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Facebook is dying, but not because of TikTok. Facebook is dying because they stopped being Facebook. If they gave what's left of their userbase what they actua

Facebook is dying, but not because of TikTok. Facebook is dying because they stopped being Facebook. If they gave what's left of their userbase what they actually wanted (chronological feed, seeing friends posts, not seeing spam, more ways to interact (bring back pets, gifts, superpokes etc)) they'd do ok. It doesn't help that their core code is a steaming pile of bloated dung that doesn't seem to be tested by anyone.

naravara 4y ago
When I started using Facebook it wasn't a newsfeed, it was just a personal homepage with a photo album and a bulletin board attached. I'd love to have something like that again that everyone uses, but everything is about goosing the influencer economy now rather than letting me socialize.
- nine_k 4y ago
  It almost sounds as if there is a niche for that! BTW have you tried dreamwidth.org, a fork of the venerable livejournal.com? They look as if 2005 had never ended,in a good sense.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    There isn't. Many companies e.g. Path, Google have tried and failed to build a social network that focused on more personal relationships. They simply don't offer enough value over say a WhatApp group.
    - nine_k 4y ago
      I think they wanted hockey-stick growth and prospects of a big payout, while the sustainable model may be a lifestyle business that barely pays for itself.
      - naravara 4y ago
        This. Though I'm not even sure about the "barely pays for itself." I mean, Automaticc/Wordpress sustains itself okay and had the resources to buy Tumblr. I think they're just under $100M in annual revenue. Outside the world of absurd Silicon Valley valuations, that would be considered very respectable
- ulfw 4y ago
  You're basically describing myspace.
  - JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
    I honestly liked MySpace. I think it was superior to Facebook in every way. At least you could enjoy some cool music on someone’s page when you visited it. The page was about them.
    - elevaet 4y ago
      Remember how you could customize the css on your myspace? That would be unthinkable nowadays.
    - joshmanders 4y ago
      Then follow me on SpaceHey, MySpace reborn. https://spacehey.com/josh https://spacehey.com/josh
    - ulfw 4y ago
      Yes it was less of a 'database' with a front end but more of a messy creative space you could put whatever you like on.
  - naravara 4y ago
    That's basically what Facebook was (though really it drew more from Friendster). As I remember it, the big appeal of Facebook over MySpace was that the interface was clean and that people felt like migrating from MySpace to The Facebook was a way of shedding their high school selves and reinventing how they presented themselves for college. So it was still loose but looked a bit more "adult." But they very much were viewed as doing the same thing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- HeyItsMatt 4y ago
  I'd love it if Meetup had a threaded discussion board with a way to pin photos and video. All my social networks would use it. That's actually what Google+ was with circles before the morons in charge forcibly bundled it into Youtube and killed it. Google should have had some patience like the people over at Musical.ly and built an audience organically rather than shoving unwanted garbage down our throats.
- sylens 4y ago
  I remember the introduction of the News Feed and how creepy and invasive it felt at the time. Here’s all the interactions you previously had to look for explicitly, now pushed in front of you. It was a harbinger of things to come.
ZephyrBlu 4y ago
Attention is zero-sum. If TikTok is winning, someone else is losing. TikTok now is what Facebook was 10 years ago.
- n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
  Smartphone attention is not zero sum. Average daily usage could increase with some novel super-addictive app or platform. Smartphone usage probably went up during the pandemic.
  - stevenjgarner 4y ago
    "The pandemic boosted global (smartphone) data consumption by more than 30 per cent in 2020" [0] [0] https://theprint.in/tech/the-covid-19-pandemic-has-led-to-an-increase-in-smartphone-data-usage-here-is-how-much/715615/ https://theprint.in/tech/the-covid-19-pandemic-has-led-to-an...
  - goldorak 4y ago
    "Average daily usage could increase" And at some point you just need to increase the hours in a day...
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  Facebook is where my older relatives social network. As soon as it became a place where people over 40 went, it lost its appeal to the young people that Facebook is really after.
  - astrange 4y ago
    It's not just that the people over 40 are on it, it's that your grandmother comes and leaves confused comments about unrelated topics on your friend's posts.
  - permo-w 4y ago
    this is why they bought instagram
threeseed 4y ago
> Facebook is dying because they stopped being Facebook a) No evidence they are dying. All we have is a single quarter's result i.e. statistically meaningless. b) No evidence that staying true to the original Facebook is the best strategy. Unquestionably, Stories has been a popular feature in both Instagram and Facebook ecosystems and perhaps certain features from TikTok will be the same. But there is plenty of evidence that the opinions of HN, Reddit etc. often do not match that of the broader public and so should be taken with a grain of salt.
- another-circus 4y ago
  I think it's really difficult to tell if they are dying or not. I don't think MAU or DAU gives the full picture as it doesn't tell us what people are using it for, what sort of new accounts are coming online (are they real people, bots, businesses or what?), and how active people actually are. Are people logging in for easy auth or are they spending more or less time actively browsing the site. You're right that HN is not the right place to judge this. I will say, as someone who works with high school kids, almost none of them have seemed to use it over the last 4-5 years.
- brynjolf 4y ago
  Did you reply to wrong comment? Did you just have a Google alert for Facebook dying? My point is you should dispute the original claim that it is life or death for Facebook instead of the subcomment running with that theory. I think Facebook is doing OK, but they have issues breaching the younger democratic, which is worrying them.
  - weq 4y ago
    Yeh lol at the facebook is dying bot. I left social media 5yrs ago (no fb, never used tiktok). I remmeber MySpace and how i left it for FB. You cant build a buisness on a bubble. You can build a bubble and extract money from investors, but honestly, the only people who use facebook are doing it because they are addicted and likely not internet savy. Its like hooking people on sugar. Except fb doesnt own the sugar, and cant only buy up the competition for so long before your no longer the hot stuff investors belevied. Facebook is a fad. Social media is not, it has overtaken traditional media in less then a decade. Social media will morph, it is not static. You cant own it. And Facebook is not the defination of it anymore.
karmasimida 4y ago
> (chronological feed, seeing friends posts, not seeing spam, more ways to interact (bring back pets, gifts, superpokes etc)) they'd do ok. I don't think so. TikTok is vastly more addictive and fresh in its content. How much content can your circle creating in a day? No more than 20 posts I would say? If facebook stays being facebook, they will die anyway. Problem in facebook right now, there isn't enough people to interact with, it is a social network, but tiktok is not. Tiktok is the new TV, with endless contents. I follow zero people there, but still I using it the right way.
- saurik 4y ago
  I think the core issue here is that Facebook can't afford to merely "do OK": they have to "make a gazillion dollars and take over the world with an ever-increasing source of bottomless revenue" or they are considered "a failure".
- mjhagen 4y ago
  > Problem in facebook right now, there isn't enough people to interact with FB took care of that by removing the chronological time line. As soon as it went away from a time line of things that happened to the people I love into a addiction stimulating ever refreshing list of flashing images it took away the interactivity. It became more of a consumption site place and they're leaning heavily into that (with Instagram too). This then means that content creation is moving from users you know to professionals (people playing the algorithm).
imiric 4y ago
> Facebook is dying because they stopped being Facebook. If they gave what's left of their userbase what they actually wanted (chronological feed, seeing friends posts, not seeing spam, more ways to interact (bring back pets, gifts, superpokes etc)) they'd do ok. I have no horse in this race, but why do you think you know what's better for FB more than the thousands of smart engineers and PMs working there? They clearly saw TikTok as a direct threat, and, probably fueled by thousands of data-driven tests, confirmed that this change results in more engagement and keeps more people on their site for longer. What you seem to want from FB is likely what a minority of its older userbase wants, but wouldn't make graphs go up and right as much. They need to attract younger generations and new users if they want to do that.
- petesergeant 4y ago
  > why do you think you know what's better for FB more than the thousands of smart engineers and PMs working there doubt they're the ones making the big strategic decisions
  - lelanthran 4y ago
    > doubt they're the ones making the big strategic decisions Of course not, but I doubt that the ones making these decisions are ignoring the metrics that the thousands of smart engineers are generating. All the large companies are able to afford extra staff whose job is exclusively to generate and analyse metrics. It seems a reach to conclude that the company pays thousands of people for a specific output, just to throw that output away. It may happen to one or two of them, but certainly not to all of the people generating the metrics.
Varqu 4y ago
My theory is that it's also the behavior of users that has changed. In my own network (age brackets 25-40), I rarely see any people posting updates or uploading pictures, which was common 5 or 10 years ago. On the other hand, Meta managed to keep the younger generation audience by acquiring Instagram, but apparently, it failed to acquire the Next-Bing-Thing (Tik-Tok)

naravara 4y ago

When I started using Facebook it wasn't a newsfeed, it was just a personal homepage with a photo album and a bulletin board attached. I'd love to have something like that again that everyone uses, but everything is about goosing the influencer economy now rather than letting me socialize.

nine_k 4y ago
It almost sounds as if there is a niche for that! BTW have you tried dreamwidth.org, a fork of the venerable livejournal.com? They look as if 2005 had never ended,in a good sense.
- threeseed 4y ago
  There isn't. Many companies e.g. Path, Google have tried and failed to build a social network that focused on more personal relationships. They simply don't offer enough value over say a WhatApp group.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    I think they wanted hockey-stick growth and prospects of a big payout, while the sustainable model may be a lifestyle business that barely pays for itself.
    - naravara 4y ago
      This. Though I'm not even sure about the "barely pays for itself." I mean, Automaticc/Wordpress sustains itself okay and had the resources to buy Tumblr. I think they're just under $100M in annual revenue. Outside the world of absurd Silicon Valley valuations, that would be considered very respectable
ulfw 4y ago
You're basically describing myspace.
- JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
  I honestly liked MySpace. I think it was superior to Facebook in every way. At least you could enjoy some cool music on someone’s page when you visited it. The page was about them.
  - elevaet 4y ago
    Remember how you could customize the css on your myspace? That would be unthinkable nowadays.
  - joshmanders 4y ago
    Then follow me on SpaceHey, MySpace reborn. https://spacehey.com/josh https://spacehey.com/josh
  - ulfw 4y ago
    Yes it was less of a 'database' with a front end but more of a messy creative space you could put whatever you like on.
- naravara 4y ago
  That's basically what Facebook was (though really it drew more from Friendster). As I remember it, the big appeal of Facebook over MySpace was that the interface was clean and that people felt like migrating from MySpace to The Facebook was a way of shedding their high school selves and reinventing how they presented themselves for college. So it was still loose but looked a bit more "adult." But they very much were viewed as doing the same thing.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
HeyItsMatt 4y ago
I'd love it if Meetup had a threaded discussion board with a way to pin photos and video. All my social networks would use it. That's actually what Google+ was with circles before the morons in charge forcibly bundled it into Youtube and killed it. Google should have had some patience like the people over at Musical.ly and built an audience organically rather than shoving unwanted garbage down our throats.
sylens 4y ago
I remember the introduction of the News Feed and how creepy and invasive it felt at the time. Here’s all the interactions you previously had to look for explicitly, now pushed in front of you. It was a harbinger of things to come.

ZephyrBlu 4y ago

Attention is zero-sum. If TikTok is winning, someone else is losing. TikTok now is what Facebook was 10 years ago.

n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
Smartphone attention is not zero sum. Average daily usage could increase with some novel super-addictive app or platform. Smartphone usage probably went up during the pandemic.
- stevenjgarner 4y ago
  "The pandemic boosted global (smartphone) data consumption by more than 30 per cent in 2020" [0] [0] https://theprint.in/tech/the-covid-19-pandemic-has-led-to-an-increase-in-smartphone-data-usage-here-is-how-much/715615/ https://theprint.in/tech/the-covid-19-pandemic-has-led-to-an...
- goldorak 4y ago
  "Average daily usage could increase" And at some point you just need to increase the hours in a day...
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
Facebook is where my older relatives social network. As soon as it became a place where people over 40 went, it lost its appeal to the young people that Facebook is really after.
- astrange 4y ago
  It's not just that the people over 40 are on it, it's that your grandmother comes and leaves confused comments about unrelated topics on your friend's posts.
- permo-w 4y ago
  this is why they bought instagram

threeseed 4y ago

> Facebook is dying because they stopped being Facebook a) No evidence they are dying. All we have is a single quarter's result i.e. statistically meaningless. b) No evidence that staying true to the original Facebook is the best strategy. Unquestionably, Stories has been a popular feature in both Instagram and Facebook ecosystems and perhaps certain features from TikTok will be the same. But there is plenty of evidence that the opinions of HN, Reddit etc. often do not match that of the broader public and so should be taken with a grain of salt.

another-circus 4y ago
I think it's really difficult to tell if they are dying or not. I don't think MAU or DAU gives the full picture as it doesn't tell us what people are using it for, what sort of new accounts are coming online (are they real people, bots, businesses or what?), and how active people actually are. Are people logging in for easy auth or are they spending more or less time actively browsing the site. You're right that HN is not the right place to judge this. I will say, as someone who works with high school kids, almost none of them have seemed to use it over the last 4-5 years.
brynjolf 4y ago
Did you reply to wrong comment? Did you just have a Google alert for Facebook dying? My point is you should dispute the original claim that it is life or death for Facebook instead of the subcomment running with that theory. I think Facebook is doing OK, but they have issues breaching the younger democratic, which is worrying them.
- weq 4y ago
  Yeh lol at the facebook is dying bot. I left social media 5yrs ago (no fb, never used tiktok). I remmeber MySpace and how i left it for FB. You cant build a buisness on a bubble. You can build a bubble and extract money from investors, but honestly, the only people who use facebook are doing it because they are addicted and likely not internet savy. Its like hooking people on sugar. Except fb doesnt own the sugar, and cant only buy up the competition for so long before your no longer the hot stuff investors belevied. Facebook is a fad. Social media is not, it has overtaken traditional media in less then a decade. Social media will morph, it is not static. You cant own it. And Facebook is not the defination of it anymore.

karmasimida 4y ago

> (chronological feed, seeing friends posts, not seeing spam, more ways to interact (bring back pets, gifts, superpokes etc)) they'd do ok. I don't think so. TikTok is vastly more addictive and fresh in its content. How much content can your circle creating in a day? No more than 20 posts I would say? If facebook stays being facebook, they will die anyway. Problem in facebook right now, there isn't enough people to interact with, it is a social network, but tiktok is not. Tiktok is the new TV, with endless contents. I follow zero people there, but still I using it the right way.

saurik 4y ago
I think the core issue here is that Facebook can't afford to merely "do OK": they have to "make a gazillion dollars and take over the world with an ever-increasing source of bottomless revenue" or they are considered "a failure".
mjhagen 4y ago
> Problem in facebook right now, there isn't enough people to interact with FB took care of that by removing the chronological time line. As soon as it went away from a time line of things that happened to the people I love into a addiction stimulating ever refreshing list of flashing images it took away the interactivity. It became more of a consumption site place and they're leaning heavily into that (with Instagram too). This then means that content creation is moving from users you know to professionals (people playing the algorithm).

imiric 4y ago

> Facebook is dying because they stopped being Facebook. If they gave what's left of their userbase what they actually wanted (chronological feed, seeing friends posts, not seeing spam, more ways to interact (bring back pets, gifts, superpokes etc)) they'd do ok. I have no horse in this race, but why do you think you know what's better for FB more than the thousands of smart engineers and PMs working there? They clearly saw TikTok as a direct threat, and, probably fueled by thousands of data-driven tests, confirmed that this change results in more engagement and keeps more people on their site for longer. What you seem to want from FB is likely what a minority of its older userbase wants, but wouldn't make graphs go up and right as much. They need to attract younger generations and new users if they want to do that.

petesergeant 4y ago
> why do you think you know what's better for FB more than the thousands of smart engineers and PMs working there doubt they're the ones making the big strategic decisions
- lelanthran 4y ago
  > doubt they're the ones making the big strategic decisions Of course not, but I doubt that the ones making these decisions are ignoring the metrics that the thousands of smart engineers are generating. All the large companies are able to afford extra staff whose job is exclusively to generate and analyse metrics. It seems a reach to conclude that the company pays thousands of people for a specific output, just to throw that output away. It may happen to one or two of them, but certainly not to all of the people generating the metrics.

Varqu 4y ago

My theory is that it's also the behavior of users that has changed. In my own network (age brackets 25-40), I rarely see any people posting updates or uploading pictures, which was common 5 or 10 years ago. On the other hand, Meta managed to keep the younger generation audience by acquiring Instagram, but apparently, it failed to acquire the Next-Bing-Thing (Tik-Tok)