I stopped two years ago. As far as I am aware I'm not missing much.
I did have a lot of old friends on FB, but I didn't stay in contact with them in real life. I was just lazily snooping on their lives, without giving anything in return.
To be completely honest, I don't have space or time for them in my real life. It isn't because I didn't like them anymore, it was simply that I didn't have the time or energy to stay in proper contact. I had also moved away.
I had the realisation that some people are supposed to drift apart. The people who are important to you will remain in contact with, and it doesn't need Facebook spying on that friendship to enable it to keep functioning.
I also stopped using Facebook, shortly before the revelations of massive surveillance. At that time I was convinced I shouldn't be in the arms of companies, stopped using many services and started self-hosting stuff. People didn't understand me.
Then, Edward Snowden revealed that the possible abstract threats I wanted to avoid can in fact become real. We are fortunate to have received this information. People still didn't understand me.
In the beginning of my time without the services I clearly felt that something was missing, but it wasn't hard to withstand, for the idealistic flame burning within me.
After some time my interest for the services faded away, like an addiction you successfully cured. Now, I'm not even thinking about using them anymore.
Many don't understand me even now, and I'm not holding my breath, anymore.
Frustrating as it is, it's The Right Thing to do. It's a shame that some people assume you're disinterested, but then don't return emails/calls.
I heard about an old Norwegian guy who had always made short calls to friends and family throughout his life and that those people appreciated that. That's more the direction I'd rather go in over the passive friend-surveillance that has crept in.
I'd rather do that over an encrypted line with open protocols, but you can't have it all! At least I've managed to move over nearly wholesale to open software - phone, OS, email, syncthing, text file notes etc. etc. - so that's one of the major personal benefits to me.
The drawbacks I still need to learn to better work around.
Addiction/productivity doesn't really come into it for me; I have my days of perfect self-discipline and others where my procrast-fu is strong. I've used and use all manner of productivity systems to make sure the bread and butter work gets done (currently running an espeak Pomodoro reminder every 25 minutes, with semi-ironic (totally not...) inspirational quotes read out in the breaks), it's just the side-projects that sometimes suffer. That's no fault of social media, though, that's on me.
I would like to follow your lead, but in some ways it feels selfish of me and thats why I stick around on FB. I live quite some distance from my family and it is the easiest way to share photos of my family with all of them without requiring them to all get a new account somewhere else.
Are there better more private solutions that are still very convenient for everyone from my 15 year old niece to my 80 year old grandparents? I also am friends with just about everyone I've ever had any sort of meaningful interaction with and I hate that I am constantly scrolling through my news feed seeing stuff that I could care less about but just doing it to pass time. I would love to shut Facebook off if it didn't mean losing the ability to share photos with my close family and friends.
Maybe its just a matter of paring my Friend list down to about 20-30 people (from about 350) but I'd still like to stop offering my personal information to a megacorp to sell out to their advertisers and who knows who else.
Maybe a bit out of left field, but I'm using Telegram (that open source messenger app) to share pictures with family. It was on a whim; once when I was at my parents place, I just set up Telegram desktop on both their PC's, the app on their tablet and on my mother's smartphone (dad has this thing with big buttons).
Now we have a group chat together with my partner (would've also added siblings if I had them) and share pictures and simple things. Everything syncs on all devices, my father who needs a big screen follows mostly on his PC and puts their pictures on from there, my mother uses her android phone.
Works better and surprisingly much more intimate than anything before, and everyone participates.
Of course, people around me have been having whatsapp groups among peers, but there's something about the telegram desktop clients' easy sharing of images and links that I started to realize recently 'just works'.
I stopped using Facebook when a stalker mentioned to me about a post they saw that I thought was private which ended being creepy to me as it was quite personal.
I had set everything to private and FB helpfully shared it with everyone. I stopped posting from that day onwards.
I stopped about two years ago also and now have a fake account because I needed one for Tinder. I've been given flack for being 'antisocial' but i'm rewarded by being able to play clueless about the facebook dramas that people talk about.
It doesn't take a lot of effort to maintain contact with people that are important in our life today. The relationships that are important to us need to be nurtured, not followed. Facebook has created this (inadvertent) anti-social follow use case, and I think a lot of people have fallen into it.
Eh, I remember the days of trying to keep in touch via email, and not getting replies, or feeling bad that I wasn't sending a reply. Just to keep in general contact, with no specific goal in mind. I don't look forward to going back to them.
Exactly? I'm talking about a situation where we both care exactly at a "casual Facebook friend" level. Like we would meet up if we were in the same town at the same time, but we aren't writing emails back and forth about what has happened lately. And that is great, IMHO.
Exactly. And if you keep seeing similar posts on a regular basis from the same set of people (close or distant), it gets repetitive and boring. How often do you need to know that x is doing y?
Any of my more "important" relationships are maintained via frequent text messages and less frequent phone calls. For me, Facebook is rarely used for keeping in touch and mostly for its group features. Otherwise its just old acquaintances from yesteryear who'd I don't necessarily care to keep up with anyway. In fact, if it wasn't so painstakingly tedious to delete large numbers of "friends" on there i'd probably only have about 50.
I stopped at about the same time as you, but I actually returned a couple of months ago. Without friending anyone. And the reason? I use Facebook as a very simple way to get news about really minor things of importance to me:
+ my climbing gym has some new routes!
+ a new video by K.I.Z, yeah!
+ oh, demonstration against some Nazis demonstrating in my neighbourhood, should definitely go there
+ Someone's looking for a climbing partner next weekend, finally heading out to the rocks again!
So likes have become a poor-man's subscription to an RSS feed and groups have become an easy to follow replacement of forums. The key in these cases is the newsfeed, which is okay for having an overview of important stuff (and without friends is not crowded with inane stuff).
I repeatedly have idle thoughts about a startup idea, combining Facebook with github's business model: Any entity such as users, companies, organizations get a page where they can post arbitrary stuff like on their current facebook profile. Users can subscribe and get an overview on their newsfeed. So far, just like Facebook but without the social crap. Financing is not done through targeted ads but by requiring companies to pay for the service - something like 500 subscribers are free, 1000 - 10 $/months etc. Quite rough around the edges, the idea, but I personally would like such a service. Anyone interested in working on that with me?
You can get an RSS feed from a facebook for some things, personally I use this with ifttt to get email of posts by various institutions (e.g., my kid's school) that I want to follow.
For climbing partners; I came across the founder of http://www.climbfind.com at a wall a while ago but I don't use it myself. Seems more focused on the US, Canada and Australia. The founder was an Aussie IIRC.
I think your idea has legs but it might be worth focusing on a niche area first (like climbing) and expanding after. Much like Facebook started with Universities.
Yes, somewhat. Anything shareable. The major point would be the github-like financing model: It's not the individual users that pay for the service by enabling targeted ads but companies that want to get in contact with potential customers on their page. It seems like a minor difference but would have quite strong effects on user privacy - there would not be a need for ever more tracking of every online activity.
This is exactly what I did too, for similar reasons. I use Facebook like Twitter. There are some organizations I'm interested in that don't use Twitter and instead post updates or news only on Facebook.
I have trouble leaving Facebook because for better or worse it is how many of my friends and acquaintances communicate. I ended up finding a nice compromise: I installed an extension which hides all the content on news feed but still allows FB chat. When I couple this extension with ublock, the only thing I see when I go to Facebook is the chat interface, which is perfect for how I use the service.
Wow, that's almost the opposite of the way I use Facebook. I keep chat turned off all the time. I hate interruptions that demand (or even imply) an immediate response, and that's what live chat/text messages/IM represent to me.
Yes, sometimes I do want real-time messages, but that's not how I want things to be most of the time. I'm perfectly okay with seeing "old friend had a baby" or "cousin graduated from high school" the next day, or whenever. It's not that I don't care about these things; I do care about them. I just don't want things that don't require a real-time response sent through a real-time communications medium.
This still shows the notifications, the sidebar that suggests groups, new friends, etc. It's a minor detail, but I don't want to be bombarded with events, tagged photos, whatever. But I do really love Messenger as a chat platform. It's quicker and more consistent than SMS (at least for my carrier) and syncs well across all of my devices.
Facebook is not cool anymore but Facebook is more useful than ever was and will probably remain so for a long time: they managed to get almost all available users (directly or by aqquisitions) and changing the status quo would be really difficult (not even Google was able to do it..). Facebook is the userbase.
I still use FB because everybody is there, if I need to talk to someone or arrange an event, I can send them a message without knowing their actual email or phone. I'm not interested in knowing that a friend I meet once a year went to the restaurant (I can easily block it) but I am interested in being able to contact him if I need to. Facebook is great for that.
Yeah I slowed down heavily around 2 years ago. The original value prop of connecting me with my friends is all but gone from the platform. It reminds me of AIM which started off as a great chat program, but AOL added too many features and ads. The original reason why I wanted to use AIM was peppered with so much bloated software cruft on it, that it became to frustrating to use. 12 years later, I'm at the same point with Facebook.
The only reason I still have it is because I have friends overseas and it's the best way to keep in touch with them if I need to get a hold of them; otherwise I don't need it.
For me Facebook works best as a calendar. Nearly everyone I know has a Fb account (one they check every day, at that), so it makes planning group trips/parties/events easier than trying to sync large groups of people across platforms and devices. It allows me to update my event details without having to worry that one of my friends won't get they update because they synced an out of date .ics file or added the event to their work calendar by mistake.
This is a thing I think people start to realize about the digital era. We can have it all, more friend, more memories, more data... but nature likes to recycle, evolutionary pressure to keep things people working together together while the rest rearrange.
Agreed – I stopped because there were too many posts I didn't really care about. I've found that if there's anything significant, someone will mention it to you anyway.
I kind of had the same thought the person you are responding to had. You switch from "I" to "you" in your last paragraph, which seemed to imply that you were using your experience to declare how things are for others. I found myself nodding while reading the prior paragraphs, as I have similar experiences, but disagreeing with your last paragraph as it clearly wasn't true for many others. It's somewhat true for me now, but I joined Facebook because my mother was quite (terminally) ill, and it was a perfect medium to share with her but not place any particular burden for her to write emails or respond. And I'm the 'you' in the context of your message.
Feeling connected no matter how small is a very strong force. I like that I have connections from my childhood to my present and to all the places I lived. Even if it is I see that my friends kids are now in high school or that someone had a great event that I had zero impact on them having.
When my son was dying from cancer I just had to jump on Facebook and I had a ton of people that were willing to help out or send him messages and videos. It was a great tool to find people who could help.
That is awful. I don't want to imagine one of my children being seriously or terminally ill. I'm glad Facebook was able to help you and your son in that horrible situation.
Key quote: MySpace is well on the way to becoming what economists call a "natural monopoly". Users have invested so much social capital in putting up data about themselves it is not worth their changing sites, especially since every new user that MySpace attracts adds to its value as a network of interacting people.
Facebook has something MySpace never achieved and something that could easily set it's place firmly where it's at, given they don't make any major changes to mess it up: The Geriatric Crowd.
If I'm not mistaken, this is the first time in history that anyone in the tech industry captured this crowd in a major way. Those in my family over 70, on both sides, can barely make a phone call on a cell phone and don't even really know what texting is... but they sure know how to use Facebook. That's how they see their grandbabbies, of course they know how.
I know this is going to be morbid, but the problem with the geriatric crowd when it comes to technology is that they have a tendency to die. The current geriatric generation is using Facebook to some degree (though in the case of my family no one over 70 uses it). What about the next generation of old people? Facebook will have to keep recapturing this market. This is very problematic because the older generation only interested in family photos really couldn't care less about the service itself; they're going to use whatever their kids and grandkids use, so long as it's not too complex (and with each generation the maximum technological complexity for the geriatric crowd will go up quite a lot).
The other problem with having family on a social media is that this immediately limits what people can safely use the service for, which leads to an inevitable but slow exodus of users and their content. Facebook is the family friendly zone for sharing photos and short notes, and it's increasingly only that and nothing else. You have Instagram for stuff you don't want your family to see. You have tumblr for stuff you don't even want many of your friends to see. And then there are the messaging apps. FB still performs very well in this arena, but it's clearly struggling against the likes of Snapchat, and I expect in 5-10 years Snapchat itself will be struggling against another newcomer with FB messenger a distant memory.
>I know this is going to be morbid, but the problem with the geriatric crowd when it comes to technology is that they have a tendency to die.
I actually thought about that too... but if you think about it relatively, the expected lifespan of someone who's 70 in 2015 (10-20yrs) is nearly an eternity in technology.
And those who are in that age group currently are very reluctant to change. It's just part of getting old. I can't see new generations of older people being much different. Maybe more accepting of change, but not actively seeking it like someone in their 20's.
>Facebook is the family friendly zone for sharing photos and short notes, and it's increasingly only that and nothing else.
I don't see this as a bad thing, but as a huge positive. Look at movies. There has even been a push in the decade or so to PG-13 everything to make more money.
But unlike movies, where they destroy stories in the name of making them Family Friendly, you can just move your non-family friendly content somewhere else. Which is personally exactly what I do.
"What about the next generation of old people? Facebook will have to keep recapturing this market. This is very problematic because the older generation only interested in family photos really couldn't care less about the service itself; they're going to use whatever their kids and grandkids use, so long as it's not too complex (and with each generation the maximum technological complexity for the geriatric crowd will go up quite a lot)."
My parents (~65) started using FB more when my great grandmother (~90) started using it. They are resistant to tech change, but they use it quite a lot. I'd imagine that given the long spans older folks tend to use technology, the drop off in folks as they die is offeset by the steady, if slow, adoption of the system by earlier generations.
I personally am not too stoked about how folks who don't know me might look at my feed (from potential clients to potential band mates to the NSA), but I might care less if I was 67 instead of 37.
By that logic, if people started leaving Facebook for another service to post their photos, the older crowd would follow them in order to keep seeing their grandchildren.
MySpace made many mistakes, the worst of which is that they would do absolutely anything to increase short term revenue regardless of the effect on the experience. The result was a messy, user-hostile product that was bleeding users to anything that offered a better social experience.
Zuckerberg is smarter than that. Facebook may (probably will, at some point) lose its dominance, but it won't be a repeat of the MySpace debacle. Perhaps people will gradually realize that "Facebooking" is not the same as real socializing, it's a low-effort, low-value pseudo-social entertainment activity.
I don't think that article is necessarily wrong. You can have natural monopolies that switch companies, but still remain monopolies (look at Apple's early 80s success that was completely squashed by DOS/Windows). Everyone migrated to Facebook and ditched myspace. It doesn't really compete with anyone now. Facebook seemed to have learned from myspace's mistakes and have been successful for a decade now. I think a shift to another social media platform is just not in the cards, at least for the forseeable future.
True, but one thing I've noticed with Facebook is that it was the first big social network that saw widespread adoption across almost all segments of (at least US) society.
I don't doubt that it will eventually go the way of AOL and MySpace but there are some key things keeping it in use. With early ISPs like AOL, there was nothing really stopping you from moving to another provider that offered something better. Combined with the move toward broadband, any AOL-exclusive features just weren't enough to keep people around for the most part and you could still access the rest of the web, email, etc. regardless of your provider.
With Facebook, you need to use their service in order to interact with people on it. I can't just use Google+ because I like the interface and mobile app better than Facebook. No matter how much I prefer another service, they aren't based on any common protocol like email so I need to use Facebook to interact with people who use it.
And with MySpace, the audience was mostly younger people. Sure, some of us had parents or employers that maintained a profile but Facebook was the first big social network that got your mom, your grandma, your boss, your doctor, your old college professor, and all the neighbors on your block to sign up. The under-30 crowd will switch services for something newer and better but the critical mass of Facebook users is hard to get around.
Coming back to Google+, I really am one of the (few apparently) people who think it's a much better alternative to Facebook. Chat is better. Levels of sharing work better and are easier to manage. The interface is smoother. There aren't game and app requests. The mobile app is better. Photo sharing is better. Basically on a technical level, it's better all around.
But when it came out and I started using it, the thing I quickly came to realize was that even if my techie friends also were trying it out, the vast majority of non-enthusiasts found the idea of setting up a profile to be annoying and not worth their time. They already had a Facebook after all. To use G+ you would either need to maintain two profiles on two services or decide to only talk to the 10% of your contacts who took the time to set up this new thing.
In the end, it never really made a dent outside of niche uses (Photography, Ingress players, etc) and has largely become the butt of jokes. Another failed challenger undone by lack of interoperability and the momentum of a large incumbent.
If there were some way to choose your platform and still communicate with the same people (a la email) then Facebook would have some sort of competition but there's no way in hell they would open themselves up to that sort of competition. And currently, there aren't any must-have features compelling enough to make people either maintain multiple profiles or just uproot en masse.
I hate Facebook, but I don't plan to stop using it anytime soon. Well - I don't hate everything about it, but I hate everything they're trying to do, so I agree with this article. But "hate"ing a company is odd, so I guess I really mean "I want to have nothing to do with".
I'll switch when there's a dominating replacement. All I want, for the rest of my life, is:
- a way to see updates from friends and acquaintances and people I've fallen out of contact with, and post mine for them.
- a way to search for and 'add' people I meet.
- a way to chat with those people (including in groups)
- all of those things, without social baggage that constrains it to 'only teenagers' or 'only colleagues and classmates' etc.
- and in a network that contains most people I meet, or doesn't have social baggage that prevents most people from being willing to join it.
To me it's an enriched version of what I get by having lots of contacts in my phone or email address book: exactly a list of people, plus the additional fact that I feel physically near them in some sense (and I think this is a concrete emotional thing. My family and friends don't feel too far away when I get to see snippets of their life streamed into mine).
Everything else - groups, events, pokes, company pages, apps, games, friend suggestions, wall posts, public about-me sections, places, reviews, ads, etc... I don't care about any of it. Maybe something that trims off all this fat would be innocuous enough to actually find adoption. I could see it living in some peer-to-peer structure too, but it has to still be absolutely trivial for anyone to join.
For me the dichotomy becomes which groups really see what... you have:
- family & close friends
- acquaintances & loose friends
- school alum
- social groups / clubs
- those who you might work with/for
- linked in, you failed this audience
- interests beyond clubs, outside acquantances
No social network does a good job at allowing a person to share with those groups as desired. What I share on twitter is far more techie than what my friends/family on FB care about (mental note, disconnect twitter from fb). What I follow on twitter doesn't line up with what I post (I also see way to much to actually track twitter or fb, I pop in every few days, and only see the top of the feed). most of the people on FB are more acquaintances or past friends from social groups, and some family.
The reality is that what will probably "win" will be a few discrete social networks... one for your career (probably not linkedin), a new one for your family and close friends, facebook for your loose friends and acquantences... and something closer to bulletin boards and/or webchat for social interest groups (probably not meetup).
I don't think the one site to rule them all will survive in the long run. And those groups trying to do so with facebook, twitter and pinterest are failing... those trying to build business models that aren't bought are failing.
Sorry, I actually forgot about g+, since none of my friends/family/acquaintances actually use it... mostly followed industry people's posts for a while, but I get most of that on twitter.
G+ was a really nice imo way to work through it... too bad nobody used it in practice. I also hope that they work through a few of the issues I have with hangouts, mostly in taking over Google Voice duties, and the limited UX on the desktop (searches from contacts for SMS don't show up before random strangers in G+).
That's just it though. G+ did most of what was listed here without the annoying app/game requests and a better interface. They had cross-platform text and video chat long before Facebook did either.
But in the end, the only thing that matters on a closed communications platform is where the people are. Most people won't bother switching platforms and in order for any competitor (G+ or otherwise) to take off is for everyone voluntarily migrate over.
I remember having an idea to make something like G+ as a response to the "which groups really see what" issue shortly before G+ launched. Glad I didn't try executing on that one. Having tried G+ though I think it's too cognitively complex to categorise a few hundred contacts into various subgroups. Most users aren't going to bother. I imagine facebook takes an automatic AI type approach as to which posts it shows to which people so techie posts are more likely to go to techies. Anyone know if that's the case? Might be a gap to do that stuff it facebook is not already on it.
> I think it's too cognitively complex to categorise a few hundred contacts into various subgroups. Most users aren't going to bother.
I actually think the fact that you have to specifically put people into circles when you follow them makes it pretty straightforward. It only takes a moment, I like the inline dropdown interface to check the circles you want to add them to, and while it does take a few minutes to wrap your head around the first time you use it (probably not a non-tech-Grandma-ready interface), once you get it, it's easy and works well (IMHO).
Same here. Regardless of how sensible their model was, I couldn't find a way to get myself to be willing to spend time on their UI.
It was just bad. With something like Facebook rises up from being unknown, its UI was pretty much vouched for early on (otherwise someone else would have won out). Google didn't have to survive competition. They just picked a UI, and I'm sure they followed lots of good UI principles and had lots of experts, but it was completely unappealing.
They also forced everything to integrate with G+ in really useless ways, which made me dislike it before even trying it. It didn't have any material problem in my life that it solved that would have made me put up with the UI. FB did: it was required for mainstream society, and it let me message my friends and others easily on the computer.
I believe the issues were more in terms of not being able to stage/market the product appropriately...
If "Google+" was first an initiative to create a universal single sign-on across all their own product lines (OAuth/OpenID), to better unify "profiles" which they did some of but didn't push it... and allowed the individual communities to continue to grow on their own (YouTube, their Blog thing, etc)... actually kept reader and extended with their own comment system etc.
By going that route, they could have made your "Google+ Profile" the center of your presence/contacts for the different social hubs. In the end, this is what happened anyway, at the cost of cannibalizing a few products, and alienating others, instead of doing the profile first, then offering "follows" across the sub-communities in a single interface later.
I think google's engineers are/were skilled enough to go this route, which would have been less "pure" architecturally, but more organic and better received.
I'm also still pissed that I can't have "tracker1" for my Google+ profile URL.. my old google profile was "tracker1" and half the first two pages of results on google search for "tracker1" are references to me.
I think linkedin's groups solve it a bit better. The problem with circles is that the people in a given circle don't necessarily have me in a circle. I can really just group the input feed, not the output feed. It's more consumption than distribution focused.
I won't say it does a great job, but Facebook does allow you to categorize your friends by "close" vs" acquaintance" vs "alum" and so on. It's worked pretty well for me insofar that I get notifications whenever a close friend updates and when I want to share with everyone-but-X.
Not so good as a subject matter filter though. I can create a list of only tech people on FB, but if a tech friend wants to post about his puppy to everyone, not so much I can do about that.
In other words - the Internet. You don't need to do all those things in a single place, or even in multiple places, but all owned by the same company.
The fact that people want to use Instagram, Vine, Snapchat and Whatsapp is proof many people don't want a single service for everything. It's just unfortunate that Facebook happens to have acquired many of those.
Yes, Facebook is realizing this and that's why they're doing these rounds of purchases rather than trying to build something own and extend Facebook.com. Ironically enough, I don't think they always prefer to strengthen their own brand because they understand the psychology behind end user decisions.
Thinking of it, it's interesting how long ago Facebook last changed functionality-wise.
I don't like them that much, but I do think Facebook does a decent job of predicting trends. That's also why I think we'll have Facebook around for a long time. In a few years, people may not even think of that they're using Facebook services since they've further specialized and added various apps, all under the Facebook umbrella but only on the back end.
I think Facebook is even on their way of breaking out the friend contacts part from their main site, with Messenger.com now an own website, and other Messenger platform changes like games.
I think that where Facebook wants to go is to no longer require any user to actually use Facebook to stay in touch (we now have Messenger, Groups, Snapchat, Instagram), so that Facebook only becomes a place that pulls them all together (except for sensitive users like youth who don't want Snapchat to get involved with parents). For those who fancy that.
I really want to be able to do PARTS of these apps all in one place. They can keep their individual responsibilities after that.
To be a bit dramatic, I get frustrated whenever:
- I have to choose between identity platforms to sign up for a site. I wouldn't be sad if there was an option (e) that was open source, transparent, not planning to monetize me, and easy to integrate with lots of various apps and services.
- I have to come up with credentials to a new website
- I have to remember what apps and services I've signed up for
- I have to save data on two different distributed file systems that don't interop.
- I have to connect with the same person on two different platforms. Or, I have to decide how much of my life I want a person to be able to see on two different platforms.
- I have to figure out if I'm okay with the privacy and security of various platforms on which I have an identity.
- I have to fill out a form with data I've already given to a service on the web.
- I discover that a friend uses a service I also use and I just wasn't aware of it.
- I have to choose between text, email, snapchat, FB message, gchat, Skype, Whatsapp, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram based on what (I've memorized) a particular friend or colleague uses.
I don't mind the different services doing different things. Users do want to use Instagram for Instagram things and SnapChat for SnapChat things. I just don't like the part where they're all mostly standalone but solving the same problems over and over and forcing me to jump through the same hoops over and over for no benefit. But I don't trust any existing system to aggregate these responsibilities either. I barely and reluctantly trust Google/FB/Twitter enough to use them for identity services across multiple sites, just because the alternative is so painful that I have to.
Is there a service that does everything? I don't see how you connect your proof to what people actually want. It seems more likely that people will just use what is immediately available to them.
In the mid nineties many early web users had their own web space with a "fancy" (back then) static website in Frontpage/Dreamweaver, it was more or less hassle free. Back then the ISPs usually provided free webspace and free email accounts. If everyone has access to a hassle free webspace with social/cloud software (blog, image sharing, file directory), then there would be less need for a central service. Obviously, things have changed. Maybe the OP is talking about that.
I think where it makes sense a couple different social networks will come to rule the roost, so to speak. Facebook may well evolve into most of them. You have close friends/family, loose friends, alumni, acquaintances, clubs, and other interest groups.
I think that those other interest groups will probably come to break off into custom sub-sites with their own message boards and chat.
I think clubs are well suited to discovery by FB, meetup and the like, but a bit too restricted in practice.
The corporate attempts to gather "likes" is B.S. mostly.
What you want potential coworkers to see isn't the same as friends/family...
In the end it's all muddled currently, and I think things may break apart a bit in the near future.
What you described is exactly what WeChat is able to do and doing well. It has a half billion users (including every Chinese I know) yet comes with no social baggage. If you don't like the social features (called Moments) you can turn it off, or simply use WeChat as an IM and hardly notice the existence of all the other features (there are not many anyway)
So your enriched version of address book does exist, but only in China, and it is one of the few things I miss so much when living outside China.
Interesting. I've never even heard of it. Any perspective on why it hasn't caught on elsewhere? (besides just our not hearing of it?)
Though, I guess, as a tech person, I have the additional preference that whatever I use be fairly open (open-source somehow if possible) and not liable to doing things like selling user data or onboarding corporate partnerships in an attempt to monetize. Even though I know how silly it is to ask for an amazing product for free with no mechanism for generating revenue and a promise not to try to come up with one. Actually, I think I would pay for such a thing.
Actually, I know of Diaspora and Ello having tried this in some capacity, but neither caught on for various reasons.
I've been on various social media for about 30 years, starting with dial-up BBSes and Usenet (when small enough you could read _every_ message posted).
Time and again, I've seen sites appear, grow, become definitively dominant, taper off, and largely disappear (never quite dying outright but gone from "everyone's on it!" to "who? what?"). High-profile lifespan is vaguely around 7 years. I've no question Facebook will do the same, already peaked and declining as the article notes, suffering from too many people, too much content, and not enough signal to retain users against the oppressive & discouraging noise. "Oh, but FB is different! Everyone is on it, even my grandmother!" many will declare; yes, and odds are your grandmother can tell of her days when CompuServe and AOL were the place to be (to the point of AOL having so much money they bought Time-Warner because they didn't know what else to do with all that cash), yet here she is on Facebook because that's what her grandkids use, but she's thinking of moving on more to Twitter/Instagram/whatever because those kids just don't post much on FB anymore.
I don't disagree, but the definition of "everybody" has gotten bigger and that counts too.
AOL may have been the place to be in the 90s, but it was still a sharp subset of my friends and acquaintances that were there, vs. the almost complete set on Facebook. And USENET/dialup/etc were even more selective. It's only been very recently (relatively speaking) that a majority of people were online at all, never mind aligned on a particular site.
I think you probably should compare more to something like AOL Instant Messenger, which had much closer to a 1:1 usage ratio of online computer users to software users (at least in the US market). The only real reason they went away was because social networks like Facebook are much more cross-connected and oriented towards group communication. The tagging features are huge, for example, since they potentially engage a lot of people at once. Ditto resharing, etc.
So the IM paradigm in general got consumed by larger social media--it wasn't a problem with AOLIM itself. But that sort of obsolescence is a vulnerability of a system that only does one thing. Facebook would probably mutate in the same situation, not die off.
The other factor is smartphones: a much larger number of people are online all the time now. If MySpace had their rise in the smartphone era, I'm sure they would have been much harder to displace. The fact that Facebook's opening their doors to the general public corresponded roughly with the release of the iPhone and subsequent rise of the smartphone was a huge bump for them.
Upshot is that a vastly larger percentage of a vastly larger number of customers are aligned on Facebook compared to older social media, and Facebook itself, as a platform, is relatively resilient to the changing needs of the customer. In an industry where both the customer acquisition and customer retention metric is "how many of your friends use it," I think Facebook will prove to be much harder to displace.
We'll see, of course, but I tend to think that the self-reinforcing nature of social media has different market characteristics than, say, mainframes. Unfortunately, the most obvious comparison--telephone networks--hasn't been a free market for a long time.
Though to that point, interoperability between social networks would certainly be a nail in Facebook's coffin. As soon as the service commoditizes to a simple portal all bets are off.
There were also a ton of oil companies before Standard Oil completely dominated the industry. They were the only player in town for a very long time. And their post-monopoly breakup offspring still are (Exxon is still the biggest).
Don't know if this will be popular here, but... I like Facebook. I like seeing people's pictures and updates. I like serendipitous moments where someone announces they're in town and I get a chance to see people I haven't seen in years. I like keeping track of social events with it. I like reading a lot of their articles. I like the conversations I get in (even some of the arguments). I think it complements and enhances my social life. I try not to let it replace it.
Sure, some of the acquaintances are obnoxious on FB. The mechanisms for focusing on what I like vs what I don't seem to work well enough.
I don't like the surveillance. I try to minimize it in a number of ways. I'm sure my measures have limited effectiveness and I'm leaking details about my whereabouts, reading habits, and other preferences anyway. If FB was the only place I was doing that -- if I wouldn't have to essentially give up mobile/internet communications to truly solve that problem -- I might think harder about whether the value I get out of FB was something I could trade for privacy.
Probably uncool but I like facebook too. Maybe I should have a more happening social life but in the absence of that it's not a bad way to keep up with people. I'm not even especially bothered about the privacy / surveillance stuff. I don't post anything I'd be particularly worried about being public and I'm not to fussed about the add tracking thing effecting which ads uBlock ends up blocking or that I don't read. I just scrolled through the last 35 posts in the main feed and couldn't find anything obviously sponsored. If there's one thing that bugs me it's not having much control over the filtering. On the phone I only tend to get quite a small subset of my friends posts.
I 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 advertising billboards.
Janitors are a necessity. Some are human, some automatic. People want spam to be fought, and they want abuse to be removed.
Between those two is the "nudging" of people into how to use Facebook. Why should you post life updates? Because it's the "done thing".
Indexing is useful because it enables you to find people you want to get in contact with using their human-recognisable name. (Facebook occasionally undermines this by refusing to accept names that people are known by)
Both of these are ongoing effort that has to be paid for if it is to scale and be done properly. Hence all the underhand cash-extraction processes.
> Why should you post life updates? Because it's the "done thing".
No - it's because you've done something you think your friends would be interested in and it's a lot easier to take a photo and click 'post to Facebook' than to write to 30 people.
That's really the fundamental function of Facebook and any successor will probably succeed by doing it better in some way. eg. Snapchat enabling you to send naughty pics without them being archived on the web for the rest of your life and so on.
My problem with Facebook is that whenever I do something I think my friends would be interested in, I actually do take a photo and upload it to Facebook.
Then, Facebook filters all my friends' feed so only 50% of them see it.
All I want from Facebook is a way to reliably see all the posts from all the people I want to follow, and have it keep doing that. I have found settings in the past that let it happen, but it seems to reset to filtered every time I take my eyes off it.
I think what you're talking about was an option at the bottom of the feed which allowed one to see everything everyone's posted. Unfortunately, upon making the feed endless, this option is no longer available.
Is there an easy way to choose who sees a particular post (ie, the way one sees a display of friends to click on when inviting them to an event)? They should implement this, allowing for deselecting unwanted viewers (rather than selecting for wanted viewers - for those with too many friends).
It's possible to create groups of friends and then when you make a post, set it to display to a particular group. For example, I have 'Gamers', 'Close Friends', 'Coworkers', 'Family', 'College Friends', and 'Hometown Friends' groups (with some overlap of course). When I post something I can target it to the appropriate group of people.
This makes sense, and I understand that most people find it highly convenient.
Just to offer a different perspective: to me, the valuable part of sharing life events is the engagement with another person. IE, the extreme convenience (broadcasting 1-to-30 people) undercuts the reason for sharing: connection.
(I also have recently identified concerns I have with group mechanics, and this no doubt influences my perspective.)
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).
I don't really get the first point about scale and brand, because the examples you give like email are built on open protocols, so it's the protocol itself that is the brand. I don't need a particular brand of email client to send emails to someone.
Yes, but the choice has to be made to use email rather than Facebook, iMessage, LinkedIn, etc. For some people it's the default, but there is always advertising trying to tempt them away. Email doesn't really have a brand identity.
Note how easily email converges on big email providers too, rather than everyone running their own services. Gmail is definitely a brand. Lo and behold, Gmail is a service that is "free" but paid for by selling analysis of the content of your emails.
> 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.
That's rather like saying that people use Apple because it has good UX: true, but perhaps we want to unpack it into specifics in order to improve our own work.
I 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).
I am impressed this got upvoted. A couple of years ago, telling everybody I am not on facebook and have never been for such uncool reasons, would have drowned like a lead-duck.
I 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.
Reddit is a gold mine for niche stuff. Don't stop using it for r/funny, r/politics, r/whatever. Those are shitholes. The small subreddits is what Reddit all about for me nowadays. The big subreddits are breeding grounds for young Redditors and to fend off those we don't want in smaller subreddits.
Yes, we've passed Peak Facebook, but that's just because it has been distilled and pornographized to the point of desensitization. Pure capitalism at its finest.
What will set the trend for the future is our understanding of how digital slavery works. We can be entering one of the darkest eras of modern history, or one of the most liberating. The choice is up to us, human beings, whether we sell ourselves to whoever is better at manipulating our emotions and thoughts, or whether we choose the free and open path that liberates us from digital tyranny.
You remind me of digital tools that are just coming into existence. Distributed autonomous corporations could organize most of the digital communication functions that the social media bubble is currently exploring. So, ethereum, Turing complete blockchains, oracles and decentralized decision making. Consensus over conceit.
Like with peak oil you've got to distinguish the US peak (which happened about 1970 though there may be second higher one coming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbert_peak_theory#/media/File...)
and a global peak - not yet for oil.
Facebook's probably peaked in the USA but has a lot of growth ahead globally.
I stopped using facebook in 2013 when I quit my part time job as a fitness instructor. The studio I worked for used it extensively to communicate with clients and post daily workouts and nutrition tips so after a month of holding out (had already deleted my account once in 2010) I signed back up (which was a hassle enough as it was, they already knew I had used that email and asked if I wanted to reactivate my old account even though I had explicitly deleted it).
It was useful but I pretty much only used it in my role as a fitness coach and when I quit that job I deleted all posts, photos and details, changed my primary email to nonsense and changed my password to something I would never remember before going through the two-week "cool-off" period they force on you to delete your account.
I help run an open studios event in Massachusetts. We in the last couple years have recently started using more social media.
Facebook has been useful for us. It drives a lot of traffic to our site and presumably some of those people come to our event (we made an official facebook event so that we don't have a bunch of unofficial ones).
Oddly its a difficult way to communicate with members and build community. Facebook also requires payment to guarantee showing up in feeds now, for a non-profit its not worth it. A fair number of our younger and older artists just aren't on it (myself included). We're finding email is the best way to communicate whats going on with our members.
Facebook works best if Everyone is on it. Once fewer people aren't on it becomes less useful. I think thats its staying power currently. Its actually amazing that it runs at its scale. Myspace was popular, but it didn't have the nearly the volume of users as facebook (plus facebook is better at sharing photos, seemingly its reason for existing). If your not on it and your friends use it as an organizing tool, it can be a little isolating (Don't be that guy/gal who they have to go out of the way to invite to things...), but with more people not on it email seems to be returning as an organizing tool.
FriendsReunited was /the/ social network [amongst a certain demographic at least] in the UK before anyone knew the term social network. They established a massive userbase including paid for users but Facebook came along and destroyed them, particularly because FR did the paid for communications like LinkedIn do.
I'm sorry but this article reads like a narcissistic wet dream. The author continues to quote himself and even misquotes himself several times (look up "facebook has tried tried to remedy" and "facebook has tried to repair"). The rest of the article slams Facebook for its success and tries to say users don't want to use Facebook. I personally love what Facebook developers are doing in terms of React and Jest. In terms of Facebook's core product, I use it for easy social login and have unfollowed anyone who posts things I don't agree with so my "feed" is pretty well curated. Myspace sank because a better product came out. When someone comes out and does Social better than Facebook, Facebook will fall but until then: if you don't like it, good news, you don't have to use it.
I would hesitate to say it's very, very bad. I don't filter people on Facebook only because I disagree with them; I filter people on Facebook because, at one point, I really enjoyed the company of that person and their current tirade of hating (the police/minorities/the west/the east/obama/republicans/etc) stands to slightly jade our friendship. Anyone who can actively filter ALL opinions they disagree with is either delusional, locked in a cabin in the woods or much more active at filtering than I am.
>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.
last I looked at apple's financial statement,s that other 160 is in pretty liquid assets, in that if Apple wanted to spend 190 billion tomorrow, it basically could
I used to actively post on facebook a lot through college and a bit later (joined when I started college, the year before facebook opened itself up to non-college accounts). For the last 2-3 years its been an idle account. Used to make several updates a week, now I make 2-3 updates a year. I removed the app a long time ago from my phone because of privacy reasons.
I've noticed I get bombarded with far more notifications as an inactive user than I was when I was active. I get emailed notifications far more frequently when I used to never have them emailed.
A friend posted on your wall? Notification.
Someone liked a post on your wall? Notification.
A friend is having a birthday? Notification.
A friend's birthday is coming up? Notification.
Invited to an event? Event coming up? Event tonight? Notification.
Someone with no connections in common commented on a post you've never read on a large public group that you have never contributed to? Notification.
Someone completely unrelated to you LIKED a post you've never viewed on the same large group? Notification.
Facebook gets desperate when a user starts churning, but holy crap I just do not care. The only reason I keep this account is because of close family on the network. I could divide my friends list by 40 and I don't think I'd miss any of the lost content.
All the stream ever shows is shared posts from Buzzfeed-clones. It's not interesting. It's a feed of spam with a very, very rare text post or meaningful photo.
Not soon enough. My son lost out on a job opportunity because of a photo of him published in fb when he was in grade 9. It's just a massive invasion of privacy, and for what? The "make a buck off the internet" guys hit the jackpot with that one.
I 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.
What will be the next big thing in social networks? What are your thoughts?
Local neighbors network? No-interface social networks? Peer-to-peer? Anonymous social networks? Video based (YouTube/Twitch)? Messanger-only? No central news-feed?
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 outside their groups.
- Pinterest, Instagram and Google+ have their own public which mostly likely are also in FB. They use it for difference purposes.
- Twitter, well this one it's difficult. First of all most of the communication is public and some users are not interested in that. Also there's a lot of self promotion messages which does not mean it will engage users to communicate. Finally Twitter tries to reinvent itself and the features are not consistent. i.e. For several weeks they enabled translations and after it was disabled. Twitter might have a chance to engage more people with Tvshows, movies, music and personalities.
Facebook after all is the social network which is easier to get started, makes a balance between public and private/groups, lot's of features available (games, messenger, groups etc...) and families and friends in the same feed. I guess it's pretty hard to beat that currently for other social networks.
FB is here to stay until there's a new round of technology and FB doesn't move quickly enough to capitalise on it. I'm guessing that won't happen for at least another five years.
FB is basically AOL, which was basically CompuServe, which was a combination of DEC networking and BBS culture. (Kind of, if you squint hard and wave your hands around in the right way.)
There is always niche for this kind of all-in-one social/messaging/groups/etc. It's a very big and profitable niche, and someone always owns it. But the incumbents change over time, and there are disruptions whenever the underlying technology changes.
FB is likely a safe bet until something new appears. The obvious near-term move is 3D social/gaming, which is why FB bought Oculus. Longer terms that may not be enough, because it's not obvious head-mounted 3D VR is going to be pleasant and friction-free enough for everyday casual use.
My guess is the something new will have strong elements of AI and social and perhaps VR too - but I could be wrong about that.
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 then we'll communicate on that.
Wanna look up for my old class-mates? Let's search for them on facebook.
The timeline will be empty/boring/spam, but the messaging app will be full.
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...
Right... at this point Facebook is where the people are that other people want to communicate with. Facebook has the massive "directory" of users.
Social networks are only useful to people if the other people with whom they want to communicate are ON those networks.
Right now, Facebook has that massive directory. This can change, of course. The Internet does not have permanent favorites. But today, Facebook is where you can easily find and interact with people.
I would love to see distributed peer to peer become the next big thing. Just the social graph would be a start since it would probably be more difficult to find a decentralized way of of holding on to content and posts(?). Anything where you want a degree of privacy you probably need the service to be either paid or distributed or the monetary incentives will be skewed against the users interests.
It's funny, but I really miss group chat in the late 90's on Yahoo Messenger, with audio... I don't think video works as well with 10+ people, but audio was pretty fun.
I think that WebRTC will deliver a lot of opportunities in that arena.
I don't think news feeds are going away, and I think that Twitter (if they can clean out the bot accounts) is one of the better resources in that gateway.
As to messenger systems... no idea... right now it kind of sucks... it was bad enough with yahoo, icq, aol, and msn messenger... now it's even more networks with even more disconnect outside facebook, and fb's app is about as invasive as it gets in terms of device privacy.
I'm a bit anti-social in some ways, so I don't actually think that social networks have much of a future.
My observations are that people don't care about being social, they want a place where they can post their frustrations, Facebook is a good platform for that.
Twitter, Instgram, Snapchat and others all have their user base, but it's way smaller and less relevant than the people using the services believe. If you and your circle of friends are only on e.g. Snapchat, that's platform will seem much more valuable and relevant that it really is. Same with Twitter, the tech world sees Twitter as way more relevant and valuable than it really is, because that the platform that many of us use (I don't, Twitter is in my just a way of following celebrities in the TV/Movie/politic or tech- world).
Some for of group chat might be handy, but there's room for a ton of these services. Although users will tend to cluster. Videos and voice is unimportant, text and pictures are not.
Path is really good, I've been using it for about a year now. It's like FB, but much closer-knit. It's like Swarm and FB. Easy to share things, easy to decide who to share with. It started where you could only have a small number of friends, but I think they removed that requirement. A number of my close friends are on it, so it's neat to see updates that I care about from people that I care about. And then I log onto FB occasionally to wade through the updates of all the tangential friends and acquaintances just to kind of see what's going on.
I think it will be non-local and won't work without text, I hope it will be peer-to-peer, and I'm not sure about what you mean by refering to anonymity in the context of social networks.
I have the next big thing. If you know javascript and the ionic framework, I would to partner up with you. Or if you have money to put down. I'm ready to pitch.
So the bad news is that it is difficult to stop using Facebook. They let me export my data, but not birthdays of my friends list. I had to break the list down into family, friends, actual friends, then check each of their pages to update my address book. I had to disconnect the few apps that were attached which was easy for me as I avoided facebooks apps like the plague, but imagine losing all of your farm animals or whatever it is that people use the games for. Now that SMS is free and my carrier provides me a softphone for my PC and tablet for free, I have reverted to SMS (disabling iMessage is a PITA). Events I handle with my calendar app / email invites which hasn't been ideal, but since some of my friends refuse to use Facebook, it never was either.
Anyway, just some of my experience so far. At least they allow me to export my data, unlike Yelp bookmarks. I kept my usage of Facebook extremely light, but this has taken a lot of my spare time. Few people will go through this effort.
Before you start using a SaaS solution, figure out how you can stop using it.
It's really not. All the saving of contacts, birthdays etc. that you talk about here... If you give a crap about any of these people, you will already have that information in another medium. The Facebook logins? Only one I had to change manually was Spotify, everything else I was able to switch to Google.
"based this prediction on the number of times Facebook is typed into Google as a search term".
If that's their only set of data, then I'm guessing this is equally likely to indicate that Google is losing users, or at least losing users trying to access common sites, at a pretty steep rate.
Did 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?
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...
Most people are already happily migrating to IM platforms where they can contact people more directly and form relevant ad hoc groups.
Facebook was smart enough to recognize that and buy one of them.
I'd be interested in seeing action metrics over time for FB. My gut feeling is that people use it more passively these days (I do, it's mostly a fancy contact book for me). Every now and then I catch myself posting stuff for reasons of "look isn't this great...please like it" but for the most part my FB use is fairly passive these days.
I also feel like I should just delete my FB account for various reasons every now and then but usually talk myself out of it.
About the Coke analogy: everybody loves Coke A Cola, Santa Claus, polar bears, summertime, Perfect harmony, cans with your name on it, it's the greatest brand name in the world.
Facebook is creepy, most people hate it and hate themselves for using it. Everybody knows somebody who lost friends because of it, or who broke up or got divorced. It's supposedly cited in one out of seven divorce cases. In terms of branding it's pretty toxic.
I don't know how long it will be around, probably for a while (if you run Facebook and Snapchat through Google trends Snapchat barely registers) but brand loyalty isn't going to keep it afloat.
If google trends is of any predictive value, Uber and Instagram should not exist (or at least be worse than myspace). The keyword 'snapchat' also shows near zero volume.
There are so many more reasons for declining search volume. It could just be that your users are starting to type terms directly into the address bar.
Or that browsers have gotten smart enough that they're autocompleting facebook.com instead of just letting you search for facebook.
I do love a good Google trends "research" dive but I'd hardly consider it good enough to cite for a scholarly paper. There aren't even real numbers, just relative search volumes.
I still have FB but I never use it unless I'm tagged or messaged on it. I use it primarily as a massive rolodex but I never read my news feed except for on accident if I log in to read a message or notification. I tweet some and those are auto-pushed to FB so it kind of looks like I'm active (that was not the goal, just a side-effect). I've got way too many friends that use FB to plan events and the like to leave it anytime soon.
I don't hold it against you if you don't have a FB but I'm also not going to feel back if you miss out on an event because you were harder to reach. I find the vast majority of FB-Defectors to be insufferable to listen to when they talk about how they aren't on FB (seriously, they fucking talk about FB MORE than the people ON FB!) and when they whine about a group of us talking on FB (therefore leaving them out) I just ignore them. I don't like FB and the reach it has into our lives but I'm not about to cut off my nose to spite my face by deleting my FB. There are plenty of ways to use FB without letting it use you IMHO and people who just flat out quit are too lazy to do so (Sign up for an account, don't add any info, turn off all location stuff, block the FB widget so it can't track you one sites, etc...).
What I really want is identity provider and FB gives that to me today (along with "first party" chat, messaging, photos, etc). Ideally I would have something like OAuth (but not OAuth) and all my friends could pick a messaging platform that supported it but right now nothing like that exists and/or the UI/UX is so terrible I'd never get my friends to switch.
That's quite a disappointing future the author is painting there. The best I can hope for is that future "hot startups" will prefer to sell themselves to any other company but Facebook when Facebook comes knocking on their door with a bag of cash. Otherwise I'll continue to express my distaste for such an acquisition, just like I did with Oculus and Whatsapp and will try avoiding them in the future. Vote with your wallet as they say.
The only thing Facebook was ever good for was finding those old friends. Now that you found them, now what? Do you need Facebook? The easy way out is to message all of them saying you are quitting Facebook and ask them for their email address. That's all you ever needed, but there was no index/search engine for it until Facebook. And once you have that part of the index you care about, you'll never need it again.
Hmmm... And I did this (had fb for a few years, deleted for a few, had for a semester abroad, deleted as soon as I had my first steady girlfriend, broke up and now about three and a half years later I'm back on). The problem I found was, as soon as I deleted my fb no one had my e-mail as it was deleted with it my account and messages.
I'm not the biggest fan of facebook obviously, but when I wqs studying abroad in France it really was a handy way to connect with people when I didn't have a cellphone. Now, after deleting for such a long period, I don't have any connection to my old friends which is a shame.
There's the argument that if people wanted to talk to you they'd make it happen but then there's the argument that if you're on facebook people are more likely to talk to you because of the convenience. No one wants to lose touch, and facebook provides and easy way to make sure that (had I not deleted) when I wanted to go back to Europe I'd have easy access for communication lines to the individuals I might want to visit.
Everything is double edged and while I've enjoyed my time off of facebook (why does everyone have to hate on the poorest in America? I will never understand. If the people on welfare were actual leechers maybe they'd own a portion of the country, anyways I digress).
That being said, it's a total privacy invasion, and the people I apparently know don't critically think too often unfortunately even as I try to gently prod, and yet, it has allowed me to find events I might not have gone too, and friends I may not have seen.
I hate to do this to hackernews where the discussion is the key reason I come here... but I did not read the article. Sorry!
I stay away from Facebook, but it does have at least one significant advantage over email: pull vs push.
If I (as a hypothetical FB user) hit a deer driving to work tomorrow, would I email all my old friends about it? Absolutely not. Would I post something to FB? Sure!
I have email addresses for old friends, and they have mine, and I have no idea what's going on their lives.
This may seem crazy, but I think the reason use facebook is psychological and to some extent, it's a rationalization of gov'ment spying. "if someone else is going to know everything about me, it might as well be my friends(as well as the NSA)". I think once we end NSA spying, people will value their privacy more, and thus not need social crutches.
My experience: the platform is amazing, but too addictive and the format does not permit in-depth discussion. Most of the good content on the web still resides on old forums.
Less and less people can write with the energy of Erik Naggum. Its not rewarded. Searching that great article from 6 months ago is a PITA. Almost no one reads longform articles anymore. Thanks Obama.
The same problems you list with Facebook exist on Reddit, too. Reddit is an echo chamber.
One of the great things about family (if you have a good one) is you have to put up with them no matter how much you disagree on the little things. Interest sites like Reddit let people form into their own ignorant cliques without serious personal effort.
I keep thinking about deleting my facebook but a few days ago I went back a few years to figure out what I needed to do to drag myself out of a horrible depression I've put myself in the past few years and I found the exact thing I needed and all I could think was, I could never delete this if it was this important to me. I feel chained to the website in a way, I've had it for 6 years and quite a bit of important social interactions are hidden in between things that don't matter that I might never find again and completely forget that part of my life.
Is there any way I can separate myself from the website without losing these things that I might need later in life at some point? I'm really wanting to just delete it but the history makes it important to me.
We? I never became a user. Apart from that: Our children will, at the latest. For our children's generation, FB already is the pinnacle of boredom and stuffiness. Whatever is cool about “where our parents humiliate themselves publicly”?
I have a 3 year old and he has no photo (that I know of) in facebook. Both me and my wife don't post anything online (also don't have FB) and if I find any family member/friend posting a picture of my son online, they will have picture taking permissions revoked. Also, there are a lot of people like us where I live.
Surely your family and acquaintances and people in the street are free - depending where you live (?) - to take pictures. So you're going to have to police all of those images in perpetuity to prevent images from appearing online. The likelihood is that when they're a teenager they'll put their lives online themselves in some way ... so?
If your child goes on a playdate or attends a nursery or goes to a public location then there's a good chance (at least in the UK) that they'll appear on Facebook no matter how many "I do not consent for my child to appear in photographs" statements you sign. Once they appear in the background of images then in the not too distant future face recognition is likely to be good enough to trawl the net for images of them. I think what you'll find is that the images are all one's you haven't curated whereas if you were adding your own images (no matter if it's only a few) then you at least have some control over the general presentation of images.
Aim/Reason: I don't really trust facebook/google, but more importantly, if he decides when he is 14-15 to put his photos online, it will be his decision. Also, growing up, baby/young pictures were usually something would use to make fun of each other.
As for the other people taking photos, sure, if he is in the background there is not much we can do, but other places (nursery or school or even playdates) can't by law do that and to be fair, those places we tend to hand pick them and they do share this with us.
My best friendships are maintained by calling by phone or Skype, calling regularly when it comes to closer friends. I keep in touch with important people in my life using technology available to my parents when they were my age, and I feel more satisfied for it.
When Facebook first launched dedicated apps for groups and messages, I was confused. But now I only have those installed, and not the primary app. I've also bookmarked both the messages page and the groups main page (which actually took some searching). I get a lot of groups, and there are some people I'm only able to talk with via Facebook messages.
Malls are ubiquitous in much of the US, and people use them differently. Some people wander, some people run in to the one store they need and leave. Some people hang out at the food court. I view Facebook the same way - as they continue to build out features, different people will choose to use the bits and pieces that work for them.
My wife cut off FB 2 years ago but I still use it mostly like a forum. Locally we have a group of 50ish gamers (Warhammer, 40k, Warmachine, etc) and this is the primary way games / tournaments / campaigns are set up. Even a trading area since gamer nerds are apt to constantly buy and trade their toys.
What's funny is we've had to convince our younger members to even sign up so we could communicate with them. Anyone younger than 20 in our group didn't usually have an FB account.
We've tried running traditional forums for the local group but it has never worked. FB is the only way to do it for now.
Same issue we had trying to get people to forums. Signing up is hard to do no matter how easy you make it. Including if it allows for Facebook sign-ons.
They're already ON Facebook. It's on their phone. They don't have to do anything.
Trust me, I -want- an updated platform to use, but the rest of the gamer community here just doesn't seem to want to migrate.
I dislike posts about Facebook's usage, if for no other reason than how many people tend to come out and say "I don't use it and I can't imagine why anyone would".
That statement is just so intellectually dishonest, it completely ruins the entire conversation. Pretending like there's no value in what Facebook offers ignores billions of dollars and billions of users who do find value. Now I'm not one for an ad populum, but when we define usefulness as "provides value to others", how can't Facebook be considered useful?
Story today on the BBC, from analysis of 500 word stories written by UK kids between 5 and 13 for a competition 'Words including email, mobile and Facebook are in decline, it said.'
(Interesting that mobile is declining, suggests the distinction is lost in a world of tablet, laptop and phone use where desktops are a thing of the past domestically)
> (Interesting that mobile is declining, suggests the distinction is lost in a world of tablet, laptop and phone use where desktops are a thing of the past domestically)
I would say that mobile is declining because land lines basically don't exist anymore, so we can just say phone instead of mobile phone.
- Informing old friends about so-called "Life Events" - not by actually posting, but by private messages
- Private groups of separate friend circles, mostly for sharing cool news/websites or music
- My facebook newsfeed mostly constitutes local news, international editorial/opinion pieces and lots of pictures of nature stuff which I like. I've unfollowed most people so I don't get their posts.
I don't have a one-stop shop for all the above except facebook, so I think I'll definitely be using it for a while.
I also found this graph to be a bad start. I mean, search queries?
If facebook.com isn't bookmarked it's still presented as suggestion right after "f" is typed in close to any facebook users omnibox. The only reason I ever search for facebook is because I accidently mistyped it.
Keeping in touch with friends, family, and acquaintances is a core need for a large fraction of humans.
Facebook, like everything, will disappear some day, but it will be because people decide to start using some other way of keeping in touch -- not because they decide that they're bored of keeping in touch. Many people just stop using Facebook, don't replace it with anything else, and are happy with that decision -- but that will not be the norm.
Unfortunately, I keep using Facebook to keep in contact with my family (this includes part of my extended family whom I haven't seen since childhood). I'm not sure it has much value since we rarely communicate through Facebook as we all have each other's phone numbers and other contact information. I'm hoping eventually my family will get off Facebook and maybe onto a more viable platform to maintain contact.
Facebook has long said they want to be the glue of the Internet, the guys that tie it all together. And they're winning at this through their login feature, their messaging, their ad platform, and their commenting features. I don't know if in the future people will still visit FB like they do today, but I doubt they are truly going away anytime soon.
I stopped using it a long time ago. For a while I mostly used Facebook connect to log into other web sites but I don't even do that anymore.
Other people are still engaged; my NEET friends will come over and look at Facebook for hours and even people I know with jobs find it compelling but I don't.
I think Facebook has staying power because they're the first social network to have made serious AI/ML investments. They'll be able to project user's likes back at them better than anyone else.
I thought that the article was worth it but it is completely stupid. The reason of MySpace curb is because Facebook started, they aren't two independent events.
The linked article quotes some research which is highly dubious. Using Google trends data [1] for anything other than the start of an analysis seems a little dangerous.
Facebook won the social network land-grab and it will be difficult for anyone to assail their stronghold. I hope someone does, but it's probably going to take a lot of money and time.
Piece needs an editorial once-over badly. Some of the pull quotes don't even match up to the same body text. Is it too much to ask for people to run spellcheck as a bare minimum of due diligence?
Facebook is already two years ahead of the analysis in this article. They spun off messenger and groups into their own apps because they saw the monolithic approach was no longer working.
I did have a lot of old friends on FB, but I didn't stay in contact with them in real life. I was just lazily snooping on their lives, without giving anything in return.
To be completely honest, I don't have space or time for them in my real life. It isn't because I didn't like them anymore, it was simply that I didn't have the time or energy to stay in proper contact. I had also moved away.
I had the realisation that some people are supposed to drift apart. The people who are important to you will remain in contact with, and it doesn't need Facebook spying on that friendship to enable it to keep functioning.