It doesn't matter what the outcome is of the 2020 election season, or what Facebook does during it. They will be blamed for it.
Buying Instagram and Whatsapp was farsighted, Facebook the company can cruise for awhile on those properties. The main site is bound to fall out of fashion, and soon.
Can't be soon enough for my taste.
To be honest I think it's pretty terrible as a group platform. No proper discussion threads and it's hard to find stuff. But people don't have to pay to host a website/forum and there's virtually no barrier to join since most people have an account on facebook.com.
The only reason I still use facebook is for these groups.
2) You make the assumption that the school does not have a private / protected group that is used for verifying group members and protecting content from non-members.
As you said the irony is that it is worse in almost every way except sign up friction. The content isn't even being spidered in any way by Google or the like so discovering the content in these groups later is also nigh impossible.
Just a travesty.
This is huge too. It's so hard to archive the data on these closed platforms - especially if you need an account ot view the data. There's a massive loss of knowledge when these platforms inevitably shutter.
Uhhh, that already happened many years ago. Talk to anyone under 30, and Facebook is VERY out of style/out-of-date. They will most likely laugh at you or think you're being ironic if you were to bring up "hanging out on Facebook" or anything like that.
As of July 2019, 13 - 24 year olds make up 31.9% of Facebook's overall userbase. Another 32% make up the 25-34 age range.
Compare that to some of the other platform's 13-24 demographic:
Twitter 39%, Instagram 37.3%, Snap Chat 58.5%
While Snapchat has a slightly younger audience, they also only have 210 million active users, a 13% increase from previous year. Facebook on the other hand has 2.45 billion active users, a 9% increase from previous year.
And at that, there are still many people in the US who mainly use Facebook, especially Gen X and older, so I always question if there are as many people on this train as it often seems like.
As for "Gen X and older", when your youngest customers are pushing 40, that's the kiss of death.
I agree with all sibling comments that claim that Facebook is already out of fashion; I'm suggesting that this will get worse, rapidly.
Suggesting? Ok, hoping.
Sadly this isn't true at all. They've been posting record profits and growth all year. Just yesterday they posted their third quarter results, where their sales rose 29% and user base increased by 35 million, including by 3 million in North America [0], despite negative news surrounding them all year. Most people simply don't care, or care enough to actually delete their accounts over these things.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-30/facebook-...
Zuck's a smart guy, and there are other smart people working there; I'm sure they realize this, but they can't actually say it to the AOCs of the world for fear of freaking out shareholders and advertisers.