey about which social networks people care about. http://www.bnet.com/blog/business-research/linkedin-trumps-facebook-in-popularity-contest/1660 http://www.bnet.com/blog/business-research/linkedin-trumps-f... Apparently helping get you sucked in to Farmville is not as valuable to people as helping you get a job and stay connected with what is happening with old co-workers. Go figure.

tintin 15y ago
I'm not sure you could call LinkedIn a social network. It can be nice to find out about an old friend, but most of it is pure business. So I'm not surprised about the survey.
- hessenwolf 15y ago
  I agree with your point about the survey results being due to it being pure business, but I still think it is a 'social network'; it's just not one that is made to spend a long time on. I take a gander at it circa once a month. (Their new feature that shows everybody that I looked at their profile though really concerns me.)
- bad_user 15y ago
  The best thing about LinkedIn for me is their recommendations system. Whenever I'm looking at people's profiles on LinkedIn, I'm looking at their work history and their recommendations, the other stuff being basically useless. And mostly I value recommendations coming from people I know. So it's a social network and I think it is more pure and valuable than the Facebook graph since on LinkedIn you only want a thousand connections if you're an HR person, not because you need friends for Zynga games, so most people on LinkedIn have between 10-200 connections representing old colleagues.
  - pagekalisedown 15y ago
    Aren't people giving out recommendations like it's going out of style?

abbasmehdi 15y ago

I'm still not sure why FB has not figured out an easy way to segment and categorize friends. FB puts me in the same room with my mom, coworkers, school buddies, and nephews. Awkward.

ern 15y ago
It allows you to group/categorize your friends, and set privacy for each group for most actions. If you wanted to hide everything from your mom, you could. If you need to share an update with your nephews, but not your school friends that's easy. Perhaps having separate Walls for different groups is the next step.
- zb 15y ago
  That's true for a certain category of content - wall posts, photo albums, notes - although they don't make it especially easy. For comments, you not only can't control the privacy setting (it's controlled by whoever posted the original content), you can't really even tell what it is. For other things - likes, your friend list - you can't control it at all.
- abbasmehdi 15y ago
  It’s too difficult, and too much work, and too much to remember, and even then fails. What if I wanted to share some posts with some friends, some with other, some with all. Have some activity visible to some, some to others, and some to all? What if I wanted to share some friends with some, some with others, some to all. FB does a terrible job at mimicking real-life social interactions. How comfortable would you feel if everyone whose number you added to your phonebook could see all your other contacts in the phone? Well FB does that. They let new friends see all friends without any relevancy guard or protections.

auganov 15y ago

As any other social site ever created it seems to be following the same path. Each month what I'm seeing on my landing page is getting less relevant and more annoying (even without growing my friend base too much and having around 20 friends, I cannot imagine what happens to those over 100). Most of that spam is generated by few active friends, while the rest does pretty much nothing. Most of communication that I see taking place is very very meaningless, somebody posts a video: "lol", "haha", "nice one", that's pretty much it. For me it's a socially filtered spam [funny stuff?] site. If some site can encourage people to have meaningful communication again it will take on Facebook, no doubt. Get 3 of my important friends on the site and I'm sold. Then Facebook just becomes a big contact list. And at that point I'm not sure where it goes. It might be a contact-list site for a long long time. Facebook might not die as a website, but competitors will definitely takeaway a lot of value from it. And so far I don't see it becoming much more than a contact-list. And keep in mind that the less engaged the users are the less ad revenue there will be. I have no doubt that as we're speaking right now users are less and less engaged with the site. Growth is still fast so the revenue is rising, but once that stops it will crumble. The will have to get more aggressive with ads or people will simply stop to notice them at all. Or perhaps start selling more of the user data. At this point there's not much you can do. Also the growth they see outside of the western world might be very much junk. I'm in Poland, Facebook craze is already old news here yet I get english ads? It's great that AT&T has high speed internet for 20$, but I'm sorry, I cannot purchase that here. Everybody knows ad revenue is tricky. Facebook is no different. Nobody is going bankrupt, I'm not saying that. Facebook is here and it will stay for few more years for sure, but to compare it to google is crazy. Google can be conquered too I'm sure, but Facebook definitely makes for a far more fragile target. Personally I'd say it will simply decay and we might not see another social site being that big in a long time to come. Facebook has half of the world on there, cool, but guess what, I am not connecting with those people and never will. Facebook managed to get a lot of people registered in one place, but has it managed to truly connect a lot of people? Not at all.

SebMortelmans 15y ago

I don't have figures to back it up, but Facebook in Belgium also feels like it's declining. Not necessary new users, that may be still even rising. But mainly active users becoming inactive. Im daring to bet that's declining big in Belgium.

nextparadigms 15y ago

I felt this was bound to happen. Too many "friends", too much spam, and it became too "mainstream", which means the early adopters would want to move on to something else. If there actually was "something else" right now, a paradigm shifting social network, the decay of Facebook would've been even faster, but unfortunately there isn't much to replace it right now, but I think there will be by the end of the year.

indigoviolet 15y ago

134 points, 76 comments, and maybe 3 of them critically examining the methodology :/

ashcairo 15y ago

I blame teenybopper exams.

oldpond 15y ago

And what do you know, The Social Network came out on cable around the same time. Coincidence?

threejay 15y ago

I deleted facebook about six months ago because it was a huge stressor that added very little value to my life. I have too many subsets of friends, which makes it impossible to maintain one personality without offending someone. This just isn't how human's interact and I think it will eventually kill off facebook, unless they find some way to mitigate it. For reference: 1) Highschool friends and family who are incredibly religious/right wing/etc 2) Friends from skiing, many of whom make a living on the mountain, who are about as vile as one can imagine 3) Friends from college or work, which consists mostly of PharmD's, MD's, and nurses. 4) Other random friends from startup stuff, partys, etc

chriserin 15y ago
I think humans inherently want to nurture each of their relationships, whether close or not, individually. Along with tailoring our communication to each person, we exclude large parts of our lives and minds from people that we want to be friends with. Doing that naturally and through different contexts is one thing, but having to electronically do that for each relationship is just impossible.

golgo13 15y ago

I am personally seeing the growth from Mexico. In the past month, a large chunk of my cousins have added me. But like others have said, most of their updates are from the Spanish version of Farmville, etc.

Shenglong 15y ago

China is really a stumbling block. I've actually been thinking about the best way to penetrate the Chinese market... I'm thinking the strategy is to start young, and keep good relations with their government. I guess this is tricky, especially if the founders can't speak Chinese, and have no family ties.

jamesteow 15y ago
Well Mark Zuckerberg is into Asian girls so I suppose that's his in.

dhughes 15y ago

It's trendy to hate Facebook these days but I think it's more than that. People want to stay connected especially people 20 to 30 years-old and how do they do that now? Smartphones, iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices. Facebook hasn't lost the battle it's just become obsolete.

int3rnaut 15y ago

To quote the Disney Hipster meme, "it's too mainstream". Perhaps I have an obscure point of view, but Facebook lost it's luster for a lot of people when the older crowd started to really embrace it. It's not as cool as it once was. This is a big problem for a lot of companies, not just social media.

jocote 15y ago
This. Was pretty cool at first connecting with classmates and writing messages about papers, projects, and planning stuff for the weekend. Now it's some gossipy aunt you haven't talked to in months and your seven year old niece sending a friend request.