Where Are Facebook's Teens Going? | Hacker News Reader

Where Are Facebook's Teens Going?

gavindonovan.com

12 pointsgavindonovan6 comments

They are going places where they can more easily control who sees what they share.

With Facebook, you must say something that is public or friends-only where your family can see it, or you must create a special list that shows the name of everyone in the list that can receive it, which is weird and complicated.

Given those choices, teens and adults alike are opting to share things on networks where they don't have to worry about the implications of what they say.

I don't understand that chart. What does "% change in millions" mean? Comparing the % change for a small user base (WeChat) to a much larger user base (Facebook) doesn't make much sense either. Facebook is huge, so a 60% growth in their mobile app is still impressive.

To add more perspectives, here is a post I did on new networks my peers and I love (born in '92).

https://medium.com/experiences-of-a-student-hacker/8956121ff...

LinkedIn comes above tumblr in this list. I'm yet to meet a teen interested about connecting to friends on LinkedIn. These are net market adoption rates, and not specific to teens, hence clearly flawed.

They are going to the same place all of MySpace's users went: to the next fad. Teens are a fickle bunch; each crop wants to feel like they are different, avant-garde, trend-setting.

Yeah, there are countless things that used to be hot among teens that have gone by the wayside, so I think the rumors of Facebook's demise are greatly exaggerated. AOL Instant Messenger, LiveJournal, Xanga... These were all great ways to communicate as a teen that were adult-free, yet there was very little staying power and/or a lack of massive general-population growth for any of them.

And many of these services aren't exactly "competing" with FB any more than SMS is, or AIM was in 2004 when Facebook started (a lot of the discussion about group chat services sounds remarkably like teens (re)discovering a mobile form of AIM circa 2000). Acquisition attempts still make sense if FB sees them as complimentary products with their own potential for massive growth instead of purely defensive moves. Maybe one of the newcomers will have more luck in that space than AOL did.

On the other hand, it's hard to elucidate what exactly will give Facebook more staying power than past attempts. Possibly simply being the first to have such a large, cross-demographic user base? I know adults of all ages who use it to keep in touch with other adults, and I also know teens who use it to keep in touch with other teens. And of course there's also some cross talk between those bases. There aren't a lot of other products attempting to do exactly the same thing, and of those that have, even Google hasn't been able to unseat FB. The core use of FB seems to be a little different for everyone, but it also seems to be comparatively competitor-free.

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