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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

I have teenagers and college-age kids and I'm not surprised in the least. They openly consider Facebook to be a platform for old people.

They seem to have moved to more of a distributed social media system. That is, they don't seem to have a central place where they communicate with friends. They seem to move between texts, facetime, tumblr, instagram, phone calls (!), etc. in a fluid manner. Anything except for Facebook (which has a negative stigma these days). They don't seem to be tied down to any one platform anymore.

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I don't think there's any sort of "stigma." There's just the fact that, since "old people" are on Facebook—and that likely includes your parents and other relatives—they all expect you to add them as a Facebook friend. At which point you won't be able to be yourself on Facebook any more, because they can observe any of your "broadcast" activity.

The nice thing about the other platforms isn't that they don't have "old people" on them. It's specifically that your parents and relatives won't even think to add you on, say, Snapchat.

Also note that the apps that teens mostly do interact with parents through now, consist mostly of group-chat apps like Messenger or WeChat, where there is an explicit separation of social contexts (the groups you're chatting with), such that you don't need to worry about your relatives seeing anything as long as you don't put it in your family group.

I think this is the biggest factor. Nobody wants their family to be snooping on their every action, especially if it is a long distance family member that you normally only see a few times a year at best or someone you live with every day. With close friends you have a field of similar interests you can discuss, with total internet strangers you can say or do anything and if people don't like it then nothing happens, but with family members and parents it is a field of potential landmines for tons of kids where everything they say and post needs to be catered to not upset those who have power over their lives.

I don't know. Recently I was at an event where an older teen was giving a speech where he mentioned some social media platform and then explained, "That's like Facebook for you old people". That got quite a laugh, but in my experience there really is a stigma among young people that Facebook is only for old people.

Right, but there is no stigma against Facebook, the stigma is against "old people" and wherever they happen to be.

That isn't what I'm saying. When I hear teens and college students talking bad about Facebook, they aren't mentioning old people (though that probably is the root cause), they are saying Facebook by name. They are saying "Facebook sucks" not "Old people suck, old people use Facebook, ergo I am declining from using Facebook for now until I too am an old person".

It sucks because you can't freely post anything there, without people (family / coworkers) judging you. I don't want to broadcast to that group of people. If I need to talk to them it's personal or in small groups, so that's done in instant messengers.

The only people I would like to broadcast to are close friends or strangers on the internet.

I don't have that many close friends, so a bigger IM group is enough for that. (I guess Instagram might work if you have lots of "close" friends.)

That leaves only my need to anonymously talk to the internet. So Twitter, reddit, personal blogs?

The moment old people hop on Instagram, expect it to die quickly.

Knowing that my 2-year-old son will very likely not even consider participating in Facebook (when he gets to that age) is pretty refreshing. It gives me hope that in the time between now and then, we'll be able to figure out how to communicate effectively in the distributed internet age. In the same vein, it worries me because it's totally plausible to think that the problems of today will be dwarfed by the problems of my son's age.

From my perspective, the very best action that I can take, in order to limit his vulnerability later on in life, is to just start educating him on how to act appropriately online. But I can only base that education on the view that I've built up of these gargantuan and ever-multiplying systems of manipulation, which leads back to my main worry: I know that there will come a time when I can no longer keep my view of these systems up-to-date, and by extension, help to keep my son educated about his and my own vulnerabilities to them. I find myself worrying a lot about his future these days...

He's growing up in a future that will be better than today by almost any measure.

The news just like to report bad events more and it biases our view.

'Enlightenment Now' by Pinker really explains it - we shouldn't be so pessimistic, as Obama said if you could choose any time up until now in which to exist (without being able to pick the conditions of your birth) you would choose today.

He'll probably be plugging into a neural interface that broadcasts his literal stream of consciousness for the world to see.

I’ve noticed that most young people don’t use Facebook until they graduate from college, become an adult and move away from home and want to keep in touch with people. Why use Facebook when your friendship circle is people you see every day?

Maybe, but at least my college-age kids have friends that are all over the country (including back here in their home state) and they don't use Facebook to keep in touch with them.

Being "brand loyal" in this regard doesn't make a lot of sense anyway. It's just a tool. You use whatever gets the job done at the moment.

> They seem to move between texts, facetime, tumblr, instagram, phone calls (!), etc. in a fluid manner.

Aah. Just like how we moved from text, the mall, AIM, Yahoo!, CokeMusic/Habbohotel, MySpace, and phone calls (!), etc. in a fluid manner.

everything changes, and yet nothing changes

People always complain about younger people not getting it, but to me this sounds like a new generation of internet users actively self-regulating their social media use.

Nah, they are just using different apps.

I’m in my twenties and that’s how my close friends and I use them... just fluidly communicate through all of them

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