8 ms·

Facebook 'boring'? 1 in 3 users are tuning it out

95 points by Garbage 14y ago

yashchandra 14y ago
I am definitely one those people. But I know friends/family who spend at least 30 mins per day on fb. May be I am spending too much time on HN and no time for fb anymore :)
jreposa 14y ago
I'm logged out of FB at work for productivity reasons. I read FB probably about twice a day. Once in the morning and once at night. I'm not missing much.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  You are voluntarily interacting twice a day and feel like you are constraining yourself. Other sites wish they could have such "unengaged" users!
maukdaddy 14y ago
Here's the original source, without the blogspammed ads: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/05/net-us-facebook-survey-idUSBRE85400C20120605 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/05/net-us-facebook-su...
ajays 14y ago
My status updates have gone from about 1/day a couple of years ago, to about 1/week now. Even though I've blocked all apps, etc., I find FB to be too noisy. The only thing I like about FB is that I can keep track of friends' events, like babies, marriages, breakups, trips, etc.
- trebuch3t 14y ago
  Agreed. Facebook has turned into a stream of blabber and pictures of people's kids (no offence). What is NOT noisy is: * Path (just my close friends) * Pair (just my girlfriend) * Google+ (the "what's hot" news feed is actually pretty interesting)
  - triathlete 14y ago
    Likewise agree. Too much freaking noise. Annoying interface and horrible ads. Im in the process of moving over to twitter.
    - ajays 14y ago
      Funny anecdote: I wrote a GM script a loong time ago to block the FB ads. And promptly forgot about it. So I was a bit confused when people would mention FB ads, and I was like: where are you people seeing these ads? This confusion reigned for a long time until recently, when one day I opened up my GM userscript manager panel and saw the FB ad blocker. Oops! So, for me, ads are not an issue (so far).
  - freshnote 14y ago
    I left Facebook, but not to join anything else. I sometimes scratch my head why I signed up in the first place. If family or friends want to reach me, email has held up surprisingly well over the years.
  - philipbroadway 14y ago
    Agree with these alternatives, but I left Path after I discovered the app uploads my Address book contacts. Lame. Such a pretty & functional UI too.. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-57372885-52/path-shares-photos-oh-and-uploads-your-contacts-too/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-57372885-52/path-shares-ph...
  - joshuahedlund 14y ago
    I found the Google+ "what's hot" feed interesting too, until they went through yet another redesign and I couldn't find it anymore. I didn't have enough interest to ask the Internet how to find it again, so I slowly just forgot about it. Now I don't felt like I've lost any utility from not giving it three minutes of my time every day.
    - abraham 14y ago
      Unless you disabled it there are hot posts every half dozen posts in your home stream. The hot stream itself has it's own link in the left hand sidebar called explorer.
- sixothree 14y ago
  Everything I care about the most in my life isn't on facebook. Nobody I know in the real world has much interest in anything I find fascinating. Point being - I have no reason to post anything on facebook.
kayoone 14y ago
FB seems to get into a negative press spiral lately because of the underperforming IPO...suddenly its all just a fad because people want to read about this new super company failing... But the truth is, it still has CRAZY numbers in terms of Daily/Weekly/Monthly Active users and average time spent on the site. Its a behemoth and will not fall!
- ktizo 14y ago
  Everything falls eventually, the only question is how long do they have in the sunshine.
- mtgx 14y ago
  Actually, the "Facebook is boring" numbers starting showing up before the IPO. Now they are just getting more attention. The problem is a real one for Facebook, whether it gets in the press and on blogs or not.
  - toemetoch 14y ago
    They hit the ceiling, I would like to know how this little plot will develop over the next 2 quarters: http://www.google.com/trends/?q=facebook http://www.google.com/trends/?q=facebook
    - demoo 14y ago
      The interesting part is the information below the graph: most searches in Turkey, Venezuela, Colombia, Malaysia, Italy, Croatia, Indonesia. Africa nowhere to be seen though.
moistgorilla 14y ago
I never really got why facebook was considered interesting. I made an account because I was pressured by some female friends into doing so but I never log on it (at least 5 months). I know I'm not the norm but still, I feel like facebook is just a fad and that people will get bored of posting every second of their life onto the internet eventually.
- ryanmerket 14y ago
  Long distant relationships. My family and close friends are mostly in Texas while I'm in the Bay Area. I like keeping track of their lives...
  - moistgorilla 14y ago
    Haha, I guess that's the difference, I don't care enough to follow anyone's life.
  - ams6110 14y ago
    I use email to keep in touch with family and close friends. I don't see what Facebook would do to improve on that.
    - yashchandra 14y ago
      The definition of "keep in touch" varies for people. If you only use email, you are probably not sharing bulk pictures of family/friends events etc. Why would you use email for that ? I understand that you could get a picasa etc. link in emails but it is easier to use fb. Not to mention the funny comments on pictures.
    - ryanmerket 14y ago
      The friction of sharing and reacting to life milestones with all your friends and family is an order of magnitude easier on Facebook. For example, try teaching a grandparent or technology inept uncle how to see photos of grandkids/nieces/nephews through email vs checking Facebook...
pchristensen 14y ago
Facebook fascinating? 2 in 3 users actively engaged!
ph33r 14y ago
Just checked the list of apps I am 'hiding' from my News Feed... It's no wonder people are tuning it out: Angry Birds Friends, Battle Pirates, Bejeweled Blitz, Bingo Island, Budweiser King Club, Camelot: The Game, CastleVille Daily Horoscope, Family Feud, Games on Mindjolt, Happy Pets, Hidden Chronicles, Hockey Pool, Horoscopes, Light of Nova, Lucky Slots: Reno, Marvel: Avengers Alliance, Miner Speed, Mirrorball Slots, Pet Society, QBet Casino, Quiz Whiz, Quotev, Ravenskye City, Ravenwood Fair, Restaurant City, SCRABBLE, Slotomania - Slot Machines, Treasure Isle, War Commander, Washington Post Social Reader, WeTopia, What is your old lady name?, Zoo World, Zuma Blitz
- evincarofautumn 14y ago
  The “Social Reader” applications are the worst. All I end up doing is Googling the article title. Luckily, I don’t think Yahoo! and the Washington Post care an awful lot about the sort of people who log into Facebook at most once a week, and then mainly to use chat.
  - CompiledCode 14y ago
    Agreed. Ads are ubiquitous (I just tune them out), but clicking a link and being told "you can't read this unless you give us your personal info and let us tell all of your friends that you read this" is wrong on so many levels. I think this sort of thing will add to the downfall of facebook. Non-savvy internet users love facebook, but it only takes one learning experience (such as seeing broadcast that you read a highly-embarrassing article) for people to become wary.
    - jquery 14y ago
      Social readers are worse than you think. Once you've opted in, even reading a Yahoo! article via a Google search may show up in your news feed. My boss potentially seeing me reading articles about "How to ask for a raise" being the epitome of this. Don't know if he saw or not, but it was a educational experience nonetheless. I was trying to be careful and I still got burned.
its_so_on 14y ago
I think facebook should charge 75 cents per month to use it. This will weed out users who just don't care; it will give more information to advertisers as well. Oh and what's that? 75 cents per month actually ends up tripling their income! (if they now get $9 per year off the seventy-five cents, plus the same four in ad revenue.) Anyway if even 75 cents per month is too much, then they can go ahead and make OEM deals etc for a facebook sticker and do like Microsoft did. Or give it away with cans of coke. One in twenty wins a year of facebook. Or, you know, do what people expect and roll into the price of a cell phone. Just some thoughts...
- mtgx 14y ago
  I think you're underestimating people. If they do decide to pay up, and then they notice that they haven't really used it in 3 months, they will stop paying even that 75 cents a month. This will lead to a lot more than 20-30% of users quitting over time. The 30% will start using a Facebook alternative, and then once they're all settled in, they will start poaching everyone else from Facebook, and get them to use this new "cooler" social network. When companies lose their early adopters, it's over. They just don't know it until a few years later when the negative numbers start showing up, and it's too late to fix the problem.
- Drakim 14y ago
  Sorry but terrible idea. Not even 1% of facebook users would stick around. And before you argue that 1% of the current user base would be great, the usefulness of a social network is greatly diminished if your friends aren't there, making eventually even the last 1% leave.
  - its_so_on 14y ago
    And your objection to the OEM model?
- snorkel 14y ago
  FB's golden goose is that is has the web's largest social audience and therby specific demographic data about everyone. FB shareholders would run screaming for the exits if ever a paid subscription were forced on its users. FB's achilles heal is exactly this: it's getting boring.
simonsarris 14y ago
66% of users are tuning in? That's great! Every time a Facebook usage topic comes up there's the usual round of scorn usually backed up by a strange display of plumage involving the sentence, "I just deleted my facebook yesterday/last month/last year/never used it." And that's okay. But I want to point out to my fellow HN-goers why facebook is so wonderful. There's also a note about privacy at the bottom[1] since that seems to be a big reason people stay away. I feel as if a lot of people here missed the point and doesn't understand what the average person sees in this system. I'll try to relay my experience in the hopes that you see the utility. To most people, especially a shy person, the usefulness of the site is astronomical. Among others I am friends with my boss, my mother, my little cousins. Facebook lets shy people like me keep in touch with a massive amount of people where I can write them the modern equivalent of letters very quickly and easily, as well as let them broadcast their life's updates to me. I can keep in touch with all manner of people. I love writing letters, people love getting letters. Facebook is not far off. Without facebook, I'd have no idea cousin X is having a baby, or that Y is having apartment trouble that I can help them with, or that Z got a new game we can play together, or person A is considering selling their car, and so on. If I meet someone at an event and really hit it off (romantically or not), I can go on facebook the next day and look them up by name and add them. No exchanging phone numbers or emails or anything like that. I just search for them and find them. In college it was enormously useful for making friends and I still find it useful now that I've graduated. I made a page for my hometown (90K population city in NH). I broadcast events going on around the city (fireworks, beer festival, city meetings). In this way I help my community learn about the goings-on of the town. It's a surprisingly popular page (more popular than the local newspaper's facebook page). These functions in times past were done with the laborous process of making a million letters or phone calls or in many cases (like my hometown page) scarcely made or not made at all. Literally, facebook is a modern "An open letter to my friends" system. And it's great at it. ~~~~~~ Okay that's off my chest. Sadly as of late its getting a little less great at its function. A lot of the reason for the downturn in usage, sadly, is probably due to the fact that every ad, every sponsored story and sponsored "like" is adding to a signal/noise ratio that will make people frown. It's a shame that facebook's financial success as the model is right now is directly competing with its utility[2], but oh-well. We may have to sigh a bit more, but its still extremely useful to the casual user and has the usage stats to show it. [1] I don't think privacy alone is enough to negate the utility of fbook. All of my privacy options are on the lowest possible setting. I treat anything that occurs on the site as if it were public. I don't see why not, I'm not going to pretend that photos of myself or my wall postings are anywhere near interesting enough to hide. In fact I'm not sure why people who put things on facebook want privacy at all. I never worry that something I say might be picked up on by the wrong person because I'd never say anything that I wouldn't want the world to hear. [2] It may be worth pointing out that I love facebook but would never invest in it for a few reasons, and this is one of them. One could argue Google ads make Google searches more useful. Facebook ads, as they are today, directly impinge on the utility of the platform. But thats a separate topic
chaz 14y ago
The metric that continues to really impress me about Facebook: 58% of users log in each day (that's 526mm DAU out of 901mm MAU, according to its SEC filing). That's roughly the same percentage as it was in 2007, when I first heard that kind of stat. I love customer surveys, but I don't think people are good at estimating how they actually spend their time or how frequently they do things.
- no-espam 14y ago
  Do those people really log in to use Facebook or do they use Facebook as an authentication provider like Pinterest and other sites?
- r00fus 14y ago
  What does this DAU indicate, actually - are these pageviews on a facebook.com website that are associated with potential advertising? Or are they related to the numerous and growing uses of FB as an identity provider?
  - dfc 14y ago
    Daily Active Users / Monthly Active Users
    - reitzensteinm 14y ago
      He's not asking what the acronymn stands for; he's asking whether it counts as a 'use' if you use Facebook to login to a third party site, or hit a like button, but you don't visit Facebook itself that day. I'd like to know as well.
  - chaz 14y ago
    DAU, from their Form S-1: Daily Active Users (DAUs). We define a daily active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, or took an action to share content or activity with his or her Facebook friends or connections via a third-party website that is integrated with Facebook, on a given day. We view DAUs, and DAUs as a percentage of MAUs, as measures of user engagement. Source: http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512034517/d287954ds1.htm http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/00011931251203451... When I first heard the stat, it was before FB Connect and Like Buttons had launched, and it seems to remain consistent today. The data seems to suggest that most users who use Facebook Connect or Like buttons will also visit Facebook.com (web or mobile) that same day. They do have a note saying that there may be mobile applications that drive daily activity automatically without active user intervention, and it may impact their measurement by up to 5%.
yashchandra 14y ago
For me, fb is useful only to keep an eye on what is going on with my family/friends specially for things such as cute pictures of their kids, marriage/birthday events etc. My wife uses her fb time to update me on those. So personally, I hardly login to fb anymore.
- cdcarter 14y ago
  This is what Facebook's utility for all of us is. Just replace cute photos of their kids with cute photos of your crush (or ex), and replace marriage events with house parties, and you've hit what the twenty-somethings on fb do daily. Anything else is to justify being there.
  - yashchandra 14y ago
    Good point. agreed:)
joseflavio 14y ago
I use Pidgin to connect to their XMPP chat server. In the real facebook page, i connect once in a week. I wonder if they count my XMPP login as a regular login.
cft 14y ago
We have a 18yo intern at the office this summer, who keeps saying "Facebook is becoming a ghost-town", when we task him with using FB API.
- _delirium 14y ago
  I'd be looking for excuses to get out of it, too, if I had to deal with the FB API on a regular basis.
- Splines 14y ago
  Where are the people in your intern's circle of friends going? I'm honestly curious. The people in my facebook feed are the usual set of people who post. Nothing has seemed to change of late.
  - cft 14y ago
    He says text and email, and still FB, but not updating as frequently, and mostly updates from apps, like instagram.
mikejsiegel 14y ago
Always take these surveys with a grain of salt. It's difficult to get accurate information from people self-reporting their behavior. Facebook has become so ingrained in peoples' routines that they don't even realize their actual usage (and in many times are in denial). I'd like to see if Facebook feels their analytics back up this self-reported data - my gut says it would not. This is also true about the advertising. Many times effective advertising gets into the subconscious - you don't realize it's working on you. The ads have to at least raise awareness of the product.
- mikejsiegel 14y ago
  Here is some data to back up this comment http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/06/facebooking/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/06/facebooking/
tosseraccount 14y ago
The great detox is on. Internet has become too much spying and exhibition(ism). The pendulum is swinging back and people want more privacy and less intrusion. Peak social is ex-post facto. I don't care if the great HN supermoderator doesn't like to hear it. Something new will come along. We'll call it Web 4.0 and get excited. Make it happen!
joseflavio 14y ago
The funny thing is that in the last one year I use hacker news much more than Facebook. The stream of news here is way more interesting and heterogeneous.
- solnyshok 14y ago
  Similar. I never bought into idea that my social friends are a good source of knowledge on topics that interest me most. For professional questions I use RSS and forums, while many of my old buddies can't tell RSS from SSD. For shopping, I google reviews and check prices online. And for keeping track of lives of some 10-15 people that I care about, facebook is too noisy.
kyt 14y ago
I find it boring because it's dominated by power users that post multiple times a day. These people may or may not be close to me, but typically they aren't. My closest friends don't post all that often and when they do they get drowned out.
gurkendoktor 14y ago
I find the idea of Facebook getting boring very interesting. Do people complain about email or gmail getting boring? Their address book? Skype? "Safari is boring these days"? For many people, Facebook is a medium. My girlfriend is busy on the iPad writing stuff in her family's private group. I am just going through the timeline looking for interesting articles just like I do on HN. Now I wonder what people who consider Facebook "boring" did before they left. Play games or be there just for the novelty of it? Then this is not a loss for existing users. I can understand the privacy concerns and the "not useful" answer though, with the terrible usability & iOS app.
- randomdata 14y ago
  I would say that Facebook positioned themselves as a news outlet, not a generic communications medium. In the beginning, the news was fresh, you were learning all kinds of interesting things about your friends; many of whom you had previously lost touch with. That was exciting and interesting. After some time passes, you've learned everything you want to know about said people and the information starts to become stale and repetitive. Combined with others feeling the same way and pulling back, a feedback loop emerges where good content starts to dwindle even quicker, worsening the problem. If I came to HN six months from now and all of the articles were still about the Facebook IPO, I think I would probably say that HN has become boring too. That is where, I believe, the sentiment is coming from.
infinitebeam 14y ago
and my feed is full of rage faces and memes.
- taligent 14y ago
  Get better friends.
hu_me 14y ago
"more than 1,000 Americans surveyed by Reuters and market research firm Ipsos, 21 percent said that they have no Facebook account, leaving 79 percent to answer questions about their Facebook use." oh that must be so statistically valid. please base your assumption about 900m userbase from a 1000+ sample out of which 21% dont have an account to begin with.
EricDeb 14y ago
I like facebook for its use in corresponding with people I normally would never contact. It gives me all the window I would ever want into their lives. For my close friends, FB is essentially useless and actually encourages me to contact them via phone or face to face less than I should because I feel like I am keeping up with them through facebook.
aaronpeterson 14y ago
I fear for facebook long-term only because I can't imagine the things I said when I was 16 lingering around on my timeline forever. Fad or not, facebook's standing with teenagers today will not be a long-lasting one. High School you will eventually be abandoned by college you and then again by professional you. How will facebook synchronize with rites of passage? Maybe this is why the proponents of facebook are usually 30-somethings...already done morphing and, as such, don't get it.
chris_wot 14y ago
I love the fact that CNet had to add a note that they updated the article that Facebook made a comment that they had no comment.

95 points by Garbage 14y ago

I am definitely one those people. But I know friends/family who spend at least 30 mins per day on fb. May be I am spending too much time on HN and no time for fb anymore :)

jreposa 14y ago

I'm logged out of FB at work for productivity reasons. I read FB probably about twice a day. Once in the morning and once at night. I'm not missing much.

SoftwareMaven 14y ago
You are voluntarily interacting twice a day and feel like you are constraining yourself. Other sites wish they could have such "unengaged" users!

maukdaddy 14y ago

Here's the original source, without the blogspammed ads: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/05/net-us-facebook-survey-idUSBRE85400C20120605 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/05/net-us-facebook-su...

ajays 14y ago

My status updates have gone from about 1/day a couple of years ago, to about 1/week now. Even though I've blocked all apps, etc., I find FB to be too noisy. The only thing I like about FB is that I can keep track of friends' events, like babies, marriages, breakups, trips, etc.

trebuch3t 14y ago
Agreed. Facebook has turned into a stream of blabber and pictures of people's kids (no offence). What is NOT noisy is: * Path (just my close friends) * Pair (just my girlfriend) * Google+ (the "what's hot" news feed is actually pretty interesting)
- triathlete 14y ago
  Likewise agree. Too much freaking noise. Annoying interface and horrible ads. Im in the process of moving over to twitter.
  - ajays 14y ago
    Funny anecdote: I wrote a GM script a loong time ago to block the FB ads. And promptly forgot about it. So I was a bit confused when people would mention FB ads, and I was like: where are you people seeing these ads? This confusion reigned for a long time until recently, when one day I opened up my GM userscript manager panel and saw the FB ad blocker. Oops! So, for me, ads are not an issue (so far).
- freshnote 14y ago
  I left Facebook, but not to join anything else. I sometimes scratch my head why I signed up in the first place. If family or friends want to reach me, email has held up surprisingly well over the years.
- philipbroadway 14y ago
  Agree with these alternatives, but I left Path after I discovered the app uploads my Address book contacts. Lame. Such a pretty & functional UI too.. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-57372885-52/path-shares-photos-oh-and-uploads-your-contacts-too/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-57372885-52/path-shares-ph...
- joshuahedlund 14y ago
  I found the Google+ "what's hot" feed interesting too, until they went through yet another redesign and I couldn't find it anymore. I didn't have enough interest to ask the Internet how to find it again, so I slowly just forgot about it. Now I don't felt like I've lost any utility from not giving it three minutes of my time every day.
  - abraham 14y ago
    Unless you disabled it there are hot posts every half dozen posts in your home stream. The hot stream itself has it's own link in the left hand sidebar called explorer.
sixothree 14y ago
Everything I care about the most in my life isn't on facebook. Nobody I know in the real world has much interest in anything I find fascinating. Point being - I have no reason to post anything on facebook.

kayoone 14y ago

FB seems to get into a negative press spiral lately because of the underperforming IPO...suddenly its all just a fad because people want to read about this new super company failing... But the truth is, it still has CRAZY numbers in terms of Daily/Weekly/Monthly Active users and average time spent on the site. Its a behemoth and will not fall!

ktizo 14y ago
Everything falls eventually, the only question is how long do they have in the sunshine.
mtgx 14y ago
Actually, the "Facebook is boring" numbers starting showing up before the IPO. Now they are just getting more attention. The problem is a real one for Facebook, whether it gets in the press and on blogs or not.
- toemetoch 14y ago
  They hit the ceiling, I would like to know how this little plot will develop over the next 2 quarters: http://www.google.com/trends/?q=facebook http://www.google.com/trends/?q=facebook
  - demoo 14y ago
    The interesting part is the information below the graph: most searches in Turkey, Venezuela, Colombia, Malaysia, Italy, Croatia, Indonesia. Africa nowhere to be seen though.

moistgorilla 14y ago

I never really got why facebook was considered interesting. I made an account because I was pressured by some female friends into doing so but I never log on it (at least 5 months). I know I'm not the norm but still, I feel like facebook is just a fad and that people will get bored of posting every second of their life onto the internet eventually.

ryanmerket 14y ago
Long distant relationships. My family and close friends are mostly in Texas while I'm in the Bay Area. I like keeping track of their lives...
- moistgorilla 14y ago
  Haha, I guess that's the difference, I don't care enough to follow anyone's life.
- ams6110 14y ago
  I use email to keep in touch with family and close friends. I don't see what Facebook would do to improve on that.
  - yashchandra 14y ago
    The definition of "keep in touch" varies for people. If you only use email, you are probably not sharing bulk pictures of family/friends events etc. Why would you use email for that ? I understand that you could get a picasa etc. link in emails but it is easier to use fb. Not to mention the funny comments on pictures.
  - ryanmerket 14y ago
    The friction of sharing and reacting to life milestones with all your friends and family is an order of magnitude easier on Facebook. For example, try teaching a grandparent or technology inept uncle how to see photos of grandkids/nieces/nephews through email vs checking Facebook...

pchristensen 14y ago

Facebook fascinating? 2 in 3 users actively engaged!

ph33r 14y ago

Just checked the list of apps I am 'hiding' from my News Feed... It's no wonder people are tuning it out: Angry Birds Friends, Battle Pirates, Bejeweled Blitz, Bingo Island, Budweiser King Club, Camelot: The Game, CastleVille Daily Horoscope, Family Feud, Games on Mindjolt, Happy Pets, Hidden Chronicles, Hockey Pool, Horoscopes, Light of Nova, Lucky Slots: Reno, Marvel: Avengers Alliance, Miner Speed, Mirrorball Slots, Pet Society, QBet Casino, Quiz Whiz, Quotev, Ravenskye City, Ravenwood Fair, Restaurant City, SCRABBLE, Slotomania - Slot Machines, Treasure Isle, War Commander, Washington Post Social Reader, WeTopia, What is your old lady name?, Zoo World, Zuma Blitz

evincarofautumn 14y ago
The “Social Reader” applications are the worst. All I end up doing is Googling the article title. Luckily, I don’t think Yahoo! and the Washington Post care an awful lot about the sort of people who log into Facebook at most once a week, and then mainly to use chat.
- CompiledCode 14y ago
  Agreed. Ads are ubiquitous (I just tune them out), but clicking a link and being told "you can't read this unless you give us your personal info and let us tell all of your friends that you read this" is wrong on so many levels. I think this sort of thing will add to the downfall of facebook. Non-savvy internet users love facebook, but it only takes one learning experience (such as seeing broadcast that you read a highly-embarrassing article) for people to become wary.
  - jquery 14y ago
    Social readers are worse than you think. Once you've opted in, even reading a Yahoo! article via a Google search may show up in your news feed. My boss potentially seeing me reading articles about "How to ask for a raise" being the epitome of this. Don't know if he saw or not, but it was a educational experience nonetheless. I was trying to be careful and I still got burned.

its_so_on 14y ago

I think facebook should charge 75 cents per month to use it. This will weed out users who just don't care; it will give more information to advertisers as well. Oh and what's that? 75 cents per month actually ends up tripling their income! (if they now get $9 per year off the seventy-five cents, plus the same four in ad revenue.) Anyway if even 75 cents per month is too much, then they can go ahead and make OEM deals etc for a facebook sticker and do like Microsoft did. Or give it away with cans of coke. One in twenty wins a year of facebook. Or, you know, do what people expect and roll into the price of a cell phone. Just some thoughts...

mtgx 14y ago
I think you're underestimating people. If they do decide to pay up, and then they notice that they haven't really used it in 3 months, they will stop paying even that 75 cents a month. This will lead to a lot more than 20-30% of users quitting over time. The 30% will start using a Facebook alternative, and then once they're all settled in, they will start poaching everyone else from Facebook, and get them to use this new "cooler" social network. When companies lose their early adopters, it's over. They just don't know it until a few years later when the negative numbers start showing up, and it's too late to fix the problem.
Drakim 14y ago
Sorry but terrible idea. Not even 1% of facebook users would stick around. And before you argue that 1% of the current user base would be great, the usefulness of a social network is greatly diminished if your friends aren't there, making eventually even the last 1% leave.
- its_so_on 14y ago
  And your objection to the OEM model?
snorkel 14y ago
FB's golden goose is that is has the web's largest social audience and therby specific demographic data about everyone. FB shareholders would run screaming for the exits if ever a paid subscription were forced on its users. FB's achilles heal is exactly this: it's getting boring.

simonsarris 14y ago

66% of users are tuning in? That's great! Every time a Facebook usage topic comes up there's the usual round of scorn usually backed up by a strange display of plumage involving the sentence, "I just deleted my facebook yesterday/last month/last year/never used it." And that's okay. But I want to point out to my fellow HN-goers why facebook is so wonderful. There's also a note about privacy at the bottom[1] since that seems to be a big reason people stay away. I feel as if a lot of people here missed the point and doesn't understand what the average person sees in this system. I'll try to relay my experience in the hopes that you see the utility. To most people, especially a shy person, the usefulness of the site is astronomical. Among others I am friends with my boss, my mother, my little cousins. Facebook lets shy people like me keep in touch with a massive amount of people where I can write them the modern equivalent of letters very quickly and easily, as well as let them broadcast their life's updates to me. I can keep in touch with all manner of people. I love writing letters, people love getting letters. Facebook is not far off. Without facebook, I'd have no idea cousin X is having a baby, or that Y is having apartment trouble that I can help them with, or that Z got a new game we can play together, or person A is considering selling their car, and so on. If I meet someone at an event and really hit it off (romantically or not), I can go on facebook the next day and look them up by name and add them. No exchanging phone numbers or emails or anything like that. I just search for them and find them. In college it was enormously useful for making friends and I still find it useful now that I've graduated. I made a page for my hometown (90K population city in NH). I broadcast events going on around the city (fireworks, beer festival, city meetings). In this way I help my community learn about the goings-on of the town. It's a surprisingly popular page (more popular than the local newspaper's facebook page). These functions in times past were done with the laborous process of making a million letters or phone calls or in many cases (like my hometown page) scarcely made or not made at all. Literally, facebook is a modern "An open letter to my friends" system. And it's great at it. ~~~~~~ Okay that's off my chest. Sadly as of late its getting a little less great at its function. A lot of the reason for the downturn in usage, sadly, is probably due to the fact that every ad, every sponsored story and sponsored "like" is adding to a signal/noise ratio that will make people frown. It's a shame that facebook's financial success as the model is right now is directly competing with its utility[2], but oh-well. We may have to sigh a bit more, but its still extremely useful to the casual user and has the usage stats to show it. [1] I don't think privacy alone is enough to negate the utility of fbook. All of my privacy options are on the lowest possible setting. I treat anything that occurs on the site as if it were public. I don't see why not, I'm not going to pretend that photos of myself or my wall postings are anywhere near interesting enough to hide. In fact I'm not sure why people who put things on facebook want privacy at all. I never worry that something I say might be picked up on by the wrong person because I'd never say anything that I wouldn't want the world to hear. [2] It may be worth pointing out that I love facebook but would never invest in it for a few reasons, and this is one of them. One could argue Google ads make Google searches more useful. Facebook ads, as they are today, directly impinge on the utility of the platform. But thats a separate topic

chaz 14y ago

The metric that continues to really impress me about Facebook: 58% of users log in each day (that's 526mm DAU out of 901mm MAU, according to its SEC filing). That's roughly the same percentage as it was in 2007, when I first heard that kind of stat. I love customer surveys, but I don't think people are good at estimating how they actually spend their time or how frequently they do things.

no-espam 14y ago
Do those people really log in to use Facebook or do they use Facebook as an authentication provider like Pinterest and other sites?
r00fus 14y ago
What does this DAU indicate, actually - are these pageviews on a facebook.com website that are associated with potential advertising? Or are they related to the numerous and growing uses of FB as an identity provider?
- dfc 14y ago
  Daily Active Users / Monthly Active Users
  - reitzensteinm 14y ago
    He's not asking what the acronymn stands for; he's asking whether it counts as a 'use' if you use Facebook to login to a third party site, or hit a like button, but you don't visit Facebook itself that day. I'd like to know as well.
- chaz 14y ago
  DAU, from their Form S-1: Daily Active Users (DAUs). We define a daily active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, or took an action to share content or activity with his or her Facebook friends or connections via a third-party website that is integrated with Facebook, on a given day. We view DAUs, and DAUs as a percentage of MAUs, as measures of user engagement. Source: http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512034517/d287954ds1.htm http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/00011931251203451... When I first heard the stat, it was before FB Connect and Like Buttons had launched, and it seems to remain consistent today. The data seems to suggest that most users who use Facebook Connect or Like buttons will also visit Facebook.com (web or mobile) that same day. They do have a note saying that there may be mobile applications that drive daily activity automatically without active user intervention, and it may impact their measurement by up to 5%.

yashchandra 14y ago

For me, fb is useful only to keep an eye on what is going on with my family/friends specially for things such as cute pictures of their kids, marriage/birthday events etc. My wife uses her fb time to update me on those. So personally, I hardly login to fb anymore.

cdcarter 14y ago
This is what Facebook's utility for all of us is. Just replace cute photos of their kids with cute photos of your crush (or ex), and replace marriage events with house parties, and you've hit what the twenty-somethings on fb do daily. Anything else is to justify being there.
- yashchandra 14y ago
  Good point. agreed:)

joseflavio 14y ago

I use Pidgin to connect to their XMPP chat server. In the real facebook page, i connect once in a week. I wonder if they count my XMPP login as a regular login.

cft 14y ago

We have a 18yo intern at the office this summer, who keeps saying "Facebook is becoming a ghost-town", when we task him with using FB API.

_delirium 14y ago
I'd be looking for excuses to get out of it, too, if I had to deal with the FB API on a regular basis.
Splines 14y ago
Where are the people in your intern's circle of friends going? I'm honestly curious. The people in my facebook feed are the usual set of people who post. Nothing has seemed to change of late.
- cft 14y ago
  He says text and email, and still FB, but not updating as frequently, and mostly updates from apps, like instagram.

mikejsiegel 14y ago

Always take these surveys with a grain of salt. It's difficult to get accurate information from people self-reporting their behavior. Facebook has become so ingrained in peoples' routines that they don't even realize their actual usage (and in many times are in denial). I'd like to see if Facebook feels their analytics back up this self-reported data - my gut says it would not. This is also true about the advertising. Many times effective advertising gets into the subconscious - you don't realize it's working on you. The ads have to at least raise awareness of the product.

mikejsiegel 14y ago
Here is some data to back up this comment http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/06/facebooking/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/06/facebooking/

tosseraccount 14y ago

The great detox is on. Internet has become too much spying and exhibition(ism). The pendulum is swinging back and people want more privacy and less intrusion. Peak social is ex-post facto. I don't care if the great HN supermoderator doesn't like to hear it. Something new will come along. We'll call it Web 4.0 and get excited. Make it happen!

joseflavio 14y ago

The funny thing is that in the last one year I use hacker news much more than Facebook. The stream of news here is way more interesting and heterogeneous.

solnyshok 14y ago
Similar. I never bought into idea that my social friends are a good source of knowledge on topics that interest me most. For professional questions I use RSS and forums, while many of my old buddies can't tell RSS from SSD. For shopping, I google reviews and check prices online. And for keeping track of lives of some 10-15 people that I care about, facebook is too noisy.

kyt 14y ago

I find it boring because it's dominated by power users that post multiple times a day. These people may or may not be close to me, but typically they aren't. My closest friends don't post all that often and when they do they get drowned out.

gurkendoktor 14y ago

I find the idea of Facebook getting boring very interesting. Do people complain about email or gmail getting boring? Their address book? Skype? "Safari is boring these days"? For many people, Facebook is a medium. My girlfriend is busy on the iPad writing stuff in her family's private group. I am just going through the timeline looking for interesting articles just like I do on HN. Now I wonder what people who consider Facebook "boring" did before they left. Play games or be there just for the novelty of it? Then this is not a loss for existing users. I can understand the privacy concerns and the "not useful" answer though, with the terrible usability & iOS app.

randomdata 14y ago
I would say that Facebook positioned themselves as a news outlet, not a generic communications medium. In the beginning, the news was fresh, you were learning all kinds of interesting things about your friends; many of whom you had previously lost touch with. That was exciting and interesting. After some time passes, you've learned everything you want to know about said people and the information starts to become stale and repetitive. Combined with others feeling the same way and pulling back, a feedback loop emerges where good content starts to dwindle even quicker, worsening the problem. If I came to HN six months from now and all of the articles were still about the Facebook IPO, I think I would probably say that HN has become boring too. That is where, I believe, the sentiment is coming from.

infinitebeam 14y ago

and my feed is full of rage faces and memes.

taligent 14y ago
Get better friends.

hu_me 14y ago

"more than 1,000 Americans surveyed by Reuters and market research firm Ipsos, 21 percent said that they have no Facebook account, leaving 79 percent to answer questions about their Facebook use." oh that must be so statistically valid. please base your assumption about 900m userbase from a 1000+ sample out of which 21% dont have an account to begin with.

EricDeb 14y ago

I like facebook for its use in corresponding with people I normally would never contact. It gives me all the window I would ever want into their lives. For my close friends, FB is essentially useless and actually encourages me to contact them via phone or face to face less than I should because I feel like I am keeping up with them through facebook.

aaronpeterson 14y ago

I fear for facebook long-term only because I can't imagine the things I said when I was 16 lingering around on my timeline forever. Fad or not, facebook's standing with teenagers today will not be a long-lasting one. High School you will eventually be abandoned by college you and then again by professional you. How will facebook synchronize with rites of passage? Maybe this is why the proponents of facebook are usually 30-somethings...already done morphing and, as such, don't get it.

chris_wot 14y ago

I love the fact that CNet had to add a note that they updated the article that Facebook made a comment that they had no comment.