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

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

#111

Post by jedisct1 »

Facebook is about sharing memories, and "static" content. One can use Facebook to read the same "group" that has been around forever, or to looks at memories from the day/week/month/year.

As a result, it's a good fit for people who are only occasionally online.

Everybody else wants to live share what's happening right now. Whatsapp is great for this, as it allows instant group chats with ephemeral ad-hoc groups.

Instagram is great to share what just happened, without a UI polluted with older and unrelated content.

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

#112

Post by greenhouse_gas »

jasode wrote: post #15

Facebook suffered from 2 waves of "Eternal September" [0]: wave 1: the addition of everybody outside your immediate friends and close family. You get the goofy uncle, the distant high school acquaintances, and all the work acquaintances from every previous job that submitted a "friend request" that you didn't reject out of politeness. The newsfeed gets polluted by nonsense such as forwarded memes, politics, and other…

What I don't understand is what is FB thinking?

Look at it this way:

What do I want to see?

Friend's image/text > Group image/text > Pages I like image/text > Friends of Friends image/text > Memes > Ads.

What does FB want me to see?

Ads > Doesn't matter.

So what do they do?

Ads > Memes > Friends of Friends image/video Pages/Group Image/Video > Friends Image/Video ------------------> Text.

Why? What financial incentive do they have to show me Memes over what I want to see?

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

#113

Post by arwhatever »

jasode wrote: post #15

Facebook suffered from 2 waves of "Eternal September" [0]: wave 1: the addition of everybody outside your immediate friends and close family. You get the goofy uncle, the distant high school acquaintances, and all the work acquaintances from every previous job that submitted a "friend request" that you didn't reject out of politeness. The newsfeed gets polluted by nonsense such as forwarded memes, politics, and other…

Wave 3: ruthlessly trim your friends list to make feed less annoying

Wave 4: still too annoying, deletes Facebook account altogether.

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

#114

Post by manigandham »

greenhouse_gas wrote: post #112
jasode wrote: post #15

Facebook suffered from 2 waves of "Eternal September" [0]: wave 1: the addition of everybody outside your immediate friends and close family. You get the goofy uncle, the distant high school acquaintances, and all the work acquaintances from every previous job that submitted a "friend request" that you didn't reject out of politeness. The newsfeed gets polluted by nonsense such as forwarded memes, politics, and other…

What I don't understand is what is FB thinking? Look at it this way: What do I want to see? Friend's image/text > Group image/text > Pages I like image/text > Friends of Friends image/text > Memes > Ads. What does FB want me to see? Ads > Doesn't matter. So what do they do? Ads > Memes > Friends of Friends image/video Pages/Group Image/Video > Friends Image/Video ------------------> Text. Why? What financial incentiv…

They are measuring and reacting. Ads make money so they will always have a certain priority, and everything else is a combination of your interests combined with what's popular as a whole. Memes are popular and/or your friends share a lot of memes so that's what gets shown to you.

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

#115

Post by graeme »

zem wrote: post #69
Pigo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is one tiny use case, but it's one that's bothered me for some time. I can't change my profile picture without it becoming a huge news story for family and "friends" to comment on. I change a little picture of me, remove the event from my timeline, and I still get hokey comments or messages reminding me how bored and lonely everyone I know must be. I severely miss when it was just a place to chat up a cut…

I can't comment on a friend's public post without it being broadcast to my timeline! this is the one dark feature that has most affected any good feelings I might have had towards facebook and my usage thereof

This has seriously reduced my willingness to comment on posts. Terrible feature.

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

#116

Post by opportune »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #65
f055 wrote: post #10

I'm 34 and Facebook lost me as well. I can't remove my account as I need to use as a developer, but I unfollowed everyone and my newsfeed is empty. It's a bliss. Funny thing is, it's all Facebook's fault. Back in the days, the service was simply brilliant to see what's going on at your friends, at home and abroad. But when Facebook introduced the algorithmic newsfeed, the usefulness ended. I could no longer see all t…

Similar experience, I think my problem with the algorithm is similar to slowing down to look at the car wreck on the side of the road. I have a few a"friends" that post horrible stuff. Conspiracy theories, rants, and other posts that are just symptoms of poor mental health. At first I stopped to read these in HORROR and disgust, because they stood out so much from the rest of my feed. Facebook takes that as a signal…

Facebook's algorithm almost seems like a quintessential example of why you need to choose good metrics in optimization problems. Maximizing user engagement sounds great - it means people are using your website and enjoying it more, right? Turns out people weren't enjoying it more, they were using it more because Facebook was shoving controversial content (e.g. dubious-quality news, debates, crazy people) down people's throats and they couldn't keep their eyes away.

You know how Facebook tries to get me engaged? It puts photos of my ex-girlfriend and her friends on the top of my feed. Sure you're going to get me to look, but I'm not going to leave the website feeling as good as when I logged on. You bring up a good point about how you have to think about the long term consequences of your viewing, but then I feel that you don't get a genuine experience when you use the platform, and if Facebook wants this, they seem to really over-estimate users' mindfulness wrt what they're actually doing.

If Facebook never figures things out, I hope whatever network comes next doesn't get greedy like they did. In particular, they need to focus on driving engagement with positive interactions and content.

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

#117

Post by oneshot908 »

jasode wrote: post #15

Facebook suffered from 2 waves of "Eternal September" [0]: wave 1: the addition of everybody outside your immediate friends and close family. You get the goofy uncle, the distant high school acquaintances, and all the work acquaintances from every previous job that submitted a "friend request" that you didn't reject out of politeness. The newsfeed gets polluted by nonsense such as forwarded memes, politics, and other…

All true, but the Eternal September for me came when I lost control of my feed to arbitrary ML algorithms attempting to maximize shareholder value whilst alienating the fewest users.

I think someone could recreate early FB on the blockchain and take a huge chunk of interesting people off of the two current awful choices. Because I do remember the time when it was fun to reconnect with people and follow their lives there.

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

#118

Post by Promarged »

sergiotapia wrote: post #25
jacquesm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't remove my account as I need to use as a developer Why?

If you need to support Facebook oauth, you need an account.

Exactly. I was removing my account yesterday and they pulled this trick. After some careful analysis it turned out that of all my integrations (Github, Twitter, Facebook) Facebook was rarely used, so I removed support for it in my site, removed the app at developers.facebook.com and the account.

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

#119

Post by bischofs »

padobson wrote: post #38

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…

Just like anything - the techies and first adopters tend to set the trends. If the HN crowd thinks its useless then it will start to trickle down to Normies, might take awhile though.

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

#120

Post by graeme »

Facebook should watch out with Instagram. It feels considerably more draining now than it used to. There are messages, stories, suggested posts everywhere. On the search feed I often end up in auto-scrolling videos.

These increase engagement and metrics. But, they produce an unwanted feeling of compulsion where instagram didn't before. I've uninstalled the app for a bit.

I never felt like that about Instagram before, but I remember first feeling like that about Facebook years ago. If I'm right, what I'm feeling about instagram is a prelude to others feeling the same. Instagram usage will first go up, then down.

I don't yet have that feeling about snapchat, though the new design is annoying. (Mixing in stories and messages)

Oddly enough, it has nothing to do with ads. I used to see them, back when instagram felt fun. Now I don't.

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