Facebook lost around 2.8M U.S. users under 25 last year • Hacker News Board

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

#321

Post by p49k » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 9:23 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #273

tgb wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. I don't care if they stumble across it but I never want to broadcast a comment, at least not to people who wouldn't already have seen the post. The worst is when public groups use Facebook as the only way to contact them - I once posted a question about leaving a coat at an event and then got a message from a friend suggesting that I hadn't invited him to the event (it wasn't the kind of thing he thought…

Wouldn't it make more sense to simply assume that anything one posts to the Internet could potentially be broadcast to everyone they know and published on the front page of the New York Times? I don't understand why people think the content they post to a website will be kept private, especially if not keeping it private maximizes shareholder value.

It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. A little tact on the behalf of Facebook’s designers can save people a ton of unneeded frustration, even if it’s technically true that the info is public for people who want to do a thorough search.

Just because data is public doesn’t mean that companies can’t be criticized for exposing it in the most annoying ways possible.

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

#322

Post by ktaube » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 9:30 AM UTC

I wonder how many users are still on Facebook just because it's the only way to authenticate in Tinder.

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

#323

Post by peferron » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 9:35 AM UTC

Yhippa wrote: post #155

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…

Facebook is no longer the best way for me to share content with people I care about. For me that's WhatsApp, Google Photos, and MMS.

My wife and I use Google Photos to share pictures of our child with our families thousands of miles away. It's unbelievably good. No ads, no bullshit promoted celebrity accounts I should follow, actually no social features at all except the bare minimum: 1) sharing albums with others (no Google account required AFAIK, it's email-based) and 2) leaving simple text-based comments on pictures and videos. No bullshit algorithmic reordering of content either, it's just all there in reverse chronological order. My 75 yo parents can't make sense of the Facebook clutter at all (I barely can myself) but they started using Google Photos as soon as they got the invite email out of the blue. I'm sure that Google is happy that I'm uploading my family life to their servers and they'll make money out of it somehow, but from a UX perspective it's close to perfect.

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

#324

Post by icantdrive55 » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 10:13 AM UTC

Pigo wrote: post #48

btown wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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 severely miss when it was just a place to chat up a cute girl"

This was the golden ticket, along with FB wasen't creepy. It was "business" focused, and hell, even for family. You were considered antisocial for not being on the rediculious site.

Now the cut girl/guy is fish mouthing, begging for likes, has way too many friends, ridiculous "sheep" mouthing off on whatever brings in likes, and those over used thoughts of the day, "Life is difficult on Mooondays"; and the magic is gone.

I know now there're really no cute people anymore. They played their cards, for all to see, and it wasen't cute. It was just pathetic.

I don't belive the ads, or restrictive user interface caused a few people, in the right demographics, leave.

FB, and maybe most social sites will get big, and then die. It's like the popular bar. It's a neat place for 10 years, then slowly dies. There's probally some business law that explains what I have noticed for ever? There's an expiration date on most business that don't keep innovating. Innovating is not just buying competition.

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

#325

Post by nitwit005 » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 10:22 AM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #157

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…

The number of folks here and on reddit and even back to Slashdot who had and continue to have negative reactions to incredibly popular things shows that it's really hard for techies to predict what will become a success. I don't think we're irrelevant or out of touch, I just think we really are in a market all our own. Look at the overwhelmingly negative response to the iPod, which then went on to destroy CD players…

I suspect you're making the usual mistake of assuming the vocal people are representative. Most of the users post nothing, and many of the rest post very little.

The people you see posting (you and I included) are weird. Betting against the product choices of wierd people is probably at least somewhat effective as an investment strategy.

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

#326

Post by ZenoArrow » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 10:26 AM UTC

discardable_dan wrote: post #296

ZenoArrow wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using WhatsApp instead of Facebook, Facebook the company doesn't care, it's still money in the bank to them (selling advertisers a detailed profile of who their users are for targeted ads). The whole idea behind buying Instagram and Whatsapp would've been to stay relevant when the inevitable decline in their flagship product kicked in. Looks like their plan is working.

At this point, communicating electronically basically necessitates someone collecting information at this point. I don't care. I just care that the dumb argument I had two years ago is in a chat room with 10 people I know and my employer will never see it.

> "At this point, communicating electronically basically necessitates someone collecting information at this point."

No, it doesn't require that. There are secure options. The main thing that keeps the current unsecure options in play is momentum, i.e. if not enough people care, nothing will get better.

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

#327

Post by PorkBoneSoup » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 10:34 AM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #144

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 have the same experience with Instagram. It used to show me interesting stuff, now it shows me interesting stuff from a few days ago. And a few days from right now, it will show me the interesting stuff that was posted right now. No amount of checking Instagram seems to make the delay go away. Every time I log in, the top of my feed is from 2 days ago. And I scroll for miles and still seeing days-old content that I…

I'm using it far less as it keeps showing me stuff I don't care about from 5 or so days ago instead of linear timeline.

It annoys me because no one ever asked for non-chronological & there's no setting to change it. Instead it shows you stuff it ‘thinks’ you want to see but so far it has been way off the mark for me. And I've missed local bar promos as a result.

I'll give it credit though; it has encouraged me to unfollow a large amount of people it kept showing me repeats of.

I definitely feel less urge to engage on Instagram now than I used to as well.

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

#328

Post by LukaCEnzo » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 10:34 AM UTC

acdha wrote: post #292

Jonovono wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same reason Netflix doesn't let you list all the movies on their site in alphabetical order - they want to create the sense that there is unlimited content. If every time you opened Instagram and there was no new content and you saw the same picture you saw last time you would just close the app. Now you never really know if there is no new content or not so you scroll down... and down...

It can’t be that simple, however, because all three show lots of old content for days even after you’ve looked at it. There must be some component of predicting the content you’re most likely to click on or guaranteeing views for promoted content.

It could also be that you only need a certain percent of new content to keep eyeballs. Thus, by only showing some new content at a time, instead of all at once (as in a chronological feed), you would increase user engagement time.

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

#329

Post by gerardnll » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 10:36 AM UTC

A friend of mine, cancelled the account 2 weeks ago. For months I was also thinking about closing it too, so I finally did it after him. Few days after having talked about it with an ex colleague, he also closed his account too.

The amount of useless information, the irrelevance of it, ads, privacy concerns, the fact that you just care about your most intimate friends, and not about that ones you connected in the beggining when you though 'oh look, my friend from primary school!', most people does no longer provide interesting content, just conversations about politics (not always sane debates), photos to generate envy/pose... and realizing that Facebook just does not give you anything good, just depression or low self steem... Also the fact that when you are bored you just check social media instead of doing something useful... All of this made me realize I had got to close it.

And I feel better, and I'm sure I would feel even better if I also close my Instagram account. Nowadays I just keep the Instagram app on my phone. I also got tired of toxic comments on Twitter and I check it much less often now.

I feel, one of the reasons we registered on Facebook was to be more social but that ended up being the opposite and now we want to feel 'contact' again, and you can only get that by physical interaction and real conversation, because a postcard or a call has never been the same than a real conversation and a hug.

This is just the beggining. I've been on Facebook for 10 years, and I'm sure a lot of millenials are starting to close their accounts, or at least they don't even use it.

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

#330

Post by RafiqM » Tue, Feb 13, 2018, 11:05 AM UTC

gaius wrote: post #309

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.

They already like too many things. The action has already happened, your suggestion would only apply for new users. And as I mentioned, I don't believe people will curate their feed by going to the effort of removing hundreds of page likes and friends. They'll just stop using it because that's too much work.