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Comment by gogopuppygogo | Hacker News Reader

There is no better way to get engagement than Facebook these days. People don’t sign into forums on websites like they once did,

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People are downvoting this, maybe because of the fact-of-the-matter'ness, but I think this is probably true, coming from someone who despises Facebook. Especially for certain age-groups, Facebook is one of the few social networks you can assume people have logins on, and (maybe especially) niche communities need to lessen friction to get people involved.

I don't know, I've never tried to create a public forum for this kind of thing, but I'd bet you'd get more activity out of facebook than some bespoke web forum or IRC/Matrix/what have you.

Yes, it was engineered to be this way intentionally, through unregulated competition rules and systematic killing of any open alternative by way of massive pumping of capital.

We live in a disgusting scenario, we're held hostage by a racket.

I see a lot of people moving away from Facebook here in Europe though. Maybe not in the US.. But about half of my friends were either never on FB or left it recently. The other half are still there. Mainly the older people in fact. The younger ones are on other stuff (like Instagram which is of course also facebook I guess)

But I don't see it as viable as a sole outreach platform for that reason.

I don't most people under 30 in the US use facebook unless they have to for something. Boomers, on the other hand...

A lot of my friends are still there but using it much much less. Has happened over the past few years. It has kept up during our plague which I didn't expect. I figured it would pick up a bit with more people being indoors and not traveling as much. I think it's rotting from the inside out. I know accounts are one metric, but how is traffic doing?

People don't sign into FB just for this.

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