America’s Teens Are Choosing YouTube Over Facebook
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The games are more for the middle aged player.
They have no list of long lost people they wish to connect with. Everyone is a friend or friend of a friend.
You can follow brands but the youth want to follow a band or an actor not a toothbrush company.
Things like poking or using a fake name or having permissions connected to school or orgs created social group that you would share related photos. Now you have to manage a list or share with everyone.
Facebook was a good way for college kids to connect with everyone from there school. They could create a new persona with fun photos/videos and show everyone how popular they are. Now you hide your friend list, avoid saying anything that you wouldn't say in front of your mother and secretly worry that anything you post will be purchased by a potential future employer enabling them to filter out your resume in record time.
As a teen, I'd go to the movies with my friends maybe 4 times a year. Never went to any events. The extent of our fun was playing basketball or just sitting around.
Similarly, my daughter's GirlScouts troop uses FB exclusively for organizing/announcements/voting, etc.
But they all plan their dances and workshops meticulously in Facebook.
I can mark dances as "interesting" months before they happen and look up later what's coming next week.
That's especially nice for other scenes than your own, in towns two hours or more away.
It's the only thing keeping me on Facebook, because I don't see how to replace that.
Is this popular with American Teens?
I am guessing not. Which kind of makes the GP's point.
And at that point, yes, they start to do everything on Facebook.
But I love nothing more than dancing the night away with great music. I'm a raver. Facebook Events is a game changer.
When I started going to raves you got a phone call from a guy who heard from a guy that there was a layby off a remote B-road that you might want to be at and when you got there another guy would give you directions along an unnamed road to an abandoned airfield and that was where the rave was.
Now we got corporate raves on a public website. The old way was better.
I also have to imagine that sometimes you just want to dance and it's probably nice to not have to jump through a lot of hoops to find a fun party.
It's not so much all-important, but it's the one feature that impacts Facebook-abstainers the most. If someone's planning a party and is lazily using FB events, you'll probably be left out if you don't have an account.
The 30+ crowd appears to believe that FaceBook is the most logical way to organize events - you can check in on your own schedule, without feeling pressured into immediately responding to someone poking you about joining up. Today's youth has no problem being expected to respond within minutes - or in the worst case, a couple of hours - to an inquiry made via SMS or Snapchat.
ie: Older person: "I may have some free time this weekend, maybe I'll check FaceBook tomorrow to see if anyone is planning something"; vs. younger generation: "Someone snapped our group telling us to come out with them Saturday, I'll decide in the next 5 minutes whether I'm in or out".
In reality FB events are extensively used by ages 16-30 as well for bigger group gatherings, such as going on holiday, going for a weekend somewhere, or something like that.
Your anecdote look like something an older person would charicaturize about youth and elderly.
I don't understand why you'd use FB events for "going on holiday, going for a weekend somewhere." Those things would entail a smaller, tighter knit group with much more communication and planning. Group chat seems like a better fit.
IMO, FB events are really only suitable for things like parties, with an large invite/smaller rsvp dynamic, with mostly broadcast messages from the host.
Yes groupchat is better when it's less than say, 8 people.
FB events are suitable for lots of things, I woulnd't say it in such a reductionary manner like "only parties".
This may be more of a 20+ use case, but either way, Facebook groups provide a sense of community. They are more personal than subreddits and less personal than a group chat.
[1] https://www.similarweb.com/blog/mobile-messaging-app-map-201...
So it was better to use wifi and WhatsApp to communicate. Once you'd fixed your net access, you could be sure of cheap easy text communications.
The EU roaming pricing law has now fixed the original cause, but it is too late to change people's behaviour.
Here we also have unlimited texting in all but the most limited pay-as-you-go offerings. The telco market is extremely competitive.
iMessage, SMS is ruling the day now. It’s incredible how utterly Google failed in this space by tossing Talk.
I'm not arguing that I think a system should or should not be open, just that I don't understand how the argument that was presented is supposed to work.
The major open ones (mail and POTS) are either going away as telcos divest and people stop answering the phone or consolidating into a small number of big players as what we see with email.
The 2030s will probably bring back the future equivalent of Telex
Can you do chat-groups on iMessage? Because that's one of the main advantages of using FB Messenger or WhatsApp around these parts of the world (Eastern Europe).
:thinking_face:
Facebook offers an event planner, a blog platform, photo hosting, video hosting, news aggregation, venmo-like payment system, de-facto single sign on service for most websites
That's in addition to Messenger, which as you said is huge.
I suppose photo sharing is integrated in messenger (the mobile app), too?
So, what has replaced instant messaging _in a meaningful way_ for teenagers? I hear Snapchat, but I don't think that it's actually filling the gap. I've heard folks say YikYak before, or whatever the fuck it was called, but that app was a pile and I'm pretty sure it died anyway over privacy violations.
What's out there that is directly connecting teens online today? Please tell me they're not all walled in to Facebook without any alternatives...
Maybe I'm nostalgic, maybe I'm stuck viewing "my" technologies through rose-tinted goggles. Maybe I'm just naive. Maybe I'm just old. It may be that "the kids" are just in to a way of communication that doesn't "feel" right to me and that I'll never understand, and which leads itself to apps like Snapchat, WhatsApp, etc... being _genuinely_ superior to what I once experienced, even when I personally view them as being woefully inadequate compared to something as simple as AIM.
It strikes me as being some sort of Socratic expression that I don't want to delve in to. I just hope that technology is serving "kids" today as well as it served me in the past, and I guess that I have to accept that what _they_ accept is performing that job satisfactorily. Maybe when I have children and they are pre-teen / teen then I will be able to understand their needs again.
My eldest is about to turn 15, and he and his mates use IRC. He's a wee bit geeky, so "retro", "techie", and "obscure/mainstream unpopular" appeal greatly.
Kinda funny 'cause dad is mostly on Slack/Telegram/WhatsApp these days. To the extent I use IRC at all it is on the channel he set up for the fam.
> I just hope that technology is serving "kids" today as well as it served me in the past
Amen.
Ah. Maybe it is specifically for teen. Because every time I scroll down there I instantly regret it. Not only the content of comments have no added value, but it's not funny, or even most of the time remotely intelligible.
And I say that why understanding the appeal of the content in video games forum, which on my personal quality scale is already very low.
It's even worse than Youtube comments because it shows that people post the same shit under their real name that their friends/fam can see. They aren't people you know.
I spent some considerable time the other day reporting racist and hateful comments on a single YouTube video. It's not something I would normally spend any time doing but in this instance it was time well spent.
I've limited my exposure to comment sections on websites to HN only. It's the only place I've found that is reliable to not be full of hate and well moderated. I only watch YouTube videos through DDG these days.
Exactly. The following is emblematic of what makes YouTube great, which is precisely what YouTube the company and its corporate advertiser don't understand. In fact, it's what they try to kill, and what ideologue shills like Vox and Vice wish they were.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj7Aa866ERY
tl;dw: Actual people being themselves having actual human reactions.
I have seen a large part of my Facebook friends leave the platform (I'd estimate at least half are inactive). And our whole class joined when Stanford came onboard as the second school after Harvard way way way long ago.
But I doubt it and I'm sure you're wrong about what runs Messenger. No company, least of all the Facebook scale ones use just one language for everything.
https://www.quora.com/When-did-Facebook-switch-away-from-usi...
sigh
I think we need to give credit to Facebook where credit is due, and it sure seems like Facebook's management wanted WhatsApp to be private for some reason.
I see no indication that WhatsApp was "private" in any way before Facebook acquired it.
I can't imagine how the Whatsapp acquisition will ever pay off. It doesn't need to because they make money with FB and Instagram but I don't see why they had to buy it..
Wait what? I thought that's obvious. Facebook and WhatsApp don't even have the same type of social graph, multi-brand approaches are probably always strategically superior and changing the fundamental concept behind high-growth apps tends to be a high-risk endeavor.
There are probably a million more reasons not to prematurely integrate. (I guess they would also need to quit their e2e encryption in the process.)
Would there be any benefit beside convenience? Honest question.
I open a private session on mobile safari, log into fbook, then “request desktop site” and read/reply. I refuse to have fbook app installed on my phone.
However I stupidly use WhatsApp everyday...
Not sure if it's on by default, but mine was turned on and I don't remember turning it on.
Also using mobile Chrome in desktop mode enables one to read messages, although it's quite awkward to use.
Facebook's push to force end users to install their messenger on mobile phones made me very suspicious. I stopped using all their regular mobile clients as well, and only use browser.
They also wanted me to fill in profile information- which I didn't do. So they took guesses- all wrong- about my education, by job, and so on. I guess they expected that if I saw something wrong I would fix it. Nope.
that AB testing has SUCKED when it comes to facebook enjoyment.
Im not sure if they were looking at minutes people spent on facebook, but that must be an awful indicator.
Whatever happened, I dont use it anymore.
This only happens in Facebook because everyone in my social circle is on Facebook though. Young people aren’t faced with this platform lock in and I absolutely agree with you, why would they ever join?
Facebook is basically the yellow pages at this point, and how many millennials ever used a phone book?
Not that it would change anything. Being on facebook means that people think they can invite me there, when in reality, I won't see anything until weeks or months later.
Personally I hear about the things I want to attend anyway, but I have the same feeling of not knowing nonetheless.
If one of my friend groups introduced a new platform, I’d have that one + Facebook. If five of my friends introduced new platforms I’d probably have 6 platforms.
Aside from that, a lot of the alternative platforms aren’t really better than Facebook. I’m on discord for instance, but they also make a living of my personal data.
That could be a killer app if Facebook gives it love.
It was surprisingly easy to forget about facebook. I had already basically avoided it for a month or two. The twitter icon was my reminder/mindless app to kill a few minutes. Twitter sucks too, but its different.
I'll check my facebook when I remember, maybe once a week when my wife mentions a friend posted something crazy on facebook. I'll check my notifications for events, but its mostly garbage.
My tech-spider-sense says the masses are losing interest in facebook.
Personally, Twitter makes me feel gross. Too much marketing spam in a small amount of time. Too easy to get sucked in and lose 30 minutes of my life to informationless noise.
In a past age I was a true believer in reddit, up until 2010-2011. I had a >6-year old account. True believer, paid for gold, believed that to be something special. Reddit ruined that and went for a different, shallower audience. Turns out, that audience is also me.
I ask because open invite eventing sucks. (I imagine organizing friends only events do too, but I wouldn't know, because we empty nesters no longer socialize like that.)
My primary volunteer gig has been experimenting with using both facebook and meetup to publish meetings, GOTV (phone banking, signature gathering), important calendar dates (eg elections).
Both kinda suck. Most of our members still get looped in via our email blasts.
But I don't really know what would be better. Looking for ideas.
(I do have ideas. But hoping to avoid making my own solution.)
PaperlessPost is a events company and we recently launched a product named "Flyer". It's an easy way to create an event and collect RSVP's using a unique URL. The designs are pretty hip too. Check it out here - https://www.paperlesspost.com/flyer
Hit me up with any questions about the product.
To better illustrate my challenge, here's an umbrella org to dozens of activities, of varying sizes and prerequisites.
http://www.sustainableballard.org
They need a whitelabel version of volunteermatch.org & meetup.com hybrid.
It's much much easier than having to find out someone's email or phone number that you might not have.
And while I haven't organized a large open event, I do enjoy using facebook for attending them.
People talk about deleting their FB account all the time, but would keep there insta. Facebook, the parent company, is far from losing out.
It’s a weaker position for Facebook though. Instagram is much more vulnerable to competition from Twitter, Snapchat, and YouTube than Facebook is.
Facebook is super defensible. No other company has a network like that. If interest shifts from fb to ig then Facebook’s moat is a lot smaller.
Edit:
I also hear a lot that most people are on FB due to keeping up with "events" as well. Aside from memories / connecting and events it provides no value back to me. I can call / text / email anyone I know, I guess it's just convenience.
At what age is it supposed to become the other way round?
Noone - whatever their age - cares about toothbrush companies. It was a very contrived example, that's my point
Truer words were never spoken. Granted, I still love to use Facebook because I have friends from years ago, all over the country. It's the only way I keep in touch with them. But as another commenter brilliantly put it, they're becoming the yellow pages.
> The sole reason I’m still on Facebook is because events are organized on Facebook. (eksemplar)
I study Music Management at the conservatory (university), and spend most of my time on events and festivals. It is my impression that few in the tech business understands the magnitude of this market, and how Facebook entirely owns it. The entire concert-format is under enormous pressure from the booming festival and club scene, making services like Songkick irrelevant. ResidentAdvisor is good, but too editorial, too little tech.
Facebook democratised event-making in a great way. You can trust that a good portion of the people attending an event is actually going. You can make events private, which is good for pirate-parties and other underground events (Lead Users). And importantly, it gives event makers insight into who is coming, how many, how the growth curve is etc. Artists can link to their personalised profile, that people will actually follow for updates. This is hugely important for creators.
If you start a competitor, it'd be natural to focus on music, but then you'll still leave all the people interested mostly in art-exhibitions on Facebook. Facebook is content-neutral, which is a huge advantage. Further, they have an entire business-suite platform (groups) on top of this, meaning I can discuss our events, plan them, while linking to relevant artists, venues etc on Facebook. I can book artists, book a venue and market the event entirely on the FB-platform. That is an important advantage in the space of social media.
Facebook is, without comparison, the best tool for events.
But I agree with all your points. FB dominates the event space. It's amazing.
http://world.timeout.com/ does a great job mapping fb events.
And then I just started realizing how creepy it is that they don't even allow somebody to outright delete their profile unless they have died and their legacy admin proves they have died and deletes it for them.
How creepy is that? They are like a manipulative partner in a relationship, who thinks they have their hooks in you so deep that they act all compassionately when you say you want to break up, but deep inside they are saying to themselves, "You'll be back bitch. You know you need daddy."
It used to be a good thing. I mean i've sparked a few relationships using facebook. But nowadays it's just political banter, pictures of single mother's babies (i lost my baby son 5 years ago so this makes me uncomfortable when im bombarded by everybody else's little bundles of joy), memes memes memes memes, stories about dead/missing people, non stop selfies, and nothing of real substance.
Aren't we supposed to like not know so much about other people so that when we get together we have something to discover about each other? It's like we have gotten to the point where we NEED to know everything about people we actually don't really know that well in real life.
And everybody is competing for points on who can be the most self obsessed and nosey at the same time. I'd rather watch Youtube videos because at least that is art in a way. People taking time to make sure what they say is presented in the best format possible.
About 2 weeks after I stopped, I no longer even wanted to use it and actually thought it was a little weird how I ever wanted to. But in 2007, it was cool and fun.
I did join back up again for one specific facebook group. however I wasn't getting much out of it and on top of that, the Cambridge Analytica debacle just left a bad taste in my mouth and I've dropped facebook entirely, again.
It's been about 3 months now and I really have no desire to sign up again - occasionally I've browsed the group as an anonymous user and nothing has inspired me to join.
I've also dropped Twitter and other social media sits - I feel that until they get their shit together as far as privacy concerns, I'm just not interested in being part of any of that.
So it's HN and a couple of subject specific forums for me, and that will do for my "social media" needs. I've considered joining reddit but the jury is still out on that.
It's Sid Meier's Civilization, not Sid Mayers' Civilisation.
It's no game.
Stay. Off. My. Lawn.
All made more difficult because you're not allowed to stop rocking your chair.
And Instagram + Snapchat are more about looking at what your friends are up to, and offer way more intimate experiences than Facebook. I have never seen a link to a news website or political ad on either platform, but Facebook is littered with them, and it crowds out the content I want to see: pictures of my friends doing cool stuff. If I want astroturfing and news, I go to reddit and HN :P
So Facebook occupies the awkward middle ground, and most people I know use it to collect acquaintances and to exchange Instagram/Snapchat handles.
Source: am teen
Medium to me feels like it's mostly oriented for technical bloggers (even though it sucks for technical blogging!) and success bloggers that tell you to wake up at 4 AM and meditate.
"A fan-created, fan-run, non-profit, non-commercial archive for transformative fanworks, like fanfiction, fanart, fan videos, and podfic"
Lots of stuff for fans, apparently.
The recommendation engine is really good now. I’ve added more to my watch later list in the last 6 months than I have in the last 6 years combined.
As an SEO I’m surprised to admit, but I find it better to search directly in YouTube than actual Google search for certain searches.
Google was playing the loooong game on YouTube and it seems to be paying off.
Are you actually watching it though?
I say "mostly" because there's likely some small effect from users who get overwhelmed by the length of their watch list and bounce from the site, but it's hard to avoid links to YouTube if you spend any time on the Internet.
The walled garden will continue being lucrative though. Especially if they win VR.
In the world the article is talking about, you do realise that YOU are one of these 'old people' right?
You need +100 subs
Why not limit how often you can change it, or make some other kind of limitation?
My few younger relatives who use FB have very basic "token accounts" that they don't actually seem to use.
Me too, in fact the wife and I save videos over the course of the week to cast to the TV on a Friday night over a few glasses of wine. We've even started to get into a few vlogs, which up until very recently we assumed were talentless narcissistic rubbish. Turns out there are at least a few good ones (mainly travel related in our case).
The best version of the newsfeed was a newsfeed that could be filtered by content type. It was great when I could view just status updates or photos. Facebook serves a purpose, for me, that is similar to my Twitter now -- as a place to consume news from outlets I subscribe to, like ESPN, The Atlantic, Vox, etc.
Facebook's best move, as a company, was the acquisition of Instagram.
More is not always better. I think Facebook, some few years back, had a shot to build a video publishing platform that could have taken some slice of the pie from YouTube, but now they have a helluva lead. They also have broadcast television and have recently introduced easier ways to share content with those you're already connected to.
It looks like the "walled garden" approach to content distribution and ultimately, the views, which drive advertising revenue is really hurting Facebook as a destination site now.
that's not even half as entertaining as instagram or snapchat right now. i feel like snapchat should really be a little bit ahead, because the social experience is a lot more interesting than instagram's, but instagram's larger user base means more interesting pictures and videos right now, even if these videos are a little bit "detached" from the user's social experience.
facebook's social experience has totally lost the plot when they started trimming the social feed in favour of links to websites outside of facebook.
really the crux of these social websites is that they need to have a social experience. if i wanted gossip news or political reading i'd go to a gossip website or a political journal.
It looks just like a portal straight out of 1999. It comes across as generic, soulless - a product trying to be everything that ends up being nothing in particular.
Here's the most recent Yahoo version of that left strip of be-everything-and-nothing portalism icons (archive.org stray example from 2014):
https://web.archive.org/web/20140420105343/https://www.yahoo...
I consume a lot of content from YouTube. It's fun, mostly enjoyable (can easily ignore the trash comments). Facebook is an extremely mediocre product by comparison, it's not much fun at all. I use YouTube regularly to watch video that might include everything from news, movie trailers, documentaries, vblogs, entertainment show clips, sports clips, speaker forums, and so on. Facebook by contrast, I consume with a bare minimum type approach: I use it as little as necessary.
The only two complaints I have about YouTube's product, is the quality of the comments, and there are still too many fake automated junk videos on there (or otherwise the: you won't believe what happened next junk). Most video search results require a bit of filtering through that.
I think something people forget when they're talking about social media is how new it is. Social sites have yet to prove they're something people genuinely want to engage with in the long term. There's no particularly good reason to believe someone who joins a site in their teens will still be on it in their 30s and beyond. They might move on to something else. Or they might not. Teens might not want to join it now that it's an established platform and not 'trendy', but they might come to it later. We don't know. There is no data for this. No previous social network has lasted long enough to discover what happens.
Let's not forget that Facebook has only been around for 14 years, and for a couple of those it was closed to world outside of academia. 12 years is nothing when you're trying to work out how people use something. This entire thing is a fascinating experiment. We're a long way from drawing any conclusions yet.
Events are really the only thing I miss from FB. Startup idea for anyone who wants to try to address it: independent Events app that connects with everything under the sun (FB, Google, etc.)
It is the primary communication tool for everyone I know in the bay area, excluding professionals that I email or teammates at code for SF that I message on slack.
I used to vent about politics on there, but I've begun to shy away from that to twitter.
Have you considered not doing that on any social media platform?
If I could get those few friends to use something else for chat I would just close out my account but until then it offers me more than it bothers me.
I mostly use WhatsApp (also Facebook obviously) with everyone else. It works great with the desktop app (WhatsApp Web) and phone app. I would prefer to use something like Signal or Wire but getting people to change is pretty much impossible without big external pressure (marketing).
It's where the powers that be decided our local cat shelter's volunteers should share notes, pictures, videos, etc.
And vintage computer collectors largely moved off forums long ago and a lot of the activity is in Facebook groups now.
Imho this is a way underrated aspect of Facebook. I've noticed that a whole lot of small business use Facebook to have a low-barrier, free, and easily updateable internet presence.
In particular, small restaurants, bars, cafes and similar ventures which have daily changing menus. Many of these use pretty much only Facebook to publish this information due to the ease of the process: Snap a picture of the daily menu card/display and post it, done. Literally, your grandma can do it!
When looking for reliable opening times on a place, that doesn't have its own internet presence, Facebook usually has way more up to date/short notices information, compared to opening time information on Google.
It's an interesting aspect about FB that even FB itself seems kind of unaware about.
I've gotten a ton of value out of Facebook. I got to know a new friend on Facebook and reconnected with a childhood friend who moved across the country. Local Facebook groups are amazing. Events. Keeping in touch long distance. Messager.
Yet another case of "Do people still watch TV? I haven't own a TV in 15 years".
https://www.recode.net/2018/3/1/17063208/facebook-us-growth-...
Facebook is massive in this country. More than two-thirds of Americans, specifically 68 percent, use the service, according to new research from Pew Research Center.
Social life has primarily moved to Whatsapp, which everyone I was talking to on FB was already using so no hiccups. I use Discord but it's primarily for gaming. I much, much prefer anonymous or semi-anonymous social media so I'm mainly on reddit for memes and whatever.
In regards to that event idea: I think where FB really stands out for events was that it functions as a calendar as well. Everyone you invite likely checks FB daily so not only are they guaranteed to see the notification for the invite (rather than it going into a spam folder...) but they're also going to see that event on their homepage whenever they log in. And you can see what's coming up easily, see what your friends are going to etc etc. I think it would be really, really hard to get the same level of functionality cross-platform. Maybe an app with SSO, but it kind of relies on having a strong user base to begin with which is tricky: the ticketing/event management market is already quite saturated. And for social events Facebook is the status quo, I can count on one hand the number of people I know who don't have a Facebook account, FB users have no reason to move to another platform. That said if anyone has an actual plan, hmu, I've got spare time to help.
I'd honestly lose track of them otherwise. Maybe that'd be fine and yes there alternatives, however it would take lots of effort to make the change and it seems to be a case of inertia for me and lots of others.
I was just thinking of shutting it down again then thinking of how I'd stay connected with all the people I already am on FB, seems exhausting. Kinda sad maybe but true in my case.
As an aside, when I hear someone putting down/wondering why about FB and using something like Instagram I find it more than a little funny.
Also, the fact that you put out stand-alone events app as a "startup idea" like it would be something no-one has thought of triggers me. It's probably the most common start-up idea floating around. It's almost a meme. "I have an idea", "oh, another events app to replace Facebook Events?".
I suspect a large percentage of HN readers have tried to some degree to create an events app. It seems like a no brainer, but the reality is that having a critical mass of users matters more than creating an app that works well. You can't monetize convincingly with ads, commission is only going to work if you can genuinely push people who wouldn't have gone anyway to go to the events, and Facebook already has the users.
Not exactly the same, but Meetup has existed for more than ten years and seems to do ok with a model that charges organizers a small amount.
I asked my wife if she uses "Events" since I hear about that so often here at HN and she doesn't - she said she occasionally sees events posted from other users but it's rare. Maybe Facebook Events are for 18-30 year olds and we've aged out?
My husband actually creates private events for things he's going to do because it gives him reminders. He could use Google calendar or something for that, sure, but he already uses events.
I consider it my portal.
Yes. Most people on HN are on facebook. Most people in america are on facebook.
If you really want to see the dominance of FB within social media.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/248074/most-popular-us-s...
> my conversations and invites are moving to WhatsApp, Discord (surprisingly awesome), Instagram, Signal, etc.
Hate to be a bearer of bad news but WhatsApp and Instagram are owned by facebook.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram
So you really haven't left facebook. You've moved within facebook.
My advice is to stop believing clickbait nonsense from news media like bloomberg and what you read on small fringe sites like hacker news.
And I was like, I think there's some porn blockers around.
And he replied, "I wish they'd watch porn! They're watching YT, getting crazy ideas from others and doing stupid things!"
Isn't it just a symptom that the next generation doesn't want the same thing as their parents?
e.g. I don't want to live in my childhood home, I don't want to wear my dad's clothes and I don't want to drive his car.
So every largely successful social media platform is doomed to only be `the one` for 1 generation?
YouTube’s user content generally has a higher production quality than Facebook posts. It’s also easier to curate and subscribe to the topics you’re interested in, unlike Facebook.
The things my father owned that are still current are pretty special to me, actually.
There's plenty of parent-centric content as well. Working adults just have the same amount of free time so those views are lower.
My early teen does not see the point in FB but spends hours on YT if left to her own devices. It’s not a reaction to her parents - she doesn’t care about that (yet?). She likes the relatable people on YT, and the topics they cover - from Minecraft to TED.
As I heard a teenager say a couple years ago "why would I create a Facebook account, its for old moms."
> As I heard a teenager say a couple years ago "why would I create a Facebook account, its for old moms."
Precisely. Apart from the illusion of becoming an internet star, kids simply cater to the places where is most unlikely that their parents and older relatives can find them.
Why post the latest slumber party photos on FB, if your aunt could somehow see and comment on those? (yes yes I know, privacy settings, custom lists, private groups, yada yada... )
Instagram (basically personal brand/image management, checking out latest styles from other people, styles she can actually afford)
Snapchat (personal circle of friends, unedited content)
YouTube (lifestyle bloggers)
Facebook is dying in their demographic.. pretty fast, except for Facebook pages for things she’s interested in
I have nieces and nephews on FB, but they never post much, they hide most of their real content on anonymous Instagram accounts.
They used to talk about when there would be more dead people on facebook than alive. I think they were mistaken about the alive people still on facebook part.
Facebook is going to be a small, odd, digital graveyard from the early 'net.
High school kids hate facebook. It is what their parents use and they view it as a historical ledger of their actions. They view facebook more like a 'yearbook' not as a day to day hangout.
But as it all adds up, Facebook is becoming less and less social overtime: people posted stuff, but they don't really expect interactions, they only want reactions, and the ones they expected. Unlike chatting, unexpected conversation could happen, and could genuinely help discovery of new perspectives. Facebook, in its current form, is just a static wall of trophies, a decorated personality about what you want people to think you are. It is tiring and indeed requires high maintenance.
It will not be surprising to me, that Facebook's downfall is just the beginning, they might keep buying other social apps, but it does little to keep their current audience from going away.
This article only refers to usage as 'visit(ing)' the sites, but nothing about interaction. Are we to assume that teens are actively consuming and producing content on YouTube?
There's a huge difference here. When I still had Facebook I would have never said I spent most of my time there. It's very easy to say YouTube consumes more of your time considering how easy it is to go down the rabbit-hole of related videos, how-tos, etc.
Even my dad always tells me to 'get on the YouTube' to look up videos on how to do things when he isn't here to show me because it has videos 'on everything'.
What I'm really getting at is there are completely different uses for each site. For advertisers it's important to know where the majority of time is spent but I don't think that means Facebook is becoming irrelevant.
I spen hours on YouTube watching America's Funniest Home videos.
Trying hard to get out of that addiction.
But Youtube and Twitch I like. It's kinda what cable public-access was trying to do, only way better.
Basically my private internet usage consists of youtube, twitch (sometimes), HN and resetera (games forum).
Facebook has absolutely no appeal to me.
Activities on YT: Slime videos, Minecraft videos, and lots of "pretty young girls doing stuff" (crafting, lifehacks etc.) They don't comment, and despite my repeated encouragement, don't really publish their own videos.
Decreased FB usage is likely a reflection that they're wary of how FB utilizes their data, and realizing it's better to be choosy where they post info about themselves.
Facebook failed to market effectively to up and coming teenagers, and as a result they have grown up into people who have chosen alternative networks that looked fun and cool, not boring and corporate blue.
No one gives a shit about data.
Monetization for users with under 10K followers is much easier on Twitch.tv right now. Than on any other platform, including YouTube. The Fortnite cultural phenomenon is just beginning. And the ancillary revenue services such as Streamlabs involve direct sponsorship. As opposed to negotiating third party brand deals. Twitch popularity is creating the feedback loop that informs game design. Looking across the Pacific at Tencent and its 500M mobile gamers. Just can't help but think there is still phenomenal upside here ;)
2.3 You may not use the Service and may not accept the Terms if (a) you are not of legal age to form a binding contract with YouTube, or (b) you are a person who is either barred or otherwise legally prohibited from receiving or using the Service under the laws of the country in which you are resident or from which you access or use the Service.
It was shoddily implemented though. IIRC even the academic that had the circle idea ranted about how badly plus had implemented it.
On one hand, I would rather have somebody else than Google handling the next social network, on the other, plus had some great idea and shined for a time in some areas like photography.
I used to frequent it a couple of times a week several years ago.
Nowadays, each time I open it by mistake I am taken aback by how extremist lunatics are everywhere in my feed (ymmv)
[0] "real insta"
[1] "fake insta"
You can conceptualize it as having a main and an alt--you'd never call your alt your real account.
The posts to the "fake insta" has less of a filter, and the account will be dropped/rotated as soon as it gets too much baggage or some content goes negatively viral. Someone bothering the user on their "fake insta"? But the user can't/won't block them for social/cultural reasons? Just stop using that account and create a brand new one, and then only tell your close friends about the new one. Everyone else is still following the old "fake" one which you no longer use hence its fake-ness.
This tends to be the top videos. Or at least consistently seems to be.
I assume the stats are based on usage not a survey.
I watch it on the TV via my PS4.
"YouTube Is No. 1 Internet Platform Among U.S. Teens, While Facebook Usage Has Plummeted: Study"
https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/youtube-teens-popular-...
It does have to slow down at some point. Google now has over 1.7 billion hours consumed on YT a day. That is about 100% growth YoY and has been accelerating. But there is only 7B people on the planet and so there is a limited numbers of hours.
So right now Google gets 10 minutes of every human on the planet with just YT and would expect that to continue to grow but at some point further down the road slow down.
Where do you think it will slow? 30 minutes? Could it ever get to an hour?
Facebook is clearly having a slow death in Europe, the real cut-off seems to be around the age of 30, the youngest, the less they are on Facebook. I wound not be surprised if the teens nowadays would not have any account at all.
But it still feels to me like watching 99% videos is mostly a boring waste of time compared to quick-read text&picture scrollable feed posts. I'm just not comfortable with the slow pace and low concentration of the information flow in videos (and books).
Is the "Twitter generation" that prefers to consume information quickly in small high-concentration portions passing away?
I sometimes come across an account and discover it’s a part of a whole community of accounts. I pick through and subscribe to some. Sometimes my feed takes a turn for the repetitive and then I prune accounts.
The homepage is OK but the subscription feed is the only thing you can get to a worthwhile state but it takes some tending to it. Similar to RSS too in that sense.
1. Facebook Events for invites 2. Facebook Marketplace 3. Facebook Groups of interests 4. The occasional profile update or "on this day" post
With the news of the new Facebook dating service, it seems that Facebook is moving away from users reading a single feed and having separate parts for all functions. For sure, it is not used to share or read anything meaningful in my circle.
What are the most common things you do on the internet?
Most interesting: these people are appealing mostly to the sub-14 crowd. Children find about youtubers by word of mouth but also by fumbling with tablets and cell phones.
I'm half tempted to disable/delete my account and see if I miss it at all.
Im a few decades older then a teenager.
This sort of hopelessness is bringing about varying degrees of abandon, nevermind the negative examples of adults and celebrities that shed light on the total lack of any positive role model. They know that the only winning move is not to play, and sometimes even that isn’t an option.
No one knows what they’re doing. No one knows what comes next. And many, many people have a sinking feeling about what’s already happened, and whether it’s all far too late.
Instagram is an envy club. The vapidity of food, vacation, beaches. But generally lower on the spectacle, as a matter of trend more than anything else.
Snapchat is for trading nudes, and general subterfuge, such as spreading rumors about eachother, with selectively memory-holed messaging.
So even youtube, with the limited veracity of generally public video as a forum will fall too. It’s only so much of a salve for truthiness.
I'm pretty sure the real reason why teenagers are leaving FB is because their parents are joining.
This doesn't make sense as a reason in 2018, does it? Everyone's parents and grandparents joined a decade ago - they're not joining now in significant numbers in the West.
The functionality is there, just nobody really uses it.
I don't use Facebook because it's a collection of everyone I know, rather than a niche group of people I want to share particular ideas about particular topics with. You can create friends lists and open up particular albums and privacy settings only to them, but it's optional, not embedded into how you ought to use FB.
I didn't want my parents, ex or colleagues to see pictures of me and my girlfriend at the beach, which are for my friends. Or tag a friend in a meme about hating work when I've got colleagues in my profile.
At the same time, I don't want to think of these issues nor do I want to make lists to curate my content, particularly because some user groups overlap.
Instagram feels much more private even though it isn't always. You still get people in your friends list outside your close circle. But the difference is that they're usually your (age) peers and somewhat cluster around your 'lifestyle'. Facebook isn't like that, most people have everyone and anyone and I respond to that by zero-posting because I don't feel like thinking about everyone who sees this.
It's made worse to know that people (like me) lurk and that FB alerts everyone the moment I've said anything in a while.
This is what Snapchat is used for from the point of view of a 57 year old Daily Telegraph columnist. In actuality, Snapchat is used for - well - a massive variety of things. It's not a great platform, but it's pretty good for freely talking about things with close friends, in a way that most would be reticent to do in a chat with logs stretching back years.
Recently I was at an event where a teenager was giving a speech in which he mentioned Snapchat or Instagram and said, as an aside, "That's like Facebook for you old people".
I have a friend working at youtube, she said so far the only safe way to "filter" video for kids is with human eyes.
I know it’s a sample size of one, but being exposed to violent & explicit content as a kid doesn’t seem to have ruined my life in any way.
Finally, any kind of “filter” would be ineffective; as kids will still find ways of exchanging such content offline. If anything, making the content forbidden would make it seem more appealing.
Most societies have an expectation that some content isn't shown to, for example a 13 year old person. In the US you have content ratings like NC-17, don't you? In the UK we have 15 and 18 rated content. So I guess content like that, some people would filter for teenagers.
The question wasn't about how to filter to teenagers, was it?
The question was about what people might want to filter to teenagers.
I guess what I'm saying is that the premise is false.
There are very few videos with age restriction and most of them have to do with sexually suggestive content, which doesn't make much sense because teenagers (at least male teens) consume porn anyways.
What kind of unrestricted videos are inappropiate for teens?
Youtube expects you to rate your videos yourself, or you can get reported and they will do it for you. Basically content that contains one of the following is supposed to be 18+ [1]:
* Vulgar language
* Violence and disturbing imagery
* Nudity and sexually suggestive content
* Portrayal of harmful or dangerous activities
Personally I put restriction when I upload game videos with graphic violence as that is not really suited for non adults imho. I'm less likely to put restriction on nudity and vulgar language although I don't swear myself in my videos.
Zuckerberg is not one to stay still, he'll copy youtube and use it to keep Facebook relevant. It's only a matter of time.
This seems to be her favorite: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1hvCOA0eQXwSAsW3jKs8IQ
I've tried to counteract this by purchasing the PC version (for her and her cousins), helping her with mods, encouraging her to "cast" her own gaming sessions, gaming with her (this works the best) - nothing has really worked. I'm not going to lose sleep over it but I'm also not giving up with trying to encourage her to be a "creator" and not just a consumer.
Wow, that's like saying America's teens are choosing Jenkem over marijuana.
It's like trying to compare Cold Stone Creamery to Din Tai Fung Dim sum restaurant. They sell to completely different markets but ultimately they're both food places, so there are tons of axes to compare them on if one considers the question for a bit.
"This is a list of the most popular websites worldwide "
Plus it doesn't count app usage, making it a fairly useless indicator.
FB had 3. MS and Apple interestingly did not have a single one in the top 10.
http://www.businessinsider.com/most-used-smartphone-apps-201...
~ Khayri R.R. Woulfe