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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

#341

Post by aws_ls »

Yep. My anecdotal example. My elder one, created an account as soon as they turned 13. The younger one, couldn't care less. Meanwhile sometime few years ago, I also deleted my FB account. My God, there are only a few tech products, I hate as much.

Lot of solutions on offer. But IMHO, only one thing will fix it. Forcing it to open its protocol. A mail++ (for social) which will just allow all the products to compete in the open. They can compete on UI, the feed sort algorithm etc, among other things. Nobody will hate on Facebook as much. Its market cap will go down, but Zuck can sleep better.[1]

[1] “I don’t think he sleeps well at night,” from https://www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-...

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

#342

Post by kortex »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #205
btown wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A “broadcast this comment?” prompt after successfully submitting a comment, even a toggle that’s default-on, would solve this elegantly IMO. I have no idea why they don’t do it. Facebook was once great at understanding that people don’t want to draw outside attention to some things that they technically do in public. They seem to have ceded that ground to Snapchat entirely, which is a painful sentence to type.

> I have no idea why they don’t do it. Not to beat this hackneyed drum to death, but: it’s because you’re not the consumer—you’re the product. They have armies of data scientists optimising their holy interaction metrics to death. They are incentivised to wage a holy war for your eyeballs, and wage a war they will. Every last base point is priceless at their scale. Every single pixel, every possible user story, every…

That sounds like a great way to overfit. I do not know exactly when it was, as it was in a lot of ways a "boiling frog" process, but from ~2010-2015 I felt the shift from "user" to "product", fully at the expense of enjoyment and user experience.

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

#343

Post by pmart123 »

btown wrote: post #36
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…

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 think Linkedin has the long tail advantage here in that since it was setup as a professional network, it tends to stay that way in regards to typical interactions and people will continue to build their network on Linkedin over their career. Additionally, Linkedin has the benefit that younger people will signup to CONNECT WITH OLDER PEOPLE as networking with those senior people might help them in their career. Facebook suffers from people assuming "hidden landmines" could exist from something they posted or wrote when they were in college, which disincentives someone to maintain and enhance new social or professional connections. So it is interesting to think about what happens when you lose young users, while simultaneously you have mature users no longer keeping their social network up-to-date on Facebook? A long time ago (in tech years), it seemed like part of Facebook's moat was that the switching costs would be high on a social network. Is this still the case? Would a reasonable analogy be what if Netflix stopped creating new content and expected continued viewership relying on only existing content? How long of a lead/lad would there be until a large drop in viewership? Facebook does owns Whatsapp and Instagram though, which provides an argument that the company is well positioned from the prospective of offering the platform for targeting group chats, and still being the epicenter of most people's social experience.

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

#344

Post by ulfw »

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…

Because as every big corporation without any creative mind of their own A/B tests shit ad infinitum. Whatever minimal change they made to the feed won an individual A/B test. Unfortunately the reality in life is not necessarily 1000 tiny improvements = 1 huge better product. Especially if there is no consistent thinking about the user experience.

I wholeheartedly agree with you that Facebook lost it's user focus.

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

#345

Post by ulfw »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #207
Yhippa wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Buying Whatsapp and Instagram for ANY price where the best business decisions Zuckerberg and Co have done. By far. They knew Facebook would die off like myspace and friendster did. or BBS and Compuserve and AOL if you want to go back that far.

Social networks come and go in waves. Some stay longer, some fizzle out quicker.

Owning the biggest alternatives to your own network is a brilliant move. If Whatsapp or Insta kills Facebook, so be it. As long as no one else does ;)

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

#346

Post by oblib »

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…

"Why would they sign up…ever?"

They grow up. When you're a teen, or even young adult, you don't want your parents snooping on you, but as you grow a bit older you find that you do want to keep in touch with family.

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

#347

Post by oflannabhra »

I have a theory: Facebook's biggest problem is that it gives people what they want, but what people want is not what makes them happy. Algorithmic recommendations are tailored to capture people for as long as possible, but the short-sightedness of "engagement" erodes the long-term benefit for the user. I think this applies to YouTube as well, or other algorithmically generated "feeds".

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

#349

Post by robbrit »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #242
agorabinary wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I have a feeling Diaspora isn't going anywhere anytime soon until they clean up their UX. Here's the initial experience:

1) Go to the site, click Join Us.

2) Get shuttled down the page to a wall of text. Click Sign Up since I don't want to read the text, and I see a green button.

3) See a list of "pods" - looks like a chatroom? I click the "Confused" button which auto-sends you to a pod.

4) See a bunch of text in German.

5) Press back.

6) Click the pod at the top of the list that says "US".

7) Get a 500 error.

8) Close tab.

I love the idea here, but I hate to say that it is poorly executed so far.

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

#350

Post by wila »

danielbln wrote: post #316
wila wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't already have an email address for all your spam, get one, then change your email address in Facebook to that one. While the annoying emails still get send, you are at least no longer bothered with it in your day to day email use. Not ideal, but slightly better. Of course you can also use email filtering rules, but seperating it physically makes it more likely you do not burn time on it by accident.

Why jump through all those hoops, just disable notification mails in the FB preferences?!

Because you might want to see some emails, but not the selection that FB deems important.
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