> 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)