16 ms·

When will we stop using Facebook?

• frik 11y ago
  What will be the next big thing in social networks? What are your thoughts? Local neighbors network? No-interface social networks? Peer-to-peer? Anonymous social networks? Video based (YouTube/Twitch)? Messanger-only? No central news-feed?
  • madez 11y ago
    I think it will be non-local and won't work without text, I hope it will be peer-to-peer, and I'm not sure about what you mean by refering to anonymity in the context of social networks.
  • Rainymood 11y ago
    If snapchat manages to create some sort of facebook-clone that integrates smoothly with snapchat, but doesn't use facebook ... it could be huge Then again, fb will probably just try to acquire them. "Embrace, extend, extinguish"
  • mkohlmyr 11y ago
    I would love to see distributed peer to peer become the next big thing. Just the social graph would be a start since it would probably be more difficult to find a decentralized way of of holding on to content and posts(?). Anything where you want a degree of privacy you probably need the service to be either paid or distributed or the monetary incentives will be skewed against the users interests.
  • lmedinas 11y ago
    Unfortunately, in my opinion, Facebook is here to stay. Reasons: - Local/OSS/decentralized social networks will not work for the common population because their friends and updates will not be there. - Video based is already a success, see Twitch, but people sometimes prefer text and likes. - Messenger only is also a success, see Whatsapp/FB messenger, but some people have the need to expose themselves to people outside their groups. - Pinterest, Instagram and Google+ have their own public which mostly likely are also in FB. They use it for difference purposes. - Twitter, well this one it's difficult. First of all most of the communication is public and some users are not interested in that. Also there's a lot of self promotion messages which does not mean it will engage users to communicate. Finally Twitter tries to reinvent itself and the features are not consistent. i.e. For several weeks they enabled translations and after it was disabled. Twitter might have a chance to engage more people with Tvshows, movies, music and personalities. Facebook after all is the social network which is easier to get started, makes a balance between public and private/groups, lot's of features available (games, messenger, groups etc...) and families and friends in the same feed. I guess it's pretty hard to beat that currently for other social networks.
    • Heliosmaster 11y ago
      I agree with you that probably FB will stay longer than everyone thinks. At least the messaging part. What I think it's the biggest factor that will give it inertia, it's the userbase. It has slowly become the centralized place for connecting with people, especially when not considering the minority of very tech-savy people. I am at a party and I met somebody I want to hang out with? He/she's probably on facebook then we'll communicate on that. Wanna look up for my old class-mates? Let's search for them on facebook. The timeline will be empty/boring/spam, but the messaging app will be full.
      • lmedinas 11y ago
        That's the point, FB is people personal ID in the Internet (I guess Google+ was suppose to have this task), and this is the reason why we have so many apps working with FB which is the central point for everything - login, pictures, address, tlf number etc...
    • TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
      FB is here to stay until there's a new round of technology and FB doesn't move quickly enough to capitalise on it. I'm guessing that won't happen for at least another five years. FB is basically AOL, which was basically CompuServe, which was a combination of DEC networking and BBS culture. (Kind of, if you squint hard and wave your hands around in the right way.) There is always niche for this kind of all-in-one social/messaging/groups/etc. It's a very big and profitable niche, and someone always owns it. But the incumbents change over time, and there are disruptions whenever the underlying technology changes. FB is likely a safe bet until something new appears. The obvious near-term move is 3D social/gaming, which is why FB bought Oculus. Longer terms that may not be enough, because it's not obvious head-mounted 3D VR is going to be pleasant and friction-free enough for everyday casual use. My guess is the something new will have strong elements of AI and social and perhaps VR too - but I could be wrong about that.
    • danyork 11y ago
      Right... at this point Facebook is where the people are that other people want to communicate with. Facebook has the massive "directory" of users. Social networks are only useful to people if the other people with whom they want to communicate are ON those networks. Right now, Facebook has that massive directory. This can change, of course. The Internet does not have permanent favorites. But today, Facebook is where you can easily find and interact with people.
  • rascul 11y ago
    http://indiewebcamp.com http://indiewebcamp.com
  • mrweasel 11y ago
    I'm a bit anti-social in some ways, so I don't actually think that social networks have much of a future. My observations are that people don't care about being social, they want a place where they can post their frustrations, Facebook is a good platform for that. Twitter, Instgram, Snapchat and others all have their user base, but it's way smaller and less relevant than the people using the services believe. If you and your circle of friends are only on e.g. Snapchat, that's platform will seem much more valuable and relevant that it really is. Same with Twitter, the tech world sees Twitter as way more relevant and valuable than it really is, because that the platform that many of us use (I don't, Twitter is in my just a way of following celebrities in the TV/Movie/politic or tech- world). Some for of group chat might be handy, but there's room for a ton of these services. Although users will tend to cluster. Videos and voice is unimportant, text and pictures are not.
  • tracker1 11y ago
    It's funny, but I really miss group chat in the late 90's on Yahoo Messenger, with audio... I don't think video works as well with 10+ people, but audio was pretty fun. I think that WebRTC will deliver a lot of opportunities in that arena. I don't think news feeds are going away, and I think that Twitter (if they can clean out the bot accounts) is one of the better resources in that gateway. As to messenger systems... no idea... right now it kind of sucks... it was bad enough with yahoo, icq, aol, and msn messenger... now it's even more networks with even more disconnect outside facebook, and fb's app is about as invasive as it gets in terms of device privacy.
  • irl_zebra 11y ago
    Path is really good, I've been using it for about a year now. It's like FB, but much closer-knit. It's like Swarm and FB. Easy to share things, easy to decide who to share with. It started where you could only have a small number of friends, but I think they removed that requirement. A number of my close friends are on it, so it's neat to see updates that I care about from people that I care about. And then I log onto FB occasionally to wade through the updates of all the tangential friends and acquaintances just to kind of see what's going on. FB:Path::Reddit:HackerNews I think. https://path.com/ https://path.com/
  • ItsJohnnyBoy 11y ago
    I have the next big thing. If you know javascript and the ionic framework, I would to partner up with you. Or if you have money to put down. I'm ready to pitch. Text me to know more 916-479-4366
• ajkjk 11y ago
  I hate Facebook, but I don't plan to stop using it anytime soon. Well - I don't hate everything about it, but I hate everything they're trying to do, so I agree with this article. But "hate"ing a company is odd, so I guess I really mean "I want to have nothing to do with". I'll switch when there's a dominating replacement. All I want, for the rest of my life, is: - a way to see updates from friends and acquaintances and people I've fallen out of contact with, and post mine for them. - a way to search for and 'add' people I meet. - a way to chat with those people (including in groups) - all of those things, without social baggage that constrains it to 'only teenagers' or 'only colleagues and classmates' etc. - and in a network that contains most people I meet, or doesn't have social baggage that prevents most people from being willing to join it. To me it's an enriched version of what I get by having lots of contacts in my phone or email address book: exactly a list of people, plus the additional fact that I feel physically near them in some sense (and I think this is a concrete emotional thing. My family and friends don't feel too far away when I get to see snippets of their life streamed into mine). Everything else - groups, events, pokes, company pages, apps, games, friend suggestions, wall posts, public about-me sections, places, reviews, ads, etc... I don't care about any of it. Maybe something that trims off all this fat would be innocuous enough to actually find adoption. I could see it living in some peer-to-peer structure too, but it has to still be absolutely trivial for anyone to join.
  • higherpurpose 11y ago
    In other words - the Internet. You don't need to do all those things in a single place, or even in multiple places, but all owned by the same company. The fact that people want to use Instagram, Vine, Snapchat and Whatsapp is proof many people don't want a single service for everything. It's just unfortunate that Facebook happens to have acquired many of those.
    • rimantas 11y ago
      > In other words - the Internet. Can you explain a bit more, because it sounds really strange.
      • 11y ago
• yuvadam 11y ago
  Yes, we've passed Peak Facebook, but that's just because it has been distilled and pornographized to the point of desensitization. Pure capitalism at its finest. What will set the trend for the future is our understanding of how digital slavery works. We can be entering one of the darkest eras of modern history, or one of the most liberating. The choice is up to us, human beings, whether we sell ourselves to whoever is better at manipulating our emotions and thoughts, or whether we choose the free and open path that liberates us from digital tyranny.
  • eggie 11y ago
    You remind me of digital tools that are just coming into existence. Distributed autonomous corporations could organize most of the digital communication functions that the social media bubble is currently exploring. So, ethereum, Turing complete blockchains, oracles and decentralized decision making. Consensus over conceit.
  • tim333 11y ago
    >we've passed Peak Facebook Like with peak oil you've got to distinguish the US peak (which happened about 1970 though there may be second higher one coming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbert_peak_theory#/media/File:US_Crude_Oil_Production_and_Imports.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbert_peak_theory#/media/File...) and a global peak - not yet for oil. Facebook's probably peaked in the USA but has a lot of growth ahead globally.
• higherpurpose 11y ago
  That's quite a disappointing future the author is painting there. The best I can hope for is that future "hot startups" will prefer to sell themselves to any other company but Facebook when Facebook comes knocking on their door with a bag of cash. Otherwise I'll continue to express my distaste for such an acquisition, just like I did with Oculus and Whatsapp and will try avoiding them in the future. Vote with your wallet as they say.
  • eggie 11y ago
    Is that because you dislike facebook, or this kind of acquisition pattern?
• mrweasel 11y ago
  >Facebook is an insanely rich company to the tune of $192 billion as of September 2014 That's not exactly being rich, those aren't billions that Facebook can go spend in the same way as Apple can spend their cash reserves. The $192 billions is the evaluation of Facebook, not the money Facebook has available to spend. Profits are what makes companies rich, not that Facebook is doing to badly in that department.
  • Kurtz79 11y ago
    Facebook is not a startup, it's a publicly traded company, meaning that its value is given by the numer of shares in the market times the stock price (which by this date is more than 226bn). If we are talking about liquid cash, FB is sitting on 12 bn, which is not so far than AAPL 33 bn.
    • testrun 11y ago
      Apple cash reserve is $194 Billion (http://americasmarkets.usatoday.com/2015/04/27/194b-apple-cash-pile-hits-record/ http://americasmarkets.usatoday.com/2015/04/27/194b-apple-ca...).
      • robinson7d 11y ago
        That article actually confirms the 33B "liquid cash" quoted in your parent. The other ~160B is "long-term investments".
        • rtpg 11y ago
          last I looked at apple's financial statement,s that other 160 is in pretty liquid assets, in that if Apple wanted to spend 190 billion tomorrow, it basically could
• prof_hobart 11y ago
  "based this prediction on the number of times Facebook is typed into Google as a search term". If that's their only set of data, then I'm guessing this is equally likely to indicate that Google is losing users, or at least losing users trying to access common sites, at a pretty steep rate.
• pjc50 11y ago
  I really should flesh out my "why you can't have a good distributed social network" post some time. What does FB provide that you don't get with a combination of email/USENET/blogs/chat? Branding, janitors, and indexing. Branding is useful because these things are so scale-driven that you want to be on the one that everyone else is using. It's easier for the uninvolved to figure this out if it's the one with huge advertising billboards. Janitors are a necessity. Some are human, some automatic. People want spam to be fought, and they want abuse to be removed. Between those two is the "nudging" of people into how to use Facebook. Why should you post life updates? Because it's the "done thing". Indexing is useful because it enables you to find people you want to get in contact with using their human-recognisable name. (Facebook occasionally undermines this by refusing to accept names that people are known by) Both of these are ongoing effort that has to be paid for if it is to scale and be done properly. Hence all the underhand cash-extraction processes.
  • amelius 11y ago
    > Both of these are ongoing effort that has to be paid for if it is to scale and be done properly. Have a look at bittorrent. Scale is not a problem. Money isn't either. Perhaps we should have a distributed social network based on it, or a similar technology.
    • pjc50 11y ago
      Bittorrent handles the distribution of large files. It explicitly doesn't handle any of the social aspects of content removal, indexing of humans by name, social graphs, etc. Spam is not a question because there's no "push" of any kind, but people would want push notification for any FB replacement. If you were to build a system for distributing "wall posts" in a bittorrent manner, it would probably end up looking a lot like USENET with a group per-person. (Long ago I knew a couple of people who did in fact have their own newsgroup in alt.) That would also replicate the problems of USENET, especially with regards to spam fighting.
  • danyork 11y ago
    Also we have to consider that "regular" Internet users (who are probably not HN readers!) just want to communicate with their friends, share pictures and jokes, find news, etc. They want a simple user experience that's just easy to use. THAT user experience (UX) has been the main issue I've seen with attempts at a distributed social network (such as Diaspora).
• PSeitz 11y ago
  No need to Google for it, because everybody has it in his bookmarks.
  • fwn 11y ago
    I also found this graph to be a bad start. I mean, search queries? If facebook.com isn't bookmarked it's still presented as suggestion right after "f" is typed in close to any facebook users omnibox. The only reason I ever search for facebook is because I accidently mistyped it.
• sirwitti 11y ago
  Did I get that correctly, that the hypothesis of facebook loosing 80% of its users (in the next years) is based on a link between google searches and facebook use? What if people google facebook less than a while ago because they already know what it is and have remembered the domain name?
  • a1k0n 11y ago
    Or, more likely, they just use the mobile app.
    • jay-saint 11y ago
      I was just going to point out the mobile app factor. Looking only at Google does not count search on App stores. It also does not take into account that over half a billion people are mobile only users. Source Q414 earnings slide deck. http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-NJ5DZ/3515235624x0x805520/2D74EDCA-E02A-420B-A262-BC096264BB93/FB_Q414EarningsSlides20150128.pdf http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-NJ5DZ/3515235624...
  • Exuma 11y ago
    lose* - this is one of the only misspellings that seem inexcusable to me. It's my ultimate pet peeve, because they don't even remotely sound the same.
  • DennisP 11y ago
    The article itself scoffs at the study, and continues with a long discussion that has nothing to do with it.
• rollthehard6 11y ago
  Story today on the BBC, from analysis of 500 word stories written by UK kids between 5 and 13 for a competition 'Words including email, mobile and Facebook are in decline, it said.' http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-32902170 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-32902170 (Interesting that mobile is declining, suggests the distinction is lost in a world of tablet, laptop and phone use where desktops are a thing of the past domestically)
  • shawabawa3 11y ago
    > (Interesting that mobile is declining, suggests the distinction is lost in a world of tablet, laptop and phone use where desktops are a thing of the past domestically) I would say that mobile is declining because land lines basically don't exist anymore, so we can just say phone instead of mobile phone.
    • pbhjpbhj 11y ago
      >land lines basically don't exist anymore // Everyone I know has access to a landline (UK). True the only reason I have a landline really is that you can't get a broadband internet connection on its own that's cheaper than phone + broadband.
• stkni 11y ago
  The linked article quotes some research which is highly dubious. Using Google trends data [1] for anything other than the start of an analysis seems a little dangerous. Facebook won the social network land-grab and it will be difficult for anyone to assail their stronghold. I hope someone does, but it's probably going to take a lot of money and time. [1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/27/google-flu-trends-predicting-flu http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/27/google-flu...
• ttty 11y ago
  Isn't that correlated with mobile devices being more popular?
• junto 11y ago
  I stopped two years ago. As far as I am aware I'm not missing much. I did have a lot of old friends on FB, but I didn't stay in contact with them in real life. I was just lazily snooping on their lives, without giving anything in return. To be completely honest, I don't have space or time for them in my real life. It isn't because I didn't like them anymore, it was simply that I didn't have the time or energy to stay in proper contact. I had also moved away. I had the realisation that some people are supposed to drift apart. The people who are important to you will remain in contact with, and it doesn't need Facebook spying on that friendship to enable it to keep functioning.
  • onewaystreet 11y ago
    The fact that 1.5 billion people use Facebook kind of suggests that you are wrong.
    • baldfat 11y ago
      Feeling connected no matter how small is a very strong force. I like that I have connections from my childhood to my present and to all the places I lived. Even if it is I see that my friends kids are now in high school or that someone had a great event that I had zero impact on them having. When my son was dying from cancer I just had to jump on Facebook and I had a ton of people that were willing to help out or send him messages and videos. It was a great tool to find people who could help.
      • AtmaScout 11y ago
        I'm sorry about your son.
      • junto 11y ago
        That is awful. I don't want to imagine one of my children being seriously or terminally ill. I'm glad Facebook was able to help you and your son in that horrible situation. Thank you for sharing your alternative viewpoint.
      • FlaceBook 11y ago
• onewaystreet 11y ago
  Facebook is already two years ahead of the analysis in this article. They spun off messenger and groups into their own apps because they saw the monolithic approach was no longer working.
• dade_ 11y ago
  So the bad news is that it is difficult to stop using Facebook. They let me export my data, but not birthdays of my friends list. I had to break the list down into family, friends, actual friends, then check each of their pages to update my address book. I had to disconnect the few apps that were attached which was easy for me as I avoided facebooks apps like the plague, but imagine losing all of your farm animals or whatever it is that people use the games for. Now that SMS is free and my carrier provides me a softphone for my PC and tablet for free, I have reverted to SMS (disabling iMessage is a PITA). Events I handle with my calendar app / email invites which hasn't been ideal, but since some of my friends refuse to use Facebook, it never was either. Anyway, just some of my experience so far. At least they allow me to export my data, unlike Yelp bookmarks. I kept my usage of Facebook extremely light, but this has taken a lot of my spare time. Few people will go through this effort. Before you start using a SaaS solution, figure out how you can stop using it.
  • reitoei 11y ago
    > it is difficult to stop using Facebook It's really not. All the saving of contacts, birthdays etc. that you talk about here... If you give a crap about any of these people, you will already have that information in another medium. The Facebook logins? Only one I had to change manually was Spotify, everything else I was able to switch to Google. It's seriously easy. Just stop using it.
• mrtree 11y ago
  I don't have fb and I don't miss it. Soon many more will join the trend and nurture their real friendships instead...
• zamalek 11y ago
  I wonder if the current "depression" is merely the tech savvy market. I find that many authors make the mistake of assuming that the average Joe thinks the same way that they (and their peers) do. In the past 2-3 months I have heard two less savvy people recite the "it's not an official relationship until it's Facebook official" social norm, which inclines me to believe that Facebook is still firmly entrenched in the way people interact with each other: even if they never visit the site it needs to be there so that they can turn their significant other into that all important profile trophy/achievement. I had this exact conversation with some coworkers (3 of us) and all of us found out that all of us only have our profiles because our significant others demand it. We never visit the site or use the site but have to exist there because of the people around us who do use it. My S/O can't have me as a partner, my sister can't tag me in a picture etc. People are worried that if there is no "paper trail" on Facebook, other people will think that they are an imposter. Therefore I'm not inclined to agree that the current trend is a long term trend. There are many other websites that provide exactly the same features of Facebook, if not more. Facebook is a part of culture now. It's a verb. It probably has a good few decades of life left in it. Finally "search query frequency" is the poster child of "correlation does not imply causation." E.g. People might not be searching for Facebook because everyone already knows what it is and what the address is. It's like ranking Google's health on how often people search for Google.
• mironathetin 11y ago
  I read facebooks terms and conditions before I created my account (you can guess, I am over 50). After that, I never thought about joining. Tried to discourage our kids, too (no success - they are under 50 ;o).
  • mironathetin 11y ago
    I am impressed this got upvoted. A couple of years ago, telling everybody I am not on facebook and have never been for such uncool reasons, would have drowned like a lead-duck.
• zz_m00 11y ago
  I have never used facebook and never will. The only real reason is because I have no interest in the type of community it promotes. The communities on facebook usually seem like a popularity contest. I've recently stopped using reddit for the same reason and I'm now using HN as my main/only source of social media.
  • Svenstaro 11y ago
    Reddit is a gold mine for niche stuff. Don't stop using it for r/funny, r/politics, r/whatever. Those are shitholes. The small subreddits is what Reddit all about for me nowadays. The big subreddits are breeding grounds for young Redditors and to fend off those we don't want in smaller subreddits.
• harryf 11y ago
  > Facebook has been haemorrhaging interest from fresh faced teenagers for a while. In the US, the percentage of teens between 13 to 17 using Facebook fell to 88% in 2014. - See more at: http://www.thepinchandzoom.com/blog/2015/5/14/facebook-stop#sthash.HEYdWxIy.dpuf http://www.thepinchandzoom.com/blog/2015/5/14/facebook-stop#... And? They own Instragram and WhatsApp which, apart from SnapChat, makes up 50%+ of what teens are doing on their phones
• iamthepieman 11y ago
  I stopped using facebook in 2013 when I quit my part time job as a fitness instructor. The studio I worked for used it extensively to communicate with clients and post daily workouts and nutrition tips so after a month of holding out (had already deleted my account once in 2010) I signed back up (which was a hassle enough as it was, they already knew I had used that email and asked if I wanted to reactivate my old account even though I had explicitly deleted it). It was useful but I pretty much only used it in my role as a fitness coach and when I quit that job I deleted all posts, photos and details, changed my primary email to nonsense and changed my password to something I would never remember before going through the two-week "cool-off" period they force on you to delete your account.
• snarfy 11y ago
  The only thing Facebook was ever good for was finding those old friends. Now that you found them, now what? Do you need Facebook? The easy way out is to message all of them saying you are quitting Facebook and ask them for their email address. That's all you ever needed, but there was no index/search engine for it until Facebook. And once you have that part of the index you care about, you'll never need it again.
  • logan5 11y ago
    That is assuming you have found all your old friends that you wanted to find. Else, you can't leave.
  • perfTerm 11y ago
    Hmmm... And I did this (had fb for a few years, deleted for a few, had for a semester abroad, deleted as soon as I had my first steady girlfriend, broke up and now about three and a half years later I'm back on). The problem I found was, as soon as I deleted my fb no one had my e-mail as it was deleted with it my account and messages. I'm not the biggest fan of facebook obviously, but when I wqs studying abroad in France it really was a handy way to connect with people when I didn't have a cellphone. Now, after deleting for such a long period, I don't have any connection to my old friends which is a shame. There's the argument that if people wanted to talk to you they'd make it happen but then there's the argument that if you're on facebook people are more likely to talk to you because of the convenience. No one wants to lose touch, and facebook provides and easy way to make sure that (had I not deleted) when I wanted to go back to Europe I'd have easy access for communication lines to the individuals I might want to visit. Everything is double edged and while I've enjoyed my time off of facebook (why does everyone have to hate on the poorest in America? I will never understand. If the people on welfare were actual leechers maybe they'd own a portion of the country, anyways I digress). That being said, it's a total privacy invasion, and the people I apparently know don't critically think too often unfortunately even as I try to gently prod, and yet, it has allowed me to find events I might not have gone too, and friends I may not have seen. I hate to do this to hackernews where the discussion is the key reason I come here... but I did not read the article. Sorry!
  • macintux 11y ago
• k__ 11y ago
  I use it mostly as a replacement for ICQ and MSN and to gather some photos after events.
• acheron 11y ago
  Is it time yet to repost this classic article? "Will MySpace ever lose its monopoly?" http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business.comment http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business.c... Key quote: MySpace is well on the way to becoming what economists call a "natural monopoly". Users have invested so much social capital in putting up data about themselves it is not worth their changing sites, especially since every new user that MySpace attracts adds to its value as a network of interacting people.
  • soylentcola 11y ago
    True, but one thing I've noticed with Facebook is that it was the first big social network that saw widespread adoption across almost all segments of (at least US) society. I don't doubt that it will eventually go the way of AOL and MySpace but there are some key things keeping it in use. With early ISPs like AOL, there was nothing really stopping you from moving to another provider that offered something better. Combined with the move toward broadband, any AOL-exclusive features just weren't enough to keep people around for the most part and you could still access the rest of the web, email, etc. regardless of your provider. With Facebook, you need to use their service in order to interact with people on it. I can't just use Google+ because I like the interface and mobile app better than Facebook. No matter how much I prefer another service, they aren't based on any common protocol like email so I need to use Facebook to interact with people who use it. And with MySpace, the audience was mostly younger people. Sure, some of us had parents or employers that maintained a profile but Facebook was the first big social network that got your mom, your grandma, your boss, your doctor, your old college professor, and all the neighbors on your block to sign up. The under-30 crowd will switch services for something newer and better but the critical mass of Facebook users is hard to get around. Coming back to Google+, I really am one of the (few apparently) people who think it's a much better alternative to Facebook. Chat is better. Levels of sharing work better and are easier to manage. The interface is smoother. There aren't game and app requests. The mobile app is better. Photo sharing is better. Basically on a technical level, it's better all around. But when it came out and I started using it, the thing I quickly came to realize was that even if my techie friends also were trying it out, the vast majority of non-enthusiasts found the idea of setting up a profile to be annoying and not worth their time. They already had a Facebook after all. To use G+ you would either need to maintain two profiles on two services or decide to only talk to the 10% of your contacts who took the time to set up this new thing. In the end, it never really made a dent outside of niche uses (Photography, Ingress players, etc) and has largely become the butt of jokes. Another failed challenger undone by lack of interoperability and the momentum of a large incumbent. If there were some way to choose your platform and still communicate with the same people (a la email) then Facebook would have some sort of competition but there's no way in hell they would open themselves up to that sort of competition. And currently, there aren't any must-have features compelling enough to make people either maintain multiple profiles or just uproot en masse.
• PaulHoule 11y ago
  I stopped using it a long time ago. For a while I mostly used Facebook connect to log into other web sites but I don't even do that anymore. Other people are still engaged; my NEET friends will come over and look at Facebook for hours and even people I know with jobs find it compelling but I don't.
• dataker 11y ago
  Facebook has too many elements of "poisonous Internet": ignorant rants, memes, political correctness, exaggerated display of public affection,... Gradually, users find other websites to channel their interests and avoid biases, like Reddit, Pinterest, HN,... It's a serious falacy to assume one will always need a network filled with friends and family.
  • aaron-lebo 11y ago
    The same problems you list with Facebook exist on Reddit, too. Reddit is an echo chamber. One of the great things about family (if you have a good one) is you have to put up with them no matter how much you disagree on the little things. Interest sites like Reddit let people form into their own ignorant cliques without serious personal effort. It seems to be a fundamental problem of humanity.
• dataker 11y ago
  Facebook has too many elements of "poisonous Internet": ignorant rants, memes, political correctness, exaggerated display of public affection,... Gradually, users find other websites to channel their interests and avoid biases, like Reddit, Pinterest, HN,... It's a serious falacy to assume one will always need a network filled with friends and family.
• jkot 11y ago
  Never? I am not even registered yet.
• pbhjpbhj 11y ago
  See also http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=friendsreunited http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=friendsreunited (in UK) or Digg or MySpace ... FriendsReunited was /the/ social network [amongst a certain demographic at least] in the UK before anyone knew the term social network. They established a massive userbase including paid for users but Facebook came along and destroyed them, particularly because FR did the paid for communications like LinkedIn do.
• kriro 11y ago
  Most people are already happily migrating to IM platforms where they can contact people more directly and form relevant ad hoc groups. Facebook was smart enough to recognize that and buy one of them. I'd be interested in seeing action metrics over time for FB. My gut feeling is that people use it more passively these days (I do, it's mostly a fancy contact book for me). Every now and then I catch myself posting stuff for reasons of "look isn't this great...please like it" but for the most part my FB use is fairly passive these days. I also feel like I should just delete my FB account for various reasons every now and then but usually talk myself out of it.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• wyclif 11y ago
  Piece needs an editorial once-over badly. Some of the pull quotes don't even match up to the same body text. Is it too much to ask for people to run spellcheck as a bare minimum of due diligence?
• guilamu 11y ago
  Never used it. Still don't get the point.
  • ams6110 11y ago
    Nicely put. I never saw what it would do for me that I wasn't already doing with email. Never signed up.
• rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  My best friendships are maintained by calling by phone or Skype, calling regularly when it comes to closer friends. I keep in touch with important people in my life using technology available to my parents when they were my age, and I feel more satisfied for it.
• flaburgan 11y ago
  When we will start using https://diasporafoundation.org https://diasporafoundation.org
  • madez 11y ago
    Maybe when it leaves being an alpha.
• flaburgan 11y ago
  When we will start using https://diasporafoundation.org https://diasporafoundation.org
• UUMMUU 11y ago
  I'm sorry but this article reads like a narcissistic wet dream. The author continues to quote himself and even misquotes himself several times (look up "facebook has tried tried to remedy" and "facebook has tried to repair"). The rest of the article slams Facebook for its success and tries to say users don't want to use Facebook. I personally love what Facebook developers are doing in terms of React and Jest. In terms of Facebook's core product, I use it for easy social login and have unfollowed anyone who posts things I don't agree with so my "feed" is pretty well curated. Myspace sank because a better product came out. When someone comes out and does Social better than Facebook, Facebook will fall but until then: if you don't like it, good news, you don't have to use it.
  • jhildings 11y ago
    >I use it for easy social login and have unfollowed anyone who posts things I don't agree with so my "feed" is pretty well curated. Isn't that a very very bad decision ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
    • UUMMUU 11y ago
      I would hesitate to say it's very, very bad. I don't filter people on Facebook only because I disagree with them; I filter people on Facebook because, at one point, I really enjoyed the company of that person and their current tirade of hating (the police/minorities/the west/the east/obama/republicans/etc) stands to slightly jade our friendship. Anyone who can actively filter ALL opinions they disagree with is either delusional, locked in a cabin in the woods or much more active at filtering than I am.
• RUG3Y 11y ago
  I haven't read the article yet, but I stopped using Facebook a couple of years ago and it was the best decision.
• senthil_rajasek 11y ago
  I quit facebook 2 years ago. When I greet people that I haven't seen in a while they are surprised by how genuine I feel.
  • bleep 11y ago
    Tell me about it! It's great being able to ask what they've been up to, and actually mean it!
• thebouv 11y ago
  My wife cut off FB 2 years ago but I still use it mostly like a forum. Locally we have a group of 50ish gamers (Warhammer, 40k, Warmachine, etc) and this is the primary way games / tournaments / campaigns are set up. Even a trading area since gamer nerds are apt to constantly buy and trade their toys. What's funny is we've had to convince our younger members to even sign up so we could communicate with them. Anyone younger than 20 in our group didn't usually have an FB account. We've tried running traditional forums for the local group but it has never worked. FB is the only way to do it for now.
  • hellbanTHIS 11y ago
    Sounds like a job for Slack.
    • thebouv 11y ago
      Same issue we had trying to get people to forums. Signing up is hard to do no matter how easy you make it. Including if it allows for Facebook sign-ons. They're already ON Facebook. It's on their phone. They don't have to do anything. Trust me, I -want- an updated platform to use, but the rest of the gamer community here just doesn't seem to want to migrate.
• uint32 11y ago
  When will social networks be federated?
• xasos 11y ago
  > losing 80% of its peak user base I'm assuming this is just for the main FB platform? They still have access to many users through messenger and FB login.
• return0 11y ago
  Well, as developers, we reached peak facebook (usefulness as a plaform for apps) years ago.
• frandroid 11y ago
  > It used to be the place where you tried to sell all your unwanted stuff, but now now people are using Craig's List or Gumtree. Dude.
• vvpan 11y ago
  Email is so far the best social network that I know.
• ianstallings 11y ago
  Facebook has long said they want to be the glue of the Internet, the guys that tie it all together. And they're winning at this through their login feature, their messaging, their ad platform, and their commenting features. I don't know if in the future people will still visit FB like they do today, but I doubt they are truly going away anytime soon.
• known 11y ago
  When a major security flaw in FB exposes all your private data to the world;
• adrianlmm 11y ago
  I don't see my self stop using Facebook any time soon, I find it very useful.
• rayiner 11y ago
  ITT: people with no kids. Facebook is indispensable for sharing baby pictures with extended family.
  • throwaway12309 11y ago
    I have a 3 year old and he has no photo (that I know of) in facebook. Both me and my wife don't post anything online (also don't have FB) and if I find any family member/friend posting a picture of my son online, they will have picture taking permissions revoked. Also, there are a lot of people like us where I live.
    • pbhjpbhj 11y ago
      What's your aim in doing this? For what reason? Surely your family and acquaintances and people in the street are free - depending where you live (?) - to take pictures. So you're going to have to police all of those images in perpetuity to prevent images from appearing online. The likelihood is that when they're a teenager they'll put their lives online themselves in some way ... so? If your child goes on a playdate or attends a nursery or goes to a public location then there's a good chance (at least in the UK) that they'll appear on Facebook no matter how many "I do not consent for my child to appear in photographs" statements you sign. Once they appear in the background of images then in the not too distant future face recognition is likely to be good enough to trawl the net for images of them. I think what you'll find is that the images are all one's you haven't curated whereas if you were adding your own images (no matter if it's only a few) then you at least have some control over the general presentation of images.
      • throwaway12309 11y ago
        Aim/Reason: I don't really trust facebook/google, but more importantly, if he decides when he is 14-15 to put his photos online, it will be his decision. Also, growing up, baby/young pictures were usually something would use to make fun of each other. As for the other people taking photos, sure, if he is in the background there is not much we can do, but other places (nursery or school or even playdates) can't by law do that and to be fair, those places we tend to hand pick them and they do share this with us.
• tempodox 11y ago
  When will we stop using Facebook? We? I never became a user. Apart from that: Our children will, at the latest. For our children's generation, FB already is the pinnacle of boredom and stuffiness. Whatever is cool about “where our parents humiliate themselves publicly”?
• danschumann 11y ago
  This may seem crazy, but I think the reason use facebook is psychological and to some extent, it's a rationalization of gov'ment spying. "if someone else is going to know everything about me, it might as well be my friends(as well as the NSA)". I think once we end NSA spying, people will value their privacy more, and thus not need social crutches.
• acomjean 11y ago
  I help run an open studios event in Massachusetts. We in the last couple years have recently started using more social media. Facebook has been useful for us. It drives a lot of traffic to our site and presumably some of those people come to our event (we made an official facebook event so that we don't have a bunch of unofficial ones). Oddly its a difficult way to communicate with members and build community. Facebook also requires payment to guarantee showing up in feeds now, for a non-profit its not worth it. A fair number of our younger and older artists just aren't on it (myself included). We're finding email is the best way to communicate whats going on with our members. Facebook works best if Everyone is on it. Once fewer people aren't on it becomes less useful. I think thats its staying power currently. Its actually amazing that it runs at its scale. Myspace was popular, but it didn't have the nearly the volume of users as facebook (plus facebook is better at sharing photos, seemingly its reason for existing). If your not on it and your friends use it as an organizing tool, it can be a little isolating (Don't be that guy/gal who they have to go out of the way to invite to things...), but with more people not on it email seems to be returning as an organizing tool.
• jalayir 11y ago
  I use it for: - Informing old friends about so-called "Life Events" - not by actually posting, but by private messages - Private groups of separate friend circles, mostly for sharing cool news/websites or music - My facebook newsfeed mostly constitutes local news, international editorial/opinion pieces and lots of pictures of nature stuff which I like. I've unfollowed most people so I don't get their posts. I don't have a one-stop shop for all the above except facebook, so I think I'll definitely be using it for a while.
• krisdol 11y ago
  I used to actively post on facebook a lot through college and a bit later (joined when I started college, the year before facebook opened itself up to non-college accounts). For the last 2-3 years its been an idle account. Used to make several updates a week, now I make 2-3 updates a year. I removed the app a long time ago from my phone because of privacy reasons. I've noticed I get bombarded with far more notifications as an inactive user than I was when I was active. I get emailed notifications far more frequently when I used to never have them emailed. A friend posted on your wall? Notification. Someone liked a post on your wall? Notification. A friend is having a birthday? Notification. A friend's birthday is coming up? Notification. Invited to an event? Event coming up? Event tonight? Notification. Someone with no connections in common commented on a post you've never read on a large public group that you have never contributed to? Notification. Someone completely unrelated to you LIKED a post you've never viewed on the same large group? Notification. Facebook gets desperate when a user starts churning, but holy crap I just do not care. The only reason I keep this account is because of close family on the network. I could divide my friends list by 40 and I don't think I'd miss any of the lost content. All the stream ever shows is shared posts from Buzzfeed-clones. It's not interesting. It's a feed of spam with a very, very rare text post or meaningful photo.
• ThomPete 11y ago
  They will stop when a better perceived alternative is out there. Until then FB is solving socializing pretty well.
• vjvj 11y ago
  For those using fb mostly as a directory/contacts books, I highly recommend FB Purity. In fact I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet. It lets you filter out certain posts or in my case, put in a bit of custom CSS to never show the news feed => no distractions when I go onto fb chat.
  • KnightHawk3 11y ago
    There is also Messenger.com which would appear to do what you want.
• xacaxulu 11y ago
  Not a moment too soon. I've been free from the USG's best tracking program for 5 years. Never looked back.
• ctdonath 11y ago
  I've been on various social media for about 30 years, starting with dial-up BBSes and Usenet (when small enough you could read _every_ message posted). Time and again, I've seen sites appear, grow, become definitively dominant, taper off, and largely disappear (never quite dying outright but gone from "everyone's on it!" to "who? what?"). High-profile lifespan is vaguely around 7 years. I've no question Facebook will do the same, already peaked and declining as the article notes, suffering from too many people, too much content, and not enough signal to retain users against the oppressive & discouraging noise. "Oh, but FB is different! Everyone is on it, even my grandmother!" many will declare; yes, and odds are your grandmother can tell of her days when CompuServe and AOL were the place to be (to the point of AOL having so much money they bought Time-Warner because they didn't know what else to do with all that cash), yet here she is on Facebook because that's what her grandkids use, but she's thinking of moving on more to Twitter/Instagram/whatever because those kids just don't post much on FB anymore.
  • dmix 11y ago
    There were also a ton of oil companies before Standard Oil completely dominated the industry. They were the only player in town for a very long time. And their post-monopoly breakup offspring still are (Exxon is still the biggest).
    • woah 11y ago
      Counterpoint: Mayflies live as adults for only weeks before mating and dying. Theirs is a brief, beautiful dance of life[0] [0] http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176365 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176365
      • makmanalp 11y ago
        > brief, beautiful dance of life I suspect the mayflies might beg to differ :( We humans can romanticize anything.
  • geoelectric 11y ago
    I don't disagree, but the definition of "everybody" has gotten bigger and that counts too. AOL may have been the place to be in the 90s, but it was still a sharp subset of my friends and acquaintances that were there, vs. the almost complete set on Facebook. And USENET/dialup/etc were even more selective. It's only been very recently (relatively speaking) that a majority of people were online at all, never mind aligned on a particular site. I think you probably should compare more to something like AOL Instant Messenger, which had much closer to a 1:1 usage ratio of online computer users to software users (at least in the US market). The only real reason they went away was because social networks like Facebook are much more cross-connected and oriented towards group communication. The tagging features are huge, for example, since they potentially engage a lot of people at once. Ditto resharing, etc. So the IM paradigm in general got consumed by larger social media--it wasn't a problem with AOLIM itself. But that sort of obsolescence is a vulnerability of a system that only does one thing. Facebook would probably mutate in the same situation, not die off. The other factor is smartphones: a much larger number of people are online all the time now. If MySpace had their rise in the smartphone era, I'm sure they would have been much harder to displace. The fact that Facebook's opening their doors to the general public corresponded roughly with the release of the iPhone and subsequent rise of the smartphone was a huge bump for them. Upshot is that a vastly larger percentage of a vastly larger number of customers are aligned on Facebook compared to older social media, and Facebook itself, as a platform, is relatively resilient to the changing needs of the customer. In an industry where both the customer acquisition and customer retention metric is "how many of your friends use it," I think Facebook will prove to be much harder to displace.
• chilicuil 11y ago
  I just keep my account to sign-up easily to other webpages.
• paulpauper 11y ago
  The methodology and reasoning behind this study is dubious at best. http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=myspace%2C%20facebook%2C%20instagram%2C%20uber&date=1%2F2010%2061m&cmpt=q&tz= http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=myspace%2C%20facebook... If google trends is of any predictive value, Uber and Instagram should not exist (or at least be worse than myspace). The keyword 'snapchat' also shows near zero volume.
  • andrewstuart2 11y ago
    There are so many more reasons for declining search volume. It could just be that your users are starting to type terms directly into the address bar. Or that browsers have gotten smart enough that they're autocompleting facebook.com instead of just letting you search for facebook. I do love a good Google trends "research" dive but I'd hardly consider it good enough to cite for a scholarly paper. There aren't even real numbers, just relative search volumes.
• oldpond 11y ago
  Not soon enough. My son lost out on a job opportunity because of a photo of him published in fb when he was in grade 9. It's just a massive invasion of privacy, and for what? The "make a buck off the internet" guys hit the jackpot with that one.
• pyabo 11y ago
  I thought that the article was worth it but it is completely stupid. The reason of MySpace curb is because Facebook started, they aren't two independent events.
• hellbanner 11y ago
  Who's we, white man? FB is superb for organizing events with people. IMHO that's its strongest offering. But I'd rather just use webapps, word of mouth and email.
• hellbanner 11y ago
  Does anyone use XML or JSON feeds connecting to multiple apps to manage events, news updates etc? Curious about your setup.
• waspleg 11y ago
  Never started. http://seapegasus.org/wp-content/uploads/seapegasus.org/2011/09/funny-facebook-fails-oinkonomics.jpg http://seapegasus.org/wp-content/uploads/seapegasus.org/2011...
• dimino 11y ago
  I dislike posts about Facebook's usage, if for no other reason than how many people tend to come out and say "I don't use it and I can't imagine why anyone would". That statement is just so intellectually dishonest, it completely ruins the entire conversation. Pretending like there's no value in what Facebook offers ignores billions of dollars and billions of users who do find value. Now I'm not one for an ad populum, but when we define usefulness as "provides value to others", how can't Facebook be considered useful?
• norea-armozel 11y ago
  Unfortunately, I keep using Facebook to keep in contact with my family (this includes part of my extended family whom I haven't seen since childhood). I'm not sure it has much value since we rarely communicate through Facebook as we all have each other's phone numbers and other contact information. I'm hoping eventually my family will get off Facebook and maybe onto a more viable platform to maintain contact.
• wwweston 11y ago
  Don't know if this will be popular here, but... I like Facebook. I like seeing people's pictures and updates. I like serendipitous moments where someone announces they're in town and I get a chance to see people I haven't seen in years. I like keeping track of social events with it. I like reading a lot of their articles. I like the conversations I get in (even some of the arguments). I think it complements and enhances my social life. I try not to let it replace it. Sure, some of the acquaintances are obnoxious on FB. The mechanisms for focusing on what I like vs what I don't seem to work well enough. I don't like the surveillance. I try to minimize it in a number of ways. I'm sure my measures have limited effectiveness and I'm leaking details about my whereabouts, reading habits, and other preferences anyway. If FB was the only place I was doing that -- if I wouldn't have to essentially give up mobile/internet communications to truly solve that problem -- I might think harder about whether the value I get out of FB was something I could trade for privacy.
  • tim333 11y ago
    Probably uncool but I like facebook too. Maybe I should have a more happening social life but in the absence of that it's not a bad way to keep up with people. I'm not even especially bothered about the privacy / surveillance stuff. I don't post anything I'd be particularly worried about being public and I'm not to fussed about the add tracking thing effecting which ads uBlock ends up blocking or that I don't read. I just scrolled through the last 35 posts in the main feed and couldn't find anything obviously sponsored. If there's one thing that bugs me it's not having much control over the filtering. On the phone I only tend to get quite a small subset of my friends posts.
• hellbanTHIS 11y ago
  About the Coke analogy: everybody loves Coke A Cola, Santa Claus, polar bears, summertime, Perfect harmony, cans with your name on it, it's the greatest brand name in the world. Facebook is creepy, most people hate it and hate themselves for using it. Everybody knows somebody who lost friends because of it, or who broke up or got divorced. It's supposedly cited in one out of seven divorce cases. In terms of branding it's pretty toxic. I don't know how long it will be around, probably for a while (if you run Facebook and Snapchat through Google trends Snapchat barely registers) but brand loyalty isn't going to keep it afloat.
• Snhr 11y ago
  I keep thinking about deleting my facebook but a few days ago I went back a few years to figure out what I needed to do to drag myself out of a horrible depression I've put myself in the past few years and I found the exact thing I needed and all I could think was, I could never delete this if it was this important to me. I feel chained to the website in a way, I've had it for 6 years and quite a bit of important social interactions are hidden in between things that don't matter that I might never find again and completely forget that part of my life. Is there any way I can separate myself from the website without losing these things that I might need later in life at some point? I'm really wanting to just delete it but the history makes it important to me.
• MindTooth 11y ago
  Been without for about four months. Burden lifted.
• joshstrange 11y ago
  I still have FB but I never use it unless I'm tagged or messaged on it. I use it primarily as a massive rolodex but I never read my news feed except for on accident if I log in to read a message or notification. I tweet some and those are auto-pushed to FB so it kind of looks like I'm active (that was not the goal, just a side-effect). I've got way too many friends that use FB to plan events and the like to leave it anytime soon. I don't hold it against you if you don't have a FB but I'm also not going to feel back if you miss out on an event because you were harder to reach. I find the vast majority of FB-Defectors to be insufferable to listen to when they talk about how they aren't on FB (seriously, they fucking talk about FB MORE than the people ON FB!) and when they whine about a group of us talking on FB (therefore leaving them out) I just ignore them. I don't like FB and the reach it has into our lives but I'm not about to cut off my nose to spite my face by deleting my FB. There are plenty of ways to use FB without letting it use you IMHO and people who just flat out quit are too lazy to do so (Sign up for an account, don't add any info, turn off all location stuff, block the FB widget so it can't track you one sites, etc...). What I really want is identity provider and FB gives that to me today (along with "first party" chat, messaging, photos, etc). Ideally I would have something like OAuth (but not OAuth) and all my friends could pick a messaging platform that supported it but right now nothing like that exists and/or the UI/UX is so terrible I'd never get my friends to switch.
• swah 11y ago
  My experience: the platform is amazing, but too addictive and the format does not permit in-depth discussion. Most of the good content on the web still resides on old forums. Less and less people can write with the energy of Erik Naggum. Its not rewarded. Searching that great article from 6 months ago is a PITA. Almost no one reads longform articles anymore. Thanks Obama.
• qq66 11y ago
  Keeping in touch with friends, family, and acquaintances is a core need for a large fraction of humans. Facebook, like everything, will disappear some day, but it will be because people decide to start using some other way of keeping in touch -- not because they decide that they're bored of keeping in touch. Many people just stop using Facebook, don't replace it with anything else, and are happy with that decision -- but that will not be the norm.
• csense 11y ago
  I was early to join Facebook and early to leave. It's been well over half a decade since I've used Facebook. Nothing I have heard about them since I quit has made me regret my decision to leave.
• evc123 11y ago
  I think Facebook has staying power because they're the first social network to have made serious AI/ML investments. They'll be able to project user's likes back at them better than anyone else.
• barlescabbage 11y ago
  reminds me of this article I loved about how Facebook is the new myspace https://medium.com/@nickgrosvenor/facebook-is-myspace-7559ff9b9f8f https://medium.com/@nickgrosvenor/facebook-is-myspace-7559ff...
• coreymaass 11y ago
  When Facebook first launched dedicated apps for groups and messages, I was confused. But now I only have those installed, and not the primary app. I've also bookmarked both the messages page and the groups main page (which actually took some searching). I get a lot of groups, and there are some people I'm only able to talk with via Facebook messages. Malls are ubiquitous in much of the US, and people use them differently. Some people wander, some people run in to the one store they need and leave. Some people hang out at the food court. I view Facebook the same way - as they continue to build out features, different people will choose to use the bits and pieces that work for them.