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Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

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Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#82

I didn’t see anyone else mention this, but to me it is a problem of facebook’s own making. They drove personal content off the site when they pushed videos and pictures by “viral marketing” firms onto it. They replaced groups (inherently personal) with pages, then scrambled to try and bring groups back years later. They turned the wall to spam from various garbage apps that were given permission to crap all over it b…

Agreed. I've always enjoyed and found great value in Facebook, which was helped by the fact that I was in college when it launched so everyone I knew back then was on it, and everyone I know today is on it (minus 2 or 3 holdouts).

I was getting frustrated with all the junk, but still used it regularly.

Now when I get that dopamine craving and am flipping through app screens on my phone looking for something novel, I often completely forget that Facebook is even there.

The changes they made are absolutely in the direction I want them to go, but perhaps it's too late?

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#83
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That whole ethos of just having informal personal conversations with college friends on Facebook is gone. The wall was never a good way to do this. It's neither as powerful nor as flexible as pretty much any competing way for a small group of people to communicate, including chat programs, email, txt, snapchat, etc. Facebook's deprioritization of the wall and buy-in on messenger/whatsapp, instagram, and the newsfeed…

The engaging part of the wall to wall wasn't how good it was for communication, it was the semi-permissioned town hall style chat for semi-related groups of friends you'd see as it whizzed by on your feed. People did all sorts of humblebragging, cries for attention, or on the nicer side of the spectrum, open discussion that chat like whatsapp and messenger do not have. The similarity between snooping around facebook…

On the other hand, your description bears a strong resemblance to Twitter. If you have a conversation with someone through replies, anyone who follows both of you will see it in their timeline, and by default, anyone can read it by going to either of your profiles. So it’s not uncommon to have someone you’ve never heard of jump into a conversation. And it’s easy enough to “snoop around” yourself; sometimes that can be a source of genuine new acquaintances, and with time, friendships. (There’s an etiquette to it, though. If you don’t know someone, you should only butt in to their conversations if you have something to add - not because, say, you disagree with a political statement they’re making, or at the very least, certainly not if you’re planning to hurl insults!)

Unfortunately, some people and some topics tend to attract a lot of those sorts of uninvited rebuttals - in other words, harassment - driving some to make their accounts private. In that case, only approved followers can see your tweets, ever. There’s no “friends of friends”-like middle ground, or any other more flexible filtering options.

On the other hand, for most people, Twitter’s system seems to work pretty well. It works for me, and I really enjoy the spontaneity of it.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#84

I didn’t see anyone else mention this, but to me it is a problem of facebook’s own making. They drove personal content off the site when they pushed videos and pictures by “viral marketing” firms onto it. They replaced groups (inherently personal) with pages, then scrambled to try and bring groups back years later. They turned the wall to spam from various garbage apps that were given permission to crap all over it b…

Worse yet, do you know how frustrating it is to be told that there are no more updates available while you know that you a missing life events from friends that actually posted them.

After a while you realize that there is no point in posting your own because they will similarly not show up for friends.

Cutting back on FB has become ever easier over time.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#85

Posting on Facebook, right now, is like updating your resume (like LinkedIn) for personal life. It just feels too "public". Sure, you can tweak your social network into different privacy levels. But, that just doesn't feel intuitive or effortless. The exclusivity factor which initially propelled the network is simply not there. At the peak of the facebook madness, you had a need to post whenever anything happened. No…

Personal opinion that this is all again unintentionally there own doing.

They drove people to stop posting personal content by making personal content so rare to come by (with ads, news,pages,sponsored posts..) that it was percieved that people don’t post those kind of things anymore.

Going to be very tough to get people back into that mindset.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#86
Hope Google shares latest YouTube hours tomorrow and we can compare. Last quarter Google shared

"As I mentioned in the last earnings call, YouTube now has over 1.5 billion users. On average, these users spend 60 minutes a day on mobile. "

Which I guess means 1.5 billion hours a day of YT use daily. Be interesting to compare to FB.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#87

Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter usage are all down. People are just spending less time on social media apps for some reasons these days. https://www.similarweb.com/blog/social-media-usage

Honestly, how many of those can someone juggle a day? I'd struggle with two yet still more show up every year. It's not big in the US, I heard, but for me it's 90% WhatsApp. MySpace used to be huge, then facebook came along. I feel like Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter are slowly replacing facebook. And what makes any of them so perfect to suggest they're the last in line?

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#88
I think with all the high profile hyperpoliticization of who and what gets into the Facebook feed of the average person, the idea that Facebook is a private space where friends create their own private worlds together has been destroyed. Now it's just another public space like Twitter and that essentially makes people not want to post personal stuff on it. This has also led to the opening in the market that Snapchat filled and a bit of a revival of twitter.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#89
post #84

I didn’t see anyone else mention this, but to me it is a problem of facebook’s own making. They drove personal content off the site when they pushed videos and pictures by “viral marketing” firms onto it. They replaced groups (inherently personal) with pages, then scrambled to try and bring groups back years later. They turned the wall to spam from various garbage apps that were given permission to crap all over it b…

Worse yet, do you know how frustrating it is to be told that there are no more updates available while you know that you a missing life events from friends that actually posted them. After a while you realize that there is no point in posting your own because they will similarly not show up for friends. Cutting back on FB has become ever easier over time.

Yep. People talk about the benefits of how they delete their facebook account, but really, you just start using it less and less as the news feed becomes less relevant to your interests.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#90
post #84

I didn’t see anyone else mention this, but to me it is a problem of facebook’s own making. They drove personal content off the site when they pushed videos and pictures by “viral marketing” firms onto it. They replaced groups (inherently personal) with pages, then scrambled to try and bring groups back years later. They turned the wall to spam from various garbage apps that were given permission to crap all over it b…

Worse yet, do you know how frustrating it is to be told that there are no more updates available while you know that you a missing life events from friends that actually posted them. After a while you realize that there is no point in posting your own because they will similarly not show up for friends. Cutting back on FB has become ever easier over time.

My wife and were 'in a relationship' on Facebook within a few months of meeting each other. Then we were 'married'. Even still, for the first four or so years that we had each other on FB, it wouldn't show me her posts. They just weren't in my feed, I'd scroll down so far I was seeing content from months ago, but I'd never see anything she'd posted that week.

Eventually it took me telling FB I didn't want to see posts from 90% of my 'friends', and then going to her feed and 'engaging' with her posts, for it to start showing them to me.

I've never actually used Facebook in any serious way; I'll log in and scroll through my feed once every few months, but I've always hated it. The other day I put my finger on why: it's the mobile equivalent of turning on the TV and flipping through channels looking for something to watch, something you do as an alternative to doing something with your time.

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