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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

#301

Post by mettamage »

Facebook has usefulness to me in three ways:

1. As a public opinion board. I post a question on my wall and people answer.

2. Chatting with my friends.

3. One Facebook group where me and my friends are in.

This is my setup to not get completely sucked into Facebook:

1. I changed my real accounts name to a fictional name that is related to my name. I changed my lastname to a French version of it (my lastname is a noun) and then I swapped my first and lastname. So anyone who Google's me on my real name can't find me.

2. I created a fake account with my real name and a modicum amount of friends (at random) in order to not get detected by Facebook that it is a fake account. I put the best pictures of me on this account. Now when people Google me, they see nice pictures.

3. My main browser has my fake account on auto-login. But it has my actual account on the auto-login of Messenger. This means when I go to Messenger, I can actually chat. And when I get nonsense (e.g. login with Facebook or sucked into some feature of Facebook) I get my fake account. Since it has a modicum of friends that I don't care about and nothing on it, there is not much I can do.

4. I set my main Facebook account on auto-login on my second browser. In this way I can still write wall posts and post/read about stuff in my Facebookgroup. Also, I installed a wall eridactor plugin.

I don't think I'll ever be able to completely get away from Facebook, but I am trying my best to keep its use to the things I want to do with it.

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

#302

Post by tayo42 »

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 don't think it will be disrupted. Facebook is like world of warcraft. I don't think there will be another in the same way again.

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

#303

Post by HappyDreamer »

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

My mother is on Facebook, and she doesn't have many many Facebook friends other than me and the closest family. Resulting in Facebook posting an event to her Facebook news feed, whenever I do something on Facebook (because there's not much else to show in her news feed). If I post a comment in a discussion at Facebook, she gets to know about it, and sometimes joins the same discussion she too.

Sometimes it's fun to hear what she thinks about the discussions I join. At the same time, feels as if Facebook is in this case a surveillance tool. I know there are other people I'm connected with, who I don't really know who they are and also don't have many other friends at Facebook. Those mostly-strangers-to-me are probably also being sent notifications about everything I do.

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

#304

Post by takeda »

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…

That because Facebook was smart to purchase competing services such as Instagram and WhatsApp.

I believe a lot of comments are about their main site which I also agree that got dramatically worse and no longer provides the same value it once did.

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

#306

Post by cozzyd »

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…

Yeah I remember being super-annoyed when non-college students were allowed on...

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

#307

Post by fabianhjr »

oneshot908 wrote: post #117
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 th…

There is already SSB / Patchwork that was recently feautred here in HackerNews.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16273096

https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/

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

#308

Post by fabianhjr »

oneshot908 wrote: post #257
stanleydrew wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

on the blockchain Why? Everything else you wrote makes sense to me except for this.

Because I doubt a corporation would stay aligned with the non-paying customer long-term. Witness GOOG. Compare and contrast with AMZN where the customer is indeed the customer.

I think we can have decentralized technolgy without blockchains though.

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

#309

Post by gaius »

RafiqM wrote: post #145

Time and time again I see the complaint that people want a 'Most Recent' news feed instead of algorithm-chosen and that's why they don't use Facebook anymore. This type of feed would be unusable for the vast majority of users. Why? Because of Page Likes. I struggled to find quantitative data on this, but I myself like over 600 pages, and I'm selective. Many people like over 1000. With a Most Recent news feed, those h…

With a Most Recent news feed, those hundreds of pages would be posting multiple times a day vying for your attention

Then people would simply only "like" things that they really liked and really wanted to see. This is a non-issue.

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