Facebook says it’s refocusing company on ‘serving young adults’ | Hacker News Reader

Facebook says it’s refocusing company on ‘serving young adults’

theverge.com

36 pointsremir20 comments

Really surprised. For years, they talked about Facebook as a utility, the dialtone of the internet. “Cool” was entirely unnecessary and actually very limiting.

So to come out now and say the new Facebook strategy is to be the cool app for the cool kids… it’s really surprising to me.

It's an impossible problem. Either mom and dad are on Facebook or the kids are. That's why the kids always go to the newest thing: Snapchat and now Tictoc.

> That's why the kids always go to the newest thing: Snapchat and now Tictoc.

Even Tiktok is getting long in the tooth, 4 years old in the International market. I would expect the next hot new thing will launch soon.

> Even Tiktok is getting long in the tooth, 4 years old in the International market.

Damn, if I needed proof I'm getting old...

For my kids (13 & 15), Discord is the big thing. And YouTube for passive consumption.

Discord is just for chatting with people. I would not put it in the same category as Youtube, TikTok, or Facebook

Perhaps not, but it's what they use instead of Facebook.

I'm wondering if Facebook will try to spin off another network, or maybe a different frontend on top of the Facebook/IG networks, to get rid of the Facebook branding problem altogether.

My (outside) impression is this is what PayPal did with Venmo. Venmo wasn't functionally superior, just "not your parent's money app".

We see the pattern in retail clothing. Parent companies recycle smaller brands through a multi-year trend cycle and raise up new brands when the last one gets too old.

They can always copy Circles functionality from Google+.

Serving young adults to who, exactly?

Slow cooked with a little salt & pepper they are very tasty

The Zuck wants to understand the human experience. It has achieved sentience.

The highest bidder, of course.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zon...

Young users are we're the growth is, older users actually have money.

Facebook is a top 5 market cap USA business. They have to think about boring things like, you know, revenue, not just user base growth.

Considering that FB et al make their money from selling ads, I'm curious about the actual expected monetary value per customer in the younger vs older demographics. Is there any public research on this topic?

If you don't have a young user base now, then in 10 years you might not have a user base at all.

Young people will eventually grow old, have jobs, etc. The cycle continues.

Serving young adults -- oka "children" -- to corporations.

Serving them where? When? At what price?

Can an individual buy one of these young adults, or is it only corporations?

read as, "we are afraid our demographics arnt valuable enought as crackpot boomers"

facebook's credibility is 0.

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