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Comment by chronotis | Hacker News Reader

Midwestern GenX suburban parent here. Nothing important happens in our subdivision (hundreds of homes) without mention of it in the neighborhood's private Facebook group. Our public school district uses a Facebook page as a primary announcement platform. Kids' sports and social groups are all organized as Facebook groups and pages. You cannot escape Facebook if you're a suburban parent in the US.

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In my experience, a lot of people still use Facebook, but in a completely different way than, say, 5 or 10 years ago. In the past, I would check it many times a day to see what my friends were up to, or to see what events we could go together to. Now what I see is mostly reposts of memes and ragebaits. Part of the reason is probably that we got older and I moved (the latter being the main reason I still use Facebook, to keep in touch with people), but since younger people moved to other networks, that doesn't change much in my opinion.

Also, people die. I already get from time a reminder of the birthday of somebody that I know died. That's creepy as hell and it's only going to get worse.

In my opinion the only redeeming feature of Facebook at the moment are private groups, but that in my opinion is not enough to sustain a social network, since many are moving to WhatsApp, Telegram and the like.

>Also, people die

I deleted Facebook last year. At that point, I had 420 friends, 10 of whom were dead. One of them I discovered was dead while going through the list of all my friends making notes of who they were. This was despite numerous posts on her wall about her death. The damned algorithm didn't bother to show me that bit of news.

True but thats 10 minutes per day. Facebook needs everybody to spend hours on them each day.

Very good point. Facebook has gone from something that I used for enjoyment (2004 through maybe 2016) to something that I resentfully use only to conduct business in my local community. It's still "social" but it's the difference between hanging out with friends vs. running errands at the store, post office, city hall, etc. It has clearly grown in importance by becoming the de facto official online presence of so many entities, so I can't escape it, but I absolutely want to minimize my time spent on that stuff.

I reflexively answered the poll with Facebook because I hate it, but then I realized that I'm probably closer to killing my Netflix account than my Facebook account, and I doubted my answer. Now you've convinced me again that Facebook is most in decline.

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