Facebook is dying, but not because of TikTok.

Facebook is dying because they stopped being Facebook. If they gave what's left of their userbase what they actually wanted (chronological feed, seeing friends posts, not seeing spam, more ways to interact (bring back pets, gifts, superpokes etc)) they'd do ok.

It doesn't help that their core code is a steaming pile of bloated dung that doesn't seem to be tested by anyone.

> Facebook is dying because they stopped being Facebook

a) No evidence they are dying. All we have is a single quarter's result i.e. statistically meaningless.

b) No evidence that staying true to the original Facebook is the best strategy. Unquestionably, Stories has been a popular feature in both Instagram and Facebook ecosystems and perhaps certain features from TikTok will be the same.

But there is plenty of evidence that the opinions of HN, Reddit etc. often do not match that of the broader public and so should be taken with a grain of salt.

There's an army of users out there accustomed to and just simply want to see what their friends are up to and posting.

Are they as sexy as the bajillion TikTok users out there? No.

Are they enough to build a solid business aruond? Yes.

Would facebook ever consider stepping up to the plate that built their core business again? No, because Facebook management sucks.

I don't give a shit about algorithmic recommendations and of horse-shit force-fed happiness content don't anticipate ever changing that. Many of my friends are the same way.

What ever happened to servicing the long tail?

> just simply want to see what their friends are up to and posting

People keep saying this is what people want. Show me the numbers that it's true.

Because when Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, Youtube etc. all move to this model and stick with it the evidence is clear that it's not want people want.

Did you ignore the OP's long tail mention on purpose? It may very well be not the majority wants, so we cannot be talking about wishes of any singular "people". And for this reason, this strategy may no be suitable for "growth".

But as a solid, sustainable profit source? Are you claiming that only a marginal number of people want this, or what?

Facebook's ARPU and overall revenue has been continuing to increase even last quarter.

So clearly they know a little bit about what is a solid, sustainable profit source.

> So clearly they know a little bit about what is a solid, sustainable profit source.

It is more than a "solid, sustainable" profit source, it is a best-in-class cash cow that feeds a growing monstrosity for shareholders that want more, more, more.

The business they left behind is still sustainable.

I'm fairly certain that drug dealers' numbers indicate that people "want" more addictive drugs.

Facebook and other social media isn't quite at that level, but the same logic applies to your argument: there are fundamentally different kinds of "wants", and the drug dealer/social media metrics invariably cater to the unhealthy kind.

So what? Let them have TikTok.

The evidence may be clear, but it is also driven by tech that is increasingly effective at pressing our dopamine buttons. I'm not sure that the opinions of a drug-addled constituency are important for the far more simple question of, "is there a sustainable business here?"

I used to see posts from 50-100 friends/family each week. Now I see posts from about 5 of them. I barely use facebook because it crashes my iPad browser (I refuse to install the app) and because the feed is so packed full of autoplay videos I can't stand it. Facebook is "dying" for myself and my entire sphere of friends/family but of course that's just an anecdote.

Ive wondered about the drop in activity. Like is it less busy because people are using it less and it's boring or w/e or are the 20year olds who were posting party pictures everyday and having friend group drama just aren't doing much anymore and grinding through life without shareable stuff

The experience for each person is probably different. I never had that sort of stuff in the first place; mostly just pictures of people's concerts, vacations, dance events, car shows, family gettogethers, home improvement projects, new cars, lots of kid pictures, etc. None of these could compare to the level of "interaction" of the 2016 political cycle, though, so all the good stuff got buried under vitriol and arguments and un-friending and I feel like it never recovered.

> the 20year olds who were posting party pictures everyday and having friend group drama

You're describing Instagram. Facebook has been the "parents' generation water cooler" for several years now. They don't even post "original content" like party pics unless it's an obituary. It's all "shares" of news and political content.

That’s perhaps also the bit that Facebook investors/management ignores. You cannot have over a billion users and expect any significant growth. You also have to accept that any change you do might alianate a small percentage of your existing users.

You may very well be right. Facebook is adjusting their offering to keep a certain segment of users. That will eject another group, or at least reduce their engagement. That’s fine, if it ensures profitability for the next five years.

It’s just interesting to be part of a group of users that aren’t intersting to the social media platforms. Which in a way just confirms that the social media part of Metas business isn’t actually important to them, only the ad revenue that it might bring.

I think it's really difficult to tell if they are dying or not. I don't think MAU or DAU gives the full picture as it doesn't tell us what people are using it for, what sort of new accounts are coming online (are they real people, bots, businesses or what?), and how active people actually are. Are people logging in for easy auth or are they spending more or less time actively browsing the site.

You're right that HN is not the right place to judge this. I will say, as someone who works with high school kids, almost none of them have seemed to use it over the last 4-5 years.

> But there is plenty of evidence that the opinions of HN, Reddit etc. often do not match that of the broader public and so should be taken with a grain of salt.

There is a lot of biases and nonsense in here and in the news being spread around over the death of Facebook (Meta) or even the beginning of its death, which has been greatly exaggerated.

They will be around for another 10+ years.

> No evidence they are dying. All we have is a single quarter's result i.e. statistically meaningless.

But their first down quarter (for users) does say something. No one would be talking about this if it hadn't happened.

It's a quarter where we are seeing an inflation explosion, COVID and international uncertainty which is causing recessionary behaviour. Companies across the IT sector are cutting jobs and revising forecasts either because of actual or expected drop in revenue.

Can't think anyone serious would look to derive any meaning from a single data point in this environment.

For all we know the entire DAU drop could be from Ukraine and Russia alone.

> inflation explosion, COVID and international uncertainty...recessionary behaviour...cutting jobs and revising forecasts...drop in revenue.

Literally none of these things account for people not logging in to FB. In fact, some (all?) of those sound like the sorts of things that would drive engagement among millions of bored and frustrated people.

Inflation = less purchasing power = less effective discretionary income.

That means less to spend on new phones, data plans etc. And more time spent at work.

> For all we know the entire DAU drop could be from Ukraine and Russia alone.

The DAU drop happened before the war, in the quarter up to December 2021.

Did you reply to wrong comment? Did you just have a Google alert for Facebook dying?

My point is you should dispute the original claim that it is life or death for Facebook instead of the subcomment running with that theory.

I think Facebook is doing OK, but they have issues breaching the younger democratic, which is worrying them.

Yeh lol at the facebook is dying bot. I left social media 5yrs ago (no fb, never used tiktok). I remmeber MySpace and how i left it for FB.

You cant build a buisness on a bubble. You can build a bubble and extract money from investors, but honestly, the only people who use facebook are doing it because they are addicted and likely not internet savy. Its like hooking people on sugar. Except fb doesnt own the sugar, and cant only buy up the competition for so long before your no longer the hot stuff investors belevied.

Facebook is a fad. Social media is not, it has overtaken traditional media in less then a decade. Social media will morph, it is not static. You cant own it. And Facebook is not the defination of it anymore.

When I started using Facebook it wasn't a newsfeed, it was just a personal homepage with a photo album and a bulletin board attached.

I'd love to have something like that again that everyone uses, but everything is about goosing the influencer economy now rather than letting me socialize.

I'd love it if Meetup had a threaded discussion board with a way to pin photos and video. All my social networks would use it.

That's actually what Google+ was with circles before the morons in charge forcibly bundled it into Youtube and killed it. Google should have had some patience like the people over at Musical.ly and built an audience organically rather than shoving unwanted garbage down our throats.

You're basically describing myspace.

I honestly liked MySpace. I think it was superior to Facebook in every way. At least you could enjoy some cool music on someone’s page when you visited it. The page was about them.

Remember how you could customize the css on your myspace? That would be unthinkable nowadays.

Yes it was less of a 'database' with a front end but more of a messy creative space you could put whatever you like on.

Then follow me on SpaceHey, MySpace reborn.

https://spacehey.com/josh

That's basically what Facebook was (though really it drew more from Friendster). As I remember it, the big appeal of Facebook over MySpace was that the interface was clean and that people felt like migrating from MySpace to The Facebook was a way of shedding their high school selves and reinventing how they presented themselves for college. So it was still loose but looked a bit more "adult." But they very much were viewed as doing the same thing.

It almost sounds as if there is a niche for that!

BTW have you tried dreamwidth.org, a fork of the venerable livejournal.com? They look as if 2005 had never ended,in a good sense.

There isn't. Many companies e.g. Path, Google have tried and failed to build a social network that focused on more personal relationships.

They simply don't offer enough value over say a WhatApp group.

I think they wanted hockey-stick growth and prospects of a big payout, while the sustainable model may be a lifestyle business that barely pays for itself.

This. Though I'm not even sure about the "barely pays for itself." I mean, Automaticc/Wordpress sustains itself okay and had the resources to buy Tumblr. I think they're just under $100M in annual revenue. Outside the world of absurd Silicon Valley valuations, that would be considered very respectable

I remember the introduction of the News Feed and how creepy and invasive it felt at the time. Here’s all the interactions you previously had to look for explicitly, now pushed in front of you. It was a harbinger of things to come.

> (chronological feed, seeing friends posts, not seeing spam, more ways to interact (bring back pets, gifts, superpokes etc)) they'd do ok.

I don't think so. TikTok is vastly more addictive and fresh in its content. How much content can your circle creating in a day? No more than 20 posts I would say? If facebook stays being facebook, they will die anyway.

Problem in facebook right now, there isn't enough people to interact with, it is a social network, but tiktok is not. Tiktok is the new TV, with endless contents. I follow zero people there, but still I using it the right way.

I think the core issue here is that Facebook can't afford to merely "do OK": they have to "make a gazillion dollars and take over the world with an ever-increasing source of bottomless revenue" or they are considered "a failure".

> Problem in facebook right now, there isn't enough people to interact with

FB took care of that by removing the chronological time line. As soon as it went away from a time line of things that happened to the people I love into a addiction stimulating ever refreshing list of flashing images it took away the interactivity. It became more of a consumption site place and they're leaning heavily into that (with Instagram too). This then means that content creation is moving from users you know to professionals (people playing the algorithm).

Attention is zero-sum. If TikTok is winning, someone else is losing. TikTok now is what Facebook was 10 years ago.

Facebook is where my older relatives social network. As soon as it became a place where people over 40 went, it lost its appeal to the young people that Facebook is really after.

It's not just that the people over 40 are on it, it's that your grandmother comes and leaves confused comments about unrelated topics on your friend's posts.

this is why they bought instagram

Smartphone attention is not zero sum. Average daily usage could increase with some novel super-addictive app or platform. Smartphone usage probably went up during the pandemic.

"The pandemic boosted global (smartphone) data consumption by more than 30 per cent in 2020" [0]

[0] https://theprint.in/tech/the-covid-19-pandemic-has-led-to-an...

"Average daily usage could increase" And at some point you just need to increase the hours in a day...

> Facebook is dying because they stopped being Facebook. If they gave what's left of their userbase what they actually wanted (chronological feed, seeing friends posts, not seeing spam, more ways to interact (bring back pets, gifts, superpokes etc)) they'd do ok.

I have no horse in this race, but why do you think you know what's better for FB more than the thousands of smart engineers and PMs working there?

They clearly saw TikTok as a direct threat, and, probably fueled by thousands of data-driven tests, confirmed that this change results in more engagement and keeps more people on their site for longer.

What you seem to want from FB is likely what a minority of its older userbase wants, but wouldn't make graphs go up and right as much. They need to attract younger generations and new users if they want to do that.

> why do you think you know what's better for FB more than the thousands of smart engineers and PMs working there

doubt they're the ones making the big strategic decisions

> doubt they're the ones making the big strategic decisions

Of course not, but I doubt that the ones making these decisions are ignoring the metrics that the thousands of smart engineers are generating.

All the large companies are able to afford extra staff whose job is exclusively to generate and analyse metrics.

It seems a reach to conclude that the company pays thousands of people for a specific output, just to throw that output away. It may happen to one or two of them, but certainly not to all of the people generating the metrics.

My theory is that it's also the behavior of users that has changed.

In my own network (age brackets 25-40), I rarely see any people posting updates or uploading pictures, which was common 5 or 10 years ago.

On the other hand, Meta managed to keep the younger generation audience by acquiring Instagram, but apparently, it failed to acquire the Next-Bing-Thing (Tik-Tok)

Facebook is a sinking ship. It's hard to turn that around.

It seems like it would've been easier to go after TikTok with Instagram - which is basically the same product, growing, and still has some brand value.

Maybe other people's feeds are different (admittedly I don't do much on it), but almost all I see on instagram are screenshots of twitter, tumblr, reddit, and tiktok videos. Very little content original to the platform.

If you don't much on it that seems right. That seems like generic content. I used to get a lot of that, now mine is the stuff I follow. Mostly art and people I know in real life

They are, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32233415

Meta already knew Facebook would sink someday. As they have Instagram, they don't care and Meta will be around for another 10 years to extract more from Instagram and their other unused platforms.

I'd expect the hype and growth around TikTok to peak once their parent company IPOs, as more corporations, advertisers, mainstream media accounts, move in to the platform to ruin it just like they did with the rest of the other social networking platforms, especially for YouTube and Instagram.

If they don't IPO soon, TikTok will get much worse for their users. Either way, the users will eventually get annoyed by TikTok's changes, pushed and boosted by the company.

> once their parent company IPOs, as more corporations, advertisers, mainstream media accounts, move in to the platform to ruin it j

> If they don't IPO soon, TikTok will get much worse for their users

So, if they IPO TikTok gets worse and if they don't TikTok gets worse? I don't see why bringing up an IPO matters.

Meanwhile, it seems unlikely they'll IPO soon if ever. They apparently raised a 2 billion round in December 2020, and they won't want to IPO in a recession. And IPOing is going to be a political act, and if I were them I would hesitate to incur the CCP's wrath.

>Facebook would sink someday

That day is very far into the future (in tech terms). 1.96 billion users are a whole fucking lot of a base to bleed. I would bet actual money that they won't dip below 1 billion by 2035, and that they would be still there (in whatever profitable form) with the same trademak in 2050.

> That day is very far into the future (in tech terms). 1.96 billion users are a whole fucking lot of a base to bleed. I would bet actual money that they won't dip below 1 billion by 2035, and that they would be still there (in whatever profitable form) with the same trademak in 2050.

While I broadly agree with you, I'd only bet money depending on the odds the bookie is giving, and I wouldn't bet on 1:1 odds either.

The reason is because those timescales are a full generation away. Since the entire value of FB is in the social network of people, it's possible that the upcoming generations bypass FB altogether for a competitor, and FB is unable to risk the pivot[1].

[1] FB might have to intentionally discard the aging existing users for the new users if the featureset that the new users want is exclusive with the featureset that the old users want.

And that explains why they have another separate 1 billion+ monthly active users on Instagram?

If they didn't think their main product would decline or get unpopular soon, why would they bet on spending $1B on buying Instagram before anyone else and copy the greatest hits and main features found in other competitors (Stories, Disappearing posts, etc) directly into Instagram first?

Without Instagram, Facebook would likely have sunk much faster and I already said they will be around for 10+ years.

So the death of Meta Platforms has been greatly exaggerated.

Why would ByteDance IPO?

You don't raise almost $10 billion dollars for a steady, stable lifestyle business. You raise almost $10 billion dollars to reach a liquidity event that pays it back to the investors with a huge profit.

Specifically to cash out at peak hype.

To make even more money

Is it taking over the same space though? I use Facebook because it's the only place I can see the schedules at my gym, or the menus as many local restaurants despite them not having updated their Facebook page in two years. As far as I know Tiktok doesn't really try to compete against these things.

Good luck. TikTok is amazing.

Facebook tries so hard to push junk and noise content at you it’s ridiculous. They’ve become a parody of themselves, and the obvious knockoff of TikTok looks pitiful.

You can hate Facebook all you want, but it's quite the stretch to call TikTok "amazing". It's very addictive, while the algo knows what you want, but that's mostly it.

Obviously anecdotal and personal opinion here, but me & many other people I know tried it a bit, spent MANY hours mindlessly scrolling, and eventually got bored. Nonetheless, it's still growing like a wildfire, but I deeply suspect it'll be a very, very fast fire. Which is a deep irony, since Facebook is following TikTok into the same cliff.

We do share a disdain for the DataKraken, yet META dominated in June '22 across the most downloaded apps. [1]

[1] https://app.finclout.io/t/b9BbQa4

> TikTok is really taking over and is a force.

So that means what? That other social medias can't exist unless they are on the absolute top? Sounds like a race to the bottom, patched up with investor creole language bullshit.

Did you forget how Friendster and the ones before lost their user base overnight? Facebook was not in that situation because so far there hasn’t been a worthy competitor. They bought the last two, and it’s not possible with TikTok. Facebook is pissing it’s meta pants.

I didn't forget. I also didn't forget that they burned all of their money, and didn't pay their taxes. I think you're extrapolating a lot from nothing.

Sorry, why is creole being referenced here?

Is this an inside joke/reference I'm not familiar with?

Is it a typo?

Edit: Thank you all for the replies. I am aware of and respectful of the literal definition.

The usage on the comment I responded to strikes me as either antiquated, inaccurate, or a typo.

'creole' has developed a linguistic meaning that parallels the ethnic one you may be interpreting.

From Wikipedia: a stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language.

I still found the comment to be a bit of a stretch with that usage.

Agreed.

Is there not a better or more general word we have for this these days in English?

Maybe we could borrow it from the Germans. I do like words like Schadenfreude.

You all need to get out of Silicon Valley. Creole languages, such as Jamaican are not only completely normal and exist, it's actually not antiquated if you look outside of the US.

I do think you need to read more about this. You seem hung up on a singular meaning, which to me says a lot more about you than me. In this context, unless you're going to be obnoxiously pandentic, creole simply means "a bunch of words and phrases smashed together" Really not worth going into highschool mode about.

Yeah, and you used it in a way that made it sound derogatory.

"Creole bullshit"

I expect the Yankees and the city folk to do this unintentionally, but not one of our own.

I have never lived in Silicon Valley.

My parents are from N'awlins (New Orleans, Louisiana).

What was said is it sounds like bullshit spouted by investors in a pidgin language they made up. Derogatory intent seems doubtful.

TIL creole can be a trigger word. I've only heard it used as "a creole language" and have never even heard anyone use the word relating to its original meaning (though I was vaguely aware of it). Personally, I'm more likely to use the word "creole" than "pidgin language", not sure about others though.

Creole itself is not a trigger word.

Considering it as a poster-child or general term for "bastard", "degenerate", "inbred", or "made-up" way of speaking is the issue.

That was the sense I got from the original comment.

Yeah, except no one said that except you. "your sense" and my own words aren't the same, clearly. All of the words you just used to describe "creole" weren't even on my radar. Didn't even know it was a thing. Take a rest, guy.

Also, all languages are "made up".

> Yeah, and you used it in a way that made it sound derogatory.

> "Creole bullshit"

They didn't write that it sounds like "creole bullshit", they wrote that it sounds like "investor creole language bullshit" ie) bullshit in an investor creole language ie) investors saying bullshit in a language consisting of words which mean one thing in English but which have a different meaning in the language the investors are speaking.

You've clearly totally misinterpreted the original post due to an unfamiliarity with the linguistics term "creole language", a term which does not even derive from the Creole peoples of Louisiana (although both the people and the term share a common French root).

Creole language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language

I think patois may be a better word

Do you maybe think you've left the actual topic?

I'd assume they're referencing it being something like a pidgin language.

Creole, such as Jamaican, are languages that exist - and discounting them is the actual racism. This post isn't even about race, or even a group of people. Take a rest.

You realize I was calling the practice of ignoring facts and bullshitting people "bullshit", right? How is this hard to follow? Next time instead of reacting, try humanity. Creole languages aren't even predominantly non-white. Feels like projection of your own bigotry, honestly.

In the above context it seemed to be used as a derogatory term. Perhaps the more neutral “jargon” would have been less loaded and more accurate, since marketing jargon is not, in-fact, a creole