Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

insidefacebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 139 posts

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#51

Post by delackner »

joe_the_user wrote: post #25
sage_joch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My sense is that Facebook is really well made, and isn't going anywhere (i.e., Facebook is to social networking what Google is to search). I could see LinkedIn getting destroyed, though. They fill a very real need, but don't seem to do it very well. This is all very qualitative, but I never feel like I have a pleasant experience on LinkedIn.

Facebook is absolutely fabulously done (complaints about it concern privacy and abuse potential but the interface is top-notch). The thing about Facebook though, is A) The interface requires lots of care and feeding to stay clean and appealing - Facebook has stayed nice through it small number of very talented engineers. B) Facebook's economics and its supply of topnotch talent has been leverage from its constant gro…

Are we talking about the same service? The User experience is horrible. I am not just talking from a hacker perspective, as most of the people I know that complain about facebook are very NON technical people. They just complain about the same things that I also hate: That facebook makes it impossible ( by design ) to hide the endless stream of inane auto-generated SPAM that fills your news stream. The worst is that this spam is directly from facebook. My news stream is now 90% "X is now friends with 10 new people", "Y and 15 other friends changed their profile pic", "That book you [Liked] has a fun factoid to blather about".

The iPhone app is worse. You can't even see your own lists at this point, and clicking on youtube links doesn't just play the video, it opens an embedded browser that gleefully suggests that you try adding youtube to your Home screen.

The iPad optimized site is so useless for reading anything a friend links to that I don't even bother clicking anymore, I just wait until I am at a PC.

The message viewer makes it impossible to quickly mark as-read or delete the vast numbers of messages that I never open because the popup notification on my phone contained enough information to never need to open the full message.

The reason that facebook is still going strong is not good user interface or experience, it is that it is incredibly sticky. They managed to become the new email for a lot of people, and that utility is enough to force a lot of people to grind their teeth and ignore the horrible parts.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#52

Post by neilk »

jsz0 wrote: post #37
jordan0day wrote: post #4

Does anyone have any good guesses as to what the "next" Facebook will be? I mean, in my experience, it basically went Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebook. While Facebook is certainly in the drivers seat to a much greater extent than MySpace was five or six years ago, history indicates they'll eventually be knocked off their throne. However, I haven't seen or heard of any serious newcomers in that space. I've personally…

I think it's settled for the next decade or so at least. With 687 million users if each user spent 15 minutes switching to an alternative it would take a combined time investment of about 20,000 years for Facebook to disappear. Of course they don't have to lose all their users to become irrelevant.. If Facebook's growth stopped today and they began to lose users at a rate of about 90,000 per day it would take 10 year…

By that logic, MySpace is also unchallengeable.

There's a class of kids out there who are 12 right now; by the time they're 16 or 18 are you sure they're going to want Facebook accounts? According to researcher danah boyd, these kids will probably have created and disposed of many different social networking accounts by that time.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#53

Post by jamesteow »

olihb wrote: post #3

They don't say why or where those users are going. If the users aren't going anywhere else, they just decided that Facebook weren't for them. This might be alright for Facebook because I guess they want committed users that log on the site several times per day, not users that log once in a while.

Anecdotal 'evidence':

I'd say 10-15% of my friends list (age 24-28) have left Facebook.

Some users just focused on websites catering to specific communities.

Some just focused most of their time on Twitter/Tumblr.

And some just realized they got by day-to-day without a social network and elected to get out of the game altogether.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#54

Post by neilk »

evgen wrote: post #33
nhangen wrote: post #26

I don't think any single service will kill Facebook. Hell, I don't think you can do anything but diminish them at this point. My bet is that the micro-niche makes a comeback and is what catches on going forward. We dont' care about high school friends we never talked to, or family members that blab about their dinner. What we care about are the things that interest us...HN is a great example. As more people move to a…

Unless of course Facebook figures out a useful and effective way to provide the same focused view of a niche community within the larger Facebook expanse. At some point they may come up with a way to easily and intuitively allow users to expose different facets of their interests and persona to different groups; if they figure this out the niche sites (even HN) are toast.

If they are really smart they'll make it even easier for niche communities to use their social graph, or to create custom data records within it. For a lot of site owners it makes sense to outsource account and user info management to someone else. FB has had trouble being reliable enough for that kind of service in the past, but it's not like they don't have the talent and money to do this.

If you look at the Like button, and their other endeavors, I don't think Facebook's ambitions are limited to just getting visits and clicks. They want to become a utility as indispensable as HTTP.

And Facebook are really smart. Keep in mind that if there is a drop, they've probably known about it for months and months, and we're just finding out it about now indirectly.

That said, I hope they don't succeed and a distributed system does succeed.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#55

Post by Arro »

jamesteow wrote: post #50
nrao123 wrote: post #32

I have long believed that Facebook/MySpace is like a TV show. Once the "content" becomes less interesting, people will slowly tune out. I am personally seeing fewer and less interesting updates from my friends. In fact, the general theory of mine is that any business whose key metric is "time spent per user", is basically a time sink AND in the media business and needs to keep up with new ways to entertain people. Th…

'Once the "content" becomes less interesting, people will slowly tune out. I am personally seeing fewer and less interesting updates from my friends.' Same here. Most of my friends who have something interesting to say will contact me via IM/e-mail or I'll read it via Twitter. So I'm left with a lot of status updates that... really don't resonate (except from a handful of key people).

'except from a handful of key people'

Agreed. If I was only facebook friends with the 10 people I really am interested in, I'd hardly notice the difference. I don't want to go through and remove all the loose friends I met in college one-by-one, though.

Twitter is much more relevant to me; I'm only following around 50 people, all of which I deliberately chose.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#57

Post by sixtofour »

nhangen wrote: post #26

I don't think any single service will kill Facebook. Hell, I don't think you can do anything but diminish them at this point. My bet is that the micro-niche makes a comeback and is what catches on going forward. We dont' care about high school friends we never talked to, or family members that blab about their dinner. What we care about are the things that interest us...HN is a great example. As more people move to a…

I'm in a mini community of about 10. We all know each other. We communicate through email. I've gotten more out of that than I ever got out of Facebook, and some of the people in my mini group were part of my network in Facebook.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#58

Post by ern »

abbasmehdi wrote: post #56

I'm still not sure why FB has not figured out an easy way to segment and categorize friends. FB puts me in the same room with my mom, coworkers, school buddies, and nephews. Awkward.

It allows you to group/categorize your friends, and set privacy for each group for most actions. If you wanted to hide everything from your mom, you could. If you need to share an update with your nephews, but not your school friends that's easy.

Perhaps having separate Walls for different groups is the next step.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#59

Post by possibilistic »

evgen wrote: post #33
nhangen wrote: post #26

I don't think any single service will kill Facebook. Hell, I don't think you can do anything but diminish them at this point. My bet is that the micro-niche makes a comeback and is what catches on going forward. We dont' care about high school friends we never talked to, or family members that blab about their dinner. What we care about are the things that interest us...HN is a great example. As more people move to a…

Unless of course Facebook figures out a useful and effective way to provide the same focused view of a niche community within the larger Facebook expanse. At some point they may come up with a way to easily and intuitively allow users to expose different facets of their interests and persona to different groups; if they figure this out the niche sites (even HN) are toast.

Not if they can't get us to join. Personally, I'll always be a little too paranoid about what they're doing with their data. Their past missteps gave us all an indication of what they really want to do.

I'm really hoping for decentalized peer to peer communities that are elastically created from locally computed interest profiles. Not a distributed facebook per se, but more like a user-centroid HN that aggregates similar people and interests... that would really make my academic life soar.

In the end, I don't think Facebook would fight for the long tail of user demographics. What they have is quite profitable enough. Why expend 90% more effort to convince all of the tinfoil hat wearers to join?

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#60

Post by dkarl »

nrao123 wrote: post #32

I have long believed that Facebook/MySpace is like a TV show. Once the "content" becomes less interesting, people will slowly tune out. I am personally seeing fewer and less interesting updates from my friends. In fact, the general theory of mine is that any business whose key metric is "time spent per user", is basically a time sink AND in the media business and needs to keep up with new ways to entertain people. Th…

Same here. I'm getting more and more bored with it. What was most interesting about Facebook for me was learning about certain people. This guy I work with likes cheesy movies, goes out to Irish bars with his wife, and likes to tweet quotes from whatever movie he's watching when he's drunk. Learning that was interesting. Seeing the same pattern every day is horribly boring. Same thing with most of my high-volume friends. A close high school friend's wife, whom I haven't had a chance to get to know in person, loves mariachi music, can't write a coherent sentence to save her life, goes to la pulga (the flea market) every weekend, enjoys drama with her coworkers, and is constantly sharing coupon deals. Fascinating to know, boring as shit to see every day.

And of course the highest volume people are the most boring. All my friends seem to have about the same volume of inanity, funny stuff, somewhat interesting comments, worthwhile content, and vital life updates to share. They just vary in what their sharing threshold is. If I could tune out everything below "worthwhile content" then Facebook would be great. I'd also only need to look at it once a day for two minutes to keep up with everybody. Alas, there is no "setLogLevel" method on my Facebook feed.

Post reply on HN