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Is Facebook dying?

90 points by catastrophe 14y ago

duked 14y ago
I was tired of slashdot obvious advertising with itworld/networkworld/junkworld.com ... only to find the same links here :(
bluetidepro 14y ago
I know the author mentions "Ok, I admit: The question that serves as the headline for this post seems on the surface a bit absurd, if not downright crazy." at the beginning but still, I don't think he really gives much valid evidence to what his underlying point is. No offense to him, but I don't give really give much credit to his case just because of how his two children (16 year old son and 13 year old daughter) use Facebook. Esp when he says himself, they are just 2 users of the ~1 billion...
kylek 14y ago
facebook started dieing after my mom added me as a friend
- fpp 14y ago
  2007: MySpace is for losers ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/bitterjug/462059242/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bitterjug/462059242/ ) 2012: Facebook is ... (e.g. like a jail - http://duvet-dayz.com/archives/2012/03/07/1192/ http://duvet-dayz.com/archives/2012/03/07/1192/ )
- Falling3 14y ago
  Great point. Of course Facebook is dying, though probably not in the way the author intended. Since I signed up in my college days, I've seen way more negatives added than positives and the last two years has been largely downhill. Most of the people I know don't actually want to be on Facebook, but it certainly is difficult to avoid. I don't think Facebook is near the cliff right now, but it's headed towards it and accelerating.
mrchess 14y ago
I'm tired of these stupid sensationalist articles. Pre-IPO everyone talks about how amazing it is, post-IPO everyone just talks about it dying and failing. People need to do something better with their time then speculate over stupidity. It's simply way too early to tell anything.
- agscala 14y ago
  This is all anecdotal, but frankly I have noticed a serious decrease in Facebook's quality since their IPO. More often I have ads thrown (not so coincidentally) at the top of my feed, and I feel like Facebook has practically started begging me to 'like' various companies' pages. Also I've seen and endless amount of meme pictures. Surely this is related to the people I'm friends with on Facebook, but I know I'm not the only one who is being bothered by this.
- saraid216 14y ago
  > It's simply way too early to tell anything. It's always way too early to tell anything until it's too late to predict because it already happened.
stevenj 14y ago
Several of my friends have quit Facebook. Many on multiple occasions. Nearly all of them have eventually come back. Many of them multiple times. I think the ones who are still gone will come back sometime. Some inevitably won't. But I think the number of people who dislike Facebook enough to never want to use it are in the extreme minority. I think most people just don't think about whether it's evil or not. It's just where they message their friends, upload and view photos, and keep track of upcoming events. The author of the post references his kids. Someday, his kids will probably be embarrassed by their dad and grow somewhat distant from him as they grow up. Most of the time, though, I think people realize that family is important and so I'll bet that his kids will rediscover the value of their father's love. Facebook is like your online social homebase. You leave it, travel different places, see new things, meet new people, but it's what you come home to. It's a part of your identity as it serves as an online archive of your life. And for many of its users this archive started pretty early. In 20 years, I think I'll be happy that I have my Facebook to look back through.
- kintamanimatt 14y ago
  So maybe quitting Facebook is like quitting cigarettes. It usually takes multiple attempts, cold turkey, to be successful.
- iskander 14y ago
  I've been off facebook for half a year but I'm still tempted to return. There isn't a good alternative for sharing photos with a group of friends, though hopefully something will emerge.
  - jamesbritt 14y ago
    ...though hopefully something will emerge. Something will only emerge if people insist others use it, just as people now insist others use Facebook. Acquiescing to FB just perpetuates it.
  - e40 14y ago
    I've taken to posting photos on google's picasa web and marking them unlisted, then posting a link on facebook. It's not perfect, but when I tried to get everyone I want to view the pictures to get a free flickr account, it was just too hard. Only about 1/5 of them were able to understand and do it, and probably a small fraction of those that did every really checked for new pics. The problem everyone has been trained on facebook and most have no reason to change. The people on HN don't like it, but the friends and relatives I have on facebook couldn't care less about the privacy and other issues. They just use it.
tatsuke95 14y ago
>"She has at last count at least three accounts, possibly more, which she uses for different purposes – some of them just to play those stupid spammy Facebook games and quizzes." Impossible! According to Facebook, multiple accounts are not an issue, and people like this are outliers! And yet, almost everyone I know has more than one account. That 900MM user number is phonier than a three-dollar-bill. I wonder what the real number is?
- freehunter 14y ago
  One of my accounts got stolen by someone from Paraguay last week. Rather than getting it back, I just set up a new one. All I use it for is for getting coupons and deals when a company makes me "like" their page to get 5% off a hot dog.
- unreal37 14y ago
  Facebook has 955MM "monthly active uniques". That's not number of accounts (which is surely over 1B), that is number of active users over a 30 day period. So all these fake accounts - people are using them (active). Ads are being displayed, activity is happening, Facebook is making money on every single one of 955MM accounts. So what makes them phony?
  - tatsuke95 14y ago
    >"So what makes them phony?" Let's start with the fact that in the article, a 13-year old girl is using multiple accounts to play games, and nothing more. Yes, she logs in and is counted as an "monthly active user". Yes, ads are being served to her. That's the problem. She's one person. But as far as Facebook (and, hence, advertisers) are concerned, she's three. Do you really believe the demographic information she's entered in the fake accounts is accurate? Do you think that she uses the fake accounts with the same commercial intent? As someone who himself has multiple accounts, I'm skeptical.
  - lostnet 14y ago
    An account that like's people who pay for more friends on ebay is an example of a an active user. Let's suppose some of these services use real workers to log in to each account. Each worker will log in how many thousands of accounts in 30 days? What Ad will they respond to unless they are also being paid for click fraud?
halayli 14y ago
The title should be: "My kids are using Facebook less these days".
- pacomerh 14y ago
  Absolutely, and because his kids are his world, then facebook is dying. Same reason why everybody posts pictures of their kids thinking the world will be interested.
VeejayRampay 14y ago
Let us hope so.
hugh4life 14y ago
No, Facebook is not dying because Facebook is the Walmart of the internet. I'd prefer not to shop there but sometimes there's no way to avoid it.
rlu 14y ago
I feel like on a normal day, my Facebook news feed is filled with more positive posts than negative ones. I don't see people whine that often. This shouldn't be surprising - don't people want to put their best foot forward on facebook? Sure, whining is fun some of the time (yay validation! everyone like and comment and agree with me!!) but a lot of the time you want to not sound whiny. I would also hesitate jumping to conclusions based on the experiences of a seemingly antisocial 16 year old (not quite her words, but she seemed to imply it) and a 13 year old who started using Facebook when she was ELEVEN? I would not be surprised if kids in that age range whine more than kids in mine (18-24)
roryliam 14y ago
Facebook isn't dying but I think it is easier to leave than it once was. The pull of Facebook is weaker with the proliferation and growth of more niche social networks - or networks such as Twitter where users can carve their own niches - and other methods of discovery of content (the article mentions Reddit and StumbleUpon). The common complaint that Facebook is full of advertising, apps and ranty, passive aggressive status updates is justified. It is possible that people will grow tired of having their friendships and other social interactions mediated through Facebook without major changes in usage habits (maybe something more intimate and limited like Path) and the way that Facebook goes about making money. While I agree that Facebook makes it easier to keep in touch with friends - possibly due to the critical mass rather than anything inherent in the service, - I do not think this is necessarily a good thing. It is often passive (stalking) rather than active. I deleted my Facebook account last weekend and I already feel as if I have an obligation to actively pursue friendships if I want them to continue.
jbigelow76 14y ago
My Facebook account is pretty much in zombie mode now. I'll give it a quick scan every couple days to see if my friends posted anything of interest but I don't post anything. Mostly it's there so my parents don't start wondering if they need to "get on that twitter thing" and to see what I've been up to.
unreal37 14y ago
Americans spend 7 hours per month on Facebook, on average. It's not dying any more than "TV" is dying.
w1ntermute 14y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines No.
- cletus 14y ago
  It's so predictable that someone posts this on every submission with a question headline. Seriously, it's old. We get it. Just move on.
  - mbesto 14y ago
    At this point, I think it's more a comment on the quality of articles that are getting upvoted to the frontpage.
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    If I ran the world I'd ban all links to wikipedia and lesswrong entries on "laws" and "fallacies". They never actually contribute anything to the discussion.
    - getsat 14y ago
      Neither do most fallacies.
jonnathanson 14y ago
It seems a little hasty to proclaim the death of Facebook based on a sample size of two kids. In fact, when I worked in marketing, I used to dread statements from leadership (or whomever) that began with "My kid was doing X, so we should get into X," or "I heard about Y on the radio, so I wonder...," etc. Dangerously flawed assumptions can come from this line of reasoning. Anecdotal samples can be useful to form hypotheses, however, and in this case, I don't think the hypothesis is out of the question. My own anecdotes, be they personal, from friends, or from co-workers, seem to be indicating a very subtle paradigm shift in social networking. It's not so much that users are abandoning Facebook, or abandoning social, but that users are segmenting themselves by use case (or worldview, as the wonderful Amy Hoy would probably describe it). The world seems to be dividing into People Who Use Facebook Every 5 Seconds, and People Who Use Facebook About Once a Week, with perhaps some other segments of significance within that spectrum. But "seems" is the operative word here. I'd need to look at actual usage data to make any real assumptions here, and my guess is that Facebook isn't going to share data that contradicts its own growth projections.
- s_henry_paulson 14y ago
  Fair enough, but I think the reason this is getting upvoted so much is because I think many of us can relate to the content in the article, so maybe there is something here worth considering. After all, with many predecessors like Friendster and Myspace, most people that left didn't even bother to delete their accounts, they just stopped using the service. As far as anecdotal evidence, I'm seeing the same thing happen as well, both with myself and others.
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    I think stories like this get upvoted because a certain percentage of HN users want FB to fail. A certain percentage (probably other people) want Google to fail and upvote those stories. A certain percentage want YC to fail and upvote those stories. A certain percentage want Apple to fail and upvote those stories. I don't think anything meaningful can be derived from such upvote patterns.
vividmind 14y ago
I had a chance to work directly with Facebook API and in terms of documentation, bugs, overall robustness I can tell that it's pretty crappy. Takes a lot of effort to do simple stuff and things are often not working. That definitely doesn't look as a good trend. Twitter API looked a lot more solid to me. Anyways, just my 2 cents from a dev POV...
autophil 14y ago
Is Facebook dying? Yes, because lately, everyone has been asking "is Facebook dying?". It's a self-fulfilling prophesy. However, I also say yes because many people I know have abandoned their accounts or use their accounts reluctantly nowadays. So yes, Facebook will continue to bleed users and die.
cs702 14y ago
I recently heard of two teenagers (relatives of a business acquaintance) who quit FaceBook because -- well, because it's no longer the freshest gumbo. They no longer feel it's cool. A few anecdotes do not make a trend, but FaceBook should be worried, because social networks can implode quickly when they stop being perceived as 'the place to see and be seen:' http://diegobasch.com/social-networks-implode-quickly http://diegobasch.com/social-networks-implode-quickly -- PS. I can relate to the author's complaint: "on Twitter I can find the stuff I’m interested in. On Facebook I can only see the stuff other people are interested in." Very true!
- mirkules 14y ago
  Besides agreeing with your point about "coolness", I also thought about the "stuff I'm interested in" vs. "stuff other people are interested in". It struck me as an insightful sentence that perfectly describes their respective social networking models. The argument comes down to reference/reinfocement vs. discovery. The former provides reference to your knowledge and interests and reinforces them. The latter lets you discover new knowledge. There is definitely room for both ideologies, as they are both kind of necessary for social interaction. Twitter: find people with same interests, Facebook: connect with those people on a more personal level, and find out their interests. Of course, I am neglecting the fact that you can find out other people's interests on Twitter, too, but Facebook strikes me as more of a passive way to do that -- Twitter just moves too fast for that (for an occasional user, like me). So, I think while there are many, many problems with Facebook, their model of interaction might not be one of them.
abc_lisper 14y ago
Not sure if it is dying, but it is very much a product that can be killed by negative press. Just negative press. May be Murdoch can pull some strings there.
lukethomas 14y ago
My 13 year old sister doesn't even have a Facebook account - but she uses Instagram like there's no tomorrow.
- johnrydell 14y ago
  Exactly the same in my town. My 13 year old daughter and all of her friends are Instagram users. I'm not sure if they are rebelling against Facebook but they love texting and Instagram. While I like emailing and FB. Generational differences...
- Sayter 14y ago
  That's precisely why Facebook purchased Instagram.
tptacek 14y ago
Can anyone point to a single good ITWorld story ever posted to HN? We get an anomalous number if ITWorld postings, because they use spam accounts to seed their stories here. But that aside: have any of them ever been good? Be mindful that you could spark an interesting HN thread by asking any inflammatory question and then just filling the article with lorem ipsum text.
- duked 14y ago
  I'm with you man, and that's one of the reason I stopped reading slashdot. ITworld/networlworld/crapworld are really not the best source of information when it comes to IT...
PaulHoule 14y ago
I haven't used FB in the last few months except to log into other sites. I haven't used Twitter much either, since the U.I. has gotten so slow for me I'd need to carve out a 10 minute block of time to wait for it to load.
jksmith 14y ago
If I really cared about this stuff, I'd love to respond to yet another request to get on Facebook by saying that I only do Myspace. I think I just felt a trend-setter gasm there. Facebook is not even cool anymore, and in five years time will be seen as one of the dumbest IPO's in history. How did these greyhairs who invested in this crap make their money in the first place? Tesla, yes. SpaceX, yes. Facebook? Are you fucking kidding me?
prostoalex 14y ago
Is communicating with friends dying? Sure, nearly six billion people do it. But I for one am dealing with a serious case of burnout. And I know I'm not alone. Ok, I admit: The question that serves as the headline for this post seems on the surface a bit absurd, if not downright crazy. Any day now seven billionth person is about to communicate with friends, and that's a population more than 21 times that of the United States. The reason I ask if communicating with friends is dying is simple: It’s because my kids have pretty much stopped doing it. Just the other day my 16 year old son told me he rarely does it, because he’s tired of other people’s whiny life updates. He’d rather spend his time reading books and discovering new things (when he’s supposed to be doing his homework, naturally). In other words, he’d like to do his own random discovery, rather than rely on his friends to do it for him. My 13-year-old daughter, a much more social creature, was all over communicating with friends for the first two years she tried it. But lately she has discovered scrapbooking, where she can build her own scrapbook and find others that interest her – without getting all this stuff she doesn’t care about pushed at her by her parents, relatives, and assorted friends. In other words, the generation that follows Gen Z has grown disenchanted with the very nature of communicating with friends. And I gotta say, I’m starting to see their point. More and more when I am bored and looking for distraction in real life I go first to newspaper or TV. Last night, for example, I spent a ridiculous amount of time following the CNN coverage of 47 percent and all the snark that erupted from Mitt Romney’s “off the cuff, inelegant” comments about the half of America he apparently detests. I was listening to national news anchors, whose voice and ability to stay fair and balanced are far superior to the local TV station experience (and miles ahead of any political coverage I ever get from my friends and family). The TV remote let me quickly change channels without having to buy a new television set or turn it off and on again. So I spent a solid hour skimming through news bytes and listening in-depth to those that piqued my interest.
- zorbo 14y ago
  Is Facebook no longer a method of communicating with friends?
- alberich 14y ago
  Your kids as just finding out that people that talk too much about themselves are boring. On facebook there is an army of people ready to post what they ate for breakfast, what they saw on TV, and so on. These people just want an audience to watch what they are doing (mostly uninteresting stuff heh).
RandallBrown 14y ago
A friend of mine I haven't talked to in awhile told me that he deleted his facebook. He said that any of the people he actually wants to be in contact with have his phone number and can catch up with him that way. The thing is though, we live on other sides of the country. I'm not really the kind of guy that randomly calls up his friends just to see how they're doing. There really aren't any other reasons to talk to him, so we just end up not talking. With my friends that are on Facebook though, I can read what they're doing, they can see what I'm doing, and we can comment and talk about it. Oh, you saw a movie? I also saw that movie, wasn't it good/bad/funny/whatever? Also, the groups and events on Facebook are just fantastic for planning things. I went on a trip with some friends from college a couple weeks ago. We all live in different parts of the country and coordinating something like that would have been a nightmare without Facebook. We made a group and used it to post all the information about when our flights were leaving, what hotel we'd be staying at. It was really really convenient. If you're annoyed with your friends posting stupid stuff, just ignore the news feed. There are dozens of other reasons to use facebook.
taylodl 14y ago
Better question: are all social networking sites doomed to be fads and thus doomed to die? The answer leads to paradoxical results. If we answer 'yes' then no one will create another Facebook and thus Facebook will survive. If we answer 'no' then a competitor will emerge and thus increasing the chance that Facebook dies.
derwiki 14y ago
tl;dr another reporter has deciding that since Facebook is waning in his household, it everyone else will probably start hating it. I'm not convinced this article provides any value, except as Yet Another thread where people can weigh in on "why I don't use Facebook anymore" or "why you're all wrong, Facebook is fine."
dumb_dumb 14y ago
Not sure about the headline but it makes sense what his kids are doing. Reddit and Tumblr allow much more freedom and do not try so blatently hard to profit from traffic. Facebook is dying a slow death for what it was once used for: fun. They have too much cash on hand to disappear any time soon. But users will grow tired of Facebook as a pleasurable diversion. Because Facebook will keep trying harder and harder to make money. Because the traffic will gradually slow down. When you make all your money from display ads, and the traffic begins to slow, you get desperate. Slowly, Facebook is inching toward this inevitability.
smashing 14y ago
I get that the overwhelming majority of Hacker News supports Barack Obama and feels the need to be very vocal in their support of him online. I understand that every two to four years their is a lot of online discussion about how evil Republicans are and how they hold us back in every way. I understand that acknowledging this as politics and not as the absolute truth to the way things have to be is very unpopular online, even on this site which is supposed to be relatively free of politics. But why do I always feel left out? I don't want to participate in the months of hate-Hate-HATE to whatever Republican candidate happens to be in the running for office. I personally don't think Romney is all that bad, and I don't think that Obama is all that good. I like technical things, not political things.
mykosmos 14y ago
The social approach is biased because one not necessarily likes what his friends like. People tend to be friend with people who have different hobbies/interests.
GeneralMaximus 14y ago
Facebook is not dying. I feel it's going from being a fad to a utility. I've noticed that people I know are posting fewer status updates with every passing year, but they still heavily use Facebook for chat, event invitations, photos and groups. For a lot of people, Facebook seems to be becoming less of a pastime and more of a tool for communicating with friends and family. I dislike Facebook as much as the next hacker, but I don't think Facebook is going anywhere anytime soon. It'll just become less interesting as a communication medium. After all, nobody is excited about the telephone any more.

90 points by catastrophe 14y ago

duked 14y ago

I was tired of slashdot obvious advertising with itworld/networkworld/junkworld.com ... only to find the same links here :(

bluetidepro 14y ago

I know the author mentions "Ok, I admit: The question that serves as the headline for this post seems on the surface a bit absurd, if not downright crazy." at the beginning but still, I don't think he really gives much valid evidence to what his underlying point is. No offense to him, but I don't give really give much credit to his case just because of how his two children (16 year old son and 13 year old daughter) use Facebook. Esp when he says himself, they are just 2 users of the ~1 billion...

kylek 14y ago

facebook started dieing after my mom added me as a friend

fpp 14y ago
2007: MySpace is for losers ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/bitterjug/462059242/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bitterjug/462059242/ ) 2012: Facebook is ... (e.g. like a jail - http://duvet-dayz.com/archives/2012/03/07/1192/ http://duvet-dayz.com/archives/2012/03/07/1192/ )
Falling3 14y ago
Great point. Of course Facebook is dying, though probably not in the way the author intended. Since I signed up in my college days, I've seen way more negatives added than positives and the last two years has been largely downhill. Most of the people I know don't actually want to be on Facebook, but it certainly is difficult to avoid. I don't think Facebook is near the cliff right now, but it's headed towards it and accelerating.

mrchess 14y ago

I'm tired of these stupid sensationalist articles. Pre-IPO everyone talks about how amazing it is, post-IPO everyone just talks about it dying and failing. People need to do something better with their time then speculate over stupidity. It's simply way too early to tell anything.

agscala 14y ago
This is all anecdotal, but frankly I have noticed a serious decrease in Facebook's quality since their IPO. More often I have ads thrown (not so coincidentally) at the top of my feed, and I feel like Facebook has practically started begging me to 'like' various companies' pages. Also I've seen and endless amount of meme pictures. Surely this is related to the people I'm friends with on Facebook, but I know I'm not the only one who is being bothered by this.
saraid216 14y ago
> It's simply way too early to tell anything. It's always way too early to tell anything until it's too late to predict because it already happened.

stevenj 14y ago

Several of my friends have quit Facebook. Many on multiple occasions. Nearly all of them have eventually come back. Many of them multiple times. I think the ones who are still gone will come back sometime. Some inevitably won't. But I think the number of people who dislike Facebook enough to never want to use it are in the extreme minority. I think most people just don't think about whether it's evil or not. It's just where they message their friends, upload and view photos, and keep track of upcoming events. The author of the post references his kids. Someday, his kids will probably be embarrassed by their dad and grow somewhat distant from him as they grow up. Most of the time, though, I think people realize that family is important and so I'll bet that his kids will rediscover the value of their father's love. Facebook is like your online social homebase. You leave it, travel different places, see new things, meet new people, but it's what you come home to. It's a part of your identity as it serves as an online archive of your life. And for many of its users this archive started pretty early. In 20 years, I think I'll be happy that I have my Facebook to look back through.

kintamanimatt 14y ago
So maybe quitting Facebook is like quitting cigarettes. It usually takes multiple attempts, cold turkey, to be successful.
iskander 14y ago
I've been off facebook for half a year but I'm still tempted to return. There isn't a good alternative for sharing photos with a group of friends, though hopefully something will emerge.
- jamesbritt 14y ago
  ...though hopefully something will emerge. Something will only emerge if people insist others use it, just as people now insist others use Facebook. Acquiescing to FB just perpetuates it.
- e40 14y ago
  I've taken to posting photos on google's picasa web and marking them unlisted, then posting a link on facebook. It's not perfect, but when I tried to get everyone I want to view the pictures to get a free flickr account, it was just too hard. Only about 1/5 of them were able to understand and do it, and probably a small fraction of those that did every really checked for new pics. The problem everyone has been trained on facebook and most have no reason to change. The people on HN don't like it, but the friends and relatives I have on facebook couldn't care less about the privacy and other issues. They just use it.

tatsuke95 14y ago

>"She has at last count at least three accounts, possibly more, which she uses for different purposes – some of them just to play those stupid spammy Facebook games and quizzes." Impossible! According to Facebook, multiple accounts are not an issue, and people like this are outliers! And yet, almost everyone I know has more than one account. That 900MM user number is phonier than a three-dollar-bill. I wonder what the real number is?

freehunter 14y ago
One of my accounts got stolen by someone from Paraguay last week. Rather than getting it back, I just set up a new one. All I use it for is for getting coupons and deals when a company makes me "like" their page to get 5% off a hot dog.
unreal37 14y ago
Facebook has 955MM "monthly active uniques". That's not number of accounts (which is surely over 1B), that is number of active users over a 30 day period. So all these fake accounts - people are using them (active). Ads are being displayed, activity is happening, Facebook is making money on every single one of 955MM accounts. So what makes them phony?
- tatsuke95 14y ago
  >"So what makes them phony?" Let's start with the fact that in the article, a 13-year old girl is using multiple accounts to play games, and nothing more. Yes, she logs in and is counted as an "monthly active user". Yes, ads are being served to her. That's the problem. She's one person. But as far as Facebook (and, hence, advertisers) are concerned, she's three. Do you really believe the demographic information she's entered in the fake accounts is accurate? Do you think that she uses the fake accounts with the same commercial intent? As someone who himself has multiple accounts, I'm skeptical.
- lostnet 14y ago
  An account that like's people who pay for more friends on ebay is an example of a an active user. Let's suppose some of these services use real workers to log in to each account. Each worker will log in how many thousands of accounts in 30 days? What Ad will they respond to unless they are also being paid for click fraud?

halayli 14y ago

The title should be: "My kids are using Facebook less these days".

pacomerh 14y ago
Absolutely, and because his kids are his world, then facebook is dying. Same reason why everybody posts pictures of their kids thinking the world will be interested.

VeejayRampay 14y ago

Let us hope so.

hugh4life 14y ago

No, Facebook is not dying because Facebook is the Walmart of the internet. I'd prefer not to shop there but sometimes there's no way to avoid it.

rlu 14y ago

I feel like on a normal day, my Facebook news feed is filled with more positive posts than negative ones. I don't see people whine that often. This shouldn't be surprising - don't people want to put their best foot forward on facebook? Sure, whining is fun some of the time (yay validation! everyone like and comment and agree with me!!) but a lot of the time you want to not sound whiny. I would also hesitate jumping to conclusions based on the experiences of a seemingly antisocial 16 year old (not quite her words, but she seemed to imply it) and a 13 year old who started using Facebook when she was ELEVEN? I would not be surprised if kids in that age range whine more than kids in mine (18-24)

roryliam 14y ago

Facebook isn't dying but I think it is easier to leave than it once was. The pull of Facebook is weaker with the proliferation and growth of more niche social networks - or networks such as Twitter where users can carve their own niches - and other methods of discovery of content (the article mentions Reddit and StumbleUpon). The common complaint that Facebook is full of advertising, apps and ranty, passive aggressive status updates is justified. It is possible that people will grow tired of having their friendships and other social interactions mediated through Facebook without major changes in usage habits (maybe something more intimate and limited like Path) and the way that Facebook goes about making money. While I agree that Facebook makes it easier to keep in touch with friends - possibly due to the critical mass rather than anything inherent in the service, - I do not think this is necessarily a good thing. It is often passive (stalking) rather than active. I deleted my Facebook account last weekend and I already feel as if I have an obligation to actively pursue friendships if I want them to continue.

jbigelow76 14y ago

My Facebook account is pretty much in zombie mode now. I'll give it a quick scan every couple days to see if my friends posted anything of interest but I don't post anything. Mostly it's there so my parents don't start wondering if they need to "get on that twitter thing" and to see what I've been up to.

unreal37 14y ago

Americans spend 7 hours per month on Facebook, on average. It's not dying any more than "TV" is dying.

w1ntermute 14y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines No.

cletus 14y ago
It's so predictable that someone posts this on every submission with a question headline. Seriously, it's old. We get it. Just move on.
- mbesto 14y ago
  At this point, I think it's more a comment on the quality of articles that are getting upvoted to the frontpage.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  If I ran the world I'd ban all links to wikipedia and lesswrong entries on "laws" and "fallacies". They never actually contribute anything to the discussion.
  - getsat 14y ago
    Neither do most fallacies.

jonnathanson 14y ago

It seems a little hasty to proclaim the death of Facebook based on a sample size of two kids. In fact, when I worked in marketing, I used to dread statements from leadership (or whomever) that began with "My kid was doing X, so we should get into X," or "I heard about Y on the radio, so I wonder...," etc. Dangerously flawed assumptions can come from this line of reasoning. Anecdotal samples can be useful to form hypotheses, however, and in this case, I don't think the hypothesis is out of the question. My own anecdotes, be they personal, from friends, or from co-workers, seem to be indicating a very subtle paradigm shift in social networking. It's not so much that users are abandoning Facebook, or abandoning social, but that users are segmenting themselves by use case (or worldview, as the wonderful Amy Hoy would probably describe it). The world seems to be dividing into People Who Use Facebook Every 5 Seconds, and People Who Use Facebook About Once a Week, with perhaps some other segments of significance within that spectrum. But "seems" is the operative word here. I'd need to look at actual usage data to make any real assumptions here, and my guess is that Facebook isn't going to share data that contradicts its own growth projections.

s_henry_paulson 14y ago
Fair enough, but I think the reason this is getting upvoted so much is because I think many of us can relate to the content in the article, so maybe there is something here worth considering. After all, with many predecessors like Friendster and Myspace, most people that left didn't even bother to delete their accounts, they just stopped using the service. As far as anecdotal evidence, I'm seeing the same thing happen as well, both with myself and others.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  I think stories like this get upvoted because a certain percentage of HN users want FB to fail. A certain percentage (probably other people) want Google to fail and upvote those stories. A certain percentage want YC to fail and upvote those stories. A certain percentage want Apple to fail and upvote those stories. I don't think anything meaningful can be derived from such upvote patterns.

vividmind 14y ago

I had a chance to work directly with Facebook API and in terms of documentation, bugs, overall robustness I can tell that it's pretty crappy. Takes a lot of effort to do simple stuff and things are often not working. That definitely doesn't look as a good trend. Twitter API looked a lot more solid to me. Anyways, just my 2 cents from a dev POV...

autophil 14y ago

Is Facebook dying? Yes, because lately, everyone has been asking "is Facebook dying?". It's a self-fulfilling prophesy. However, I also say yes because many people I know have abandoned their accounts or use their accounts reluctantly nowadays. So yes, Facebook will continue to bleed users and die.

cs702 14y ago

I recently heard of two teenagers (relatives of a business acquaintance) who quit FaceBook because -- well, because it's no longer the freshest gumbo. They no longer feel it's cool. A few anecdotes do not make a trend, but FaceBook should be worried, because social networks can implode quickly when they stop being perceived as 'the place to see and be seen:' http://diegobasch.com/social-networks-implode-quickly http://diegobasch.com/social-networks-implode-quickly -- PS. I can relate to the author's complaint: "on Twitter I can find the stuff I’m interested in. On Facebook I can only see the stuff other people are interested in." Very true!

mirkules 14y ago
Besides agreeing with your point about "coolness", I also thought about the "stuff I'm interested in" vs. "stuff other people are interested in". It struck me as an insightful sentence that perfectly describes their respective social networking models. The argument comes down to reference/reinfocement vs. discovery. The former provides reference to your knowledge and interests and reinforces them. The latter lets you discover new knowledge. There is definitely room for both ideologies, as they are both kind of necessary for social interaction. Twitter: find people with same interests, Facebook: connect with those people on a more personal level, and find out their interests. Of course, I am neglecting the fact that you can find out other people's interests on Twitter, too, but Facebook strikes me as more of a passive way to do that -- Twitter just moves too fast for that (for an occasional user, like me). So, I think while there are many, many problems with Facebook, their model of interaction might not be one of them.

abc_lisper 14y ago

Not sure if it is dying, but it is very much a product that can be killed by negative press. Just negative press. May be Murdoch can pull some strings there.

lukethomas 14y ago

My 13 year old sister doesn't even have a Facebook account - but she uses Instagram like there's no tomorrow.

johnrydell 14y ago
Exactly the same in my town. My 13 year old daughter and all of her friends are Instagram users. I'm not sure if they are rebelling against Facebook but they love texting and Instagram. While I like emailing and FB. Generational differences...
Sayter 14y ago
That's precisely why Facebook purchased Instagram.

tptacek 14y ago

Can anyone point to a single good ITWorld story ever posted to HN? We get an anomalous number if ITWorld postings, because they use spam accounts to seed their stories here. But that aside: have any of them ever been good? Be mindful that you could spark an interesting HN thread by asking any inflammatory question and then just filling the article with lorem ipsum text.

duked 14y ago
I'm with you man, and that's one of the reason I stopped reading slashdot. ITworld/networlworld/crapworld are really not the best source of information when it comes to IT...

PaulHoule 14y ago

I haven't used FB in the last few months except to log into other sites. I haven't used Twitter much either, since the U.I. has gotten so slow for me I'd need to carve out a 10 minute block of time to wait for it to load.

jksmith 14y ago

If I really cared about this stuff, I'd love to respond to yet another request to get on Facebook by saying that I only do Myspace. I think I just felt a trend-setter gasm there. Facebook is not even cool anymore, and in five years time will be seen as one of the dumbest IPO's in history. How did these greyhairs who invested in this crap make their money in the first place? Tesla, yes. SpaceX, yes. Facebook? Are you fucking kidding me?

prostoalex 14y ago

Is communicating with friends dying? Sure, nearly six billion people do it. But I for one am dealing with a serious case of burnout. And I know I'm not alone. Ok, I admit: The question that serves as the headline for this post seems on the surface a bit absurd, if not downright crazy. Any day now seven billionth person is about to communicate with friends, and that's a population more than 21 times that of the United States. The reason I ask if communicating with friends is dying is simple: It’s because my kids have pretty much stopped doing it. Just the other day my 16 year old son told me he rarely does it, because he’s tired of other people’s whiny life updates. He’d rather spend his time reading books and discovering new things (when he’s supposed to be doing his homework, naturally). In other words, he’d like to do his own random discovery, rather than rely on his friends to do it for him. My 13-year-old daughter, a much more social creature, was all over communicating with friends for the first two years she tried it. But lately she has discovered scrapbooking, where she can build her own scrapbook and find others that interest her – without getting all this stuff she doesn’t care about pushed at her by her parents, relatives, and assorted friends. In other words, the generation that follows Gen Z has grown disenchanted with the very nature of communicating with friends. And I gotta say, I’m starting to see their point. More and more when I am bored and looking for distraction in real life I go first to newspaper or TV. Last night, for example, I spent a ridiculous amount of time following the CNN coverage of 47 percent and all the snark that erupted from Mitt Romney’s “off the cuff, inelegant” comments about the half of America he apparently detests. I was listening to national news anchors, whose voice and ability to stay fair and balanced are far superior to the local TV station experience (and miles ahead of any political coverage I ever get from my friends and family). The TV remote let me quickly change channels without having to buy a new television set or turn it off and on again. So I spent a solid hour skimming through news bytes and listening in-depth to those that piqued my interest.

zorbo 14y ago
Is Facebook no longer a method of communicating with friends?
alberich 14y ago
Your kids as just finding out that people that talk too much about themselves are boring. On facebook there is an army of people ready to post what they ate for breakfast, what they saw on TV, and so on. These people just want an audience to watch what they are doing (mostly uninteresting stuff heh).

RandallBrown 14y ago

A friend of mine I haven't talked to in awhile told me that he deleted his facebook. He said that any of the people he actually wants to be in contact with have his phone number and can catch up with him that way. The thing is though, we live on other sides of the country. I'm not really the kind of guy that randomly calls up his friends just to see how they're doing. There really aren't any other reasons to talk to him, so we just end up not talking. With my friends that are on Facebook though, I can read what they're doing, they can see what I'm doing, and we can comment and talk about it. Oh, you saw a movie? I also saw that movie, wasn't it good/bad/funny/whatever? Also, the groups and events on Facebook are just fantastic for planning things. I went on a trip with some friends from college a couple weeks ago. We all live in different parts of the country and coordinating something like that would have been a nightmare without Facebook. We made a group and used it to post all the information about when our flights were leaving, what hotel we'd be staying at. It was really really convenient. If you're annoyed with your friends posting stupid stuff, just ignore the news feed. There are dozens of other reasons to use facebook.

taylodl 14y ago

Better question: are all social networking sites doomed to be fads and thus doomed to die? The answer leads to paradoxical results. If we answer 'yes' then no one will create another Facebook and thus Facebook will survive. If we answer 'no' then a competitor will emerge and thus increasing the chance that Facebook dies.

derwiki 14y ago

tl;dr another reporter has deciding that since Facebook is waning in his household, it everyone else will probably start hating it. I'm not convinced this article provides any value, except as Yet Another thread where people can weigh in on "why I don't use Facebook anymore" or "why you're all wrong, Facebook is fine."

dumb_dumb 14y ago

Not sure about the headline but it makes sense what his kids are doing. Reddit and Tumblr allow much more freedom and do not try so blatently hard to profit from traffic. Facebook is dying a slow death for what it was once used for: fun. They have too much cash on hand to disappear any time soon. But users will grow tired of Facebook as a pleasurable diversion. Because Facebook will keep trying harder and harder to make money. Because the traffic will gradually slow down. When you make all your money from display ads, and the traffic begins to slow, you get desperate. Slowly, Facebook is inching toward this inevitability.

smashing 14y ago

I get that the overwhelming majority of Hacker News supports Barack Obama and feels the need to be very vocal in their support of him online. I understand that every two to four years their is a lot of online discussion about how evil Republicans are and how they hold us back in every way. I understand that acknowledging this as politics and not as the absolute truth to the way things have to be is very unpopular online, even on this site which is supposed to be relatively free of politics. But why do I always feel left out? I don't want to participate in the months of hate-Hate-HATE to whatever Republican candidate happens to be in the running for office. I personally don't think Romney is all that bad, and I don't think that Obama is all that good. I like technical things, not political things.

mykosmos 14y ago

The social approach is biased because one not necessarily likes what his friends like. People tend to be friend with people who have different hobbies/interests.

GeneralMaximus 14y ago

Facebook is not dying. I feel it's going from being a fad to a utility. I've noticed that people I know are posting fewer status updates with every passing year, but they still heavily use Facebook for chat, event invitations, photos and groups. For a lot of people, Facebook seems to be becoming less of a pastime and more of a tool for communicating with friends and family. I dislike Facebook as much as the next hacker, but I don't think Facebook is going anywhere anytime soon. It'll just become less interesting as a communication medium. After all, nobody is excited about the telephone any more.