
Daily Facebook users drops for the first time in US - osrec
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-north-america-daus-drop-for-first-time.html?__source=twitter%7Cmain
======
vuldin
Anecdotally, I haven't been on Facebook in months. In spite of that, I
wouldn't be surprised if my account is counted somehow in the daily usage for
some of those days just because of the extent to which their services have
extended throughout many other websites. I've joined, canceled, then joined
again, but never really used the site to any large extent. It is a very
unnatural (yet at times necessary) way to communicate with people.

The decline of Facebook is in no way the decline of technology-enhanced
socializing. People will hopefully just find other more natural ways to do so.
My hope is on decentralized apps that allow people to own and control access
to their own data.

~~~
mrmondo
I moved my account to Ireland (in a somewhat improperly researched attempt to
force them to delete my data due to Ireland’s data retention laws), waited a
month or so then scripted deletion of all the images and posts on the account,
changed all details and disconnected it from everyone and everything, then
waited a week or so ‘deleted’ the account.

That was about 5 years ago (and it was a great life decision IMO) but - people
say they still see me popping up on their feeds with my (fake) birthdate,
memories (which I was untagged or had privacy settings disallowing me to be
tagged in) and other weird things.

I’ve been careful not to mistakenly log in once which I fear my bring the
account back from the dead and I’ve also kept an eye to make sure there’s no
identity theft / fake account going on.

I don’t trust that company one bit, I’m glad I left but I don’t for one second
believe my data’s actually been deleted.

While I truly hope something open source and decentralised gets momentum, I
still truly love twitter - I get a lot out of it and I’ve met and networked
with a lot of great people through Twitter.

------
simias
I see many people clamoring for the death of Facebook but don't they own many
of the up-and-coming social networks anyway? If people are ditching Facebook
for Instagram you might as well switch to cocaine to stop your crack
addiction.

~~~
golergka
Chats. Most of my friends and me have most of our social interactions in
private chat groups, with silly pictures and pictures, personal stories and
drama happening all the time.

I've tried most of the big ones (except WeChat and other chinese apps, where I
don't have a single peer), and I bet on Telegram. They're moving forward with
incredible speed, and from all the competitors, they seem to understand their
audience and usage patterns best.

Also, it's a platform that's already actively used for commerce. Just like
with Bitcoin and darknet, drugs are the primary growth factor (I don't know of
any other transactions cryptocurrency is actually used as currency). I expect
that after they release their own currency, it will take over all existing
crypto from sheer convenience.

~~~
thejosh
Only reason I use FB is chat as well, simply because friends and family still
use it.

Only reason I still have a FB account and not simply a messenger account is
spotify is tied to it and I can't unlink from FB as the login source..

~~~
jimmies
Messenger-with-a-phone-number-account is just a Facebook account in disguise.
They just don't show you the login credentials. Under circumstances, you can
obtain the login token to log in the web interface and it would behave just
like a Facebook account with some restrictions.

It might look different to most people, but given one still gets a
"restricted" Facebook account created behind the scenes with a messenger
account, I don't think people understand the privacy implications of that. See
my other top-level post for my take on the issue.

------
cx_in_the_chat
I wonder when the next "facebook" will come along. I predict people will
abandon facebook just as they did with myspace, as soon as something new,
cleaner and with less spam will be available to migrate to. Of course after
some period of time the new service will also end up filled with memes and ads
and the cycle will continue once again.

~~~
kristianc
The MySpace comparison is a little tired. MySpace felt big, but even at its
peak, only had 75m MAUs. Even Pinterest today has over twice as many, between
175m and 200m. Facebook is at 2.2bn, and its DAILY active users are 184m.
Extrapolated over a month, this blip accounts for half of MySpace's MAUs.
There's some pretty serious network effects there, to the point where building
a slightly better mousetrap is not going to work.

2009 was also a loooong time ago: the App Store had just been born, people
were just starting to use Twitter, the Android platform was just getting going
and 25% of all PC sales in Europe were netbooks. MySpace was barely even
accessed by people using smartphones.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Network effect isn't that relevant since people don't actually have a ton
invested in Facebook beyond just the social graph and that social
connectivity. It is thus rife for a preference cascade if it turns out a
competitor hits all the right buttons with some other compelling reason to
switch. All it really takes is for a competitor to be actually superior on the
merits (so, not something like google plus that was mostly the same and in
many ways actually worse) and then a critical mass to start forming there.
Once the "well, I guess I should have an account over there just to keep up
with my friends X, Y, and Z every once in a while" cycle starts and that
becomes common then a preference cascade becomes possible. Nobody really
understands social media very well today, which is odd considering its age, so
nobody is really hitting all the right notes with an offering but the
potential exists.

~~~
kristianc
The social graph and the social connectivity is huge. You're asking people -
2.2bn of them - to incur the overhead of another platform to check, which
they're not going to do unless all of their friends are already on that
platform in the first place.

And those people (and the advertisers that pay for the servers, the hosting)
are not going to turn up unless ... well you get the picture. And the reason
why advertisers pay to advertise on Facebook is because of the strength of
their social graph in identifying people's preferences and profile of device
usage, which Facebook has because they already have all the users.

Facebook is already 'good enough' in so many areas, and for the areas that the
core FB app is not so strong (visuals, low friction messaging, short form
communication), guess what, Facebook has already bought a competitor.

~~~
orbifold
I think you are missing the point, you don't need to get 2.2 bn to migrate to
your new platform, just "strongly connected components". This is why for
example Discord or Slack can exist even though they have some overlap with
Facebooks functionality (mostly messenger and groups). I don't really know
what the value of facebook is to most people, I've heard that it has groups
for almost everything, but most other features I would guess are easily
"unbundled" as Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat are evidence for.

~~~
kristianc
Facebook's value is in the 2.2bn figure - its value to advertisers is in its
identity graph. To displace FB as FB did MySpace, you need some way of
replicating that.

The value of that identity graph to advertisers (which is how you keep the
lights on) works in exponents - if you have 10% of Facebook's graph, you don't
have something that is 10% as useful, you have something that is 1% as useful.

You can get some of the way by unbundling FB's core feature set and innovating
on a particular feature, but your upper limit for that is probably a product
that is used by hundreds of millions of people, not a Facebook killer.

Slack's moat is that it is socially unacceptable to use Facebook at work,
which is a nice one to have but sets up an entirely new set of challenges
trying to get people to adopt it outside. Discord, similarly is almost
entirely limited to gaming. Number of PC Gamers worldwide total tops out at
about 800m.

WeChat is a special case: Owned by Tencent, operates in a market that Facebook
is completely locked out of, and operating on a completely different set of
cultural assumptions.

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jimmies
To "escape" Facebook, in 2017, I tried to maintain a Messenger account with a
phone number but without a Facebook account. By accident, I discovered that
the Messenger-with-a-phone-number thingie that they have is just a Facebook
account that doesn't allow you to log in "traditionally." But if you manage to
get the auth token to log in, it allows you to play with a lot of stuff. It
allows you to rate places, edit places, see people's profiles, register for
events invisibly. It doesn't allow you to interact and post status updates,
but it is still very much a Facebook account behind the scenes.

If it entertains you, I have a draft here for you to see my 6 months journey
working with fb security on that "bug" (disclaimer: it wasn't very fun or
exciting... basically, I didn't qualify for their bounty program. They only
give out rewards to bugs that could be used to get other people's personal
info.)

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSa-
LjM5IzyTWJuD...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSa-
LjM5IzyTWJuD1rDj6H9v0gBafi_cNZ7zQZkbpwDf6qIzXXv3jutgfLcDF6jpLfk7CaJKgtLGy5H/pub)

Edit: I have updated the link to the doc with the proof of concept video
removed because the names weren't blurred. Bad taste on my end, my apologies.

------
nukeop
Facebook has recently hit 2 billion total users. Given that we have somewhere
around 7 billion people on the planet, this seems to be the unbeatable
ceiling. Let's estimate generously that half of the world's population has
access to internet. That gives us 3.5 billion people. Around 750 million of
these people are Chinese - they don't, and can't use Facebook. This leaves us
with 2,750,000 people - many of which won't be interested in using Facebook,
or can't have an account for a multitude of reasons, such as being too young
(let's say under 10), or too old (let's say over 75). Clearly there isn't much
room for Facebook to grow now. If there's no room to grow, there is nowhere to
go but down. It can be therefore predicted that, subtracting bots, the daily
users will start dropping regularly very soon, and will keep on dropping as
people move away from this platform due to its diminishing popularity, because
of network effects.

~~~
carlmr
For media what they measure their growth in is total time (attention) spent on
the platform. Even with 2 billion people signed up being the growth ceiling in
terms of number of people. We need to see whether they manage to increase (#
people) * (average time spent on Facebook). That number still has a huge
upward potential. Declining number of daily visitors is a sign that this
growth is negative too though.

I don't think that messengers can really replace social media. I don't spend
time on a messenger if I'm not messaging someone. Facebook is more about
posting something you find interesting, and consuming what other people post
(+ adds interspersed). This is a completely different market. Will something
replace Facebook? Surely, at some point. But I don't think it will be
messengers. It will be another service that makes people feel like they get
more of the content they want from their friends.

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maaaats
Most of my feed now is friends liking or commenting on pages I have no
interest in. If I could remove all that I might check it out more often. Or
maybe I would discover none of my friends post anything anymore?

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ryanbertrand
Most of the posts on my newsfeed are posted by random parents which have added
me over the years. Facebook even sends me text messages and emails to “come
back”. I get random notifications about some ‘friend’ I haven’t spoken too in
10 years posted something on Facebook...like that will bring me back to your
platform.

I haven’t found a way to disable those alerts and notifications.

I’m happy with Instagram because it just serves a simple purpose.

~~~
narrowtux
You can disable these notifications by clicking the 3 dots next to them and
then selecting "Hide notifications of this kind" or something like that.
Granted they'll come up with new kinds of the same thing that will spam you
again, but it works for me right now.

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jsemrau
Who else should join ? Don't they have 99% market penetration in the US?

~~~
Axsuul
New people being born and becoming of age.

~~~
Jaruzel
Ah, but younglings flock to the IM platform-de-jour instead of Facebook. Right
now that's SnapChat and WhatsApp. Most 13 year olds have no interest in
Facebook as it's considered uncool[1]. This attitude has been in place for a
few years now. Couple that with more and more established users leaving the
platform, and you start to see the decline that's being reported.

\---

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
intersect/wp/2015/02...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
intersect/wp/2015/02/21/why-teens-are-leaving-facebook-its-meaningless/)

------
franzpeterstein
I think social media is dead and Facebook a bubble for parents, fake-politican
bots and old poeple.

------
osrec
Is this the beginning of the end or just natural stabilisation? I would guess
the former; the platform is simply boring now.

------
KasianFranks
Facebook has always been the next AOL. In comparison, you'll rarely hear
someone say "I'm leaving Google search". Social nets vs Search and Search
still wins. This is why there's still a large difference in value between them
in terms of revenue, users and algorithmic technology.

~~~
fwdpropaganda
I did leave Google search. I so did many others on HN.

~~~
minor3rd
So... .000005% of the population?

~~~
DiThi
Change and growth must start somewhere. I've used DDG for years but only
recently I started recommending it to everybody, and endorsing Firefox as
well.

~~~
Outpox
Same here, ditched Chrome for Firefox and Chromium, and Google Search for DDG.
Altough I don't see how I could stop using Android, maps, youtube and gmail
:-/

~~~
fwdpropaganda
I'm in the exact same spot. Android can be ditched for LineageOS. Gmail is
risky because of security; using anything else is a big gamble. Maps is also
irreplaceable right now, but over time competitors will get better.

You should ditch Chromium as well.

~~~
hyperbovine
> Maps is also irreplaceable right now, but over time competitors will get
> better.

The last company to pour significant resources into maps was Apple and they
have essentially given up. If the most valuable company ever created cannot
defeat Maps, nothing will. Including OSM. There was a story on here a few
months ago called Google Maps’ Moat. Give it a read. Maps is not going
anywhere.

~~~
fwdpropaganda
I read that article back then, I just don't agree with it ^.

With the rise of self-driving cars, maps will become a non-issue. All the
companies that nail self-driving cars, and there will be several, will over
time have a maps that is better than Google's today.

^ I mean, I do agree it's a moat, it just had the unusual property that the
path to bring it down is pretty clear.

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tanilama
Ad cow is coming to an end.

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bantersaurus
Im using instagram instead...

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mantas
Good

