9 ms·

Facebook Is Losing Teens

104 points by kellyhclay 13y ago

cookiecaper 13y ago
As the article stated, it's difficult to overcome the "grandma factor" -- once something becomes so pervasive as to be near-universal, even among persons unlikely to be clued in, its cool factor is diminished if not completely obliterated. Some groups actively crave differentiation, and teenagers seeking to assert their independence are prominent among them. It can be difficult to express and explore in the way teenagers seek when you know all your grandparents, great grandparents, uncles, aunts, great uncles, great aunts, cousins, second cousins, etc. will be reading, as they surely will when you post on Facebook.
- argonaut 13y ago
  As a 19 year old, I will say that from my perspective, this "coolness" factor is seriously overblown and misunderstood. Facebook was never "cool," even when I first got Facebook back in 9th grade, when I was around 14 years old. Facebook was always a highly addictive and vital necessity - a social utility, the lack of which meant losing touch with friends, not being invited to events, and generally missing out on a large amount of social interaction. It was never cool and I never saw how coolness or differentiation had anything to do with it. Likewise, Snapchat is not "cool." Snapchat is pretty maisntream now (among my peers). It's popular because it's fun. All my peers use Snapchat as picture messaging for frivolous photos you wouldn't put on Facebook/Instagram.
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  - psbp 13y ago
    Facebook was very cool ~2006-2007, when I was a teen. I think, like anything popular with teens, these services lose novelty fast.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    Facebook was very cool, right before it was open to the public.
    - wyck 13y ago
      It was cool for people not familiar with the internet, for others it was just another social place, like the island in your kitchen.
  - snogglethorpe 13y ago
    > Facebook was never "cool," even when I first got Facebook back in 9th grade, when I was around 14 years old At the time Facebook was cool, it wasn't open to 14 year olds...
    - ghaff 13y ago
      A bit blunt but, yeah. Facebook was arguably a lot more cool when you at least needed an .edu address to get on. (Or a bit before or after that point depending on your perspective.)
      - gaius 13y ago
        And a very specific .edu or .ac.uk at that. It's easy to be cool when you are leveraging exclusivity already.
    - argonaut 13y ago
      Yes, but my point is that Facebook's ascendancy extended well into the period after Facebook lost it's "coolness," so concerns over FB's decline are overblown.
  - chetanahuja 13y ago
    "a social utility, the lack of which meant losing touch with friends, not being invited to events, and generally missing out on a large amount of social interaction" And according to the article (and my own, admittedly limited, survey of teens and "tweens" I know), that utility value doesn't exist anymore. Now, you could argue that the thing they are moving to is also facebook under a different name (instagram)... but I suspect it would be just as ephemeral as a "required" social network as the facebook itself has proven to be.
    - argonaut 13y ago
      I actually think the value increases as you get older (through college-aged), as your social networks fragment and split off. When I was in high school my FB friends were mostly people I saw day-to-day anyway, so FB merely consisted of keeping in the loop with the social activity of people I would see in person every day anyway. So I can totally understand why once-core FB activities are moving to Instagram/Snapchat/Twitter, as a sort of unbundling function (in the sense that each service separately does a slice of FB). But now that I'm off to college, FB is the only way I keep in meaningful touch with people from HS, people I've met randomly over the years, people from summer programs, etc.
      - rustynails77 13y ago
        I just don't share this vision. You either have -real- friends, or you have acquaintances. Facebook is not for real friends. If people are your friends and want to stay in contact with you, they will - like they did before Facebook existed.
        zitko 13y ago
        Agreed. Sadly most of my "friends" are replacing real person-to-person dates, coffees etc. with Facebook chatting.
        gaius 13y ago
        You might as well argue that a telephone isn't for "real" friends that you see in the street every day. The truth of a modern lifestyle is that people are very mobile. I can remember losing touch with people for a few years back when your email address was from your college or employer, two moves and you were gone - until the world agreed that we'd use Facebook as a self-updating address book.
  - ea777 13y ago
    The thing I find interesting about referring to Facebook as a social utility is how different that angle is than just being "social" and that's it. Instagram (and others) may be more "cool" at this point than Facebook, but they absolutely do not provide the same level of usefulness. Private messages, events with invitations, groups, the level of organization for photos, etc all together in one place connected to everyone you care about is indeed "useful." It's just straight up inefficient to organize events and share specific information on Instagram, Twitter or like services. It's because of this I feel they will continue to thrive, as teens will still use them for the "utility" and other services for the new, trendy social interactions.
- gohrt 13y ago
  "Coolness" can be handled by branding/skinning and merge/acquisition. When Instagram was cooler than Facebook Photos, Facebook merged/acquired.
- specialist 13y ago
  A social networking site loses its appeal when those ex-coworkers you don't like start "friending" you.
joelrunyon 13y ago
> Karp wrote that all of her friends are using Instagram and Snapchat, Well...Instagram is owned by facebook so there's that...
- cookiecaper 13y ago
  As of only fairly recently, and it can still be a problem for the Facebook brand even if the same conglomerate owns both units.
  - joelrunyon 13y ago
    Not if you think of facebook like a company & facebook.com & instagram.com as services of the company with many more like it on the way.
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- batgaijin 13y ago
  I take issue with that statement, I think this is very representative of HN.
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treelovinhippie 13y ago
Didn't Zuck say recently that the actual numbers weren't concerning, and that they're aware they are past the "cool" stage and instead want to move on to become the social fabric of the Internet, much like a utility.
- psbp 13y ago
  This would make sense if they actually offered much utility. Even Google+ has them beat when it comes to compelling features.
  - Myrmornis 13y ago
    Err, what? If I closed my facebook account I would lose virtually all contact I have with every friend I have made other than the person I live with and a few people who live near me and my family. How the hell is that not utility?
    - CoryG89 13y ago
      It's not really Facebook offering utility though. They offer the same features every other site trying to be the "fabric of the internet" offers and some would say not as much. It just so happens that everyone you know has a Facebook at the moment.
      - Myrmornis 13y ago
        If I like watching birds and someone in my village puts up a bird feeder and all the birds go there and he offers to let me come and watch in return for a small payment then I would say that, while the birds are at his feeder, he is offering utility. This remains true even if all the other villagers also put up identical feeders which remain sadly birdless. Whereas If I'm understanding you correctly, you would say that he is offering utility only if the birds are at his feeder because of some unique bird-attracting design features of his feeder which the other feeders lack. That seems to me to be confusing an implementation detail with what actually matters to the user: he just wants access to birds (his friends). He doesn't care why they are where they are.
Geee 13y ago
Aren't Instagram and Snapchat completely different products? Of course, these compete on the 'share of time' of the users, in which case everything teens do is competing with Facebook.
- tantalor 13y ago
  No, Facebook, Instagram, and Shapchat all do the same thing: photo & videos sharing. So do Twitter, Tumblr, reddit, MySpace, Google+, blogs, etc.
wavesounds 13y ago
Facebooks is priced at 240X Price to Earnings. If they start losing users or even stop growing its hard to imagine how that PE ratio continues to makes any sense. Even with an increase in mobile revenue its still less then desktop revenue and users are certainly flocking to mobile too which is a double wammy. So facebook has to transition to making more money per user if its user base stops growing. Otherwise you're going to have people really questioning the price of the stock which could end up effecting the whole industry.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  The only way that valuation made sense is if facebook managed to capture an enormous fraction of all worldwide ad revenue. That always seemed extremely unlikely to me.
  - MichaelApproved 13y ago
    OP is only giving half the story. FB earnings are, in a sense, artificially low. They are dumping money into expanding and growing. FB wants good earnings but, right now, that's not as important as growing users and use. Of course there will always be money spent on growth but to what extent. When they go from dumping money into growth, P/E will be more meaningful in the typical sense.
    - wavesounds 13y ago
      Investing in growth is only an excuse for high PE if you are growing though, if the trend in the article continues and they maintain this PE ratio then maybe they're throwing good money after bad
    - InclinedPlane 13y ago
      I was talking about revenue. Yes, they are growing. They are expanding their revenue. They have to in order to justify their valuation. But they need to grow at unsustainable rates for a fairly long time for that valuation to make sense. Unless they completely pivot the company they would, as I mentioned, need to grab significant fraction of all of Earth's advertising revenue, in all media. It's unreasonable to assume that current share holders are investing in facebook out of some belief in an unannounced, unplanned, speculative pivot into a different industry, that's either clairvoyance or rank stupidity.
yeukhon 13y ago
Teens are attracted to Twitter, Instagram and Vine. They like these mini social network where they could gain followers by posing interesting tweets or photos or videos. Youtube's top celerity usually started their channels when they were teen (high school, freshman). Certainly getting your channel popular now is harder, so the best way to get attention is either by posting photos or posting a 6-second videos. Vine and Instavideos took the spike. Kids are spending more time watching videos and looking at photos than reading statuses. Ironically, IMO, Vine and instavideos took off partly because people could publish to FB and Twitter. I spend most of my FB time either reading memes or vine videos. i don't pay much attention to status anymore.
- XorNot 13y ago
  Vines is going to crash hard suddenly IMO. At it's core it's just not versatile enough for anyone to actually try and become "popular" from Vines videos - what you do their, you can do on YouTube as well, but with more versatility. You can't do much with 5 second videos as a limit - but the 5 second movie/10 second movie etc. was a format that people were using on YouTube well before Vines.
  - yeukhon 13y ago
    Maybe. I think there is a value running a 5-10 seconds show. It's supposed to be funny, capturing attention. Youtube to me and possibly to many people is formal, it's a website you go to for a full talk. You would watch a 5 minutes show instead. This is why you don't blog on twitter. You write status and you chat and that's "blog" for some people. Since vine is a twitter company, I am sure twitter is trying to monetize it.
    - XorNot 13y ago
      5 seconds is about how long it took to read this sentence and move your eyes to the next one. The problem is, a video, unlike a picture, or indeed - text, doesn't linger on a frame naturally. Your example seems to support my point more then undermine it too - you mention 5 minutes. Not 5 seconds. 5 minutes is a lot of content's length on YouTube. Its not remotely possible on Vine.
ktd 13y ago
I suppose the coming months/years will be when we see whether Facebook becomes the "backbone of the social Internet" or just another MySpace. I honestly don't know where the smart money is here-- it's an exciting time!
tantalor 13y ago
This inevitability is an assumption of Facebook's strategy (see Zuckerberg's Letter), and the reason they bought Instagram. My suspicion is that teenagers will engage Facebook as they become adults and the social pressures shift.
hawkharris 13y ago
As more teenagers gravitate toward online social networks (if not Facebook, then Instagram, etc.), I'm concerned that not enough of them will feel lonely. I recently watched a Louis C.K. interview about young people and technology, which struck a chord with me. I agree that adolescents benefit from a sense of boredom and isolation because it encourages them to cultivate stronger in-person social networks: http://teamcoco.com/video/louis-ck-springsteen-cell-phone http://teamcoco.com/video/louis-ck-springsteen-cell-phone
- fossuser 13y ago
  I wouldn't worry about facebook preventing people from feeling lonely - it doesn't really solve that problem. If anything facebook allows you to more easily cultivate in person social networks by making preliminary communication much easier.
- vdaniuk 13y ago
  I am flabbergasted. Adolescents benefit from isolation? And you're citing a comedian? Care to cite some serious sources?
  - dwaltrip 13y ago
    What the parent comment is trying to get at is that many people today do not know how to sit quietly alone with their thoughts. If they have a single spare moment, in less than half a second they whip out their phones and mindlessly check fb, etc. Due to this, they are less pensive and self reflective. While hard to test, it seems like a reasonable theory.
    - vdaniuk 13y ago
      Really? I am not sure. We've got a lot of quirks in our cognition and intuition is not really a good heuristic for studying human mind.
      - zxcdw 13y ago
        Haven't you noticed it yourself, that especially younger people seem to be engaged with their mobile devices whenever there is a few minute idle time, when e.g. waiting for a class to start. Quiet hallway, 10-20 people, all but a few with their noses in their phones.
libovness 13y ago
There are really two hypotheses: 1) _Teenagers in general_ do not use Facebook (which does _not_ rule out that they will become avid Facebook users once they grow out of their teenage years) 2) _Today's teenagers_ disinterest in Facebook is fundamentally different than it was for teenagers' of several years ago (which would suggest they'll never get attached to Facebook the way previous teenagers once did, and therefore never become avid Facebook users). The 10-K report suggests #2 ("younger users were less engaged with the social network than previously") but my hunch is that it's more like #1 (I argued this here: http://whoo.ps/2013/03/04/teens-go-where-identity-isnt http://whoo.ps/2013/03/04/teens-go-where-identity-isnt). Teenagers now have more social networking options (Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) to choose from than previous generations of teenagers - which explains why today's teenagers are less engaged with Facebook than previously - but that doesn't mean they won't want/need the kind of canonical identity that Facebook provides (once that awkward, impressionable teenager actually grows into an adult with a firmer identify).
6d0debc071 13y ago
> However, teenagers have made it clear with their quick adoption of social networks such as Instagram and Snapchat they want to share everything and with as many people as possible. Alternative explanation - teens want to share ephemerally and with a certain degree of anonymity. They don't want their parents looking over their shoulder at their friends or conversations, and seek to avoid entanglement with sections of their social network that are going to bully them or have a significantly lasting effect tied to a persistent searchable identity.
- FkZ 13y ago
  The lack of anonymity and pseudonymity on Facebook is definitely a factor. Facebook works under the assumption that we have one unified "identity" to which we can and want to tie everything we do. In reality, we share different parts of ourselves with different people at different times.
smoyer 13y ago
MySpace is laughing ... not maliciously but because they now understand that teens are a migratory species. You can't expect them to stay anywhere.
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ISL 13y ago
If only Facebook had a product like Instagram, perhaps they could use it as a gateway drug...
tonydiv 13y ago
For those referring to the social utility of Facebook, I recommend hiding your news feed. The newsfeed is not a social utility, whereas messages, profiles, looking up mutual friends, etc. IS a social utility. Here's how to hide your newsfeed without affecting your experience on the rest of the site: https://medium.com/productivity-efficiency/631ed8f466e1 https://medium.com/productivity-efficiency/631ed8f466e1 Basically, this trick uses a Chrome extension that hides the newsfeed using custom CSS.
VLM 13y ago
At the peak of the CB "bubble" around 1978, roughly 10% of all cars had a CB radio installed in them as a lower bound, although claims were it was higher, like 15% to 20%. That percentage has dropped somewhat since then... There is no particular reason to assume the peaking and decline of a socializing technology must result in its similar competitors growth in a nearly identical field. It could be home video conferencing or terminals built into vehicle seatbacks or far more likely, something we can't imagine at this time. And no, for you youngsters, the smartphone was not the social technology replacement for CB, for basically all of the 80s and a substantial part of the 90s average people simply completely stopped technologically socializing in their cars. I see no reason to prevent future people from simply not socializing via handheld devices. That doesn't mean the death of the industry, truck drivers still have CBs, but your grandpa probably does not (not since Carter was president, anyway) The industry can only make money on the up slope, but investors and innovators can make money on both up and down slopes. Might be time to start thinking of money making schemes for the down slope.
- rietta 13y ago
  I never played with CB other than low power walkie talkies from radio shack. I did get into amateur radio in 2003 and do have a radio that can be mounted in the car. There seems to be quite a lot of activity on the air where I live. It's still a fun hobby in 2013 and is a nice break from the daily grind of the internet startup scene. It's funny how different various subcultures are - even among technical people.
  - VLM 13y ago
    Even just within ham radio the subcultures are pretty wide, there's the HF guys, the digital mode guys, the contesters, the microwave builder/experimenters, the public service volunteer guys, the dxpedition ops, the antenna system designers, the satellite/moonbounce ops... The good news is it only takes several decades experience (and $$$$$$) to try everything by which time someone's gone and invented something new.
shadesandcolour 13y ago
I don't even think that the reason is "Facebook isn't cool anymore". Facebook is just annoying at this point. When Facebook was for your friends from college and/or high school, things were great. You could post embarrassing things that people did, inside jokes, whatever. Now your mom is on Facebook. your grandma is on Facebook, and so is your boss. Yes you can stop them from seeing everything you post or everything your friends post, but no one knows that. There's probably a 50/50 chance that if I were to post something funny and slightly embarrassing on a friends wall, BAM, there's their grandma who is a tad bit confused. Then of course your friends grow up and all they post is baby pictures. Teenagers, who are looking to keep things private between them and their friends, can't have their mom popping up on their Facebook pages all the time.
xdd 13y ago
Facebook was cool until weaponized.
moinnadeem 13y ago
As a teenager, Twitter is what everyone is using currently. Don't complicate it, teens just want to be on what their friends are on, and their parents are not on. Twitter just fits the need.
ta_24278 13y ago
They've been losing teens for a while now, and once you start losing teens, a so-called "social networking" website is dead, it doesn't know it yet because the agony may take a while. Due to its unusual size for facebook it might take a longer while, but it's on the path to irrelevance that many others have walked before: friendster, myspace, msn, etc. it's funy that the 10-13 years demographics adoption will make or kill an online website.

104 points by kellyhclay 13y ago

As the article stated, it's difficult to overcome the "grandma factor" -- once something becomes so pervasive as to be near-universal, even among persons unlikely to be clued in, its cool factor is diminished if not completely obliterated. Some groups actively crave differentiation, and teenagers seeking to assert their independence are prominent among them. It can be difficult to express and explore in the way teenagers seek when you know all your grandparents, great grandparents, uncles, aunts, great uncles, great aunts, cousins, second cousins, etc. will be reading, as they surely will when you post on Facebook.

argonaut 13y ago
As a 19 year old, I will say that from my perspective, this "coolness" factor is seriously overblown and misunderstood. Facebook was never "cool," even when I first got Facebook back in 9th grade, when I was around 14 years old. Facebook was always a highly addictive and vital necessity - a social utility, the lack of which meant losing touch with friends, not being invited to events, and generally missing out on a large amount of social interaction. It was never cool and I never saw how coolness or differentiation had anything to do with it. Likewise, Snapchat is not "cool." Snapchat is pretty maisntream now (among my peers). It's popular because it's fun. All my peers use Snapchat as picture messaging for frivolous photos you wouldn't put on Facebook/Instagram.
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- psbp 13y ago
  Facebook was very cool ~2006-2007, when I was a teen. I think, like anything popular with teens, these services lose novelty fast.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Facebook was very cool, right before it was open to the public.
  - wyck 13y ago
    It was cool for people not familiar with the internet, for others it was just another social place, like the island in your kitchen.
- snogglethorpe 13y ago
  > Facebook was never "cool," even when I first got Facebook back in 9th grade, when I was around 14 years old At the time Facebook was cool, it wasn't open to 14 year olds...
  - ghaff 13y ago
    A bit blunt but, yeah. Facebook was arguably a lot more cool when you at least needed an .edu address to get on. (Or a bit before or after that point depending on your perspective.)
    - gaius 13y ago
      And a very specific .edu or .ac.uk at that. It's easy to be cool when you are leveraging exclusivity already.
  - argonaut 13y ago
    Yes, but my point is that Facebook's ascendancy extended well into the period after Facebook lost it's "coolness," so concerns over FB's decline are overblown.
- chetanahuja 13y ago
  "a social utility, the lack of which meant losing touch with friends, not being invited to events, and generally missing out on a large amount of social interaction" And according to the article (and my own, admittedly limited, survey of teens and "tweens" I know), that utility value doesn't exist anymore. Now, you could argue that the thing they are moving to is also facebook under a different name (instagram)... but I suspect it would be just as ephemeral as a "required" social network as the facebook itself has proven to be.
  - argonaut 13y ago
    I actually think the value increases as you get older (through college-aged), as your social networks fragment and split off. When I was in high school my FB friends were mostly people I saw day-to-day anyway, so FB merely consisted of keeping in the loop with the social activity of people I would see in person every day anyway. So I can totally understand why once-core FB activities are moving to Instagram/Snapchat/Twitter, as a sort of unbundling function (in the sense that each service separately does a slice of FB). But now that I'm off to college, FB is the only way I keep in meaningful touch with people from HS, people I've met randomly over the years, people from summer programs, etc.
    - rustynails77 13y ago
      I just don't share this vision. You either have -real- friends, or you have acquaintances. Facebook is not for real friends. If people are your friends and want to stay in contact with you, they will - like they did before Facebook existed.
      - zitko 13y ago
        Agreed. Sadly most of my "friends" are replacing real person-to-person dates, coffees etc. with Facebook chatting.
      - gaius 13y ago
        You might as well argue that a telephone isn't for "real" friends that you see in the street every day. The truth of a modern lifestyle is that people are very mobile. I can remember losing touch with people for a few years back when your email address was from your college or employer, two moves and you were gone - until the world agreed that we'd use Facebook as a self-updating address book.
- ea777 13y ago
  The thing I find interesting about referring to Facebook as a social utility is how different that angle is than just being "social" and that's it. Instagram (and others) may be more "cool" at this point than Facebook, but they absolutely do not provide the same level of usefulness. Private messages, events with invitations, groups, the level of organization for photos, etc all together in one place connected to everyone you care about is indeed "useful." It's just straight up inefficient to organize events and share specific information on Instagram, Twitter or like services. It's because of this I feel they will continue to thrive, as teens will still use them for the "utility" and other services for the new, trendy social interactions.
gohrt 13y ago
"Coolness" can be handled by branding/skinning and merge/acquisition. When Instagram was cooler than Facebook Photos, Facebook merged/acquired.
specialist 13y ago
A social networking site loses its appeal when those ex-coworkers you don't like start "friending" you.

joelrunyon 13y ago

> Karp wrote that all of her friends are using Instagram and Snapchat, Well...Instagram is owned by facebook so there's that...

cookiecaper 13y ago
As of only fairly recently, and it can still be a problem for the Facebook brand even if the same conglomerate owns both units.
- joelrunyon 13y ago
  Not if you think of facebook like a company & facebook.com & instagram.com as services of the company with many more like it on the way.

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batgaijin 13y ago
I take issue with that statement, I think this is very representative of HN.
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treelovinhippie 13y ago

Didn't Zuck say recently that the actual numbers weren't concerning, and that they're aware they are past the "cool" stage and instead want to move on to become the social fabric of the Internet, much like a utility.

psbp 13y ago
This would make sense if they actually offered much utility. Even Google+ has them beat when it comes to compelling features.
- Myrmornis 13y ago
  Err, what? If I closed my facebook account I would lose virtually all contact I have with every friend I have made other than the person I live with and a few people who live near me and my family. How the hell is that not utility?
  - CoryG89 13y ago
    It's not really Facebook offering utility though. They offer the same features every other site trying to be the "fabric of the internet" offers and some would say not as much. It just so happens that everyone you know has a Facebook at the moment.
    - Myrmornis 13y ago
      If I like watching birds and someone in my village puts up a bird feeder and all the birds go there and he offers to let me come and watch in return for a small payment then I would say that, while the birds are at his feeder, he is offering utility. This remains true even if all the other villagers also put up identical feeders which remain sadly birdless. Whereas If I'm understanding you correctly, you would say that he is offering utility only if the birds are at his feeder because of some unique bird-attracting design features of his feeder which the other feeders lack. That seems to me to be confusing an implementation detail with what actually matters to the user: he just wants access to birds (his friends). He doesn't care why they are where they are.

Geee 13y ago

Aren't Instagram and Snapchat completely different products? Of course, these compete on the 'share of time' of the users, in which case everything teens do is competing with Facebook.

tantalor 13y ago
No, Facebook, Instagram, and Shapchat all do the same thing: photo & videos sharing. So do Twitter, Tumblr, reddit, MySpace, Google+, blogs, etc.

wavesounds 13y ago

Facebooks is priced at 240X Price to Earnings. If they start losing users or even stop growing its hard to imagine how that PE ratio continues to makes any sense. Even with an increase in mobile revenue its still less then desktop revenue and users are certainly flocking to mobile too which is a double wammy. So facebook has to transition to making more money per user if its user base stops growing. Otherwise you're going to have people really questioning the price of the stock which could end up effecting the whole industry.

InclinedPlane 13y ago
The only way that valuation made sense is if facebook managed to capture an enormous fraction of all worldwide ad revenue. That always seemed extremely unlikely to me.
- MichaelApproved 13y ago
  OP is only giving half the story. FB earnings are, in a sense, artificially low. They are dumping money into expanding and growing. FB wants good earnings but, right now, that's not as important as growing users and use. Of course there will always be money spent on growth but to what extent. When they go from dumping money into growth, P/E will be more meaningful in the typical sense.
  - wavesounds 13y ago
    Investing in growth is only an excuse for high PE if you are growing though, if the trend in the article continues and they maintain this PE ratio then maybe they're throwing good money after bad
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    I was talking about revenue. Yes, they are growing. They are expanding their revenue. They have to in order to justify their valuation. But they need to grow at unsustainable rates for a fairly long time for that valuation to make sense. Unless they completely pivot the company they would, as I mentioned, need to grab significant fraction of all of Earth's advertising revenue, in all media. It's unreasonable to assume that current share holders are investing in facebook out of some belief in an unannounced, unplanned, speculative pivot into a different industry, that's either clairvoyance or rank stupidity.

yeukhon 13y ago

Teens are attracted to Twitter, Instagram and Vine. They like these mini social network where they could gain followers by posing interesting tweets or photos or videos. Youtube's top celerity usually started their channels when they were teen (high school, freshman). Certainly getting your channel popular now is harder, so the best way to get attention is either by posting photos or posting a 6-second videos. Vine and Instavideos took the spike. Kids are spending more time watching videos and looking at photos than reading statuses. Ironically, IMO, Vine and instavideos took off partly because people could publish to FB and Twitter. I spend most of my FB time either reading memes or vine videos. i don't pay much attention to status anymore.

XorNot 13y ago
Vines is going to crash hard suddenly IMO. At it's core it's just not versatile enough for anyone to actually try and become "popular" from Vines videos - what you do their, you can do on YouTube as well, but with more versatility. You can't do much with 5 second videos as a limit - but the 5 second movie/10 second movie etc. was a format that people were using on YouTube well before Vines.
- yeukhon 13y ago
  Maybe. I think there is a value running a 5-10 seconds show. It's supposed to be funny, capturing attention. Youtube to me and possibly to many people is formal, it's a website you go to for a full talk. You would watch a 5 minutes show instead. This is why you don't blog on twitter. You write status and you chat and that's "blog" for some people. Since vine is a twitter company, I am sure twitter is trying to monetize it.
  - XorNot 13y ago
    5 seconds is about how long it took to read this sentence and move your eyes to the next one. The problem is, a video, unlike a picture, or indeed - text, doesn't linger on a frame naturally. Your example seems to support my point more then undermine it too - you mention 5 minutes. Not 5 seconds. 5 minutes is a lot of content's length on YouTube. Its not remotely possible on Vine.

ktd 13y ago

I suppose the coming months/years will be when we see whether Facebook becomes the "backbone of the social Internet" or just another MySpace. I honestly don't know where the smart money is here-- it's an exciting time!

tantalor 13y ago

This inevitability is an assumption of Facebook's strategy (see Zuckerberg's Letter), and the reason they bought Instagram. My suspicion is that teenagers will engage Facebook as they become adults and the social pressures shift.

hawkharris 13y ago

As more teenagers gravitate toward online social networks (if not Facebook, then Instagram, etc.), I'm concerned that not enough of them will feel lonely. I recently watched a Louis C.K. interview about young people and technology, which struck a chord with me. I agree that adolescents benefit from a sense of boredom and isolation because it encourages them to cultivate stronger in-person social networks: http://teamcoco.com/video/louis-ck-springsteen-cell-phone http://teamcoco.com/video/louis-ck-springsteen-cell-phone

fossuser 13y ago
I wouldn't worry about facebook preventing people from feeling lonely - it doesn't really solve that problem. If anything facebook allows you to more easily cultivate in person social networks by making preliminary communication much easier.
vdaniuk 13y ago
I am flabbergasted. Adolescents benefit from isolation? And you're citing a comedian? Care to cite some serious sources?
- dwaltrip 13y ago
  What the parent comment is trying to get at is that many people today do not know how to sit quietly alone with their thoughts. If they have a single spare moment, in less than half a second they whip out their phones and mindlessly check fb, etc. Due to this, they are less pensive and self reflective. While hard to test, it seems like a reasonable theory.
  - vdaniuk 13y ago
    Really? I am not sure. We've got a lot of quirks in our cognition and intuition is not really a good heuristic for studying human mind.
    - zxcdw 13y ago
      Haven't you noticed it yourself, that especially younger people seem to be engaged with their mobile devices whenever there is a few minute idle time, when e.g. waiting for a class to start. Quiet hallway, 10-20 people, all but a few with their noses in their phones.

libovness 13y ago

There are really two hypotheses: 1) _Teenagers in general_ do not use Facebook (which does _not_ rule out that they will become avid Facebook users once they grow out of their teenage years) 2) _Today's teenagers_ disinterest in Facebook is fundamentally different than it was for teenagers' of several years ago (which would suggest they'll never get attached to Facebook the way previous teenagers once did, and therefore never become avid Facebook users). The 10-K report suggests #2 ("younger users were less engaged with the social network than previously") but my hunch is that it's more like #1 (I argued this here: http://whoo.ps/2013/03/04/teens-go-where-identity-isnt http://whoo.ps/2013/03/04/teens-go-where-identity-isnt). Teenagers now have more social networking options (Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) to choose from than previous generations of teenagers - which explains why today's teenagers are less engaged with Facebook than previously - but that doesn't mean they won't want/need the kind of canonical identity that Facebook provides (once that awkward, impressionable teenager actually grows into an adult with a firmer identify).

6d0debc071 13y ago

> However, teenagers have made it clear with their quick adoption of social networks such as Instagram and Snapchat they want to share everything and with as many people as possible. Alternative explanation - teens want to share ephemerally and with a certain degree of anonymity. They don't want their parents looking over their shoulder at their friends or conversations, and seek to avoid entanglement with sections of their social network that are going to bully them or have a significantly lasting effect tied to a persistent searchable identity.

FkZ 13y ago
The lack of anonymity and pseudonymity on Facebook is definitely a factor. Facebook works under the assumption that we have one unified "identity" to which we can and want to tie everything we do. In reality, we share different parts of ourselves with different people at different times.

smoyer 13y ago

MySpace is laughing ... not maliciously but because they now understand that teens are a migratory species. You can't expect them to stay anywhere.

deleted 13y ago
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ISL 13y ago

If only Facebook had a product like Instagram, perhaps they could use it as a gateway drug...

tonydiv 13y ago

For those referring to the social utility of Facebook, I recommend hiding your news feed. The newsfeed is not a social utility, whereas messages, profiles, looking up mutual friends, etc. IS a social utility. Here's how to hide your newsfeed without affecting your experience on the rest of the site: https://medium.com/productivity-efficiency/631ed8f466e1 https://medium.com/productivity-efficiency/631ed8f466e1 Basically, this trick uses a Chrome extension that hides the newsfeed using custom CSS.

VLM 13y ago

At the peak of the CB "bubble" around 1978, roughly 10% of all cars had a CB radio installed in them as a lower bound, although claims were it was higher, like 15% to 20%. That percentage has dropped somewhat since then... There is no particular reason to assume the peaking and decline of a socializing technology must result in its similar competitors growth in a nearly identical field. It could be home video conferencing or terminals built into vehicle seatbacks or far more likely, something we can't imagine at this time. And no, for you youngsters, the smartphone was not the social technology replacement for CB, for basically all of the 80s and a substantial part of the 90s average people simply completely stopped technologically socializing in their cars. I see no reason to prevent future people from simply not socializing via handheld devices. That doesn't mean the death of the industry, truck drivers still have CBs, but your grandpa probably does not (not since Carter was president, anyway) The industry can only make money on the up slope, but investors and innovators can make money on both up and down slopes. Might be time to start thinking of money making schemes for the down slope.

rietta 13y ago
I never played with CB other than low power walkie talkies from radio shack. I did get into amateur radio in 2003 and do have a radio that can be mounted in the car. There seems to be quite a lot of activity on the air where I live. It's still a fun hobby in 2013 and is a nice break from the daily grind of the internet startup scene. It's funny how different various subcultures are - even among technical people.
- VLM 13y ago
  Even just within ham radio the subcultures are pretty wide, there's the HF guys, the digital mode guys, the contesters, the microwave builder/experimenters, the public service volunteer guys, the dxpedition ops, the antenna system designers, the satellite/moonbounce ops... The good news is it only takes several decades experience (and $$$$$$) to try everything by which time someone's gone and invented something new.

shadesandcolour 13y ago

I don't even think that the reason is "Facebook isn't cool anymore". Facebook is just annoying at this point. When Facebook was for your friends from college and/or high school, things were great. You could post embarrassing things that people did, inside jokes, whatever. Now your mom is on Facebook. your grandma is on Facebook, and so is your boss. Yes you can stop them from seeing everything you post or everything your friends post, but no one knows that. There's probably a 50/50 chance that if I were to post something funny and slightly embarrassing on a friends wall, BAM, there's their grandma who is a tad bit confused. Then of course your friends grow up and all they post is baby pictures. Teenagers, who are looking to keep things private between them and their friends, can't have their mom popping up on their Facebook pages all the time.

xdd 13y ago

Facebook was cool until weaponized.

moinnadeem 13y ago

As a teenager, Twitter is what everyone is using currently. Don't complicate it, teens just want to be on what their friends are on, and their parents are not on. Twitter just fits the need.

ta_24278 13y ago

They've been losing teens for a while now, and once you start losing teens, a so-called "social networking" website is dead, it doesn't know it yet because the agony may take a while. Due to its unusual size for facebook it might take a longer while, but it's on the path to irrelevance that many others have walked before: friendster, myspace, msn, etc. it's funy that the 10-13 years demographics adoption will make or kill an online website.