I read “it’s dying” by people on Discord and Reddit all the time, but the numbers prove otherwise. It’s been going up this entire time and sitting over 3 billion MONTHLY ACTIVE USERS!
I feel like the bubble around people on other platforms saying “who uses Facebook anymore lol” is kind of wild given the numbers. Keep in mind these are active users not just abandoned accounts.
Hobby groups. Marketplace. Business page for companies. Everything except its original purpose of keeping up with the lives of your real life friends.
It’s dying in the sense that no Millenials really uses Facebook the same way we did as when it first started, and most Gen Z would treat having a Facebook page to be a completely alien concept.
People moved on.
Hobby groups
This is it. FB killed most smaller forums, anyone can make a “group” for any hobby and people can join with an existing account.
Some bigger forums still thrive, but very few new forums get any traction.
Has a serious advantage over meetup. I started a group on there. Had a lot of fun and then I am looking at a $200 yearly bill.
Everything except its original purpose of keeping up with the lives of your real life friends.
Good. That was always my least favorite part of social media
This. It will vary by region but in my area I suspect that 99% of users use marketplace + messenger and that’s it.
In most of developing countries (Africa and SEA) is free and dosnt require an active internet connection, so literally everyone with an old phone has access to it
This is the reason.
It was first, free, and global.
I live in a rural community. Facebook has more or less replaced the web here.
Businesses post their hours, specials, and information on Facebook. Some of them don’t have websites. The rec centre has a hard time keeping their website up to date, but the Facebook group is always accurate. Newspapers have closed down, so a Facebook group keeps people apprised of what’s going on (it seems to be pretty accurate, since everyone in town is part of it, people involved in events chime in). Kids and adults sports groups advertise and tell their members what’s going on via Facebook groups.
It’s a shitty medium, since the Facebook algorithm mixes trash advertisements with town-specific events, but it seems to suffice for the town’s needs.
I suspect it isn’t just my town. The network effect is strong, so I suspect there are niche communities where Facebook is verging on ubiquitous.
I find this so annoying. I don’t use Facebook, so if you post info about your business on there, I just won’t see it and won’t use your business.
to look at it objectively, if you don’t use the service you’re simply not part of the demographic targeted by the business employing
bythat service. That’s mutual.It’s lazy and stupid to host your entire company’s online presence on a for-profit proprietary platform.
It’s lazy and stupid
Another way to say the above would be “simple and easy”. Which is why it’s done by a lot of small businesses that don’t have the expertise (or the funds to hire expertise) to do something better
If it’s a small town hardware store, it’s easier for them to manage a Facebook page that they can access using their regular Facebook account.
Good luck to them when Facebook starts throttling their views and demanding money for more exposure. And good luck to them since they don’t show up on Google or yellow pages sites, nor have a website listed on Google maps. Like the other person said above, plenty of people will just do business elsewhere.
Instead of just doing W analysis, why don’t you learn SWOT analysis instead. It will water down your bias.
Businesses are in the business of running their business, not worrying about FOSS principles and the open web. They can set up a quick information front without having to pay for a webmaster, hosting space, server space, an ISP to handle all that traffic, etc. So why would they care or want to spend the effort otherwise at their size?
I addressed the question in your last sentence here:
What part of “they don’t care” are you having trouble wrapping your head around? They’ll either live with it, or move to another platform that’s easy to use.
IT is not a core competency of most businesses and their goal is to minimize time to deploy and effort on parts that are not core to their business. If it means spending slightly more then so be it. It’s the “build or buy” problem and since IT isn’t their thing, “buy at the cheapest price possible” is gonna win every time.
Most small business need all the business they can get. But if they don’t care, then that is on them.
This is real funny because you can get throttled by big corporations even if (or rather especially if) you’re self hosting pretty much the same way
I have never once had one of my websites throttled, and I’ve been building websites for 20 years.
Yeah I found out the same when I moved back to Iceland. Buying a used car? Renting an apartment? Staying up to date on the parents groups in school, kids sports, any events by any business or group? Contacting any person?
Being forced to hand over all my personal information just to do any of the above really doesn’t sit well with me 😑
It sucks that you need to give them anything, but you don’t have to give them everything, and depending on what information the people you’re interacting with see, the information you give Facebook doesn’t necessarily need to be accurate.
There’s much more info about you up for grabs if you use facebook.
This. In the west among the younger generations, sure, Facebook is outdated/dead. Among other generations, and across much of the world, it is still almost as essential as email.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Zero
A criticism also stated that Facebook is practicing digital colonialism because it is not introducing open internet but building a "little web that turns the user into a mostly passive consumer of mostly western corporate content”.
An article by Christopher Mims in Quartz in September 2012 stated that Facebook Zero played a very important role in Facebook’s expansion in Africa over the 18 months following the release of Facebook Zero, noting that data charges could be a significant component of mobile usage cost and the waiving of these charges reduced a significant disincentive for people in Africa to use Facebook.
To me as a kid with a rudimentary phone and little pocket money, this was also how I got onto and used to access Facebook.
Kind of reminds me of what AOL was trying to do in the ’90s. If it wasn’t for broadband Internet coming directly from telecom services they might’ve succeeded, too.
digital colonialism
Lmao
What else would you call it? It’s them trying to be the face of the internet, the only internet these people know.
Something less dramatic and hilarious probably. Maybe manipulative business tactics.
This is infuriating to me. The Internet gave every person and every company a completely blank slate from which to represent their identity. A slate owned by no one. Then everyone voluntarily decided that’s too hard and moved everything over to the god awful site that is Facebook. Ugh.
Facebook leveraged people’s lack of technical know-how and laziness
I’m almost a pariah in my rural area because I refuse to have a Facebook account or an iPhone.
Gotta be something wrong with that boy, Martha.
Facebook is the closest thing to the Chinese concept of an everything app that the US has.
Puke
Yup niche communities is spot on. I’m into disc golf but most of the community news and local club updates still primarily occur on FB. This is also an extension of suburban and rural community popularity.
Facebook was extremely aggressive in getting their software preloaded on all hardware sold in developing areas over the last 20 years. So countries like India (with one and a half billion people by itself) have a large segment of users that think Facebook is the internet. It’s Zucks ultimate walled garden.
3 billion of those people likely access Facebook for everything that we think of as online. Commerce, social networking, music, videos, it’s all on Facebook.
Just like how people thought AOL was the Internet 20 years back.
Exactly. We’ve come full-circle. The likes of AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve were practically eradicated by the open internet, and it’s taken 30+ years to get even close to clawing it back into some kind of walled garden. But it looks like they’re making progress.
I remember that, about a decade ago, Facebook including free access to their services on cell phones in India; there was concern and pushback about creating this walled garden monopoly, obviously to no avail.
My guess is that is why many memes from India from back then involved screenshots of the older generations using Whatsapp as a sort of social network, the subcontinent’s own version of “ok boomer” humor.The free access to Facebook scheme was killed due to protests, and we now have a net neutrality principle. The workaround FB found was to get smartphone manufacturers to include Facebook as a pre-installed app. And now the government is cracking down on pre-installed apps, so I don’t know what they’ll do next.
large segment of users that think Facebook is the internet.
This really hurt to read somehow. I mean you’re right, but it’s still shit.
This the right answer.
So countries like India (with one and a half billion people by itself)
Also old people use Facebook a lot here. It was their first social media and they have settled on that. There are some set of people who are switching to Instagram day by day but the rate isn’t any threat to Facebook.
Because people have those family members who insist on doing everything on Facebook Messenger, and that Signal or even fucking Whatsapp is too fiddly for them. So everyone ends up with the lowest common piece of shit network, and it counts them as active users whether they actually use it or not and just happens to be checking for messages in the background.
That is exactly it for me. I use Messenger to talk to friends and family in Thailand and they refuse to use Signal or Telegram. A few do use Line but 90% will only use FB and Messenger.
Yea but like… why are they allowed to refuse services and you aren’t? Like, I refuse to use whstsapp out of principle (I live in a country where it’s the de facto standard but fuck
facebookmeta). Some people I communicate with refuse to use telegram or signal out of convenience. Why should I be the one to budge and give up my principles? I‘m even providing options…Because you’re the minority. It’s obnoxious to tell everyone to download an additional app just to talk to you. You’re probably not that special.
Yea, I’m not. And I’m not telling them they have to download anything. I just tell them I’m not on WhatsApp. And either they use one of the other services, including SMS and e-Mail, or it wasn’t that important. Most people manage.
Does those number include people that only use the account with other pages widgets? Like “access with your Meta account” and shit like that.
I use Facebook. I am not in touch with very many of my relatives. The few that I am in touch with are all on Facebook. I also live a significant distance from pretty much all of my friends and that’s a way I can keep in touch with them. On top of that, my brother, who is on the spectrum, prefers to communicate with me that way. In fact, I would probably never hear from him until my mother died if I didn’t because he’s never called or emailed me.
But… here is how I use Facebook: I only follow select friends and relatives who aren’t too annoying- which means following about 10-15 people and unfollowing all the others, I tell it every time I see an ad I never want to see again, and I am only in groups that are either small and personally significant to me (like the group for my relatives) and a couple of others that I mostly just look at and don’t participate in.
No arguments, no political unpleasantness, nothing that makes me angry or upset unless something bad is happening to someone I care about, and honestly it’s not unpleasant. I think I’ve maybe blocked three people the entire time I’ve been on Facebook and all three did something personal to me offline that made me decide to cut off contact with them.
Sure, they’re hoovering up my data, but so is everyone else.
A lot of users are also from poorer countries that lack the means to create their own web infrastructure. Using Facebook to run your business account is easier, cheaper, and more reliable than most alternatives there. Phone carriers and ISP often also have “free”-data for certain social media platforms. You get 1GB+1GB for Facebook/IG/YT/Some Game. So you are stuck in this loop where everything reinforces itself to use Facebook.
This. Also, FB invested heavily in many of those countries in order to drive up its growth back in the mid 2010s, exactly to ensure that, once the internet finally became widely available for those people, “everything” would be on FB.
I suspect the majority of those users are from SEA countries.
This! I’m from one of those developing countries and using Facebook is a necessity at this point since everything and everyone is in that platform.
Network effect. That’s why we need to keep the fediverse alive: so futur generation aren’t forced to signed into Facebook, Discord or whatever would be (or would have been) trendy.
There are plenty of people for whom Facebook may as well be the entire Internet. Not just demographic groups but entire countries. It’s definitely in decline with the demographic that uses Reddit, Lemmy, and discord – but several billion average users don’t disappear overnight
Yup, in many of the world’s poorer regions Facebook has partnered up with cell phone providers to provide free access to the Facebook ecosystem and a limited number of other sites but not the general internet. This means for instance that if someone posts a newspaper article you can’t even check up on the source without incurring extra costs. For millions of people Facebook therefore is the de facto Internet experience.
I have never been a Facebook user so I’m mostly guessing.
But I think there was a heyday where people spent a great deal of time on there.
Now they don’t. They just log on when it’s needed to get ahold of someone or check a specific niche community.
Thus it’s dying because the ad revenue is way down. It’s in decline not because it lacks users, but because they no longer spend hours there.
My brother is in the ICU right now, and everything is being co-ordinated on Facebook. It’s how we are letting people know updates, and how we get a hold of people.
Facebook is really the only social media platform that lets you find people somewhat easily from their name.
Sorry to hear about your bro.
I also wonder what they consider an active user. Would logging in through Facebook to play a mobile game count? What about just logging in through Facebook on any site to get an account on that site? I know I probably check my Facebook once every 3 months to check up on fam but other than that I don’t use it.
This sounds accurate to me. I have an account, and there are certain people that I use Messenger for, but I haven’t updated my status or shared anything in about ten years.
That’s the same boat as me.
Messenger and nothing else for 9 years now.
Reddit killed Facebook for me when i started getting banned for memes etc
Then reddit killed reddit for me
I started a facebook account in 2006 and stopped using it a few years later. I still have an account but only look at it maybe 2 or 3 times a year.
I hate when I have to log in to find a business though. It 's infuriating.
And I hate reddit with the glare of a thousand suns.
I don’t think it’s dying at all, it’s still very popular across the world.
Ad revenue is up, because they’ve replaced the feed with 98% ads and sponsored posts. You can’t even see what your friends are posting now. It’s disgusting.
This. It’s horrible and outright unusable. I used to block each and every “recommended” post/page, after a few weeks they stopped appearing so frequently.
I tried that, but there’s a million more to take their place. A couple days ago there was an ad for a game that was a completely naked woman with her legs spread open as the picture. I reported it and Facebook said they’ve reviewed it and determined it doesn’t violate their community standards, even though exposed nipples are explicitly stated in their standards as a violation. There was an option to request further review and I tried to do that, and of course the submit button was disabled and broken because a trillion dollar company cant even be bothered to build a functional website. I’m fucking done with that site. If I can’t even look for content my actual friends posted without being assaulted with pornography, then I’m done. I wish they’d crash and burn like the dumpster fire they are.
The point isn’t so much to actually block all the garbage, that’s impossible, but to suggest to the Facebook algo to show you less such stuff.
I’ve also seen people getting semi-pornographic adverts on Youtube, so your experience sounds entirely expected. Putting everything else aside, it’s “funny” how any other smaller independent website or a user on these major websites can and will be sanctioned (the user getting banned, the small website gaining a negative reputation) for hosting/posting pornography, but when a major website shoves pornography right into your face (and probably minors’ too, which is unambiguously illegal) nothing can be done, there is never any sort of uproar or criticism, I doubt you could even report it to some authority…
it’s very possible to block all the garbage and get no ads or sponsored posts. use your friends-only feed.
you can if you change to your ‘friends’ feed.
It doesn’t load. It shows like 0-1 post and then just spins endlessly. I know there’s content they could show, because I’ve checked.
works fine for me on desktop website and android app. Not sure what’s going on with your computers/accounts. 🤷♂️
I’ve viewing it from the website on my phone. Before you might suggest it, no, I’m not interested in the app.
sounds like you need a better browser, and a better phone.
Firefox and Pixel 7 Pro. It doesn’t load on my desktop either, also using Firefox.
Statistics show the average person spends far more time on Facebook vs other platforms though.
I’m not sure that’s a good source. It’s combines a bunch of different sources, and the one for Facebook itself combines a bunch of other sources
It looks to me like “social media” breaks down into a few categories: Video/image sharing (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Douyin, Kuaishou); Messaging (WhatsApp, WeChat, FB Messenger, Telegram, Snapchat, QQ); Microblogging (Twitter, Weibo); and tangled fog of pulsating yearning (Pinterest).
Then, there’s Facebook, which defies easy categorization. It does all of the above, plus more. It’s how people maintain loose connections with other people that they may not talk to every day. What is its competition? Basically, I think it remains popular because it’s the default, nothing else can replace it.
Yeah it’s hilarious how people have been saying Facebook is dying for years now. It’s the biggest it’s ever been.
I’m one of those people. I’m only using messenger, but since I message people from desktop (and I don’t want to install their client, they know enough about me already), I still have to log in to the base Facebook page. After a while I started using the Feed Eradicator plugin (or what), but unfortunately I still have to log in if I want to be able to message my acquaintances.
Why am I still using Facebook messenger? Back when most of the users were still unaware about their practices, all of my friends and family joined and now it is their main way of communication. There’s no way everyone important to me would just start using a second social media platform for me. Also, I can’t make calls from desktop WhatsApp (which could still have a chance to become a substitute for most of the people I know). Anything else is just too niche for most of them to install for the sake of one person. Or three.
I wish there was a good practical solution because I’d prefer not being part of this ugly machine, but until then, I’ll have to stick with it.
Leaving FB for WA = Leaving Meta for Meta.
I know. I mentioned WhatsApp because at least it’s big enough for many of them to know or be comfortable with. Even I don’t know the rest of the options too much, but apart from my brothers, not many of my relatives and friends know about Signal or Telegram (or whatever could be any better - note that it isn’t even an English speaking or big country). And with that, we’re back to square one with the niche problem.
EDIT: And I also don’t know if I can make calls and share media both from PC and phone. It’s a plus if I don’t need a separate client on PC. Even more of a plus if I can just use a website without an app on phone.
Because non technically savvy people get comfortable and it’s always difficult to get them to move, so everyone who wants to change, can’t because they end up alone and social media only works if you have people to be social with. Younger people will have the same problem with TikTok and the like when their friends age and they want to move. Only new generations start with a clean slate and can get all their friends to start out at the new sites.
Yep, inertia.
It was years ago, but I used to work for a US based ISP. I’m a Canadian and the place I was working at had a contract to suppliment their support team.
My team did enhanced support, beyond what the ISP would deal with. Basically it was remote geek squad type service for people’s computers.
While I was working there in the mid 2000’s, there was a Facebook outage. All of Facebook’s services were unavailable. We broke records with how many calls we got that day. Almost all of them went something like this:
Client: “the internet doesn’t work!” Tech: can you open a browser and… Client (interrupting) “it says page cannot be displayed!!11” Tech: I understand, can you tell me what it says at the top in the address bar? (Insert some explaining of how to find the address bar) Client: “facebook.com” Tech: okay, I want you to click on that and erase it, then type in google.com, hit enter, and tell me what the page says. Client: " it says Google, with a (some bad description of a text entry field)" Tech: this is Google’s website, it loaded from the internet, so your internet works. Facebook is down. Client (without missing a beat): “can you fix Facebook?” Tech: No. (Call ends)
I’m certain my employer made bank that day, since clients had to pay an extra monthly charge on their internet bill to speak with us, and their support made a point of dumping calls to us whenever they could. If someone wanted to speak to another tech, sure, but you have to buy this service…
I did not like that job. I actually got a call from an inexperienced Linux user who couldn’t get DNS resolution. I tried to coach him over the phone to determine if his internet was working at all. Before I could actually give him an answer, my manager dropped by (he was monitoring the call) and told me to tell him we could not help him, that the support center only supported Windows based systems, since, out of everyone there, I was the only one with enough Linux knowledge to know what to do, and he didn’t want to give anyone the impression that we could help with Linux.
All the guy needed to do was change his resolv.conf to valid DNS servers and he would have been fine. It doesn’t work that way anymore, but it did at the time, and I knew it. I did not feel good getting off of that call. It’s like, I have the answer, this guy needs the answer, he paid to speak to me, and I really want to help him out, but I would probably lose my job if I do. I was very blunt with him. I said that I could help him, but I wasn’t allowed to. He understood, but I still felt like shit. I was too timid to realize my worth, which was part of the reason I was there to begin with… Now, I would have just made it clear that he’ll only get help on this once, and when we hung up, never expect to reach me again, and that nobody here knows what I do about this stuff, then helped him anyways. Fuck that manager. I’m so glad I don’t work there anymore.
