Facebook lost around 2.8M U.S. users under 25 last year

Started using FB in 2004 when there were barely a few hundred thousand users. It was great as a college freshman going to a new place not knowing anyone and needing to make friends fast and keep up. In my 30s now and have almost completely stopped using facebook. I check in once every few months, usually when I need to sign in because someone messages me there instead of email. It's actually stunning to me that Facebook is lumped in with other tech giants like Google and Amazon. If the services that google and amazon provide disappeared tomorrow it would have a sudden and devastating impact on many parts of my life and business. If facebook completely disappeared, I honestly wouldn't even realize it for at least a couple months (until the next time I check in) and even then I wouldn't care one bit. In all honestly I think it would be an improvement to society.

I keep my profile to use Facebook login everywhere else.

Not to mention the erosion of the idea that it is default-safe to share your social experiences with your group of "friends." Adoption by colleagues and family shifts the tone considerably towards LinkedIn, where one's professional image is paramount - and all that does is make the platform more stressful to use.

Facebook does provide tools to segment one's friends into groups to whom content can be privately posted, but from a UX perspective they're deemphasized. I see a lot more social conversations moving to group chats (some on Facebook Messenger, some on GroupMe/WhatsApp and the like), because membership is determinate, you make the choice of target audience before being prompted to make a post, and the context into which you post is not a newsfeed (which we've been trained to think is global to an entire circle of friends) but just that specific chat history. (I'm sure there's some psychology/UX research in that people don't intuit that a "posting destination" can be distinct from the list of content you're viewing.)

Chats are just a "safer space" to be oneself. And if Facebook wants to capture one's true self and preferences, it will need to evolve beyond the idea that a single newsfeed is the place people want to do that.

Whenever I see a post like this on HN, I see the inevitable "the product sucks" posts in the comments.

As an engineer and social media user, I completely agree, but it doesn't seem to be bearing out in the marketplace. Facebook continues to grow[0] (if more slowly).

So what is the HN audience to Facebook? Our we taste makers? A demographic ahead of the product curve, predictive of Facebook's imminent decline?

Or are we simply irrelevant to the mass market? Are we the people going to the art house movie theaters while the masses flood into multiplexes for the latest Marvel sensory overload spectacle?

[0]https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/31/facebook-q4-2017-earnings/

The US hasn't been the focus for several years. Africa/India/Asia were far more important than sustaining US numbers.