I don't have fb and I don't miss it. Soon many more will join the trend and nurture their real friendships instead...
When will we stop using Facebook?
51–60 of 252 posts
Re: When will we stop using Facebook?
#52I wonder if the current "depression" is merely the tech savvy market. I find that many authors make the mistake of assuming that the average Joe thinks the same way that they (and their peers) do.
In the past 2-3 months I have heard two less savvy people recite the "it's not an official relationship until it's Facebook official" social norm, which inclines me to believe that Facebook is still firmly entrenched in the way people interact with each other: even if they never visit the site it needs to be there so that they can turn their significant other into that all important profile trophy/achievement.
I had this exact conversation with some coworkers (3 of us) and all of us found out that all of us only have our profiles because our significant others demand it. We never visit the site or use the site but have to exist there because of the people around us who do use it. My S/O can't have me as a partner, my sister can't tag me in a picture etc. People are worried that if there is no "paper trail" on Facebook, other people will think that they are an imposter.
Therefore I'm not inclined to agree that the current trend is a long term trend. There are many other websites that provide exactly the same features of Facebook, if not more. Facebook is a part of culture now. It's a verb. It probably has a good few decades of life left in it.
Finally "search query frequency" is the poster child of "correlation does not imply causation." E.g. People might not be searching for Facebook because everyone already knows what it is and what the address is. It's like ranking Google's health on how often people search for Google.
Re: When will we stop using Facebook?
#53I really should flesh out my "why you can't have a good distributed social network" post some time. What does FB provide that you don't get with a combination of email/USENET/blogs/chat? Branding, janitors, and indexing. Branding is useful because these things are so scale-driven that you want to be on the one that everyone else is using. It's easier for the uninvolved to figure this out if it's the one with huge adv…
> Both of these are ongoing effort that has to be paid for if it is to scale and be done properly.
Have a look at bittorrent. Scale is not a problem. Money isn't either. Perhaps we should have a distributed social network based on it, or a similar technology.
Re: When will we stop using Facebook?
#54Did I get that correctly, that the hypothesis of facebook loosing 80% of its users (in the next years) is based on a link between google searches and facebook use? What if people google facebook less than a while ago because they already know what it is and have remembered the domain name?
Or, more likely, they just use the mobile app.
I was just going to point out the mobile app factor. Looking only at Google does not count search on App stores. It also does not take into account that over half a billion people are mobile only users. Source Q414 earnings slide deck.
http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-NJ5DZ/3515235624...
Re: When will we stop using Facebook?
#55I read facebooks terms and conditions before I created my account (you can guess, I am over 50). After that, I never thought about joining. Tried to discourage our kids, too (no success - they are under 50 ;o).
Re: When will we stop using Facebook?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, in my opinion, Facebook is here to stay. Reasons: - Local/OSS/decentralized social networks will not work for the common population because their friends and updates will not be there. - Video based is already a success, see Twitch, but people sometimes prefer text and likes. - Messenger only is also a success, see Whatsapp/FB messenger, but some people have the need to expose themselves to people outs…
I agree with you that probably FB will stay longer than everyone thinks. At least the messaging part. What I think it's the biggest factor that will give it inertia, it's the userbase. It has slowly become the centralized place for connecting with people, especially when not considering the minority of very tech-savy people. I am at a party and I met somebody I want to hang out with? He/she's probably on facebook the…
That's the point, FB is people personal ID in the Internet (I guess Google+ was suppose to have this task), and this is the reason why we have so many apps working with FB which is the central point for everything - login, pictures, address, tlf number etc...
Re: When will we stop using Facebook?
#57>Facebook is an insanely rich company to the tune of $192 billion as of September 2014 That's not exactly being rich, those aren't billions that Facebook can go spend in the same way as Apple can spend their cash reserves. The $192 billions is the evaluation of Facebook, not the money Facebook has available to spend. Profits are what makes companies rich, not that Facebook is doing to badly in that department.
Facebook is not a startup, it's a publicly traded company, meaning that its value is given by the numer of shares in the market times the stock price (which by this date is more than 226bn). If we are talking about liquid cash, FB is sitting on 12 bn, which is not so far than AAPL 33 bn.
Apple cash reserve is $194 Billion (http://americasmarkets.usatoday.com/2015/04/27/194b-apple-ca...).
Re: When will we stop using Facebook?
#58I really should flesh out my "why you can't have a good distributed social network" post some time. What does FB provide that you don't get with a combination of email/USENET/blogs/chat? Branding, janitors, and indexing. Branding is useful because these things are so scale-driven that you want to be on the one that everyone else is using. It's easier for the uninvolved to figure this out if it's the one with huge adv…
> Both of these are ongoing effort that has to be paid for if it is to scale and be done properly. Have a look at bittorrent. Scale is not a problem. Money isn't either. Perhaps we should have a distributed social network based on it, or a similar technology.
Bittorrent handles the distribution of large files. It explicitly doesn't handle any of the social aspects of content removal, indexing of humans by name, social graphs, etc. Spam is not a question because there's no "push" of any kind, but people would want push notification for any FB replacement.
If you were to build a system for distributing "wall posts" in a bittorrent manner, it would probably end up looking a lot like USENET with a group per-person. (Long ago I knew a couple of people who did in fact have their own newsgroup in alt.) That would also replicate the problems of USENET, especially with regards to spam fighting.
Re: When will we stop using Facebook?
#59I have never used facebook and never will. The only real reason is because I have no interest in the type of community it promotes. The communities on facebook usually seem like a popularity contest.
I've recently stopped using reddit for the same reason and I'm now using HN as my main/only source of social media.
Re: When will we stop using Facebook?
#60I really should flesh out my "why you can't have a good distributed social network" post some time. What does FB provide that you don't get with a combination of email/USENET/blogs/chat? Branding, janitors, and indexing. Branding is useful because these things are so scale-driven that you want to be on the one that everyone else is using. It's easier for the uninvolved to figure this out if it's the one with huge adv…
Also we have to consider that "regular" Internet users (who are probably not HN readers!) just want to communicate with their friends, share pictures and jokes, find news, etc. They want a simple user experience that's just easy to use.
THAT user experience (UX) has been the main issue I've seen with attempts at a distributed social network (such as Diaspora).