Daily Facebook users drops for the first time in US | Hacker News Reader

Daily Facebook users drops for the first time in US

cnbc.com

49 pointsosrec48 comments

Anecdotally, I haven't been on Facebook in months. In spite of that, I wouldn't be surprised if my account is counted somehow in the daily usage for some of those days just because of the extent to which their services have extended throughout many other websites. I've joined, canceled, then joined again, but never really used the site to any large extent. It is a very unnatural (yet at times necessary) way to communicate with people.

The decline of Facebook is in no way the decline of technology-enhanced socializing. People will hopefully just find other more natural ways to do so. My hope is on decentralized apps that allow people to own and control access to their own data.

I moved my account to Ireland (in a somewhat improperly researched attempt to force them to delete my data due to Ireland’s data retention laws), waited a month or so then scripted deletion of all the images and posts on the account, changed all details and disconnected it from everyone and everything, then waited a week or so ‘deleted’ the account.

That was about 5 years ago (and it was a great life decision IMO) but - people say they still see me popping up on their feeds with my (fake) birthdate, memories (which I was untagged or had privacy settings disallowing me to be tagged in) and other weird things.

I’ve been careful not to mistakenly log in once which I fear my bring the account back from the dead and I’ve also kept an eye to make sure there’s no identity theft / fake account going on.

I don’t trust that company one bit, I’m glad I left but I don’t for one second believe my data’s actually been deleted.

While I truly hope something open source and decentralised gets momentum, I still truly love twitter - I get a lot out of it and I’ve met and networked with a lot of great people through Twitter.

I see many people clamoring for the death of Facebook but don't they own many of the up-and-coming social networks anyway? If people are ditching Facebook for Instagram you might as well switch to cocaine to stop your crack addiction.

Chats. Most of my friends and me have most of our social interactions in private chat groups, with silly pictures and pictures, personal stories and drama happening all the time.

I've tried most of the big ones (except WeChat and other chinese apps, where I don't have a single peer), and I bet on Telegram. They're moving forward with incredible speed, and from all the competitors, they seem to understand their audience and usage patterns best.

Also, it's a platform that's already actively used for commerce. Just like with Bitcoin and darknet, drugs are the primary growth factor (I don't know of any other transactions cryptocurrency is actually used as currency). I expect that after they release their own currency, it will take over all existing crypto from sheer convenience.

Only reason I use FB is chat as well, simply because friends and family still use it.

Only reason I still have a FB account and not simply a messenger account is spotify is tied to it and I can't unlink from FB as the login source..

Messenger-with-a-phone-number-account is just a Facebook account in disguise. They just don't show you the login credentials. Under circumstances, you can obtain the login token to log in the web interface and it would behave just like a Facebook account with some restrictions.

It might look different to most people, but given one still gets a "restricted" Facebook account created behind the scenes with a messenger account, I don't think people understand the privacy implications of that. See my other top-level post for my take on the issue.

I wonder how monetization of users compares for those alternative platforms though. Instagram seems to be okay, since you can insert ads and probably deduce user profiles for targeted ads pretty easily from who they follow. Even image analysis for marketable things in the pictures to show relevant ads for is surely possible.

WhatsApp on the other hand seems much harder to make money with.

In both cases though, I guess the good thing is that it's a step back from the all-encompassing and creepy global social network Zuckerberg had in mind for Facebook. Instagram and WhatsApp seem more moderate in scope in comparison.

I wonder when the next "facebook" will come along. I predict people will abandon facebook just as they did with myspace, as soon as something new, cleaner and with less spam will be available to migrate to. Of course after some period of time the new service will also end up filled with memes and ads and the cycle will continue once again.

Isn't it more a case of facebook's audience fragmentation towards snapchat, whatsapp, etc?

Perhaps, but snapchat and whatsapp are more specialized services eg. with focus on stories or messaging whereas facebook offers the whole package so to speak. That's something people will always value I think.

The MySpace comparison is a little tired. MySpace felt big, but even at its peak, only had 75m MAUs. Even Pinterest today has over twice as many, between 175m and 200m. Facebook is at 2.2bn, and its DAILY active users are 184m. Extrapolated over a month, this blip accounts for half of MySpace's MAUs. There's some pretty serious network effects there, to the point where building a slightly better mousetrap is not going to work.

2009 was also a loooong time ago: the App Store had just been born, people were just starting to use Twitter, the Android platform was just getting going and 25% of all PC sales in Europe were netbooks. MySpace was barely even accessed by people using smartphones.

Network effect isn't that relevant since people don't actually have a ton invested in Facebook beyond just the social graph and that social connectivity. It is thus rife for a preference cascade if it turns out a competitor hits all the right buttons with some other compelling reason to switch. All it really takes is for a competitor to be actually superior on the merits (so, not something like google plus that was mostly the same and in many ways actually worse) and then a critical mass to start forming there. Once the "well, I guess I should have an account over there just to keep up with my friends X, Y, and Z every once in a while" cycle starts and that becomes common then a preference cascade becomes possible. Nobody really understands social media very well today, which is odd considering its age, so nobody is really hitting all the right notes with an offering but the potential exists.

The social graph and the social connectivity is huge. You're asking people - 2.2bn of them - to incur the overhead of another platform to check, which they're not going to do unless all of their friends are already on that platform in the first place.

And those people (and the advertisers that pay for the servers, the hosting) are not going to turn up unless ... well you get the picture. And the reason why advertisers pay to advertise on Facebook is because of the strength of their social graph in identifying people's preferences and profile of device usage, which Facebook has because they already have all the users.

Facebook is already 'good enough' in so many areas, and for the areas that the core FB app is not so strong (visuals, low friction messaging, short form communication), guess what, Facebook has already bought a competitor.

I think you are missing the point, you don't need to get 2.2 bn to migrate to your new platform, just "strongly connected components". This is why for example Discord or Slack can exist even though they have some overlap with Facebooks functionality (mostly messenger and groups). I don't really know what the value of facebook is to most people, I've heard that it has groups for almost everything, but most other features I would guess are easily "unbundled" as Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat are evidence for.

Facebook's value is in the 2.2bn figure - its value to advertisers is in its identity graph. To displace FB as FB did MySpace, you need some way of replicating that.

The value of that identity graph to advertisers (which is how you keep the lights on) works in exponents - if you have 10% of Facebook's graph, you don't have something that is 10% as useful, you have something that is 1% as useful.

You can get some of the way by unbundling FB's core feature set and innovating on a particular feature, but your upper limit for that is probably a product that is used by hundreds of millions of people, not a Facebook killer.

Slack's moat is that it is socially unacceptable to use Facebook at work, which is a nice one to have but sets up an entirely new set of challenges trying to get people to adopt it outside. Discord, similarly is almost entirely limited to gaming. Number of PC Gamers worldwide total tops out at about 800m.

WeChat is a special case: Owned by Tencent, operates in a market that Facebook is completely locked out of, and operating on a completely different set of cultural assumptions.

By your logic facebook shouldn't be popular since it was too difficult to start.

The thing is, you absolutely 100% don't need a competitor to spring forth fully formed with 2.2 billion active users on day 1 as Athena leaping out of the head of Zeus. You just need enough of a community to exist for it to be viable on its own (and there are already many not-facebook killers who are at that level). What's missing right now is a compelling experience that fully competes with facebook. Everything else out there is either in a smaller niche such as instagram (which is owned by facebook) or snapchat or what-have-you or doesn't cover all of facebook's core featureset or is a worse experience or is run incompetently in some way (/cough/twitter/cough/).

The way that these switchovers happen is early adopters start doing lots of cool shit somewhere else and then a subset of people start following them there. You act like it's an onerous thing to do so, but this is meat and potatoes run of the mill shit for digital natives in the 21st century. Almost no one on planet Earth has a single social media account. If you have one you likely have several. Facebook, instagram, tumblr, twitter, snapchat, slack, discord, whatsapp, groupme, hangouts, AND SO ON. You will use whatever means is most convenient for keeping up with your friends, that's just the nature of life today. If your best friend starts using "something else" a lot then you are going to be incentivized to check it out. If you're young you are even more likely to invest the time and energy in exploring new platforms, if you're older it may take more effort but it's just a matter of how much. If some other platform is truly more compelling than facebook then people are going to engage with each other more there, which will encourage more people to check it out, more people to adopt it as one of their primary modes of keeping in touch, and a preference cascade to start.

What all this means is that facebook's marketshare of the social media landscape is actually surprisingly tenuous. A truly superior competitor could unravel their entire market in a single year, perhaps. That may be unlikely (it's hard to say without specific examples) but it's the sort of thing that is well within the realm of possibility.

Remember, people thought that myspace, blogger, flickr, etc. all had nearly unassailable locks on their respective marketshares too, but those crumbled almost overnight. Given that a lot of people use facebook right now who are nevertheless very dissatisfied with the experience of using facebook I think the situation is ripe for a turnover.

> All it really takes is for a competitor to be actually superior on the merits

Yes, cause we all know that in tech, having a superior product guarantees success :)

On top of that, let's say you're right. The product has to be radically better, people won't move for 5-10-20% better.

> beyond just the social graph and that social connectivity

And Facebook Groups. That was one of Facebooks genius moves, there is so much local information locked-up in those silos out of sight of Google and other search engines. It is Facebook's treasure-trove that keeps people engaged, particularly for hyper-local news and interests not covered by the media. And no hosting costs, nor time spent on admin tasks.

I'm active on a locality-based special-interest forum that after a decade of slow growth has around 600 total members and about 20 posting-active. Anyone can come along and look at it, and sign-up if they like. The equivalent Facebook Group has 2,000+ members in just a couple of years, and no way for non-members to view it.

I think there is definitely a potential for such a competition. And people, such as diaspora and mastodon lately, have attempted so but failed. I have put some thoughts into it, and I think the reason diaspora failed is because they focused too much on federation and technology. The core issue of Facebook isn't that it is not federated. It is that it is too greedy, no one trusts it. I'd think if someone like Jimmy Wales created a non-profit social network with clear ethical guidelines, I'd be very much interested to join and donate to.

Trying to make something decentralized for the crazy cost of deployment difficulties seems like one unworthy tradeoff.

To "escape" Facebook, in 2017, I tried to maintain a Messenger account with a phone number but without a Facebook account. By accident, I discovered that the Messenger-with-a-phone-number thingie that they have is just a Facebook account that doesn't allow you to log in "traditionally." But if you manage to get the auth token to log in, it allows you to play with a lot of stuff. It allows you to rate places, edit places, see people's profiles, register for events invisibly. It doesn't allow you to interact and post status updates, but it is still very much a Facebook account behind the scenes.

If it entertains you, I have a draft here for you to see my 6 months journey working with fb security on that "bug" (disclaimer: it wasn't very fun or exciting... basically, I didn't qualify for their bounty program. They only give out rewards to bugs that could be used to get other people's personal info.)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSa-LjM5IzyTWJuD...

Edit: I have updated the link to the doc with the proof of concept video removed because the names weren't blurred. Bad taste on my end, my apologies.

Facebook has recently hit 2 billion total users. Given that we have somewhere around 7 billion people on the planet, this seems to be the unbeatable ceiling. Let's estimate generously that half of the world's population has access to internet. That gives us 3.5 billion people. Around 750 million of these people are Chinese - they don't, and can't use Facebook. This leaves us with 2,750,000 people - many of which won't be interested in using Facebook, or can't have an account for a multitude of reasons, such as being too young (let's say under 10), or too old (let's say over 75). Clearly there isn't much room for Facebook to grow now. If there's no room to grow, there is nowhere to go but down. It can be therefore predicted that, subtracting bots, the daily users will start dropping regularly very soon, and will keep on dropping as people move away from this platform due to its diminishing popularity, because of network effects.

For media what they measure their growth in is total time (attention) spent on the platform. Even with 2 billion people signed up being the growth ceiling in terms of number of people. We need to see whether they manage to increase (# people) * (average time spent on Facebook). That number still has a huge upward potential. Declining number of daily visitors is a sign that this growth is negative too though.

I don't think that messengers can really replace social media. I don't spend time on a messenger if I'm not messaging someone. Facebook is more about posting something you find interesting, and consuming what other people post (+ adds interspersed). This is a completely different market. Will something replace Facebook? Surely, at some point. But I don't think it will be messengers. It will be another service that makes people feel like they get more of the content they want from their friends.

Most of my feed now is friends liking or commenting on pages I have no interest in. If I could remove all that I might check it out more often. Or maybe I would discover none of my friends post anything anymore?

Most of the posts on my newsfeed are posted by random parents which have added me over the years. Facebook even sends me text messages and emails to “come back”. I get random notifications about some ‘friend’ I haven’t spoken too in 10 years posted something on Facebook...like that will bring me back to your platform.

I haven’t found a way to disable those alerts and notifications.

I’m happy with Instagram because it just serves a simple purpose.

You can disable these notifications by clicking the 3 dots next to them and then selecting "Hide notifications of this kind" or something like that. Granted they'll come up with new kinds of the same thing that will spam you again, but it works for me right now.

Who else should join ? Don't they have 99% market penetration in the US?

New people being born and becoming of age.

Ah, but younglings flock to the IM platform-de-jour instead of Facebook. Right now that's SnapChat and WhatsApp. Most 13 year olds have no interest in Facebook as it's considered uncool[1]. This attitude has been in place for a few years now. Couple that with more and more established users leaving the platform, and you start to see the decline that's being reported.

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[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/02...

I know a lot of people that created Facebook accounts for their kids.

I think social media is dead and Facebook a bubble for parents, fake-politican bots and old poeple.

Is this the beginning of the end or just natural stabilisation? I would guess the former; the platform is simply boring now.

Facebook has always been the next AOL. In comparison, you'll rarely hear someone say "I'm leaving Google search". Social nets vs Search and Search still wins. This is why there's still a large difference in value between them in terms of revenue, users and algorithmic technology.

I did leave Google search. I so did many others on HN.

Social nets are much more easily duplicated than algorithmic search.

So... .000005% of the population?

Change and growth must start somewhere. I've used DDG for years but only recently I started recommending it to everybody, and endorsing Firefox as well.

Same here, ditched Chrome for Firefox and Chromium, and Google Search for DDG. Altough I don't see how I could stop using Android, maps, youtube and gmail :-/

I'm in the exact same spot. Android can be ditched for LineageOS. Gmail is risky because of security; using anything else is a big gamble. Maps is also irreplaceable right now, but over time competitors will get better.

You should ditch Chromium as well.

> Maps is also irreplaceable right now, but over time competitors will get better.

The last company to pour significant resources into maps was Apple and they have essentially given up. If the most valuable company ever created cannot defeat Maps, nothing will. Including OSM. There was a story on here a few months ago called Google Maps’ Moat. Give it a read. Maps is not going anywhere.

I read that article back then, I just don't agree with it ^.

With the rise of self-driving cars, maps will become a non-issue. All the companies that nail self-driving cars, and there will be several, will over time have a maps that is better than Google's today.

^ I mean, I do agree it's a moat, it just had the unusual property that the path to bring it down is pretty clear.

if you were really wanting to move away from gmail, I'd recommend a paid-for service, like fastmail

My comment about security still applies. In fact, I think it was precisely fastmail that a while ago I read on HN someone complaining that someone else hacked them by calling customer support and kind of guessing some questions.

So... I don't care what the rest of the population is doing?

I am (trying to) leave Google search for Duck Duck Go. Many people I know are doing the same. Admittedly it is harder to leave Google search than Facebook.

What's keeping you? I switched my default search engine nearly a year ago and in large part I haven't really noticed. At first, occasionally I'd not find something I was looking for, and would switch to Google to see if I could find it. The number of times that I've found something on Google but not DDG in the past six months would be low single digits.

Ad cow is coming to an end.

Im using instagram instead...

Good

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