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Comment by msoad | Hacker News Reader

I think this is an "old people's thinking" perspective. Younger generation are way more open about their dating life than us. They openly talk about their dating life at work or friends group. They don't mind getting matched with a coworker or classmate.

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How old is old? I'm 28 and would not use this because I don't trust Facebook.

My little brother is 16 and I know he won't use this because no one he knows uses Facebook. I don't even think he has an account. They're all on Snapchat and IG. I was talking to him about this last week. They all think of Facebook as for a different generation. As stale.

I feel similarly and know a lot of my circle does too. Except for events and sometimes messaging, nothing happens there.

> My little brother is 16 and I know he won't use this because no one he knows uses Facebook.

Is this really true? I heard from someone at Facebook that while teenagers say they don't use Facebook, if you look at the stats, they definitely do.

Very true in my experience. While many (maybe 60%) still have an account, they basically do nothing with it. If you're a Facebook employee you may see that number of signups number and go "yeah they are using it" but the amount of use is VERY different from what I can tell.

Generally I'm very in agreement with the parent: The older won't want to use Facebook for dating, the younger would never look to Facebook.

That said, I'd go even farther and say the original claims are offbase here. First, teens absolutely have multiple personas they show, but they tend to be privacy circle based in that there are maybe 3/4 levels and they share increasingly more/less with each level.

Not only that, Facebook knows this. Instagram launched "close friends" explicitly because everyone was using "sinstas" and "finstas" to post to a smaller subset of people.

To me, all of this says that Facebook is probably targeting an older market of maybe say Match/OkCupid users who aren't used to a type of Hinge style interface. Anyone I know on Hinge would laugh you out of the room if you asked them to switch to Facebook dating.

> number of signups

Definitely not. DAU and MAU are what they base their user numbers and big milestones on

Wrong verbiage, point still stands. Probably a decent number of MAU on Facebook in that range but logging in and checking one thing twice a month is a big usage difference from daily or semi daily sessions that last for minutes, not seconds.

"Active" there means opened, not actively consumed. I'm "active" almost every day, but the majority of my sessions are below 20 seconds. They mean nothing to Facebook, and they mean nothing to me. Facebook lost the value it had for me.

Another anecdata, but our kid's babysitter (also 16) doesn't have a Facebook account, and neither does her twin sister. They both have IG and Snap though. She said the same thing: "Facebook is for old people".

Also my 20 year old cousin didn't have a FB account until he went to college and was forced to get one to join some local FB groups. But he only uses it for that. Otherwise he's on IG and Snap.

They use FB Messenger for sure. From what I hear it's still popular among younger cohorts.

and still fb grows and grows and grows, be it instagram, whatsup or the blue app, facebook doesn't seem affected by opinions of hacker news people. in many countries it is basically the internet wether you like it or not.

My comment was specifically about Facebook.com and acknowledged that younger users are moving to instagram. I didn't say younger people are leaving all Facebook-owned subsidiaries.

Similarly, I referenced my circle of friends—who are not hacker news people—as not using Facebook either.

I think in a marketers mind, you are from the outbound Millenial generation rather than the current 'young' Generation Z (or Zoomers as they're called in the Wojak meme world).

Which is why I shared the opinions and behaviours of my brother, who is 16. He's that next generation.

> Younger generation are way more open about their dating life than us. They openly talk about their dating life at work or friends group. They don't mind getting matched with a coworker or classmate.

Being young and LGBTQIA+, I can assure you that I never discuss my dating life at work or with my relatives (none of whom know I'm gay, but thankfully, I don't live with them anymore).

Until there are strict federal anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQIA+ folks, I'll never trust an employer to know that side of my life.

OkCupid's "hide my profile from straight people" feature is fantastic for exactly this reason. Pity the site's fallen out of favor, it's the one dating app I felt comfortable with.

It's not a generational thing, it's called being in your 20's. Those currently well past their 20's talked openly about their dating when they were 20, too.

Do people under 25 even use Facebook? I mean... most of them see it as another LinkedIn for sharing Granny Photos.

I was on Bumble a little late at night... kinda mindlessly swiping... girl looked cute... little familiar... swipe... Instantly realize as it chimes with "boom" that it was my boss. Nope nope nope, delete the whole thing and never return. They all have a problem around showing you co-workers, and it'd be so easy to just be like, "Cool, never show me people who work here, or never show me people I know on Facebook / LinkedIn." Wouldn't catch everything, but it'd catch a lot of it. Ha, and... the bigger problem I guess is that I don't really trust any of these sites to link them to Facebook or LinkedIn. They all seem fundamentally scammy and spammy.

But... I've had some fun with Bumble. Just... yeah I don't even trust it with my Spotify playlists.

>They don't mind getting matched with a coworker or classmate.

they don't mind now. One of the big problems with digital transparency is that this information will be hard to get rid off if they ever wish to in the future.

Is openness about past relationships in the workplace still a good idea if it leads to some sort of office intrigue a year or two down the line?

That is a HUGE generalization. You may be open about your dating life, but that doesn't mean everyone is nor do they want it to be associated with their professional life. True in point, say you are into a kink, do you want everyone in your social circle knowing about it?

Yeah it's a load of assumptions, I'm chalking it more up to a "socially anxious person's thinking" than "old" person's thinking. For many people I think being able to smoothly integrate their existing social life into a dating app is a godsend.

Right, I mean secret crush seems like a real improvement over the status quo in its ability to discover potential relationships without risking making existing friendships awkward.

You would think. Those of us who have been wasting time on the internet for long enough remember the Secret Crush Meme from LiveJournal [1], which worked just like this. It was great up until someone realised they could just say they had a crush on everyone they knew to get a list of who had crushes on them, without any genuine reciprocity of the crush.

If you could figure out a way to make it somehow costly to falsely say you have a crush on someone, this might work, but until then, this is game-theoretically wince-inducing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_matching

Generally speaking for 99%+ of people, You shouldn’t have more than a few crushes at once. And they shouldn’t change that often. That would’ve curbed that a lot without restricting many people

Maybe just limit the number of people you can have a crush on at once.

Yes, but also, young people also use may different digital personas "just like us".

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/10/20/d...

Some degree of separation/anonymity is still something people want even if they are more transparent about the outcomes.

I didn't think young people used the Facebook brand anymore? If all the stories that have been published about that are to be believed.

They don't. They should have called this Instagram Dating, but Zuck doesn't want to admit that the Facebook brand is no longer "cool"

I think dating being "cool" is dangerous territory, and probably why Facebook dating didn't exist until now.

That's Tinder territory, and tinder doesn't have a great reputation as an app that's "healthy".

I have plenty of people in my extended friend group who are in their mid to late 20s, and most of them are still quite active on FB.

Nobody thinks it's cool or fun anymore, of course. But it's still the go-to spot for sharing life events, family news, anything you want to brag about really. Or any vacation pictures that you'd like grandma and grandpa to see.

IG is still image driven, so it's not a platform you can easily use for relaying text based information to your social network.

Mid to late 20s are the old people everyone's talking. That age group was in high school when Facebook was getting popular

Young is like current high school and college

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Late 20s is def old (I can personally attest to that). Mid 20s might be too? In the context of what’s being discussed here.

It makes me wonder how sensitive generation Z is to privacy concerns. It would seem to me that there would be vast differences between that generation and say, Gen X and Boomers (who for a long time refused to share credit card numbers with e-commerce sites). Perhaps the true success of this feature will become apparent with the coming Generation(s), assuming Facebook manages to maintain its position as the premier social networking site.

Boomers I know can't even conceive of how privacy has been eroded. Sure they won't share cc numbers with ecommerce sites but they have no problem giving up every detail of their life to facebook.

I think they will be even more sensitive to privacy and understand better about wearing a different mask for different groups. They grew up with this understanding that FB was where their parents are, thus were conscious about curating their image. Likewise, I'm sure they will continue to treat other social media with the same scrutiny.

People in their 30s grew up in an era where FB allowed only college students. And they were old enough not to really care once it became open to their parents.

I would say they are a lot more sensitive. They witnessed all the millennials post anything and everything on social media at first with little regard future consequences. I think there is a much better cognitive understanding that anything you post is permanent versus in 2007.

> They openly talk about their dating life at work or friends group. They don't mind getting matched with a coworker or classmate. reply

Coworkers and classmates aren't the problem. For young people, facebook is where mom and grandma is. Not that you're gonna match with them, but just sharing the name is a turn off.

Counterpoint: Finsta accounts.

Personal observation: It depends on the environment and not the age range.

...but maybe: until they get older...

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