Will 2013 be the year Facebook becomes MySpace? | Hacker News Reader

Will 2013 be the year Facebook becomes MySpace?

dendory.net

32 pointsdendory53 comments

It seems to me that Facebook has always been stuck with a damned lot: to make their product profitable, they have make their product worse. This is exactly the problem with "social" games. These games are lousy exactly because the lousy features make them money. With the direction that Facebook is going, it seems to be a service where users volunteer to receive spam. I do not think any company in this position is setup for long-term success.

On a philosophical note, I have always felt that Facebook is just a slot machine company. They make a fancy box that takes advantage of the weaknesses of the human brain (obsession with novelty, gossip, and visual stimulus) to keep users doing an activity for much longer than required to get the benefit of that activity. I could be radical and say that I think Facebook delivers no value to its customers and that most people end up actively regretting the time they spend on Facebook (I think it is uncontroversial to say that no one goes to bed wishing he had spent more of his day on Facebook), however there is always someone with a story about reuniting with a long-lost elementary school friend due to Facebook. Nonetheless, even if this value does exist, in no way does it justify the amount of time most Facebook users spend on the site nor does it describe the majority of user activity. This is not to say that Facebook is doomed any more than Las Vegas is doomed, but maybe people will wise up and be more careful about how they spend their time...

A bit of anecdote: I have noticed people on reddit commenting that they now use reddit more than Facebook as all the good content on Facebook is just copied from reddit. If reddit had some kind of social interface, it might move aggressively into this market.

Isn't that the same phenomenon as television? It's still going strong. (Increasingly coupled with a realtime twitter stream)

Absolutely yes.

I think so. In the natural arc of a new medium, social media is now at the point that television hit thirty years ago, when the "big three" networks started losing control to a host of new cable channels.

TV is obviously still around, but it's much more of a bazaar now.

Paradoxically, a social interface would kill Reddit, as it thrives on anonymity. Also a Catch-22.

I think you're probably right. Then again, people seem to have a great time at reddit meetups.

And all the good content on Reddit comes from HN

Which is not meant as facaetious as it sounds - in financial terms Facebook is the Belgium Dentist of ephemeral trivia.

Then again I spend far far too much time on here, and all HN uses to keep me here is a points system.

You stay on HN because of the points system? Your points are mostly not even visible to others.

So what? Are points, or what ever, only any use for showing off to others?

I'd bet that to a fair few people here, the points are a quiet way that they, well, we, get our opinions or thoughts sort of validated to our selves. So, if my karma goes up after this post, I will quietly know more agreed with me than disagreed. And that is kind of comforting. But I don't feel any need for others to have to know that, its just a nice quiet me thing.

And of course the opposite is true, and I quietly get to know I might be taking rubbish.

One problem I've found with that is that people are discouraged from downvoting unless something is off topic or out of line, whereas upvotes are encouraged more broadly.

If only 20% of people reading a comment like it, at least some will still upvote.

So on average, even my mediocre comments get +1-3 points. Thus the more I comment, the more points I get, even if quality is only so-so.

It was more that Facebook et al have sophisticated gamification to keep one engaged, HN just has karma (and community) yet I react like one of Skinners rats. I suppose if I have learnt something it's get addicted to something that has positive effects

I don't spend a lot of time on facebook and the time I do spend there I feel I get a lot more value from, or regret a lot less, on average than, say, time spent reading blog comments or reddit/HN or tech pundits or ...

Granted that's not saying much ...

1) If you read in a literal manner the reports companies file with the SEC, you'd think each and every one of them is going to fail. Know that when companies list all the "threats" they "believe" they face in SEC reports, you have to be aware that it's basically legal-ass-covering, and doesn't really actually reflect internal sentiment. They basically include those so that if they get sued by shareholders they can point to those reports as legal evidence that they informed them of all the risks. Anyone who has read multiple SEC reports will know that this is pretty mundane stuff.

2) The OP's right about the coolness. Facebook is not seen as cool among teens anymore. It's seen as necessary. You are seen as an unusual person if you don't have a Facebook. The same applies to having a cellphone - it's assumed you have one, and it's a surprise if you don't (disclosure: I'm going off personal experience from high school).

But you're right. It's not seen as cool anymore. I think this is a great thing: Coolness brings you users. Necessity bring you the money.

It goes without saying that Blake Ross was being sarcastic about his reason for leaving.

Don't agree 100%, but the quality of FB overall as a product has definitely degraded as of late as they've been pushing Gifts, Commerce, and other revenue streams onto users very strongly.

I've noticed several annoying redesigns / changes that hide convenient functionality in order to make the user click through "No, I don't want to give a gift"... Very annoying, definitely makes me less pleased and less engaged with the site.

As obnoxious as those gift suggestions can be for some people I'd never think of sending a gift, I've found the actual experience of sending a gift on Facebook to be great. You can send something across the country the day of someone's birthday (as opposed to sending something with a belated birthday card), because a lot of them give the receiver an option between a couple of gifts (say a bottle of red, white or rose wine).

I'm not saying I don't like the Facebook gift product. I tried it out a few times, and you're right - they nailed it. The virtual card and slow reveal as the user clicks through (then it shows up unwrapped on the wall, etc) is awesome and a great end-to-end addition to the site.

What I really hate is that because this great new feature makes money, as opposed to the previous goal of driving growth, engagement, what have you, it is pushed first and foremost and hides many more useful features behind additional clicks to first say "No, I don't want to buy a gift". For example, the one-click write-on-everyone-whos-birthday-it-is-in-one-dialogue feature was unbelievably useful. Now you have to click twice for each person to write on their wall (once on the thing that says "Buy a gift", then once on "Write on their timeline").

> "Then we have the recent departure of Blake Ross, the company's Director of Products. In his now removed goodbye letter he mentioned that he did an informal survey and found that teenagers would actually answer 'no' to the question of whether they still viewed Facebook as 'cool', and this influenced his decision to leave the company."

Blake Ross was being sarcastic.

I agree that he was being sarcastic about whether this was a realistic reason for him leaving. But I still think it's telling that he made the joke - it seems to me to indicate that there's some perception, internally, that teenagers no longer view them as cool.

For example, if I were to leave Google, and had the same sense of humor as Blake Ross, I might say something like "I'm leaving Google because my mom and her friends don't use Google+. But seriously..." I wouldn't actually leave Google for that reason, but it doesn't make it an untrue statement.

its more likely he was mocking doomsayer articles like this one

Mockery only functions one way. If a customer mocks a company representative, it's an accusation. If a company representative mocks a customer, it's an acknowledgement.

As usual, the title is a little bit sensationalist. According to the company, Facebook is curently being used actively by 1 billion users. For Facebook to go the MySpace way (let alone in single year), something incredibly extraordinary would have to happen, akin of Google as a search engine becoming irrelevant. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it's a bit naive to suggest such thing because teenagers engage less with the site these days.

If we're going to compare myspace and facebook... it's worth pointing out that myspace, at its peak, had 110m active users. In other words, MySpace never achieved what Facebook has.

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/01/09/social-network...

A lot of that can be ascribed to being in the right place at the right time, however.

Lots more people have access to the internet, or are internet-savvy enough to use social media sites, than twelve years ago, when MySpace was in its prime.

There were no MySpace apps for iPhone or iPad, because the most popular phone at the time was the old Nokia "snake" phone.

12 years ago? Myspace was founded in Aug 2003, meaning it's only 9.5 years old now. It was acquired by News Corp just 8 years ago when they had only 25m registered users [0].. and was at its peak active users just 5 years ago (the numbers I already linked to).

Facebook was started only 6 months after Myspace.

So this isn't just about being in the right place at the right time. Myspace clearly made mistakes and/or executed poorly. They had the lead until mid-2008..

0. http://triblive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/s_720589.html#axzz...

I notice my teenage sister using Facebook as something like an appliance: like email or SMS...it's just a little tool. When I was in highschool, it was a platform; a destination.

With un-monitized mobile apps and notifications on every device, it's just a communication tool nowadays. Instagram and Pinterest are what I notice teens using the same way I used Facebook in highschool.

So my predicion: it either becomes like Google and Email...or it dies. But nothing can bring back its coolness factor.

Exactly this. 5 years ago I would spend many hours browsing friends walls and playing games. These days I check it for 5 mins for messages and try to ignore the superfluous ads and like spam. Most of my friends have gone from having a new update every other day to updating monthly or less. Facebook will stay around as a tool but it is certainly no longer a social destination.

Facebook knows this, however, and its been hinted at that this is by design. It will mean that they always have users.

Am I the only one who finds that email other than beeing much more appropriate to send .. emails is also way more romantic?

I actually prefer handwritten letters, if I'm being romantic.

comparison was between facebook messages and email.

Facebook is the World of Warcraft of social networks.

- Previous competitors were big, but only about 10% of what they've become.

- They struck a nerve somewhere and didn't fill just a niche, they fulfilled what everyone wanted at the same time.

- Made changes to satisfy the masses.

- Made changes to satisfy the bottom line.

- They will (or already have) reach a saturation point where they are losing people at the same clip as they are gaining them.

- They will very, very slowly degrade, being eaten by many competitors but probably not just one.

- Reach a lower equilibrium, nowhere near their peak, where they can continue for a very long and profitable future.

The last one is how WoW is doing right now. I don't know if Facebook has a 'very profitable' future for how big they are, although I do think they will be a portion of their current selves and sustain that for a very long time.

As a side note, I think the reason people are so pessimistic about Facebook's future (and has been discussed on HN before) is that if it was completely abandoned tomorrow, all of it's content is irrelevant. It's not really a blogging platform, it's not really an image archive, all that is there is connections - and even those might not be all that significant.

EDIT: formatting.

Nope. Here's a difference: My parents never signed up for MySpace. It takes a lot of momentum to stop a beast as big as Facebook. MySpace was never even close.

While true, is this just the first example of a social site that has gotten big enough to attract your parents? Or is this the first site your parents will, for lack of a better term, abandon just like others did with myspace?

Yeah, I don't know that it's really anything to do with Facebook per se, but rather the fact that it's 2012 and people's parents are now signing up for social media sites.

I think it's the case that Facebook has just gotten that big. Also, it doesn't have terrible custom backgrounds like MySpace. To the extent that they can avoid that, I think they'll be ok. There's probably a few other things they should focus on too...

Serious question: Did your parents think you might be groomed on MySpace by perverts? Were the worried for you in any way? (In this context of course, I'm sure in general they care about you!!!) See, a lot of parents sign up to facebook because of the various scare stories, and want to monitor their kids. I know quite a few in that category.

On the other hand, I'm a parent and I signed up before my kids even knew FB existed. My parents have not signed up, and likely never will. Neither will my parents parents, but then Im not sure they even know what a "facebook" even is.

I have since closed my facebook account. Unless places like here are some how called "social", I don't do "social" at all. Well, I do, but I don't call sitting in front of a computer social. I call it giving over personal information so a web site can make money. Not that there is anything wrong with that, its fair enough for those who want to partake. But to me, that is what it is. I communicate with friends via email if I have to use a computer to do so.

I don't think my parents were concerned for me by the time MySpace was a thing, though I do remember them talking to me and my sister about being careful in chat rooms on AOL back in the day.

> We believe that some of our users, particularly our younger users, are aware of and actively engaging with other products and services similar to, or as a substitute for, Facebook. For example, we believe that some of our users have reduced their engagement with Facebook in favor of increased engagement with other products and services such as Instagram.

Anecdotal evidence that happens to be confirmed by this FB press release: one of my younger colleagues (she's in her early 20s) just told me a couple of days ago: "I almost don't use FB anymore, I'm only using Instgram". She's the only person I know face to face who had a MySpace account (I live in Europe, where MySpace wasn't really that big of a thing anyway) and she has generally been among the first to experiment with new social thingies.

I'm not saying FB will "be dead" anytime soon, but is good that they've chosen not to bury their head in the sand like Google does with Google+. Of course, it just happens that Instagram is now owned by FB.

It already has, in the sense that early adopters and content creators have largely abandoned it in favor of other services (mostly Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and now Vine). Facebook is now mainly the realm of corporate-sponsored pages and gossip among non-technical folk, so basically MySpace circa 2004.

Granted, it's much less aggressively bad than MySpace was at that time, since people can't arbitrarily embed HTML/CSS/JavaScript wherever they want, but its stock prices are absurdly over valued and it has never found a way to monetize its audience, and it has totally lost the trust of its users.

The main thing Facebook has going for it is that everyone is on it. But most high-profile people only use it as a place to link to their profiles on the services they actually use, and people will follow the people they "follow" on to new services, if you follow me.

I think it's safe to say that it will become more and more of a ghost town over the coming year or two.

fb is the premier social product in a world going social. they have a great foundation. everybody needs to take a step back and allow them to make some mistakes as they build a better product. think about some of the most revolutionary companies out there. everyone of them has a hiccup or two.

Why not use something better in the meantime?

I wonder how much the "we no longer show all your posts to all your friends" issue is going to hurt Facebook?

I have limited data on this - but I know it's the reason I've stopped bothering to post anything on Facebook. I'll post on Google+, Livejournal or one of many blogs or forums where 100% of my friends can see what I'm saying, thanks, rather than have Facebook decide how my social interactions work and which 15% of my friends it'll show my posts to.

In my experience, when the "Facebook chooses who sees your posts, and it's never everyone" rule is demonstrated to other semi-"normal" Facebook users, they react very negatively.

I miss being able to unsubscribe from my annoying acquaintances. It's too socially awkward to defriend some people who post 15 inspirational messages a day.

You can still do that they just changed the name. Where the unsubscribe thing was there is now a drop down that you can uncheck put posts in your your feed.

Click the arrow, and hit hide post.

Then click 'change what updates you receive from X'

Then set it to only important or none.

Found it, that's a pretty odd design choice actually, that button doesn't look like it's going to trigger a dropdown, in fact it looks like it would unfriend the person if clicked.

I think it's a poor metaphor. But I do think Facebook's future is going to more as a platform for connecting third party services. Few users are going to be on just one of these other services, and there's value in creating the best space to share content from disparate services.

Facebook can lose 50% of its users and still have more users than basically anything else on the Internet. All they need to do is figure out how to monetize these users consistently, and they will be fine.

For a minute I've misread it as "overcomes" and thought the article is from the past....

No, the site itself hasn't done anything too drastic to suggest anything of that sort.

Hmm, if so and so is going to happen, it will take someone to actually do it, so the real question is who will do it, and how? Anyone up for it ? Anyone?

10 bucks says, it will be 2014, not 2013, given how much time it will take at minimum to catch up to FB

No.

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