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Researchers Claim Facebook Is 'Dead and Buried' To Many Young Users
JoeyRox writes "The recent decline in Facebook's popularity with teenagers appears to be worsening. A Global Social Media Impact study of 16 to 18 year olds found that many considered the site 'uncool' and keep their profiles alive only to keep in touch with older relatives, for whom the site remains popular. Researches say teens have switched to using WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Twitter in place of Facebook."
Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded.
And trust me, it's not because it's "uncool", its because the little shits are afraid of getting caught.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I hate it when those damn kids start playing on my lawn.
Unfortunately researcher is almost right. I have a teenage relative that only uses instagram and snapchat. She has a Facebook profile but that's only because myself and other "older" relatives use Facebook.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I read about this in the newspaper.
Personally I find that Facebook has too many features. It sort of reminds me of Microsoft Office with this endless parade of new tiny and mostly useless features.
I think that this is where the snapchats and twitters do so very well. With a very simple core feature set it is not hard to keep focused on what works. But with facebook it almost seems like they don't want to leave anything out just in case some competitor comes along and eats their lunch.
I think it all boils down to the question: what is Facebook? With the highly successful recent upstarts that is an easy thing to answer. But with facebook the question is actually quite complex. It is very difficult for facebook to be so much to so many.
To sum it up they have lost their 30 second elevator pitch. But maybe with this information Facebook will realize that their core audience aren't teenyboppers but adults and thus will focus their feature set in that direction.
Only old people use Facebook.
Agreed.
I'm 25, I stopped using facebook about 2 years ago (suspended my account even, email spam is annoying).
I signed up to twitter, I still have my account, but honestly I don't think I ever looked at twitter after creating an account, I'm not even sure what my username is.
Communication is personal, not "lets spam the world with my words". I have a phone, I text and call people I actually want to communicate with. I have skype and IRC for online / casual discussions with people who aren't in my immediate world. Forums and mailing lists for more technical and important things. Email covers everything else.
Needless to say, with the above tools at my, far more appropriate disposal - there's literally no need, want, or remote desire for facebook, nor twitter. Nor was there ever.
After spending all their money on cell phones, kids cannot afford to buy products advertised to them on Facebook.
The fact that Facebook's customer base is morphng into older folks only helps its business model of selling ads.
I don't think there's any one place - yet - that has the cachet Facebook (and MySpace before that) once had. Among my daughter's circle of friends (all in their early 20s), though, it appears Tumblr is the new Facebook. And she's told me before the only reason she has a Facebook account at all is to keep in touch with her older relatives.
Of course I like to respond that I quit Facebook before it was cool. :-P At which point she invariably rolls her eyes and says "DA-ad..."
#DeleteChrome
Who cares? FB got enough users to go IPO and exit. In the time it took for that to happen, its users migrated to other services, just in time for them to create profitable exits for their founders and ultimately fuck over their retail investors when the userbase shifts to the next cool thing.
The only business model is passing notes in class. Email and USENET let you fuck around while looking like you were working. Then came GeoCities, profitably exited to Yahoo. Then came Instant messaging systems, same sort of pump/dump deal. (Somewhere around here phone companies discovered there was money to be made in texting, which was just another way to pass notes in class.) Then came MySpace and Facebook, and Instagram. Then came Twitter, basically a way to monetize texting and take it back from the phone companies. Now it's Snapchat, who promises to let NSA and anyone clever enough to rename a misnamed .JPG back to ".JPG" keep archives, but since most of its userbase (see above -- passing notes in class!) doesn't care, because they don't know enough about technology to see beyond "the client app autodeletes after viewing".
The more it changes, the more it stays the same, and the less I want anything to do with this industry anymore, except to daytrade the stocks in it. You can't invest in it, because fads only last 3-5 years, and it takes 2-4 of those years to go from startup to IPO exit. (Any bets on when GitHub IPOs, jumps its shark, and everyone switches to Mercurial? Fuck, maybe there's a fad/pendulum effect there, and in ten years we'll abandon DVCS for centralized versioning systems once thought obsolete, sorta like how we moved from decentralized application hosting of local executables on personal computers back to SaaS and the fuckin' cloud.)
Funny, I just had a conversation with the same answer from my low 20-somethings sister. She never uses Facebook and chats with instagram and snapchat. Seems inefficient, but maybe that's just me!
She does have a twitter account--a marketing course in one of her college classes required all the students to open a twitter account. If THAT'S not the death knell of a social network (professors ordering students to open an account!), I don't know what is.
Teenagers want and need to find a place of their own, to form their own subculture. A new technology comes along, they jump on board because they are highly adaptable, their parents less, often much less, so. But after five years the teenagers are getting out of their teens and those entering the teens once again need to find their own space. Therefore, there can be no permanent place for teens unless it puts off older people joining or staying. Anyway, someone needs to beta test the new communications paradigms.
Bitter and proud of it.
Like many slashdot users, for most of my life, I've been accused of spending too much time on computers.
As a child of the 80s, I've spent countless hours on BBSes, terminal internet, dialup internet, AOL instant messenger, battle.net, mmos, civilization 1, civilization 2, civilization 3, etc. ;-)
Today, however, I feel like a luddite. I don't use Facebook. I don't use instagram or snapchat or whatsapp. I read one or two twitter accounts, but don't have an account myself. My wife is totally hooked on Facebook, and I'm now I'm the one complaining about spending so much time on the computer!
It's a bizarre world.
She does have a twitter account--a marketing course in one of her college classes required all the students to open a twitter account. If THAT'S not the death knell of a social network (professors ordering students to open an account!), I don't know what is.
I don't think a professor can demand that of the students. What if a student cannot accept the EULA of Twitter? Will the school refund the tuition and other expenses incurred before knowing about this requirement?
WOW, full circle. welcome back to my lawn!
I think the inefficiency is part of the point, honestly. I personally dislike Facebook exactly because it has tried to be where you contact everyone you know, regardless of the context, and I simply don't want to spend the time to curate a stark divide between sharing with coworkers and friends when I don't share that much on Facebook in the first place. At this point in my life, it's like my contact list, except that it posts cat videos.
The old Facebook dismissal is that if you want share something with your real friends, you pick up the phone. I think that's the slightly wrong way to look at it, but it has a point. It's a bit of signaling, actually, that is accomplished by using the phone or any more involved means of contact. If I take the time to learn your details in a completely new or inefficient contact system, it means that messages from me are more likely to be significant because there's a greater barrier to me contacting you and I clearly put more effort into it that pulling up your profile on Facebook.
If efficiency was cool, Linux would have been developed in the 1960s, all airlines would be blended-wing, with waveriders being next year, minimum gas mileage for new cars would be 100 mpg at 100 mph, fast food would be fast (and healthy), the Tea Party would be banned by law, teenagers would have memorized everything published on the Blue Zones and ebooks would be in LuaLaTeX format, not a subset of HTML.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Why are you so jaded? If email works, then stick to it. It's not as if anyone is forcing you to follow the fashionistas? One of the beauties of Unix is that you can take a Unix programmer from the 1980s and drop him in 2014 and he'll still be productive. True, he wouldn't know anything about GUIs (which change with time) but the core has remained largely the same. The same can be said about all core technologies around today.
There was never an abundance of teenagers on Facebook. It was initially for college students, and it branched out to older users. It has never been a good tool for young people living with their parents (for obvious reasons).
She does have a twitter account--a marketing course in one of her college classes required all the students to open a twitter account. If THAT'S not the death knell of a social network (professors ordering students to open an account!), I don't know what is.
I don't think a professor can demand that of the students. What if a student cannot accept the EULA of Twitter? Will the school refund the tuition and other expenses incurred before knowing about this requirement?
No different than if an engineering student felt they couldn't accept the EULA of Matlab. These are the standard tools of the profession and if a student is unable to bring himself to use a profession's standard toolset then it is much cheaper to find out after paying for a few courses than after completing an entire degree program.
I use talk.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If efficiency was cool, Linux would have been developed in the 1960s ...
Of course, you realize that Unix development started in the mid 1960s.
The history of Unix dates back to the mid-1960s when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT&T Bell Labs, and General Electric were developing an experimental time sharing operating system called Multics for the GE-645 mainframe. ... On this PDP-7, in 1969, a team of Bell Labs researchers led by Thompson and Ritchie, including Rudd Canaday, developed a hierarchical file system, the concepts of computer processes and device files, a command-line interpreter, and some small utility programs.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
It's all about privacy. Ironically everyone said the kids don't care about privacy while not realising they were leaving in herds because of privacy. It's just that their privacy concerns are more short term than ours. They are worried about being caught doing whatever it is they do by their parents, rather than what boring stuff like what future employers will know about them etc.
The old Facebook dismissal is that if you want share something with your real friends, you pick up the phone. I think that's the slightly wrong way to look at it, but it has a point. It's a bit of signaling, actually, that is accomplished by using the phone or any more involved means of contact.
This is exactly what google+ excels at. Having circles of friends is much closer to the way we live . Of course, the circles are very small, since no one else uses google+. :(
Hmm, this is also closer to real life too
For those interested in photography though, check it out. It is worth it.
Marketing is a professional field?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why oh why did you have to write this as AC? It's the perfect analysis of the problem: Facebook is getting less popular with teens exactly because it gets more popular with older people, i.e. their parent generation.
Not only because of the ancient "It's uncool to do what your old folks are doing". You can't share your ... less "parent-compatible" exploits anymore with your friends using Facebook. Because your parents are listening. Huh? You could make it "friends only" and not friend your parents? Yeah. Sure. You can not friend your parents.
So you could only use Facebook to post about your latest "family friendly" happenings. Which would pretty much double as the killer for your social life as a teen.
So of course teens move away from a service they can't use sensibly anymore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
i have nothing to hide, i use 'wall'
A Global Social Media Impact study of 16 to 18 year olds
These are people whose social network consists of persons they see just about every day of their life, i.e., their classmates and family. It's not surprising they don't find facebook useful. What is surprising is that they find any other online social network particularly useful. I imagine twitter has more to do with keeping up with celebrities/bands and snapchat/whatsapp is really not a social network so much as it is an improved texting interface which probably works well for intercommunication between small high school cliques.
The reason they use facebook to keep in touch with older relatives is because older relatives are the only people they have developed significant relationships with who are not immediately accessible. When these same students go out-of-state to various colleges, Facebook is going to be a much better way to keep track of each others lives, interact casually with new people (i.e. facebook can be very passive, it doesn't require as much direct activity as a chat program, can just go ahead and friend that guy/girl you maybe like), and keep track of clubs and related events.
But I have seen some die off in facebook popularity. People still check it but they don't post nearly as much. I personally blame privacy issues and the 'like' feature. The latter because it's makes it a popularity contest. Some people are secure enough to not care, others are going to be put off when certain friends post and get 100 likes and they get 2, or even if they do get enough likes stress about keeping it up, or whatever. Best just not to post and avoid the stress of whether your post will be well-received by the community. Any contest is ultimately only going to be participated in by people who do well at the contest, assuming there is any choice in participating.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
I disagree. Technically the first prostitute wasn't a prostitute until she'd done the deed, and that didn't happen until she'd marketed her wares. Marketing is the oldest profession, prostitution a very close second. ;-)
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Given many (most?) major companies and organizations maintain an active Twitter presence operated by their PR or customer relations department? Yes.
Given that it only takes one bad (or mistaken/misread) tweet from a major company that could potentially disrupt millions in revenue, or even ruin their image permanently, I'm rather surprised that the organizations own lawyers haven't recommended it to be removed due to the liability*.
We've seen things go horribly wrong. Plenty of times. Some are forgiven. Most are not. All are remembered permanently thanks to the internet.
* How long before social media liability insurance policies are written? I'll give it another 15 seconds. Watch and see. I promise you it's coming.
I was having similar thoughts. Thanks for speaking my mind so clearly.
ALL social media sites are simply fads. There is not one that will stand the test of time. Facebook selling stock? Cool - Suckerburg really got one over on all the greedy fools with money to gamble. It certainly isn't going to last as long as MS, Apple, or Google. Facebook isn't the new IBM, or even Timex. Bars, pubs, and other social meeting places come and go. Facebook offers nothing truly special, unless they start serving free beer.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Sorry, didn't finish that...
What "really bugs you"?