The Fall of Facebook
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Does anyone really buy this? Who cares what people say? It's all about what they do. People say a lot of things. It's cool to not love FB. Yet somehow, some way, it remains one of the most addictive and stickiest products for an ever-increasing and huge number of people.
I agree. For me, Facebook has become more of a utility. If asked the same questions I would probably answer in a similar way. I do not 'love' Facebook the way I 'love' other products but it has its uses.
It hasn't has yet proved to be an unsuccessful business model though.
That kind of user desperation is a bad long-term sign for a brand.
1. Product stagnation. I think the monetization goals of Facebook are also starting to impact the usability and enjoyability of the site.
2. Brand issues. Why is Facebook not cool anymore? Is it simply due to ubiquity? Can they regain that credibility? Is the "youth market" a lost cause for them?
3. The potential for competition in the space. Building a social network seemed like a lost cause battle for many years because it is essentially "owned" by Twitter and FB - and nichely LinkedIn - (at least in the U.S.) For all its many, many (stress: many) flaws, ello showed one thing: people are clamoring for something other than Facebook. Now ello is really a bad approach at this, it feels like a weekend project rooted in one thing: to make sure it could never make money. But I get all that. Even a site with no clear or dependable direction, with atrocious design could generate a lot of interest with some false scarcity. To me that says if you can create "the next social network" and it's actually beautiful and usable and you don't position yourself on some dumb morality issue then there are people who will jump ship.
So while nobody loving Facebook and still using it might seem like all's well, to me it points to a lack of real competition and is - I'm sure - something discussed often at FB & Twitter.
Facebook is trying to enter the business market (Facebook at Work), so maybe they've already given up
If users generally dislike facebook, but continue to use it, it's a bad situation to be in for Facebook. It indicates that people are using the product because of its network effects and despite the product itself.
It means that if anything begins to actually challenge the network effect of facebook, they will be in a very tough spot.
A telling moment that happened two nights ago for me. A friend from ~8 years ago came to visit and we wanted to send a joking message out to a few people from the old group of friends we used to hang out with.
The conversation was literally:
A: "Post it to Facebook and tag everyone." B: "Ehhh. It would be funnier to find an old email thread and reply to it."
We went with B. It seemed like a better idea, plus we weren't sure if folks in the group checked Facebook. But everyone reads email -- and sure enough, we got life updates from the whole gang within 12 hours.
It could mean a lot of things. Maybe it means it's cool to say you dislike FB. Maybe it means people feel badly about their addiction to social networks in general. My point is that it could mean a million things that may very well have nothing to do with FB.
Furthermore, what you're describing sounds to me like the best situation for any company to be in. Ever. You make something that is so compelling and you solve a certain problem so well that people tolerate it despite its deficiencies.
That's the opposite of what I'm describing. I'm describing making something that people don't find compelling, that doesn't solve their problems, but they use it because it's their only option (the network effect).
FaceBook already has had companies brand themselves as the anti-FaceBook.
People need to use shopping bags because they need to carry groceries. No one needs to use Facebook. If you decide tomorrow that you absolutely hate shopping bags, your grocery shopping is going to be a hell of a lot less convenient. If you decide tomorrow that you absolutely hate Facebook, you're just going to have more free time.
Mithaldu's point, as I understood it, was that shopping bags serve a very clear function and people don't have strong feelings of love towards them. They use them because they work. Same thing with FB (apparently). What this article fails to grasp is that having billions of people feel that they need to use your service is worth way more than people saying they "like" your product.
² ³ Just to head off any possible future complaints about that. Some people do think about shopping bags. I do. I like cloth ones and hate the rest. I'm sure there's also some people who think about facebook. We're talking about the average street person though.
³ Yes, there is no footnote 1, i have no superscript 1 on my keyboard. Please send it if you find it.
People hate Comcast, and yet we all use it because (for many of us) there are no other options.
Sentiment is an important measure because it indicates the activation energy required to leave if a sufficient replacement emerges.
But that's not what Facebook is anymore. Facebook is the social graph expressed in Internet form, and is so interwoven with the fabric of the Internet that it's difficult to avoid, even if you're intentionally doing so.
Some products phase in and out, that's for sure. I think Zuck's realized the potential for that to happen, and once he got on the top of the totem pole began preparing for it. He turned FB from an app into a social graph and API that is everywhere, and now he's paying from $1B (Instagram) to $19B (WhatsApp) to get some of his biggest would-be enemies to join him. He does not screw around with the Innovator's Dilemma.
I'll be the first to admit I despise my current Facebook feed. It's full of clickbait articles mingled with the occasional update from someone whom I may or may not care about. That being said, I have tried to delete Facebook multiple times, and to no avail. I still have my hopes that they'll change the algorithm a bit and kill the effectiveness of the clickbait to the same extent they killed the spamminess of those social games and widgets. (Although they still exist and are annoying, they're an order of magnitude less annoying than they used to be.) But, despite my best efforts to avoid it, I still check my Facebook feed at least daily.
What pulled me back? At first, it was that Facebook was integrated with Spotify. I had to create a new account and build up all of my playlists, songs, etc. from scratch. That was kind of a pain. Then I deleted Facebook again. I ended up missing a party that was only planned on Facebook. Then I missed the news that a friend was engaged, and another friend was pregnant. Then I couldn't log into my Kiva account to redistribute the repayments I had received because I had used Facebook to sign up. Facebook is just an incredibly, incredibly sticky product. Network effects are a bitch.
Sure, hackers will say, "Well your friends should have called you instead of putting it on Facebook." But they didn't. Even though I'm not in college, if I'm not on Facebook I'm missing the party. (Even though "the party" is now simply knowing that my friend finished med school and is moving to Michigan.)
Facebook isn't as sexy as it used to be, but it has become increasingly difficult to avoid. Think about that - we have to figure out ways and work hard to avoid a product. That's why a significant proportion of the Internet's users log in to Facebook every day. Unless some major shift takes place, Facebook isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
I remember being excited about all the ways I could use Facebook as the 'social' backend to a whole bunch of apps I considered building. I also remember eventually giving up on that idea because clearly Facebook had decided that being the 'social API' was not their goal anymore.
Meanwhile, the vast, vast majority of my network (ages generally around 25-35, Dutch, tech-savvy) only use Facebook for chat, internal groups, and the occasional silly post, which is much less than our use a few years ago (we'd upload vacation photos and actually 'write'), and a significant number of us would leave if it wouldn't be so inconvenient. And the vast majority of teens seem to not really be into Facebook.
Basically, had FB continued with their 'social layer of the web' approach, it'd have been perfect for us, and it seems, to me, for FB too. And yet for some reason they decided to stay the old course and tend their increasingly less-cool walled garden. I am usually capable of understanding the behavior of a company even if it acts in ways that I don't like, but I don't see how this benefits them.
The only plausible theory I can come up with is that FB suffers from groupthink. It would explain this issue, but also many of their tone-deaf actions concerning privacy and the timeline. Perhaps they are really mostly building for themselves, and not realizing that their audience is slowly eroding. But then analysis of user behavior should make this clear... it confuses me!
Been hearing this line from the hn crowd for at least three years. Stopped holding my breath a while ago.
I am a Facebook hater, and I am also guilty of this. If I'm organizing or promoting an event or social occasion I'll go through my list of Facebook friends and invite the ones that seem appropriate. People who are not on that list don't get an invite unless I happen to think of them specifically. I guess some people would say that if they're not at the forefront of my mind then I'm a lousy friend anyway, but it doesn't mean I wouldn't like them to come to my party, or that they wouldn't like to be invited.
Except it's not a product, it's a glorified contact book and thus very easy to replace.
But even that is dwindling.
What I would like to do if follow people, what happens and what they post. But Facebook only gives me a fraction of what my friends publish. I'd basically have to dig up each friend by myself to see everything they've posted. So I don't even know how they are doing, except when I chat with the closest ones.
But disconnecting is hard for a human being.
I happen to know it would feel good, too. When Facebook suspended my account I wondered if this is it, then. Things got arranged back to where they were but before that I felt a wave of relief. I wouldn't have minded being free either.
Lots of red flags. If you can't get rid of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, that means you are an exhibitionist, or narcissist.
Or, you are selling something. That's why I'm on Facebook and Twitter: to help sell my software and apps.
It's also much easier for me to keep in touch with relatives in remote places. I get a little of their life every day, but don't have to spend hours on the phone with everyone to do it.
Can I get rid of Facebook? Of course. Facebook didn't even exist for the first three decades of my life. I think people who have a Facebook "problem" really have mild "internet addiction" and Facebook just happens to be their poison.
FWIW, the best part about Facebook is grandma doesn't send me 43 emails a day containing jokes about the weather anymore. :)
Sure I can call them. Sure I can send them email, or paper letters, or text messages. And for specific communications, that's fine. But for just sharing what you're up to from day to day, or week to week, many people appear to prefer using Facebook, and find other methods inconvenient.
1980 "The Fall of Microsoft" -- the problem is that 100% of their revenue is programming tools such as MS BASIC and MS COBOL. These are not the high growth areas. There's a new breed of "productivity" software such as Dan Bricklin's VisiCalc spreadsheet introduced last year and WordPerfect word processor introduced this year. Microsoft is in serious trouble. (Unforseen: They saw explosive growth in MS Office and Windows o/s.)
1983 "The Fall of Intel" -- the problem is that they can't compete with cut throat memory prices from Japan. It's a low margin business. (Unforseen: They emphasized CPUs and got out of the RAM business.)
1997 "The Fall of Apple" -- ... we all know this story, yada yada yada
(The following quotes were made up but I hope people get the point.)
The problem with typical journalists predicting the "fall" of a company is that they base it on publicly known information. They base it on what the company has done in the past. The journalists don't sit in boardroom meetings outlining future plans that are unrelated to their current core revenue generators. The journalists also aren't privy to the secret skunkworks projects in the R&D pipeline. It's understandable that they don't have this information but they almost never make disclaimers of their blind spots which makes their predictions sound more convincing.
That's not to say that companies do fail to evolve. Kodak, Myspace, Atari, etc.
What's hard to say from the outside looking in is if Facebook is a 1980-Microsoft/1983-Intel or is it Kodak/Atari?
I think Zuckerberg and his team are well aware of the precarious and fickle nature of "social networking" and that's why they're exploring other channels such as payments, virtual reality, etc. Maybe they'll even get in on the health care monitoring game as well. If a journalist has some credible educated guesses or grabs an insider's scoop on these unknowns, that's much more interesting than predicting a companies death with incomplete information.
It's also worth noting that Berkshire Hathaway the textile company no longer exists. The mill was shut down long ago and it's essentially the same company in name only. In fact it's hardly what you would consider a business in the typical sense of the word. BH has something like 30 employees (at Berkshire Hathaway itself, the rest are all employed by companies Berkshire owns, which it handles in a very hands off way).
So citing these companies as evidence that criticism of Facebook is unfounded is of dubious validity.
I'm aware of that which is why I already listed counterexamples such as Myspace, Kodak that didn't make a successful transition to a new revenue growth.
>So citing these companies as evidence that criticism of Facebook is unfounded is of dubious validity.
Personally I despise Facebook and enjoy reading any criticisms about it. My point regarding this particular article was that the journalist (like every other journalist that's not "in the know") has to base his prediction on what Facebook is doing now. They don't volunteer their blind spot, therefore we as readers have to be aware of it.
Notice that the following excerpts from the article talk about Facebook-the-Company actions and its future:
>Then it scooped up WhatsApp, which had garnered hundreds of millions of users with a simple, solid messaging application. That cost Facebook $21.8 billion.
>It’s all enough to make you wonder whether Facebook, unlike AOL or MySpace, really might be forever—or at least as forever as anything American capitalism is capable of producing.
I think that it's the amalgam of many small, seemingly innocuous design decisions like this that slowly undermine a company's credibility.
I just mean, if even the most basic features cause users grief, then I don't have confidence in anything beyond that. The same goes for issues with Netflix (closing API), Twitter (throttling), even Google (too much power over a site's livelihood, no support) and Apple (constant deprecation of APIs and broken documentation links).
I'm not sure anymore how these companies will be able to stand against free and open competitors, which is why I see us soon entering a brave new world where openness will be crushed by legislation from lobbyists. If anything, behemoths like Facebook will only grow larger and more powerful, at all our expense. That said, I still goof off for hours on Facebook, what can I say..
Last time I did it (about a year ago), I got lots of retweets on Twitter and tons of people asking about it on FB. This year, when I announced what I was doing, nobody said anything on FB. I asked a few people if they saw my post and their response?
"Um yeah, my newsfeed is so full, when did you send it?"
"About a day ago."
"Yeah, I probably didn't see it."
Not only has social media completely bogged down people's lives, they can't even sort through their own newsfeeds to get stuff which might actually be important. For me, it was the last straw. As an occasional FB user, I finally realized if I wasn't posting every 5 minutes, the likelihood someone saw my post and could or would respond to it was almost zero.
Two weeks ago, I deleted my FB account and haven't missed a thing since.