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I think this highlights how out of touch you (and the Facebook developers) are.

I’ve had a Facebook account since the days of needing a edu email account to register. During my college years Facebook was a very important thing and all of my friends were very active and it was nice being able to see what people were up to and doing.

Over time Facebook started optimizing away to whatever it is now. I’ve deleted the Facebook app because it’s simply garbage. My friends don’t really post personal things anymore (most don’t even post anything anymore) and the influx of users and this “retweet” culture has made it so my Facebook feed is essentially spam. Why should I have to bother and waste time to curate what I see? Why should I have to hide so many individual pages?

Furthermore, the recent(?) addition of these marketplaces made it just way worse. My news feed activity is constantly telling me about new things for sale here and I just don’t care. I thought I’ve disabled these notifications but apparently I haven’t because they still show up. To be honest I don’t even know how to disable these messages because everything is hidden under 20 layers of options.

Not to mention the whole age/generation issue:

I’m 30, and my sister is 20. I’m at that age where I don’t really meet a lot of new people anymore, so my friends list has been very stagnant. I really just keep a Facebook profile just to let the occasional old friend/family contact me or find me. My sister and her friends look at Facebook and think it’s something old people use. For her everything is Snapchat.

I keep hearing that my age group don't use Facebook but this clashas with the multiple relentless group chats and the dozens of notifications from groups that I engage with every day. On the other hand, I post things about myself about once a year, which could make someone on my friends list think I never log on. I wonder if this shift from social network to content aggregation and chat is a significant reason for this perception.

I love how many people are acting like their own personal experiences and gripes are highly representative of some large segment of the userbase. Frankly, I don't think disgruntled HN users are their core demographic.

I'm also 30 and registered in 2005. Lots of my friends post frequently. Curating by hiding people I don't want to see takes a negligible amount of time and effort. I've barely even noticed the marketplace. The idea that 30 is "that age" where you don't meet many new people is bizzare to me. I regularly make new friends and the standard way of exchanging contact info is FB.

Do you have wife and kids? or maybe you are single? I think you are not representative for your demographic. I agree with OP here, it matches my experience and experience of most of my friends and their friends.

I am single, and very social. My point, though, is that you can't really determine what is representative from your own anecdotal experience, as real as it feels to you.

Even adding the experience of a dozen HN users (and discounting the ones that disagree) still represents a small and very biased sample. And have you honestly gathered that much information about the experience and usage of your friends' friends? Or is it possible you are applying a combination of projection and confirmation bias? Also, the news cycle is currently mostly negative about FB, so it's popular to be bashing it, but many of those people continue to use it daily anyway.

I just think there is a very common pattern here on HN of people acting like "this product/service doesn't really work for me, therefore it is shit/out of touch/etc," when there are likely many people who do actually get value out of using it.

While arguably anecdotal, I see pretty much what you do. Nobody is posting to Facebook regularly any more. I can pretty much browse my entire news feed in 10 minutes once every two weeks.

What I believe keeps people on Facebook is Messenger. Even people who never post on Facebook is available via Messenger and given that Facebook makes it pretty easy to find people, it's slowly devolving to a "better phonebook".

The most powerful feature for me at the moment is "On This Day" - highlighting to me how my engagement there has changed, and how it was (not to sound too old) better in the old days.

Luckily I'm quite "friend light" on there, but most of my social interaction has moved to WhatsApp (including groups for nights out/sharing photos, organising, and engaging with different people - all of the things I used FB for). Guessing one of the main reasons they bought them.

I've been a Facebook user for, oh, almost 14 years now, and adding all those users didn't make the product better for me. But the newsfeed changes mentioned did make it worse. (And maybe those billion people would have liked it better the way it was in 2007.)

I'm skeptical that tweaking newsfeed weights will make the people I care about start posting regularly again. I doubt the evaporative cooling is reversable.

> Disclosure: I worked there for 8.5 years, including writing Facebook Chat.

In my book this is equivalent to saying you worked for Philip Morris for 8.5 years and worked on campaigns to bring in new smokers.

Your book is poorly written: even accepting your premise, I didn’t work on the growth team.

I think it's respectable that you gave a disclaimer that you worked there in a thread about Facebook's use value. It's a little unlikely that doing so wouldn't result in an accusation of bias, too. It certainly should not be the basis for an ad hominem against your response. So it brings me to, why mention it?

Not a disclaimer, but a disclosure :)

The reason I mentioned it was because it was rather relevant to my having the incentive to remember the timelines of FB launching various features almost a decade ago.

Facebook cheated the numbers, so to speak. In every poor SEA country is a Facebook plan, or plan with x data + free Facebook. Stop acting like it was organic growth, it really wasn't and we both know that.

Where can I read more about this?

I'm not from SE Asia, but from Romania. This kind of thing happens everywhere:

https://www.vodafone.ro/shop/abonamente-de-date#tab-1

-> "Detalii abonament"

-> Social Pass: [...] (Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp, Pinterest, Twitter, Viber)

It's widespread around the world, except for the US, until recently.

Ah I had never read an article about it, just saw the phone plans and talked to folks when I was there. Minimum googling brought me here - https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/333313/milliions-of-face...

Also available in SA. You have to share your facebook data with the mobile company though.