Is Facebook becoming the next MySpace? | Hacker News Reader

Is Facebook becoming the next MySpace?

grobmeier.de

77 pointsgrobmeier61 comments

Well, people's engagement with facebook has certainly declined from its peak years ago.

However, all your "friends" are on it. Nobody wants to go back through that process on an upstart network. Nobody has the energy or motivation.

There's plenty of room for new entrants that take slices of your friends and optimize that experience. For example, another network for just your family... offering a close, intimate experience, one you feel comfortable sharing all your baby pics on, etc. Another network for professional (sorry, LinkedIn already there). Another for your classmates. All sitting under the facebook umbrella that has your entire social graph.

But one thing that's clear about facebook is they are not at all focused on improving the user experience any longer. They are not unveiling new features that improve user experience. They are fully engaged with improving the advertiser experience. Maximizing the value of the data they have on you. Maximizing ad revenue. These aren't bad things and are obviously necessary, but when a company seems 100% focused on the revenue rather than the user, I think that signals the start of a decline.

> Nobody wants to go back through that process on an upstart network. Nobody has the energy or motivation.

I disagree. Firstly, you make it sound as if filling out some information about yourself (don't we do that all the time anyways?), posting some pictures, and updating your status is some overwhelming endeavor. For those of us old enough to have started on myspace and switched to facebook, it really was pretty seamless.

I'm not saying anyone should rush to develop the "next facebook", but I do think that the new entrants you speak of could easily become significant later on.

I agree that facebook seems pretty much stagnant when it comes to the user experience. I'm actually eager to see the new myspace once it debuts for that reason...

Well, I will say Google+ is pretty good, but for me it came too late. I already had social network fatigue and too much content already in facebook to do much useful with Google+ or to spend any real time with it. I kinda wish Google+ had come first.

> Firstly, you make it sound as if filling out some information about yourself (don't we do that all the time anyways?), posting some pictures, and updating your status is some overwhelming endeavor.

But that's not what makes a social network. User profiles have existed since the beginning of the internet. A social network is a place to see and be seen. But this requires people--the more the better (usually). Facebook for better or worse, has already won this game.

I don't really get this idea of facebook being "stagnant". Perhaps they've already refined the concept of general social networking to its peak. It's an odd idea in SV that a site has to constantly roll out new "user experiences" to remain relevant. Facebook is a platform for attention-whoring. They do that just fine. The users themselves create the experiences.

Actually, they don't do that [attention whoring] just fine. They've actually severely diminished that experience with the new system that limits the exposure your updates get unless you buy a $7 promotion. This scheme is a disaster ... yes, charge Pages for it, but not regular individual users.

Why is it a disaster? As long as there is no feedback on how little exposure one's posts get, I don't see a downside to facebook with this. Being flooded with bad/uninteresting content was a real problem. Filtering one's stream was an important usability addition.

when you have to fall back to charging for relevant content, I think it's fair to say that your model is broken.

Going back and readding friends on a new network is a great way to shed the years of non-friend buildup that has occurred without hurting any feelings.

It could definitely be advantageous - Facebook was the first exposure to most of the world of a social network. When it came along many people added & accepted friends they didn't care much about at all in a spurt of initial enthusiasm, before learning over time that that might not have been such a good idea.

But I still don't think that would be sufficient to overcome the massive Facebook network effect now.

I completely agree. They have yet to truly add value to their service that enriches my experience with their product. Coming up with more ways to sell advertisements is not a sustainable business model. Well, it could be, but I would hope that this does not continue to be the norm for Facebook.

"However, all your "friends" are on it. Nobody wants to go back through that process on an upstart network. Nobody has the energy or motivation."

Another possibility is that the next innovation for social networks will be effortless friend adding & management. I've never had a problem adding friends, but I find manually dealing with lists/groups/circles/whatever to be enormously painful so they're never current. The idea of separate accounts for separate "slices" of friends is appealing partly because it's both transparent and stable (ie Facebook can't change what's in my Twitter account), but it can't be the best possible approach, right?

This comment caught my eye: "...I have learned that most content inside of Facebook is real crap. 'Ouch, I broke my toe' is one of the more interesting posts." This and other anecdotal evidence suggests Facebook is slowly turning into an online public square -- a place where it's in one's best interest never to do, say, or share anything private of real significance, because sooner or later the whole town will find out about it.

That stuck out to me as well. It's true. I think most are very aware of the non-privacy of Facebook, and act accordingly. There is a value in more personal communication, however, I don't think an ad-based social network can deliver it.

But we've had personal communication for ages now. That's email, IMs, Skype, etc. I wonder how many users just use Facebook for the sake of private messaging by now because the topics that fuel conversations between friends are often of private nature. Things not everyone has to know. I think that kind of defeats the purpose of a social network though.

Facebook is going to forge a new path to irrelevance, not take the same path as MySpace. People will stop using Facebook because (1) they outgrow it, (2) they get tired of it, or (3) it lost its usefulness.

I don't believe another app will take its place. Rather, I think an existing app/platform is already Facebook's biggest competitor. And it's one you've been using for 30 years. Email.

It may be different for different cohorts, but for my social circle, SMS is the de facto communication medium. I deleted my Facebook account over a year ago and still keep up with friends, plan events, etc., all via text message.

Thus, there really was no downside in terms of being "out of the loop", while I get the benefit of not feeling like shit because I'm continually inundated with self-promotion posts that make others (most of whom I barely know) look like they are doing more important things than me.

I've simply stopped logging in to Facebook - since around last Christmas. I don't miss it at all. It was neat to catch up with childhood friends and old Army buddies however, there are other ways to keep in touch without feeding the data-dredge.

No. That said, they do seem to be either making mistakes or getting their eye off the target.

The publicly admitted target is to provide social networking for people. The obvious business target is to make money. But they have to make money while not annoying their users. We know their users are not their customers, because the users do not pay to use the service. The customers are the advertisers. Thus the balance between making sure the advertisers get their wares in front of as many eyeballs as possible while annoying the minimum number of users. And it seems to me that they have this balance wrong at this point. This will happen and if they are monitoring carefully, they'll tune the balance and people will be happy.

The longer-term challenge is that nothing lasts for ever (thanks 2nd law of thermodynamics). Facebook do not need to turn into MySpace to no longer be the top dog. Google wants the top position in the social networking space and they have lots of money to spend their way into it. Or Facebook can drop the ball and get their balance of advertising to their users wrong (see above). Or a new service could come along that finds a way to survive without being beholden to advertisers. (Open-source projects to the rescue?) Or, people could just get fed-up of all the mindless banter on Facebook and decide that they have more important things to do. Or, new networks will arise that actually interoperate, so you can connect to someone on another network. My prediction is that some of all of these will take place.

I have no preference. I am a pastor, so I go where the people are (people business after all) and right now, the people are on Facebook. If MySpace successfully restarts, I'll go there as well.

You provide pastoral care over Facebook?

Nice one.

It's one of the ways that I am available to my congregation. And they love the chat feature as they can catch me without having to call.

Haven't taken on anyone outside of the congregation yet. I suppose that could happen.

For those who scale down how they use it (make profile private, engage only w/ real-world friends, post some pictures) Facebook can be rewarding and useful. It's when you follow Facebook's own druthers to have a public profile and connect with everyone under the sun (and like every product under the sun) that Facebook suddenly becomes shit.

Agreed, I have a small amount of friends, only those I see in person on a regular basis (and family) and Facebook is quiet but worth visiting again for me.

But it's not cool anymore, mom and aunts and uncles remind me of that every day

I've been using Facebook that way since I started with it and I've been happy, but began using it less and less. I'll probably cut a load of the 'friends' I've got on there (people I've met a few times etc) and try and clean it up a bit.

Mostly it's that old quote "Hell is other people", and other people tend to post crap, invite you to every group under the Sun and invite you to play every game they see.

I stopped abusing Facebook about a year ago, and really haven't missed it at all.

The reason I stopped using is because I realised that quantity of posts was increasing while the quality was decreasing. My news feed just to be app activity, ads, and other chaff I am not interested in - not just my friends, but also friends of friends.

Oh fuck; I forgot the infernal nuisance that is "LIKE IF YOU ENJOY ICE CREAM IN THE SUN! :D".

"Facebook is the next MySpace" How many comments have said that? But it is not. While certainly more bloated than it used to be it is still relatively fast to load and find stuff unlike Friendster and then MySpace (how did they make the same mistake?)

Why it will not go they way of MySpace is because no matter if you don't use facebook...you use facebook whenever you go to a ton of other sites. Its hard NOT to use fb.

So I say this...

Facebook is the new Ticketmaster.

If you want to go to a big concert or other big event, well you have to use Ticketmaster...at least almost have to just like facebook.

It's clearly the new AOL.

AKA, "the next Compuserve."

AKA, the new horse-and-buggy

Who knows maybe the new MySpace will be the death of Facebook.

Until Facebook starts letting people make their profiles have white text on a yellow background with autoplaying music, I'm not too worried about it going anywhere.

If I deleted my Facebook, I would be cut off socially from so many people. My core group of friends would still be in contact with me, but the hundreds of friends and acquaintances I've made throughout the years would get lost to time.

Even with the people I see every day, the ease of collaboration with events and groups on Facebook makes it more than worth it to have it.

If you hate the newsfeed, then don't look at it. If you're upset that not all of the people that "like" your page don't see your band's post, you're part of the problem.

> the hundreds of friends and acquaintances I've made throughout the years would get lost to time

As they should.

> Finally I strongly believe at one day there will be a decentralized social network, based on Open Source tools.

How about tent.io ?

This looks cool. Another guy has showed me: https://joindiaspora.com/ which also looks pretty interesting. Thanks!

My sarcasm detector is broken, I think... :-/

I do know about "mess" and problems with reaching fans of the page (wich arouse from the fact that people "like" too many pages in fact) but still Facebook remains more than a site - it's rather a social phenomena. And that's why I don't see the way any competitor come on its place. Although competiton is always for good, of course.

Totally bored of it, nothing really interesting, just a marketing machine...

Only if you decide that's what you want it to be by "liking" hundreds of pages.

Wrong. Regardless of your volume of "likes," it's a cluttered mess with dozens of best guess advertisements and a river of promoted crap. AOL 2.0

Yes. If you say otherwise, you most likely still have an account.

Someone mentioned that any question asked in a headline has an answer: "no".

Thus, I propose the headline should read "Will Facebook Avoid MySpace's fate?"

So it's not that MySpace lost and Facebook won. It's that MySpace won first, and Facebook won next. They'll go down in the same order.

Everyone gets what they want out of Facebook

It's been so for at least 5 years.

Christian, you say you hate FB UI and like Google+ one. What UI aspects do you hate in FB?

if facebook is myspace and google+ is dead on arrival, what tool a normal person have to share photos and stories with his close friends and family? there is still a need for this kind of tool.

It's already the next MySpace...

Hope so

it just misses pr0n and few animated gifs, then is the clone

yes

Facebook has been faking it for at least a year. By faking it I mean not growing under their own power. Now "Fakebook" either has to buy users (like the Instagram deal) or its growth is due to mostly fake users with fake likes giving fake metrics.

People are leaving Fakebook now. Not in droves (yet), but the opinion leaders within groups and families are. The ones that are informed are. And the rest will follow once there is another massive invasion of their privacy.

To those reading this who still use their Facebook account, try going without it for a month. See if you don't feel better. I know I did.

While a lot of people talk about privacy or content relevancy issues, which I agree are important, there is a good thread on Reddit discussing why Facebook can be bad for your mental health.

One user writes, "I started to compare my life to others, hating people based off of their status...All it brought me was anger and a lower self-confidence. Almost immediately after deleting it, I felt better. I'm mostly ok with how I live my life and I don't need to compare my life to that of others."

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/11wm5w/to_those_w...

I think that's a very interesting thought. I deleted my Facebook account after I felt that it sucked up too much of my time just browsing status updates. Before, every so often, I would check Facebook to see if anything new had been posted. It got to the point where I had enough and now I feel less anxious about constantly going on the Internet. Information was overloaded for me.

> And the rest will follow once there is another massive invasion of their privacy.

I don't see why people keep clinging to this line of reasoning. There is zero evidence of this, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. Not enough people care enough to make any significant changes. The blogs and news articles try to paint a picture of user unrest over privacy issues, but it's all a fantasy.

People will leave when and only when it stops being the place where everyone else is. There will be no mass exodus. The only way facebook will lose its perch is through a slow trickle over many years.

Well this guy clearly has questionable sense.

Myspace absolutely had a use. It just wasn't generic/clean enough for a mass audience. And as for his criticisms about Facebook. I personally have never experienced any of them.

Meanwhile the only 'mess' I see around is the Google+ feed. It's nothing but a geeky, low-brow clone of Reddit.

Maybe you should stop following geeky, low-brow people?

I don't think you understand how their feed works. It's based on who you choose to follow.

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