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Comment by throwaway82388 | Hacker News Reader

I’m far from bullish on meta long-term, but reporting like this would have you believe that nobody uses Facebook, and that Instagram is soon to share its fate. Optimists that they are, tech reporters overweight growth to absurd extremes. Maybe reporting on youth trends brings out the insecurities in all of us—you’d rather not look clueless in front of your two cool friends in their early 20s than the 2 billion or so Facebook MAUs.

TikTok is a platform with huge growth potential. IG is perceptibly declining. But Facebook has proven itself fairly durable, mostly to people outside tech and media bubbles. It’d be wise to not call it over just yet.

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It takes a second to open an app, become a MAU, and then close it in disinterest. I'll admit this is my relationship with Facebook. I never see anything on there I am remotely interested in. Just old relatives spewing nonsense. But I guess I count as one of those 2 billion MAUs. I wonder how many are in the same spot.

I’d bet a solid majority, like it is on any social platform. Most users don’t post or engage.

Biggest predictor for Facebook and IG use among my sample of friends is whether they’re married and have families, or in many cases, pets. In my sample, many own homes or property. Not where the growth is, but not worthless from a revenue standpoint.

> Biggest predictor for Facebook and IG use among my sample of friends is whether they’re married and have families, or in many cases, pets.

Which way does the correlation go?

You keep opening it though

Myself and other folks in my friend group are MAU in that we use FB about once a month, maybe once every two months. My IG use became the same after the recent feed changes. Using either platform now feels like work and I have enough work to do already.

Durable isn't a great word for what Facebook has become. It's been LinkedIn-ified - the entire notifications category is filled with useless recommendations and suggestions rather than meaningful updates from connections. And they still put notification dots up for it. Even if there's an opt out option and I could 'filter that' I haven't seen anything else relevant in 1+ year.

That sounds like a bad experience, but it’s not universal. It’s challenging to understand a platform from our individual vantage points (without access to internal dashboards), particularly on a network with between 2–3 billion MAUs. And if your personal interests are elsewhere, and your generational cohort is underrepresented. I’m an ‘elder millennial’ who got Facebook when it was still only for edu domains, and I’ve grown older with the service. I just briefly checked in with mine and within the last 24 hours I can see at least a dozen updates (all with decent engagement) from family and friends, some distant and others close. Babies being born, kids doing kid stuff, holiday posts. Pretty typical, particularly at this time of year. All that is to say, it’s all a function of your real world network. If I were the age I was when I started using Facebook, I’d probably find it desolate and boring, too.

But I would say ‘fairly durable’ is an apt description of an 18 year old service still operating at its scale. Exciting, maybe less than it once was. But fairly durable, certainly.

All of us tend to forget that each year there is a whole cohort of people getting a new phone and using fb, instagram, twitter, whatever for the first time.

Disagree on Facebook being enduring; agreed on TikTok.

The underlying thesis behind FB - that people want to connect with people that they know - is eroding.

Does it? Back in 2021 TikTok was averaging more hours of viewing per month than Youtube (in the US.)

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