
Survey says Facebook still in use by young, but Snapchat/Instagram are real - garry
http://blog.garrytan.com/tenth-grade-tech-trends-my-survey-data-says-s
======
mcphilip
Anecdotal evidence: I had never messed with Instragram until I got a
girlfriend whose peer group used that exclusively over Facebook. These are all
in the 28-32 age range. It seems they were all eager to use a system that just
focused on sharing photos and didn't want all the 'bloat' associated with
Facebook. In addition to preferring the focus on photosharing, there was a
sense of just wanting to be back on a network where they just dealt with the
few people they cared about.

Obviously Instagram falls under the Facebook umbrella, but it did serve as a
wake up call to me about there possibly being a group of young professionals
that is more than willing to completely ditch Facebook proper for something
that better fits their social networking goals.

~~~
majormajor
It is amusing that there's less friction to move to a new network than to
clean up the old one. Unfriending (or hiding/muting/whatever while still
actively using Facebook) is much more likely to be taken as an affront by your
long-time Facebook friends than simply stopping using FB much.

But eventually it seems like the same people will move to the new network of
choice, and try to contact you there, and you've got the same problem all over
again? Or you drift out of touch with that new network...

~~~
grecy
> Unfriending (or hiding/muting/whatever while still actively using Facebook)
> is much more likely to be taken as an affront by your long-time Facebook
> friends than simply stopping using FB much.

I've muted hundreds of people in my friends list, and they are none-the-wiser.

~~~
darklajid
Hundreds? As in > 200?

Maybe the list shouldn't be called 'friends' anymore? That list is bigger than
my list of Outlook + GMail contacts.

As a prime example for a very different use of social networks: Can you
explain to me how adding these people to your account (friends, acquaintances,
whatever you name the list) adds, especially if they are muted and don't show
up in your feed of social stuff (tm) anyway? Fascinating.

~~~
dagw
Based on what I've seen, refusing to add someone can be seen as a social snub
in many circles. Simply adding and muting someone avoids a lot of social
hassle of people wanting to know why you refused to add them when you did add
some other person.

~~~
vidarh
This is one of the things Google+ got relatively right: Perceived "friendship"
are not in any way symmetric. Even close friends will often have different
ideas about the depth and importance of their relationship. Facebook has tried
very hard to ignore that.

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1337biz
I don't want to come across as rude, but I am fascinated how easy people are
buying into these numbers. From my perspective the survey is in its current
form far less informative than the original anecdote.

There is absolutely zero information on the data source he or Survate was
using. The population seems to be selected based on the single factor age -
meaning they might be getting the data from the easiest, cheapest accessible
data sources available. In the end most of the responses could be coming from
30 y/o guys in India clicking on random answers to earn their 5c on mTurk.

In contrast to that, the original anecdotal evidence had the full story,
provided the exact context on why and how the data was generated. But data
without context is no data.

~~~
garry
Survata is a survey-wall -- meaning you have to answer a survey before you see
a given article. They have about 20 publishers signed up, and they're all non-
spammy content. Users are all US-based, which can be verified via geo-ip, and
there's little reason for people to spoof that here.

I never claimed to have more anecdotal evidence -- the whole point is to try
to validate the claims via some form of data collection. It was cheap and fast
to do.

~~~
awenger
(Survata co-founder here)

Garry's explanation is a good one. The data for this survey was collected via
surveywalls (example at [1]), which let visitors access premium content online
for free in exchange for answering a few questions. All respondents here have
US IP addresses and self-report age in the 13-25yr range. We generally see
honesty rates of 90% or higher to questions for which we can verify the answer
(e.g. "Which OS are you currently using?" or "Who is the President of the
US?").

1\. Example surveywall: [http://www.hyperink.com/So-You-Want-To-Be-A-
Programmer-b1559...](http://www.hyperink.com/So-You-Want-To-Be-A-
Programmer-b1559a9))

------
patja
I see many parents who forbid their children from using Facebook, but they are
barely aware of what Instagram is and have never heard of Snapchat. Needless
to say, those children are all over Instagram and Snapchat.

The first thing every adult says when I explain Snapchat is "oh, it is a
sexting app!"

~~~
eddieroger
Lots of truth in this one. My uncle took away my cousin's phone a few months
ago, and it didn't even phase her since her iPod had better communications
tools than the dumbphone. She was texting via Kik (I thought it had died),
Instragramming and FaceTiming. Talk about punishment.

------
jacalata
I am so happy to see someone make an effort to do more than tell a story of
how their girlfriends cousins dog said something and so obviously
facebook/college/everything is totally over. Anecdotes are for color, data is
for predictions and analysis.

~~~
kmfrk
People are beginning to preface anecdotal evidence with "this just anecdotal,
but ...", as if there is some loophole to the fallacy.

It's really annoying when people confuse humility and an acknowledgement of a
scarcity of evidence with jumping head-first into making a useless, fallacious
argument.

Personal stories are fine[1], but it's worth keeping in mind that one of the
pre-eminent unironic peddlers of anecdotal evidence as proof is Thomas
friggin' Friedman.

[1]: For spotting "black swans", for instance.

~~~
_delirium
In discussion forums I'm okay with the preface, because I read it as something
like an implicit request for more information, "I think I've noticed [x] but
don't have any real data, anyone know something further?" But I wouldn't write
an article (not even an essay-length blog post) based on that premise.

------
jeremy_k
I would be hesitant to wonder about the data on Snapchat and what it provides.
Think of how the app works: You take a picture, add a caption, and draw on the
picture if you please. Then you select friends to send it to and you're done.
That can be accomplished in < 30 seconds. Viewing snaps sent from friends is
at MAX 10 seconds per snap. Unless a user is sending and receiving a lot of
snaps, I would doubt they reach ' used regularly (defined by several hours per
week or more, multiple answers OK)' threshold.

~~~
nwh
Thinly veiled, Snapchat is for sending nudes. In that sense I suppose it's
more incentive to send photos, given the premise that the photos won't be seen
by a third party.

------
jacoblyles
On a related note, this article is interesting: "What The Tech World Looks
Like To A Teen"

[http://www.buzzfeed.com/joshmiller/what-the-tech-world-
looks...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/joshmiller/what-the-tech-world-looks-like-
to-a-teen)

It got marked dead on submission. I'm not sure if the domain is marked spam,
or I'm banned from submission, or what.

~~~
nitrogen
It's usually best to submit the original article instead of a syndicated (AKA
"blog spam") post: <https://medium.com/product-design/d8d4f2300cf3>
(previously on HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4982850>).

------
jstalin
No one seems to be mentioning the incredibly high usage of Tumblr in that
survey. I have to say I'm really surprised.

------
victordg
Usage of Tumblr looks surprisingly high (at least for me), according to that
graph. Even though that stats are exclusively for the younger segment of
users, they don't seem to correlate at all with overall data I've been able to
gather. For example: \- Facebook's unique visitors ~160M
[http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/21/net-us-facebook-
us...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/21/net-us-facebook-users-
idUSBRE85J1L020120621) \- Tumblr unique visitors ~24M
[http://blog.compete.com/2012/10/10/pinterest-surpasses-
tumbl...](http://blog.compete.com/2012/10/10/pinterest-surpasses-tumblr-in-
unique-visitors/)

------
cowboyhero
The most striking thing is the across the board drop from one age group to the
next. That to me is the more interesting story here.

Curious about Survata' methodology. Neither the author nor their website go
into a great deal of information about this. (I mostly want to know who crafts
the questions, as it's easy to inadvertntly skew survey results).

As an aside, linking to Survata's homepage not just once but three times in a
~600 word post makes this thing, aside from its casual observations, feel like
an 'advertorial.'

~~~
awenger
(Survata co-founder here)

Survata has a DIY survey creation tool, but we review and suggest wording
changes to avoid biased questions. We also advise on how to arrange (and
randomize) answer choices to allow us to calculate and compensate for answer
biases like always clicking the first or last option.

Responses are gathered on surveywalls across the web, where visitors answer
short surveys in exchange for free access to premium content (e.g. ebook or
video).

------
alexleavitt
What this post doesn't describe is usage numbers per person. I wonder how many
Tumblr users are also Facebook, Snapchat, etc. users...? Also, how many
respondents chose none of the options?

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joering2
it would never cross my engineering mind to develop app like Snapchat. If you
pitch it to anyone who played with iOS for a moment, they will laugh at you
and say: no fun, I can hold two buttons and take print screen and the purpose
of your app - dissapearing photo - is gone. But yet SC managed to raise $8MM.
How on Earth is that?? Is it possible that those who took photos have no idea
holding power button and clicking menu button with take a print screen??

~~~
bcoates
Don't underestimate the power of defaults. When you send someone a photo
through most systems the recipient has to go out of their way to delete it, so
they wind up keeping (and re-sharing) things they didn't even intend to. If
you want to circumvent Snapchat's retention policy you have to actually care
enough at the moment to do so, which is a much bigger barrier than any
technical one.

------
xarien
We have too many companies offering "free" products to demographics with very
limited purchasing power... I'm glad I'm not in the boat of appeasing this
fickle group.

------
mbloom1915
1,000 people is a very small sample...

~~~
Evgeny
Not true, at least if the sample is truly random.

It gives a confidence interval of plus or minus 3% (regardless of the size of
population being surveyed!)

[http://www.publicagenda.org/pages/best-estimates-guide-
sampl...](http://www.publicagenda.org/pages/best-estimates-guide-sample-size-
and-margin-error)

 _For example, if 50 percent of a sample of 1,000 randomly selected Americans
said they favor recycling laws, in 95 cases out of 100, 50 percent of the
entire population in the U.S. would also have given the same response had they
been asked, give or take 3 percentage points (i.e., the true proportion could
be 47 percent or 53 percent). The bigger the sample, the smaller the margin of
error, but once you get past a certain point -- say, a sample size of 800 or
1,000 — the improvement is very small._

