Is Facebook Dying?

I think so. From what I gather from people who do use it, it's all about marketplace and business related groups. So it's basically Craigslist and yellowpages for cold calling at this point. These sorts of features simply don't work on their own, real use is what let's you get away with sticking ads in there, if all anyone ever sees are ads they change the channel.

Personally I think all the old guard of social media is dying, and doing their best to hide it. You smell the desperation in their decisions. YouTube, Instagram, twitter, Facebook, reddit, they all seem out of style and things like tiktok, discord and Snapchat seem to be where the hype is. Of course, they're dying at different rates, but they seem to have decided at some point that ux innovation was over, they were done iterating and began to focus on increasing profitability regardless whether decisions improve ux or not, meanwhile new companies began experimenting with different ux approaches and business models. I expect in a few decades it will be common wisdom that social media trends change fast and no social media company will expect to be able to rest on their size and buy up the competition forever.

A twelve year old laughed at me for using Facebook - and I mean a genuine, mirthful, hearty laugh. I'm thirty. If I'm being laughed at by someone from generation Z for using Facebook... how will Facebook grow? And I don't even use Facebook that much; most of my social activity occurs on Discord.

- at the end of last year they recorded a decrease in users for the first time

- their users are about a quarter of the world's population; at that scale even a downward trajectory will take ages and it will likely stabilisie at some point

- there's many people who aren't like you out there in the world, there are more people like you on HN so it will be easier to find similar opinions to yours

The posting of status updates has declined, but at least for me there's still a lot of worthwhile content there which I can't get anywhere else.

I am a member of a number of active Facebook Groups for neighbourhood news, some niche hobbies too small to have their own forums, etc.. I also quite come across planned sport/music events which have only a very basic website, with all updates about the event posted on Facebook.

I think the killer feature is the to the ability to post photos along with text and then discuss it, without relying on external services. Forums can't handle photos well, and Instgram doesn't deal with long form text or extensive discussion well.

Fingers crossed, praying and wishing that it's dying!!

I grew up during the Cold War and instantly recognized FB as a Stasi-wet-dream surveillance tool. Never signed up and never will.

I'm encouraged that younger folks are rejecting it though I worry they may simply substitute something else equally bad (e.g. TikTok).

The younger generations seem to have long abandoned it, first in favor of Instagram (I know it's also a FB property), then to others - i.e. TikTok, etc. At least in the US.

The only people I see still regularly posting personal updates to FB are older people.

Where I live in Asia it’s indispensable, but still pleasant.

I only participate on heavily moderated local groups about local issues. It’s a wonderful way to communicate with people in your community and learn what’s going on.

I unfollowed everyone I know in America and don’t interact with any of them.

There seems a weird bubble or disconnect from the world in such questions, and in comments like this, from this page: "I think so. From what I gather from people who do use it, it's all about marketplace and business related groups. So it's basically Craigslist and yellowpages for cold calling at this point."

I've read so many times on HN that no-one uses FB. Meanwhile, I have friends in many countries around the world I chat with on FB. In India, Russia, SE Asia, Australia, west & east Europe, Africa, latin america etc. The majority of their siblings, parents, children if they have them, are on FB too. So are all their friends. Just about everyone in a lot of countries, seemingly almost all of them, is on there.

I haven't posted anything much in years, maybe once a year. I very rarely look at the news feed. Mostly I'm on FB to chat with friends, and look at their pics if we didn't chat in a while. We exchange pictures, audio, video, PDFs, links etc in the chat. One of these "No-one uses FB" people might look at my wall and think I'm never on FB any more, too, I guess.

I'm not sure if the HN meme of "No-one uses FB" means just "in my circle" and/or "in the USA".. but in the wider world, it does seem like everyone, from 8 to 80, uses it. Everyone with a phone/internet, anyway.

Also, not sure why some people seem to have the idea that FB is just about the news feed and nothing else. As if one is forced to spend all time on FB scrolling the news feed, and if that's bad then FB is useless.

“We're all dying. That's what defines the condition of living."

    -Winston S. Churchill

So yes. Facebook is slowly dying, with it's aging users. (Kids don't use it much.)

But it's going to take a long, long time. Facebook Marketplace draws users of all ages, and there's always the chance of some innovation along the way that might draw younger people in.

I wouldn't bet on Facebook dying any faster than Twitter or Snapchat.

IMHO people around me have been using FB more in the last couple of years, partly due to the pandemic (UK):

1. generally keeping in touch with people they couldn't see due to travel restrictions, including FB Messenger

2. organising events for people with shared interests / hobbies. I've connected with a lot of new people on hiking and music groups recently that I didn't know before

3. advertising and placing orders on micro businesses e.g. micro breweries, food outlets

FB has a platform that can cope with this without any work on the admin side and no cost. The type of things I mentioned in 2/3 often wouldn't exist if the people had to support their own website. Google works for businesses (3) to an extent, but I'm finding listings on fb more common for small events. I'm not sure the other social platforms really cater well for any of these things in my country.

This only works because most people in the target demographic are already on fb

Here in Brazil, Facebook is a kind of synonym for old people. If you use Facebook people tell you are old. I'm 22, and i don't know anyone from my age group who uses facebook. Youg people are using TikTok and then instagram.

Just look at Facebooks last quarterly results and guidance. When the company itself tells investors it's dying, it probably is.

Facebook is so feature bloated now. I rarely log in anymore because it is just too overwhelming.

I literally have 30 menu options in the side bar. This is not an exaggeration. There are stores, memories, groups, marketplaces, messaging, live, watch. It's insanity.

They've gotten too good at keeping your attention. My mom is addicted to facebook. She can't put it down. She is constantly telling me about news articles and crap I don't care about.

Facebook is a cancer that people should cut out. Instagram isn't as bad (yet).

Before Facebook we were on Hi5 and Myspace, before that Usenet, Geocities,...

The time will come for Facebook as well.

Here in Italy, most of the people I know stopped using it, nowaday it is mostly used by our parents and granparents (yea I'm serious)

We can only hope. I hear AARP has a hot new social network for most of the demographic on Facebook.

Yes, but Facebook marketplace is lit.

First they killed messaging without the spying app. mbasic is no more. Then they killed the editbox by an upgrade which didn't work. you cannot post sentences anymore, just word's.

yes, they killed it. Messenger on purpose, other core features by incompetence.

Has anyone else noticed Facebook getting more aggressive in its attempts to get you back on the platform? Just this morning, I actually received an SMS about one of my old uni professors sharing a link. And that's on top of more popup notifications, emails, etc.

I started using it around 2009ish and stopped using it years ago, only logging like once or twice a year. One reason was nobody was posting anything interesting anymore, that has been going on for over 5 years. A bit hard to generalize because near the end my feed was dominated by 1-2 very active people and I got all their interactions with other people, so only my greater bubble was being silent, not everyone everyone.

Hard to tell and you'll probably get a skewed picture here, of people who probably were early adopters (pre 2010) and have since moved on (unless it's big in their family).

More like stagnation, I think pretty much everybody in the world has either decided to use or not use Facebook, there is nowhere for growth since it doesn't appeal to young people and their brand is pretty toxic.

I noticed a huge decline in friends posting in late 2021. I got a new phone and didn't install the app. I have to go on FB every once in a while because an older app I run has a facebook page, and people sometimes contact me through that. But I just respond to send me an email.

When I do look at my feed, much like you, it's no longer my friends posting.

The rate of decline could be as strong as facebook's rate of growth back in the day. The less people are engaged, the less people will come back, which leads to a cycle.

Somebody else already mentioned Brazil but I feel like in the rest of Latin America, alas, it's going strong. Lots of pages and groups still working with lots of engagement.

I find it funny that Facebook is now dying because it's considered "too mature" by the youth because back in the day the whole reason why Facebook got so popular was because it was "more mature" than the pre-teen infested social media platforms that preceded it.

I wonder if there is going to be a shift from global to local too. That would be fun to witness. Facebook killed all our national social media platforms the same way it killed myspace in the US.

I think nope. Where do you live, the US? In some Asian and African countries, Facebook is indeed popular. They will still share everything there, and chat with each other. Maybe you can say Facebook is dying in the US when there're twitter, IG, WhatsApp. But global, I think Facebook, the app itself, is still the largest social media in thr worly and still will be for a very long time unless Meta wants to shut it down on Africa and Asia

I get a feeling that the news feed was never really what social people wanted. And when they included stories, there was even less reason to post to the news feed.

I think the most social value of Facebook is in groups. There are some amazing groups where people self-organize, share knowledge and generally help each other.

The public FB is mostly about media companies sharing stuff, but groups is where people are actually involved and that part is very much alive.

Dont worry, by moving into VR they are totally going to turn the ship around.

Are you looking for HN anecdotal sampling or larger data sets? How would you go about getting actual statistically significant data sets?

A good chunk of the board game industry is on Facebook (and if not there, then on Twitter), across a handful of board game promotional or design discussion groups. Facebook is nice in that if any of those people I'm friends with post in one of those groups it'll notify me and I can pop in and comment and maintain my network / see what they're up to that way, and I can share what I'm working on and see what people are interested in it.

Outside of that, it mostly seems to be another receptacle for hot takes nowadays, which doesn't really interest me (why I'm barely on Twitter). When I want to discuss current events I'll go to a subreddit and discuss it more or less anonymously, I'd rather not risk annoying or pissing off (or myself becoming pissed off at) people in my Facebook friends list.

Yes, it is, but it will be a long and painful one, as they are the biggest social network, by far. Developers and other platforms are slowly decoupling from Facebook (FB Login, Ads, etc) and it's impacting their business. As they lose users, and engagement, they will lose ad dollars. This will cause them to make short term decisions to make up for the loss, which may hurt them in the long run.

The saving grace is if they somehow deliver on their Metaverse promise. Zuck knew FB was dying before everyone else, hence the full on pivot. We'll see if they can reinvent themselves to become the leader in Web3, which could ultimately save the company. As it stands today, with war waging on multiple fronts, regulation, user sentiment, competition, emerging trends and so on, they are dying.

Thing is people I was friends 10 years ago I'm not now... Fb biggest mistake was insistence connecting only with people you know. Of course I don't wanna see what timmy from English class in hs is doing now and even if I see anything I'm not respond after 10 years of silence.. then Facebook made sure your every activity was broadcasted to entire network and having two accounts is highly discouraged. So once entire 4 generations were there I couldn't even like a meme without thinking how it's gonna look to granddad. Now timeline became even more garbage ads and ads.... I truly think idea of timeline is more fundamental whether it's newsfeed, Twitter, YouTub... It's rewarding to keep scrolling and keep finding great stuff...

Its really hard as an individual to judge how facebook is doing, because if you ask 10 people you will get 10 different answers based off what the facebook algorithm has decided to show them.

For some people it is a wasteland of advertisements because their peers have moved on.

Facebook is full of MLM shit and found dogs.

well - my feed is literally dying. i've got an "oops, something went wrong" error message (instead of the feed) for months, the console is full of errors. only news i get are from notifications.

I don't know. I'm using FB only for sharing links to my portfolio page. I don't consume anything on FB over 3 yeas. RSS give me much more control over my daily feed and I'm ok with that.

Seems like it. Now they are trying to switch to the vr/ar stuff and monetize it heavily, possibly by some crypto scheme. Risky move, probably isn’t gonna pan up.

It's in decline, but there are a couple of local groups on it that I find useful, and it's convenient for sharing pictures with extended family. Some of our younger extended family members only have an FB account to occasionally stay in touch with older relatives but don't use it otherwise.

But the local groups might work better as WhatsApp groups, so it's mostly inertia.

I'm 29 and I only use my Facebook as a log-in tool for one or two sites. I left a message on my FB page saying that I'm no longer going to be active there. This was two years ago. My older sister has moved to Instagram. I myself prefer Discord.

If I'm representative of younger people—and I have no idea if that's the case—Facebook proper is in deep trouble.

People in Israel, Brasil, Colombia, use it very regularly as it is a means of commerce and basically the only way to find apartments or do so many essential activities. Especially in Israel. I notice that Colombians and Brazilians use Instagram more to make online stores, and home delivery for all kinds of stuff from clothing to beauty products

It won't die like myspace but it is long past it's peak. To me, dead means it is no longer a platform where advertising on it has good ROI. I can't imagine it being in the less than 10M in the US or 100M global daily use count in the next decade, even with a decline I think it can keep up much more addicts coming back to it.

Yes. The question is now: Is Instagram dying?

Facebook is king for niche groups and I just don't know why. I'd love to give it up but I honestly don't know a better way to interact with these micro groups i've grown to love. P.S the answer is most definitely not reddit

I deleted my Facebook for the exact reason you describe. it was a graveyard and Facebook's didn't even have enough content it was recycling content for days....I only wanted it for groups and those were getting to be dead too...

They will die for sure when they show 99% ads and 1% of the post is cringe. Why should they show me feed that I never care? And, it seems my profile is full of some motivational, ostentatious people which I really don't like

I expect to stay connected periodically on FB to hear about deaths and funerals. For the generation that embraced it, communicating the fact of death seems mostly done over FB.

It died when it became non-exclusive to students and let everyone in. Sure they got a broader market, but at this point it is 99% ads in my feed. Why would anyone want that?

Yes, for a good long time, probably 5 years at least. All of my activity has been on Instagram for ~6 years, and there's basically nothing on FB except marketplace

I've been using Facebook more lately but not as a social network. I've bought and sold a few items on Facebook marketplace. I also now belong to a few obscure technology groups that only exist on Facebook and I have a Quest VR headset.

I also use it to see which relatives are now Qanon or Qanon-adacent.

Facebook messenger still being used a lot but I don't see a lot of people browsing their timeline anymore. Specialised groups get some attention though.

I still have an account, but use it infrequently. Its really just life support for friendships and connections which have been in a vegetative state for years.

I think so, too. Increasingly, work communication comes from Twitter, Linkedin, and communities on Reddit and IH

Facebook died long ago. Perhaps was really alive only for few years. What we see are the leftovers…

If they are it'll be a long slow death, they still make a lot of money.

I use it for messaging, events and birthday updates.

it already is dead, new generations are on tiktok, so facebook userbase doesn't get renewed, hence it'll die by demography

It’s about time.

And taking down the world with them.

not in the slightest. it's a portal to the web for a very large amount of people.

In Bangladesh it's booming

Yes - slowly, but surely!

God, I hope so.

Yes

Speaking as a creative working with clients up and down the S&P500 in the last years there was a feeling that Facebook got more and more restrictive with creative advertising. In the beginning you could integrate your own apps and interact with pretty much the whole Facebook api you had creative freedom and you could track the effectiveness yourself. After Burger Kings "Sacrifice a friend for a whopper campaign" [0] everything changed. Year after year it got more restrictive even now in their newer offerings you are more and more restricted (Not more than 20% text in ads, no static animations in sparkAR filters the list goes on and on.) AND they are basically just asset flips from other social media or ad networks. Carousel Ads, Stories, SparkAR everything is already there but better from other providers creatives don't like to work on Facebook ads anymore and media companies don't like that they can't sell more adaptions because Facebook Ads are just resells.

There was a lot of hype about the metaverse because everyone hoped that there will be creative freedom again but when talking to their agency representatives it looks like it's even more restrictive. At the moment Facebook is basically the garbage dump for assets you already created for other networks, there is no creative freedom and their AR offerings are lacking behind snap and TikTok. In the 2000s and 2010s you sold whole campaigns because of Facebook, now Facebook Ads are just a chart you spend 1 second in a presentation. I believe it's dying and it can't come soon enough for the creative industry. For us, Facebook is now a waste of time and energy.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq_SbjxNvc8

Facebook groups is pretty good. Gotta join the right group.

If your asian there was the whole subtle Asian thing a couple years back that generated tons of sub groups like subtle Asian rock climbing.

Don't have to be asian too join and I'm positive there's groups outside of the whole subtle Asian thing.

No, but Instagram is dominating.

Probably. But Facebook doesn't care. They have Instagram, WhatsApp and soon the metaverse. They have enough pans on the fire to keep cooking. I left it long ago too. But WhatsApp is harder to do without. I think their company is doing fine and they seem to diversify very well.

The only boat that they really seem to have missed is the community that tiktok serves. But it seems to offer the lowest standard of viral memes and stupid joke videos.. I'm not on tiktok but every time someone sends me a video I really hate, it has their logo on it. I've literally never seen anything that came across my WhatsApp with that logo that was worth watching. So I'm definitely not tempted to try. For some reason it really rubs me the wrong way. It seems to embody everything I hated about what Facebook became. If I were leading Facebook I'd not want to double down on that direction either.

For what it's worth, when I was on Facebook I also hated people (re)sharing memes and videos. I used it to see what my friends were up to in their lives but the amount of crap became too high. Too many people sharing memes, 'funny' videos, petitions or trying to sell/promote stuff. I think it's the algorithms egging them on. Trying to get as many likes and followers as they can. Eventually people got disillusioned with that rat race on Facebook, and I think the same will happen to the tiktok crowd.

But maybe social media is just not for me. The more algorithms involved, the worse it seems to get at showing me what I want to see. I have very little patience for wading through a timeline of stuff I'm not interested in trying to find the one bit of worthwhile information. WhatsApp has pretty much taken over that function for me. Because it doesn't do any prioritising or inserting ads or content it thinks I will like, it just passes messages like it should do. Just like Facebook used to do before it went down the toilet. Most of my real friends I now have in WhatsApp groups.

But of course that's also owned by Facebook.. So yes I think Facebook the company (now meta) will be fine. Facebook the service not. I think the metaverse is a risky bet but potentially very rewarding.