Facebook May Lose 80% of Its User Base by 2017 | Hacker News Reader

Facebook May Lose 80% of Its User Base by 2017

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28 pointsadventured27 comments

What? How is Facebook like an idea or an illness?

The problem Facebook solves is a problem we humans have had for thousands of years: how do we stay in touch with our friends and family? Facebook has made staying in touch much easier and simpler than any method before it. I don't see Facebook's demise until something else comes along to make staying in touch with friends and family even easier.

shrug you can model anything as an illness if it has vaguely the same characteristics. Just needs some ability to spread via connections, and some ability to cure a node and make it immune to reinfection at the same time (for example, getting over the sickness and becoming immune, dying of smallpox, or getting bored of MySpace).

I guess you could attempt to model a person's use of a social network as a result of attractors and repulsors. Attractors could be wanting to stay in touch with friends. Repulsors cold be simple apathy, or lack of novelty. When the balance of the two drops enough, you get bored of Facebook (or whatever), and stop caring about it.

...anyhow, the study uses a funky metric/proxy (google search trends...). They claim it works.

I'd argue that Facebook does not solve the problem and is just one of many solutions. As always with first new market exploiters their limitations will be features on newer, smaller, and more agile 2nd generation exploiters. You won't see a demise, or a new facebook rise up somewhere else, it will simply be subjected to fragmentation of the market.

Humans haven't had that problem for thousands of years. For thousands of years our friends and family were mostly our neighbors if not actually living in our households. You could argue that Facebook and social media in general has perverted the notion of what a "friend" is.

Of course we have. Soldiers going off to war. Marriages between two families in different towns or countries for political or economic reasons. Moving from the country to the city in the hopes of a better life. Becoming a travelling merchant. Etc.

Maybe the need was not as great as it is now, but the need certainly existed.

I built a few large scale viral games at zynga, crowdstar, etc. These games eventually exhibited the same strange behavior. They would stop growing - then start a quicker decline into nothingness. We tried every thing: features, advertising spend(s), focus groups, etc.

Once all your users' friends and contacts have been exposed to your game - growth becomes impossible. They either didn't want to try it or tried it (immune / infected). Once you have peaked, people with the least interest begin to leave. The scary issue is that people with moderate interest are effected by this group of early leavers. Then moderately interested users start tapering off. This begins a very quick death circle.

This study is based on a couple of very shaky assumptions. The first is that they're modeling the decline of Facebook on the decline of MySpace, and assuming that their traffic/popularity curves are similar. I think the two sites are completely different animals and all comparisons became invalid when FB launched their app platform in 2007. Maybe when they launched their News Feed in 2006.

The second is that they're basing it on Google Trends data, which is obviously based on searches for Facebook. With the enormous shift to mobile and users going directly to the app, I think that throws a serious kink in trying to apply 2007+ trends to 2014+.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.4208v1.pdf

I wonder how it would turn out if they just asked facebook for the data instead of google trends

People are foaming at the mouth, waiting for and wanting Facebook to fail.

It already has in my book.

There is absolutely nothing visionary about it except that its a really nice cash cow.

I don't expect it to last through 2015. 2017 is way to long

Why does it need to be visionary to survive?

In order to make sure that their stocks stay as high as possible for as long as possible.

I would invest for sure if there was such a thing as Facebook X labs.

But nope lets go with timeline

They have an AI lab.

Just like e-mail failed back in 2001, or the time the telephone the the deadpool in 1985.

The better analogy to those would be if someone had said social networks in general were going to die off.

The land-line has been effectively killed off (the last X million accounts will be slow to go, much like the last X million AOL accounts have been). Facebook would be the land-line approach, social networking voice telephony in general.

Vastly more people now get their email through a web browser - "webmail" - than via dedicated desktop email software (eg Outlook). Facebook is Outlook, social networks are email in general.

I'm not saying Facebook will die like that of course, rather your comparison is all wrong.

When we all first joined Facebook, we were hit with an exciting torrent of old friends we'd lost touch with, especially old hookups/romances that suddenly became possible again. This was like a pathogen entering a fresh population of potential hosts.

Then, over the past 6 years, we explored all of those new possible relationships and took them to their conclusion. But now there's nothing left; like the pathogen killing off all its hosts and having nowhere else to go.

In order to survive, the population has to create new hosts faster than they're being killed i.e. Facebook would have to generate new connections for us at a faster rate than we can explore them. I don't think it comes anywhere close.

In this sense, it definitely has biological underpinnings.

>In order to survive, the population has to create new hosts faster than they're being killed

I don't think that's true. Why do there need to be new connections for you to go through? What you just described is the equivalent of setting up your contacts list from scratch. Say on your phone. You get a new phone and now get to re-add all the people you know or knew. Because you want to stay in touch with them.

Once that is done, does that contact list of yours also "die out" because there is nothing new to add on a regular basis? I don't think so. You just finished building your initial contacts. And you know what happens then? You start to use it. On a regular basis. It is a tool you set up and once it is set up you use it. Simple as that. And that is the same way you can use Facebook. Once you added all the people you want to stay in contact with you can do just that.

It all boils down to how people actually use Facebook. Do they use it like a tool as I just described? Or do they merely play the game of "Who can collect the most "friends""?

I use it as a tool. I have my real friends on there. I don't have 300+ people on there just so when I post something I can marvel at the multitude of "likes" to get some kind of gratification through it. And as long as all those people continue to use Facebook I can continue to keep in touch with them this way. Even past 2017 or whatever date these people have calculated.

One reason AIDS has been so successful as a pathogen is that it takes a long time to kill the host. The infection has plenty of time to spread.

Ebola, on the other hand, never spreads very far because it kills so quickly, as described above.

I wonder if we'll see a "slow-kill" social service emerge in the next few years; one that slows your roll, prevents you from blitzing through the experience all at once.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.4208v1.pdf

Full study for anyone interested

Hasn't Facebook not only surpassed MySpace in peak popularity, but has lasted (usage wise) quite a bit longer than MySpace? I feel like MySpace never actually tried to significantly innovate and change itself (in its heyday) while Facebook has iterated significantly multiple times since I've been using it.

It's also true that the planet Earth may lose up to 100% of its users by 2017.

What are the odds that the people behind this are shorting FB?

There's no shortage of sensationalist stories about public companies – even a tiny bit of price movement can be leveraged for big gains.

Or may not :) The way things are, they will either be stable like google and they are going in that direction, or completely dissapear.

2017 is still a long time in the future. More than enough time for them to innovate.

Linkbait

Exactly. Why else quote a study that the author readily admits is faulty?

... or may not.

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