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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

The thing about infectious diseases (the model they are using) are that the virii just die and that's that. What is not clear is where 80% of Facebook's users would be in 2017. Google+ ? Somehow I don't think so. This would be much more compelling for me if there was some Facebook alternative that was growing rapidly in the 14 - 24 demographic but the Princeton guys don't mention one, and I've not come across it yet. Its hard for me to believe that 80% of Facebook's users will stop using it and go back to no equivalent.

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> Its hard for me to believe that 80% of Facebook's users will stop using it and go back to no equivalent.

Really? Why? Who's to say that "social media" (at least in the sense of a unified platform with a real name) wasn't a fad?

Plenty of people are moving to a more fragmented internet life, with personal messages on Snapchat, photos on Pinterest, discussion on Reddit, etc.

Case in point: in the 1990s, portals were big, and every popular website wanted to be a portal. Likewise, between 2006 and now, most popular websites integrate social features.

What people seek in Facebook, they'll start finding in more directed services. Facebook was made for a world where smartphones and affordable or free fast mobile internet access was rare. A shrunk version of the regular web version can be enough for adults who are already used to Facebook, but teenagers and children will flock to user experiences that explore the advantages and idiosyncrasies of smartphones.

Maybe Facebook the company will own some of these new services and interface ideas, but Facebook the old timeline/friends/profile service will get obscured by the new, shiny, more intimate new services.

Agree! Indeed, the comparaison with portals springs to the mind. While the amount of items (links, people, services, cultural niches) available increases, the need for more specialised and fragmented avenues of consumption increases. It's not difficult to imagine a scenario when one can pick and mix completely their online experience and still find their their social connections across different platforms, with the use of some meta tool, like an OpenId that also exposes the patterns of activities of one's friends.

As a purely empirical, nonrepresentative sample, I can see that most of my friends on Facebook are fairly quiet nowadays and my own account is virtually dead. It's still quite useful to have a FB a/c in order to authenticate on other apps; maybe FB will transforms itself into the aforementioned meta-tool...? Until it's superseded by a more specialised one...

Facebook definitely seems worried about smartphones. They tried to make their own phone interface, and (despite some good reviews) it was a commercial disaster: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57583557-94/heres-why-the-f...

For me, its a scale thing. The 800M users is 80% of Facebook's user base give or take. Seems like more than a fad, definitely an itch was being scratched. For example the migration from MySpace to Facebook was pretty clear, but I don't see the bulk of Facebook's audience heading to some other service.

That said, its entirely possible that "social" is a fad, and certainly that internet social is way to wide a network than old fashion neighborhood social (invest in NextDoor I guess :-) but I'm still convinced that the value proposition of amplifying your ability to maintain a larger web of relationships is still a thing. Not many people are natural super connectors and Facebook takes more ordinary people a lot closer to that.

At some point people will just get sick of having a separate social network (with separate, even though maybe synced, friend lists) for every single thing they do. I for one would love if Facebook ate Instagram, Foursquare and Yelp - I'm already sick of using separate apps for something that could benefit from being tightly integrated with FB.

I agree, things that I used to do on Facebook, discuss topics and articles, say whats on my mind, play games, and post photos can all be done better else were. Where I see a shift in my Facebook friends list is most people have inactive accounts but are active on Twitter, Redit etc.

Snapchat and Pinterest is hardly fragmented internet life and it has every bit as big a world domination wish as FB.

First, it's viruses, not virii. And viruses are not the sum totality of infectious diseases.

Second, as I mentioned in another comment, a very easy extension of this model allows infectious diseases to reach a state where they exist at equilibrium within the population. I have no idea why the authors didn't use them.

It seems that that 14-24 demographic is flocking to less general "social networks" and more image-centric or one-to-one social networking apps, like Instagram and Snapchat. Essentially networks that allow them to not see what their parents/aunts/other families are sharing or taking pictures of.

Hasbro doesn't die just because the current crop of 5-12 year olds outgrow their products. Instead, they simply target the next wave.

On the other hand, social networks seem to adhere very strongly to a particular generation or crowd. I don't find it too difficult to believe that different crowds use different social networks (due to network effects bootstrapping at differing rates in differing groups) and that consequently "the Facebook" of the next generation will be Snapchat or something else.

Facebook's challenge, then, is to figure out how to become Hasbro or else it will become Myspace.

Yes, and as Hasbro does so, they destroy one of my favorite games as a kid (Risk). Sorry for the tangential comment, but I was floored I discovered what they did to the game, as I was searching for Risk (the classic) at local stores to buy for my kids.

I think the social usage is becoming much more fragmented. I tend to keep up with my family via WhatsApp and Instagram, business contacts via Linkedin and the rest is Twitter.

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