
The Fall of Facebook - prostoalex
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/12/the-fall-of-facebook/382247/?single_page=true&utm_source=SitePoint&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Versioning
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xwowsersx
> “In three years of research and talking to hundreds of people and everyday
> users, I don’t think I heard anyone say once, ‘I love Facebook,’ ”

Does anyone really buy this? Who cares what people say? It's all about what
they do. People say a lot of things. It's cool to not love FB. Yet somehow,
some way, it remains one of the most addictive and stickiest products for an
ever-increasing and huge number of people.

~~~
andrew93101
I think it is relevant.

If users generally dislike facebook, but continue to use it, it's a bad
situation to be in for Facebook. It indicates that people are using the
product because of its network effects and _despite_ the product itself.

It means that if anything begins to actually challenge the network effect of
facebook, they will be in a very tough spot.

~~~
eob
Re: challenging the network effect.

A telling moment that happened two nights ago for me. A friend from ~8 years
ago came to visit and we wanted to send a joking message out to a few people
from the old group of friends we used to hang out with.

The conversation was literally:

A: "Post it to Facebook and tag everyone." B: "Ehhh. It would be funnier to
find an old email thread and reply to it."

We went with B. It seemed like a better idea, plus we weren't sure if folks in
the group checked Facebook. But everyone reads email -- and sure enough, we
got life updates from the whole gang within 12 hours.

~~~
Joeboy
Yeah, because of its age, ubiquity, relative lack of growth etc I think people
don't consider email along with the emerging sexy social networking platforms.
I tend to use it in preference to Facebook if I'm communicating with specific
people. I would not use it for sending everybody I know amusing pictures of
cats.

------
yason
The problem with Facebook is that your contacts are there. I'd have left a
long time ago if it was a similar service for a dedicated crowd of hobbyists
or for work colleagues but everyone's there from my neighbours to my relatives
to my friends' kids.

But even that is dwindling.

What I would like to do if follow people, what happens and what they post. But
Facebook only gives me a fraction of what my friends publish. I'd basically
have to dig up each friend by myself to see everything they've posted. So I
don't even know how they are doing, except when I chat with the closest ones.

But disconnecting is hard for a human being.

I happen to know it would feel good, too. When Facebook suspended my account I
wondered if this is it, then. Things got arranged back to where they were but
before that I felt a wave of relief. I wouldn't have minded being free either.

~~~
TrinnyLopez
Your contacts are only in Facebook and no where else? There's people that you
are friends with on Facebook but no where else?

Lots of red flags. If you can't get rid of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, that
means you are an exhibitionist, or narcissist.

Or, you are selling something. That's why I'm on Facebook and Twitter: to help
sell my software and apps.

~~~
cgriswald
I don't agree. I'm going back to school. You have a lab partner and need to
communicate? He's probably on Facebook. You want to invite those other guys to
the party but no one has their number? Easy to find on Facebook. I have many
contacts on Facebook that I don't have anywhere else because there isn't a
need to have them anywhere else. Facebook basically makes it easier for me to
maintain social contact with more people than I would otherwise. Sending
someone a message on Facebook is "softer" than sending someone a text or email
or making a phone call.

It's also much easier for me to keep in touch with relatives in remote places.
I get a little of their life every day, but don't have to spend hours on the
phone with everyone to do it.

Can I get rid of Facebook? Of course. Facebook didn't even exist for the first
three decades of my life. I think people who have a Facebook "problem" really
have mild "internet addiction" and Facebook just happens to be their poison.

FWIW, the best part about Facebook is grandma doesn't send me 43 emails a day
containing jokes about the weather anymore. :)

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jasode
1960 "The Fall of Bershire Hathaway" \-- the problem is that the textile
business has been in decline after WW2, the overseas manufacturers are
undercutting on price, and Egyptian cotton is more highly coveted than Alabama
cotton. (Unforseen: The company stopped dealing with fabrics and became a
holding company for investments.)

1980 "The Fall of Microsoft" \-- the problem is that 100% of their revenue is
programming tools such as MS BASIC and MS COBOL. These are not the high growth
areas. There's a new breed of "productivity" software such as Dan Bricklin's
VisiCalc spreadsheet introduced last year and WordPerfect word processor
introduced this year. Microsoft is in serious trouble. (Unforseen: They saw
explosive growth in MS Office and Windows o/s.)

1983 "The Fall of Intel" \-- the problem is that they can't compete with cut
throat memory prices from Japan. It's a low margin business. (Unforseen: They
emphasized CPUs and got out of the RAM business.)

1997 "The Fall of Apple" \-- ... we all know this story, yada yada yada

(The following quotes were made up but I hope people get the point.)

The problem with typical journalists predicting the "fall" of a company is
that they base it on publicly known information. They base it on what the
company has done in the past. The journalists don't sit in boardroom meetings
outlining future plans that are unrelated to their current core revenue
generators. The journalists also aren't privy to the secret skunkworks
projects in the R&D pipeline. It's understandable that they don't have this
information but they almost never make disclaimers of their blind spots which
makes their predictions sound more convincing.

That's not to say that companies do fail to evolve. Kodak, Myspace, Atari,
etc.

What's hard to say from the outside looking in is if Facebook is a
1980-Microsoft/1983-Intel or is it Kodak/Atari?

I think Zuckerberg and his team are well aware of the precarious and fickle
nature of "social networking" and that's why they're exploring other channels
such as payments, virtual reality, etc. Maybe they'll even get in on the
health care monitoring game as well. If a journalist has some credible
educated guesses or grabs an insider's scoop on these unknowns, that's much
more interesting than predicting a companies death with incomplete
information.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
Survivorship bias. What about all the other companies that were the size of
Berkshire Hathaway in the 60s, Microsoft in the 80s, Apple in the 90s, etc.
that didn't develop into massive successes?

It's also worth noting that Berkshire Hathaway the textile company no longer
exists. The mill was shut down long ago and it's essentially the same company
in name only. In fact it's hardly what you would consider a business in the
typical sense of the word. BH has something like 30 employees (at Berkshire
Hathaway itself, the rest are all employed by companies Berkshire owns, which
it handles in a very hands off way).

So citing these companies as evidence that criticism of Facebook is unfounded
is of dubious validity.

~~~
jasode
>Survivorship bias.

I'm aware of that which is why I already listed counterexamples such as
Myspace, Kodak that didn't make a successful transition to a new revenue
growth.

>So citing these companies as evidence that criticism of Facebook is unfounded
is of dubious validity.

Personally I despise Facebook and enjoy reading any criticisms about it. My
point regarding this particular article was that the journalist (like every
other journalist that's not "in the know") has to base his prediction on what
Facebook is _doing now_. They don't volunteer their blind spot, therefore we
as readers have to be aware of it.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
Good points. I think I'm in agreement with you.

------
zackmorris
I recently discovered that there is no way to traverse the Facebook graph API
without a logged in user or using <app id>|<app secret> in place of a token.
This seems strange to me, because public posts can be readily seen with a
browser.

I think that it's the amalgam of many small, seemingly innocuous design
decisions like this that slowly undermine a company's credibility.

I just mean, if even the most basic features cause users grief, then I don't
have confidence in anything beyond that. The same goes for issues with Netflix
(closing API), Twitter (throttling), even Google (too much power over a site's
livelihood, no support) and Apple (constant deprecation of APIs and broken
documentation links).

I'm not sure anymore how these companies will be able to stand against free
and open competitors, which is why I see us soon entering a brave new world
where openness will be crushed by legislation from lobbyists. If anything,
behemoths like Facebook will only grow larger and more powerful, at all our
expense. That said, I still goof off for hours on Facebook, what can I say..

------
at-fates-hands
The last two years I've had times were I went "Social media" free and did
nothing on my social media accounts for 30 days at a time.

Last time I did it (about a year ago), I got lots of retweets on Twitter and
tons of people asking about it on FB. This year, when I announced what I was
doing, nobody said anything on FB. I asked a few people if they saw my post
and their response?

"Um yeah, my newsfeed is so full, when did you send it?"

"About a day ago."

"Yeah, I probably didn't see it."

Not only has social media completely bogged down people's lives, they can't
even sort through their own newsfeeds to get stuff which might actually be
important. For me, it was the last straw. As an occasional FB user, I finally
realized if I wasn't posting every 5 minutes, the likelihood someone saw my
post and could or would respond to it was almost zero.

Two weeks ago, I deleted my FB account and haven't missed a thing since.

------
mschuster91
What made people sick of Facebook was pages upon pages of Farmville,
Mafiaville and other games. And still, I get new game invitations by the day
from relatives and work colleagues which I unfortunately cannot unfriend.

~~~
differentView
When I used to use Facebook, I was able to block those games.

~~~
cgriswald
Not only can you block those games, you can prevent individual people from
sending you invites from _any_ game without unfriending them.

