I'm in the UK and do voluntary work with teenagers.
While I can't at all say my sample is representative or that I've I polled them to check, my experience is that it definitely isn't dead and buried; these teenagers definitely still use it, and in ways that don't suggest it's just to pander to their parents.
Anecdote not data I know, but the headline conclusion sounds over-broad to me.
It's one of the largest employers of people like us, they have tremendous mindshare as virtually everyone is a user and in one insidious way or another they form an important part of the net as a whole (see, "sign in with fb" or "comment with fb" or "like on fb").
Why do we care about Facebook is tantamount to never covering any large internet company which I might be OK with but I suspect is not what you're arguing about.
It might be worth a conversation about why the HN filters are tuned so that I hear so much about Snapchat and I never heard a single word about the Climate Corporation - easily the most exciting startup I've seen, right up until they sold to Monsanto.
It was like this during the IPO too. The internet really just likes to hate on FB for whatever reason. You don't here the same about Twitter, whose stock is outperforming FB despite making less money.
Maybe people think that if everyone believes Facebook is dead then it will die. Facebook has information on everyone and it's really hard to leave because everyone else uses it. If it just fucking disappeared one day I would be so happy.
> The internet really just likes to hate on FB for whatever reason. You don't here the same about Twitter, whose stock is outperforming FB despite making less money.
Everyone likes an underdog, and the new thing. Facebook probably stopped being both by the time the movie came out, and the IPO cemented it. Pre-IPO Twitter, like your favorite team in the offseason, is still a blank canvas onto which we can paint an impossibly bright future.
... and it's not the first one. As there are websites generating content in facebook format, such as jokes, philosophical quotes and personality quizzes, ... there seem to be websites generating content fitting HN. "Facebook", "teenagers" and "dead" is basically the magic receipe to climb up the newsfeed, now that NSA articles are downgraded by default on HN.
Should we attempt to detect and bury HN submissions about teenagers leaving facebook?
"Is there some benefit to knowing the fate of Facebook?"
If you care about social media in general then yes, the fate of the world's largest social media platform is tremendously important. If your life or business doesn't intersect much with social media then, no.
Companies come and go in both existence and importance. If Facebook goes away tomorrow, something will take its place.
If your business is social media, wouldn't it be better to discuss how to improve it, new features, etc.? Where can a small company create a viable business?
Here's hoping that it's the last year of these sort of posts because it died and is replaced by something less intrusive and where you can control what data about you is disseminated and used against you.
I learned this over a decade ago managing one of those old-fashioned "forums". A decent-sized and long lived one.
The secret to overall satisfaction (there will always be outliers) is a policy and approach of "opt-in".
We never tried to "break" anonymity. As people became comfortable with each other, they often shared personal contact information (mostly, privately). And because they were otherwise anonymous, they felt comfortable sharing and discussing matters they otherwise would not have. To everyone's benefit.
We had limits, and these were stated up front, and forum members felt invested in pointing them out and helping to enforce them (e.g. reporting serious violations) when necessary. Forum members also had input to the policy, both in ongoing suggestions as well as during periodic, publicly announced reviews.
People participated as much, or as little, as they wanted to. And they shared, both publicly and privately, what they wanted to. Private and orthogonal communication channels were, well, if not overtly encouraged, then certainly not discouraged -- although we would caution people about sharing too much too quickly.
Think about it. Take your time. "Opt in" to what you are comfortable with.
We ended up with a very loyal and long-standing community. And a significantly sized one, that did literally span the globe.
Now, from a mass commercial perspective, perhaps many people will find difficulty in how such policy and site is supposed to work, financially. And I'm not saying I have all the answers to that.
Nonetheless, "opt-in" still nags at me as the way to go.
When Facebook was more "opt-in", it was the hotness. Size and Grandma being on it (not to mention your parents -- argh!) may be one thing -- one deterrent.
But the loss of "opt-in", and an increasingly panopticon feel? That to me seems far worse.
Facebook should be improving opt-in and the ability to segregate into communities that have their own degrees of privacy.
Encourage people to meet and share -- on their own terms. Provide the venue.
I teach in a Further Education College in the UK. FB seems pretty popular with the 16-19 students there as well, along with BBM on old Blackberries using the free wifi we provide!
About three years ago, FB was the 'thing' for teenagers. I mean when smartphones were less powerful, kids would be logged into facebook on their PCs for hours each day, browsing through photos, chatting with their friends, playing stupid games. Today I see, they are more hooked into smartphones for everything it was famous for. Of course, Facebook is still good for being connected to acquaintances, colleagues but its just not on everybody's lips as it used to be.
I won't imply FB would a history in any near time but the social market itself is so dynamic, that its just a matter of time when you are replaced by a better alternative.
Right. Most people use FB on their phones now, I think, while previously on PCs. And I think people probably don't use it as much as they did, but it's still widely used.
You use it for all your messaging and image sharing, over SMS, SnapChat, or other apps?
Having a Facebook account and posting status updates while chatting on SMS or SnapChat is the point of the article, and the point of FB is dying posts.
No one things that everyone won't have a FB account. But if FB isn't your one source of social media interactivity, it's losing mindshare.
I'm a 37 year old (jeez, typing that suddenly made me feel much, much older) male. I went from being an early, avid, oversharing Facebook user to quitting it 6 months back.
But that's just what it is. Two anecdotal examples which by themselves neither prove nor disprove anything.
Are teenagers just selecting the tool that is right for them?
Facebook has this horrible habit of trying to work out what you would most like to see in your feed. It's exceptionally transient.
Teenagers are moving to Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp because they do a better specific job. Switching between apps isn't hard.
However FB is very good for event organisation or even a cheap meetup.com alternative.
Of note I find twitter etc less invasive. When you look at the FB app permissions it really really wants to know pretty much everything that is going on in your phone.
> Facebook has this horrible habit of trying to work out what you would most like to see in your feed. It's exceptionally transient.
That's a feature introduced not long ago to reduce transience - feeds were dominated by chatty users and apps, everything else got drowned out. IMO it's a hugely important and useful feature that any other feed-based service must replicate unless chooses to be completely transient, i.e. twitter. Facebook is not transient at all - individual timelines still contain everything, and even the feed does not, in my experience, change retroactively.
I would love it if Facebook would just remember my preferred setting of "view everything, by everyone, and display it in chronological order".
And then allow me to mute chatty users.
Because at the moment I have one chatty user posting the equivalent of "funny email forwards" which all get shown to me, and items from my family are muted.
That's on the desktop browser website, not any app. (Goodness only knows how the app works).
While I'm here: I post photos. Photos either go to "everyone can see these" or to a single list "semi-private". I only ever use those two, never ever anything else. Facebook generated list names populate the drop-down selector, meaning that choosing "semi private" from the list is clunky and irritating.
Haha, wow, this post sound really grumpy but it isn't meant to be.
"Because at the moment I have one chatty user posting the equivalent of "funny email forwards" which all get shown to me, and items from my family are muted."
Exact-fsking-this
Thanks, I don't need to 'like this if I love Jesus' or know about how Obamacare is described in the Bible as Antichrist stuff
No, I mean why do you socialise with them at all? Why do you want to go to an event with, chat to, share photos with or keep in touch with someone whose views you aren't interested in?
Saying FB is stupid because it shows you this crap is like choosing to go round their house and saying real life is stupid because you have to listen to their crap.
Hah - if I didn't socialize with people who have views in which I'm not interested, I wouldn't have any friends! (And vice verse, as I'm sure that I can be just as obnoxious in just the same way to other people.) Building communities doesn't have to be about creating echo chambers in which you can only interact with members of the same social class, educational background, income profile, political leanings, race, sexual orientation/gender identity, et cetera. In fact, I would argue that What's Wrong With America Today(tm) is how people tend to emphasize their differences instead of politely agreeing to disagree.
This is the eternal argument with any social news/network tool: "It's not the tool that sucks, it's your choices in who to read that suck".
But Facebook is perceived in a different way to others (twitter, etc). Facebook is for family. Facebook is for events. Facebook is sometimes for people who met you last night at a party.
It's rude to de-friend great aunt Jemima, no matter how much you disagree with the politics in that last forwarded post of hers. The best that you can do is mute her.
I didn't want my mother's endless email forwards, but I didn't block her email address because she was my mother.
It's the same for facebook. Obviously I can mute individuals, but it's weird that Facebook auto-mute doesn't mute people posting endless dumb forward but does block original content from my family.
Hmmm a few years ago a friend who worked there told me they experimented with having two tabs: one with their machine learning algorithm, and one that was like Twitter and just had 'everything, by everyone, in chronological order.' Do you know what happened? <i> Duration per user on the site went down </i> by a statistically significant margin.
One of the things they do well is micro-optimize many different features and use machine learning & data analytics to provide the "best" features, whatever that may be. What they DO suffer from sometimes is lack of prioritization of the correct features (like messaging, removal of certain features, pages products, etc.)
Well, yeah. Because people were finding what they wanted in a shorter time frame.
Which grocery store do you want to shop in, the one where everything is hidden and there's only one cashier so you have to spend a long time there, or the one where you can find everything quickly and there's 20 cashiers open? The marketers say, "store number one". I say number two is better.
The problem with time on site is that it can also mean "time spent looking for what I want to see but can't 'cause I can't find it." For a commerce site or a saas site this is terrible user experience. For FB, it's terrible user experience too but a great metric to show advertisements. What a bad incentive they have.
I spend several minutes everytime I use Facebook wondering how the hell I can achieve something, or where on the page the button is hidden, or what this inscrutable icon will do.
"Time on the site" is similar to the supermarket trick of moving items around to make customers look for things, thus exposing them to more 'buying opportunities' of stuff they wouldn't normally look at.
It's probably great for them, but it's not so fun for the user / customer.
It's funny. when I started using fb I just kept an eye on the email notifications: a permanent stream of all activity (including posts later deleted by the poster). It worked perfectly for me; it was before the worst of the farmville-style app-spam -- but I'm sure killing that was just a (bayesian or not) spam-filter away if I'd felt the need.
With what fb has morphed into, I generally assume the only way to share stuff with friends (in a way that they'll actually have the opportunity to see it or choose to ignore it) is to tag them or share directly on their wall. In other words; I might as well send an email with a couple of cc's tacked on.
I don't really mind that they're sabotaging their own product; I much prefer a decentralized, self-hosted web. It does mean I'll see less from many friends though - people that (rightfully) don't bother setting up a home page.
Duration on the site might not be the right thing to measure. I mean, I guess that probably turns into more dollars for them from ad impressions. But not could be that time on site was shorter with the other model available was because their users got what they wanted faster.
Intuitively, this doesn't seem like it would be the case for the change described, but I hope that they are measuring some approximation of user engagement levels in addition to just time on site.
Yes. But it's frustrating that Facebook has an automute that decides that original content from my close relatives is something to be muted while some tedious repost from a pal is something that I want to see.
And it feels like there's no point setting any settings when the [sort: most recent / top stories] drop down randomly reverts back to top stories.
I find Twitter to be better at connecting to people you admire and are involved in your industry. I can see a similar situation for teenagers.
I help organise a regular monthly event. I PR through twitter but host an event through a Facebook group. Articles/photos/stories are discussed in detail through the FB group, but they are sourced through twitter.
Twitter gives you the ability to 'focus' an account (I have two, my personal and the event one) towards the type of people/organisations that are of interested for the specified account.
In fact it's a very very good way of filtering out noise. You only bring articles to the FB group that would get the people talking.
FB is way too vague and generally is just part of me wasting 5 minutes to be entertained.
Twitter I use to try and get a better understanding of the world I live in and to learn from people I admire.
Funny and strange. I have never been able to find any use or value whatsoever in Twitter. My account has been sitting unused for years, whereas I use Facebook near every day.
Twitter doesn't really do any kind of job when it comes to showing you the right content. Just a dump-feed of everything. Even though I use Twitter every day, I doubt that case is useful for everyone.
I asked my teenage son (~15) about what he and his friends were using and his answer surprised me - he said anyone using Facebook was "weird" as "it's for old people" (direct quotes). This surprised me as he (and everyone he knows) have been ultra keen Facebook users for the last few years. He's not really into tech apart from game playing and socializing.
SnapChat and a bit of SMS are apparently what he uses these days.
... I had to explain to our older teen, who lives on Facebook, what Twitter was.
("It's where middle-aged Guardian readers post outrageous articles from the Guardian for other middle-aged Guardian readers to be outraged about and post their outrage at the Guardian on Twitter. For Guardian readers, middle age starts at fifteen.")
No statistics on the sourced article, just a bunch of anthropologists' interviews with teenagers that cannot simply explain the whole of this situation. Eternal September has seemed to sweep HN with this garbage somehow making it to the top.
So, Facebook isn't anymore a cool new thing teenagers obsess about. Wowzers!! Does that really surprise anyone? It's not exactly a sustainable niche, kinda by definition. The real question is whether those teenagers, once grown up and less interested in beingt cool and different from their parents, will start seeing value in what Facebook offers, i.e. whether network effects in social media are cross-generational. I suspect so, since generations are not in fact discrete.
I've found myself using Facebook less and less the older I get. I used it every day in high school, relatively often in college, and barely go on anymore. I have an account simply because I have to. Its always changing on me, there's a bunch of new stuff that I have no idea how to use, and my news feed is a bunch of annoying gibberish that I don't care about and don't feel like spending the time to improve. I'm not sure if I'm the norm or not, but if they're starting to lose the age segment I personally was most active in, that can't be a good thing.
It will be interesting to see what happens in the next few years. On the plus side for Facebook, they own Instagram, one of the things said to be gaining the market they are losing, so they can still reach it. However, it remains to be seen how well they can monetize Instagram.
I feel like teens are the stick used to beat Facebook because they've never really been the ones who fanatically used it.
This study seems to constantly come out saying teens are using x messenger app. Facebook isn't a messaging system like Snapchat or WhatsApp. It's a repo for social contacts and experiences, which is why it has a symbiotic relationship with messaging apps (people sent texts while Facebook was only on the web! Facebook is losing ground to texts!).
Of the four Twitter and Instagram are the competitors but both lack the walled garden that Facebook offers. Facebook for all it's privacy concerns makes these look like a safe-house.
Instagram treads the role of messaging app and social network best, and is owned by Facebook and is deeply integrated. That doesn't seem like a dead and buried social network.
Yeah, a "Real Name Policy" will do that to your startup. When everything you say has your name and photo next to it you're much less likely to say anything. Every single one of your personal opinions offends someone or is in disagreement with someone out there and it's only a matter of time before they discover it and discover you. In this case kids' personal lives were being revealed in front of their parents+teachers+bosses and everyone else that's now on facebook.
Maybe if Facebook changed over to pseudonyms and was more transparent with the data they collected on everyone, people wouldn't have so much to worry about.
God.. every year I read some story about "Facebook is dead because" blah, blah, blah.
Look you want to kill FB then create something. And please not another FB clone; we need something different. And better.
It's like, when I lived in SFO, I could't throw a dead cat without hitting someone who wrote the "next greatest social network", and yet FB is still here.
I don't see how that article talks about the FB killer. It merely states that it has observed UK teenagers moving away from Facebook and cites various reasons, one of them being parents encouraging the use of FB.
Maybe a FB killer is an app made for parents that persuades them to encourage their kids to use FB?
I'm a teenager in the UK and Facebook has most certainly not died. it seems to me that people do use it less now but that may just be due to growing up (no more farmville etc.). However, Facebook is still heavily used for setting up events, sharing photos, and messaging people. The reason why facebook is so good at all of these things? Because everyone has Facebook. If I need to ask a friend something, There are several ways to ask them:
- Text: Might not have their number, have to pay, it's only available on their phone, not on their computer
- WhatsApp (or similar): They may not have it, I may not be their contact, only available on their phones
- SnapChat: Hard to hold a conversation with someone
- Instagram: Great for sharing photos, not for communicating
- Facebook: Am Friends with everyone I will need to contact. Easy to use. They receive it on their phone and computer (more likely to see it sooner). Free.
Facebook may lose some interest from people but I'm sure it will be around for a long time, at least until the large majority of people have moved to another platform where they can communicate
Opps, Forgot that: that's how irrelevant it's become.
Email is just for signing up for things and for 'professional' communication (e.g. job offers, work placements, to teachers etc.). I think I only have about 5 of my friends email addresses, mainly just because sometimes I'll need to CC them into something.
WOW! Teenagers are moving away from Facebook? That's SHOCKING news. Fresh stuff, I had no idea Twitter and Whatsapp are also social networks! And I didn't know Facebook could be in competition with itself (Instagram). And it's not like I read the exact same article, except with actual content, two months ago. Definitely deserves to be on the front page of HN.
Its not 'dead' or 'not dead', its that they now use other sites and services too, resulting in less time with facebook exclusively. A few years ago its was almost 100% FB. Now its just one of many services they use.
Also think there might be a historic thing going on where FB was designed for large screen PCs, other services are more targeted at mobile, and FB has had to catch up with that, but lost out to some others along the way, as it were. I think BB still feels heavy, the other services feel light.
I just think many people now use FB for what it was originally for. But, its now a little off putting becuase its clogged up with other features that other sites just do better.
The Facebook app is just a portal to the website. Apps that appeared as apps first seem to be a bit more of sanctuary, as I'm pretty sure mums and dads everywhere haven't quite yet mastered the whole app concept. My parents for instance still have feature phones despite using Facebook.
Personally, I'm glad to see apps that are primarily used for conversation, rather than obsessing about what our 'friends' are doing every and any minute of the day, are becoming more popular. For me Facebook has wholly been replaced by Twitter and Whatsapp, and I've noticed my younger cousins are using BBM and Skype.
It seems like different tools for different purposes. Once grandma and potential emitters got on Facebook it lost its edge, if not it's use. It's more about PG sharing. I find that 5% of my friends dominate the feed. I'm not sure if it's the algorithm, or that they are narcissists.
Twitter seems more event and business promotion oriented / maybe persona oriented.
Snapchat is the one to send bad stuff that your parents and teachers won't find out about.
Facebook is basically dead and buried with kids my age too, at least in my area. It's really only used for messaging and event planning now. Most teens are on Twitter and Snapchat. Although not as much as there used to be, there are still a lot of people on Instagram too.
I don't think you can confidently say that "x is dead" and have it be true for everyone in a certain age group in every area. It's a case-by-case type of thing.
>>Where once parents worried about their children joining Facebook, the children now say it is their family that insists they stay there to post about their lives.
This is absolutely the case for me. I was born and raised in Turkey and I currently live in LA. I attempted to quit Facebook several times, only to come back when my mom insisted that she felt disconnected from me when my status updates stopped.
In Spain this is happening the reverse way: the first Spanish social network (Tuenti), which was the most popular amongst teenagers, is dying and being buried due to the loss of users to the more feature-grown Facebook.
Tuenti was bought by Telefónica and basically I think they're going to end up pivoting to be only the only thing that is still profitable for them (a MVNO called Tuenti Móvil).
Don't forget, those teenagers entire families are now on Facebook. I concede that the actions of teenagers might be an indicator of what's to come, but the world has hardly 'moved on' yet.
"one country" that has a high GDP per capita, sweet-spot demographics for advertisers, and a high ad spend budget by marketers, that allows FB to generate considerable revenues. this is not just a "warning sign".
I'm gonna have to disagree with you on that one. Basically all social events are organised on Facebook with my friends because of how simple it is to do so and everyone uses it, general purpose chatting is also done on facebook to save credit
The steps from 4 to 7 seems to me not to be at all inevitable. Facebook provides pretty solid and sustainable value in allowing you to keep in touch with people you know. It does not require excitement, hype and obsession for that.
Of course, if usage intensity declines, so does revenue (but also costs).
That's not it. People still use facebook and will for a long time. It's just that next generation won't use what the old one used. Also it's not about social network or not, it's about some method of communication/sharing/organizing. It's not about being interesting/boring. It's not a game as you (and many other people - especially those verbal about quiting these services) try to portray it. All that matters is that you have contacts there.
As others mentioned, great example is ICQ. Many people still use it. Not much of new people, but people who got to it in the late 90s and early 00s.
Facebook just seems broken to me. Out of my 170 friends the news feed only shows me 4-5 posts per day, and only going back 4-5 days for a boring total of about 20 posts. I'm pretty sure there's more content, but Facebook doesn't seem to want me to see it.
Can someone find quantitative information? The fact that teenagers say that they use cooler apps like Snapchat or instagram does not imply that Facebook has to loose.
Maybe they spent more time on their smartphones overall or they spend less time with older media like TV and radio?
Probably because kids are using instagram which is also owned by facebook, so either way facebook wins. Facebook is becoming increasingly popular among the middle aged and this also is the most profitable demographic.
While I can't at all say my sample is representative or that I've I polled them to check, my experience is that it definitely isn't dead and buried; these teenagers definitely still use it, and in ways that don't suggest it's just to pander to their parents.
Anecdote not data I know, but the headline conclusion sounds over-broad to me.