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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.
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 ~~by~~ that 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.
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?
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 😑
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.
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 is the closest thing to the Chinese concept of an everything app that the US has.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can only think logging in, so yes.
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.
Statistics show the average person spends far more time on Facebook vs other platforms though.
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.
I literally have to use Facebook to know what's happening in my small community. It's the most convenient place to learn about what's going on and I hate it
Many overseas countries have Facebook preloaded on a lot of their phones. They also have data caps but Facebook is exempt from counting towards their data cap.
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.
Marketplace and local groups for the tea.
I hate that Facebook marketplace overtook Craigslist because I have a bunch of shit to sell and don't want to log into my Facebook account to do it.
There are so many scams on FB marketplace, it is awful. I tried giving away an old lawnmower and only got people trying to scam me. Or pay them to come get it.
No, I am not paying you $30 to pick up a still running lawnmower.
Lotta people keep Facebook for the marketplace.
Also, a lot of scammers make accounts to use for the marketplace.
The marketplace fluffs the numbers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I finally deleted mine the other day. No goodbyes, no fanfare, just dumped it like the garbage it is. No regrets.
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
People don't use Facebook, hence you find them on other platforms. They may be thinking that if they don't use it, then nobody does.
But you also have to consider where these people live. It might be "dying" there, while Facebook is getting new users in other markets. I remember watching a video about genocide in Myanmar and the role that Facebook played. Access to Facebook was free if I recall correctly, it was the internet for most people.
It'd be interesting to see data by country.
I live in Morocco. I keep leaving Facebook for months but I end up going back there even though I don't like it at all. The reason is that all the people I know and all local content is available only through Facebook. There are hardly any Moroccans on the Fediverse, I've only seen like one other person in all my years of using Mastodon. If I wanna see what's going on in the country, the city and anything related to the region then I am obliged to be on Facebook. I suppose this is the case with most developing and non-english speaking countries.
And even better question is why people still treat the twelfth most popular social media platform like it's an indispensable town square?
I still have it because it's still the easiest and most convenient way to message people that you've just met. There's a sort of snowball effect in which having lots of people incentives even more people to stay on the platform. Nobody I know actually uses Facebook as a social media site - they only use it for Messenger.
Although, I've found that more and more people are starting to use SMS as their first choice rather than Messenger
It IS dying, but for the youth. And I'd even say "for the youth that resembles mine"
Yeah - I do find it odd when people say Facebook is dying, because it really isn't. Unless Zuckerberg pulls a Musk anytime soon, it isn't going anywhere - unlike Xitter, Facebook is an advertising juggernaught that makes more than enough money to keep itself afloat.
And that's not even mentioning Facebook groups, news pages, business pages, the market place, etc.. they've got fingers in many different pies, and it shows.
And even more, while it may not be popular amongst tech savvy folks, it is still insanely popular amongst regular folks. I for one can vouch that a significant proportion of my non-techy friends use either it or Instagram as their primary social media.
Hell, that's why messenger is up there too - everyone has Facebook, so everyone has messenger, making it extremely convenient to message people you know. It's certainly why I use it a lot, it's where my friends are.
Meta dominates social media even now - just look at your list. Of the top seven, over half of them are Meta.
It's probably because people on Discord and Reddit aren't fully reflective of the wider world population.
The same goes for Twitter. It's losing users, but there are still lots of them.
They're popular because they offer something to its users. It's truly as simple as that.
I don't use it, but I would assume because if the people you know are on it, leaving it means that you can't talk to them.
Social media is an example of a type of system that benefits from network effect; the value rises as something like the square of the number of users. That is, there's value in using the system because other people use it.
Systems that benefit from network effect are going to be pretty hard to shift people off of.
In practice, it's probably not really the square of users -- most people don't interact with or even have the realistic possibility of interacting with billions of people. But they do interact with "pools" -- not an official term, just something I'm making up here -- of people that might be a subset of that. Some might be friends and associates, the sort of thing that hovers around Dunbar's number, maybe 150. There might be a broader pool of people with similar interests that one might interact fleetingly with, a broader pool that speaks the same language, etc. And once a lot of people in such a "pool" are in a given system, it increases the value to an individual a lot, because those are the people that the system lets them speak to and lets them hear. If you leave for a competing system, you give up connectivity to all the people in that pool.
That creates a collective switching barrier, and a potent one. The point of social media is to communicate; if nobody else uses it, it has essentially zero value.
There's also an individual switching barrier created by UI familiarity -- that discourages anyone from using a given system, isn't really specific to social media, but it explains why anyone would tend to want to avoid switching away from a system that they are familiar with, all else held equal.
In the case of social networks like Reddit, a moderator might have built up personal reputation and a userbase for their particular group. I don't know how Facebook group moderation works, but let's say that it works the same way as on Reddit. If you switch to a Facebook alternative, you lose the status, plus the network effect from that particular group. That's another individual switching barrier.
In the case of social networks like Reddit, which use pseudonyms, you accrue reputation associated with a pseudonym. I know a handful of pseudonyms on the Threadiverse that are knowledgeable or trustworthy. That gets zeroed out when you switch a network; people lose both the status and the knowledge of the reputations of others, don't know who to trust. There are ways to deal with that particular one, like having a bot that everyone trusts that tells a new Fediverse account to send a particular random comment, waits for a Reddit account to send a message and then endorses a particular user on the Threadiverse as also being a user on Reddit. But...if you look at the Fediverse today, it doesn't have a mechanism for that. And if people running social media like Facebook or Reddit discovered some kind of process like that, they'd probably have an interest in shutting it down, doing what they could to disrupt that transfer mechanism. That's another individual switching barrier.
The combination of all of these switching barriers makes it pretty tough for someone to leave, and it's one reason why social networks have value -- because you're getting your hands on information about and access to a large userbase that will have a hard time switching away.
I don't actually know if there is some kind of alternative that aims to do the same thing that Facebook does. Reddit isn't it, and Twitter isn't it, though they do do some vaguely-related things. But, okay, let's say that something like that exists.
It's really hard to get a person to switch, because if they do so in isolation, they smash into the switching barrier associated with network effect.
And because you have to have everyone do this at the same time, you have a collective action problem. You propose that everyone switch from Facebook to -- for example -- Fedibook on the Fediverse. If everyone switched concurrently, nobody would hit the barrier to switching from network effect. But...it's hard to convince everyone to do so. Maybe some people are sick or busy that day and don't want to put the time in at the same time. Some people aren't going to want to do it -- they aren't going to want to put in the time to learn a new system and build new workflows around it, maybe learn new client software. It's like switching from Windows to Linux -- someone may have put many years into learning Windows, and that's experience that in part goes away if they switch to Linux; for them, that's a large individual switching barrier. Some percentage of people feel, based on a quick assessment, that the individual switching barriers above dominate, make a switch from Facebook not worthwhile even if they are willing to participate in a mass concurrent switch. Maybe some people think that Fedibook is technically-superior to Facebook and would have used it if each had 0 users and were put side-by-side, but don't want to deal with trying to coordinate a concurrent switch. And because you can't get a simultaneous collective switch going due to those reasons, every individual user thinking about switching is going to face the big collective switching barrier -- being cut off from lots and lots of other people.
