Is Facebook dying? | Hacker News Reader

Is Facebook dying?

itworld.com

90 pointscatastrophe73 comments

It seems a little hasty to proclaim the death of Facebook based on a sample size of two kids. In fact, when I worked in marketing, I used to dread statements from leadership (or whomever) that began with "My kid was doing X, so we should get into X," or "I heard about Y on the radio, so I wonder...," etc. Dangerously flawed assumptions can come from this line of reasoning.

Anecdotal samples can be useful to form hypotheses, however, and in this case, I don't think the hypothesis is out of the question. My own anecdotes, be they personal, from friends, or from co-workers, seem to be indicating a very subtle paradigm shift in social networking. It's not so much that users are abandoning Facebook, or abandoning social, but that users are segmenting themselves by use case (or worldview, as the wonderful Amy Hoy would probably describe it).

The world seems to be dividing into People Who Use Facebook Every 5 Seconds, and People Who Use Facebook About Once a Week, with perhaps some other segments of significance within that spectrum. But "seems" is the operative word here. I'd need to look at actual usage data to make any real assumptions here, and my guess is that Facebook isn't going to share data that contradicts its own growth projections.

Fair enough, but I think the reason this is getting upvoted so much is because I think many of us can relate to the content in the article, so maybe there is something here worth considering.

After all, with many predecessors like Friendster and Myspace, most people that left didn't even bother to delete their accounts, they just stopped using the service.

As far as anecdotal evidence, I'm seeing the same thing happen as well, both with myself and others.

I think stories like this get upvoted because a certain percentage of HN users want FB to fail.

A certain percentage (probably other people) want Google to fail and upvote those stories.

A certain percentage want YC to fail and upvote those stories.

A certain percentage want Apple to fail and upvote those stories.

I don't think anything meaningful can be derived from such upvote patterns.

Since it's absolutely impossible for anyone to legitimately relate to the proposed sentiments because in reality all people are is haters... That's what you're saying. So let's disregard any and all anecdotes.

I didn't say there's no merit to the article, or that its point might not be right. It might just be. Rather, what I'm saying is that I'd like to see some actual analysis and data on this subject for once, instead of just everyone's anecdotes.

I'm pretty sure we've all got anecdotes about how our friends, kids, neighbors, co-workers, etc., are slowing down or stopping their Facebook use. And that may well mean something big. But it's equally possible that we, our peers, and our children, are not a representative sample. Or that we're just not the core FB user base. Etc.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm open to the conjecture posed in the article. I may even be partially inclined to believe it. But I'm skeptical until I see real evidence.

Several of my friends have quit Facebook. Many on multiple occasions.

Nearly all of them have eventually come back. Many of them multiple times.

I think the ones who are still gone will come back sometime.

Some inevitably won't.

But I think the number of people who dislike Facebook enough to never want to use it are in the extreme minority. I think most people just don't think about whether it's evil or not. It's just where they message their friends, upload and view photos, and keep track of upcoming events.

The author of the post references his kids. Someday, his kids will probably be embarrassed by their dad and grow somewhat distant from him as they grow up. Most of the time, though, I think people realize that family is important and so I'll bet that his kids will rediscover the value of their father's love.

Facebook is like your online social homebase. You leave it, travel different places, see new things, meet new people, but it's what you come home to. It's a part of your identity as it serves as an online archive of your life. And for many of its users this archive started pretty early.

In 20 years, I think I'll be happy that I have my Facebook to look back through.

So maybe quitting Facebook is like quitting cigarettes. It usually takes multiple attempts, cold turkey, to be successful.

I've been off facebook for half a year but I'm still tempted to return. There isn't a good alternative for sharing photos with a group of friends, though hopefully something will emerge.

...though hopefully something will emerge.

Something will only emerge if people insist others use it, just as people now insist others use Facebook.

Acquiescing to FB just perpetuates it.

I've taken to posting photos on google's picasa web and marking them unlisted, then posting a link on facebook. It's not perfect, but when I tried to get everyone I want to view the pictures to get a free flickr account, it was just too hard. Only about 1/5 of them were able to understand and do it, and probably a small fraction of those that did every really checked for new pics.

The problem everyone has been trained on facebook and most have no reason to change. The people on HN don't like it, but the friends and relatives I have on facebook couldn't care less about the privacy and other issues. They just use it.

Man, I can't even imagine what Facebook would look like after 20 more years of them abusing user privacy. They will probably have their own line of video-enabled shower faucets by then...

"Want free showers? Tell your friends!"

small print- with frictionless sharing of video live streaming to the web. Don't worry, only your friends, family and work colleagues will see it, no random strangers.

I agree with your thoughts about having an archive to look back through in many years to come.

I'm in college right now and I can imagine in a few years looking back the messaging history (i.e. private conversations) will seem funny.

I dunno. I think there is something to be said about the whole archival nature of it. And Facebook knows this - it's sort of the entire reason behind Timeline.

>Facebook is like your online social homebase. You leave it, travel different places, see new things, meet new people, but it's what you come home to. It's a part of your identity as it serves as an online archive of your life.

I really do agree with this.

I detest Facebook's attitude towards privacy. I've got my account on complete lockdown. Friends and family lament that they can't post to my wall, and that I don't post at all. Ever. I've never 'liked' anything to my knowledge. I've had the same three or so pictures on my profile for years, and I've never posted a status update once.

But you know what? Everybody I've ever known and still care to is on there, in my friends list. Paradoxically, it is Facebook's relentless pursuit of building the social graph (privacy be damned) that allowed it to crawl the address books of almost everyone I've ever known and let them track me down and attempt to friend me. Friends from middle school who I've wondered about for years. Right there. Family members whose contact information I'd never have tracked down. Right there. An entire database of all the people I could possibly care about and care to contact in my lifetime (even if it's just once every few years) is right there. All of this with zero effort expended from me.

Last year I was in NYC and was lamenting the loss of an old phone with a lot of contact numbers from friends who had moved out of state or I had otherwise lost touch with. I particularly wanted to meetup with one friend who had moved out to run a museum, but no longer had her number or email handy. I suddenly remembered "Oh wait. Everybody is on Facebook whether they use it or not." Fired it up, searched her name, found it, sent a message with my number, and 8 minutes later she called me for drinks.

That is great. That is useful and relevant to me. Facebook is a social home base. For me it is like the ultimate address book that self-populates and bombards you with tremendous amounts of noise that you wade through when you open it to do what you came there to do, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a very real value.

>"but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a very real value."

You do a good job of demonstrating how Facebook has real, practical value for social lives.

The problem is with the commercial value. The better the user-experience, the worse the commercial value. Can the worlds of social and commercial value co-exist, over lengths of time as long as 20 years? I'm not sure.

Precisely. My anecdote is little comfort to a platform looking to extract value from its users by targeting ads at them.

But it's better than nothing. At least I'm sticking around for the opportunity for them to someday extract value from me. If they didn't have this hook, I'd abandon the site completely. Compare that to something like MySpace in its heyday, which never had anybody's real life social network on there in any meaningful sense. Absolutely nothing to keep them there, and leave they did.

Indeed, it's like my space.

I quit Facebook because I felt the value of what was being collected wasn't really worth saving. Sure, there were occasional birth announcements, and other neat life events, but ultimately most of my timeline was people posting bored comments while they were waiting or about to go do something, people posting pictures that were rather mundane (pictures of food, pictures of new purchases, etc), linking memes, game spam, and telling each other happy birthday. I don't feel I will really care about a vast majority of that in 20 years.

Also, and this is not true for everyone since some are careful to select who is on their Facebook, but I found after leaving that the truly important people in my life stay connected regardless of Facebook. A lot of what was on my Facebook was noise, and relationships that only exist because of and on Facebook.

I quit it too. Besides the high amount of garbage that people were posting, I thought that the privacy controls really sucked.

It's like you have to anticipate everything you or other people will say to you and somehow create your privacy rules, so that only the right people will see the stuff.

For me, facebook was pretty much like TV. A nice way to waste my time doing nothing. I felt weird when I quit facebook, there is a lot of social pressure for you to be part of it. But now I'm used to it :)

I can't believe that anyone really thinks Facebook, at least in anything close to its current form, will still exist in 20 years. It'll just be something we all nostalgically laugh about from time to time, just like AOL or Geo Cities.

...or myspace or friendster or orkut or tribes.net or ...

I recently heard of two teenagers (relatives of a business acquaintance) who quit FaceBook because -- well, because it's no longer the freshest gumbo. They no longer feel it's cool.

A few anecdotes do not make a trend, but FaceBook should be worried, because social networks can implode quickly when they stop being perceived as 'the place to see and be seen:' http://diegobasch.com/social-networks-implode-quickly

PS. I can relate to the author's complaint: "on Twitter I can find the stuff I’m interested in. On Facebook I can only see the stuff other people are interested in." Very true!

Besides agreeing with your point about "coolness", I also thought about the "stuff I'm interested in" vs. "stuff other people are interested in". It struck me as an insightful sentence that perfectly describes their respective social networking models.

The argument comes down to reference/reinfocement vs. discovery. The former provides reference to your knowledge and interests and reinforces them. The latter lets you discover new knowledge. There is definitely room for both ideologies, as they are both kind of necessary for social interaction. Twitter: find people with same interests, Facebook: connect with those people on a more personal level, and find out their interests. Of course, I am neglecting the fact that you can find out other people's interests on Twitter, too, but Facebook strikes me as more of a passive way to do that -- Twitter just moves too fast for that (for an occasional user, like me).

So, I think while there are many, many problems with Facebook, their model of interaction might not be one of them.

>"She has at last count at least three accounts, possibly more, which she uses for different purposes – some of them just to play those stupid spammy Facebook games and quizzes."

Impossible! According to Facebook, multiple accounts are not an issue, and people like this are outliers!

And yet, almost everyone I know has more than one account. That 900MM user number is phonier than a three-dollar-bill. I wonder what the real number is?

One of my accounts got stolen by someone from Paraguay last week. Rather than getting it back, I just set up a new one. All I use it for is for getting coupons and deals when a company makes me "like" their page to get 5% off a hot dog.

Facebook has 955MM "monthly active uniques". That's not number of accounts (which is surely over 1B), that is number of active users over a 30 day period.

So all these fake accounts - people are using them (active). Ads are being displayed, activity is happening, Facebook is making money on every single one of 955MM accounts.

So what makes them phony?

>"So what makes them phony?"

Let's start with the fact that in the article, a 13-year old girl is using multiple accounts to play games, and nothing more. Yes, she logs in and is counted as an "monthly active user". Yes, ads are being served to her. That's the problem.

She's one person. But as far as Facebook (and, hence, advertisers) are concerned, she's three. Do you really believe the demographic information she's entered in the fake accounts is accurate? Do you think that she uses the fake accounts with the same commercial intent? As someone who himself has multiple accounts, I'm skeptical.

An account that like's people who pay for more friends on ebay is an example of a an active user.

Let's suppose some of these services use real workers to log in to each account. Each worker will log in how many thousands of accounts in 30 days? What Ad will they respond to unless they are also being paid for click fraud?

Yeah, unique as primary key in relation database :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines

No.

It's so predictable that someone posts this on every submission with a question headline. Seriously, it's old. We get it. Just move on.

At this point, I think it's more a comment on the quality of articles that are getting upvoted to the frontpage.

If I ran the world I'd ban all links to wikipedia and lesswrong entries on "laws" and "fallacies".

They never actually contribute anything to the discussion.

Neither do most fallacies.

Can anyone point to a single good ITWorld story ever posted to HN?

We get an anomalous number if ITWorld postings, because they use spam accounts to seed their stories here. But that aside: have any of them ever been good?

Be mindful that you could spark an interesting HN thread by asking any inflammatory question and then just filling the article with lorem ipsum text.

I'm with you man, and that's one of the reason I stopped reading slashdot. ITworld/networlworld/crapworld are really not the best source of information when it comes to IT...

The title should be: "My kids are using Facebook less these days".

Absolutely, and because his kids are his world, then facebook is dying. Same reason why everybody posts pictures of their kids thinking the world will be interested.

I'm tired of these stupid sensationalist articles. Pre-IPO everyone talks about how amazing it is, post-IPO everyone just talks about it dying and failing. People need to do something better with their time then speculate over stupidity. It's simply way too early to tell anything.

This is all anecdotal, but frankly I have noticed a serious decrease in Facebook's quality since their IPO. More often I have ads thrown (not so coincidentally) at the top of my feed, and I feel like Facebook has practically started begging me to 'like' various companies' pages.

Also I've seen and endless amount of meme pictures. Surely this is related to the people I'm friends with on Facebook, but I know I'm not the only one who is being bothered by this.

> It's simply way too early to tell anything.

It's always way too early to tell anything until it's too late to predict because it already happened.

No, Facebook is not dying because Facebook is the Walmart of the internet. I'd prefer not to shop there but sometimes there's no way to avoid it.

Is communicating with friends dying?

Sure, nearly six billion people do it. But I for one am dealing with a serious case of burnout. And I know I'm not alone.

Ok, I admit: The question that serves as the headline for this post seems on the surface a bit absurd, if not downright crazy. Any day now seven billionth person is about to communicate with friends, and that's a population more than 21 times that of the United States.

The reason I ask if communicating with friends is dying is simple: It’s because my kids have pretty much stopped doing it. Just the other day my 16 year old son told me he rarely does it, because he’s tired of other people’s whiny life updates. He’d rather spend his time reading books and discovering new things (when he’s supposed to be doing his homework, naturally). In other words, he’d like to do his own random discovery, rather than rely on his friends to do it for him.

My 13-year-old daughter, a much more social creature, was all over communicating with friends for the first two years she tried it.

But lately she has discovered scrapbooking, where she can build her own scrapbook and find others that interest her – without getting all this stuff she doesn’t care about pushed at her by her parents, relatives, and assorted friends.

In other words, the generation that follows Gen Z has grown disenchanted with the very nature of communicating with friends. And I gotta say, I’m starting to see their point.

More and more when I am bored and looking for distraction in real life I go first to newspaper or TV. Last night, for example, I spent a ridiculous amount of time following the CNN coverage of 47 percent and all the snark that erupted from Mitt Romney’s “off the cuff, inelegant” comments about the half of America he apparently detests.

I was listening to national news anchors, whose voice and ability to stay fair and balanced are far superior to the local TV station experience (and miles ahead of any political coverage I ever get from my friends and family). The TV remote let me quickly change channels without having to buy a new television set or turn it off and on again. So I spent a solid hour skimming through news bytes and listening in-depth to those that piqued my interest.

Is Facebook no longer a method of communicating with friends?

Your kids as just finding out that people that talk too much about themselves are boring. On facebook there is an army of people ready to post what they ate for breakfast, what they saw on TV, and so on. These people just want an audience to watch what they are doing (mostly uninteresting stuff heh).

That army is also on Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, Wordpress, LiveJournal, MySpace, and any other free website that allows them to publish themselves for others to publicly see. That doesn't mean that those services aren't useful to those of us who have friends that aren't narcissists.

If your Facebook news feed (or your Twitter stream, or whatever else) is full of nothing but self-indulgent crap, then maybe you should find some better people to be friends with?

Actually I found that most people acted like they had an alter ego. When they are online they are boring, but when you meet them personally they are nice people.

I'm pretty happy with my friends, I just don't feel the need for something like facebook and the need for filtering stuff that I never had to filter before.

For those that find facebook to be so great, more power for them.

Not to mention the "braggart" economy that is springing up. People are now broadcasting their lives - truly or falsely - across social networks to increase others opinions of them.

A friend of mine I haven't talked to in awhile told me that he deleted his facebook. He said that any of the people he actually wants to be in contact with have his phone number and can catch up with him that way. The thing is though, we live on other sides of the country. I'm not really the kind of guy that randomly calls up his friends just to see how they're doing. There really aren't any other reasons to talk to him, so we just end up not talking.

With my friends that are on Facebook though, I can read what they're doing, they can see what I'm doing, and we can comment and talk about it. Oh, you saw a movie? I also saw that movie, wasn't it good/bad/funny/whatever?

Also, the groups and events on Facebook are just fantastic for planning things. I went on a trip with some friends from college a couple weeks ago. We all live in different parts of the country and coordinating something like that would have been a nightmare without Facebook. We made a group and used it to post all the information about when our flights were leaving, what hotel we'd be staying at. It was really really convenient.

If you're annoyed with your friends posting stupid stuff, just ignore the news feed. There are dozens of other reasons to use facebook.

Facebook isn't dying but I think it is easier to leave than it once was. The pull of Facebook is weaker with the proliferation and growth of more niche social networks - or networks such as Twitter where users can carve their own niches - and other methods of discovery of content (the article mentions Reddit and StumbleUpon).

The common complaint that Facebook is full of advertising, apps and ranty, passive aggressive status updates is justified. It is possible that people will grow tired of having their friendships and other social interactions mediated through Facebook without major changes in usage habits (maybe something more intimate and limited like Path) and the way that Facebook goes about making money.

While I agree that Facebook makes it easier to keep in touch with friends - possibly due to the critical mass rather than anything inherent in the service, - I do not think this is necessarily a good thing. It is often passive (stalking) rather than active. I deleted my Facebook account last weekend and I already feel as if I have an obligation to actively pursue friendships if I want them to continue.

facebook started dieing after my mom added me as a friend

2007: MySpace is for losers ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/bitterjug/462059242/ )

2012: Facebook is ... (e.g. like a jail - http://duvet-dayz.com/archives/2012/03/07/1192/ )

Great point. Of course Facebook is dying, though probably not in the way the author intended. Since I signed up in my college days, I've seen way more negatives added than positives and the last two years has been largely downhill.

Most of the people I know don't actually want to be on Facebook, but it certainly is difficult to avoid.

I don't think Facebook is near the cliff right now, but it's headed towards it and accelerating.

I know the author mentions "Ok, I admit: The question that serves as the headline for this post seems on the surface a bit absurd, if not downright crazy." at the beginning but still, I don't think he really gives much valid evidence to what his underlying point is. No offense to him, but I don't give really give much credit to his case just because of how his two children (16 year old son and 13 year old daughter) use Facebook. Esp when he says himself, they are just 2 users of the ~1 billion...

I get that the overwhelming majority of Hacker News supports Barack Obama and feels the need to be very vocal in their support of him online. I understand that every two to four years their is a lot of online discussion about how evil Republicans are and how they hold us back in every way. I understand that acknowledging this as politics and not as the absolute truth to the way things have to be is very unpopular online, even on this site which is supposed to be relatively free of politics. But why do I always feel left out? I don't want to participate in the months of hate-Hate-HATE to whatever Republican candidate happens to be in the running for office. I personally don't think Romney is all that bad, and I don't think that Obama is all that good. I like technical things, not political things.

My Facebook account is pretty much in zombie mode now. I'll give it a quick scan every couple days to see if my friends posted anything of interest but I don't post anything.

Mostly it's there so my parents don't start wondering if they need to "get on that twitter thing" and to see what I've been up to.

Is Facebook dying? Yes, because lately, everyone has been asking "is Facebook dying?". It's a self-fulfilling prophesy.

However, I also say yes because many people I know have abandoned their accounts or use their accounts reluctantly nowadays.

So yes, Facebook will continue to bleed users and die.

I feel like on a normal day, my Facebook news feed is filled with more positive posts than negative ones. I don't see people whine that often.

This shouldn't be surprising - don't people want to put their best foot forward on facebook? Sure, whining is fun some of the time (yay validation! everyone like and comment and agree with me!!) but a lot of the time you want to not sound whiny.

I would also hesitate jumping to conclusions based on the experiences of a seemingly antisocial 16 year old (not quite her words, but she seemed to imply it) and a 13 year old who started using Facebook when she was ELEVEN?

I would not be surprised if kids in that age range whine more than kids in mine (18-24)

Not sure about the headline but it makes sense what his kids are doing. Reddit and Tumblr allow much more freedom and do not try so blatently hard to profit from traffic.

Facebook is dying a slow death for what it was once used for: fun. They have too much cash on hand to disappear any time soon. But users will grow tired of Facebook as a pleasurable diversion. Because Facebook will keep trying harder and harder to make money. Because the traffic will gradually slow down. When you make all your money from display ads, and the traffic begins to slow, you get desperate. Slowly, Facebook is inching toward this inevitability.

Facebook is not dying. I feel it's going from being a fad to a utility. I've noticed that people I know are posting fewer status updates with every passing year, but they still heavily use Facebook for chat, event invitations, photos and groups. For a lot of people, Facebook seems to be becoming less of a pastime and more of a tool for communicating with friends and family.

I dislike Facebook as much as the next hacker, but I don't think Facebook is going anywhere anytime soon. It'll just become less interesting as a communication medium. After all, nobody is excited about the telephone any more.

If I really cared about this stuff, I'd love to respond to yet another request to get on Facebook by saying that I only do Myspace. I think I just felt a trend-setter gasm there.

Facebook is not even cool anymore, and in five years time will be seen as one of the dumbest IPO's in history. How did these greyhairs who invested in this crap make their money in the first place?

Tesla, yes. SpaceX, yes. Facebook? Are you fucking kidding me?

Better question: are all social networking sites doomed to be fads and thus doomed to die? The answer leads to paradoxical results. If we answer 'yes' then no one will create another Facebook and thus Facebook will survive. If we answer 'no' then a competitor will emerge and thus increasing the chance that Facebook dies.

I had a chance to work directly with Facebook API and in terms of documentation, bugs, overall robustness I can tell that it's pretty crappy. Takes a lot of effort to do simple stuff and things are often not working. That definitely doesn't look as a good trend.

Twitter API looked a lot more solid to me.

Anyways, just my 2 cents from a dev POV...

Americans spend 7 hours per month on Facebook, on average. It's not dying any more than "TV" is dying.

I haven't used FB in the last few months except to log into other sites.

I haven't used Twitter much either, since the U.I. has gotten so slow for me I'd need to carve out a 10 minute block of time to wait for it to load.

The social approach is biased because one not necessarily likes what his friends like. People tend to be friend with people who have different hobbies/interests.

Not sure if it is dying, but it is very much a product that can be killed by negative press. Just negative press. May be Murdoch can pull some strings there.

tl;dr another reporter has deciding that since Facebook is waning in his household, it everyone else will probably start hating it.

I'm not convinced this article provides any value, except as Yet Another thread where people can weigh in on "why I don't use Facebook anymore" or "why you're all wrong, Facebook is fine."

My 13 year old sister doesn't even have a Facebook account - but she uses Instagram like there's no tomorrow.

Exactly the same in my town. My 13 year old daughter and all of her friends are Instagram users. I'm not sure if they are rebelling against Facebook but they love texting and Instagram. While I like emailing and FB. Generational differences...

That's precisely why Facebook purchased Instagram.

Let us hope so.

I was tired of slashdot obvious advertising with itworld/networkworld/junkworld.com ... only to find the same links here :(

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