The Facebook Era Is Over
linkedin.com
linkedin.com
What used to be a place to hang out, share photos of last night's party, gossip, brag, etc.. is now a mind numbing scrolling experience.
It's becoming increasingly difficult to tell it apart from reddit.
Assuming kids are the primary driver of content on fb, then with their absence should come a drop in value from checking into fb daily (this is occurring to me, today. I’m not sure if its due to more aggressive advertising or loss of usage, but my feed is like 50% ads atm, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t true five years ago).
If theres a lack of people posting content on fb, then you’ll naturally feel no incentive to post (the social media feedback loop, in reverse). Eventually, the feed becomes useless, and all thats left is the messenger app driving value to fb
And of course, in social media, the adults follow the kids. If the kids are running around on a different app, then those who wish to stay in contact will slowly move to it as well. And those who wish to stay in contact with both and so on.
Social media is all about feedback loops, and the young are the primary fuel for it. FB will struggle to survive in its current form if it doesn’t have the next generation.
And social media doesn’t have the kind of lock-in to claim a current population gaurantees a future population. You can have yik-yak and fb simultaneously. If half your audience is on yik-yak and the other on fb (eg friends on yak, family still on fb), you might cross-post. But dangerously for fb, you’re not going to cross-post to fb if yik-yak is your primary, and your audience has yik-yak as their primary too.
Gina Bianchini is the founder and CEO of Mighty Networks, a software-as-a-service company for brands and businesses that bring people together via classes, events, content, and community, all in one place. Before Mighty Networks, she founded Ning, a pioneering social platform for creating your own social networks, in 2004.
> Ning
This takes me back 10 years when I would read pmarca's blog religiously.
Would definitely be a complicated legal maneuver, but hey, then we would have Muzeta.
When they did that I saw that Facebook was becoming less and less useful to me. When I looked around at my close friends and family; almost all were in a few really active, really niche groups and getting most of their Facebook experience there. But Facebook has no interest in being the next-generation phpBB. I'm assuming this is the beginning of the end; no adapt-or-die mentality since they can just acqui-hire now.