Let's first think about the demographic that has kept Facebook afloat; Baby Boomers and Generation X. When you think about most of these individuals, they graduated high school and college without much there to remind them of individuals they were acquainted with, minus maybe their yearbooks from high school. Sure, most probably wrote or emailed their close friends, but we're talking about those afterthought individuals that they came into contact with under specific circumstances that generated that "acquaintance" classification. Then, all of a sudden, appears Facebook, a platform that allows these individuals to link their name with their school. It's a database at their fingertips with all of their classmates with up-to-date pictures, life stories, and mutual friends to explore. Facebook is that one "person" I referenced earlier; the person that brings up that name you hadn't thought about for years, except now you can actually explore what they are up to, and Facebook continuously reminds people of those afterthought names.
The question is, how long is this effect going to sustain Facebook's competitive advantage? Like people have mentioned, there was Whitepages, now there is Facebook, but what's next?
Are they? My young teenaged (age 13-17) nieces/nephews have no FB presence at all. Their older siblings were on FB all the time at that age and still have FB pages, but are no longer very active - they mainly use FB to comment on their parents and other relatives pages.
While this is purely anecdotal, FB does seem to be losing young users:
https://www.inc.com/zoe-henry/facebook-losing-users-faster-t...
If they are going to Instagram, then FB isn't really losing them, if they are going elsewhere, then it doesn't bode well for FB.
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Facebook does almost nothing useful. It’s kind irritating to actually try to do anything with the user interface, since everything is slippery funnels.
Whatever isn’t an inductive dark pattern is otherwise emotional blackmail. The options and settings provided to the user don’t make sense, and are all defaulted to the worst choices imaginable.
WhatsApp doesn't have this problem. It's hard to monetize with ads but it's a data goldmine.
I'd bet against you. The trajectory is fine and Zuckerberg is a good CEO. They have nearly a third of the earth as users and a ridiculously high percentage of internet users.
Given a long enough time horizon any company is vulnerable, but FB is here to stay for a long while.