U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says

It seems to me that the overall interest in Facebook is decreasing. The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years. It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving.

Still, Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition. We don't see any news about their user base decreasing and news channels don't seem to dislike them. Facebook is doing a good job making sure their biggest three platforms are seem as independent from one another, keeping Instagram and WhatsApp almost free from controversy.

Personally I see no loss for them here. Besides, they will promptly acquire any new players that look promising, or shamelessly copy them as they did with Snapchat.

I actually found some great rugs (owners did not know what they had!) and furniture on the FB marketplace. Much better finds than on craigslist, and easier to verify that the seller is a human.

I love WhatsApp, but they haven't found good ways to monetize it yet and one of these days they'll ruin it.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-insta...

[1] https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-speaks-on-whats...

With all the negative press FB has been receiving, it would seem wise to dissociate Whatsapp and Instagram from FB in the minds of the public.

I have to think people are deriving some value from it, but I cannot imagine what it is.

As much as I hate FB and its abhorrent privacy policies, there are a very large population who do not care about privacy. I have some in my household who don't and FB's latest financial results prove it.

You're not wrong, but I find it a bit frustrating how much resistance I get whenever I try and suggest using Signal instead of Whatsapp. As far as I can tell, it has pretty much all the features of Whatsapp that I use, without all the spying.

I think John Oliver did a pretty good job of framing the Snowden revelations in terms of "the NSA can see your penis". That's a good angle to make people care.

I'm not much of a user myself, but among my friends that use it heavily I've noted a number of complaints that it has gotten HARDER to use for their primary use: keeping up with friends.

Their issue isn't that FB has become stale or boring, but that it has actively LOST ground relative to their purpose.

The problem with Facebook, is that either it's boring, or it's not boring, and in that case it's often far worse. Facebook latched onto the fact that outrage measures as "engagement" then other people latched onto that fact and started to use Facebook for their own outrage mongering purposes.

Still, Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition. We don't see any news about their user base decreasing and news channels don't seem to dislike them. Facebook is doing a good job making sure their biggest three platforms are seem as independent from one another, keeping Instagram and WhatsApp almost free from controversy.

So one company, three brands?

If I were to start my own crowdfunding app, I'd have one app with three "skins" and three different brands, each a different level of "edginess." In the Terms of Service would be the discretion for the site to "shift" your account from one of the three to another. The only effect of this, would be to shift the public information around the creator and subscriptions from one site to another. I would do this, so that "maintaining our brand" would never become an issue in funding creators, even edgy or downright controversial ones.

So this must be your assessment of twitter as well? Same current observation, Same predicted outcome?

I follow friend and family on facebook. If they post crap, it's because they have stupid things to say. I don't have many friends who I think are stupid.

Obviously you can follow celebrities on facebook and only follow friends on twitter but it doesn't feel like they're made for that use case, the 'reverse' of what I use it for.

And yes it affects Twitter as well.

It seems to me that it takes "energy" to get people to change. Change being one of how they think about something, how they respond to something, or what they spend their time on. As far as I can tell, there are three very well known and very well studied energy pools that can be amplified and then tapped, one is fear, one is anger, and one is reward.

With fear and anger, a process is set up to increase levels in the target, while simultaneously offering a solution vector (ie a change in behavior that will address the fear or anger). I am sure psyche majors can quote all sorts of work here on that aspect of things.

For web companies, if your revenue is derived by ads, and you can only get people to click on your ads if they are looking at your page, it seems using fear and anger to drive people to page after page would be the best strategy to maximize their exposure to ads.

"outrage measures as engagement" is a perfect summary of the effect. The feedback loops are horribly exploitative.

I think younger folks have migrated to Instagram, snapchat, etc. where they actually post/use the platform.

I sincerely hope so!

Craigslist was tainted by the unsavory element of prostitution and stolen goods and isn’t a resource that I seek out. Facebook marketplaces seem like what eBay was in the 90s.

Email hasn't had any new features added in decades, and people still use it.

For me, Facebook is a tool. I use it to organise events and groups, and communicate with people.

There's no other tool that works as well. I can have all my messages, groups, and events in one place. Almost everyone I know uses Facebook as well, so it's centralised.

Speaking of event management, one very useful feature that Facebook has added recently is integrated payments for events. You can set up a Facebook event that has tickets, and people can purchase and pay for tickets through FB without having to go to the external ticket sales platform (moshtix, eventbrite etc.). I'm not sure if you can do ticketing directly through Facebook or if you need an external service, I haven't set up any events with tickets. Anyway, it's a very useful feature as it saves me having to sign up for different ticket platforms.

I actually preferred the simpler design FB had back in 2013 or so before the big redesign. After that everything seemed to get busier and louder. Usability took a hit after that IMO.

Always wondered if we could create a lurker account that everyone shares — we share the password and just agree not to change the password, post, etc.

What's really hurt Craigslist is all the scammers. You can't post anything of value on there without some scammer responding and telling you they're going to send you a cashier's check and have a personal assistant pick it up.

You don't have this problem at all on Facebook AFAICT. When someone responds to your ad on Facebook Marketplace, it's a real person who actually wants to buy your old junk.

Unless Facebook figures out a way to address this, it's the start of a death spiral. The only thing that makes Facebook interesting is the people it can connect you to. If a few of them leave, the place becomes a little more boring than it used to be... which leads a few more of them to get bored and leave, which makes the place a little more boring... which leads more people to get bored and leave, etc. What started as a few snowflakes turns into an avalanche.

It's kind of the photo-negative version of the positive feedback loop Facebook enjoyed on its way up. Back then, each new person who joined created an additional incentive for other people to join, which gave them tremendous upward velocity. But the same dynamic running in reverse could send them downward just as quickly.

If I recall, correctly, the last major feature (read: that had any fanfare) was when they added the ability to have hi-res photos (and more of them), which was timed with the release of the Transformers movie? So, yeah, it's been a hot minute since they did anything substantial.

I know a couple of people who don't have any Facebook "friends" connected to their accounts, but they follow brands and companies they're interested in keeping up with.

It's sort of like RSS, but with more companies on board.

IME, Facebook Marketplace is far from free of scams and stolen merchandise. That's why some people call it Fencebook.

Google Trends never lies. Some say that people have learned they don't have to search for Facebook, but the trend for Facebook follows the 'myspace curve of disengagement':

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=f...

Note that people never type 'whatsapp' into a browser.

I think that social media is always going to be fickle. Google and search is a much better bet for the product being relevant in years to come.

Facebook is also a black hole. It is very rare that something written on Facebook is noteworthy enough to be shared outside of Facebook, here for instance.

Telegram is getting popular in some countries where WhatsApp has been very dominant.

But when Facebook is harvesting data about you, it doesn't feel like a person is doing it. It feels like some abstract machine or algorithm or a faceless corporation is doing it. They even promise that humans aren't individually looking at your data. So people bank on that impersonality. The data may be collected, but who cares, nobody is actually really looking at it, right?

The truth is that people do often look at it, despite all the promises and everything. That's what you have to convey and that's what John Oliver was trying to establish with his angle.

It's inconvenient for me, but I'm happy enough to accomodate them.

In a way, it would be like shadowbanning, but more open.

Someone here not long ago on HN opened my eyes to the 'lists' feature of Twitter, it's been a remarkable improvement for me with the platform. "IRL" friends in one list, "Net" friends in another, sports commentary (because that's a thing I'm into), etc. etc. Crap is more or less 'siloed'.

I wish twitter promoted the feature more, to be honest, I think it can help with some of the gripes you have, if not for you maybe for others as it did with my experience on the platform.

Having the chance to engage with bright people who share my passion was the key. But the majority of my family has never been on Facebook.

I maintain a company page through an otherwise content-free account. As a corporate user I find Facebook slow and difficult to navigate.

All social networks die. They either fail to achieve critical mass, or they do and it turns out the mass was mostly composed of bovine scatology.

It should remove features, it has become a bloated abomination with no focus.

It's the problem where you have cross-generational social media infused with varying socio-economic levels you find that people online want to align with their tribe BUT ALSO want to be connected with you because of a physical connection.

Prior social networks were already "pre-aligned":

Myspace: Majority School Peers/Friends +-4 years Twitter: Industry networking/interest based

Facebook is "everything". I've hit this moment where I don't want to add "2nd degree" or "loose" connections on facebook because I don't think it will enhance our relationship, if anything it could drive a wedge between us. I see these people 1-2 a year, and in person, it's great, but online, it's horrible.

People could post the same stuff on FB, Twitter, or email lists the hard part is finding stuff worth subscribing to. It’s really more about what platform creators use, and Twitter’s lightweight nature means a lot of interesting things end up on it.

They aren't a tech company as such but this reminded me of Coca Cola. There's Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Coke No Sugar plus whatever flavored variations they are currently doing. They are all slight variations on more or less the same product but it gives people the feeling that they are making a choice.

FB has obviously made very very smart acquisitions in WhatsApp and Instagram. I get the feeling these were primarily made because of the excellent data they had through their VPN app tracking service (as you could see the hypergrowth in real time and know exactly who to pick and how aggressively to go after). I'm sure they have or are working very hard on some alternative to this (maybe buy metadata off ISPs or become a network/transit carrier in their own right so they can see the IPs where stuff is going?).

But I do wonder if all social networks just are fads. You have a problem that as the network gets bigger, it starts becoming less interesting to you. Your social circles start overlapping (you don't want to post anything because it may offend someone, coworkers, grandparents, children), which stops everyone posting, which causes the whole thing to grind to a halt and become less interesting.

I don't feel it's my place to ask them to share the pictures and updates another way, so I'm remain basically a read only FB user.

If there were a simple way to tee those things into some other feed, I'd leave FB as well.

It works since basically everyone is on it and you don’t have to make people register and create an account as a barrier to entry. People used to have email listservs instead, but I think there is so much email marketing now that the signal to noise ratio on most people’s personal accounts approaches 0.

If someone could create a platform for an online discussion forum that doesn’t require signing up for a new service, will notify you of activity, and is free that would probably help a lot of people move over. NextDoor might have been able to, but they’re too focused on specific geographic neighborhoods and they have a serious racism problem.

I will bit the rebranding of Zero to No Sugar might have also been an attempt to get ahead of legislation to tax sugary drinks.

You get thematic subreddits for these kind of discussions, and you didn't even need a full-fledged account. Just a nickname. No email confirmation, no phone authentication, no anything.

False.

But then you have to tell them to check your profile for your one allowed link, go to your site, search for the product/blog/video - or you pay for an ad with links enabled.

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/02/27/analysis-trumps-faceb...

And one of my goals for 2019 is to shut that group down and move the conversation into our app.

TikTok

I went to great lengths to keep my account completely anonymized, so the suggested friends list is a hilarious cross-section of global randos. Of course being a pseduonym account I could be banned at any moment.

What I think is ad supportted _anything_ turns to crap eventually. It's a toxic business model.

This approach opens up exciting new opportunities for market segmentation via badge engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badge_engineering

... in much the same way that Ford (say) could design one car and then sell it to very different audiences as the Ford Taurus, Mercury Sable, and Lincoln Continental.

Cool, I had not realized that Facebook now allows non-members to post and participate in their forums. That's really great! Not sure where on Facebook it is one can do that, but I'll be on the look out now that I know they've added this.

Thats not a new problem though, is it? I dare you to buy used car parts on ebay.

It also nudges users to enable cloud backups which in practice means that everyone has them enabled (...which in practice means that all your messages are unencrypted in the other person's cloud storage.)

P.S.: never seen 'BS' expressed so eloquently...

Incidentally, the iOS Twitter client also shows tweets in your feed which your followers liked. And you can't turn that off. I don't understand that feature at all and it made me switch to a third-party client.

It was very clear cut at the time, Twitter did a 180° and left RSS along with lean HTML and got super slow and noisy (so much for adtech.) Facebook started changing its appearance compulsively and adding random crap. Then it removed itself from search engines for vendor-lock maxima.

What's saved it, IMO, is the similar deluge of stories about political in-fighting taking place in WhatsApp groups.

The available conclusions to the reader of the two angles on it are: 1) politicians are organising terror attacks; 2) there is no causal relationship between WhatsApp and terror attacks

... one of which seems eminently more reasonable than the other; so thankfully that's where we are.

Amusingly it also came under fire from politicians in the opposite direction in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal: far from wanting to peek at end-to-end encrypted data (as called for whenever it's used by terror groups) they then wanted assurances that the data hadn't been snooped on or passed to third-parties!

In short, the formats of the sites make all the difference. CL was created to preserve anonymity and not be a centralized social network, but that feature is also its undoing because it facilitates scamming.

It's an odd platform. They have a lot of great features for outreach and discovery of local events and groups of people, leveraged by the strong network effect. For contact with local groups of people with similar interests, and for planning events, for group communication, it is an effective tool and one that has enriched my life in substantial ways.

The one thing that I really hate is the front page feed. It was probably a great business decision on their part to emphasize microblogging, as it definitely increased engagement in the platform. It also turned everyone into memelords who just re-share funny cat pictures, pyramid schemes and incendiary political propaganda. I tried just filtering that out with the "see fewer posts like this", but I turns out that people just don't really post anything but image macros and articles anymore.

I then soon joined Twitter and consciously curated who I followed. I felt [and still do feel] fine about being on Twitter.

Some months ago I rejoined Facebook. I am consciously curating who I do and don't "friend" or follow. So far, so good. Yes, I am noticing the now-expected targeted ads ... but I prefer them, to be honest. Market me tickets to the Fandango showing of 'Logopolis' please; even if I don't buy, that's much more useful than the usual random jar of some guy's snake oil you'd offer me 20 years ago. Is this me being Institutionalized on tracking? Maybe, but there is an "after the uncanny valley" for tracking/advertising just like there is for robotics and AI. I'm interested to see how that works in relation to echo chambers.

If you've tried it, how do you think Facebook's classifieds compare to NextDoor's classifieds?