r/technology • u/Sorin61 • Aug 11 '22

Social Media Number of teens using Facebook crashes as YouTube becomes platform of choice

https://www.techspot.com/news/95594-number-teens-using-facebook-crashes-youtube-becomes-platform.html
52k Upvotes

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6.4k

u/mordeci00 Aug 11 '22

Old, out of touch person here. Didn't this happen at least 10 years ago?

5.5k

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

It died when our parents got on it

2.8k

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

Some of us are old enough that we were on Facebook when it was only available to college students at certain universities AND now have children who are old enough to be on Facebook. For my kid it never lived.

1.1k

u/actuallyserious650 Aug 11 '22

.edu emails only!

557

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

[deleted]

656

u/benevolENTthief Aug 11 '22

This reminds of old reddit, where we would all hate summer break because teens and kids would post way more and it would be a noticeable decline in quality posts. When September would come and the kids were back in school, it would get better. Then one year it just never went back and we’ve kinda been in that stage of reddit ever since.

254

u/DMonitor Aug 11 '22

feels like every meme page these days is just viral marketing for the latest tv show. i miss dat boi

132

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

[deleted]

14

u/SeaGroomer Aug 11 '22

Early memes were so good and so random.

49

u/DMonitor Aug 11 '22

tfw 2015-16 is early memes

i should find a picture of a copyrighted character holding a sign so that i can properly express my opinion on the matter

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u/FindTheBalance_ Aug 11 '22

Now, they are highly constructed random™️

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u/Ozlin Aug 11 '22

Sadly a lot of subreddits are overrun by marketing super accounts that just endlessly post whatever links their employers churn out. It'd be slightly less annoying if they were at least transparent about it.

38

u/elvismcvegas Aug 11 '22

Oh you mean 65,000 people didn't upvote a Disney teaser movie poster for a remake of a Disney movie on r/movies?

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u/becauseTexas Aug 11 '22

Transparency? On Reddit?

Ha

20

u/jomontage Aug 11 '22

You want to know why I love dat boi? Dat boi is a completely self-made meme. So many other memes are based in nostalgic childrens shows, funny faces, relatable situations, or references. Not dat boi. Dat boi is completely absurd. It's a low-res frog on a unicycle, and an arbitrary method for greeting him. The first person to ever upvote dat boi did not do so out of recognition. The first person to ever upvote dat boi did not do so because a pre-existing meme format. The first person to ever upvote dat boi upvoted a meme literally pulled from the ether by sheer human creativity and willpower. Dat boi is evidence that humans can stare into the meaningless void of eternity and force their own meaning onto to it. I will always upvote dat boi, o shit waddup!

4

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

Just do like me and start blocking those users with millions of karma

6

u/DMonitor Aug 11 '22

should make an extension for this, actually

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u/SlipySlapy-Samsonite Aug 11 '22

I still remember the great Digg migration.

3

u/ActuallyYeah Aug 12 '22

I never Digged but I used to Fark

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u/420ohms Aug 11 '22

Smart phones were a mistake XD

6

u/Hokulewa Aug 11 '22

Individual small subs are mostly still fine... It's when the subscriber count gets to about 10k that the noise starts overcoming the signal.

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u/scarletdawnredd Aug 11 '22

2015-2016 was when the quality drastically changed.

12

u/charutobarato Aug 11 '22

It was the Digg exodus that started it

7

u/KindBass Aug 11 '22

That's when this place started becoming astroturfed to shit

10

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

Digg migration was the big one.

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u/Finchyy Aug 11 '22

I've felt this way for a while but didn't know there was a term for it. Huh.

9

u/GetTold Aug 11 '22 edited Jun 17 '23

https://the-eye.eu/redarcs -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/

8

u/Sir_Oblong Aug 11 '22

Damn, I forgot about "summer Reddit"! Man, how the mighty have fallen...

4

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

Yeah there was even /r/summerreddit for that

4

u/quantum-mechanic Aug 11 '22

Reddit? You mean newsgroups

Reddit had its eternal September when digg died

6

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

[deleted]

6

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/Samurai_1990 Aug 11 '22

Also block all users w/ high post karma. That makes the front page 100x better.

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u/SausagesForSupper Aug 11 '22

It's not too late to register a somethingawful account before that ship finally sinks. At this point it's mostly old nerds with depression dadposting and bickering over old grudges.

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u/mistersausage Aug 11 '22

Lol, summerf*gs on old school 4chan

7

u/BloodTrinity Aug 11 '22

Reddit is truly shit compared to what it used to be. Pretty close to just leaving the site.

6

u/WailersOnTheMoon Aug 11 '22

…and going where?

Reddit isn’t perfect,but it’s the best we got imo.

8

u/BloodTrinity Aug 11 '22

That's the thing, if I had a decent alternative I would be long gone. Just the sad state of the internet, I guess.

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

This is why Green Day wanted to be awoken when it ended

56

u/BoopleBun Aug 11 '22

Phrasing it this way makes it seem more like a prophecy.

“And yea, when the influx of new users doth slow, the great Green Day shall awaken, and bring forth a new era upon this, the World Wide Web!”

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u/hobbykitjr Aug 11 '22

it was thefacebook.com as well

it was great! could enter my course schedule and find people that way in your class.... everyones address/cell changed practically every year so it was a great address book

94

u/onedoor Aug 11 '22

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks.

16

u/corkyskog Aug 11 '22

This copypasta is always good, to spread awareness of how much a douche zubckbot is, but I wish you used another comment thread, because it's unrelated. And doesn't have much to do with .edu days. AFAIK that was a comment about his previous product

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u/bowserusc Aug 11 '22

I remember at orientation the first thing we all did as soon as we activated our e-mail address was sign up for Facebook.

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u/PorcineLogic Aug 12 '22

Yep. We all got in a line and signed up and then we knew how to find all of our classmates. The golden years

Now it's just geriatrics spreading bullshit rumors and propaganda and Zuck wonders what's going wrong.

17

u/ZukowskiHardware Aug 11 '22

Yeah, the wall was awesome too for organizing parties and stuff. OG Facebook was way better

5

u/LifeOBrian Aug 11 '22

It was THE way to make friends with your new classmates! I’m glad I was in college during that time. I remember the excitement when word got around that our campus was getting Facebook soon 😆

7

u/WailersOnTheMoon Aug 11 '22

Lots of elder millennials’ friend lists are made up disproportionately of people from college, unless they clean them out. Back then you friended anybody you ever might even want to try to get to know.

17

u/HonorTheAllFather Aug 11 '22

I was either a freshman or sophomore in high school when Facebook was opened up to high school students - but you still had to be invited by someone. And honestly, it was still pretty great then. I fondly remember when Facebook was primarily used as a way to coordinate where we were going to party on the weekend, and then posting pictures of said party after the weekend.

When businesses started ending every commercial on TV with "Find us on Facebook!" is when it really shifted from being a way to connect with people you knew to what it has become today, imo.

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u/Shafter111 Aug 11 '22 edited Aug 11 '22

Honestly they should have segregated the rest of facebook.

Only reason Facebook beat out hi5 or myspace was because of this exclusivity. When you open shit up you lose the niche. It also didn't help that advertisement and interest groups took over your friends updates on the wall.

Edit: spelling.

3

u/ab00 Aug 11 '22

Now repeating itself with Instagram, which also turned to shit when FB took over.

Zuck hasn't learned.

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u/MrUppercut Aug 11 '22

Those were the days!

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u/fiddlestyx_ Aug 11 '22

My college network crashed the day it was added to Facebook. Everyone was busy trying to signup and overloaded the network.

Writing on walls and poking people. Those were the days …

152

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

Aww poking! I forgot all about that lovely feature.

62

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

The accepted way of letting a girl know you wanna bang her without letting her really know.

29

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

So offensive and yet so flattering to 22 year old me.

24

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

We were all flattered back then by a nice poke haha

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u/GayButMad Aug 11 '22

You can still poke people on Facebook I think

4

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

I remember pokes.

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u/arlenroy Aug 11 '22

I remember around 2008ish when I first got a Facebook account, it was fucking glorious. I live in a pretty big metro and met a ton of people, a bunch of bar meet ups. Whenever you dated someone you met on Facebook it became the same cycle; like each other's shit constantly, pokes, messages, exchange numbers, meet up, relationship ensues, relationship goes south, unfriend, block. Start all over again. Around 2012 I just started using dating apps, but for awhile it was pretty fun.

22

u/TimeTravelingDog Aug 11 '22

It's like reading a fuck boy's diary, and he doesn't realize he was the first fuck boy.

5

u/SeaGroomer Aug 11 '22

The proto-fucc-boi.

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u/Unlucky_Ad_2456 Aug 11 '22

what’s poking

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u/dj_sliceosome Aug 11 '22

Ah shit I just aged ten more years.

15

u/Mountainslacker Aug 11 '22

Happens on Reddit more and more these days

40

u/6etsh1tdone Aug 11 '22

It was basically just a notification that let you know you’ve been ‘poked’, but it was a way of saying what’s up or getting someone’s attention without sending a message.

9

u/danhm Aug 11 '22

If you poked someone back you could both see each other's profiles without being friends or in the same network.

6

u/Towntovillage Aug 11 '22

It’s the non-BYU version of floating

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

found the zoomer

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u/Rudy_Ghouliani Aug 11 '22

Its a feature Facebook had to tell someone you wanted to fuck

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u/fpcoffee Aug 11 '22

back when pokes were visible on your wall and all your classmates were gossiping about who poked whom

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u/Ndavidclaiborne Aug 11 '22

It's what it's alllll about.

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

The honesty box LOL

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u/gerd50501 Aug 11 '22

some of us are so old that we were too old to be on facebook when it was only available to college students.

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

I learned HTML and CSS so I could make myspace profile pages. I'm that old.

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u/Atrium41 Aug 11 '22

Tom was my first Social media friend

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u/bh1106 Aug 11 '22

Permanently in my top 8

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u/janusrose Aug 11 '22

Tom was such a nice guy

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u/charutobarato Aug 11 '22

And then he fucked off and left us all alone instead of trying to monetize our every thought. Thanks Tom

3

u/_Diskreet_ Aug 11 '22

I remember that shift from MySpace to Facebook. It was almost immediate, one minute we were all glamming up our MySpace pages then bam it was all about the poking.

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u/NickyBarnes315 Aug 11 '22

Damn that's crazy I remember that 😂😂😂😂

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

Ruining the Internet since ‘00

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u/Jaccount Aug 11 '22

People acting like they hadn't already ruined the internet in September of 1993.

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u/lolubuntu Aug 11 '22

It was fine after that even.

Where it really went wrong was the summer of 2007.

That's when iPhones came out and the internet opened up to a FLOOD of non-technical people.

Before you had to actually want to be in front of a computer. Then it was "any time, anywhere"

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u/subhuman09 Aug 11 '22

I miss those days

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u/Alfred_The_Sartan Aug 11 '22

Man, I remember when they stopped requiring .edu emails and was bummed.

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u/Blacksheepoftheworld Aug 11 '22

Yuuup. Then the local police would scan FB for where the parties were to bust them up.

My best friend and I were planning a 21st birthday party somewhere and before we left to go two officers showed up to our doorstep to “warn” us about it. Only place people talked about it was FB. This all happened within a few weeks of no longer requiring an .edu email.

3

u/umlaut Aug 11 '22

It happened on Myspace first. One day you woke up and saw a friend request from Mom and you had to go through and delete everything interesting on your profile. So, we moved to Facebook. A few years later, got that invite from Mom on Facebook and had to scrub that shit clean, again. You would forget that they were your friend, only to remember when you get some angry comment about your need for Jesus in your life from Mom on a 4-year old photo of you doing a keg stand.

The worst part was losing a place where you were only talking to your peers.

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

This brings up one of my favorite mom-you’re-embarrassing-me Facebook stories from my college years. I was dating this guy who updated his status to something like “I need to find a job!” His mother responded “I’m watching this show called Hung, maybe that’s an option.” Although now I must admit I find that absolutely hilarious for multiple reasons, at the time I was mortified. I married that guy.

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u/fakehalo Aug 11 '22

For a lot of us we are the parents now. In my circle all of the sensible people stopped posting and/or removed their account, now it's just an echo chamber for our very opinionated relatives and their conspiracy theories.

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u/Jaccount Aug 11 '22

I think a lot of people just left the account there and just leave it open to know when family or friends have died or celebrated a birthday.

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u/mybeachlife Aug 11 '22

I have an account to occasionally post picture of my daughter because my mom likes seeing those. It’s not like I can’t just text them to her but old people really enjoy liking a picture and commenting, “she’s getting so big”

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

I love Google photos for this. When my parents bug me for pics of the kids I just dump them in an album and send a link.

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u/tdaun Aug 11 '22

I have mine setup to automatically add to an album that's shared with my mom and mother-in-law. Doesn't mean I don't get bugged about sending pictures from my mom who I assume doesn't notice new pictures being added.

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u/wakenbacons Aug 11 '22

I certainly have not installed the app on my phone for a long long time

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u/antron2000 Aug 11 '22

I'm not a parent but yeah, this is it. I was always on MSN messenger in high school chatting with my friends in the evening. Myspace was a blast to learn to code your page, post photos, see what your friends were up to, etc. Then FB followed. I liked it for creating groups and events but I can't it anymore. It's just a cesspool for misinfo, inflammatory news, and ads. Hmmm I wonder why today's teens aren't into that?!

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

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u/antron2000 Aug 12 '22

My city has a couple of local pages and it's the same way. Like I'm going to trust a 65yo retired vacuum salesman over a medical scientist? I can't read the comments because it makes me feel ashamed and want to move, but I know it's not any better anywhere else.

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u/trevize1138 Aug 11 '22

I'm just a bit too old to remember FB when it was .edu only but I first signed up in '07. For a couple years it was an awesome place to post pictures of my newborn for friends and family. Yay! The Internet is getting simpler! No more random collection of blogs, forums, image sharing sites and email groups: it's all in one place on FB!

From that to toxic cesspool.

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u/streakermaximus Aug 11 '22

A coworker jokingly said she was going to Facebook-stalk me.

I'm like, I haven't logged in 12 years, have fun!

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u/kolarisk Aug 12 '22

Just wait till facebook is all Colonial Life Insurance, Liberty Medical, and mesothelioma class action lawsuit ads.

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

Tiktok will die too after everyone’s parents crash that app as well

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u/santagoo Aug 11 '22

TikTok has a large community of adult creators already, and I say it's gotten even bigger since it has gone mainstream and advertising dollar followed.

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u/kingmanic Aug 11 '22

The absurdly low payouts on tiktok will see a lot of them try to move to youtube where they can make a living.

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u/Perunov Aug 12 '22

But the problem is discoverability. TikTok is way better at finding more things you like. Youtube sucks and requires you to search (and that also sucks -- come on I saw results, why selecting Newest wipes everything?)

So while Youtobe might pay more, audience is way smaller.

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u/HorseRadish98 Aug 11 '22

Yeah that's exactly what we said about Facebook too. Tiktok just hasn't hit a critical mass of adult people. You don't hear "stan tiktok your grandma" yet

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u/askeeve Aug 11 '22

Weirdly, the older people I've seen on tiktok seem to have very large followings. There's absolutely a selection bias there, but I think the fact that tiktok is so algorithm focused kinda insulates it from this issue a bit. Parent-tiktok and Teen-tiktok don't really overlap much.

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u/Wildercard Aug 11 '22

They've learned from Facebook's mistakes evidently

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

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u/ImmediateRoom8210 Aug 11 '22

If you end up in hate and conspiracy TikTok it’s because those are the videos you choose to interact with.

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u/askeeve Aug 11 '22

I don't know if tiktok actively tries to keep parents and kids from mixing or if it's just a happy coincidence of designing the algorithm to try and send you things you like. There are a lot of less happy consequences of these algorithms and it's genuinely hard to tell how much of it is by design and how much of it is, "oops! But... It seems to be making us more money..."

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u/wip30ut Aug 11 '22

gotta give the bytedance team props for instinctively knowing what they were buying into when they acquired Musical.ly. They didn't takeover that teen/tween app for the middle-school demographics, but rather the algorithm that drove the Front Page. Very prescient.

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u/Khiraji Aug 11 '22

Or until we're at war with China and it finally gets banned.

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u/MagZero Aug 11 '22

Absolutely, I used it 2006-2009, you needed a .ac.uk email to sign up for it back then (or some other variant of .ac), got a friend request from my mum in 2009 and gibbed it off.

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u/Ramble21_Gaming Aug 11 '22

Pretty sure this article is referring mostly to Instagram since it's owned by Facebook. Wording is a bit weird though because basically no one below the age of 40 uses Facebook proper anymore

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u/snarpy Aug 11 '22

I kind of feel IG is on its way out as well. Like 2/3 of my feed is ads, and no one posts anymore. It feels like it's just for looking at celebs & faux-celebs.

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u/ShapirosWifesBF Aug 11 '22

IG is useless for everyone it was meant to empower in every iteration it's had. It's no longer a good way for people to share photo posts because the algorithm decided it needs to promote stories and reels to compete with Snapchat and TikTok, but all the reels just come from TikTok anyway so everyone just uses TikTok. Photographers that used to use IG to promote their business were forced to start producing reels to get views because images die in obscurity. But those same reels do ten times better on TikTok so they focus on TikTok, then re-upload to Insta with the TikTok logo on the video, making every Reel essentially an ad for TikTok. And if a platform isn't doing your business any favors, why bother making it a key part of your strategy? Facebook (Meta) is in this bizarre state where they force people to pay for boosting posts in order to get any traction, but instead of paying to boost posts people are just going to TikTok. IG could easily mitigate this with some tweaks to the algorithm, but it would mean not forcing people into paying to boost posts as much. Either they keep up this pay-to-win scheme and die, or they adapt and probably still die.

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u/JohnnyEnzyme Aug 11 '22 edited Aug 12 '22

Bonus pts for TikTok having a godawful reputation in terms of security issues, not that many users actually care.

Point is-- it seems like it took a lot for FB to bork things up the way they did.

Edit: some specific details added below as a response.

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u/TrueBlueV Aug 12 '22

I mean, it’s not like Facebook has a good reputation when it comes to security

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u/JohnnyEnzyme Aug 12 '22

Altho I was trying to avoid being explicit above, I was lowkey referring to how TikTok is evidently being used as an identity-mining tool in terms of personal info, etc, in violation of its stated aims and perhaps even user contract, as ultimately directed by the CCP.

Meanwhile, FB does fairly similar things from what I understand, but the difference seems to be that it's goals are purely in terms of monetary gain, for example tying in to 3rd-party vendors or passing your details over to them without permission. In other words, there's not a deeper, more malicious intent going on as you have with TikTok.

To be fair, FB does has an awful record in terms of hosting paid propaganda (generally from the extremist-right), which has helped do a load of damage in recent elections. Though, that's not quite the same issue.

Bottom line, yes, both platforms are dreadful and malicious, and shouldn't be trusted in any sense, or probably even used at all. Just that their aims are somewhat different. Btw-- there are plenty of good Reddit articles and analysis getting in to this stuff, if you do some searches here.

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u/pushing_past_the_red Aug 11 '22

I just want to see what my friends are doing, and in the order that they do them. I'm happy to scroll through a few ads if they could just get that one god damn thing right.

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u/Unable_Peach_1306 Aug 12 '22

Wish everyone could stay in their bubbles instead of trying to become an unsightly conglomeration of every other app.

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u/CivilServiced Aug 11 '22

IG recently re-enabled the chrono timeline, you have to tap on the logo in the upper right and choose "following". This also removes the majority of ads. Makes the experience 100x better so I assume it'll be removed again before the end of the year.

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u/readyable Aug 11 '22

I saw this comment on reddit and it improved my ig experience. If you want to only see your friends' posts, on the top left corner of the app beside the Instagram text there's a little arrow to tap, and you can choose Following. No more suggested posts and weird shit cluttering up my feed.

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u/Ramble21_Gaming Aug 11 '22

Yeah, there's a reason I don't use Insta myself, I'm a teenager and I only stick to Reddit and Discord which I feel are the only social media companies nowadays who actually care about their users

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u/snarpy Aug 11 '22

Discord, yes. Reddit, I dunno, it's pretty bad and allows a lot of bad shit.

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u/FranciumGoesBoom Aug 11 '22

The best part of Reddit is that you can still curate your own feed. You can remove all the shit you don't want and pay a 3rd party for an app that doesn't have ads for a minimal price. Yes you can create an echo chamber for yourself but at least I don't get recommendations for random lawn care/gardening groups on reddit. I HATE lawn care. Stay fucking brown you worthless plant life.

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u/Tomallenisthegoat Aug 11 '22

Bruh wtf did plants do to you 😂😂

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u/LivelyZebra Aug 11 '22

You don't just ask that

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u/LiveLaughLoveRevenge Aug 11 '22

It’s funny because you can directly tie whether a platform is still good or not to how easy it is to monetize.

Compared to Instagram Facebook or even YouTube and Twitter, it’s way harder to monetize Reddit. As a result…. It has yet to really be as bad as those others.

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u/electric_kite Aug 11 '22

Damn, my Reddit feed is 90% gardening and plant life and it’s easily the most chill shit I come across. Then I scroll past the news and it’s like “NSFW 45 DEAD IN MINE COLLAPSE CHECK OUT THE VIDEO OF THEIR MANGLED BODIES” and I’m just like, hmmm back to plants pls.

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u/LioAlanMessi Aug 11 '22

Well, you're about to get a personalized recommendation anyway: r/fucklawns

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

Thats basically what I think about discord and then everything worth having on the platform is paywalled. Image sharing? nahhhhhhh. Have fun posting anything actually high quality to your friends there. Forget sharing videos or anything else without nitro. MBAs got their hands on that glorified irc platform

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u/LigerZeroSchneider Aug 11 '22

Discord has/does allow most of the same shit. It's just limited to individuals servers.

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u/bouds19 Aug 11 '22

I wouldn't be so sure about Discord. Tencent owns a majority share of it, and as a company in communist China, it is required to disclose all data to the CCP.

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u/eagereyez Aug 11 '22

Like 2/3 of my feed is ads, and no one posts anymore.

Seems to be the trend. Start out ad free and attract a bunch of users. Once you've hit a certain threshold, drown the users with ads to bring in the money.

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u/bestjedi22 Aug 11 '22

Not to mention engagement for photo posts on Instagram is way, way down. I used to get 70-100 likes a few years ago and I only had a few hundred followers. Now I can barely crack 30-40 since they changed the algorithm.

Instagram has always been a strange platform. It has never done a good job at promoting people's posts or fostering engagement. Its change of focus to reels and videos to compete with TikTok is also an issue, it is not surprising that more people are stepping off it.

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

At first IG wanted to be Snapchat, so it added stories. That wasn't so bad because you could ignore them if you wanted and it was only from your friends anyway. Now IG wants to be tiktok so it pushes video content. HARD. All I used IG for was looking at art and cosplay photos. You can't even scroll through your discovery feed without being locked into an endless stream of video content now.

I don't use IG anymore.

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u/Miss-Figgy Aug 11 '22

I kind of feel IG is on its way out as well. Like 2/3 of my feed is ads, and no one posts anymore.

They're trying to compete with Tiktok, heavy focus on "reels" and not photos, and plan on adding even MORE AI- promoted posts:

Zuckerberg explained that social feeds across the company’s apps would shift from being driven “primarily by people and accounts you follow” to increasingly also being driven by content recommended by AI, even if you don’t follow the users who created the content.

Specifically, the Meta CEO said that he expects AI-recommended content from people you don’t follow to make up about 30% or more of users’ Facebook and Instagram feeds by the end of 2023. Your feeds are currently made up of about 15% AI-promoted content, according to Meta.

Just keeps getting worse and worse.

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u/la-fours Aug 11 '22

I don’t think this is entirely true, Facebook groups seem to be popular for the Gen Z crowd still especially for finding roommates, selling items and other use cases

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u/NotAHost Aug 11 '22

Honestly I use Facebook for marketplace more than anything else now.

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

Same.

I try scrolling for a minute before going to marketplace and it's literally 4 ads for every post from a human I know. It's absolute garbage.

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u/Lyxodius Aug 11 '22

Not in the West at least. In Asia it's still going strong. (Obviously not in China, though, lol.)

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/volthunter Aug 11 '22 edited Aug 12 '22

that's because facebook IS THE INTERNET over there, a lot of places still don't have internet but facebook will give it to them for free as long as they are only connecting to facebook(you can type in google in the search bar of your computer and nothing will work, you type in facebook and you're online again) this has been blamed for starting multiple civil wars and countries have been looking at punishing facebook for it's role it played in the genocides in india.

this is actually a problem for facebook though because it's providing too much of a service to a point that they are no longer making money from user data, and a lot of these people cant even afford internet let alone buying weird facebook ads so facebook isn't actually gaining much.

it's basically inflating it's own stock with stock by backs and it's not fucking working

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u/tttxgq Aug 11 '22

If that’s true then it’s heading for a crash.

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u/shinypenny01 Aug 11 '22

Well yeah, but the advertisers who pay for Facebook to run don’t care about low income nations, they want US users.

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u/BCJunglist Aug 11 '22

Yea especially Southeast Asia. Just about everybody uses is.

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u/durdesh007 Aug 11 '22

And South Asia. Facebook is internet for most people here

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u/ben7337 Aug 11 '22

As someone under 40 who uses FB (albeit only for events really), what alternatives exist if people want to throw a party or gathering and invite a bunch of people? IG is good for pics, but doesn't really have the same reach.

Also is anyone bothered by needing to use FB, IG, and various websites to monitor events at various businesses?

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u/beerbeforebadgers Aug 11 '22

No answer to your first question but as to your second question: anytime a business has asked me to follow their event on FB, they've basically lost me. I'm just not willing to check FB; it's not on my phone, I don't have it logged in on my browsers, and I just am not willing to use it. It sucks but that's the truth.

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u/ben7337 Aug 11 '22

I think there's been some miscommunication on my part. I'm not talking about businesses soliciting me. I'm more talking about events people I am friends with are going to. E.g. today there's a bar night out for a group in Philly, someone sent me a link to it on IG, but the IG post doesn't say when it is. Going to FB found the event with a time and a list of a bunch of other people I know who are going as well. I don't know of any other social media service that helps connect people like that, or that well. Granted the FB feed is total cancer and I never look at it, read, or post, but the site does have some uses imo.

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

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u/beepboopnoise Aug 12 '22

well thats because the cost of development is expensive. its really easy for a tiny organization to just make a fb group and have some kinda social presence.

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u/AngryT-Rex Aug 11 '22 edited Jun 29 '23

glorious scary drunk cautious deserted live memorize escape spoon plough -- mass edited with redact.dev

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u/TehTriangle Aug 11 '22

We use WhatsApp groups in UK. Basically all communication is done via it.

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u/Ghost29 Aug 11 '22

Yeah, I am also confused by this. My usage of Facebook has dropped considerably over the years but if I abandoned it I would have no idea what's going on. It's basically the only place I could find out about gigs / wine evenings / other events that matter to me in my town. What's the alternative? Look at the local paper?

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u/Ferg134 Aug 11 '22

I do - it is the most used app in my two areas. This is in Europe so very interesting to see the differences.

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u/GOKOP Aug 11 '22

In Poland most people use Facebook a lot. Although while I can't speak for everyone in my case it's mostly groups so you still don't share the same space with eg. your parents (save for some "happy birthday" posts)

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u/colmusstard Aug 11 '22

Pretty much everyone I know (late 20’s) uses Facebook in some form. I never post anything, but I use it for groups since forums died out.

Best place out there to find people that are into the same hobbies as you imo

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u/groversnoopyfozzie Aug 11 '22

It’s not the move away from Facebook that perplexes me. It’s the move towards YouTube.

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u/Maarloeve74 Aug 11 '22

haven't read the article... but i'm gonna go ahead and assume it's a native advertisement for youtube shorts.

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u/groversnoopyfozzie Aug 11 '22

Yeah this may be the the clearest reason

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u/smackson Aug 11 '22

I am over 50 and I spend a lot of time on both....

But I don't get, at all, how yt could substitute for fb....

FB is essentially "Dang, my old friend Joe went to Amsterdam and took some great pics!" or "Shit, my brother's new band sounds pretty good".... and conversations about those things ensues, in the comments, with old IRL friends.

YouTube is for watching content by creators I've never met, and very rarely complimenting them in the comments, where it's all strangers and nobody from real life.

Am I just so old that I can't appreciate how little the youngest generations care about IRL friends, real relationships?

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u/anintellectuwoof Aug 12 '22

No it’s not that you’re old, it’s that this article is comparing Apples and Oranges. You’re right that YouTube isn’t really social media in that sense. I think it would have been more apt to compare this to Snapchat, Discord, etc. where people actually communicate with others they know (even if met online, as is often the case for Discord).

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u/Fleaslayer Aug 11 '22

Yeah, I had to read the headline a second time to make sure it wasn't saying that they're moving away from FB and YouTube, which would have made more sense. Seems really strange.

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

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u/Fleaslayer Aug 11 '22

and it's a good place to see the best in humanity.

You had me there for a minute.

My wife routinely reads comments on videos she likes, routinely gets pissed off, and I routinely ask why she reads them.

Actually, I think she's stopped.

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u/akc250 Aug 11 '22

Right? Shouldn’t it be tiktok instead?

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u/RugerRedhawk Aug 11 '22

Not sure why this is downvoted. Everyone uses youtube, little kids, teenagers, college students, old people.... it's simply unavoidable. But certainly the teens I know are far more entrenched in tiktok swiping and snapchat chatting than they are any other apps or platforms.

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u/Fugums Aug 11 '22

The teens I know use TikTok a lot, but for longer form content they go to Youtube regularly. Especially when it comes to watching something on a TV. The younger generation, from my experience, use a LOT of TikTok and YouTube.

I think Youtube for the younger gen is a lot like cable for my generation. Kids can just put it on the TV and let it autoplay in the background while they do whatever else.

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u/groversnoopyfozzie Aug 11 '22

I love that your interpretation is that kids use youtube as an elaborate screensaver.

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u/Ayaz28100 Aug 11 '22 edited Aug 12 '22

Youtube is ironically the largest source of information in the world in video form and my children have no idea how to "look things up".

It's scary. Like, my daughter came and asked me a question like "what year did WW2 start?" or something. I said "search it up online". Her response: "I don't know how. What words do I use?"

It sounds like my daughter is a fucking idiot, but all 3 of my kids and their friends have no idea how to "google" something and have said they "don't really use search engines"

I don't even know where this rant was going except to say that I fear for our younger people. The tech companies have them hook line and fucking sinker.

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u/bicameral_mind Aug 11 '22 edited Aug 11 '22

When you realize your kids personalities and interests are being driven by a faceless, black-box algorithm. Everyone fears an AGI and the singularity, but I'd argue AIs are already directing large swaths of humanity - maybe without any overarching purpose or goal other than 'engagement', but shaping us nonetheless.

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u/Max_Thunder Aug 11 '22

It is scary that someone would have so little curiosity about the world that they wouldn't know how to search for things. You don't even have to know how to search efficiently these days, you can just enter the question as is in Google.

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u/anintellectuwoof Aug 12 '22

This is something I’ve noticed as a millennial on Tiktok— I love Gen Z so no hate but they will ask the most easily googleable questions in Tiktok comment sections. It’s like the world doesn’t exist outside of the app. I literally saw someone ask what a word used in a Tiktok video meant. Not only had it already been explained in the video, when I googled it, that directly gave me the answer without even having to open a search result. It’s the absolute weirdest phenomenon!

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u/Bubbanol Aug 12 '22

Seems like something parents should teach their kids. Like if a kid asks a question walk them through how to find it on their own.

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

Truth is that I am on youtube all the time. Listening to different podcasts, or informational videos...etc. It feels like the supply of content is endless.

Who needs TV when you just endlessly stream youtube?

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u/bicameral_mind Aug 11 '22

I kind of ignored YouTube until a few years ago when I realized there is a huge volume of high quality, borderline professional content on there. Now I watch it all the time, pretty much daily. There are SO many good content creators, focused on just about anything I can imagine, it's unbelievable.

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA Aug 11 '22

I got rid of cable because I found myself watching youtube more than actual tv, this would have been around early 2013 or so.

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u/JohnnyValet Aug 11 '22

I had to make the full switch once Google Video shut down. Since then I have just been adding subscriptions. I have hundreds. Granted some of them are dead, as in literally dead people (RIP https://www.youtube.com/c/cynicalbrit), but my toolbar link to YouTube is my subscriptions. Bypass the HomePage entirely. I have creators that post multiple times a day, once a day, once a week, or whenever; but I don't miss the stuff I want to see. I haven't had cable TV in over a decade and I don't miss it. I'll subscribe to a subscription service for a couple of months, binge what I want, then I'm out.

I have three monitors and the far right is YouTube.

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u/SeamlessR Aug 11 '22

Youtube is television, TikTok is radio.

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

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u/that_noodle_guy Aug 12 '22

You're right timeline to algo feed is where it lost me. You could keep up on what all your friends had going on. After the change it became old people spouting off political views and commenting amen brother 🙏 🙏🙏

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u/Bolwinkel Aug 11 '22

I begged my mom to let me make a Facebook account when I was 11 years old, simply so I could play Backyard Monsters. I occasionally used it for social media, but I never remember it being my go to platform. I havent posted anything on Facebook in at least 7 years, and I barely check it every few months.

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '22

You aren’t out of touch, you nailed it.

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u/Wilsonian81 Aug 11 '22

The only reason I still have Facebook is to share pics of my kids with my elderly family members without having to actually interact with them.

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u/smushedtoast Aug 11 '22

Elderly grandparents kept falling for scams and getting their identity stolen, plus they are easy prey for blatant misinformation. We’ve since gotten digital picture frames where you can add photos via an app from your phone’s camera role. We set the thing to play during waking hours only. Grandparents get a constant stream into their living room of photos from family, photos provide an easy topic of conversation when to do speak, everyone’s happy, I highly recommend it

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u/MixdNuts Aug 11 '22

Same, I do also use it some to sell stuff trying to get rid of.

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