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Facebook Lost Around 2.8 Million US Users Under 25 Last Year (recode.net)
According to new estimates by eMarketer, Facebook users in the 12- to 17-year-old demographic declined by 9.9 percent in 2017, or about 1.4 million total users. That's almost three times more than the digital measurement firm expected. There were roughly 12.1 million U.S. Facebook users in the 12- to 17-year-old demographic by the end of the year. Recode reports: There are likely multiple reasons for the decline. Facebook has been losing its "cool" factor for years, and young people have more options than ever for staying in touch with friends and family. Facebook also serves as a digital record keeper -- but many young people don't seem to care about saving their life online, at least not publicly. That explains why Snapchat and Instagram, which offer features for sharing photos and videos that disappear, are growing in popularity among this demographic. Overall, eMarketer found Facebook lost about 2.8 million U.S. users under 25 last year. The research firm released Facebook usage estimates for 2018 on Monday, and expects that Facebook will lose about 2.1 million users in the U.S. under the age of 25 this year.
Facebook - a stolen software project, run by a sociopath
Myself I'm half ready to bail. Nothing in the feed worth reading anymore. All it took was a few un-follows of friends and a half dozen "this is porn" feedback of suggested news and stories of things that popped up in the feed and it hasn't been updated with much of anything in a while.
Other than a little messaging with friends and a few pictures for the Grandparents I have little to do with Facebook anymore.
How much of this is because Facebook decided that they don't care about helping people socialize any more, and that they're all about the advertiser eyeballs?
Friend someone on Facebook and you'll ... possibly occasionally see things they post, maybe. Sometimes even when they post it!
I "follow" the local National Weather Service on Facebook. (I think they call it following for pages, I can't remember, maybe that's Twitter.) They post things like weather forecasts and hazardous weather alerts. Facebook only ever shows them to me several days after they're relevant.
There's absolutely no way to find out what Facebook is hiding from you and no way to tell it not to filter things out. Is it any wonder kids don't see the appeal? Who wants to sign up for a service so that they can maybe see a few posts from their parents a couple of days after they posted them?
Re "Someone should clone"
+1 for that.
Go back further to an IM GUI, with chat rooms, video, voice, file transfer. Add in a calendar and some group collaboration.
The internet needs effortless communications, fun, ability to enjoy chat, sharing, working together.
No US party political censorship, SJW enforcing their brand of politics, per nation, per link, per comment censorship.
The internet wants its freedom of speech back from the censorship of the US party political SJW.
Once users cant send a link, comment on a link, share a link, write a movie review, read a movie review, can only select for SJW approved news links...
Thats people ready for some freedom of speech and freedom after speech.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
In the antediluvian days, before the great internet flood, CompuServe was center of the universe of the digital social space. I am sure that some readers are now asking "CompuWhat?" Then, in the Internet Archaic era, AOL arose to command the hearts and minds and social intercourse of the wired populace. "AOWhat?" Then came the Classical age of internet civilization, where Yahoo was the great Caesar. "Ya-What?". After the Dark Ages of the dotcom meltdown, a social media Renaissance arose with great city states like Myspace and Flickr. "Maybe your space grandpa, but not my space!"
[To quote from the Wikipedia article about Myspace: "From 2005 to 2008, Myspace was the largest social networking site in the world, and in June 2006 surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States. In April 2008, Myspace was overtaken by Facebook in the number of unique worldwide visitors. . . As of January 2018, Myspace was ranked 4,153 by total Web traffic, and 1,657 in the United States."]
Now, Facebook has arisen, to a rousing IPO, intriguing founders and principles, and a flow of money to make the robber barons of the Gilded Age blush with envy. Yet, social preeminence in the digital age would seem to be a fleeting, precarious, and uncertain thing. Of late, Facebook has garnered attention mostly for its dark and nefarious side, akin perhaps to fascism, communism, and other dubious and totalitarian social philosophies of the 20th century.
The Greeks reminded us of the moral perils of hubris, in parables such as Daedalus and Icarus. In modern terms, "the bigger they are, the harder they fall". Given the history of internet social media in the past 20-30 years, anybody heavily invested in Facebook might want to consider their long term position. Who knows - the very existence of monolithic social media behemoths such as Facebook might be more akin to the media model of Snapchat and Instagram, here today gone tomorrow.
The article that I read this morning was predicting a slow decline with a linear drop-off over many years. I think this completely misses the value of Facebook: it is not useful because of anything it does, it's useful because other people use it. Every person who quits makes it slightly less useful for 20 or so other people (and less valuable for a few hundred advertisers). I still run a Jabber server, but I haven't used it regularly for years - when I logged on before Christmas because I was consulting for someone who wanted to use it for pair debugging, I found that of the 100+ people in my roster, zero were online. Every person who quits a communication system increases the probability that someone else will leave. If only half of your friends are using Facebook then Facebook becomes the least convenient way of communicating, so you leave. Now there's a new group of people for whom Facebook isn't useful.
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