I think the Facebook site will be _very_ different in the next few years than what we're traditionally used to.
The strategy that Facebook has been pivoting towards is in favor of smaller community building, rather than the "mass market square" approach, which is why:
1) Groups have been more prominent and getting quite a bit of promotion
2) Messenger has gotten quite a bit of UX improvements
3) New features like "Rooms," which favor small / intimate video conversations
4) Investments in hardware experiences like Portal, which have been heavily marketed towards family communication thus far (successfully it seems, looking at their last revenue #'s.)
5) Facebook Workplace, which was a smart B2B play anyway, but also aligns with their "micro-community" approach
Zuck messaged this new pivot IIRC around the last US presidential election, but it may have started before that. Therefore I would expect to see more of these types of experiences:
What's interesting about your comment is how Facebook, as an online community, has lost all context that other online communities had.
Think about people griping about work. You could do that in older online communities, but now that everyone knows everyone on Facebook, a gripe about work is probably going to be seen by your colleagues and potential employers and...
Basically, the concept of an online community that has boundaries away from your IRL (in real life) community is gone. (Or, everyone's mother and kids have Facebook accounts.)
I remember that fateful day in highschool where the parents volte-faced and joined facebook, and the site was ruined forever. then came the aunts and uncles and grandma and your boss from two jobs ago. eternal september, but the influx didn't ever stop and here we are with billions of users and a mess.
> Groups have been more prominent and getting quite a bit of promotion
But they made them worse with the new look. You can‘t see the number of new posts anymore so if you are in slow moving groups you have to click on them to check for new posts. So instead of checking FB several times a day to see if there is a significant count of new posts in one of my groups I switched to checking once a day and just looking into my favourite groups.
Amongst other things, I think they're trying to keep from being unbundled. Right now they're vulnerable to someone else doing what they did to Myspace et. al., having college students peeled off into some other more targeted service.
But who likes this stuff? Who really wants to use it? I don't know anyone especially the younger crowd as I have teenagers, that want anything to do with facebook
I use Messenger with a group of friends because it seems to be a pretty reliable way of group texting between iOS and Android (text messages were coming in out of order) and we all have Facebook accounts.
We all use Facebook to plan group events. Things like birthday parties, vacations, and where we're all going to stay for weddings.
I'm in a few local Facebook groups for things like trail running and hiking. They're great for getting information about current conditions.
Facebook Marketplace has been better than Craigslist or Offerup since it's a little more likely to be a real person (or at least it's a little easier to tell if they are based on their profile.)
It' also nice that I don't need to have a dozen different accounts to do all this stuff.
I'm not a teenager, but all the teenagers I know use Instagram.
I would use a social network that only my actual friends were on. When I was in college I would have found a college-only social media site useful and enjoyable. The biggest problem with most social media is they are too impersonal due to having too many disparate connections (eg my aunt, a former boss, my best friend, a former acquaintance from high school) and they shove “influencers” and other popular content down your throat.
I can imagine that Facebook will be able to create a decent platform for young people if they only have to worry about adding features/promoting content that young people like.
I don't know about those specific features, but I'm always surprised how people make assumptions about a global service with over two billion users based on an extremely local sample of anecdotes.
"I don't think anybody in the world buys fish because I live in Montana and my kids hate it"
I have just stopped being a teenager, but my interest in memes is actually surprisingly well covered by facebook - there are groups for all kinds of niches.
It's sort of like Reddit, but a little less crappy.
That said I don't really use it because I have a very bad memory of the company and the site, so the hurdle to ever opening it up is quite high.
I stood on a hill and I saw the Old approaching, but it came as the New.
It hobbled up on new crutches which no one had ever seen before
and stank of new smells of decay which no one had ever smelt before.
I think Facebook is bleeding college age people to Instagram (yes I know it is owned by FB), snapchat and the likes and this is serious ad revenue, if allowed to continue all spells the death of a platform. Form me this is a signal of fear or desperation to save the website facebook. Facebook the company is VERY fine and healthy, but I think Facebook the website is in trouble
The release of this certainly means that they don't think that they're reaching as many college students as they could, which might be framed desperation, given FB's origins. But I personally think that's an overly pessimistic interpretation. I'm not sure what signs would point to the Facebook platform as a whole approaching "death." Their number of active users (for just Facebook, not Instagram or anything else) have been consistently growing each quarter - even specifically in the US.
It doesn't matter that you are getting more users if those users are old and that's basically what is happening to Facebook. FB these days is just a place where content gets recycled, original content, viral memes and cultural trends happen elsewhere (TT, IG, etc). Just try to list the number of public figures (that young people care about) that use FB as its main channel? Now compare that against TT, IG, etc.
FB managed to buy IG and WhatsApp but they won't always be able to buy their competitor or copy them
I wonder what engagement on Facebook looks like overall. Anecdotally, I haven't seen many in my (older) circle "rage quitting" Facebook but I've seen a lot of people going from using it pretty regularly to using it rarely or to a first approximation of never.
Despite their best efforts to do so, I would argue that most people don't know that FB owns Instagram or WhatsApp. For college-aged people, IG, TikTok, and Snap are what they live in.
These people are never going to come back to Facebook. No one moves to last generation's social network.
The lifespan of any social network is effectively only one generation long. Which is long enough to make a lot of money, but not long enough to build a business that lasts a lifetime.
When Facebook first launched and was only available on certain campuses, it had an intimate and safe feeling. It was used primarily to share experiences with friends. The site was simple and compact. Feeds had a high signal to noise ratio, and it was about personal connection rather than political warfare. Somehow, unless they take on a content policy that bans news/politics/etc, I doubt they can get back to that place from where society is today. Even if the software was exactly the same as it was, we have changed and we have been changed in large part by social media these last 15 years.
A ban on political content won’t make fb what it was before. The toxic political content is a symptom of the problem, not a cause.
The community is the difference. Social bubbles on fb are now huge, and include people with wildly varying ideas for what they want to get out of social media. People naturally segregate different aspects of their social life in their real-world interactions, but that nuance is completely lost on fb.
Jokes aside that this is how FB started, I wonder if this is a reaction to recent claims that FB has a general political slant, and that this might be a way to isolate and segregate people associated with colleges.
> I wonder if this is a reaction to recent claims that FB has a general political slant
I don't want to generalize too much from my own window into Facebook, but it does look like they may be in a feedback loop. As more and more toxic conservative garbage gets reshared, progressives start ditching Facebook. That means the remaining userbase likes that stuff more, so the feed gets tuned to make it more prominent. That turns off more progressives, who drop out. Rinse, lather, repeat.
When I go on Facebook now, it looks like Internet Fox News, and that's despite trying very hard to unfollow the people who reshare that stuff.
Even the left-leaning content on Facebook has gotten more extreme and virulent. It's just a miserable hellhole now of two tribes screaming at each other while the feed AI fans the flames.
> As more and more toxic conservative garbage gets reshared, progressives start ditching Facebook.
I think this is a function of the friends you have, and what Facebook assumes you like to see based on the pages your friends like (lookalike audience targeting). When I was more active on Facebook, there was a lot of left-wing direct action, and zero Fox News stuff.
But wouldn't that feedback loop work the other way too? That there's someone saying "as more toxic liberal garbage gets reshared, conservatives start ditching Facebook"? Leaving just the people who enjoy screaming at each other?
I view one of the largest reasons for this as trying to ensure they keep user retention for younger demographics for live chat, which they've been lagging behind quite a bit compared to e.g. Discord. If Facebook completely loses their young demographic network effects it would be very difficult for them to regain them.
This will be tough as Discord is currently happily enjoying its unlimited growth and no profits phase, and has enough network effects that it's almost impossible to not use it as a young Internet-using male in many countries.
> If Facebook completely loses their young demographic network effects it would be very difficult for them to regain them.
Facebook has had incredible success at mimicking other companies’ features, and when that fails purchasing major competitors. Discord is still niche, and I suspect their marketing and image will make it hard to break out of ‘gamer’ culture.
I disagree that Discord is niche at this point. They're already worth several billion and it's still growing significantly, with perhaps several hundred million users and very high user-retention, usage, network effects, and proprietary lock-in. I'd still invest in Discord today if I could, in a heartbeat.
Just as a data point: I'm a member of several Discord communities, none of which are gaming-related.
I've also noticed more recently that people are starting Discord communities around all kinds of non-gaming topics. Very commonly they seem to revolve around a public persona, like a YouTube celebrity, a musician, or a podcast host.
Readit News
The strategy that Facebook has been pivoting towards is in favor of smaller community building, rather than the "mass market square" approach, which is why:
1) Groups have been more prominent and getting quite a bit of promotion
2) Messenger has gotten quite a bit of UX improvements
3) New features like "Rooms," which favor small / intimate video conversations
4) Investments in hardware experiences like Portal, which have been heavily marketed towards family communication thus far (successfully it seems, looking at their last revenue #'s.)
5) Facebook Workplace, which was a smart B2B play anyway, but also aligns with their "micro-community" approach
Zuck messaged this new pivot IIRC around the last US presidential election, but it may have started before that. Therefore I would expect to see more of these types of experiences:
"Facebook Campus" - "Facebook Workplace" - "Facebook [TBD]"
Think about people griping about work. You could do that in older online communities, but now that everyone knows everyone on Facebook, a gripe about work is probably going to be seen by your colleagues and potential employers and...
Basically, the concept of an online community that has boundaries away from your IRL (in real life) community is gone. (Or, everyone's mother and kids have Facebook accounts.)
But they made them worse with the new look. You can‘t see the number of new posts anymore so if you are in slow moving groups you have to click on them to check for new posts. So instead of checking FB several times a day to see if there is a significant count of new posts in one of my groups I switched to checking once a day and just looking into my favourite groups.
I use Messenger with a group of friends because it seems to be a pretty reliable way of group texting between iOS and Android (text messages were coming in out of order) and we all have Facebook accounts.
We all use Facebook to plan group events. Things like birthday parties, vacations, and where we're all going to stay for weddings.
I'm in a few local Facebook groups for things like trail running and hiking. They're great for getting information about current conditions.
Facebook Marketplace has been better than Craigslist or Offerup since it's a little more likely to be a real person (or at least it's a little easier to tell if they are based on their profile.)
It' also nice that I don't need to have a dozen different accounts to do all this stuff.
I'm not a teenager, but all the teenagers I know use Instagram.
I can imagine that Facebook will be able to create a decent platform for young people if they only have to worry about adding features/promoting content that young people like.
"I don't think anybody in the world buys fish because I live in Montana and my kids hate it"
It's sort of like Reddit, but a little less crappy.
That said I don't really use it because I have a very bad memory of the company and the site, so the hurdle to ever opening it up is quite high.
Bertolt Brecht, Parade of the Old New. (1939)
FB managed to buy IG and WhatsApp but they won't always be able to buy their competitor or copy them
Deleted Comment
The lifespan of any social network is effectively only one generation long. Which is long enough to make a lot of money, but not long enough to build a business that lasts a lifetime.
The community is the difference. Social bubbles on fb are now huge, and include people with wildly varying ideas for what they want to get out of social media. People naturally segregate different aspects of their social life in their real-world interactions, but that nuance is completely lost on fb.
I don't want to generalize too much from my own window into Facebook, but it does look like they may be in a feedback loop. As more and more toxic conservative garbage gets reshared, progressives start ditching Facebook. That means the remaining userbase likes that stuff more, so the feed gets tuned to make it more prominent. That turns off more progressives, who drop out. Rinse, lather, repeat.
When I go on Facebook now, it looks like Internet Fox News, and that's despite trying very hard to unfollow the people who reshare that stuff.
Even the left-leaning content on Facebook has gotten more extreme and virulent. It's just a miserable hellhole now of two tribes screaming at each other while the feed AI fans the flames.
I think this is a function of the friends you have, and what Facebook assumes you like to see based on the pages your friends like (lookalike audience targeting). When I was more active on Facebook, there was a lot of left-wing direct action, and zero Fox News stuff.
Maybe find different friends :)
This will be tough as Discord is currently happily enjoying its unlimited growth and no profits phase, and has enough network effects that it's almost impossible to not use it as a young Internet-using male in many countries.
Facebook has had incredible success at mimicking other companies’ features, and when that fails purchasing major competitors. Discord is still niche, and I suspect their marketing and image will make it hard to break out of ‘gamer’ culture.
I've also noticed more recently that people are starting Discord communities around all kinds of non-gaming topics. Very commonly they seem to revolve around a public persona, like a YouTube celebrity, a musician, or a podcast host.