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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

#241

Post by tomcooks »

epberry wrote: post #153
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…

Great reference to "Eternal September" - didn't know about that. I can now think of many examples of this happening to online communities.

You might also enjoy reading about ancient greek ideas of ἐσωτερικός and ἐξωτερικός

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

#242

Post by toomanybeersies »

agorabinary wrote: post #184
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…

We need a social network experience where users own their data, and are presented with a simple and user friendly interface that connects this data with their chosen friends. Currently we have user data mined en masse at great privacy risk and for endless profit, ad infinitum. Facebook has not decayed because of an influx of new users beginning with this "eternal september", but because of the pointed decisions by it…

Sounds like you're describing Diaspora:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)

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

#244

Post by toomanybeersies »

et-al wrote: post #107
CharlesW wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this. If I may propose one more… wave 3: bots[1] [1] https://mashable.com/2017/11/02/facebook-phony-accounts-admi...

I don't encounter bots on Facebook that much, but they're definitely ruining Instagram. Years ago, I'd be more open to making "Instagram friends". However nowadays when I get a few likes, I go to the user's profile and see that their followers/following ratio is skewed, I know they're fishing for followers with a bot. Ultimately all interactions on social media will be scripted by bots.

I went through a bit of a phase for a week or two of trying to get more followers on my photography insta.

It didn't take me long at all to realise that the vast majority of new followers were either just straight up spambots, or were using bots to fish for followers.

Botting to fish for followers in Insta isn't the worst, usually it's just automating what a person would do: search for a hashtag; like photos; and drop some comments. But it really kills engagement when most comments are something like "Nice! :thumbs:", or "Love this! :heart:", and you know that 90% of accounts that follow you will automatically unfollow you in a week.

Instagrams social discovery aspect has been ruined. It has been taken over by bots and groups of people on whatsapp/$messaging_service that schedule when to post and all like the photo the moment it gets posted to boost it to the discover page. It has become all about gaming the algorithm.

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

#245

Post by anigbrowl »

olivermarks wrote: post #103

Regardless of user age, I have no idea what FB is 'for' anymore. The whole egosphere thing of celebrating your latest life success with posts is only ok for a small social circle. The idea of a captive user being fed 'feeds' has killed off that intimacy amongst friends in an already elderly and visually sterile environment. I have a FB account and around 1400 'friends'. I rarely post on the account except to post art…

I use it for two things, albeit on different accounts. For myself, I keep in touch with a small circle of friends (20/~400) for personal stuff - family news, similar sense of humor etc., and participate in a number of groups, in much the same way I would on HN. Groups are where it's at, really. Oh, and I follow some news pages on specific subjects. FB is generally a terrible way to get news but an OK way to filter it to pick up high-quality content that might otherwise get lost int he shuffle.

My other accounts are purely for research, social network analysis and so on.

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

#246

Post by anigbrowl »

dvt wrote: post #75

FB seems to be on its deathbed. It's obvious that it's completely lost on young users (18-25), and even young adults (25-35) are just about done with it. Serious question: is now the time to disrupt? What would the "next" MySpace/FB look like? Ignoring techie "features" like decentralization, what do you think users actually care about?

I wouldn't be so sure about that. It is definitely ripe for disruption (and I've been saying that for a while) but on its deathbed? Far from it.

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

#247

Post by delecti »

adjkant wrote: post #225
delecti wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scroll until you see the first thing you saw the last time you checked the app. Do that every time you open the app and you'll never see things from before the last time you checked. It's absurd that it's necessary, but it works 100% of the time for me since they moved to non-chronological sorting.

So THAT is how they artificially increase their DAU and use time - make the user experience only tolerable if you essentially have to use the app daily and be constantly updated.

Sure, but there's a certain amount of sense in that the fix for "I want to see everything posted by the people I follow" is "go look at everything posted by the people you follow".

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

#248

Post by anigbrowl »

err4nt wrote: post #221
oblib wrote: post #190

"12- to 17-year-old demographic declined by 9.9 percent in 2017" I'll offer those numbers are related to their parents already being there. Those kids will probably sign up or come back when they get a bit older.

Why would they sign up…ever? What's the value proposition? Will their parents have left in a few years? When I joined Facebook (~2006/7) there was a very clear value to me: my and my college classmates could send messages, collaborate, and organize events. Now it seems like a wasteland, I really have no idea how I could put Facebook to work for me, and since not everybody I need to collaborate with it is on Facebook…

Groups. there are tons of groups, open, private, and secret, and it's easy and handy to build/organize a small community on there than through X or Y private forum website that people have to log in separately to. People frequently try to build groups up to a critical mass and then move them off FB for privacy and/or profit, but most people are in multiple groups and there's no discernible advantage in moving to a different platform for semi-casual socialization. That's why lots of other social networks for subgroups launch to great fanfare and are then deserted 6 months to a year later. They just don't have enough critical mass to overcome Facebook's network effect on a permanent basis so people keep going back to FB because that's where everyone else is for many practical purposes.

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

#249

Post by graeme »

mschuster91 wrote: post #128
graeme wrote: post #120

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,…

> I don't yet have that feeling about snapchat, though the new design is annoying. I tried to try it out but even on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 when it came out it was unbearably slow and even not using the camera drained the battery (IIRC it is/was because Snapchat kept the camera on during the time the app was open in order to avoid the 1-2s lag of camera setup). I can't understand why and how kids and young people lik…

MKBHD had a good take on Android snapchat, in passing on this video where he announced he's leaving the platform for instagram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-DfipidnOE

Basically, it's far worse than the iOS version, due to Android fragmentation and Snapchat's failure to code for the different camera of at least the high end android devices.

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