Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!
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.
Some demographics FB is a necessity, i.e. ballroom dancers including those in competition to keep track of latest events and seminars. But yes there's plenty of timepits of meaningless subjects like "what would you look like as the opposite sex" which they say the results will stay private (yeah, insert blame the Russkies tagline here).
mfwright@batnet.com
How much of this is the age cohort shrinking?
I know there baby boom echo is getting older.
This is an organization with a user base of 2+ billion, with 70+ million fake profiles, and a digital graveyard of dead users numbering in the tens of millions.
By comparison, an "impact" of 1-2 million starts to look like a rounding error, regardless of the demographic.
of those accounts were bots?
I read it as 1.4 of 12.1 million.
I suppose the fact that it's only 12.1 in that age range should be more concerning were I Facebook, but 12 percent or so drop is significant too.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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.
Bigger problem: you can't see what other people share. FB has "monetized" themselves out of the business by selling all the space in the feed to advertisers and never showing you anything from the people that you're trying to stay connected to.
It used to be a good tool for keeping up with everyone in your circle and what they're up to in a kind of rapid, quick-check way. Now if you want to see your friends' or family's updates, you have to go to each person's timeline individually, one at a time. Otherwise, they're essentially invisible to you. So you just call them instead, since it amounts to the same thing as checking and scrolling through every individual profile one by one.
Meanwhile, your feed is a whole bunch of bullshit clickbait from advertisers that have paid to insert themselves into the feeds of everyone of your age and your gender in your country.
And on the very rare occasion that you do happen to see a promoted item on your feed that you're interested in, generally the the app updates the feed just as you're about to tap on it, and *poof* it's gone. And there's no way in heaven or hell to go back and find it ever again, it's just gone. It's literally a platform for carefully obscuring from you anything you want to see and putting in front of you and endless list of things you couldn't care less about.
That's not what anyone was promised when they signed up, or what led to Facebook's growth.
Basically as soon as they decided to monetize the feed aggressively, the result was predictable and lots of people predicted it. "Great, so now we're going to see a lot of ads that we don't give a shit about, disguised as 'updates' from organizations and pages we don't care about, and everything we do care about will be hidden."
Yup. Exactly what happened.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Facebook?
That's for old people!
Like my parents!
That's funny....
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