Why Teenagers Are Fleeing Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Why Teenagers Are Fleeing Facebook

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Everyone is all concerned about how teenagers are fleeing Facebook, but they all fail to realize why teenagers will head back to Facebook. It was originally designed as the online version of College, a way to interact with new and old friends. When all these kids leave their high schools and head off to college where are they going to keep in touch with their old friends, Facebook. When they meet someone new in College where will they add this new friend, Facebook. Facebook is the initial meeting point for new friends and then once you become better friends it is then that you follow and add them on other social media sites. If Facebook sees a huge decline in College age students in the next few years then I will be worried about their future, but until then it doesn't matter what the teenagers do because when they begin to grow up, they will join the rest of society and use their Facebook. Teenagers are not the demographic to follow when understanding Facebook's fate.

Also, they are all leaving Facebook to use intagram, a Facebook owned company, or use snapshat which will die off in popularity in the coming years.

I never cared for the various made up features on FB such as likes, pokes, wall posts etc. but yes, like you said, the keeping in touch really is its killer app. It's basically a self-updating rolodex with discovery.

Right, because teens were never the original market anyway. A lot of us original Facebookers hated it when FB opened up to high schoolers.

The "us" in your comment shows the genius behind Zuckerberg's exclusivity as a growth model and it's seeming irony.

I agree Facebook would have no benefit for me when I was a teenager since all the people I wanted to interact with and cared about were close by and easy to get a hold of in school or via phone.

When Facebook went mainstream I was already in university and had started losing contact with people from grade school, high school etc. But facebook allowed me to reconnect with those people and some of my best friends today are actually people that I knew but didn't spend alot of time with in grade school because they were in different classes but through FB realized they had very similar personalities to me and we became great friends.

Facebook is also the preferred means of organizing events, groups and using messaging instead of e-mails in almost all of my friend circles.

May view may be skewed though since I'm from Iceland where Facebook has something close to 50% of the whole country has a Facebook account and 90% in the 25-35 age group. But I live in London though where the use of Facebook is a mixed bag, most of the foreigners here I know use it but my English friends seem less interested in it and prefer e-mail over FB messages.

Exactly correct. The further your friends are from you the more you want to interact with them in some way. If everyone you know is at school who needs FB. I keep in touch with friends from two generations many of whom are spread all over the world and even those locally I don't see often enough.

However I wish FB would be replaced by something simpler that was just for keeping in touch with friends and little else. But since everyone is on FB it's hard to change until everyone has (1) a better choice (2) a reason to leave.

Excellent point. Every two or three week or so, I'm wondering why I'm still on FB. Answer? Because there are those people I met when I was traveling a lot, and even though we don't talk much or at all, it's good to know that there is this one central place where I can get in touch with any of them.

Yes

Facebook is more of a "friends catalog", you don't care about the newsfeed so much but it allows you to interact in some ways.

But the real action happens elsewhere.

> When all these kids leave their high schools and head off to college where are they going to keep in touch with their old friends, Facebook.

If teenagers decide to congregate on a different social network, why would they stop using that and go back to facebook just because they go to college?

If you and your closest friends find a better place online to meet that doesn't suffer from facebook's "everybody's there and can see what you're doing" problem, why wouldn't you continue meeting there after high school?

"If teenagers decide to congregate on a different social network, why would they stop using that and go back to facebook just because they go to college?"

Not only that but parent comment (which does make some valid points) doesn't take into account what could be called the reverse network effect. If stories of facebook's lack of popularity continue to surface (as well as the reasons for it) things would begin to accelerate (stock drops, advertisers no longer see it in a positive light) users who wouldn't leave begin to leave or discover alternatives, someone is spurred on to develop a product which attracts more of their users etc. In other words usage drops, morale at facebook drops it's no longer the place to be. Facebook hasn't been around that long and after a while it is entirely possible that even users today will tire of it and move elsewhere. And losing the network effect will make it less valuable to anyone who sticks around.

That was exactly what happend to the German clones from the so called "VZ" group. The where designed after facebook, but before its internationalisation.

Once FB gained traction here, it was a lost fight for the VZs. The other local social networks suffered as well.

But here the next big thing for the kids/youth is Instagram. So the stay with FB. But listening to them when I commute, it really is, "Have you seen thet thing on Instagram..." when one year back it was "... seen oon FB..."

yep, that's a realistic observation. seen that too

Good thing Facebook were smart enough to buy Instagram. And more importantly, have been smart enough to not screw with it (just look at all the Google+/YouTube blowback)

Bebo, Hyves, MySpace were very popular among teenagers.

Your life dramatically changes after high school, and the types of products and services you use change with it.

Worrying about your parents being on the same social network as yourself ceases to be an issue when you become an adult yourself, and you no longer have to hide the fact that you were out partying when you were supposed to be studying at a friend's house. And as the GP notes, Facebook solves the problem that teens haven't yet had to confront - how do you catch up with your friends when you don't seem them several times a week?

In fact, the thing that has made Facebook such a phenomenon is not that teens found it cool, but rather that the much larger older population found it useful. I would be willing to bet that teens don't even make up 10% of Facebook at this point in time. When adults stop posting and stop receiving notifications on Facebook, then Facebook has something to worry about. Until then, my money would be on teens gravitating back to Facebook as they get older, and being cool becomes less important than knowing that all of your friends are contactable on Facebook.

Anecdote: I'm 55 and I do not have a facebook account. I was recently taken severely to task for this grave omission by cousins, one in her late 60s and the other in his early 70s.

That is a big and growing market, as the 'silver surfers' increase their smartphone/tablet skills and find the web applications that enable them to achieve a major goal: contacting far flung family.

I may have to cave in because they want to use FB for organising family meetups (this is an extended mafia with branches on 4 continents by the way).

Remember your Clay Christensen: The late majority follow the early adopters. In this case, this means where the teenagers move to, that is where the parents will eventually go. The writing has been on the wall for this for a few years now -- FB doesn't stand a chance to last out the decade.

Teenagers as a group are not trendsetters for other age groups, for example when did you ever see a Justin Bieber hairdo on anyone over the age of 17?

They are time rich and money poor, a situation that reverses as you get older. They live geographically close to most of their friends. This is mostly not true for adults, who tend to be time poor, wealthier than teenagers, and geographically separated from their friends. Because of this, looking to teenagers to understand what most people want from their social media does not seem like a particularly good idea to me.

"when did you ever see a Justin Bieber hairdo on anyone over the age of 17?"

Give it a few years...

"In this case" because remember -- they were the ones that started the migration to FB; in this case, they were exactly "the trendsetters for other age groups" and so if they move, your early adopters are moving and the late majority will follow.

Additionally, non-facebook users will find that when they go to college, they won't know when any of the parties are (and they won't know about any of the study groups). If you're a person that has that typical human need to belong, university almost forces you to log into facebook.

For many people, being on the same social network as your parents is still problematic in college.

Facebook solves the problem that teens haven't yet had to confront - how do you catch up with your friends when you don't seem them several times a week?

Twitter. Every teen I know, though admittedly a small sample, says that facebook is for old people and twitter is the way they communicate with each other. Constantly.

Until then, my money would be on teens gravitating back to Facebook as they get older...knowing that all of your friends are contactable on Facebook. No they won't be. The ones in their social circle will be on twitter or something like that that replaces it. Facebook will gray out; even the older people I know that haven't deleted their profile yet are getting tired of it.

you forgot skype and many other new contenders, what you say sounds highly biased and short sighted. I totally agree with @raverbashing he is so right that Facebook is nothing more than a friends catalog.

Well, that's one possibility, but high schoolers were hooked on Facebook too, at least before it opened up to the general public. The generation that uses Facebook now has used it since high school or college, but the next generation didn't start using in high school and they might not start in college, either. Maybe Facebook is less of a "stage of life" thing and more of a generational thing.

Everyone seems concerned with teenagers fleeing facebook, but I've found that I have also been "fleeing" facebook. My time spent on the site has been diminishing—partly due to the fact that in my late 20s, so many of my friends are posting picture after picture of their children—and as my time spent on the site diminishes, I notice that stories I'd probably care have been squeezed out of the news feed, making the site less interesting and feeding into my distance.

I know I'll probably keep the account for reconnecting with old friends every few months or so, but I get the feeling that the way I use and think about facebook needs to shift for me to get any sort of value beyond occasionally checking in on people or requesting phone #'s when I happen to be in the same town.

"in my late 20s, so many of my friends are posting picture after picture of their children"

I'm older and I can't even imagine what it would be like if I had the amount of friends that younger people have and they all or even most posted pictures of their kids and every random event they attended. Even now with the amount that I do have (quite small by choice) it's to much.

Wait to those children of your friends start playing sports or are in school plays (I'm assuming by your age the children are quite young I guess.)

Posting videos of plays and soccer games probably recorded on a full size iPad. I hadn't thought of that, yet. It's terrifying.

Facebook does a great job of filtering what it shows you.

I have lots of "friends" on Facebook, and once in a while I see a photo (usually of a major event) of a classmate I haven't seen in a long while and I didn't remember he was on my friends list.

My Facebook use is mostly to keep in touch with my family abroad, and we have a closed group. I usually don't post much to my broader "friends" list.

As a 28-year old single male, browsing Facebook and seeing pictures of dating and married couples makes me feel like shit. It's ironic, because a tool that's supposed to keep people connected amplifies my feelings of loneliness. So I find myself checking it less and less often.

> the granddaddy of all social networks—Facebook

Have people seriously forgotten what socialising on the internet was like before Facebook? There were social networks way before Facebook, and there will be other social networks after Facebook.

They might not be called "social networks" though, because just like the services themselves, the words we use to describe them change constantly as well. Culture changes constanty, after all.

How about the "not dead grandparent of all social networks"? Maybe Friendster and Six Degrees are the deceased great-grandparents, only seen in faded daguerreotypes.

It's more like... the social network. Everything else is in the perimeter.

It's great to see someone else mention SixDegrees; it's the progenitor of the modern "social network" as people relate the term today, although I'm not sure it ever attracted many teenagers in the late 90s.

Hard to believe that was 16 years ago. Jeez.

Seriously, have we already completely forgotten the neon-colored wonder of Myspace?

I suspect people are using granddaddy more often for emphasis, as in "the king of a social networks--Facebook", not describing how old they are, since that comment was followed by details on how big Facebook is.

Not saying I like it, but that's what I took it to mean.

"granddaddy" doesn't mean first. Given a lot of sites are the 2nd or 3rd generation derivatives of FB, I think it's a reasonable use of the term.

I'm curious; does anyone[1] experience a pressure to join a social network the same way I did in the earlier years of Facebook where all activities, conversations, and events were moved to that platform - and not using it rendered you a non-person?

There's the pressure of "all the cool kids use it", and then there's the ostracism that comes with not using the platform.

There's "traction", and then there's "Facebook traction".

[1]: Outside countries like China, Japan, South Korea that might have their own social media exclusive to Asia.

Whatsapp. It is now a fundamental piece of communication in my country. Without it, you can barely communicate. Texting (SMS) is dead. Phone calls are too intimate, the minutes too expensive. Everyone has data connectivity due to their smartphones. I resisted for a very long time but at some point you will HAVE to get yourself into it. Especially when you get frustrated looks when people cannot find you in their Whatsapp contact list.

I've noticed the same thing. I find it strange though. Most people I know have smart phones on contracts and most smartphones come with unlimited SMS. Still these people prefer Whatsapp and Viber. I drives me nuts as I'd rather not send me communications through yet another company.

It is mostly the ability to participate in group chats, share media and the native feel of it. It really just works. I don't like the whole third party idea either, especially because the company behind Whatsapp is pretty shady.

SMS is just too dated to compete. In fact, wih the new SMS proxy API in Android (apps can act as interfaces to SMS), Whatsapp can even obtain a bigger role.

But SMS is also sent through a company(ies)

With Whatsapp I'm sending my messages using data that's already going through my phone company. In other words why not use SMS? By using Whatapp I'm just adding a second company to the mix that doesn't need to be there.

Mostly because the sms exchanges between companies are worse than using data to access an internet based messaging service. They have wacky standards support (Group MMS?) and wildly overcharge you for sending 144 characters.

Who doesn't have unlimited SMS?

I mean that seriously, nobody in any of my social circles uses whatsapp. I honestly don't have a solid grasp on who exactly their core market is.

Lots of people dont have unlimited MMS

and anyway none of what you said addresses the above reasons for wanting an internet based messaging system

Do you know many 13 - 16 year olds?

> I honestly don't have a solid grasp on who exactly their core market is.

I'm guessing it's whoever was using blackberry messenger.

> "Do you know many 13 - 16 year olds?"

Admittedly no, but aren't most children on their parent's cellphone plans?

I would expect the cash strapped ones to be in their early twenties, but I'm not seeing that in practice.

I suspect the value in whatsapp is in something other than limitations of SMS, but I can't say what.

The popularity of BBM didn't come out of nowhere.

Some countries have better plans than others. And teens can send insane amounts of texts.

I don't get why people just don't use email rather than whatsapp.

Whatsapp is like iChat, but x-platform. You get delivery notification etc

Where, Israel?

Reminds me of when when it got harder to find out about when/where local bands were playing if you weren't actively using MySpace, because posting something on MySpace was easier, cheaper, and had a wider reach than going all over town flyering bars.

My wife quit Facebook. It was her primary method of interacting with people, primary connection, so it was hard to decide to disconnect.

Facebook made her feel like shit.

She's had a bad job or two before, and in the evening I needed to go on an hour long walk with her to help unwind from her job. Facebook upset her at that level.

Since she quit Facebook, she's been happier, feels better and has been more focused on herself.

I can only imagine teenagers have it worse.

Full disclosure it could be worse for her because we lost our baby this year and everyone else is having kids.

Kids aren't going to converge on a platform their parents use. End of story. That's why FB was so 'in' when it first started. literally no one over 21.

And that's really the last word on the subject. It's done growing and unless they do some major branching out it's probably as profitable as it will ever be. Which is going to unfortunately traumatize a whole bunch of stockholders and sink a lot of other innocent tech stocks but when we look back it's probably going to seem pretty obvious that Facebook wasn't ever going to be the next Google or even the next LinkedIn. It's audience is too fickle.

Facebook was so much fun in its university exclusive days, because it was like a quasi-private campus community. With groups, it was even a good way to meet new people.

As far as I can tell, all of that is long dead. And 99.9% of Facebook's growth came after that era, certainly. But I still think that the future of "social networks" is going to look a lot more like early Facebook than current Facebook.

And now they're all on instagram instead... Yeah, that purchase makes a lot more sense doesn't it?

Social media sites have a distinct finite lifespan. I've seen many come and go, all peaking with the same sense of "this is taking over and will last forever". Facebook is showing the exact same cycle, facing total burnout within 5 years. This is a good time to cash out, and a good time to build the next virtual venue.

These are reasons I left Facebook. Well, all but "parents" anyway. I was a parent before Facebook happened.

One really good reason for adults to leave Facebook is it has become an HR magnet.

I personally have been using Facebook more because of the ways I've structured my feed, i.e, I no longer follow friends, but instead follow thought leaders, specific companies/brands and other information sources. For me, Facebook would be even more valuable if it did a better job of understand who I am, what I want to see and when I want to see it. This would then be further impressive if Facebook did a better job of showing me new information based on my expressed interests.

I am not too sure about this narrative in general, but let's assume it's true that teens are leaving FB and not coming back. As "The Ad Contrarian" notes frequently in his blog, all the people with money are over 50. So, it actually might be awesome for FB that they have so many of those folks. Our culture is obsessed with young people and for some reason thinks that's where the money is, but it's not.

Young people used to drive purchasing decisions. That might still be the case.

When an article's main source is the author's son, you know you're in for a treat.

Facebook is pretty tiresome, for many of the reasons already beaten to death here. It's also nothing new, there were "social networks" long before MySpace, rewind to the 90s and there was the uber-cool MindVox, the less cool and old people version the Well. Nothing new here.

What strikes me is the simple fact that it's kind of useless. I don't need endless status updates of people I don't really know, if I need to find my friends or share something with them, there's this new thing called a smartphone, it has my Contacts, I can share whatever I want with them and not spend my time staring at endless scrolling ads and the flotsam of people's lives.

Everybody short FB now! On a more serious note - I can sense a trend rising in FB bashing, someone with better access than mine should check whether the investment banks and hedge funds are shorting FB in large volumes. This is the problem with public companies - there is always the stock market in the background and you can never tell whether bad news are true or just ordered by the shorting side.

    one of his biggest issues with Facebook is that “it’s normal to be friends with people you don’t know.”

There was a time when the rules stated that you had to actually know the people on your friends list in real life... This was before FB went commercial...

This is one of the reasons why I deleted my FB account.

> Teenagers, not surprisingly, are hip to corporate exploitation.

That's why they use Pintrest instead!

About two years ago I overheard some preteen kids talking about them leaving Facebook when their parents joined and added them as friends. I'm guessing they don't want their parents too much involved in their social life.

No offense, but the only people who care if Facebook is cool or not are other teenagers. They also think eating dinner with the family at 6 is not cool, honestly who cares.

No offense, but avoid a career in marketing.

I will avoid a career in maketing the targets tenagers with the same zeal that I would avoid the plague.

I think the end of the article summed it up pretty well: the signal to noise ratio dropped too low. (even if teens wouldn't use the term signal to noise)

When people leave Facebook, where do they go?

Is there a different social network that doesn't have these problems?

Yes, it is called the Internet.

The original social network: speaking to people IRL.

Not IRL, but texting, via whatsapp, photos via snapchat and instagram.

In real life social networks are ephemeral. Someone you meet at a party and have a good time with for the duration of that party is immediately part of your near intimate social network, at least now. You might even share personal things with that person. The next day you might find it weird if they called you however if you didn't leave the night explicitly on some kind of terms to hang out more.

Over time we grow closer to some people and further away from others.

Facebook isn't engineered to do handle this. It just wants more and more data, more connections. It doesn't reflect real life. Build a social network where friending and un-friending is determined algorithmically, based on the number interactions and type and their content instead of a button you have to toggle and it may be take off. Problem is, you'd have to own all the channels through which people communicate.

Turns out people don't want to have to maintain a social graph.

"When people leave Facebook, where do they go?"

Out?

I'm sensing that many people now avoid anything that resembles a 'social network', as if they tried it and are now over the whole concept. Facebook left a bad taste in a lot of mouths.

Edit: NPR's All Things Considered did a story on this exact thing a while ago: http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2013/06/17/192718821/teen... and apparently Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and Vine are big ones for the teens they talked to.

Snap chat. Sexting is the new communication.

And so it begins ...

You're downvoted? Really? I expected more from HN.

Teenagers are the demographic that started FB. Everyone followed them. If they leave, everyone will eventually follow. It's nothing personal; it's just how this stuff works.

I recommend you read The Innovator's Dilemma by Clay Christensen which explains it all quite nicely.

Says Yahoo!?!?

Watch out for ad hominem attacks here, they don't fit with the HN vibe. That being said, I get your point. Reading the article I thought it ridiculous to say tweens are leaving for Instagram, which is owned by Facebook (how do you leave a company but not leave a company?), and Tumblr, which is a Yahoo service.

I'm not entirely sure the author's sample size is large enough, either.

This should not be on the front page. I can only assume that because the readership wants facebook to go down, they're happy to uplift any story that suggests that they are.

Look at this articles sources.

>"... you don’t want their mom to yell at you,” my 15-year-old son told me.

>My 17-year-old daughter told me about a friend with an aunt who routinely lurks around her niece’s Facebook account.

>one of my daughter’s high-school friends explained.

>or prompts to answer "questions about me." Renaud, a 19-year-old Facebook user at McGill University in Montreal (ok this one is reasonable)

>one of my son’s friends emailed

>another of my daughter’s friends complained.

I've got some problems with this article as well

1. Parents. this was clearly written by an isolated one.

2. Too much pointless stuff.

3. Too many ads. It's like this was designed specifically so people would be click baited.

4. It's Vapid. As if there is no substance to this article at all.

5. Fake friends. (this one is a guess)

The secret, powerful cabal that decides which stories end up on the front page of Hacker News is going to be after you for exposing this. Quick! Run for safety! I'll hold them off as long as I can!

Interesting. You actually think this is worth material for HN?

Personally I felt bad about that comment, because it was shooting fish in a barrel, but it seems those fish needed to be shot.

This is actually a big deal for Facebook. 20 years ago, no one would have really cared WHAT teenagers considered "hip". The reason was, teenagers had next to zero buying power. Teenagers were trying to act like "grownups". Now, take a look at any of your teenager friends/family. They're standing there in a mirror with a brand new iPhone and a Macbook Pro in the background. Now look at a picture with their moms and/or dads. Notice that much of the time, the adults are trying to dress like the kids. The kids now represent an enormous potential as the adults are just dying to hold on to their youth. For now it's wise for any company that wants to turn a huge impulse profit to pay attention to what the fickle teen generation is currently considering cool. Vine is a perfect example.

20 years ago was 1993. Marketing obsession with teenagers predates 1993 by decades, and with good reason--brand impressions created by age 16 can last for life.

In earlier, healthier economic times, teenagers actually had buying power too because they could work minimum wage jobs without having to pay bills.

I was going to say something similar. The poster sounds like a young one, assuming things were different before he was born. Not so. For example, back in the 60's muscle cars were hugely important for auto makers and they were largely an object of teen lust. High schoolers and their cars used to be really important; young people's love affair with cars has waned in last couple decades. And teenagers have determined large amounts of adult (i.e, their parents) spending for long time, which has made them target of advertisers for just as long.

Marketing to teenagers definitely goes back decades, but not forever. I believe it is very much a post-WWII phenomenon.

What bills do teenagers have to pay now that they didn't in 1993?

The only thing that I can think of would be a phone bill.

It's not that they have more bills, it's that they're less likely to have jobs.

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