10 ms·

What Happens When the President Sits Down Next to You at a Café

242 points by pliptvo 13y ago

JacksonGariety 13y ago
> "Facebook is so uncool even the president of the United States knows it." Shouldn't he know better than anyone, since his job depends so heavily on social media?
julien_c 13y ago
Funny piece.
rwmj 13y ago
Is it supposed to be satire? Anyway, I don't think Facebook can be dead without an obvious challenger. There's presumably still a need for people to chat with each other in the way that Facebook does. (Also can't believe I'm defending Facebook here ...)
- arethuza 13y ago
  Aren't dead/alive and cool/uncool orthogonal? e.g. Microsoft is pretty much alive even though it is uncool. Quick thought: couldn't we replace Gartner's quadrant thing with this? I would estimate that for Facebook dAlive/dt > 0 and dCool/dt < 0 Edit: I need to make a list of which companies fall into each Quadrant - I initially thought that nobody was "cool & dead" and, after thinking about it for a bit, realised that a lot of companies fall into this area: - Symbolics - SGI - Cray - Sun (undead as part of the seriously uncool Oracle) - Harlequin (Lisp/PostScript vendor)
  - annnnd 13y ago
    Interesting poing - but in case of FB one could argue that staying alive depends on being cool.
    - arethuza 13y ago
      I think it was important initially, but I think they might have outgrown that and become a part of standard infrastructure - the social dial tone.
- nettletea 13y ago
  It's easy to bemoan the incumbent, but it's not easy to get rid of them. Remember Myspace, it was huge. A no-frills more personal alternative to it was born in Facebook. They are different products granted. But the early adopters chose to champion Facebook. Just like Google was the new cool Yahoo. Later Facebook grew into the huge monster that it is. I have political reservations and worries about a silo like Facebook, but I have to respect it being a work of epic proportions. A new kid on the block might be able to quickly grab the lime-light if they play their cards right, but there's the worry that they'll become the future uncool incumbent. Some companies amazingly hang in there as the competition just isn't strong enough, good enough or wealthy enough to remove them. As others have said a good product doesn't have to be cool. My bread board is brilliant, but it's not cool. The worry with I'd have with a well established web app, is that it might become a bloated behemoth. People are happy to moan about Facebook right now, currently I don't really see a good alternative, but where there's a will there's a way.
wanda 13y ago
The parts the author did not hear: We're watching all FB activity and we're stumped What social networks should the NSA target? How can the NSA deal with the impermanence of snapchat content? "They" being the 18-35s, prime hacker demographic, main target of surveillance.
- mjolk 13y ago
  Yes, because that can be the only subtext. Because the President can only be concerned with the NSA, bitcoin, and tor. It's not like he's a person or father that could be having a conversation about social network applications like a normal person.
  - wanda 13y ago
    Yes, because we can't make jokes on HN. Because HN is all business, in-depth analysis, serious adult talk. It's not like the users are people, even professionals off-the-clock, that could be enjoying (or at least successfully identifying) a joke together like normal people.
    - skwirl 13y ago
      The joke wasn't funny. When something isn't funny people can't tell if it is a joke or not.
    - mjolk 13y ago
      The "joke" is so tired that is just registers as more complaining that doesn't add to the health of discussion.
- tomaskafka 13y ago
  > How can the NSA deal with the impermanence of snapchat content? You just order them to make a backdoor they can't talk about and archive it yourself, duh. Next!
deleted 13y ago
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dredmorbius 13y ago
The question's been asked "can a company die without an obvious challenger?" Yes, it can. A company, platform, or technology can "die" in the sense that it loses the initiative, and more importantly, the ability to drive an industry and/or conversation, even though it hasn't yet died. Apple was "dead" through most of the 1990s. It simply didn't matter, outside of the graphics and design areas, and for a very small cadre of fervent fans. The turnaround shocked me. IBM very nearly died in the early 1990s, as its place as the center of the business computing world was shaken by anti-trust actions, Microsoft, and the upsurge in Unix vendors. The company's never fully regained its former footing, though it did recover largely. Microsoft has been in the process of dying for most of the past decade. A highly symbolic moment for me was when The Economist newspaper ran a cover showing the leaders in tech: Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Microsoft wasn't even mentioned (it reminds me of an earlier revealing moment when the CEO of Visa International named the company's biggest rivals: MasterCard, AmEx, and Microsoft -- I guess it didn't pay to Discover...). Sun Microsystems was fingered for the walking dead as Linux became ascendant, with its acquisition by Oracle (a panic response of both companies, coming at least five years too late to do either any good) coming long after it was obvious the company had not only staggered but was mortally wounded. One thing to realize is that a fading icon is often not replaced by a direct competitor, but by one which addresses short Facebook has dominated Silicon Valley for the past 5 years, stealing initiative from Google (who seems to be somewhat winning it back). Part of the situation is that "traditional" social networking is becoming passe, in part because it's become too Byzantine, and too intrusive. Social networks -- real social networks, not the online instantiations of them -- work best when the groups are relatively small, Dunbar's number is respected, and there's a level of insularity around any given group. TheFacebook at Harvard had those features. Facebook, Inc., 1 billion served, doesn't, and cannot. Another secret is that one of the secret sauces of social is photo sharing (still hard if you don't have your own dedicated server), and that services are sprouting up to offer this (Imgur, Snapchat, etc.), which is essentially disrupting the former Social glue much the way Craigslist gutted classified newspaper advertising in the late 1990s. I'd like to think that the constant drumbeat of surveillance state revelations we can thank heros and patriots Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, and Glen Greenwald for are having an effect, though I think that may be giving the general public a bit too much credit. Not totally sure of that though.
deleted 13y ago
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vincie 13y ago
Facebook has always been uncool. The uncool people are just saying this now to sound cool.
jgreen10 13y ago
Things that were once cool either fade or become normal. Facebook has become normal.
zaidf 13y ago
This is actually a great milestone. It is hard to build a sustainable billion dollar business on "being cool" because any minute society might decide you're no longer cool and move on to the next shiny object. Just ask myspace. Facebook isn't a billion dollar business because it is the new shiny object on the block. it is used because it delivers good old value of helping you stay in touch with your friends.
- wavefunction 13y ago
  >>Facebook isn't a billion dollar business because it is the new shiny object on the block. it is used because it delivers good old value of helping you stay in touch with your friends. Not much of a defensible competitive advantage imo.
bloat 13y ago
Why should it be cool? Why can't it just be useful? There are many, many uncool people in the world, or people who couldn't care less what is cool, and who just want to keep in touch with some mates, or find out when the next meeting of their local cycling club is, or find out what was played on the most recent podcast they listened to, or, or, or, a hundred other uses.
- basicallydan 13y ago
  Good point. The truth is, it's fun for journalists and, well, the rest of us, to point out that Facebook isn't cool. Maybe you don't find it fun, and maybe some others do. It's the same reason "hipsters" feel pride for finding the latest band cool before anybody else does - it's just some vague social currency. By pointing out that something which was once cool is no longer cool, you are distancing yourself from it and gaining some of that currency, thus making yourself cooler. So, that's why it should be cool. To help it's users be cool. I'm not saying this is in any way a useful point of view to take, or that it in any way affects how useful Facebook is, but I'm fairly sure that this is what is going on. Plain old-fashioned shallow trend-setting and trend-following. Playground economics.
SandB0x 13y ago
I swear Facebook is slowly turning into Lotus Notes. It's got the the little messenger panel on the right. It's got the clunky mail client, it's got the calendar and you can invite people to a meeting/party. You have to use it because everyone else uses it and everyone else uses it because it's been around for years. It's not fun or simple to use any more and you have to be on your guard about what you share and who might see it. It's not really surprising that teenagers aren't into it.
- j45 13y ago
  I'm not a FB fan, nor have I developed Notes apps in a good 8+ years, but Facebook might be like notes in another way: Both seem to do what they do, in their time, better than anything else out there. When I saw Notes being mentioned, flashbacks of LotusScript, NotesSQL and came, especially it's non-relational DB (nosql a decade earlier than the rage it became later). Notes incredibly clunky mail and document system did a few things well before anything else -- great two way replication of data for online and offline work. Domino took Notes apps and rendered them for the web, allowing complex web apps to be built in a time where there was little like it. I didn't hesitate to leave Notes, but it wasn't for lack of respect, it was just one of the half dozen or so stacks I worked in at the time. Every line of code we write will be crap in 5 years. Every stack we use will be crap in 5 years. Everything's new, but everything's the same too.
- Tloewald 13y ago
  It's not lotus notes until they seriously screw up the ui. It's actually almost inconceivable that facebook's ui could become that screwed up, regardless of how much you despise facebook.
  - aestra 13y ago
    It isn't like Facebook doesn't "revamp" the UI all the time and confuse everyone while making it a worse experience. I can see it getting there eventually. Facebook used to be rather simple, now it is a convoluted mess. Not only is it a convoluted mess, but ever different "version" of it is different. The mobile app is much different from m.facebook.com which is much different from facebook.com and the iOS app is probably different too. Remember lite.facebook.com? I MISS IT SO MUCH!! :( Oh yeah sometimes the picture viewing interface is different depending on what you clicked on. Ever try to find a video someone uploaded? Go ahead. It's under Photos > [Name's] Photo's > Videos. Yeah... What's with all the needless JavaScript? And more importantly, all the JavaScript ERRORS?
betawolf33 13y ago
"one of our agents will be coming around to swipe you" <- I honestly don't know what this means.
- vincie 13y ago
  They need to scan the NFR chip embedded in the back of your skull to ID you.
- leephillips 13y ago
  It means a secret service agent will feel you up with a metal detector to ensure that you're not armed. (I enjoyed the style and pacing of this article: fairly entertaining.)
  - BlackDeath3 13y ago
    And if you are (legally) armed?
    - jmccree 13y ago
      You'd likely have to leave or face a felony with 10 years prison sentence. (Per H.R. 347, it's 10 years for entering a secret service permanent or temporary restricted area without permission with a firearm.)
      - BlackDeath3 13y ago
        So, if I was there before anybody who had anything to do with the President showed up, and I had a legal firearm on me, and SS shows up and decides that I'm suddenly in a restricted area, I'm immediately a felon? Am I missing something here?
        mpyne 13y ago
        They would kick you out before they setup the restricted area, so you wouldn't be a felon. You just wouldn't be armed near the POTUS either.
bqpro1 13y ago
I case of such companies like Facebook there is no point to say that they are dead. In fact there are 2 Facebooks: Facebook as a company and FACEBOOK as a presence in modern culture. The second is much more important, then the first one. For many people FACEBOOK is the way they act on the web and communicate with others. Even if Facebook is not growing any more (or even shrinking) it still the only medium that has a digital picture of relations between 1 billion people and that makes is something more then just a company. Of course if I were 16 now, I would not be on Facebook, because in this age you have a lot of things that you wish to keep in secret. But still Facebook is one of first app we install on a new mobile device. I do not see any comparison between Fb and Microsoft or Fb and Apple. Facebook do not produce any goods etc. It just mapping relations and other features of people into digital data.
- TarpitCarnivore 13y ago
  >Of course if I were 16 now, I would not be on Facebook, because in this age you have a lot of things that you wish to keep in secret. Someone on here the other day made a comment about the whole teenager thing and it was a pretty good one. It was to the affect of: teenagers don't need to be on Facebook yet because they still see all their friends and social circles, that becomes more difficult to manage you as move away for college. So perhaps that's when they may turn to Facebook when they need a more centralized way to do chat, pictures, statuses, etc.
  - bqpro1 13y ago
    Or maybe in fact something completely opposite is the case: relations between teenagers’ social circles are so difficult to map (there is so plenty of inclusions, exclusion, intersections and other Boolean staff) that Facebook is not able to manage it ;-)
  - rzt 13y ago
    I have a 16 year old sister. She was on Facebook and then deleted her profile. She deleted her profile at about the same time she went from being semi-awkward early teenager still shaking off her Russian accent (we adopted her) and became one of (what I am guessing based on her friends and the things she does) the coolest kids in her school. She is probably doing lots of things that I don't want to know about. That's cool and Facebook gets in the way of doing that.
k-mcgrady 13y ago
Even Zuckerberg doesn't care if Facebook is 'uncool': “Maybe electricity was cool when it first came out, but pretty quickly people stopped talking about it because it’s not the new thing, the real question you want to track at that point is are fewer people turning on their lights because it’s less cool?”
- jdimov 13y ago
  Zuck's question is good, but I'm afraid his answer isn't.
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  That strikes me as hybris. Facebook is not some kind of radical new discovery, it's not even a radical new invention. That's like pretending Elvis Presley or The Beatles invented music because they had a huge market share.
  - k-mcgrady 13y ago
    The point is that Facebook has become or is becoming a utility. People don't get excited about email anymore or think it's cool but they use it daily. Facebook is no longer this cool new site with interesting new features - it's an easy way for people to message and share photos.
    - PavlovsCat 13y ago
      Like many, many sites with those features before and after it. I still think adoption is the only thing "special" about it.
- vidarh 13y ago
  But Facebook is not electricity. At best they're a type of light source. The alternative is to Facebook is not living in the dark, but switching to another type of light bulb. It might take some time before something comes along you like well enough (heavens knows finding a LED bulb I don't hate have taken a few attempts, as the 10 different makes of LED bulbs presently in my living room proves), but the change from one type of electrical bulb to another is a whole lot less problematic than going back to candles. The threshold is far lower. For starters, the population in general is vastly more internet savvy. And contenders for all or part of their space is shooting up all over the place. And parts of their audience wants to be different and stand out from their parents or others.
triangleman 13y ago
>According to White House background, provided to me after he left, they met to discuss how to get more 18-34 year-olds to sign up for the coverage under the Affordable Care Act. (The law depends on 18-34 year-olds signing up for healthcare.) Doesn't the law _compel_ 18-34 year-olds to sign up for health insurance?
- smacktoward 13y ago
  No, it requires them to pay a fine if they don't have health insurance (see https://www.healthcare.gov/what-if-someone-doesnt-have-health-coverage-in-2014/ https://www.healthcare.gov/what-if-someone-doesnt-have-healt...). The amount of the fine is fairly modest compared to the cost of most health insurance plans, though, so the worry is that 18-34s will choose to just pay the fine instead of joining the insurance risk pool.
  - jmccree 13y ago
    Not a fine of course, but a "tax". A fine would be unconstitutional. My state rejected expanded medicaid, which leaves anyone in that gap between ~$2k and ~$11k with the option of paying the penalty tax or just stop working. There's a lot of the 18-30 year olds in that income bracket here.
    - chrisro 13y ago
      There are a whole host of exemptions from the tax, including: "You were determined ineligible for Medicaid because your state didn’t expand eligibility for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act." https://www.healthcare.gov/exemptions/ https://www.healthcare.gov/exemptions/
      - jmccree 13y ago
        Thanks for that! I was unaware of that exemption, apparently that was added in Jun 13. It doesn't seem to be a widely published exemption.
ck2 13y ago
Facebook is dying? Best news I've heard this year so far. Is having your own website cool again yet? Wake me up when we're there.
- smackfu 13y ago
  > Is having your own website cool again yet? Wake me up when we're there. Yes, it's cool, but the only way to get people to visit it are to post it to Twitter, Facebook, Hacker News, Reddit, etc.
  - shiftpgdn 13y ago
    Let's bring back web rings.
    - JonnieCache 13y ago
      We should totally do that! Can we snazzify them with some kind of javascript gimmickry please? Maybe some kind of websockets-based visualisation of other users whizzing round the ring?
    - JTon 13y ago
      Oh the nostalgia. My experience with web rings is most of the sites in them are turds. Maybe Google could build a machine learned web ring where you can shuffle through similar sites.
  - imsky 13y ago
    In the old days people had huge lists of links to friendly sites. That was social networking without the middleman.
wambotron 13y ago
I always see the "everyone else uses it so I have to" argument when it comes to facebook. I don't use FB at all, and neither do my core group of friends. None of us have run into any issues with this. Want to hang out? Call, email, text. Want to have a get-together? You need to notify me way in advance anyway, and I'll add it to my own calendar. The whole thing just seems to me that people LOVE facebook-stalking other people, and THAT is why they use it. So many people I work with check facebook for people before interviews or even just meeting a new person. It's creepy. I don't care what someone puts on their facebook profile. I don't want to or need to know.
shmerl 13y ago
Facebook was never cool. As well as any other centralized social network.
poopsintub 13y ago
Facebook's dead based on half a conversation someone might have heard. Keep the journalistic gold coming this way, The Atlantic.
Gaurav322 13y ago
Robinson Meyer, I think that may be he talked about Facebook?? But, as you said in your blog-post that you missed out so many things due to noise and you clearly listened only two words "Instagram" and "Snapchat" from the president of USA... So, all are you doing is just guessing that If he doesn't talk or you don't listen about Facebook from his mouth, then Facebook sucks... That's not cool... man
hawkharris 13y ago
While I want them to be true, the claims that Facebook is dying don't seem to be supported by data. Facebook's recent engagement report (also posted on HN) showed that the percentage of users 25-31 has grown by 32%. The percentage of people 35-51 grew by 41%. And the percentage of those over 55 grew by 88%. What other commenters probably mean to say is that Facebook is dying among teenagers. Even so, the website still has over 13 million teen users. And the users in the older groups are arguably more valuable from a financial standpoint because they have direct access to more disposable income. Maybe you're skeptical of the report because Facebook helped generate it. Okay, I can understand that. But even if the numbers have been inflated to benefit Facebook's platform, I think you'll be hard-pressed to find any legitimate, large-scale study that doesn't show significant growth in the 25+ demographic. Uncool? I think so, and a relatively small demographic of young people agrees with me. Dying? Definitely not. http://istrategylabs.com/2014/01/3-million-teens-leave-facebook-in-3-years-the-2014-facebook-demographic-report/ http://istrategylabs.com/2014/01/3-million-teens-leave-faceb...
- vidarh 13y ago
  The problem is that their potential base of new users is rapidly diminishing, while they've seemingly started burning the younger end. They may very well be a very long way from irrelevance, but teens grow up. If the teens who are now starting to turn away from Facebook keep disliking it also when it becomes socially possible for them to totally ignore it, and younger kids does not take it up as much, then that will have ripple effects also amongst older users (e.g. my mother uses Facebook mostly to keep up with pictures of grandchildren and the like). And these things can turn very quickly. I remember more social networks that used to be cool than I care for (anyone remember sixdegrees.com from 1997?)
  - waterlesscloud 13y ago
    It's unknown, though, if the teens won't sign up when they grow up to an age where Facebook is less of a social negative for them.
r0h1n 13y ago
>> Facebook is so uncool even the president of the United States knows it. I'm trying to parse the actual meaning of this editorialized headline (the actual headline is "What Happens When the President Sits Down Next to You at a Cafe"). Does this equate the President of the United States to being one of the least clued-in/laggard Internet users? Otherwise what does "even the President of the US" mean?
- mwill 13y ago
  To be fair to the headline, that line is a direct quote from the article. It also seems to be the section most relevant to HN. I feel like a post that only contained the text under the 'Failure' subheading, with a little intro would have made it to the top of HN as well. As for what "even the President of the US" means, to me there's this image of big organizations (governments included) the world over being clunky and clueless when it comes to social media and the internet, not being able to innovate or adapt new methods of interaction, or even understand what the public is doing, and just generally being one or two steps behind the young internet savvy crowd. It may not be true, especially for individuals within the organization, but it's still certainly the expectation these days.
wtvanhest 13y ago
Mark my words. There is a place I'm the market for an event manager and digital rollidex to replace Facebook for adults. I don't know how someone will get people to use it, but there is absolutely a place for it. I would leave Facebook immediately if I wasn't going to lose all my contacts.
deleted 13y ago
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- billyhoffman 13y ago
  I can understand the importance of keeping up with people, but I think Facebook lets you do it at such scale that it becomes meaningless. I care what's going on in the life of the best man at my wedding. I care less what's going on in the life of my lab partner in chemistry all those years ago. Facebook makes it trivial to track both which from a technical side is pretty amazing. However I have limited attention and tracking the lives of that many people is just not sustainable. About a year ago, I deleted every "friend" I had not physically seen and spent time with in the last 18 months. This might not work for everyone, but for me it was incredibly refreshing. Fewer, higher quality relationships was far better. (and yes, I took this to the logical conclusion and just stopped using Facebook. I have not missed it)
jokoon 13y ago
I think facebook failed to diversify itself. It stagnated. No local events, no job searching, no tools or ways to search for new people to meet like meetup, no true dating functionality (and god knows there would be a lot of potential). To make things worse, there were many stories that tainted facebook reputations: the ad system, the privacy settings, the first suspicions of CIA links, and then the Snowden leaks. It's no surprise. I'm still amazed there are people actually complaining about google+ and making fun of it. Zuckerberg is not even leading it like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Google founders would. Facebook is just a startup success story, but that ends here. It makes money, people use it like an easy-to-use internet forum and chat applications, but it's as much social as everything else that existed before it. It's just user friendly, and money making.
- randomdata 13y ago
  > No local events While that may have never been an explicit feature, I remember the events interface (circa the 2008 timeframe, if I recall correctly) doing a fairly good job of allowing you to find local events. It was my goto place to discover things to do for a while. Then they changed the behaviour, making them virtually impossible to find unless your friends were invited.
mberning 13y ago
Am I the only person over 30 that uses Facebook, doesn't think it sucks, and doesn't think it is dying? In fact, for my purposes, I think it is a great experience. Let me explain. I am quite involved in the automotive community. In the last year or two it seems like almost every manufacturer, tuning shop, engineering shop etc. has set up a GOOD Facebook page and starting posting tons of cool and relevant stuff every day. News, project updates, pictures of upcoming work, event info and pictures... I feel as if life could not be better right now for the person that wants to get plugged in to the automotive scene. Log in to Facebook, find the page for your favorite manufacturer or shop and like it, add all your car buddies as friends, ignore/unfollow the shit you don't like, get invited to some private groups by your friends, etc. I don't know, seems like for me there are quite a lot of people using Facebook that actually like how it works and what it enables.
- tim333 13y ago
  I'm well over 30 and I like facebook and have it on most of the time. I think it's mostly the teenagers who are giving up.
  - bmj 13y ago
    Some may say there is some correlation between these two things. [NB: I am not a Facebook user, and am well over 30. I don't consume much social media.]
- justinhj 13y ago
  I'm over 40 and quite like Facebook. Everyone I know is on there from my boss to my grandmother, and I hear that in mind when I post. It's the main channel with which I discover what my family are up to, since I have emigrated. That said I can see why young people would hate it.
- mattdeboard 13y ago
  The fact that people over 30 find Facebook cool is much of the reason why younger people don't find it cool.
sdfjkl 13y ago
> His hands grasp mine. They feel like the rough surface of your favorite baseball. What's with this president cult. He's just another human being.
- wmeredith 13y ago
  Yeah, that solicited a WTF in my head when I read it.
- logfromblammo 13y ago
  "And when I licked those hands, they tasted like sweet apples and flaky pastry, just the way Mom used to make her pies." I can't stand seeing the political shams where the VIP comes in and pretends to be an ordinary person talking to other ordinary people. Of course, there is also that schadenfreude when they utterly fail to pull it off. But I don't blame the politician; that's just what they're made to do: I blame the journalist. Rather than summarize the meaningless show of a politician gladhanding and baby-kissing his way through an audience, his hands felt like a baseball--your favorite baseball, because a true American would own several. Really? Are you sure it wasn't more like the soft leather from well-worn bootstraps, lightly marked by salt stains acquired while walking the wintry streets of Chicago's south side? Ridiculous. It's just as bad as Bush Jr. trying to pull the Texas good ol' boy schtick and the media egging him on. I want my watchdog back, even if he's jingo yellow, not a toothless yappy lapdog.
yaph 13y ago
I suspect Mr. Obama knows more than you like about Faceboook et al.
desmondrd 13y ago
HN used to be full of things that mattered. This belongs on Reddit.com.
- noonespecial 13y ago
  The top story right now is "Decide which init system to default to in Debian". This doesn't matter much to an awful lot of people, but matters a lot to folks around here. I'd say we're not so bad off yet... HN used to be more full of things that mattered to us. I agree that I used to go to reddit to look for stories like this. But the us here has changed some over the years. Just upvote the stories you like and flag the worst of it and take it in stride. The whole thing is just a great big Ouija board of geek culture.
puranjay 13y ago
When you talk about Facebook dying, do remember that Facebook owns Instagram where all the cool kids hangout these days.
farinasa 13y ago
Is it really surprising that the guy with access to all internet traffic has knowledge about internet traffic?
chainlink 13y ago
Lotus Notes. It Still Sucks http://codinghorror.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a85dcdae970b0128776fca5d970c-pi http://codinghorror.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a85dcdae970b0128776...
canvia 13y ago
I think this is in part due to people realizing how much data FB is keeping on them, and then selling. Educated people don't want to be a commodity. Older people are slower to learn/change, but young people are already done with FB. FB is bloated and appeals to the lowest common denominator. They created a set of easy tools that make the internet more accessible to people that are not technologically knowledgeable. Skype and photobucket and twitter are far too complicated for someone who thinks Outlook is email and Yahoo is the internet. Once people master how to use the tools on FB many will realize that there are better alternatives, some that aren't going to track them all across the internet. However, there is no single alternative that aggregates these tools in a better fashion. I was just writing a proposal last night for a new social site to replace FB/g+ that is freemium subscription based with a key selling point that there is no tracking, no ads, and a high level of privacy. It would have a base set of features and that's it. No bloat. No expansion. Just sharing with friends. It doesn't need to be a billion dollar company. Profit margins don't have to be huge. It just needs to be profitable and deliver a needed service to the niche of people that care about privacy. The rest will follow with network effects. If the tool is effective people will use it forever even without feature creep, i.e. usenet, IRC, HN
the_watcher 13y ago
The "Facebook is uncool and dying" story trend is getting so old. It's not dying. The only metric that anyone ever cites is that young teens aren't signing up as often anymore, but they don't mention that user growth on Facebook is still strong, or that most of those young teens will sign up once they hit an age where its utility for them is higher (so an age where they don't interact with 90% of their social circle every day). They are still rolling out really cool new features (Graph search, user-specific trending topics). They are way ahead of the game in mobile (already moving to having multiple specialized apps for different functionalities that deeplink to each other, rather than a single app that tries to pack all of the desktop functionality into it). Facebook is not dead, dying, or sick. It's in fantastic shape.
gress 13y ago
Another attack piece against Facebook. I wonder who is paying for the current media onslaught?
KVFinn 13y ago
>None of this kept me from experiencing immediate, full-on, feverish anxiety. >And then—for the first time in nearly an hour—I could work. I found that I was so accustomed to his voice, how he holds his body, his aura, that ignoring him in person is as easy as ignoring a TV. Easier, in fact. He stops being the president and starts being That Guy Who You See In Tweets, That Guy Who Gives Speeches, That Guy. Interesting how your mind can put the president into the same bucket as leaving the news on in the background.
unethical_ban 13y ago
Meta-comment: I read this article with the real title on HN, and it mentioned almost nothing about Facebook. I assume the mods changed the title, which steered the early conversation about the piece. Therefore, due to "title activism" taken too long after the post, I was thoroughly confused for a while.

242 points by pliptvo 13y ago

> "Facebook is so uncool even the president of the United States knows it." Shouldn't he know better than anyone, since his job depends so heavily on social media?

julien_c 13y ago

Funny piece.

rwmj 13y ago

Is it supposed to be satire? Anyway, I don't think Facebook can be dead without an obvious challenger. There's presumably still a need for people to chat with each other in the way that Facebook does. (Also can't believe I'm defending Facebook here ...)

arethuza 13y ago
Aren't dead/alive and cool/uncool orthogonal? e.g. Microsoft is pretty much alive even though it is uncool. Quick thought: couldn't we replace Gartner's quadrant thing with this? I would estimate that for Facebook dAlive/dt > 0 and dCool/dt < 0 Edit: I need to make a list of which companies fall into each Quadrant - I initially thought that nobody was "cool & dead" and, after thinking about it for a bit, realised that a lot of companies fall into this area: - Symbolics - SGI - Cray - Sun (undead as part of the seriously uncool Oracle) - Harlequin (Lisp/PostScript vendor)
- annnnd 13y ago
  Interesting poing - but in case of FB one could argue that staying alive depends on being cool.
  - arethuza 13y ago
    I think it was important initially, but I think they might have outgrown that and become a part of standard infrastructure - the social dial tone.
nettletea 13y ago
It's easy to bemoan the incumbent, but it's not easy to get rid of them. Remember Myspace, it was huge. A no-frills more personal alternative to it was born in Facebook. They are different products granted. But the early adopters chose to champion Facebook. Just like Google was the new cool Yahoo. Later Facebook grew into the huge monster that it is. I have political reservations and worries about a silo like Facebook, but I have to respect it being a work of epic proportions. A new kid on the block might be able to quickly grab the lime-light if they play their cards right, but there's the worry that they'll become the future uncool incumbent. Some companies amazingly hang in there as the competition just isn't strong enough, good enough or wealthy enough to remove them. As others have said a good product doesn't have to be cool. My bread board is brilliant, but it's not cool. The worry with I'd have with a well established web app, is that it might become a bloated behemoth. People are happy to moan about Facebook right now, currently I don't really see a good alternative, but where there's a will there's a way.

wanda 13y ago

The parts the author did not hear: We're watching all FB activity and we're stumped What social networks should the NSA target? How can the NSA deal with the impermanence of snapchat content? "They" being the 18-35s, prime hacker demographic, main target of surveillance.

mjolk 13y ago
Yes, because that can be the only subtext. Because the President can only be concerned with the NSA, bitcoin, and tor. It's not like he's a person or father that could be having a conversation about social network applications like a normal person.
- wanda 13y ago
  Yes, because we can't make jokes on HN. Because HN is all business, in-depth analysis, serious adult talk. It's not like the users are people, even professionals off-the-clock, that could be enjoying (or at least successfully identifying) a joke together like normal people.
  - skwirl 13y ago
    The joke wasn't funny. When something isn't funny people can't tell if it is a joke or not.
  - mjolk 13y ago
    The "joke" is so tired that is just registers as more complaining that doesn't add to the health of discussion.
tomaskafka 13y ago
> How can the NSA deal with the impermanence of snapchat content? You just order them to make a backdoor they can't talk about and archive it yourself, duh. Next!

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

dredmorbius 13y ago

The question's been asked "can a company die without an obvious challenger?" Yes, it can. A company, platform, or technology can "die" in the sense that it loses the initiative, and more importantly, the ability to drive an industry and/or conversation, even though it hasn't yet died. Apple was "dead" through most of the 1990s. It simply didn't matter, outside of the graphics and design areas, and for a very small cadre of fervent fans. The turnaround shocked me. IBM very nearly died in the early 1990s, as its place as the center of the business computing world was shaken by anti-trust actions, Microsoft, and the upsurge in Unix vendors. The company's never fully regained its former footing, though it did recover largely. Microsoft has been in the process of dying for most of the past decade. A highly symbolic moment for me was when The Economist newspaper ran a cover showing the leaders in tech: Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Microsoft wasn't even mentioned (it reminds me of an earlier revealing moment when the CEO of Visa International named the company's biggest rivals: MasterCard, AmEx, and Microsoft -- I guess it didn't pay to Discover...). Sun Microsystems was fingered for the walking dead as Linux became ascendant, with its acquisition by Oracle (a panic response of both companies, coming at least five years too late to do either any good) coming long after it was obvious the company had not only staggered but was mortally wounded. One thing to realize is that a fading icon is often not replaced by a direct competitor, but by one which addresses short Facebook has dominated Silicon Valley for the past 5 years, stealing initiative from Google (who seems to be somewhat winning it back). Part of the situation is that "traditional" social networking is becoming passe, in part because it's become too Byzantine, and too intrusive. Social networks -- real social networks, not the online instantiations of them -- work best when the groups are relatively small, Dunbar's number is respected, and there's a level of insularity around any given group. TheFacebook at Harvard had those features. Facebook, Inc., 1 billion served, doesn't, and cannot. Another secret is that one of the secret sauces of social is photo sharing (still hard if you don't have your own dedicated server), and that services are sprouting up to offer this (Imgur, Snapchat, etc.), which is essentially disrupting the former Social glue much the way Craigslist gutted classified newspaper advertising in the late 1990s. I'd like to think that the constant drumbeat of surveillance state revelations we can thank heros and patriots Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, and Glen Greenwald for are having an effect, though I think that may be giving the general public a bit too much credit. Not totally sure of that though.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

vincie 13y ago

Facebook has always been uncool. The uncool people are just saying this now to sound cool.

jgreen10 13y ago

Things that were once cool either fade or become normal. Facebook has become normal.

zaidf 13y ago

This is actually a great milestone. It is hard to build a sustainable billion dollar business on "being cool" because any minute society might decide you're no longer cool and move on to the next shiny object. Just ask myspace. Facebook isn't a billion dollar business because it is the new shiny object on the block. it is used because it delivers good old value of helping you stay in touch with your friends.

wavefunction 13y ago
>>Facebook isn't a billion dollar business because it is the new shiny object on the block. it is used because it delivers good old value of helping you stay in touch with your friends. Not much of a defensible competitive advantage imo.

bloat 13y ago

Why should it be cool? Why can't it just be useful? There are many, many uncool people in the world, or people who couldn't care less what is cool, and who just want to keep in touch with some mates, or find out when the next meeting of their local cycling club is, or find out what was played on the most recent podcast they listened to, or, or, or, a hundred other uses.

basicallydan 13y ago
Good point. The truth is, it's fun for journalists and, well, the rest of us, to point out that Facebook isn't cool. Maybe you don't find it fun, and maybe some others do. It's the same reason "hipsters" feel pride for finding the latest band cool before anybody else does - it's just some vague social currency. By pointing out that something which was once cool is no longer cool, you are distancing yourself from it and gaining some of that currency, thus making yourself cooler. So, that's why it should be cool. To help it's users be cool. I'm not saying this is in any way a useful point of view to take, or that it in any way affects how useful Facebook is, but I'm fairly sure that this is what is going on. Plain old-fashioned shallow trend-setting and trend-following. Playground economics.

SandB0x 13y ago

I swear Facebook is slowly turning into Lotus Notes. It's got the the little messenger panel on the right. It's got the clunky mail client, it's got the calendar and you can invite people to a meeting/party. You have to use it because everyone else uses it and everyone else uses it because it's been around for years. It's not fun or simple to use any more and you have to be on your guard about what you share and who might see it. It's not really surprising that teenagers aren't into it.

j45 13y ago
I'm not a FB fan, nor have I developed Notes apps in a good 8+ years, but Facebook might be like notes in another way: Both seem to do what they do, in their time, better than anything else out there. When I saw Notes being mentioned, flashbacks of LotusScript, NotesSQL and came, especially it's non-relational DB (nosql a decade earlier than the rage it became later). Notes incredibly clunky mail and document system did a few things well before anything else -- great two way replication of data for online and offline work. Domino took Notes apps and rendered them for the web, allowing complex web apps to be built in a time where there was little like it. I didn't hesitate to leave Notes, but it wasn't for lack of respect, it was just one of the half dozen or so stacks I worked in at the time. Every line of code we write will be crap in 5 years. Every stack we use will be crap in 5 years. Everything's new, but everything's the same too.
Tloewald 13y ago
It's not lotus notes until they seriously screw up the ui. It's actually almost inconceivable that facebook's ui could become that screwed up, regardless of how much you despise facebook.
- aestra 13y ago
  It isn't like Facebook doesn't "revamp" the UI all the time and confuse everyone while making it a worse experience. I can see it getting there eventually. Facebook used to be rather simple, now it is a convoluted mess. Not only is it a convoluted mess, but ever different "version" of it is different. The mobile app is much different from m.facebook.com which is much different from facebook.com and the iOS app is probably different too. Remember lite.facebook.com? I MISS IT SO MUCH!! :( Oh yeah sometimes the picture viewing interface is different depending on what you clicked on. Ever try to find a video someone uploaded? Go ahead. It's under Photos > [Name's] Photo's > Videos. Yeah... What's with all the needless JavaScript? And more importantly, all the JavaScript ERRORS?

betawolf33 13y ago

"one of our agents will be coming around to swipe you" <- I honestly don't know what this means.

vincie 13y ago
They need to scan the NFR chip embedded in the back of your skull to ID you.
leephillips 13y ago
It means a secret service agent will feel you up with a metal detector to ensure that you're not armed. (I enjoyed the style and pacing of this article: fairly entertaining.)
- BlackDeath3 13y ago
  And if you are (legally) armed?
  - jmccree 13y ago
    You'd likely have to leave or face a felony with 10 years prison sentence. (Per H.R. 347, it's 10 years for entering a secret service permanent or temporary restricted area without permission with a firearm.)
    - BlackDeath3 13y ago
      So, if I was there before anybody who had anything to do with the President showed up, and I had a legal firearm on me, and SS shows up and decides that I'm suddenly in a restricted area, I'm immediately a felon? Am I missing something here?
      - mpyne 13y ago
        They would kick you out before they setup the restricted area, so you wouldn't be a felon. You just wouldn't be armed near the POTUS either.

bqpro1 13y ago

I case of such companies like Facebook there is no point to say that they are dead. In fact there are 2 Facebooks: Facebook as a company and FACEBOOK as a presence in modern culture. The second is much more important, then the first one. For many people FACEBOOK is the way they act on the web and communicate with others. Even if Facebook is not growing any more (or even shrinking) it still the only medium that has a digital picture of relations between 1 billion people and that makes is something more then just a company. Of course if I were 16 now, I would not be on Facebook, because in this age you have a lot of things that you wish to keep in secret. But still Facebook is one of first app we install on a new mobile device. I do not see any comparison between Fb and Microsoft or Fb and Apple. Facebook do not produce any goods etc. It just mapping relations and other features of people into digital data.

TarpitCarnivore 13y ago
>Of course if I were 16 now, I would not be on Facebook, because in this age you have a lot of things that you wish to keep in secret. Someone on here the other day made a comment about the whole teenager thing and it was a pretty good one. It was to the affect of: teenagers don't need to be on Facebook yet because they still see all their friends and social circles, that becomes more difficult to manage you as move away for college. So perhaps that's when they may turn to Facebook when they need a more centralized way to do chat, pictures, statuses, etc.
- bqpro1 13y ago
  Or maybe in fact something completely opposite is the case: relations between teenagers’ social circles are so difficult to map (there is so plenty of inclusions, exclusion, intersections and other Boolean staff) that Facebook is not able to manage it ;-)
- rzt 13y ago
  I have a 16 year old sister. She was on Facebook and then deleted her profile. She deleted her profile at about the same time she went from being semi-awkward early teenager still shaking off her Russian accent (we adopted her) and became one of (what I am guessing based on her friends and the things she does) the coolest kids in her school. She is probably doing lots of things that I don't want to know about. That's cool and Facebook gets in the way of doing that.

k-mcgrady 13y ago

Even Zuckerberg doesn't care if Facebook is 'uncool': “Maybe electricity was cool when it first came out, but pretty quickly people stopped talking about it because it’s not the new thing, the real question you want to track at that point is are fewer people turning on their lights because it’s less cool?”

jdimov 13y ago
Zuck's question is good, but I'm afraid his answer isn't.
PavlovsCat 13y ago
That strikes me as hybris. Facebook is not some kind of radical new discovery, it's not even a radical new invention. That's like pretending Elvis Presley or The Beatles invented music because they had a huge market share.
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  The point is that Facebook has become or is becoming a utility. People don't get excited about email anymore or think it's cool but they use it daily. Facebook is no longer this cool new site with interesting new features - it's an easy way for people to message and share photos.
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    Like many, many sites with those features before and after it. I still think adoption is the only thing "special" about it.
vidarh 13y ago
But Facebook is not electricity. At best they're a type of light source. The alternative is to Facebook is not living in the dark, but switching to another type of light bulb. It might take some time before something comes along you like well enough (heavens knows finding a LED bulb I don't hate have taken a few attempts, as the 10 different makes of LED bulbs presently in my living room proves), but the change from one type of electrical bulb to another is a whole lot less problematic than going back to candles. The threshold is far lower. For starters, the population in general is vastly more internet savvy. And contenders for all or part of their space is shooting up all over the place. And parts of their audience wants to be different and stand out from their parents or others.

triangleman 13y ago

>According to White House background, provided to me after he left, they met to discuss how to get more 18-34 year-olds to sign up for the coverage under the Affordable Care Act. (The law depends on 18-34 year-olds signing up for healthcare.) Doesn't the law _compel_ 18-34 year-olds to sign up for health insurance?

smacktoward 13y ago
No, it requires them to pay a fine if they don't have health insurance (see https://www.healthcare.gov/what-if-someone-doesnt-have-health-coverage-in-2014/ https://www.healthcare.gov/what-if-someone-doesnt-have-healt...). The amount of the fine is fairly modest compared to the cost of most health insurance plans, though, so the worry is that 18-34s will choose to just pay the fine instead of joining the insurance risk pool.
- jmccree 13y ago
  Not a fine of course, but a "tax". A fine would be unconstitutional. My state rejected expanded medicaid, which leaves anyone in that gap between ~$2k and ~$11k with the option of paying the penalty tax or just stop working. There's a lot of the 18-30 year olds in that income bracket here.
  - chrisro 13y ago
    There are a whole host of exemptions from the tax, including: "You were determined ineligible for Medicaid because your state didn’t expand eligibility for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act." https://www.healthcare.gov/exemptions/ https://www.healthcare.gov/exemptions/
    - jmccree 13y ago
      Thanks for that! I was unaware of that exemption, apparently that was added in Jun 13. It doesn't seem to be a widely published exemption.

ck2 13y ago

Facebook is dying? Best news I've heard this year so far. Is having your own website cool again yet? Wake me up when we're there.

smackfu 13y ago
> Is having your own website cool again yet? Wake me up when we're there. Yes, it's cool, but the only way to get people to visit it are to post it to Twitter, Facebook, Hacker News, Reddit, etc.
- shiftpgdn 13y ago
  Let's bring back web rings.
  - JonnieCache 13y ago
    We should totally do that! Can we snazzify them with some kind of javascript gimmickry please? Maybe some kind of websockets-based visualisation of other users whizzing round the ring?
  - JTon 13y ago
    Oh the nostalgia. My experience with web rings is most of the sites in them are turds. Maybe Google could build a machine learned web ring where you can shuffle through similar sites.
- imsky 13y ago
  In the old days people had huge lists of links to friendly sites. That was social networking without the middleman.

wambotron 13y ago

I always see the "everyone else uses it so I have to" argument when it comes to facebook. I don't use FB at all, and neither do my core group of friends. None of us have run into any issues with this. Want to hang out? Call, email, text. Want to have a get-together? You need to notify me way in advance anyway, and I'll add it to my own calendar. The whole thing just seems to me that people LOVE facebook-stalking other people, and THAT is why they use it. So many people I work with check facebook for people before interviews or even just meeting a new person. It's creepy. I don't care what someone puts on their facebook profile. I don't want to or need to know.

shmerl 13y ago

Facebook was never cool. As well as any other centralized social network.

poopsintub 13y ago

Facebook's dead based on half a conversation someone might have heard. Keep the journalistic gold coming this way, The Atlantic.

Gaurav322 13y ago

Robinson Meyer, I think that may be he talked about Facebook?? But, as you said in your blog-post that you missed out so many things due to noise and you clearly listened only two words "Instagram" and "Snapchat" from the president of USA... So, all are you doing is just guessing that If he doesn't talk or you don't listen about Facebook from his mouth, then Facebook sucks... That's not cool... man

hawkharris 13y ago

While I want them to be true, the claims that Facebook is dying don't seem to be supported by data. Facebook's recent engagement report (also posted on HN) showed that the percentage of users 25-31 has grown by 32%. The percentage of people 35-51 grew by 41%. And the percentage of those over 55 grew by 88%. What other commenters probably mean to say is that Facebook is dying among teenagers. Even so, the website still has over 13 million teen users. And the users in the older groups are arguably more valuable from a financial standpoint because they have direct access to more disposable income. Maybe you're skeptical of the report because Facebook helped generate it. Okay, I can understand that. But even if the numbers have been inflated to benefit Facebook's platform, I think you'll be hard-pressed to find any legitimate, large-scale study that doesn't show significant growth in the 25+ demographic. Uncool? I think so, and a relatively small demographic of young people agrees with me. Dying? Definitely not. http://istrategylabs.com/2014/01/3-million-teens-leave-facebook-in-3-years-the-2014-facebook-demographic-report/ http://istrategylabs.com/2014/01/3-million-teens-leave-faceb...

vidarh 13y ago
The problem is that their potential base of new users is rapidly diminishing, while they've seemingly started burning the younger end. They may very well be a very long way from irrelevance, but teens grow up. If the teens who are now starting to turn away from Facebook keep disliking it also when it becomes socially possible for them to totally ignore it, and younger kids does not take it up as much, then that will have ripple effects also amongst older users (e.g. my mother uses Facebook mostly to keep up with pictures of grandchildren and the like). And these things can turn very quickly. I remember more social networks that used to be cool than I care for (anyone remember sixdegrees.com from 1997?)
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
  It's unknown, though, if the teens won't sign up when they grow up to an age where Facebook is less of a social negative for them.

r0h1n 13y ago

>> Facebook is so uncool even the president of the United States knows it. I'm trying to parse the actual meaning of this editorialized headline (the actual headline is "What Happens When the President Sits Down Next to You at a Cafe"). Does this equate the President of the United States to being one of the least clued-in/laggard Internet users? Otherwise what does "even the President of the US" mean?

mwill 13y ago
To be fair to the headline, that line is a direct quote from the article. It also seems to be the section most relevant to HN. I feel like a post that only contained the text under the 'Failure' subheading, with a little intro would have made it to the top of HN as well. As for what "even the President of the US" means, to me there's this image of big organizations (governments included) the world over being clunky and clueless when it comes to social media and the internet, not being able to innovate or adapt new methods of interaction, or even understand what the public is doing, and just generally being one or two steps behind the young internet savvy crowd. It may not be true, especially for individuals within the organization, but it's still certainly the expectation these days.

wtvanhest 13y ago

Mark my words. There is a place I'm the market for an event manager and digital rollidex to replace Facebook for adults. I don't know how someone will get people to use it, but there is absolutely a place for it. I would leave Facebook immediately if I wasn't going to lose all my contacts.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

billyhoffman 13y ago
I can understand the importance of keeping up with people, but I think Facebook lets you do it at such scale that it becomes meaningless. I care what's going on in the life of the best man at my wedding. I care less what's going on in the life of my lab partner in chemistry all those years ago. Facebook makes it trivial to track both which from a technical side is pretty amazing. However I have limited attention and tracking the lives of that many people is just not sustainable. About a year ago, I deleted every "friend" I had not physically seen and spent time with in the last 18 months. This might not work for everyone, but for me it was incredibly refreshing. Fewer, higher quality relationships was far better. (and yes, I took this to the logical conclusion and just stopped using Facebook. I have not missed it)

jokoon 13y ago

I think facebook failed to diversify itself. It stagnated. No local events, no job searching, no tools or ways to search for new people to meet like meetup, no true dating functionality (and god knows there would be a lot of potential). To make things worse, there were many stories that tainted facebook reputations: the ad system, the privacy settings, the first suspicions of CIA links, and then the Snowden leaks. It's no surprise. I'm still amazed there are people actually complaining about google+ and making fun of it. Zuckerberg is not even leading it like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Google founders would. Facebook is just a startup success story, but that ends here. It makes money, people use it like an easy-to-use internet forum and chat applications, but it's as much social as everything else that existed before it. It's just user friendly, and money making.

randomdata 13y ago
> No local events While that may have never been an explicit feature, I remember the events interface (circa the 2008 timeframe, if I recall correctly) doing a fairly good job of allowing you to find local events. It was my goto place to discover things to do for a while. Then they changed the behaviour, making them virtually impossible to find unless your friends were invited.

mberning 13y ago

Am I the only person over 30 that uses Facebook, doesn't think it sucks, and doesn't think it is dying? In fact, for my purposes, I think it is a great experience. Let me explain. I am quite involved in the automotive community. In the last year or two it seems like almost every manufacturer, tuning shop, engineering shop etc. has set up a GOOD Facebook page and starting posting tons of cool and relevant stuff every day. News, project updates, pictures of upcoming work, event info and pictures... I feel as if life could not be better right now for the person that wants to get plugged in to the automotive scene. Log in to Facebook, find the page for your favorite manufacturer or shop and like it, add all your car buddies as friends, ignore/unfollow the shit you don't like, get invited to some private groups by your friends, etc. I don't know, seems like for me there are quite a lot of people using Facebook that actually like how it works and what it enables.

tim333 13y ago
I'm well over 30 and I like facebook and have it on most of the time. I think it's mostly the teenagers who are giving up.
- bmj 13y ago
  Some may say there is some correlation between these two things. [NB: I am not a Facebook user, and am well over 30. I don't consume much social media.]
justinhj 13y ago
I'm over 40 and quite like Facebook. Everyone I know is on there from my boss to my grandmother, and I hear that in mind when I post. It's the main channel with which I discover what my family are up to, since I have emigrated. That said I can see why young people would hate it.
mattdeboard 13y ago
The fact that people over 30 find Facebook cool is much of the reason why younger people don't find it cool.

sdfjkl 13y ago

> His hands grasp mine. They feel like the rough surface of your favorite baseball. What's with this president cult. He's just another human being.

wmeredith 13y ago
Yeah, that solicited a WTF in my head when I read it.
logfromblammo 13y ago
"And when I licked those hands, they tasted like sweet apples and flaky pastry, just the way Mom used to make her pies." I can't stand seeing the political shams where the VIP comes in and pretends to be an ordinary person talking to other ordinary people. Of course, there is also that schadenfreude when they utterly fail to pull it off. But I don't blame the politician; that's just what they're made to do: I blame the journalist. Rather than summarize the meaningless show of a politician gladhanding and baby-kissing his way through an audience, his hands felt like a baseball--your favorite baseball, because a true American would own several. Really? Are you sure it wasn't more like the soft leather from well-worn bootstraps, lightly marked by salt stains acquired while walking the wintry streets of Chicago's south side? Ridiculous. It's just as bad as Bush Jr. trying to pull the Texas good ol' boy schtick and the media egging him on. I want my watchdog back, even if he's jingo yellow, not a toothless yappy lapdog.

yaph 13y ago

I suspect Mr. Obama knows more than you like about Faceboook et al.

desmondrd 13y ago

HN used to be full of things that mattered. This belongs on Reddit.com.

noonespecial 13y ago
The top story right now is "Decide which init system to default to in Debian". This doesn't matter much to an awful lot of people, but matters a lot to folks around here. I'd say we're not so bad off yet... HN used to be more full of things that mattered to us. I agree that I used to go to reddit to look for stories like this. But the us here has changed some over the years. Just upvote the stories you like and flag the worst of it and take it in stride. The whole thing is just a great big Ouija board of geek culture.

puranjay 13y ago

When you talk about Facebook dying, do remember that Facebook owns Instagram where all the cool kids hangout these days.

farinasa 13y ago

Is it really surprising that the guy with access to all internet traffic has knowledge about internet traffic?

chainlink 13y ago

Lotus Notes. It Still Sucks http://codinghorror.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a85dcdae970b0128776fca5d970c-pi http://codinghorror.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a85dcdae970b0128776...

canvia 13y ago

I think this is in part due to people realizing how much data FB is keeping on them, and then selling. Educated people don't want to be a commodity. Older people are slower to learn/change, but young people are already done with FB. FB is bloated and appeals to the lowest common denominator. They created a set of easy tools that make the internet more accessible to people that are not technologically knowledgeable. Skype and photobucket and twitter are far too complicated for someone who thinks Outlook is email and Yahoo is the internet. Once people master how to use the tools on FB many will realize that there are better alternatives, some that aren't going to track them all across the internet. However, there is no single alternative that aggregates these tools in a better fashion. I was just writing a proposal last night for a new social site to replace FB/g+ that is freemium subscription based with a key selling point that there is no tracking, no ads, and a high level of privacy. It would have a base set of features and that's it. No bloat. No expansion. Just sharing with friends. It doesn't need to be a billion dollar company. Profit margins don't have to be huge. It just needs to be profitable and deliver a needed service to the niche of people that care about privacy. The rest will follow with network effects. If the tool is effective people will use it forever even without feature creep, i.e. usenet, IRC, HN

the_watcher 13y ago

The "Facebook is uncool and dying" story trend is getting so old. It's not dying. The only metric that anyone ever cites is that young teens aren't signing up as often anymore, but they don't mention that user growth on Facebook is still strong, or that most of those young teens will sign up once they hit an age where its utility for them is higher (so an age where they don't interact with 90% of their social circle every day). They are still rolling out really cool new features (Graph search, user-specific trending topics). They are way ahead of the game in mobile (already moving to having multiple specialized apps for different functionalities that deeplink to each other, rather than a single app that tries to pack all of the desktop functionality into it). Facebook is not dead, dying, or sick. It's in fantastic shape.

gress 13y ago

Another attack piece against Facebook. I wonder who is paying for the current media onslaught?

KVFinn 13y ago

>None of this kept me from experiencing immediate, full-on, feverish anxiety. >And then—for the first time in nearly an hour—I could work. I found that I was so accustomed to his voice, how he holds his body, his aura, that ignoring him in person is as easy as ignoring a TV. Easier, in fact. He stops being the president and starts being That Guy Who You See In Tweets, That Guy Who Gives Speeches, That Guy. Interesting how your mind can put the president into the same bucket as leaving the news on in the background.

unethical_ban 13y ago

Meta-comment: I read this article with the real title on HN, and it mentioned almost nothing about Facebook. I assume the mods changed the title, which steered the early conversation about the piece. Therefore, due to "title activism" taken too long after the post, I was thoroughly confused for a while.