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Is Facebook dying?

itworld.com

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Re: Is Facebook dying?

#31

Post by jamesbritt »

stevenj wrote: post #5

Several of my friends have quit Facebook. Many on multiple occasions. Nearly all of them have eventually come back. Many of them multiple times. I think the ones who are still gone will come back sometime. Some inevitably won't. But I think the number of people who dislike Facebook enough to never want to use it are in the extreme minority. I think most people just don't think about whether it's evil or not. It's jus…

Facebook is like your online social homebase. You leave it, travel different places, see new things, meet new people, but it's what you come home to. It's a part of your identity as it serves as an online archive of your life. And for many of its users this archive started pretty early.

Indeed, it's like my space.

Re: Is Facebook dying?

#32

Post by jamesbritt »

iskander wrote: post #11
stevenj wrote: post #5

Several of my friends have quit Facebook. Many on multiple occasions. Nearly all of them have eventually come back. Many of them multiple times. I think the ones who are still gone will come back sometime. Some inevitably won't. But I think the number of people who dislike Facebook enough to never want to use it are in the extreme minority. I think most people just don't think about whether it's evil or not. It's jus…

I've been off facebook for half a year but I'm still tempted to return. There isn't a good alternative for sharing photos with a group of friends, though hopefully something will emerge.

...though hopefully something will emerge.

Something will only emerge if people insist others use it, just as people now insist others use Facebook.

Acquiescing to FB just perpetuates it.

Re: Is Facebook dying?

#33

Post by cs702 »

I recently heard of two teenagers (relatives of a business acquaintance) who quit FaceBook because -- well, because it's no longer the freshest gumbo. They no longer feel it's cool.

A few anecdotes do not make a trend, but FaceBook should be worried, because social networks can implode quickly when they stop being perceived as 'the place to see and be seen:' http://diegobasch.com/social-networks-implode-quickly

--

PS. I can relate to the author's complaint: "on Twitter I can find the stuff I’m interested in. On Facebook I can only see the stuff other people are interested in." Very true!

Re: Is Facebook dying?

#34

Post by mbesto »

cletus wrote: post #30
w1ntermute wrote: post #22

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines No.

It's so predictable that someone posts this on every submission with a question headline. Seriously, it's old. We get it. Just move on.

At this point, I think it's more a comment on the quality of articles that are getting upvoted to the frontpage.

Re: Is Facebook dying?

#35

Post by e40 »

iskander wrote: post #11
stevenj wrote: post #5

Several of my friends have quit Facebook. Many on multiple occasions. Nearly all of them have eventually come back. Many of them multiple times. I think the ones who are still gone will come back sometime. Some inevitably won't. But I think the number of people who dislike Facebook enough to never want to use it are in the extreme minority. I think most people just don't think about whether it's evil or not. It's jus…

I've been off facebook for half a year but I'm still tempted to return. There isn't a good alternative for sharing photos with a group of friends, though hopefully something will emerge.

I've taken to posting photos on google's picasa web and marking them unlisted, then posting a link on facebook. It's not perfect, but when I tried to get everyone I want to view the pictures to get a free flickr account, it was just too hard. Only about 1/5 of them were able to understand and do it, and probably a small fraction of those that did every really checked for new pics.

The problem everyone has been trained on facebook and most have no reason to change. The people on HN don't like it, but the friends and relatives I have on facebook couldn't care less about the privacy and other issues. They just use it.

Re: Is Facebook dying?

#37

Post by libraryatnight »

stevenj wrote: post #5

Several of my friends have quit Facebook. Many on multiple occasions. Nearly all of them have eventually come back. Many of them multiple times. I think the ones who are still gone will come back sometime. Some inevitably won't. But I think the number of people who dislike Facebook enough to never want to use it are in the extreme minority. I think most people just don't think about whether it's evil or not. It's jus…

I quit Facebook because I felt the value of what was being collected wasn't really worth saving. Sure, there were occasional birth announcements, and other neat life events, but ultimately most of my timeline was people posting bored comments while they were waiting or about to go do something, people posting pictures that were rather mundane (pictures of food, pictures of new purchases, etc), linking memes, game spam, and telling each other happy birthday. I don't feel I will really care about a vast majority of that in 20 years.

Also, and this is not true for everyone since some are careful to select who is on their Facebook, but I found after leaving that the truly important people in my life stay connected regardless of Facebook. A lot of what was on my Facebook was noise, and relationships that only exist because of and on Facebook.

Re: Is Facebook dying?

#39

Post by mirkules »

cs702 wrote: post #33

I recently heard of two teenagers (relatives of a business acquaintance) who quit FaceBook because -- well, because it's no longer the freshest gumbo. They no longer feel it's cool. A few anecdotes do not make a trend, but FaceBook should be worried, because social networks can implode quickly when they stop being perceived as 'the place to see and be seen:' http://diegobasch.com/social-networks-implode-quickly -- PS…

Besides agreeing with your point about "coolness", I also thought about the "stuff I'm interested in" vs. "stuff other people are interested in". It struck me as an insightful sentence that perfectly describes their respective social networking models.

The argument comes down to reference/reinfocement vs. discovery. The former provides reference to your knowledge and interests and reinforces them. The latter lets you discover new knowledge. There is definitely room for both ideologies, as they are both kind of necessary for social interaction. Twitter: find people with same interests, Facebook: connect with those people on a more personal level, and find out their interests. Of course, I am neglecting the fact that you can find out other people's interests on Twitter, too, but Facebook strikes me as more of a passive way to do that -- Twitter just moves too fast for that (for an occasional user, like me).

So, I think while there are many, many problems with Facebook, their model of interaction might not be one of them.

Re: Is Facebook dying?

#40

Post by tptacek »

Can anyone point to a single good ITWorld story ever posted to HN?

We get an anomalous number if ITWorld postings, because they use spam accounts to seed their stories here. But that aside: have any of them ever been good?

Be mindful that you could spark an interesting HN thread by asking any inflammatory question and then just filling the article with lorem ipsum text.

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