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Facebook optimized for an older demographic, the initial users quickly graduated and started to look like adults.

Teens don’t want to catch up with friends spread across the world, etc. But this means the next generation lacked the critical mass of young people which keeps a social network alive. Worse they eventually turned on monetization strategies which are effective for a captive audience but discourage further adoption.

The real question is a new generation will age into Facebook or is it ultimately doomed to irrelevance.

Facebook is irreparably doomed as a social network, but will continue to thrive as a software innovator (React, osquery, graphQL, etc).

The question becomes whether leadership will set their ego aside, stop trying to make the world like them, and own the actual future. No generation wants a Metaverse. Literally no one was asking for it until crypto got kicked out of Mom's house and needed a reason to crash on the couch.

I agree with you though: Facebook _optimized_ as it is trying to do with the eyeballs of all humans (e.g. VR color theory). Problem is that society learned its lesson. We became aware of how software aggregates our behavior for major ad deals with no regard for our collective health – mental & physical. Just like smoking in 1950, Facebook had its day. It's time to change some laws based on what we learned and get back to building genuinely cool stuff.

Facebook is irreparably doomed as a social network, but will continue to thrive as a software innovator (React, osquery, graphQL, etc).

Can that software really “thrive” if the core part of the business were to fade away, though?

Big companies can’t live on tech alone. I’m thinking of companies like Sun and Yahoo that made some cool software but ultimately didn’t have sustainable businesses.

Valve could maybe be seen as an example. Originally their core was the half-life series. Now it's steam.

It’s a lot more clear to me how Valve derives revenue from Steam than how FB would derive revenue from any of the tech mentioned above.

Steam is a store, for software. Extremely popular store for that. They make technology, but their main income is selling games made by others, digital collectibles derived from these and then collectibles and lootboxes for their own games.

None of that is "tech" as I would understand. No one is for example paying them for their work with Proton to make Windows games run on Linux. And I don't think there is even such market.

Steam provides a great deal of utility for people selling games on their store via technology. DRM for example is technology, but so is validating installation, checking for updates, etc.

> No generation wants a Metaverse.

source? Or did you pull this out of your behind

Presumably reasonable people would find the assertion self-evident, esp. after seeing some of those grotesque tech demos from a few months back.

I get what you mean but the statement that reasonable people would agree could always be tautologically true, as opposed to evidence for others.

As self-appointed representative and de facto ruler of the Millenial generation's software artisan guild, I endorse the gentleperson's statement

Yup, 0xtown pulled it out of his phat ass

I do not think a new generation will age into it. Facebook's problem is not just that their existing users got older and younger people won't join. Millennials, their former bread and butter, have been leaving the platform in droves. I don't think they are going to come back in their 40s and 50s.

Absolutely, parents joined the network and then kids had to flee to whatever was popular next, there's not much else to it.

A victim of its own success! Parents and grandparents joined because Facebook was easy to use and all their kids were on it.

It's not a victim of success, it's a victim of expansion greed.

Before your aunt, grandma, and gradeschool cousin could join facebook, it was a place to be pretty open about having fun in college. That openness didn't work well with expanding the population to people who wanted to do what the cool college kids were doing because the college kids didn't want to share their weekend party plans nearly so much when grandma started to comment on them.

Is "expansion greed" just another way of saying "inclusiveness"?

"Inclusiveness" is a pretty loaded term which doesn't really seem to apply when you consider how it is used elsewhere.

Your aunt didn't need to see that you were invited to a kegger on Thursday, and you didn't want her to.

>"Inclusiveness" is a pretty loaded term which doesn't really seem to apply when you consider how it is used elsewhere.

How exactly is "inclusiveness" inappropriate here? Because it goes against the agenda that inclusiveness is always good? I guess using different synonyms for positive and negative connotations is one way to preserve doublethink.

Russell Conjugation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation

Before, Abercrombie was an outdoor supply company.

The movement into generation-focused apparel was a pivot. They didn't make the next pivot to maintain. I think most companies need to continuously evolve.

In M*A*S*H Season 7, Episode 6 "None Like it Hot" from Oct 23, 1978, Hawkeye and B.J. purchase a bathtub from Abercrombie and Fitch

(using a throwaway account) that's the day I was born!

it had at least one previous pivot. The original was a high-end hunting and fishing store. Then they got bought by Oshman's Sporting Goods. I think I was once in a store from that era. Sort of mid+ range outdoor gear, home furnishings, etc.

Yeah, I recall being quite taken a back, initially, when a Hemingway profile mentioned his A&F spree.

A long time ago I read a book In Search of LL Bean that talked about the old A&F. Apparently their Manhattan (I think) store had a gunsmith on premises and carried fly fishing lures that were apparently as specific as this type of fish, in this river, during this month.

This is apparently the lifecycle of outdoor fishing brands. Orvis (100+ yr old fly fishing company) places more emphasis on clothes than fly rods, flies and waders-- the margins and addressable market are probably both larger. Field and Stream is Dick's spinoff to target outdoors customers, and they typically dedicate 70% of floorspace to clothes, too.

Pretty much.

Not a fisherman but Orvis is better than most. But they're also still family-owned.

REI is also probably better than most but they're a co-op.

But even in those cases they're pretty mass-market oriented which is pretty inevitable unless you're mostly niche mail order. REI doesn't stay in business and support a broad retail network selling climbing ropes and carabiners.

My father managed an Eddie Bauer flagship in the 70s, and they sold shotguns and climbing gear, as well as camping and fishing equipment. He considered A&F their primary competitor, which is how I learned that history.

Forever21 has been pretty much forever Forever21

And it went through bankruptcy in 2019 to forever be that.

Also note in the case of Abercrombie that they were sued, and lost, over their hiring practices and marketing materials, and were required by the court to change them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzalez_v._Abercrombie_%26_Fi....

I don't know that fashion brands are famously cyclical. Most of the brands haven't been around long enough to have any more than 2 cycles.

The first one is the initial popularity. The second one is the dead cat bounce of nostalgia 20 years later. After that, they become costumes, not fashion.

> Twitter has plenty of problems, but "only my crazy uncle uses it" isn't one of them.

The crazy uncle vibes are off the charts on Twitter. Considered that the two personalities most entwined with the platform are Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

And then you have the whole even more mentally unstable group that seems to derive their whole existence from criticising and attacking those...