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What's interesting about your comment is how Facebook, as an online community, has lost all context that other online communities had.

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.)

I remember that fateful day in highschool where the parents volte-faced and joined facebook, and the site was ruined forever. then came the aunts and uncles and grandma and your boss from two jobs ago. eternal september, but the influx didn't ever stop and here we are with billions of users and a mess.

You can't forget about Facebook Marketplace, which is arguably more successful than Groups.

Marketplace is practically killing Cragslist and Kijiji where I am (Toronto area)

My wife started selling stuff on Marketplace for fun and it's basically become a side business for her. It's crazy how successful it's become.

I guess I'll have to try it out. Craigslist has an abysmal user experience and I can't believe they haven't implemented a way to remove duplicate posts and spammy listings on just about every keyword.

My friend buys and flips used exercise equipment on FB Marketplace. Craiglist can be a bit shady as you don't really have name or face to the seller/buyer. On one hand, the anonymity on Craigslist is nice for either party but on the other, it can lead to a dangerous situation. With FB Marketplace, you can quickly glance at their profile and have atleast a name and face to the individual buyer/seller.

> Groups have been more prominent and getting quite a bit of promotion

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.

Facebook Dystopia - An online meeting place for your side, after the collective national identity is no longer viable.

Amongst other things, I think they're trying to keep from being unbundled. Right now they're vulnerable to someone else doing what they did to Myspace et. al., having college students peeled off into some other more targeted service.

But who likes this stuff? Who really wants to use it? I don't know anyone especially the younger crowd as I have teenagers, that want anything to do with facebook

I don't know about those specific features, but I'm always surprised how people make assumptions about a global service with over two billion users based on an extremely local sample of anecdotes.

"I don't think anybody in the world buys fish because I live in Montana and my kids hate it"

You assume I assume. This is well documented and highly reported on.

"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.

https://xkcd.com/2357/

I would use a social network that only my actual friends were on. When I was in college I would have found a college-only social media site useful and enjoyable. The biggest problem with most social media is they are too impersonal due to having too many disparate connections (eg my aunt, a former boss, my best friend, a former acquaintance from high school) and they shove “influencers” and other popular content down your throat.

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.

snapchat, instagram, tiktok, those didn't exist when facebook.com started, otherwise I don't think they'd have had much success

I use and like a lot of this stuff.

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.

I have just stopped being a teenager, but my interest in memes is actually surprisingly well covered by facebook - there are groups for all kinds of niches.

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.

I have an unsettling feeling that this will accelerate the cohesion in fringe groups such as QAnon, Boogaloo, Antifa, etc.

In other words, technology that makes our lives easier can be used by people we don't like to make their lives easier also.

Your argument is valid, however, when it comes to social media - I really believe that the world would be a better place without social media. Compared to the downsides of Facebook, the upsides are very little. People used to connect to their loved ones through email and other means before Facebook. It has definitely brought some upsides, but the given what it did in 2016 election (cambridge analytica), how it has sucked in a whole generation of people into constant attention seeking behavior, and ofcourse the emergence of fringe groups which had no real voice before social media. Before facebook, these groups did not have a widespread influence - they would have to recruit people in person.

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.

But we're not talking about "social media" in broad terms, we're talking specifically about Facebook's pivot towards smaller community and group building, per:

> 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).

Have you spent as much time trying to understand the upsides of social media as the downsides?

How confident are you that your measure of the two is acccurate?