
Facebook Is the New Excel – Alex Muir - shahryc
http://alexmuir.com/facebook-is-the-new-excel
======
wolrah
The bit about apartment searching made me shudder. Dedicated apartment search
web sites already suck enough at providing relevant information in an easily
searchable form, the idea of searching through unorganized text is just
insane.

Unfortunately I know the author has a point. In the car community forums are
losing traffic like crazy while Facebook groups have constant traffic. The
Facebook groups are absolutely horrible to use but it's where the people are.
With no ability to categorize or "sticky" threads the discussions are a
disaster, but for some reason a lot of people are fine with that.

~~~
King-Aaron
Completely agree with the car forums - and all enthusiast forums in general.

You get the same inane questions being asked daily - if not hourly - because
people can't easily find information that had been asked previously.

Not to mention that facebook allows more "casual" enthusiasts to partake in
conversations, than what I'd consider proper "enthusiasts". I feel that it
dilutes the quality of a technical question's responses when you have one
person replying with solid advice, and ten others who either shitpost, or
offer plainly incorrect advise.

------
forkLding
I think Facebook might be the new Excel now but in a couple of years wont be.

Facebook (the main website) has seen a slump in new user registrations in the
pre-teen and teen groups and its main group is 25-34 year olds
([https://www.statista.com/statistics/187041/us-user-age-
distr...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/187041/us-user-age-distribution-
on-facebook/)) who will get older.

I've basically tried marketing on facebook before and realized that it's very
hard to reach the teen groups if you're advertising for a product built for
youth anymore whereas Facebook in the past could have not only reached the
25-34 years olds but also grabbed the 13 to 24 year old groups.

I definitely think the dominance of Facebook.com (main website) will start to
subside in 5 years or so until we no longer interact with the website actively
but rather just passively scroll through it now and then.

------
tinokid
This was 2016. Two years hence the feeling is different.

