Facebook Has 3 Billion Users. Many of Them Are Old. (cbsnews.com) 102
Facebook says it is not dead. Facebook also wants you to know that it is not just for "old people," as young people have been saying for years. From a report: Now, with the biggest thorn in its side -- TikTok -- facing heightened government scrutiny amid growing tensions between the U.S. and China, Facebook could, perhaps, position itself as a viable, domestic-bred alternative. There's just one problem: young adults like Devin Walsh (anecdote in the story) have moved on. [...] Today, 3 billion people check it each month. That's more than a third of the world's population. And 2 billion log in every day. Yet it still finds itself in a battle for relevancy, and its future, after two decades of existence. For younger generations -- those who signed up in middle school, or those who are now in middle school, it's decidedly not the place to be. Without this trend-setting demographic, Facebook, still the main source of revenue for parent company Meta, risks fading into the background -- utilitarian but boring, like email.
They're Privacy Rapists (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook/Meta[stasize] are just a bunch of Privacy Rapists, that keep pretending to apologize when getting caught. Is it really any wonder why anyone doesn't want to hang around them, ever?
Re:They're Privacy Rapists (Score:5, Informative)
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You think it's just facebook? It's everyone, google, amazon
I never said it was just Facebook/Meta[stasize] - yes indeed google, amazon, apple, etc. any company that's a public (and even some, probably a lot, of private ones) will be privacy rapists, since their real customers are their investors/stockholders, and they'll abuse consumers' privacy as a tool to generate value for their customers.
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Hell yes, my bank has one even when logged in: dpm.demdex.com and before connect.facebook.net when I log in.
Re:They're Privacy Rapists (Score:4, Interesting)
That's simply untrue, and it's deeply unhelpful.
In Europe we have fairly strong privacy laws, and also I think a much better understanding of what privacy is and how companies use our data. The laws allow us to request our data and see exactly how it is used. That transparency really helps make this debate about facts and about how we want our data to actually be used.
For example, Google does not sell your personal data. It would be insane to do so as it's what makes their business so valuable. It would be like Coke selling their recipe, only worse.
However, Google does use your personal data to target ads. They offer some control over that, including an opt-out of some targeting. It's important to understand exactly how their business operates in order to have a useful conversation about privacy, because clearly there is demand for services like the ones Google offers, and most people are willing to trade some personal info for them, assuming they retain control over that information and Google only uses it in clearly defined, easy to understand ways.
Europe's privacy rules are far from perfect, and it's an evolving area of law and society. At least it's actually a thing here though. It's scary to listen to Americans talk about companies violating their privacy and stealing their data as if it's some inevitable, uncontrollable force of nature that defies regulation.
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Re:They're Privacy Rapists (Score:4, Insightful)
That doesn't say what you seem to think it says.
Google allows advertisers to bid of access to certain demographics, but it doesn't share the individual's data with them. At least not in the EU, where that would be illegal since Google has not specifically, separately, asked for opt-in permission to do so.
It also wouldn't make much sense for Google, since they make more money being the gatekeepers to those individuals, than from selling that information to others to use directly.
Google holding an ad auction and displaying it does not require sharing of data.
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It's all the same crap, just with a different name. They become big and popular and then a new fad comes along, and people lose interest in the old ones. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
I ignore them all. The only way to win the game is to not play.
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AOL --> MySpace --> Facebook --> Instagram --> Tik Tok
How it started...
Taught people how to internet --> taught people how to code --> connected people with family/friends --> picture-focused narcissism --> video focused narcissism
How's it going...
Irrelevant news aggregator after shutting down all functional business lines --> Tom Meme lol --> failed "metaverse" --> desperately wants to be tiktok --> taking over the world shortly
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There's an entire spectrum of hate & bigotry. It's just not fair to limit it to racism...
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Re: Hello there, fellow kids! (Score:2)
Ha, I was thinking that too. This guy's post basically covers all humanity.
People need to separate out the concept of respecting people from respecting their beliefs and values.
I'm American (Score:1, Insightful)
It's always the same scam with the 1%. Get us hating each other for some immutable characteristic and then we fight while they take all the good stuff for themselves. And we fall for it. Ever
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I have way more hatred for Christians than Muslims. Muslims play a minor role in my country, they don't even register, Christians on the other hand push the crap some OCD patient wrote down a couple millennia ago into laws affecting me.
Re:Hello there, fellow kids! (Score:5, Funny)
"Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"
He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"
He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too!"
Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over."
- Emo Philips
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I've never seen that one before. Hilarious shit. Thanks for posting.
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There's no hatred like the love of a religious man when you worship his god wrong.
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The instinct is to avoid inbreeding by breeding with the most different, otherwise we get inbred people who think it is normal to breed with your relatives or even children as you state.
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Did you miss the part where almost 1/3rd of the entire human race uses FB?
So uh yeah it's definitely the home of various -ists. Duh. Because almost every adult with a phone is on there. Double duh.
VirtueSignal++;
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So ... Facebook is people?
Yuck, it's even more disgusting than I thought.
Utilitarian and boring, like email... What? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Devil's advocate time (Score:3)
Email isn't a social network. Facebook is. The UI is terrible, but it's consistently terrible. Meaning users who put the effort in to learn it don't have to learn it again. Sort of like Microsoft Office.
People don't use it to communicate, they use it to network. A good example is my buddy using it to find people to go on fishing trips with. Or my other buddy using it to find Warhammer 40k games. It works for that because ever
Re:Devil's advocate time (Score:4, Interesting)
Email's competitors are different forms of communication/data transmission. As long as email's flavour of communication is useful (it is and it will be), it's going to stay around. Snail mail is still around. Reduced, but still useful and around. Will be the same with email IMO.
Facebook is slowly dying, and the more users bleed out of that walled garden, the less useful it becomes and the more power it gives to competitors, further accelerating its demise. The "networking" part is also dying along. People will look for groups elsewhere. Your buddy's children will possibly use different social networks to find games/buddies to do stuff with, etc. It's losing critical mass.
I did (Score:2)
Facebook is *always* dying. That's because kids don't want to be on the same website as their parent. So they go find something new, and when they grow up they stick with it and leave Facebook.
This has been a problem for Facebook for ages, and they solve it by buying up competitors where the kids go. There's over 100 companies FB has bought.
Networking isn't dying, it's just always migrating off Facebook. FB then uses their m
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The "networking" part is also dying along. People will look for groups elsewhere. Your buddy's children will possibly use different social networks to find games/buddies to do stuff with, etc. It's losing critical mass.
I really hope the networking aspect goes away. There used to be good forums for just about any hobby or interest out there. Information was easy to find with a keyword search. Many of those forums migrated to facebook and now all the useful info is buried in a sea of ads or offtopic crap. If you need to replace the ECU on a 1998 Civic, a forum would help. Good luck finding that on a facebook group.
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The possibility of Facebook having a breakthrough relevance as a platform ended somewhere between when Candy Crush was a big deal, and the 2016 US presidential election.
Since then, they've been riding out their previous momentum. They've squandered any good will which people may have had towards them by overt propaganda campaigns, politicized "fact checking", and the wholesale selling of PII.
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Facebook became toxic because it filled up with racist uncles and conspiracy theory believing aunts. Facebook wasn't willing to do anything about it, so everyone else left and now it's just wall to wall bullshit.
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All facebook domains are blocked in my etc/hosts, but I do find an occasional "utility" to facebook (and instagram): basic information on local shops / arts and crafts, places that use social media to post news and products. I would say I interact with facebook as "utility" for about once every 10,000 email exchanged.
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Facebook wishes it had 1% of the utility of email, and whatever scraps of utility it has left, it's going downhill. I mean, I can't comprehend why such a comparison of (rotten, worm-infested) apples to oranges is being made.
It's a weird comparison (website vs protocol) but kinda relevant.
The major utility of FB is that almost everyone uses it. There's a number of times when I wanted to get in touch with an old acquaintance and Facebook was the only real method I had for doing so.
I guess I'm old now. (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides Slashdot, and Reddit, Facebook is really the only social media I use because that is where all my old friends are. Most of them just share the occasional meme or slice of life; none of us are the kind of people that share pictures of ourselves and our food all day long for validation.
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... for validation.
Obviously, you're a bunch of invalids.
Try the fish, I'll be here all week.
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I haven't used FB for 10+ years but don't they ban people and lower the virality of posts they don't like, including/especially political posts? If so, then why post that material there?
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That only happens to those who fail to pay the protection money...
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That's because Facebook is pretty good at placing people within an information bubble that fits them well.
If you have a lot of different things that interest you (say, more than 20-30), that specific algorithm breaks down and the gates of hell are open.
What bothers me to no end is that Facebook murdered classic forums (by being easier to manage), and once it did that, it promptly became horrible to manage. Don't even get me started with how badly is information maintained and categorized (that is, not at al
Many of them are... (Score:2)
..dea, er, I mean scrip, er I mean bot, er I mean old.
Yeah, that's it.
They know (Score:4, Interesting)
This is why Facebook is unstoppable. Every few years the kids find a new social media platform (where their parents & grandparents aren't hanging around) and every few years they buy it up. If they can't buy it they'll run it out of business by pricing ad buys super low.
If you wanna see Facebook taken down a notch demand anti-trust law enforcement.
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There's been Facebook, then Snapchat/Instagram, and now Tiktok. There isn't something new every few years that gets bought up. There's only one single example of Facebook purchasing another social media platform.
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WhatsApp has become largely irrelevant. Instagram is not far behind.
Basically, every time something is bought up by a megacorporation, people know that it's time to move on.
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It's like corporations just don't want to accept that they're the smelly child. I.e. "It's not that we like being here, what we like about this place is that YOU are NOT here".
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Largely irrelevant to whom?
All things considered I'd very much rather not use it, but it seems awfully persistent.
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whatsapp has ~50% more active users than facebook messenger
2 billion vs 1.3
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WhatsApp has become largely irrelevant.
Um, are you sure? Pretty much everyone I know is there.
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It's not really social media though, is it? I use it, but just to text Europeans.
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Yeah. Myspace ate AOL's lunch, which ate Compuserve's lunch. Facebook came along and the youngsters left all those other services for Facebook because it became inhabited by oldsters, and the new generation of youngsters found something else. I imagine the best way to cripple Tiktok is to send all adults instructions on how to get on and follow their children. That would be TT's death knell.
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I'm so old I remember reading this [slashdot.org] with astonishment.
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"I can understand how IM appeals to kids (regardless of nationality), but I find IM incredibly distracting."
Literally first post in that article, the author hasn't posted since 2005. I guess he stuck with e-mail, after all.
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they solve this problem by buying up any emerging competitor..
This is the tactic of any large tech company. See Microsoft. See Alphabet.
If government were serious about regulation, the single most important thing they could do, would be to prohibit huge companies from doing any sort of M&A. Global turnover > X? No M&A for you, period, no exceptions.
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The usefulness for young people is actually negative. Exactly BECAUSE their old folks are using it.
Imagine you're a teenager. And you're using a social media platform that your parents use. Can you not "friend" them? Well, of course you can't because, uh, well, why would you, what are you hiding, Timmy?
So you have to friend them. But then the whole appeal of the site goes out the window. Because you can't post anything you wouldn't want your parents to see. Or, the worst case scenario, have your parents com
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Facebook is actually advertising alternate profiles now. I think they started doing it for exactly the reason that you stated; to be able to have a sanitized public facing Persona and a uncensored private facing Persona.
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I prefer my solution: Using the profiles of other people to give my antisocial side a night on the town.
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Here's some stuff that I find useful on Facebook:
- 3D printing communities, with excellent projects, ideas, advice;
- Miniature painting communities;
- Scale Model communities;
- Server and media stuff (Unraid, PLEX, Ubiquiti, etc., etc);
- Plants (cacti, succulents)
- Art (Steampunk, Gothic, Pagan, Cyberpunk);
- PC stuff (watercooling);
- Local news (including VERY local ones, neighborhood stuff).
Just some examples out of the many groups I am part of (some I co-manage or moderate).
Like pretty much any other tool,
Slashdot has 100 users. The code is OLDOLDOLD (Score:5, Funny)
2bn/day? Bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: 2bn/day? Bullshit (Score:2)
Facebook has always lied about actual user numbers, especially if you are a business looking to advertise. I remember when they told me that the reach of my ad in a 10 mile radius was almost double the actual population size. So are they counting devices, or people?
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They count ad-pushing. It's how many times those ads are being pushed to devices.
Time to move to second life (Score:5, Funny)
I heard it's the next thing.
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Second life is obsolete already, LifeGPT is the groovy thing these days.
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I heard it's the next thing.
They already renamed that the metaverse, and it's already the previous thing again.
Many? (Score:2)
I'd guess that "almost all" would be nearer the truth at this point.
"3 Billion Users" (Score:1)
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> old?, they're not even people.
As long as bots buy products, ain't matter. Bender has to replace his ass every 3 months, for example.
If you grow up under total surveillance (Score:2)
you resent it.
Everyone growing up past the millennium has been under constant parental supervision. And I mean constant. They had their cellphones bugged, their movement tracked, their online behaviour monitored, their social media forcibly associated with their parents. These people have learned what it means to have no privacy whatsoever.
And they're sick of it.
What's left for Facebook is a generation that doesn't know that feeling of constant supervision who do actually believe that you don't have to fear
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+1 Insightful.
I wonder if constant surveillance is in reality the main cause of youth depression.
You can't win by chasing the latest (Score:1)
...fad forever. You are not going to always hit the target, as fads come and go unpredictably.
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If you're big enough, you can. Just buy out the latest fad... unless it's made by that pesky Chinese who won't sell it to you.
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Big corporations usually ruin such. Maybe they can milk it for a few years, but then it becomes a ball and chain. Big corporations and start-ups just think too different: culture clash.
"A plague a' both your houses!" -Mercutio (Score:2)
Is there anything either of these pox peddlers can provide that is necessary for living my life? The steady drumbeat of serotonin hits from exaggerated clickbait "news" and AI-written headlines designed to make my blood pressure spike? Frothy propaganda pieces posted by sock puppets and nation-states intent on sowing discord? Intrusive messages from people I tried to leave behind in high school and co
this never gets old ROFL (Score:2)
A Millennial Job Interview [youtube.com]
OK, slightly dated: it won't be Siri.
It will be ChatGPT.
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LOL.
Another good one is Fired Twitter Employee Applies For First Real Job [youtube.com]
wonky maths or definitions (Score:2)
Re:wonky maths or definitions (Score:5, Interesting)
In the ad world, if you're older than 25, you're old. Your buying habits are pretty much set in stone and you're worthless as an ad target.
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In the ad world, if you're older than 25, you're old. Your buying habits are pretty much set in stone and you're worthless as an ad target.
I really wish they would stop showing me ads then. Either their ad targeting really fails at figuring out I'm twice that age, or even if they know that point they still keep trying!
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In the ad world, if you're older than 25, you're old. Your buying habits are pretty much set in stone and you're worthless as an ad target.
That's true for products that have been on the market a long time and/or do not have an "age bias", think laundry soap and toothpaste.
But there are new emerging products (I've seen plenty of 50+ with smartwatches), and there are products that you did not care for early in life, that you care for now (think old people pills, for example).
Publicity for those is still valuable.
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In the ad world, if you're older than 25, you're old. Your buying habits are pretty much set in stone and you're worthless as an ad target.
Not all ads are about changing buying habits. They are often about re-enforcing them. Coke is not pretending that it is going to win over Pepsi drinkers, they are trying remind Coke drinkers that they are thirst and it's time to get that sweet refreshing taste in their mouth again.
And let's not go into political ads they definitely do not target the under 25 demographic.
daily logins??? (Score:2)
2M people are not actively logging in daily, they just haven't deleted the facebook app they set up years ago and the app is still busy gathering data on them and sending daily updates to meta.
Friendster, MySpace, etc.? (Score:2)
Those are even older, but not many users as Facebook's. I wonder how many are on Friendface [youtube.com] (ad [youtube.com])? ;)
Many were old before they died... (Score:2)
Facebook is for stupid old people (Score:1)
I'm in my 40s, as are my friends. Of course I know a lot of TikTok people would consider that ancient, almost lichs. But even we think Facebook is for 'old people' like our parents - very gullible old people who believe any lies they read.
But most people on Facebook don't want to leave it - that's where they get all their daily right wing lies and family updates. Facebook always makes sure they get fed all the most inflammatory lies, since that's more clicks and advertising. I see this with my Mom. So
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Actually, that's one of the most useful things about facebook -- I find out what my crazy right wing friends are thinking. Also, I find out what my crazy left wing friends are thinking. Almost none are neither, interestingly enough.
Where are people going? =7 (Score:2)
I don't use Facebook for posting or reading "private" stuff anymore, but I still use it for organising and sharing events and group pages, and for communication and information sharing with people in these groups and events.
Tried using Discord, but it sucks for these things.
What are "young people" moving to for handling stuff like special interest groups, clubs and club activities, events, polls, chats/group chats? =/
2 billion log in every day (Score:2)
What a coincidence, 2 billion people on the planet are over 60.
Facebook is no longer social media (Score:2)
Facebook could have stayed useful and relevant.
Haha. not only for old people (Score:2)
Haha, I'm one of the "old" people on facebook. The only "young" people on there are for the benefit of their "old" relatives, not each other. However, Instagram is another story, owned by...
FB is useful for me to keep in touch with my "old" old friends. Of course, I block the ads, and use script blockers elsewhere, so except from what my friends leak...
Why is being old considered to be so bad? (Score:2)
This is a strong trend especially in the US and swapping over the rest of the Western world⦠somehow being old is considered to be bad, something to be ashamed of and hide and all you should want to be is NOT old. Being old is like the worst thing you could be next to overweight.
How terrifying when all of us WILL grow old.
Why not a bit more kindness?
In other cultures, being old is associated with experience and maybe even some wisdom.