Researchers Claim Facebook Is 'Dead and Buried' To Many Young Users 457
JoeyRox writes "The recent decline in Facebook's popularity with teenagers appears to be worsening. A Global Social Media Impact study of 16 to 18 year olds found that many considered the site 'uncool' and keep their profiles alive only to keep in touch with older relatives, for whom the site remains popular. Researches say teens have switched to using WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Twitter in place of Facebook."
Fuck... (Score:0, Insightful)
I'm old :(
Re:Good. (Score:2, Insightful)
I hate it when those damn kids start playing on my lawn.
You call THAT shit a lawn?
Damn, have your standards been lowered by social media...
Re:Get Off My Lawn (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares? FB got enough users to go IPO and exit. In the time it took for that to happen, its users migrated to other services, just in time for them to create profitable exits for their founders and ultimately fuck over their retail investors when the userbase shifts to the next cool thing.
The only business model is passing notes in class. Email and USENET let you fuck around while looking like you were working. Then came GeoCities, profitably exited to Yahoo. Then came Instant messaging systems, same sort of pump/dump deal. (Somewhere around here phone companies discovered there was money to be made in texting, which was just another way to pass notes in class.) Then came MySpace and Facebook, and Instagram. Then came Twitter, basically a way to monetize texting and take it back from the phone companies. Now it's Snapchat, who promises to let NSA and anyone clever enough to rename a misnamed .JPG back to ".JPG" keep archives, but since most of its userbase (see above -- passing notes in class!) doesn't care, because they don't know enough about technology to see beyond "the client app autodeletes after viewing".
The more it changes, the more it stays the same, and the less I want anything to do with this industry anymore, except to daytrade the stocks in it. You can't invest in it, because fads only last 3-5 years, and it takes 2-4 of those years to go from startup to IPO exit. (Any bets on when GitHub IPOs, jumps its shark, and everyone switches to Mercurial? Fuck, maybe there's a fad/pendulum effect there, and in ten years we'll abandon DVCS for centralized versioning systems once thought obsolete, sorta like how we moved from decentralized application hosting of local executables on personal computers back to SaaS and the fuckin' cloud.)
Re:Too complicated (Score:5, Insightful)
[1]: One example personally was someone tagging me while I was browsing a humidor in a FB pic. A week later the health insurance company I had at the time then sent a demand letter that I either go for a physical or pay smoker's rates.
That claim I find rather hard to believe. So much so that I don't, without it being backed up.
Does anyone have any evidence for this happening?
Re: Who would believe it? (Score:4, Insightful)
If efficiency was cool, Linux would have been developed in the 1960s, all airlines would be blended-wing, with waveriders being next year, minimum gas mileage for new cars would be 100 mpg at 100 mph, fast food would be fast (and healthy), the Tea Party would be banned by law, teenagers would have memorized everything published on the Blue Zones and ebooks would be in LuaLaTeX format, not a subset of HTML.
Re:Too complicated (Score:4, Insightful)
Whoa, footnote [1] is a little too egregious for me to let it pass unremarked. Why in the world could the insurance company see the picture? How long was it from posting to reaction? Which company was this? (I'm not inclined to reward this kind of behavior)
For one, the logical leap they made is huge, and for another, that's some serious monitoring of online traffic for this to be true. I have to admit I'm a bit skeptical, not that I'm sure they wouldn't love to do this.
Re:Get Off My Lawn (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are you so jaded? If email works, then stick to it. It's not as if anyone is forcing you to follow the fashionistas? One of the beauties of Unix is that you can take a Unix programmer from the 1980s and drop him in 2014 and he'll still be productive. True, he wouldn't know anything about GUIs (which change with time) but the core has remained largely the same. The same can be said about all core technologies around today.
Re:The REAL cool kids are all using IRC (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd imagine the lack of social networking elements is the draw. People assume that today's kids don't care about privacy, but I get the sense that most of them want their social connections to be more ephemeral than Facebook encourages. With Facebook, defriending someone could be slightly embarrassing, so I just accumulate a pile of people I used to know and may not identify with anymore, with potentially added stress if I delete them. With a messaging app, I message you, or I don't. You can add all the privacy features you want to Facebook, but the possibly preferable alternative is not putting all the effort into maintaining a profile.
Facebook was never for teenagers. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
There was never an abundance of teenagers on Facebook. It was initially for college students, and it branched out to older users. It has never been a good tool for young people living with their parents (for obvious reasons).
Re: Who would believe it? (Score:5, Insightful)
She does have a twitter account--a marketing course in one of her college classes required all the students to open a twitter account. If THAT'S not the death knell of a social network (professors ordering students to open an account!), I don't know what is.
I don't think a professor can demand that of the students. What if a student cannot accept the EULA of Twitter? Will the school refund the tuition and other expenses incurred before knowing about this requirement?
No different than if an engineering student felt they couldn't accept the EULA of Matlab. These are the standard tools of the profession and if a student is unable to bring himself to use a profession's standard toolset then it is much cheaper to find out after paying for a few courses than after completing an entire degree program.
Re: Who would believe it? (Score:5, Insightful)
If efficiency was cool, Linux would have been developed in the 1960s ...
Of course, you realize that Unix development [wikipedia.org] started in the mid 1960s.
The history of Unix dates back to the mid-1960s when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT&T Bell Labs, and General Electric were developing an experimental time sharing operating system called Multics for the GE-645 mainframe. ... On this PDP-7, in 1969, a team of Bell Labs researchers led by Thompson and Ritchie, including Rudd Canaday, developed a hierarchical file system, the concepts of computer processes and device files, a command-line interpreter, and some small utility programs.
Re:Get Off My Lawn (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Who would believe it? (Score:2, Insightful)
If you support the fucking tea party, you deserve all the cheap shots you are destined for. Fuckwit.
Re: Who would believe it? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's all about privacy. Ironically everyone said the kids don't care about privacy while not realising they were leaving in herds because of privacy. It's just that their privacy concerns are more short term than ours. They are worried about being caught doing whatever it is they do by their parents, rather than what boring stuff like what future employers will know about them etc.
Re:Who needs facebook? (Score:4, Insightful)
Totally agree.
When I was in school I saw this quite a bit (parents forcing their viewpoint to the detriment of their kids).
Trying to impart good values has to be balanced by reality. I too don't get a lot of this "phone culture" stuff. It drives me crazy to be at a restaurant with a bunch of people from _my_ generation all with their phones out instead of actually talking. That said, this is the reality we live in, it's becoming a necessary skill to fit in socially.
Robbing a kid of the ability to socialize in their generations preferred medium because the parents thinks it's rubbish is just asking for problems later in life.
Re: Yogi Berra (Score:5, Insightful)
Then again, what SnapChat lacks (and Facebook has) is a "stack". If one service holds ones content, contacts, communication and even identity to other services, one might be slow to switch. But a stand-alone messaging service is easily ditched, or used alongside another one.
Re: Who would believe it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why oh why did you have to write this as AC? It's the perfect analysis of the problem: Facebook is getting less popular with teens exactly because it gets more popular with older people, i.e. their parent generation.
Not only because of the ancient "It's uncool to do what your old folks are doing". You can't share your ... less "parent-compatible" exploits anymore with your friends using Facebook. Because your parents are listening. Huh? You could make it "friends only" and not friend your parents? Yeah. Sure. You can not friend your parents.
So you could only use Facebook to post about your latest "family friendly" happenings. Which would pretty much double as the killer for your social life as a teen.
So of course teens move away from a service they can't use sensibly anymore.
Re: Yogi Berra (Score:4, Insightful)
The NSA and other peeping toms. Duh.
16 -18 year olds have never had a reason to use FB (Score:5, Insightful)
A Global Social Media Impact study of 16 to 18 year olds
These are people whose social network consists of persons they see just about every day of their life, i.e., their classmates and family. It's not surprising they don't find facebook useful. What is surprising is that they find any other online social network particularly useful. I imagine twitter has more to do with keeping up with celebrities/bands and snapchat/whatsapp is really not a social network so much as it is an improved texting interface which probably works well for intercommunication between small high school cliques.
The reason they use facebook to keep in touch with older relatives is because older relatives are the only people they have developed significant relationships with who are not immediately accessible. When these same students go out-of-state to various colleges, Facebook is going to be a much better way to keep track of each others lives, interact casually with new people (i.e. facebook can be very passive, it doesn't require as much direct activity as a chat program, can just go ahead and friend that guy/girl you maybe like), and keep track of clubs and related events.
But I have seen some die off in facebook popularity. People still check it but they don't post nearly as much. I personally blame privacy issues and the 'like' feature. The latter because it's makes it a popularity contest. Some people are secure enough to not care, others are going to be put off when certain friends post and get 100 likes and they get 2, or even if they do get enough likes stress about keeping it up, or whatever. Best just not to post and avoid the stress of whether your post will be well-received by the community. Any contest is ultimately only going to be participated in by people who do well at the contest, assuming there is any choice in participating.
Re:Get Off My Lawn (Score:4, Insightful)
This is about communication, so yes, you are forced to use something that the other side also uses. Because communication involves at least two people.
Sure, the UNIX nerd from 1980 can sit alone with his box and hack away, so all is fine. Typical slashdot reaction.
Re:Get Off My Lawn (Score:2, Insightful)
If it can't be said in 140 chars or less it's not worth communicating?
This really bugs me. I use facebook fairly regularly, as it's my primary method for keeping in contact with friends and family in all the different parts of the world that I've lived in or spent significant time in and suits this job very well. However over the last few years an annoying trend has popped up. People will post something interesting (in amongst the stuff I don't care so much about) and I'll write a long and thoughtful comment as a reply. The response is then "Ugh, you're so wordy", "TL;DR", "geez, I didn't need an essay", or similar.
Meaningful thoughtful statements have somehow been declared 'out of fashion' or otherwise no longer acceptable.
I also run a facebook page for the book(s) I wrote/write as well as a twitter feed. Interaction thought the facebook page is excellent; however I've basically given up on twitter as I can't really say anything useful in that small number of characters. I could in theory start my own blog, post information there and then link to it from the twitter feed, but that just seems like significant extra work compared to what I'm doing on facebook (honestly, I'd rather be spending my time writing books than promoting them).
Re: Who would believe it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems like FB's friend/non-friend division is not a good model of real life relationships! Wow! Surprise, surprise. Makes me wonder what Google did wrong with G+ to get so little popularity - the categorization of friends into separate groups and selective per-group availability of your content seemed to be among the initial assumptions (based on press releases from long time ago, I have no idea whether it works as advertised). That seems to be the right solution. Something else must have been very wrong... Without an account on either service I can't risk a guess.
Google forces users to use real names.
Google tries to TRICK you into adding real information.
Then when you do, locks it up with all your other Google type service accounts; youtube. gmail, etc.
And follows it up by taking away a bunch of tools IN those service accounts.
In return for this, you get more ads related to what they think you will buy.
It's truly insidious and very likely to poison the opinion of google in any half-aware tech person.
Meanwhile, google makes it easy for the nigh-facist government to scoop up all the data. (Which, might not bother you now, but could when a different congress and a different president get in control who later decide you shouldn't be allowed to be free of IRS audits due to your beliefs on drug use.)
That's just what I picked up by reading here and other places about google+. I am never going to use it, and I instruct anybody who asks never to use it.
Re: Who would believe it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Given many (most?) major companies and organizations maintain an active Twitter presence operated by their PR or customer relations department? Yes.
Given that it only takes one bad (or mistaken/misread) tweet from a major company that could potentially disrupt millions in revenue, or even ruin their image permanently, I'm rather surprised that the organizations own lawyers haven't recommended it to be removed due to the liability*.
We've seen things go horribly wrong. Plenty of times. Some are forgiven. Most are not. All are remembered permanently thanks to the internet.
* How long before social media liability insurance policies are written? I'll give it another 15 seconds. Watch and see. I promise you it's coming.
Re: Who would believe it? (Score:5, Insightful)
I was having similar thoughts. Thanks for speaking my mind so clearly.
ALL social media sites are simply fads. There is not one that will stand the test of time. Facebook selling stock? Cool - Suckerburg really got one over on all the greedy fools with money to gamble. It certainly isn't going to last as long as MS, Apple, or Google. Facebook isn't the new IBM, or even Timex. Bars, pubs, and other social meeting places come and go. Facebook offers nothing truly special, unless they start serving free beer.
Re:Google+ is for you (Score:4, Insightful)
For those interested in photography
Nudge nudge! Say no more! Bet she does, bet she does!