Facebook Campus
about.fb.com
about.fb.com
The strategy that Facebook has been pivoting towards is in favor of smaller community building, rather than the "mass market square" approach, which is why:
1) Groups have been more prominent and getting quite a bit of promotion
2) Messenger has gotten quite a bit of UX improvements
3) New features like "Rooms," which favor small / intimate video conversations
4) Investments in hardware experiences like Portal, which have been heavily marketed towards family communication thus far (successfully it seems, looking at their last revenue #'s.)
5) Facebook Workplace, which was a smart B2B play anyway, but also aligns with their "micro-community" approach
Zuck messaged this new pivot IIRC around the last US presidential election, but it may have started before that. Therefore I would expect to see more of these types of experiences:
"Facebook Campus" - "Facebook Workplace" - "Facebook [TBD]"
Think about people griping about work. You could do that in older online communities, but now that everyone knows everyone on Facebook, a gripe about work is probably going to be seen by your colleagues and potential employers and...
Basically, the concept of an online community that has boundaries away from your IRL (in real life) community is gone. (Or, everyone's mother and kids have Facebook accounts.)
Your argument is totally valid - we can make knives for cooking and they can be used for killing people as well. I just feel like its more like a poison laden dagger that's masquerading as a cooking knife when it comes to social media.
> The strategy that Facebook has been pivoting towards is in favor of smaller community building, rather than the "mass market square" approach, which is why:
It's great that people have the ability to form groups with like-minded people, that's how the Internet worked before Facebook, and it sounds like there's some reversion to that.
The fact that it can also be used by "fringe groups", is just another way of saying "I don't want normal people to have nice things because people I don't like also have those nice things", but the world has always worked that way (see: Nazis and the radio). Bad people have existed for forever, and it's up to the laws we make that protect life & liberty to ensure that their impact on the world is limited, not limiting our our communication tools and hope that by 2nd order effect we prevent the people we don't like from having a voice (which is itself pretty dystopian).
How confident are you that your measure of the two is acccurate?
"I don't think anybody in the world buys fish because I live in Montana and my kids hate it"
"According to a recent study by Edison Research, Facebook is hemorrhaging users in the US, losing about 15 million people since 2017. The largest drop is among teen users and millennials."
"As of February 2019, 62% of 12-34 year olds in the US log into Facebook. This is down from 79% in 2017, and represents about 11 million of of the overall decrease"
"Senior citizens in the US are the fastest growing group of Facebook users, nearly doubling in numbers between 2012 and 2019, a vast shift from the platform’s beginnings as a service for college students."
Hearing younger folks say the same thing first hand only validates the research and the numerous articles. All of the statistical data can be skewed and I imagine any small study (pew, edison) is going to have different results. So where does that leave me? We'll when you have backyard full of teenagers that are all well off with mobile devices and all of them tell you facebook is for boomers and talking to grandma, that tends to hold a little weight coupled with some of the statistical data. Interestingly enough we can find data that makes the opposite claim so what does one do when presented with competing data? They use the data they have which in this case is directly from a reputable demographic/source.
I can imagine that Facebook will be able to create a decent platform for young people if they only have to worry about adding features/promoting content that young people like.
I use Messenger with a group of friends because it seems to be a pretty reliable way of group texting between iOS and Android (text messages were coming in out of order) and we all have Facebook accounts.
We all use Facebook to plan group events. Things like birthday parties, vacations, and where we're all going to stay for weddings.
I'm in a few local Facebook groups for things like trail running and hiking. They're great for getting information about current conditions.
Facebook Marketplace has been better than Craigslist or Offerup since it's a little more likely to be a real person (or at least it's a little easier to tell if they are based on their profile.)
It' also nice that I don't need to have a dozen different accounts to do all this stuff.
I'm not a teenager, but all the teenagers I know use Instagram.
It's sort of like Reddit, but a little less crappy.
That said I don't really use it because I have a very bad memory of the company and the site, so the hurdle to ever opening it up is quite high.
But they made them worse with the new look. You can‘t see the number of new posts anymore so if you are in slow moving groups you have to click on them to check for new posts. So instead of checking FB several times a day to see if there is a significant count of new posts in one of my groups I switched to checking once a day and just looking into my favourite groups.
Bertolt Brecht, Parade of the Old New. (1939)
FB managed to buy IG and WhatsApp but they won't always be able to buy their competitor or copy them
i could see the argument that they spend less money than other demographics but not that it doesnt matter
The lifespan of any social network is effectively only one generation long. Which is long enough to make a lot of money, but not long enough to build a business that lasts a lifetime.
The community is the difference. Social bubbles on fb are now huge, and include people with wildly varying ideas for what they want to get out of social media. People naturally segregate different aspects of their social life in their real-world interactions, but that nuance is completely lost on fb.
I don't want to generalize too much from my own window into Facebook, but it does look like they may be in a feedback loop. As more and more toxic conservative garbage gets reshared, progressives start ditching Facebook. That means the remaining userbase likes that stuff more, so the feed gets tuned to make it more prominent. That turns off more progressives, who drop out. Rinse, lather, repeat.
When I go on Facebook now, it looks like Internet Fox News, and that's despite trying very hard to unfollow the people who reshare that stuff.
Even the left-leaning content on Facebook has gotten more extreme and virulent. It's just a miserable hellhole now of two tribes screaming at each other while the feed AI fans the flames.
I think you misspelled "Twitter" :)
I miss the days when Facebook was about sharing personal connections, stupid and fun stuff, as a shy kid in high school who didn't speak very good English, facebook has helped me made friends and connect with kids in my school as I was more comfortable talking to them online. Hard to imagine that would ever take place with the way Facebook is today, where you log on to scream at other people's political opinions which are different from yours.
If they really wanted to maximize "engagement" they would actually hide all of the political posts and rage inducing comments and show nothing but cat pictures.
This should end well.
I think this is a function of the friends you have, and what Facebook assumes you like to see based on the pages your friends like (lookalike audience targeting). When I was more active on Facebook, there was a lot of left-wing direct action, and zero Fox News stuff.
Maybe find different friends :)
Has anyone actually ever taken this advice when receiving it in the context of frustrating social media content? I see people throwing this advice around a LOT in these discussions and have always tried to find someone who actually went and did it just because someone on the internet said to.
Curious how well it worked. It sounds about as useful advice as telling someone to “just” get another job after mildly venting about a rough day at the office (or on zoom, given the state of things here recently), which is something we’ve all done just to decompress I would imagine.
Personal curation is a thing, which I think will solve the case for a non-trivial amount of people, if more were intentional and deliberate about it, but it stops short personally of getting 'better' friends.
Which...I just think is unhelpful advice unless an individual is truly and consistently harming the friendship with their actions and behaviors.
You can also 'snooze' a person for up to 30 days. Problem I noticed with that was once that 30 days is up, the news feed algorithm SEEMINGLY overcorrects and tends to show you nothing BUT posts from that individual with a higher weight against everything else once their snooze period is over.
As someone who had a number of friends that posted content that was just annoying and boring (not so much incendiary or vitriolic-although they get snoozed too), I used snooze quite a bit. They're great friends, we just have very different tastes and tolerances for what happens on social media. So I used the tools given to me to see less of it, but maintained the friendship.
I saw a good mix of both, given I have friends and family that span the political spectrum. In any case, I've suspended my account and given up on FB because it has become just too toxic. Maintaining a diverse circle of FB friends requires refraining from saying or responding to anything even remotely political and that just became too damn tedious for me. I'm off twitter as well (not that I was ever really into that one).
Social Media is a cancer and needs to DIAF.
That reminds me, I have yet another email from a FB recruiter sitting in my inbox, guess I wasn't quite rude enough the last time.
There is a lot of that too, but I also find that fairly toxic. I'm not interested in angry tribal signaling even when it's for my own tribe.
> Maybe find different friends :)
We don't all have the luxury of replacing our family and personal history.
The sad part is that I don't really have real life friends, so seeing what people are up to on Facebook was kind of cool. Until it turned into just a big political echo chamber.
This will be tough as Discord is currently happily enjoying its unlimited growth and no profits phase, and has enough network effects that it's almost impossible to not use it as a young Internet-using male in many countries.
Facebook has had incredible success at mimicking other companies’ features, and when that fails purchasing major competitors. Discord is still niche, and I suspect their marketing and image will make it hard to break out of ‘gamer’ culture.
I've also noticed more recently that people are starting Discord communities around all kinds of non-gaming topics. Very commonly they seem to revolve around a public persona, like a YouTube celebrity, a musician, or a podcast host.
From my perspective, the last thing we need is more Facebooks and Twitters.
Maybe they decided instead of risk another social media site going through the same lifecycle as Facebook did and fragmenting market share, they could keep it all under one roof. I suppose it could also be an attempt to keep the engineering simpler, too.
Hardly an expert, though.
This seems strangely familiar...
Privacy controls were 'public' by default, but then the only people seeing stuff were fellow students anyway. It was fantastic.
I deleted my Facebook account a few years ago for various reasons, but they had a really great product back then. Somehow I doubt this will capture the charm of v1.
To replace the feature, there were competing class list apps, each requiring users install it and with its own data, so none of them worked.
I remember thinking whoever made that decision probably didn't understand the feature. But they sure were motivated to build an app ecosystem nobody asked for.
It felt like you could click on any person in your school and find a path of friends that connected you.
I remember when about a third of us got "approved" for Facebook, and two thirds were just jealously wondering why their elite private liberal art schools weren't "good enough". I've never seen a clearer case of envy/FOMO.
I wonder if I should make an extension or site to list them all.
Remember, Facebook was running on a PHP backend. Apache spins up an entire _process_ for every HTTP request it receives. Facebook was most likely buying their own hardware. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were running their servers at capacity and dealing with both hardware and software scaling issues.
Edit: FB is also an image heavy website, which at the time was considered a heavy website.
Basically Facebook want to fully substitute email within colleges.
What could go wrong?
This is not for users, it is more for university admins.
On budget phones(think 8GBs) web apps are the best solution but yet there is only a mobile version of Facebook.com.
Never forget that the internet is awash in dead companies and sites that were extremely popular and powerful, until they werent.
Facebook is a giant, but its dominance in the USA and the EU is likely short lived.
It is not competition that will kill Facebook, its the change in people's behavior. Very different from the competitive view you take.
The death of Facebook will be from both in how people interact with each other and tech. Whether its a fundamental shift in comm(mobile phones) or a leap in tech like serverless / peer to peer that removes the need for a central service. Eventually, Facebook will not exist anywhere near its current form.
Remember, FB not a service like Google that serves the user. You dont need them to do anything but connect to other people. If you dont need to use FB, you wont. For now, its easier and working very well at scale. But that's temporary. Maybe 10 years. Maybe longer... One day it too will be a memory, owned and operated by a PE firm that specializes in brands.
Microsoft Operating System
Amazon Online Bookstore
Google Internet Search
Tomorrow we're rebranding as "TheFacebook" and will only be available to Harvard students.
Wow. It’s been a long time since I thought of Facebook as fun, and at this point it’s been not-fun longer than it’s been fun.