I haven't used FB in the last few months except to log into other sites.
I haven't used Twitter much either, since the U.I. has gotten so slow for me I'd need to carve out a 10 minute block of time to wait for it to load.
Is Facebook dying?
41–50 of 76 posts
Re: Is Facebook dying?
#42If I really cared about this stuff, I'd love to respond to yet another request to get on Facebook by saying that I only do Myspace. I think I just felt a trend-setter gasm there.
Facebook is not even cool anymore, and in five years time will be seen as one of the dumbest IPO's in history. How did these greyhairs who invested in this crap make their money in the first place?
Tesla, yes. SpaceX, yes. Facebook? Are you fucking kidding me?
Re: Is Facebook dying?
#43I was tired of slashdot obvious advertising with itworld/networkworld/junkworld.com ... only to find the same links here :(
Re: Is Facebook dying?
#44Can 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.
I'm with you man, and that's one of the reason I stopped reading slashdot. ITworld/networlworld/crapworld are really not the best source of information when it comes to IT...
Re: Is Facebook dying?
#45Is communicating with friends dying?
Sure, nearly six billion people do it. But I for one am dealing with a serious case of burnout. And I know I'm not alone.
Ok, I admit: The question that serves as the headline for this post seems on the surface a bit absurd, if not downright crazy. Any day now seven billionth person is about to communicate with friends, and that's a population more than 21 times that of the United States.
The reason I ask if communicating with friends is dying is simple: It’s because my kids have pretty much stopped doing it. Just the other day my 16 year old son told me he rarely does it, because he’s tired of other people’s whiny life updates. He’d rather spend his time reading books and discovering new things (when he’s supposed to be doing his homework, naturally). In other words, he’d like to do his own random discovery, rather than rely on his friends to do it for him.
My 13-year-old daughter, a much more social creature, was all over communicating with friends for the first two years she tried it.
But lately she has discovered scrapbooking, where she can build her own scrapbook and find others that interest her – without getting all this stuff she doesn’t care about pushed at her by her parents, relatives, and assorted friends.
In other words, the generation that follows Gen Z has grown disenchanted with the very nature of communicating with friends. And I gotta say, I’m starting to see their point.
More and more when I am bored and looking for distraction in real life I go first to newspaper or TV. Last night, for example, I spent a ridiculous amount of time following the CNN coverage of 47 percent and all the snark that erupted from Mitt Romney’s “off the cuff, inelegant” comments about the half of America he apparently detests.
I was listening to national news anchors, whose voice and ability to stay fair and balanced are far superior to the local TV station experience (and miles ahead of any political coverage I ever get from my friends and family). The TV remote let me quickly change channels without having to buy a new television set or turn it off and on again. So I spent a solid hour skimming through news bytes and listening in-depth to those that piqued my interest.
Re: Is Facebook dying?
#46> "She has at last count at least three accounts, possibly more, which she uses for different purposes – some of them just to play those stupid spammy Facebook games and quizzes." Impossible! According to Facebook, multiple accounts are not an issue, and people like this are outliers! And yet, almost everyone I know has more than one account. That 900MM user number is phonier than a three-dollar-bill. I wonder what t…
Facebook has 955MM "monthly active uniques". That's not number of accounts (which is surely over 1B), that is number of active users over a 30 day period. So all these fake accounts - people are using them (active). Ads are being displayed, activity is happening, Facebook is making money on every single one of 955MM accounts. So what makes them phony?
>"So what makes them phony?"
Let's start with the fact that in the article, a 13-year old girl is using multiple accounts to play games, and nothing more. Yes, she logs in and is counted as an "monthly active user". Yes, ads are being served to her. That's the problem.
She's one person. But as far as Facebook (and, hence, advertisers) are concerned, she's three. Do you really believe the demographic information she's entered in the fake accounts is accurate? Do you think that she uses the fake accounts with the same commercial intent? As someone who himself has multiple accounts, I'm skeptical.
Re: Is Facebook dying?
#47Several 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 spa…
I quit it too. Besides the high amount of garbage that people were posting, I thought that the privacy controls really sucked.
It's like you have to anticipate everything you or other people will say to you and somehow create your privacy rules, so that only the right people will see the stuff.
For me, facebook was pretty much like TV. A nice way to waste my time doing nothing. I felt weird when I quit facebook, there is a lot of social pressure for you to be part of it. But now I'm used to it :)
Re: Is Facebook dying?
#48Is communicating with friends dying? Sure, nearly six billion people do it. But I for one am dealing with a serious case of burnout. And I know I'm not alone. Ok, I admit: The question that serves as the headline for this post seems on the surface a bit absurd, if not downright crazy. Any day now seven billionth person is about to communicate with friends, and that's a population more than 21 times that of the United…
Is Facebook no longer a method of communicating with friends?
Re: Is Facebook dying?
#49Several 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. I really do agree with this. I detest Facebook's attitude towards privacy. I've got my account on complete lockdown. Friends and family lament that they can't post to my wall, and that I don't…
>"but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a very real value."
You do a good job of demonstrating how Facebook has real, practical value for social lives.
The problem is with the commercial value. The better the user-experience, the worse the commercial value. Can the worlds of social and commercial value co-exist, over lengths of time as long as 20 years? I'm not sure.
Re: Is Facebook dying?
#50Is communicating with friends dying? Sure, nearly six billion people do it. But I for one am dealing with a serious case of burnout. And I know I'm not alone. Ok, I admit: The question that serves as the headline for this post seems on the surface a bit absurd, if not downright crazy. Any day now seven billionth person is about to communicate with friends, and that's a population more than 21 times that of the United…
Your kids as just finding out that people that talk too much about themselves are boring. On facebook there is an army of people ready to post what they ate for breakfast, what they saw on TV, and so on. These people just want an audience to watch what they are doing (mostly uninteresting stuff heh).