There isn't anything to do on facebook for the young/youth.
The games are more for the middle aged player.
They have no list of long lost people they wish to connect with. Everyone is a friend or friend of a friend.
You can follow brands but the youth want to follow a band or an actor not a toothbrush company.
Things like poking or using a fake name or having permissions connected to school or orgs created social group that you would share related photos. Now you have to manage a list or share with everyone.
Facebook was a good way for college kids to connect with everyone from there school. They could create a new persona with fun photos/videos and show everyone how popular they are. Now you hide your friend list, avoid saying anything that you wouldn't say in front of your mother and secretly worry that anything you post will be purchased by a potential future employer enabling them to filter out your resume in record time.
The sole reason I’m still on Facebook is because events are organized on Facebook. I know I’d still get invited if I deleted Facebook, but I don’t really want to be the person, that everyone always have to text message for rsvp, planning, changes and so on.
This only happens in Facebook because everyone in my social circle is on Facebook though. Young people aren’t faced with this platform lock in and I absolutely agree with you, why would they ever join?
Facebook is basically the yellow pages at this point, and how many millennials ever used a phone book?
I removed facebook from my home screen on android and replaced it with twitter.
It was surprisingly easy to forget about facebook. I had already basically avoided it for a month or two. The twitter icon was my reminder/mindless app to kill a few minutes. Twitter sucks too, but its different.
I'll check my facebook when I remember, maybe once a week when my wife mentions a friend posted something crazy on facebook. I'll check my notifications for events, but its mostly garbage.
My tech-spider-sense says the masses are losing interest in facebook.
The masses (especially boomers in America) still use Facebook, they've just retreated into groups, messenger, and marketplace. This behavior aligns with Facebook's product focuses. The Facebook killer does not exist yet.
Personally, Twitter makes me feel gross. Too much marketing spam in a small amount of time. Too easy to get sucked in and lose 30 minutes of my life to informationless noise.
On twitter you just block the accounts that are sending you promoted tweets. Eventually, you'll run out of people trying to target you. You have no recourse on Facebook.
Strange random ads are ok compared to seeing creepy demographically targeted ads. Also, there are only so many national brands who are willing to spend money indiscriminately.
I had a clicketty clicky addiction to Facebook, which I replaced with the reddit mobile app.
In a past age I was a true believer in reddit, up until 2010-2011. I had a >6-year old account. True believer, paid for gold, believed that to be something special. Reddit ruined that and went for a different, shallower audience. Turns out, that audience is also me.
Shilling and karma farming have killed ingenuous sharing of information. I used to go on reddit to discover new things. That's no longer the case. I still visit small subs about some shows, games, languages, etc, but I am no longer exposed to unexpected unknown information.
Kinda similar. I stopped using FB since a year. I don't post anymore and check notifications like once a month. I realized you can't quit social cold turkey unless you have something to do in that time. Luckily for me, I started liking Twitter, Reddit and some PUBG.
I'm going to be that person once I get around to messaging everyone alternative contact means. However, I cannot even be bothered to login to Facebook just to do that...
Not that it would change anything. Being on facebook means that people think they can invite me there, when in reality, I won't see anything until weeks or months later.
I ask because open invite eventing sucks. (I imagine organizing friends only events do too, but I wouldn't know, because we empty nesters no longer socialize like that.)
My primary volunteer gig has been experimenting with using both facebook and meetup to publish meetings, GOTV (phone banking, signature gathering), important calendar dates (eg elections).
Both kinda suck. Most of our members still get looped in via our email blasts.
But I don't really know what would be better. Looking for ideas.
(I do have ideas. But hoping to avoid making my own solution.)
PaperlessPost is a events company and we recently launched a product named "Flyer". It's an easy way to create an event and collect RSVP's using a unique URL. The designs are pretty hip too. Check it out here - https://www.paperlesspost.com/flyer
If one of my friend groups introduced a new platform, I’d have that one + Facebook. If five of my friends introduced new platforms I’d probably have 6 platforms.
Aside from that, a lot of the alternative platforms aren’t really better than Facebook. I’m on discord for instance, but they also make a living of my personal data.
100% agree. Facebook completely dropped the ball in terms of what they're really offering these days. Besides some a/b testing and ad optimisation what have they added in terms of features in the last 5 years?
It's basically a messenger and a newsfeed with pictures, sometimes videos and URLs to (often fake) news. Anything else kind of went nowhere after a while - whether that's their Classifieds section or Foursquare-competitor section or Games etc
I have seen a large part of my Facebook friends leave the platform (I'd estimate at least half are inactive). And our whole class joined when Stanford came onboard as the second school after Harvard way way way long ago.
Well a couple of years ago they added a super new feature that made the messenger stop working on mobile. And then they improved it by making it stop working when you check the 'Desktop Site' box by having it delete every word you type. Quite an effort, fucking up a text input, probably required a huge effort.
That was extremely annoying, although you can work around it by accessing mbasic.facebook.com with a mobile browser.
Also using mobile Chrome in desktop mode enables one to read messages, although it's quite awkward to use.
Facebook's push to force end users to install their messenger on mobile phones made me very suspicious. I stopped using all their regular mobile clients as well, and only use browser.
Agree- it made me suspicious as well. They wanted it a little too much.
They also wanted me to fill in profile information- which I didn't do. So they took guesses- all wrong- about my education, by job, and so on. I guess they expected that if I saw something wrong I would fix it. Nope.
#ProTip I still have some distant friends who occasionally message me on fbook messenger.
I open a private session on mobile safari, log into fbook, then “request desktop site” and read/reply. I refuse to have fbook app installed on my phone.
And an even bigger fuckup is how they spent 19 Billion USD on buying yet another messenger and never integrating it with their first messenger, so they now run two. Why, nobody knows.
Yea totally not a monopoly-like move to buy out a competitor even though they can't fully integrate it because their competitor was built around privacy and they are not.
If, by "built around privacy", you're referring to end-to-end encryption, that was introduced (fully) to WhatsApp in 2016. Facebook acquired WhatsApp in February 2014. Open Whisper Systems announced their partnership with WhatsApp in November 2014. Facebook could have easily slashed that end-to-end-by-default idea if they wished to.
I think we need to give credit to Facebook where credit is due, and it sure seems like Facebook's management wanted WhatsApp to be private for some reason.
I see no indication that WhatsApp was "private" in any way before Facebook acquired it.
Whatsapp was never about apps and never about anything but messaging. Integrating any of the features that make money for FB would've driven users away. The only thing they brought to Whatsapp is Stories (apparently all apps need this now) but I don't know anyone who uses it on Whatsapp. It's always empty on whatsapp while people happily use it on Instagram.
I can't imagine how the Whatsapp acquisition will ever pay off. It doesn't need to because they make money with FB and Instagram but I don't see why they had to buy it..
Others have touched on this... but I bet it's also to lock down that market space. Facebook's competition is communications platforms. By preventing anyone else from dominating the secure communications space, they don't face that threat.
I think they bought it purely to prevent it evolving into a competitor. It's got too many users to kill off as a product, and at least they are 'Facebook' users in a roundabout way, and by not adding anything anything new to WhatsApp they can keep it subjugated. Keep your enemies closer and all that.
Also their codebases are beyond incompatible. Facebook uses Hack, a PHP derivative while Whatsapp is Erlang. You'd need to completely rewrite the latter to integrate it but you'd lose the incredible efficiency of Whatsapp doing so.
Why do the codebases need to share a similar set of languages and tools? Integrating two services doesn't necessarily mean merging them into a single product; Facebook could likely allow the two to communicate without a complete product merger.
Are you sure about that? Is Hack / PHP powerful enough to handle billions of messages an hour? If so, i'm impressed.
But I doubt it and I'm sure you're wrong about what runs Messenger. No company, least of all the Facebook scale ones use just one language for everything.
Of course the backing service is not PHP. That would be a particularly poor choice for a high volume messaging statement. They originally wrote it in Erlang and later rewrote it in C++.
Wait what? I thought that's obvious. Facebook and WhatsApp don't even have the same type of social graph, multi-brand approaches are probably always strategically superior and changing the fundamental concept behind high-growth apps tends to be a high-risk endeavor.
There are probably a million more reasons not to prematurely integrate. (I guess they would also need to quit their e2e encryption in the process.)
Would there be any benefit beside convenience? Honest question.
I didn’t like this attempt to get you to install the messenger app either. However, I found out you can access messages on mobile using mbasic.facebook.com
Very true. They 'optimised' it with the wrong parameters in mind. And sadly they dropped the ball on big picture / vision. a/b testing is wonderful if you have an almost perfect product (Google Search). It's not when you are still trying to evolve a product.
As a teen, I'd go to the movies with my friends maybe 4 times a year. Never went to any events. The extent of our fun was playing basketball or just sitting around.
See maybe this is why I never understood the supposed all-important-ness of Events. I still just hang out with friends or family or by myself rather than going to "events".
At the older end of "teens" - a lot of people enter partner dance scenes when they're starting college. So 18-20-ish. (I'm a late bloomer, only started dancing at 25.)
And at that point, yes, they start to do everything on Facebook.
I follow local market and food truck events, a couple of cool bars and arcades I like that frequently have events on, a place that does dog-centric events, local car shows that are of interest to me, etc. Facebook then surfaces other events that it thinks are of interest to me, and most of them are. I'd say 75% of my social calendar comes from Facebook events. I can understand young people not being interested in any of this and following their specific interests, like following a band on instagram rather than a venue on facebook.
> See maybe this is why I never understood the supposed all-important-ness of Events. I still just hang out with friends or family or by myself rather than going to "events".
It's not so much all-important, but it's the one feature that impacts Facebook-abstainers the most. If someone's planning a party and is lazily using FB events, you'll probably be left out if you don't have an account.
My point is that I, and I suspect lots of people, aren't reliant on being included in party planning of this sort. I just send or receive a message to my friends or family like "barbecue at 6:30 on Friday?" or way more often I don't do that at all and just chill at home. I'm not at all saying that there isn't a very large contingent of people for whom Events is super useful because they do way more stuff that makes sense to plan that way, I know that this contingent definitely does exist. What I'm saying is that there is another contingent of people like me who just don't do that, and people often seem to be in disbelief that such people exist. We do!
A few of the local meetups are organized over FB instead of Meetup.com (because even the few bucks that Meetup charged was "too expensive" - though I think more in time/logistics than in actual dollars).
Similarly, my daughter's GirlScouts troop uses FB exclusively for organizing/announcements/voting, etc.
I used to organise a local user group - it was free to attend, quite small, and we averaged maybe one meeting every couple of months. I wanted to put it on meetup.com for more visibility, but $10/month feels like a lot to pay for something so small and non-commercial.
It’s hard to coordinate large numbers of people without events. Organizing a party before Facebook was actually a lot of work compared to now, when all of the information you need is all in one place.
If we're gonna meet up for a few drinks or lunch/dinner, we just message a group (whatsapp/telegram) but if were sorting a weekend away, or a party then FB events gets used. Easy to keep the convo all together, post details, see whos coming etc.
When I started going to raves you got a phone call from a guy who heard from a guy that there was a layby off a remote B-road that you might want to be at and when you got there another guy would give you directions along an unnamed road to an abandoned airfield and that was where the rave was.
Now we got corporate raves on a public website. The old way was better.
Yes, the raves you will only hear about from friends of friends are very much alive and well. Weekly in my area. The bars/clubs close at two, these start right after and go to 8am... 1pm next day... whatever you want.
Closed groups are big for certain use cases - either for small-ish hobby+location specific communities or for attendees of some large events (i.e. music festivals).
Yes, Facebook is very popular for expat groups around the world. Nearly every city with an active expat community has an extremely active Facebook group where people communicate. It's automatically assumed that other expats in the area are subscribed.
This may be more of a 20+ use case, but either way, Facebook groups provide a sense of community. They are more personal than subreddits and less personal than a group chat.
Your saying "I use Facebook Events extensively" places you most likely in the ~30-50 age range.
The 30+ crowd appears to believe that FaceBook is the most logical way to organize events - you can check in on your own schedule, without feeling pressured into immediately responding to someone poking you about joining up. Today's youth has no problem being expected to respond within minutes - or in the worst case, a couple of hours - to an inquiry made via SMS or Snapchat.
ie: Older person: "I may have some free time this weekend, maybe I'll check FaceBook tomorrow to see if anyone is planning something"; vs. younger generation: "Someone snapped our group telling us to come out with them Saturday, I'll decide in the next 5 minutes whether I'm in or out".
This seems very very disconnected from reality. You're confusing the word "events" for meaning "meeting up with friends"
In reality FB events are extensively used by ages 16-30 as well for bigger group gatherings, such as going on holiday, going for a weekend somewhere, or something like that.
Your anecdote look like something an older person would charicaturize about youth and elderly.
> In reality FB events are extensively used by ages 16-30 as well for bigger group gatherings, such as going on holiday, going for a weekend somewhere, or something like that.
I don't understand why you'd use FB events for "going on holiday, going for a weekend somewhere." Those things would entail a smaller, tighter knit group with much more communication and planning. Group chat seems like a better fit.
IMO, FB events are really only suitable for things like parties, with an large invite/smaller rsvp dynamic, with mostly broadcast messages from the host.
I started with BBS in the early 90s (I was technically a pre-teen) and progressed to IRC shortly after... But, I _really_ remember when ICQ first showed up in my school and then even more so when AIM followed it. It's a bit silly to say today, I guess, but those were actually defining moments when I retrospect on the popular technology during that period of my life.
So, what has replaced instant messaging _in a meaningful way_ for teenagers? I hear Snapchat, but I don't think that it's actually filling the gap. I've heard folks say YikYak before, or whatever the fuck it was called, but that app was a pile and I'm pretty sure it died anyway over privacy violations.
What's out there that is directly connecting teens online today? Please tell me they're not all walled in to Facebook without any alternatives...
Groupme. Largest group messaging app used, by far. There is also a large number using Discord, but that is mostly the more nerdy/gamer kids. No one wants to use facebook, but unfortunately most of the parents use facebook so they are forced to use it by association.
Snapchat, whatsapp, FB messenger, kik, viber, instagram, twitter ("slide in my DMs"). What I'm unsure about is anonymous online interaction. Is reddit and topic-specific forums all that are available? Maybe FB groups?
Maybe I'm nostalgic, maybe I'm stuck viewing "my" technologies through rose-tinted goggles. Maybe I'm just naive. Maybe I'm just old. It may be that "the kids" are just in to a way of communication that doesn't "feel" right to me and that I'll never understand, and which leads itself to apps like Snapchat, WhatsApp, etc... being _genuinely_ superior to what I once experienced, even when I personally view them as being woefully inadequate compared to something as simple as AIM.
It strikes me as being some sort of Socratic expression that I don't want to delve in to. I just hope that technology is serving "kids" today as well as it served me in the past, and I guess that I have to accept that what _they_ accept is performing that job satisfactorily. Maybe when I have children and they are pre-teen / teen then I will be able to understand their needs again.
>Maybe when I have children and they are pre-teen / teen then I will be able to understand their needs again.
My eldest is about to turn 15, and he and his mates use IRC. He's a wee bit geeky, so "retro", "techie", and "obscure/mainstream unpopular" appeal greatly.
Kinda funny 'cause dad is mostly on Slack/Telegram/WhatsApp these days. To the extent I use IRC at all it is on the channel he set up for the fam.
> I just hope that technology is serving "kids" today as well as it served me in the past
facebook is dial tone. Not very fun but useful when you want to communicate. Youtube is content made largely by their peer group. It's fun and dynamic. The comment threads are spicy and you can be a virtual person. Facebook is boring.
Ah. Maybe it is specifically for teen. Because every time I scroll down there I instantly regret it. Not only the content of comments have no added value, but it's not funny, or even most of the time remotely intelligible.
And I say that why understanding the appeal of the content in video games forum, which on my personal quality scale is already very low.
YouTube comments have very low value. Much lower than Facebook threaded comments, because at least you're friended those people whereas on YT they're all randos trying to get attention.
View the comments of any widespread post on Facebook like the video on a popular page.
It's even worse than Youtube comments because it shows that people post the same shit under their real name that their friends/fam can see. They aren't people you know.
Does anyone understand the sorting algorithm used? On the rare occasion I go to yt comments, I’m baffled why garbage throwaway comments with few votes are higher than thoughtful highly voted responses.
The comment threads on YouTube are usually inane. If they're not inane, they're racist or homophobic (or both at the same time).
I spent some considerable time the other day reporting racist and hateful comments on a single YouTube video. It's not something I would normally spend any time doing but in this instance it was time well spent.
I've limited my exposure to comment sections on websites to HN only. It's the only place I've found that is reliable to not be full of hate and well moderated. I only watch YouTube videos through DDG these days.
Facebook the website doesn't have much to offer, however 'everyone' has one, so its separate messenger app is still very widely used (at least in the U.K.) I'd be interested to know if this is the case in the U.S. as well.
Among my circle of friends and parents at school (K-8), Facebook is eroding as an ubiquitous platform. Many parents in certain professions feel that it is best avoided.
iMessage, SMS is ruling the day now. It’s incredible how utterly Google failed in this space by tossing Talk.
I'm not sure how to interpret the idea that iMessage is doing it right but Google was wrong to shift from talk to hangouts. Hangouts is basically iMessage but you can actually reach the other half of the population that doesn't use Apple.
Yes. But if iMessage is presented as the success and as an example of what Google could have had part of if they only hadn't switched to hangouts, I'm not sure how it works as evidence since google switched to be more like iMessage.
I'm not arguing that I think a system should or should not be open, just that I don't understand how the argument that was presented is supposed to work.
All communication systems are in the process of flipping back to closed systems.
The major open ones (mail and POTS) are either going away as telcos divest and people stop answering the phone or consolidating into a small number of big players as what we see with email.
The 2030s will probably bring back the future equivalent of Telex
Can you do chat-groups on iMessage? Because that's one of the main advantages of using FB Messenger or WhatsApp around these parts of the world (Eastern Europe).
Google is failing big in SMS. I have a Google Voice number that I've used since it was announced as Grand Central. Do you know what happens when someone sends a vcard? Nothing good - it just says it isn't supported. There isn't a way on the phone or even from a computer to SEE the vcard. I don't care if you support it, show me the blob of text and I'll read it myself!
I understand a lot of the US still uses SMS, hence the constant talk of iMessage. The rest of the world uses Whatsapp or Messenger, except Japan/China/Korea who primarily use their own clients. Nowadays the only SMS I get are 2FA codes.
iMessage between iMessage users is akin to Whatsapp/messenger -- not actually SMS/MMS. Those are only sent when, say, messaging an Android user or if an iMessage failed to deliver.
iMessage came after WhatsApp (WA itself isn't the first messaging app...), I wonder why WA didn't get big in the US, maybe it's because virtually all mobile contracts in the US include a texting package. As for WA, one key to its success was probably the automatic upload of your address book to see who of your contacts is already in the system (and the privacy side in the battle of privacy vs convenience loses another battle), on other IM clients you had to add contacts manually.
There are texting packages in European contracts as well, particularly in the more competitive markets in North Europe, but one reason to prefer WhatsApp is roaming: in the US, you can use your texting package all over the continent, but in Europe, you couldn't - whenever in a neighbour country, sending an SMS or an MMS could be very expensive, and what's worse, the price is unpredictable or even scammy.
So it was better to use wifi and WhatsApp to communicate. Once you'd fixed your net access, you could be sure of cheap easy text communications.
The EU roaming pricing law has now fixed the original cause, but it is too late to change people's behaviour.
IIRC WhatsApp also cared a lot about making the app available on all kinds of phones. Not just iOS/Android. So all those people in the rest of the world could start using it and bring their families on board.
WA is also practically non-existent in Denmark. If someone is one WA they are either an ex-pat or have lived extensive time abroad and have friends / family they keep in touch with.
Here we also have unlimited texting in all but the most limited pay-as-you-go offerings. The telco market is extremely competitive.
I'm not sure about that. I don't use Whatsapp at all anymore (and before that rarely). I'm more likely to use SMS with friends within Norway and Messenger for those who aren't in Norway.
I can attest to this (HS student). Although I specifically don't have an account, my peers definitely use FB as a means of communication, a way to publicize for school events, and organize group activities. The network effects run strong.
Messenger is definitely the most popular messaging app where I live (near Vancouver, Canada), and [1] seems to indicate that this is true for most of North America. WhatsApp is still the most popular messaging app worldwide though, although in my experience it is barely used in Canada/USA.
Facebook offers an event planner, a blog platform, photo hosting, video hosting, news aggregation, venmo-like payment system, de-facto single sign on service for most websites
That's in addition to Messenger, which as you said is huge.
When I was a teenager (10 years ago) I found out about Facebook through my own mom. Facebook isn't for the youth, the appeal of Facebook was reconnecting with old friends, and family. To a young person, they usually see their friends in school and their family all the time 'cause they get dragged wherever their parents go. The value of Facebook is a storage facility for memories, once you got a large enough body of people somewhere on the internet the rest of the internet follows as a result.
Edit:
I also hear a lot that most people are on FB due to keeping up with "events" as well. Aside from memories / connecting and events it provides no value back to me. I can call / text / email anyone I know, I guess it's just convenience.
I don't know about that; when I initially asked people about it they were telling me "oh, it's just like Myspace, but better," and it was a few years before I remember seeing teachers or older relatives signing on.
Dunno I thought MySpace was waaaay better. I got to have music on my profile, and I spoke directly with artists I liked, things I never was able to do on any other platform, at least not as common.
> Now you hide your friend list, avoid saying anything that you wouldn't say in front of your mother and secretly worry that anything you post will be purchased by a potential future employer enabling them to filter out your resume in record time.
Truer words were never spoken. Granted, I still love to use Facebook because I have friends from years ago, all over the country. It's the only way I keep in touch with them. But as another commenter brilliantly put it, they're becoming the yellow pages.
I was in high school when people started using Facebook and I don't really remember it being substantially different than now. I mean, yes, I exercise more restraint in what I post now than I did then, but is that actually a change in the platform or simply the wisdom of age? I remember my friends getting themselves into trouble by posting photos of themselves drunk.
the youth want to follow a band or an actor not a toothbrush company
Exactly. The following is emblematic of what makes YouTube great, which is precisely what YouTube the company and its corporate advertiser don't understand. In fact, it's what they try to kill, and what ideologue shills like Vox and Vice wish they were.
The games are more for the middle aged player.
They have no list of long lost people they wish to connect with. Everyone is a friend or friend of a friend.
You can follow brands but the youth want to follow a band or an actor not a toothbrush company.
Things like poking or using a fake name or having permissions connected to school or orgs created social group that you would share related photos. Now you have to manage a list or share with everyone.
Facebook was a good way for college kids to connect with everyone from there school. They could create a new persona with fun photos/videos and show everyone how popular they are. Now you hide your friend list, avoid saying anything that you wouldn't say in front of your mother and secretly worry that anything you post will be purchased by a potential future employer enabling them to filter out your resume in record time.