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Comment by FussyZeus | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is a fad. A damn big one I'll grant you but it's already losing it's grip on the next generation of users. It's huge now but I feel it's already lost it's luster, I mean come on, I'm a huge user (keeping up with friends across states is damn hard otherwise) and I can't stand being on it, and I know a lot of friends who feel the same.

It will have it's time, in due time. Hyperlinks are not dead.

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my feed is garbage - just stupid memes and mostly sponsored posts. That said, most people I know use it as a "rolodex." It's the easiest way to add a contact and then quickly message them in the future. also, a lot of people still use it for events. people are still checking their feeds compulsively just out of a need for stimulation and when they feel lonely though. But facebook is basically a cloud contacts solution at this point.

Agreed. Facebook is pretty irrelevant with the High School crowd. Every has smart phones with apps that offer far less friction for communicating.

High school students will start using Facebook once they realize they can't keep "connected" with their high school friends that are studying in a bunch of different universities.

Don't they seem to have moved past serving that core audience?

The problem is, as those kids grow up and into the demo that is there core audience, I doubt very much they will move to facebook, and more than 40-somethings suddenly start using myspace.

High School students already use social media to connect with their peers, they just aren't using Facebook to do it. Source: I teach.

Don't they have like 1.65B MAUs? How is that a fad?

If you don't have the younger markets, you don't have a future. Once their parents are on a service, the younger market isn't if they don't need to be.

Facebook is delaying it by playing big in International markets and in developing countries but the social aspects can't be outrun and won't change, as I said, it's a BIG fad but it's a fad and it will die a fad's death in due time.

Why do think Zuck is pushing the Facebook private Internet in the developing world so hard? He's not stupid, he sees the writing on the wall.

I hate FB and stopped using it a few months ago. But the people behind the company are pretty clever. They might have seen the writing on the wall and are trying to move pretty quickly to act against it. You've already alluded to one, but FB has also bought Oculus, Instagram and WhatsApp. All for ridiculous amounts of money, but with a crazy amount of potential. As a company FB isn't going anywhere, any time soon and by extension nor are its ideologies and practices.

True that, I'm sure the company will be around for a good long time, but the social network I think has another 10 years in it, tops. Then everyone will move onto the new shiny thing.

I have read this comment so many times over the years, but if you look at the actual figures, this simply is not true. Young people all over the world continue to make Facebook accounts at record rates month over month, at higher rates than they do snapchat accounts or any other social media account. Younger people just make more accounts, and shape their identity in different ways across different accounts intentionally or not. 18-35 demographic is by far the largest on Facebook. If you look just at the U.K, 1.17 million 18 year olds have Facebook accounts vs. 920,000 Snapchat accounts (Experian is the source for these figures). Of course you could make the point that Facebook has a ridiculous amount of fake accounts, but I haven't seen any recent attempts at quantifying that, and they wouldn't be alone in that regard anyway. Facebook continues to aggressively update their products, and they aren't a stranger to what their users like or how they use their product, I think it is naive to declare it a fad, and it has already been around too long for it that term to describe it.

Try having fake accounts. It is really not as facebook would this make easy.

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