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Is Facebook dying?

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Re: Is Facebook dying?

#51

Post by RandallBrown »

A friend of mine I haven't talked to in awhile told me that he deleted his facebook. He said that any of the people he actually wants to be in contact with have his phone number and can catch up with him that way. The thing is though, we live on other sides of the country. I'm not really the kind of guy that randomly calls up his friends just to see how they're doing. There really aren't any other reasons to talk to him, so we just end up not talking.

With my friends that are on Facebook though, I can read what they're doing, they can see what I'm doing, and we can comment and talk about it. Oh, you saw a movie? I also saw that movie, wasn't it good/bad/funny/whatever?

Also, the groups and events on Facebook are just fantastic for planning things. I went on a trip with some friends from college a couple weeks ago. We all live in different parts of the country and coordinating something like that would have been a nightmare without Facebook. We made a group and used it to post all the information about when our flights were leaving, what hotel we'd be staying at. It was really really convenient.

If you're annoyed with your friends posting stupid stuff, just ignore the news feed. There are dozens of other reasons to use facebook.

Re: Is Facebook dying?

#52

Post by deveac »

tatsuke95 wrote: post #49
deveac wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Precisely. My anecdote is little comfort to a platform looking to extract value from its users by targeting ads at them.

But it's better than nothing. At least I'm sticking around for the opportunity for them to someday extract value from me. If they didn't have this hook, I'd abandon the site completely. Compare that to something like MySpace in its heyday, which never had anybody's real life social network on there in any meaningful sense. Absolutely nothing to keep them there, and leave they did.

Re: Is Facebook dying?

#53

Post by s_henry_paulson »

jonnathanson wrote: post #24

It seems a little hasty to proclaim the death of Facebook based on a sample size of two kids. In fact, when I worked in marketing, I used to dread statements from leadership (or whomever) that began with "My kid was doing X, so we should get into X," or "I heard about Y on the radio, so I wonder...," etc. Dangerously flawed assumptions can come from this line of reasoning. Anecdotal samples can be useful to form hypo…

Fair enough, but I think the reason this is getting upvoted so much is because I think many of us can relate to the content in the article, so maybe there is something here worth considering.

After all, with many predecessors like Friendster and Myspace, most people that left didn't even bother to delete their accounts, they just stopped using the service.

As far as anecdotal evidence, I'm seeing the same thing happen as well, both with myself and others.

Re: Is Facebook dying?

#54

Post by pacomerh »

halayli wrote: post #12

The title should be: "My kids are using Facebook less these days".

Absolutely, and because his kids are his world, then facebook is dying. Same reason why everybody posts pictures of their kids thinking the world will be interested.

Re: Is Facebook dying?

#55

Post by waterlesscloud »

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.

If I ran the world I'd ban all links to wikipedia and lesswrong entries on "laws" and "fallacies".

They never actually contribute anything to the discussion.

Re: Is Facebook dying?

#56

Post by taylodl »

Better question: are all social networking sites doomed to be fads and thus doomed to die? The answer leads to paradoxical results. If we answer 'yes' then no one will create another Facebook and thus Facebook will survive. If we answer 'no' then a competitor will emerge and thus increasing the chance that Facebook dies.

Re: Is Facebook dying?

#57

Post by waterlesscloud »

s_henry_paulson wrote: post #53
jonnathanson wrote: post #24

It seems a little hasty to proclaim the death of Facebook based on a sample size of two kids. In fact, when I worked in marketing, I used to dread statements from leadership (or whomever) that began with "My kid was doing X, so we should get into X," or "I heard about Y on the radio, so I wonder...," etc. Dangerously flawed assumptions can come from this line of reasoning. Anecdotal samples can be useful to form hypo…

Fair enough, but I think the reason this is getting upvoted so much is because I think many of us can relate to the content in the article, so maybe there is something here worth considering. After all, with many predecessors like Friendster and Myspace, most people that left didn't even bother to delete their accounts, they just stopped using the service. As far as anecdotal evidence, I'm seeing the same thing happe…

I think stories like this get upvoted because a certain percentage of HN users want FB to fail.

A certain percentage (probably other people) want Google to fail and upvote those stories.

A certain percentage want YC to fail and upvote those stories.

A certain percentage want Apple to fail and upvote those stories.

I don't think anything meaningful can be derived from such upvote patterns.

Re: Is Facebook dying?

#58

Post by patrickk »

ryandvm wrote: post #13
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…

Man, I can't even imagine what Facebook would look like after 20 more years of them abusing user privacy. They will probably have their own line of video-enabled shower faucets by then...

"Want free showers? Tell your friends!"

small print- with frictionless sharing of video live streaming to the web. Don't worry, only your friends, family and work colleagues will see it, no random strangers.

Re: Is Facebook dying?

#59

Post by johnrydell »

lukethomas wrote: post #38

My 13 year old sister doesn't even have a Facebook account - but she uses Instagram like there's no tomorrow.

Exactly the same in my town. My 13 year old daughter and all of her friends are Instagram users. I'm not sure if they are rebelling against Facebook but they love texting and Instagram. While I like emailing and FB. Generational differences...

Re: Is Facebook dying?

#60

Post by lostnet »

unreal37 wrote: post #18
tatsuke95 wrote: post #6

> "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?

An account that like's people who pay for more friends on ebay is an example of a an active user.

Let's suppose some of these services use real workers to log in to each account. Each worker will log in how many thousands of accounts in 30 days? What Ad will they respond to unless they are also being paid for click fraud?

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