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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.
How much of this is the age cohort shrinking?
I know there baby boom echo is getting older.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
First those Russkie bastards literally hacked every voting machine in 'Murica to get that Nazi Trump elected, and now they are spending... at least $0.97.. to drive good millenials away from pro-Hillary Facebook!
DAMN YOU RUSSIA!
At least one user over 25.
"That explains why Snapchat and Instagram, which offer features for sharing photos and videos that disappear"
Uh, no, they don't. Maybe Snapchat and Instagram don't make them available to others but anyone can save those artefacts once they have access...
Captcha: record
Yep, even for us older people Facebook get's boring after awhile. Maybe because most of us actually don't have much to share?
Someone should clone Facebook 2004 and relaunch it.
I half feel bad for people that missed out. People yelling down the dorm halls "Did you find out about the facebook?" "Our school has been added to the facebook, do you have an invite?"
College only, you could go to away games or "networking" events and connect with other people that wasn't e-mail.
Now it's just the tragedy of the commons. I want to know how many "dark" groups there are. It's what has my wife hooked. She's in quite a few 'invite only' groups for her profession. They'd be much better off on a subreddit with some anonymity. I ended up making a new account just so I could add some sub groups that think that's the best way to communicate. (Some CNC, 3D printing and FreeNAS/BSD groups).
We're sitting on a powder keg of people ready to migrate to a new site. The next site that takes on Facebook, Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, etc is going to be huge. Everyone is just too afraid to leave what they know for now.
Facebook - a stolen software project, run by a sociopath
They all just died in accidents like texting while driving, or choking to death while someone else was busy posting pics of their own meal...
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?
Implement a dislike button and I'll rejoin! And none of this half-arsed "you can thumbsdown a video, but not a comment" bullshit that YouTube have implemented.
Now they are becoming teenagers.
No mystery here.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
At this point there's no one left on Facebook but moms posting kid pics and boomers writing the kind of batty political screeds that only the elderly and college kids can get away with.
of those accounts were bots?
Has this new Google+ site...
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
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.
whatever platform they go to. We're not taxing businesses enough that there's any meaningful checks on their buying power and we sure as hell aren't enforcing anti-trust laws.
Now, if self driving cars create cheap, useful mass transit, _that's_ the death of Facebook. My kid stopped using social media when she got a car and could go see her friends without a 3 hour (one way) bus ride (if there even was a bus). I know it's popular to hate on teenagers but they're not anti-social, they've just been spread out so much by urban sprawl and the lack of soccer moms (who unless you're really well off are probably working full time jobs and/or recovering from work weeks) that hanging out 'digitally' is the only practical means.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Only actually harassing and forcing people (including via manipulating then, which is more likely with children) is the problem!
I can do that with food too!
Oh sure. "Meet me at the park for sex or I'll send all of your friends and family the video of you eating a sandwich".
Totally; food works so well for blackmail.
I deleted my account for similar reasons. Facebook these days seems to just be an outrage platform with different sides all screaming at each other and nobody listening. There are rarelyany useful discussions or exchanges of information going on, and when an interesting discussion does start up half the time it results in one side getting banned from whatever page you're on. Add to that the fact that Facebook has insanely inconsistent standards for what is and isn't acceptable, and the whole thing just becomes completely useless unless you're looking to just hang out in your own little ideological echo chamber.
Facebook?
That's for old people!
Like my parents!
That's funny....
They agree to help Trump, then hacked two voting machine vendors and attacked every political email system (including opposing Republcians), to put in Trump, Trump in turn blocked the GOP position for arming Ukraine, chaning it from 'lethal weapons' to 'non-lethal' weapons, which in turn received a thank you from the Russian ambassador.
Hyperbole only works if its way way way above reality.
That's not much different.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Another problem for FB is how people use it. If people go to the site, look at their feed, see ads and post status updates FB can harvest data and sell ads.
If people just use Messenger Lite, the possibilities are much less. And from FB's point of view using the mobile app is better than using the mobile website which is better than using Messenger which is better than using Messenger Lite.
In fact the very fact that they offered Messenger Lite is a sign they're in trouble. All the crap the mobile app and full fat Messenger do in the background drained peoples batteries and people started to complain. However that background crap was a vital part of FB's data hoovering business model. So was relying on people to actively post stuff on the website, ideally with no adblocker installed.
Heck if you use uBlock Origin it's amazing how many third party websites access facebook.com, which is blocked by default on uBlock Origin.
Facebook has a lot to lose once people decide it is a bad thing and try to interact with it to the minimum possible. Unfortunately I know people in other countries who are only contactable via FB Messenger so I keep Messenger Lite on my phone. If they migrated away I'd use something else to contact them. Apart from that I avoid FB completely.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
ntr
It's known as Metcalfe's law and named after the co-creator of Ethernet. The value of a network (V) is equal to the number of nodes (n) squared - or V = n^2
When n decreases by a small amount, V decreases by a greater amount.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Grannybook is the cooles and hipstest thing ever!
Everyone is on board. Your parents, your teachers, even grandma!
Come and join this awesome world of coolness!
Only on Facebook does a mid-twenties birthday cake advance the clock of doom. And here I thought evolution was harsh tossing young women on the reproductive junk heap at age thirty.
IMO, the problem with that claim is, it doesn't adequately explain why only the younger crowd is leaving it in big numbers? Are you REALLY going to tell me that it's the 12 to 18 year olds who are the only ones who have a good grasp on the downsides of Facebook monetizing the info you post, etc. etc.??
I think the obvious answer is that the older generation has pretty much "owned" Facebook. If you sign in and look at any random "news feed", you're going to see mainly material of interest to a crowd much older than pre-teens. As long as these teens and pre-teens "friend" their own family and relatives, that's going to continue to be true -- since it's their older brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles and older cousins or nephews sharing the memes asking you to recall objects from the 1970's like rotary dial phones and LP record players, classic movie quotes from the 80's, etc. etc.
I wondered why my ex-coworker/friend (who is 8 years younger than me) never used facebook for anything even though we were facebook friends. Then we were hanging out and his story mentioned something about waking up the next morning and seeing his adventures on snapchat. It was at that point I realized he uses snapchat and I use facebook. They do the same thing but you only share with who's on your network. Most weeks, if not months I forget Snapchat exists, but then again I was just wrapping up college when facebook became available at my school. Myself and all my friends are already invested in that platform. The other day I got a notification that I'd been "Facebook friends" with someone for ten years. The kids these days have no sunk costs (years of data) in either platform, similar to how we (I) jumped around from AIM to ICQ to IRC to Google Chat and later settled on Facebook Chat and Whatsapp.
My coworker is about 25, I don't see him ever gaining a strong attachment with Facebook, beyond keeping in touch with parents and aunts and uncles for marriage/job announcements.
moox. for a new generation.
Who woulda thunk it! Facebook causes depression, proliferates fake news and hysteria and people are starting to notice? Amazing!
Everything that makes it big, like Facebook, seems to eventually grow out of its pants.
Hey we are making some cash, let's add this and that and bloat the system to the point where its nothing like it was, at least we will be rich!
Whatever comes around next will likely have the same issue. It will be great at first then history will repeat itself, even if the makers are aware of these issues, something will happen whether it be legal, social, etc.. There are always people that ruin it, which leads to changes, and then there is always tracking information and making money.
Everyone I know loved the old Facebook. Not a chat room, but just Facebook. Sure there were some issues, like annoying political posts that never change anyone's mind, news from the Onion that every old conservative believes (and will argue with you over) and the ridiculously stupid ones like Saturn will be the size of the moon in the night sky on April 22, 2019 - and people actually share it like its true!
However, it was great to keep tabs with each other and not scroll endlessly wondering if your browser will freeze before you find your friends post about the snail he found on his bedpost. Too many ads. There should be none in the news feed and less on the sidebars, hell my browser can only handle so much! I also want my feed in order, not based on an algorithm of what I should see first, nor should I have to click a drop down to sort the posts that way!
So, my question (as an old fart) is, where are they going? This question reflects my ignorance of some other social media (I don't do Instagram, Twitter, etc...at least not yet). I've continued on FB, not because I like it, but because it's allowed me to connect with many friends that I'd lost contact with 30-40 years ago. Is there a suitable substitute out there?
Just another day in Paradise