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Comment by Firebrand | Hacker News Reader

Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter usage are all down.

People are just spending less time on social media apps for some reasons these days.

The trend is moving towards private chatrooms (whatsapp, telegram, slack, messenger groups). People are tired of public social media.

Even as a pretty public twitter/fb/etc person, I'm finding that my social activity increasingly happens in private and semi private chats. For most of my friends, they use chat groups exclusively. The only times they post on Facebook/Instagram publicly is when they need to brag about some semi-big event.

Instagram Stories are popular tho. They seem to have mostly replaced the old casual personal posting.

Discord also seems to be growing rapidly.

For me FB has become too samey.

- News: the same articles everyone is posting everywhere. Plus nutter conspiracy theorists educating us all about why the earth is flat / we never went to the moon / we should embrace communism/capitalism on completely unrelated threads.

- Friends: same people going on about the same things. One guy has a special hatred for Trump that he vents every day. Another guy talks about local affairs for his little island community. Both people I know IRL, but online they become cartoons.

- Groups: same messages over and over, with news mixed in. Sports team group news is a filter for your team. So I see all the transfers for my team, and all the game updates and comments from the fans. Pretty low quality, as in "anyone know this guy we're buying? Yeah, he's a midfielder". And permanently "We should fire the coach / He's the best coach ever".

- Baby pics / anecdotes. These are great, but take about 5 seconds to consume and like.

Honestly, how many of those can someone juggle a day? I'd struggle with two yet still more show up every year. It's not big in the US, I heard, but for me it's 90% WhatsApp. MySpace used to be huge, then facebook came along. I feel like Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter are slowly replacing facebook. And what makes any of them so perfect to suggest they're the last in line?

"we compared app data from Q1 2015 to Q1 2016"

this data is 2-3 years old now.

That is interesting. Too much noise , too much distraction?

It's a cesspool, imo. My Facebook is overwhelmed by extremely ugly political obnoxiousness these days, which makes it almost worthless (I'd have to hide 3/4 of the conversations/posts by friends). Between that and the junk content and general corporate spam, maybe 3-5% of what I've seen on FB in the last year has been legitimately valuable social content. The majority of people I know hate Facebook as a product now. They don't just not want to use it, they hate it. Facebook knows what their product has become, it's so bad now they stopped trying to pretend otherwise. They're basically facing their Microsoft Internet tsunami moment, they either quickly adapt or fade from here. If they fade, what will happen is a dozen new social competitors will spring up and begin stripping fringe corners off the core FB network, amounting to tens of millions of users in eg North America. It'll simply break up at the edges, and retain a large foundational user base that will be a lot less engaged.

All the political stuff just ends up making me mad and probably ends up pissing off certain acquaintances if I jump into a thread. Why would I want to continuously look at that stuff?

I've been thinking about how much I hate Facebook as a product. I think the idea might not be wrong and centralization of trust might not be a horrible idea. Implementation is important. There just needs a GNU or Wikipedia of Facebook to exist. A place that has a great code of conduct and not-for-profit agenda.

The only people left now are people who REALLY like to show what they are up to.

I can only hope things are not going to be so self centered anymore.

I'm curious if it's related to the concept of push notifications.

If I have my online network of friends configured in such a way so that I get a notification on my phone, I don't need to stay on Facebook all day wading through cruft. If a close friend posts something, I'll get a notification and check it out. I read/watch and I'm out.

I doubt it, push notifications have been around for years now...Could just be fatigue from it all. Millennials are also getting to their 30s/mid-30s on the old side and are having families, so probably less time/need for a bunch of social networks.

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