About six months ago, I noticed something about Facebook: it was slow. I don't mean that I was getting fewer "likes" or that I had less crap in my feed; those things haven't really changed. But conversation in groups has dropped off sharply, and most telling, popular groups that had been gaining new members daily -- sometimes by the hundreds -- started having slower membership gains. Then they plateaued. And now they are declining. Post reach dropped precipitously, I suspect as part of Facebook's efforts to convince group and page owners to pay for visibility. It's funny that after all these years, they still don't understand how the internet works.
I've seen this before. I saw it with dialup BBSes, and with newsgroups, and with pay-per-month web services, and with free webforums. I've been waiting for it, because frankly, Facebook is a shitty, shitty platform for online discussion, and discussion has always been my main motivation for being online.
I went looking to see what the Web had to say about Facebook's user numbers, and found these:
http://www.fastcompany.com/3025273/fast-feed/study-facebook-will-lose-80-of-its-users-by-2017
http://www.dailydot.com/technology/facebook-teen-stats-fall-2014/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2015/01/27/facebook-active-users-decline/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/27/facebooks-active-users-arent-so-active-anymore-says-survey-data/
I can't say I'll be sorry to see it go.
But what will fill the niche? Most other platforms either try to be Facebook, or are sort of an niche app that expanded beyond it's original vision.
There seemed to be more interaction on facebook...
What i believe fucked themselves in the A was their motherfucking sponsored news articles and ads in the goddamn newsfeed... i want to see what my acquaintances are up to, not the billionth 20 THINGS ABOUT THAT YOU WONT BELIEVE
my newsfeed besides that is filled with updates of pretty alt models... but with people i know we mostly keep it in chat and rarely post anything....
for all we care we might as well be in msn messenger that allows for offline messages to be sent... or could be whatsapp if it wasnt such a bitch to type on a phone...
Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on June 03, 2015, 05:46:03 PM
But what will fill the niche? Most other platforms either try to be Facebook, or are sort of an niche app that expanded beyond it's original vision.
No idea.
My only guess is that whatever it is will be completely different, and will just sort of bloom onto the scene organically.
Good riddance!
Time for a Myspace comeback!
I actually suspect it will be Twitter.
I found myself over the last year interacting more with the discordians on facebook then anyone else, friends, family etc.
Facebook isn't cool for young people so that will be an ultimate death for the site but not for a few years to come.
Baseless speculation: Facebook goes through periodic Drive-people-away mode ever since the IPO, in a price fixing exercise.
Say you have a load of shares in facebook, you are its ceo, and you control its technology.
You sell a load of your shares at a high price, but you control the product.
You make the product unpleasant to users and drive down revenue from adverts and get some negative press about privacy issues or thought experiments etc, you drive down the share price and buy back some of your initial shares.
You fix the product, people become more active, the revenue stream restores. Your share price goes up and you sell again for a large profit before repeating the cycle.
Crazy talk. Utter madness. Such things would never happen.
Good.
Fuck facebook.
I'm hoping for some kind of integrated communication platform with various options for both direct and indirect communication. In which the user decides which are direct and which are indirect based on personal preference.
Facebook will add Myspace groups the ones that mimic forums.
Several of my friends and I use it quite extensively as a communication hub, but I wonder if we fall in a narrow demographic band where Facebook rose to prominence at just the right time in our lives. The Internet will move on and some of us will stay just out of habit.
Also gonna say, I've noticed a SHARP drop off in the last 6 months, in groups.
I think I can see why, to a degree. Same thing happened here. Put a bunch of people in a room. The smarter, charismatic ones start seeing it as a competition, and drive each other away. Eventually, you fall below a threshold where conversations can occur.
(Similarity ends here)
In the meantime, the people that leave make more pages, which go gangbusters for a few days and then die.
And all the people who hang around ANYWHERE post millions of "game" or "joke" threads, and there's the horrible selfie threads, of course.
I've noticed a bend away from what people are actually doing, and a shift to what's "Trending"
People stop talking about their lives and doings in favor of the latest funny meme, clickbait article, or point of outrage. Facebook promotes these, and certainly slants posting order to them, because some make them advertising money.
Hence the plot is lost
Quote from: Richter on June 05, 2015, 01:11:40 AM
I've noticed a bend away from what people are actually doing, and a shift to what's "Trending"
People stop talking about their lives and doings in favor of the latest funny meme, clickbait article, or point of outrage. Facebook promotes these, and certainly slants posting order to them, because some make them advertising money.
Hence the plot is lost
Yes yes, the newsfeed has been corrupted, in that sense (of many) Myspace was better.
One other thing: Dial up BBSs had a small following. Then the internet happened, and people became more and more drawn into social interaction accordingly.
So a possibility is that people are just getting sick of being so social.
I discussed this a little at the amsterdam conference I went to. I wish I was still in the job that paid me to look into trends, but it sounds like a similar cycle found in BBs and early online gaming (MUs etc).
Essentially, the new thing flourishes for a while, people play around with the format of the tool, bend its purpose a bit, and form into cliques. These then gradually fall victim to all the usual issues of group dynamics, become 'crusading' or 'fluffy', and people realize it is no longer fun. Then The New Hotness takes over to do the same thing, and a hard core is left behind in the old place.
I doubt TNH is going to be Twitter, though. Last time I was paying attention Twitter was on the decline. Its toolset is specifically designed against indepth discussion. No idea what TNH is gonna be, though. Maybe I'm wrong.
Quote from: Doktor Howl on June 05, 2015, 04:54:13 AM
One other thing: Dial up BBSs had a small following. Then the internet happened, and people became more and more drawn into social interaction accordingly.
So a possibility is that people are just getting sick of being so social.
I know I am.
/grumpy hermit
Oh who am I kidding, that slash is a lie. I never stop being a grumpy hermit.
Quote from: Demolition Squid on June 05, 2015, 08:35:33 AM
I doubt TNH is going to be Twitter, though. Last time I was paying attention Twitter was on the decline. Its toolset is specifically designed against indepth discussion. No idea what TNH is gonna be, though. Maybe I'm wrong.
the largest growing userbase with the 15-25 years is snapchat, its a dumb format but it is arguable that they are undercutting the young userbase from facebook.
Instagram too is on the rise among teens. Seems to me people don't want to talk anymore.
sharing content is easier than talking to people I guess :(
Interesting...
I've been curious about whether this might be related to the increasing polarization in public discourse. It could just be nostalgia, but I don't remember people jumping straight to 'fuck you and everything you stand for' the moment one aspect of something you said didn't jive with their view ten years ago - even on the heavily moderated sites like MysticWicks. That feels like it is new.
I've also stayed the hell away from Tumblr and Reddit, though, and I understand that Tumblr/Reddit is where a lot of the more in-depth discussions take place (for better or for worse), so it could be that there's a split between the kind of people who would want to use Facebook for serious talk - now using those two sites - and the kind of people who would use Facebook for casual stuff - now using Snapchat/Instagram.
I'd be curious to know what the user numbers on all four sites actually are compared with Facebook, and whether the decline in Facebook's traffic has coincided with a rise in theirs.
Quote from: Demolition Squid on June 05, 2015, 08:59:55 AM
Interesting...
I've been curious about whether this might be related to the increasing polarization in public discourse. It could just be nostalgia, but I don't remember people jumping straight to 'fuck you and everything you stand for' the moment one aspect of something you said didn't jive with their view ten years ago - even on the heavily moderated sites like MysticWicks. That feels like it is new.
I've also stayed the hell away from Tumblr and Reddit, though, and I understand that Tumblr/Reddit is where a lot of the more in-depth discussions take place (for better or for worse), so it could be that there's a split between the kind of people who would want to use Facebook for serious talk - now using those two sites - and the kind of people who would use Facebook for casual stuff - now using Snapchat/Instagram.
I'd be curious to know what the user numbers on all four sites actually are compared with Facebook, and whether the decline in Facebook's traffic has coincided with a rise in theirs.
Tumblr in fact invented the FUCK YOU response, long before the political tards got ahold of it.
Squid, there's some info in this article, I think. http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2015/01/27/facebook-active-users-decline/
Quote from: Doktor Howl on June 05, 2015, 04:15:28 PM
Quote from: Demolition Squid on June 05, 2015, 08:59:55 AM
Interesting...
I've been curious about whether this might be related to the increasing polarization in public discourse. It could just be nostalgia, but I don't remember people jumping straight to 'fuck you and everything you stand for' the moment one aspect of something you said didn't jive with their view ten years ago - even on the heavily moderated sites like MysticWicks. That feels like it is new.
I've also stayed the hell away from Tumblr and Reddit, though, and I understand that Tumblr/Reddit is where a lot of the more in-depth discussions take place (for better or for worse), so it could be that there's a split between the kind of people who would want to use Facebook for serious talk - now using those two sites - and the kind of people who would use Facebook for casual stuff - now using Snapchat/Instagram.
I'd be curious to know what the user numbers on all four sites actually are compared with Facebook, and whether the decline in Facebook's traffic has coincided with a rise in theirs.
Tumblr in fact invented the FUCK YOU response, long before the political tards got ahold of it.
I thought it was the political tards on Tumblr. I mean, on the Internet at large, you're permitted to be in one of two camps, politically: Tumblr or the neo-Nazis from /pol/. There is no middle ground.
Quote from: The All-Seeing Waffle on June 06, 2015, 11:15:59 AM
Squid, there's some info in this article, I think. http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2015/01/27/facebook-active-users-decline/
I can't seem to get this link to work for me... could you C&P or is it crazy long?
QuoteThere's no question that Facebook is the world's biggest social network and will probably continue to be for some time.
But the way we use Facebook is changing: gradually, it's becoming a far more passive hub for our online social interactions.
A new comprehensive survey shows that out of the eight biggest social networks, Facebook was the only one to see a decline in the rate of people actively using the site per month over 2014 — a pattern that was consistent in regions across the world — while others like Pinterest and Tumblr saw large jumps in activity.
While Pinterest saw activity increase 97% and Tumblr by 95%, Facebook was the only big network to experience a drop in active usage last year, by 9%, according to GlobalWebIndex (GWI), a research firm that interviews 170,000 internet users in 32 markets and claims to run the largest ongoing study into digital consumption to date.
The slide was most acute in Asia Pacific, where the rate of active Facebook users declined 12%, and social networks like WeChat and Qzone dominate, particularly in China.
(http://blogs-images.forbes.com/parmyolson/files/2015/01/Screen-Shot-2015-01-27-at-13.21.131.png)
QuoteOutside of China Facebook is still the leader in social networking with around 81% of adult internet users claiming to be members of the site. And many of them are still logging in regularly; more than half of Facebook's active users were logging in more than once a day in 2014.
But Facebook has become more of a passive hub for underlying social connections than a place to actively share our thoughts. And with so many checking Facebook on their smartphones, they'll often only check in for short periods anyway, leaving little time to do more than browse and maybe "like" a photo or two.
Around 40% of Facebook users said they had "browsed their newsfeed for updates without posting or commenting on anything" in the last month, according to the GWI survey.
Once again teenagers were the big demographic that often didn't post anything in their Facebook network, and were less likely than others to carry out 17 of the 20 or so different Facebook behaviors tracked in the GWI survey. (That includes clicking a "like" button, commenting on a friend's photo or video and messaging a friend.)
(http://blogs-images.forbes.com/parmyolson/files/2015/01/Screen-Shot-2015-01-27-at-13.20.32.png)
Quote"It's not that Facebook is being abandoned," GWI's head of trends Jason Mander wrote in the latest report. "Rather, it's that people are using Facebook less intensively or actively than before." The causes of this are varied and have been well documented already: the rise of Instagram means people fewer people upload photos to Facebook. The rise of messaging apps like WhatsApp and Kik means people are taking their conversations onto other platforms.
Another is simply the rise of social networking on our smartphones generally. On tiny screens and with limited time we're more likely to swipe down to browse than type out an interesting comment. "This encourages much more passive forms of engagement where people are more likely to simply look at things rather than interact with them," writes Mander.
That's why Facebook's revenues should remain strong: as long as people keep coming to "look at things" on Facebook, ads will get eyeballs too and the profits should keep rolling in.
Smaller platforms like Instagram, which saw a 47% rise in active usage, and LinkedIn (38%) saw healthy increases because people have broadly been opting for a wider range of niche networks, many of which they can connect to via Facebook.
When it comes to mobile, Facebook is still the most popular social app with 41% of adult internet users saying they regularly use the app. But Snapchat was the fastest growing social app in 2014, with active usage growing 57% and more than a third of 16-19 year olds claiming to use the app in the U.S., Britain, Ireland and Sweden.
(http://blogs-images.forbes.com/parmyolson/files/2015/01/Screen-Shot-2015-01-27-at-13.40.23.png)
QuoteInternet users of all ages are spending more time overall on social networks – an average 1.72 hours per day, up from 1.61 hours in 2012. Internet users now spend more than 6 hours a day online, with around 30% of that time spent on social networking.
"That's important food-for-thought given how many commentators have been willing to proclaim that the social networking 'bubble' has burst and that the top networks are dying," says Mander in the report. "Rather, we're actually spending more time on networks now than in the earlier part of the decade."
When it comes to website visits, YouTube was the standout winner of all the social networks. Some 82% of all internet users outside of China claim to have visited the video-sharing site in the last month, while 73% can say the same for Facebook.
Invoice is in the post.
Huuuuuh. Very interesting.
Thanks Junkenstein. :)