Sadly many groups I am a part of have moved to facebook and have no interest in moving off of the platform.

To be honest I think it's pretty terrible as a group platform. No proper discussion threads and it's hard to find stuff. But people don't have to pay to host a website/forum and there's virtually no barrier to join since most people have an account on facebook.com.

The only reason I still use facebook is for these groups.

I've also found that my kids' school sometimes _only_ sends out notifications or surveys via Facebook, even though they have two other specific systems they pay for that are specifically made for parent/school communications.

A pubic school? This sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Go on. How so?

The most obvious one to me is violations of FERPA rules and posting private information/pictures of my kids in a public forum.

1) OP stated they were "notifications and polls", neither of which would contain private information or pictures.

2) You make the assumption that the school does not have a private / protected group that is used for verifying group members and protecting content from non-members.

I do make that assumption because your average staff member that would manage something like that, would do the easy path of default settings (which are probably public).

Agreed on all counts. It is the only reason I go to Facebook.

As you said the irony is that it is worse in almost every way except sign up friction. The content isn't even being spidered in any way by Google or the like so discovering the content in these groups later is also nigh impossible.

Just a travesty.

> The content isn't even being spidered in any way by Google or the like so discovering the content in these groups later is also nigh impossible.

This is huge too. It's so hard to archive the data on these closed platforms - especially if you need an account ot view the data. There's a massive loss of knowledge when these platforms inevitably shutter.

I think this may be why some groups use it. I have involved myself in many online business groups (real estate, mlm, etc) and they have a good reason to use facebook groups. They are very easy to control what voices are heard. For example to submit a post to one group which you have to pay +$2500 to enter every post has to be approved by the administrator before it's visible.

> The main site is bound to fall out of fashion, and soon.

Uhhh, that already happened many years ago. Talk to anyone under 30, and Facebook is VERY out of style/out-of-date. They will most likely laugh at you or think you're being ironic if you were to bring up "hanging out on Facebook" or anything like that.

While I've certainly heard that statement made, the publicly stated demographic statistics do not support it.

As of July 2019, 13 - 24 year olds make up 31.9% of Facebook's overall userbase. Another 32% make up the 25-34 age range.

Compare that to some of the other platform's 13-24 demographic:

Twitter 39%, Instagram 37.3%, Snap Chat 58.5%

While Snapchat has a slightly younger audience, they also only have 210 million active users, a 13% increase from previous year. Facebook on the other hand has 2.45 billion active users, a 9% increase from previous year.

Sounds like they will be in trouble in 50 years when their current userbase is dead.

As far I can tell, this is only really the attitude in the Western world. Most of my relatives live in Nigeria, and all of them use Facebook a lot.

And at that, there are still many people in the US who mainly use Facebook, especially Gen X and older, so I always question if there are as many people on this train as it often seems like.

I don't think Facebook would be happy to lose all their high-value customers and keep the ones in markets where they don't make as much money.

As for "Gen X and older", when your youngest customers are pushing 40, that's the kiss of death.

I agree with all sibling comments that claim that Facebook is already out of fashion; I'm suggesting that this will get worse, rapidly.

Suggesting? Ok, hoping.

I wish this were true...I'm the only one in my tech-literate family of 25+ who doesn't have an account. They think I'm weird and all asked why I'm not on FB, it's inconvenient for them to email me. Really? You can't email me? Come on.

> Facebook, the platform, is in trouble.

Sadly this isn't true at all. They've been posting record profits and growth all year. Just yesterday they posted their third quarter results, where their sales rose 29% and user base increased by 35 million, including by 3 million in North America [0], despite negative news surrounding them all year. Most people simply don't care, or care enough to actually delete their accounts over these things.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-30/facebook-...

I'd wager that it already is falling out of fashion, at least among young people (say 30 and under).

I've been curious about this. It makes sense that students might use something else. They are all right there in one place. What happens as everyone leaves school, scatters and joins a lot of different groups? They seem to end up on facebook even if it's only because those groups already existed.

Agree but for the comment about buying Instagram and Whatsapp being farsighted. I think it practically guarantees they'll be broken up.

It's a funny dynamic; the left is having an all hands freak out over FB (who I intensely dislike also) because right wing dorks like Ben Shapiro are the most frequently shared memes on their platform. Basically because FB is a bunch of old people, and old people like right wing memes and Ben Shapiro.

Zuck's a smart guy, and there are other smart people working there; I'm sure they realize this, but they can't actually say it to the AOCs of the world for fear of freaking out shareholders and advertisers.

Regardless of the political motivations that precluded all this controversy, I'm happy with the end-result - someone should be holding Zuck's feet to the fire. It's been too long that Zuck's got to play in the playground without supervision.