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Comment by TuringNYC | Hacker News Reader

I'm 39, so out of touch with many people and especially out of touch with younger generations. I recently spoke to a college counselor who has tremendous interaction with students across all mediums.

He is pretty balanced in his views. He swears, Facebook interactions are an empty shell of what it was in 2008 and that it is nearly completely irrelevant for the current and incoming generation of students (not including Instagram and WhatsApp, which are FB properties, and very much hot.) He bases this on interactions he has with almost a thousand+ students. For me, this is difficult to fathom, Facebook to me is like General Electric, a bastion of day to day life.

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I'm in my mid-30s and I agree based on what I've seen. Facebook is a ghost town now. And a lot of people I know that have both Instagram and FB are only using Instagram now. I think it's clear that people are more careful about what and who they share with, which is why the ephemeral systems (snapchat, instagram stories) are gaining in popularity. Apple has improved the photo sharing stuff in iCloud lately too, so I'm seeing more and more people I know close using the (private) photo sharing system.

A lot of people don't want their daily musings to be on the "permanent record," regardless of age group, and Facebook is almost a victim of its own success -- it's too good at connecting people by loose ties and encouraging this problem. And then it's not long before you have a huge list of Facebook "friends" which include actual friends, family, extended family, bosses, ex-bosses, co-workers, etc. Now, imagine putting all of those groups of people at your dinner table and try to think of topics you'd be open to discussing among all of those disparate groups.

Yeah - ephemerality is going to be the word of the century. We forget, and since this is such a natural thing to us, we did not immediately realise how machines that cannot forget was very much problematic. We get that now.

There are a bunch of people trying to make apps that forget over time, eventually, one of them will figure out a way to mass market. Heck, I spent last Saturday at the top of HN with one of those that I made, Aether. [0] Prior HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370208

[0] https://getaether.net

>And then it's not long before you have a huge list of Facebook "friends" which include actual friends, family, extended family, bosses, ex-bosses, co-workers, etc. Now, imagine putting all of those groups of people at your dinner table and try to think of topics you'd be open to discussing among all of those disparate groups.

This is what it comes down to, isn't it? That's all of facebook's problems.

The success of Instagram and WhatsApp comes from them being less connected, that's their core feature. I don't even mind facebook owning them. I like that the big trend is moving away from documenting every minute of your life in an online repository. Instagram is its own, surreal thing and WhatsApp is basically texting.

> And then it's not long before you have a huge list of Facebook "friends" which include actual friends, family, extended family, bosses, ex-bosses, co-workers, etc. Now, imagine putting all of those groups of people at your dinner table and try to think of topics you'd be open to discussing among all of those disparate groups.

Incidentally, this was exactly one of the problems that Google+ was trying to solve with its "Circles" concept.

I'm only a few years younger than you, and I also use Facebook a lot. But I only use groups, events and messenger.

It's impressive how bad their UI is for my use, though. It seems like Facebook is trying to be useless for important things, like community groups where you actually have to coordinate things, or events you actually want to show up to. Instead they're working really hard to always shove uninteresting algorithmic suggestions in your face at every turn.

I know the feeling, even though I haven't been on Facebook in years. My 18 year-old met his current girlfriend because she saw him in a parking lot and asked what his Snapchat name was. I don't think he even bothers with FB any more.

The interesting thing to me was that this girl simply expected that he would be on Snapchat. I guess that's where everyone is these days.

Car parks, quality dating grounds!

For many Americans, large parking lots/being carbound are facts of life. Half the land area in non-residential zoned properties is required to be parking in many municipalities, which helps to make these areas unfriendly to commute in for any mode, pushing buildings significantly further apart for little benefit.

Cars have been the least worst way to get around these hostile environments for a long time, though I think eBikes are starting to become more popular as they can cut around the horrifyingly bad traffic in many of these places, while not requiring one to join the lycra crowd.

Why would you need to join the lycra crowd without an eBike?

I hope they take off, though. Everything I hear about US traffic sounds hopelessly hostile.

> Why would you need to join the lycra crowd without an eBike?

Because you get very sweaty trying to ride a bike any distance in 90 degree weather.

What a strange, cynical comment.

Car parks are a mere part of greater reality - what sense of quality does it imbue that is more or less worthy than any other where perchancing on another is concerned?

that probably depends a lot on the time of day

Snapchat is out of fashion already. It's Tik-tok/Musically that's the current fad (or trendy) social media app.

Tiktok bought their way to their current position. I bet most of the "best tiktoks" accounts on Facebook/Twitter are owned by themselves. In a matter of months they will die off naturally.

It does seem very artificial. A very boring/obnoxious app that went from nothing to being pushed at me from everywhere.

Tik Tok is Chinese, though. Is there a US version out?

Yes. Facebook just launched one :)

I'm in my early-40s and when I first met my wife in college, we exchanged AIM handles :)

> I'm 39 ... Facebook to me is like General Electric, a bastion of day to day life

I'm in my early 50s. None of social media made any sense to me, and I never engaged in any of it. Email seemed (and still seems) to be perfectly adequate for keeping in touch with friends and family.

Mid 30s here. For me, fb is an easy way to connect with new people. Particularly useful when traveling or in a new school. You search by name, confirm the photo is of the person you're looking for, and bam, they're in your address book.

The rest of it - constant updates about mundane things - in other words, the whole news feed - can be ignored.

For another anecdote: I’m a college student, and essentially the only reason that anyone I know uses Facebook is for groups that date to a while ago, groups set up by older people, and Messenger.

I can confirm this is true with my son (24), his GF, and most of their peers. Facebook interaction is limited to occasional sharing of photos with older relatives, usually via Instagram.

This is mostly true of my younger employees, who are a similar age as my son.

Definitely makes me wonder if Instagram got rid of the crosspost-to-facebook feature, how much more dead would Facebook appear? Most of the people around my age group (20-30s) are largely on Instagram and then some cross-post to Facebook for the "old people."

General Electric is not doing so well either.

GE is "reinventing" just like IBM. They will probably be dying 10 years from now...

The same way people have been predicting the death of IBM, Microsoft etc. for past couple decades?

Yep, same tangent/thinking. Reality is IBM & Microsoft have enough contracts and political capital to ensure their continued existence.

Microsoft still exists as a business, but what about mindshare? It's not event part of FANG

They don't merely exist as a business. They have a higher market cap than 4/4 FANG companies.

GE stock has plummeted by nearly 80% in the last two years.

So are you saying that it's going the way of MySpace?

A big difference is that Facebook has gained a large number of older users. For that reason, Facebook is going to have a much slower decline.

I'm 25, very few of my contemporaries share on Facebook anymore. It's a shadow of three years ago. My mom and her brother will post pretty often. Self promoters fill up my feed. I can infinite scroll for a while without seeing anything from friends I spend time with offline. Facebook Messenger, Facebook Events, Instagram are still ubiquitous.

I'm not young and Facebook is heavily used in hobbies with various groups chiming and thriving. Messenger is also heavily used.

If anything it's "what my friends had for dinner" that's dying and that's good thing.

I’d second that observations just based on how my 8 younger siblings use it. They’re 13-28 and all barely touch Facebook, though some are very active on Instagram. To them, me using Facebook is what old people like me do.

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