> Who cares what people say?

I agree. For me, Facebook has become more of a utility. If asked the same questions I would probably answer in a similar way. I do not 'love' Facebook the way I 'love' other products but it has its uses.

Exactly. It's a utility and for whatever that utility is, apparently the product is working fantastically.

I agree that it is a utility. However unlike water or electricity, Facebook is free service subsidized by advertisements. That's a pretty horrible business model because they have to extract value from their users by reducing their privacy, controlling their information and identity, and cluttering their communication channels with noise.

> That's a pretty horrible business model

It hasn't has yet proved to be an unsuccessful business model though.

Because their main costs are detached from their main revenue streams they have no way to accurately price how much a user costs them and how much value they provide. That's what makes it a horrible business model. How do you optimize what you can't accurately measure?

Normally I would agree with this, but the recent example of Ello makes me wonder if FB's edge here isn't softer than it might look. I encountered a lot of non-technical people who desperately wanted Ello to be something they could use in place of Facebook. It didn't turn out to be that, of course, but you could almost taste how badly they wanted it to be that.

That kind of user desperation is a bad long-term sign for a brand.

I think the fact that everyone uses Facebook but nobody's particularly fond of it points to three things:

1. Product stagnation. I think the monetization goals of Facebook are also starting to impact the usability and enjoyability of the site.

2. Brand issues. Why is Facebook not cool anymore? Is it simply due to ubiquity? Can they regain that credibility? Is the "youth market" a lost cause for them?

3. The potential for competition in the space. Building a social network seemed like a lost cause battle for many years because it is essentially "owned" by Twitter and FB - and nichely LinkedIn - (at least in the U.S.) For all its many, many (stress: many) flaws, ello showed one thing: people are clamoring for something other than Facebook. Now ello is really a bad approach at this, it feels like a weekend project rooted in one thing: to make sure it could never make money. But I get all that. Even a site with no clear or dependable direction, with atrocious design could generate a lot of interest with some false scarcity. To me that says if you can create "the next social network" and it's actually beautiful and usable and you don't position yourself on some dumb morality issue then there are people who will jump ship.

So while nobody loving Facebook and still using it might seem like all's well, to me it points to a lack of real competition and is - I'm sure - something discussed often at FB & Twitter.

> Is the "youth market" a lost cause for them?

Facebook is trying to enter the business market (Facebook at Work), so maybe they've already given up

I think it is relevant.

If users generally dislike facebook, but continue to use it, it's a bad situation to be in for Facebook. It indicates that people are using the product because of its network effects and despite the product itself.

It means that if anything begins to actually challenge the network effect of facebook, they will be in a very tough spot.

Re: challenging the network effect.

A telling moment that happened two nights ago for me. A friend from ~8 years ago came to visit and we wanted to send a joking message out to a few people from the old group of friends we used to hang out with.

The conversation was literally:

A: "Post it to Facebook and tag everyone." B: "Ehhh. It would be funnier to find an old email thread and reply to it."

We went with B. It seemed like a better idea, plus we weren't sure if folks in the group checked Facebook. But everyone reads email -- and sure enough, we got life updates from the whole gang within 12 hours.

Yeah, because of its age, ubiquity, relative lack of growth etc I think people don't consider email along with the emerging sexy social networking platforms. I tend to use it in preference to Facebook if I'm communicating with specific people. I would not use it for sending everybody I know amusing pictures of cats.

> It indicates that people are using the product because of its network effects and despite the product itself.

It could mean a lot of things. Maybe it means it's cool to say you dislike FB. Maybe it means people feel badly about their addiction to social networks in general. My point is that it could mean a million things that may very well have nothing to do with FB.

Furthermore, what you're describing sounds to me like the best situation for any company to be in. Ever. You make something that is so compelling and you solve a certain problem so well that people tolerate it despite its deficiencies.

> You make something that is so compelling and you solve a certain problem so well that people tolerate it despite its deficiencies.

That's the opposite of what I'm describing. I'm describing making something that people don't find compelling, that doesn't solve their problems, but they use it because it's their only option (the network effect).

I'd liken this to the position Microsoft held in the late 90s and early 2000s. Most people had an active dislike for MS, and undoubtedly helped the meteoric rise of Apple as the MS-alternative.

FaceBook already has had companies brand themselves as the anti-FaceBook.

It's kind of like expecting people to go "i love my shopping bags".

Really? You think Facebook is a totally utilitarian joyless tool like a shopping bag?

People need to use shopping bags because they need to carry groceries. No one needs to use Facebook. If you decide tomorrow that you absolutely hate shopping bags, your grocery shopping is going to be a hell of a lot less convenient. If you decide tomorrow that you absolutely hate Facebook, you're just going to have more free time.

This is a ridiculous point. "No one needs to use Facebook"? That's subjective and not your call to make unless you're defining need by "things that are required in order to stay alive", in which case shopping bags aren't a need either.

Mithaldu's point, as I understood it, was that shopping bags serve a very clear function and people don't have strong feelings of love towards them. They use them because they work. Same thing with FB (apparently). What this article fails to grasp is that having billions of people feel that they need to use your service is worth way more than people saying they "like" your product.

Yes, that was my point. People don't love or hate their shopping bags because they don't think about them in the first place². Facebook is the same thing to many people. Something they use everyday without giving it a second thought. (Until the handle breaks / some ui element is redesigned. Then they get huffy and a few words later the analogy breaks down.)

² ³ Just to head off any possible future complaints about that. Some people do think about shopping bags. I do. I like cloth ones and hate the rest. I'm sure there's also some people who think about facebook. We're talking about the average street person though.

³ Yes, there is no footnote 1, i have no superscript 1 on my keyboard. Please send it if you find it.

Your observation isn't necessarily in contradiction, though.

People hate Comcast, and yet we all use it because (for many of us) there are no other options.

Sentiment is an important measure because it indicates the activation energy required to leave if a sufficient replacement emerges.

That's Why No one gets rid of Facebook because there's nothing like it.

There have been several things just like Facebook.

Facebook, the product, is no longer this super sexy app that college kids are checking out. Looking for Facebook to be that, you will probably predict its future demise.

But that's not what Facebook is anymore. Facebook is the social graph expressed in Internet form, and is so interwoven with the fabric of the Internet that it's difficult to avoid, even if you're intentionally doing so.

Some products phase in and out, that's for sure. I think Zuck's realized the potential for that to happen, and once he got on the top of the totem pole began preparing for it. He turned FB from an app into a social graph and API that is everywhere, and now he's paying from $1B (Instagram) to $19B (WhatsApp) to get some of his biggest would-be enemies to join him. He does not screw around with the Innovator's Dilemma.

I'll be the first to admit I despise my current Facebook feed. It's full of clickbait articles mingled with the occasional update from someone whom I may or may not care about. That being said, I have tried to delete Facebook multiple times, and to no avail. I still have my hopes that they'll change the algorithm a bit and kill the effectiveness of the clickbait to the same extent they killed the spamminess of those social games and widgets. (Although they still exist and are annoying, they're an order of magnitude less annoying than they used to be.) But, despite my best efforts to avoid it, I still check my Facebook feed at least daily.

What pulled me back? At first, it was that Facebook was integrated with Spotify. I had to create a new account and build up all of my playlists, songs, etc. from scratch. That was kind of a pain. Then I deleted Facebook again. I ended up missing a party that was only planned on Facebook. Then I missed the news that a friend was engaged, and another friend was pregnant. Then I couldn't log into my Kiva account to redistribute the repayments I had received because I had used Facebook to sign up. Facebook is just an incredibly, incredibly sticky product. Network effects are a bitch.

Sure, hackers will say, "Well your friends should have called you instead of putting it on Facebook." But they didn't. Even though I'm not in college, if I'm not on Facebook I'm missing the party. (Even though "the party" is now simply knowing that my friend finished med school and is moving to Michigan.)

Facebook isn't as sexy as it used to be, but it has become increasingly difficult to avoid. Think about that - we have to figure out ways and work hard to avoid a product. That's why a significant proportion of the Internet's users log in to Facebook every day. Unless some major shift takes place, Facebook isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

This is pretty much why I'm so confused that Facebook didn't go through with the whole 'facebook as a platform' plan.

I remember being excited about all the ways I could use Facebook as the 'social' backend to a whole bunch of apps I considered building. I also remember eventually giving up on that idea because clearly Facebook had decided that being the 'social API' was not their goal anymore.

Meanwhile, the vast, vast majority of my network (ages generally around 25-35, Dutch, tech-savvy) only use Facebook for chat, internal groups, and the occasional silly post, which is much less than our use a few years ago (we'd upload vacation photos and actually 'write'), and a significant number of us would leave if it wouldn't be so inconvenient. And the vast majority of teens seem to not really be into Facebook.

Basically, had FB continued with their 'social layer of the web' approach, it'd have been perfect for us, and it seems, to me, for FB too. And yet for some reason they decided to stay the old course and tend their increasingly less-cool walled garden. I am usually capable of understanding the behavior of a company even if it acts in ways that I don't like, but I don't see how this benefits them.

The only plausible theory I can come up with is that FB suffers from groupthink. It would explain this issue, but also many of their tone-deaf actions concerning privacy and the timeline. Perhaps they are really mostly building for themselves, and not realizing that their audience is slowly eroding. But then analysis of user behavior should make this clear... it confuses me!

>Facebook, the product, is no longer this super sexy app that college kids are checking out. Looking for Facebook to be that, you will probably predict its future demise.

Been hearing this line from the hn crowd for at least three years. Stopped holding my breath a while ago.

I think you misunderstand the post you are replying to.

That's true. Well, in that case, let's just interpret what I said as aimed at the doomsayers in this thread. :)

> I ended up missing a party that was only planned on Facebook ... Sure, hackers will say, "Well your friends should have called you instead of putting it on Facebook." But they didn't.

I am a Facebook hater, and I am also guilty of this. If I'm organizing or promoting an event or social occasion I'll go through my list of Facebook friends and invite the ones that seem appropriate. People who are not on that list don't get an invite unless I happen to think of them specifically. I guess some people would say that if they're not at the forefront of my mind then I'm a lousy friend anyway, but it doesn't mean I wouldn't like them to come to my party, or that they wouldn't like to be invited.

"products"

Except it's not a product, it's a glorified contact book and thus very easy to replace.