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Comment by King-Aaron | Hacker News Reader

There's around 2.23 billion active users you might want to pass that message on to.

Active users as a statistic reminds me of employment rate.

It sounds useful, but it's not really that useful, because it's not really measuring the interesting thing, it just sounds like it is.

For example, I think the stat you're quoting is monthly active users. If everyone used to engage with FB 20 times a day but now does so once a day (or once a week, or once a month) the active user count will stay the same, but the reality is very different.

Look at the daily active users then:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-d...

I get that's closer, but it's still not that useful, because it doesn't actually capture how people use the software and whether that's changing.

People communicate with me via FB messenger, and I respond to them. Otherwise I don't use the app. Am I an active user?

Once a day I open it, realise it's shit and vacuous, and importantly my SIL (the only person I still use it to keep up with) hasn't made any useful updates, so I close it 20 seconds later (this one is me, fwiw). Am I an an active user?

I don't post anything, I just scroll through the same 200 friends I'd had for 10 years, with no movement or differing usage. Am I an active user?

I don't use facebook as a social tool, I have no friends etc, but facebook groups are used in my area to buy and sell things. The second people move to another site I'd happily move. Am I an active user?

    Am I an active user?

Yes

    Am I an active user?

Yes

    Am I an active user?

Yes

    Am I an active user?

Yes

That is a very nicely formatted response.

It--- at least to me--- proves my point that active user is not a useful metric, as all of those people have very different values and drive growth (or don't) in very different ways, and so have no use being clumped together.

We didn't even get to talk about differing user demographics or time, data by country, trends inside countries etc.

You could have made the same criticism about a magazine in 1965. They tout to advertisers how many “readers” they have and how readership is growing, and your criticism is “all I do is open it and flip through the pages; I don’t _read_.”

Your value is not in reading the articles but in viewing the ads. For FB display advertising, you opened the app and viewed ads. Eyeballs captured! Value unlocked! Sure they’d rather have you spend 5 hours on the site, but even your slight attention is valuable.

That's like saying 'pounds' is not a useful metric because it does not tell you 'pounds of what'.

What weighs more, a pound of lead or a pound of feathers?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH0hikcwjIA

Pretty sure OP is a passive user, and is extremely susceptible to better tools for OP's needs coming along, eg: the current crop of buy/sell/trade apps/PWAs out there.

There's no such thing as a passive user to facebook through. There are accounts with no activity at all and are simply dead, and accounts with activity. That's it. An active user is simply an account that it still used from time to time. The point is the metric tells you nothing about how it is used.

I think a better metric would based on actual user behaviour rather than a simple count. For example, the number of posts or comments across the network, or the number of friend requests sent (new connections made). I still use Facebook quite a bit, but I've definitely become more of a consumer than a participant - I don't think my own status has been updated in months. It's basically become YouTube/Reddit, but with content based on people I actually know rather than what's popular.

Yeah, but it's really a matter of time. Facebook has become the social network for grandmas and aunties.

Facebook has expanded to new countries in the last decade which has brought these millions of users, but younger generations in countries that have had Facebook for a long time are not using it anymore.

In the US most Facebook users are between 25-34. There are barely any teenagers.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/187041/us-user-age-distr...

This trend is a bit less pronounced in global demographics, but I think it's clear that younger generations don't like Facebook.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/376128/facebook-global-u...

Most developed countries have populations that continue to skew older: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2018/comm/cent...

Yes, but teens are using other platforms than Facebook:

http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/05/31/teens-social-media-tec...

Staking your claim on what teenagers today do today doesn't make much sense to me because teenagers get older.

Facebook just has to be the social network people end up on.

I'd at least look at college-aged people, not the weird, limited social life of high schoolers.

Maybe. Time will tell.

Google+ has 3.3 billion profiles and 7.9 million Communities.[1]

If they stop showing up, it really doesn't matter.

MUAs are better than static profiles, but if the motivation is fear or guilt, rather than active affinity, the connection is tenuous.

________________________________

Notes:

1. I counted them: https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/9zx67d/google_com...

The people who should on Facebook aren't there any more - the young and the influential

You can't grow with an audience base filled with 50 year olds.

They are using Instagram instead which is also owned by Facebook.

You can't grow when you have onboarded most of the world with access to internet. (total users is 2B. When they are not even in China)

Facebook can still grow its revenue even if the number of users is constant if: (a) Users become richer over time; (b) Users spend more time online; (c) Facebook can improve the algorithm that matches ads to users

What matters is the DAU or daily active users. I'd be willing to bet that number is dropping.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-d...

I honestly don't know the quality of data that statista produces, so take it with a grain of salt. The curve does appear to be dimming towards the end of Q3 '18, but it certainly doesn't appear to be as dire as people make it out to be.

I think there's a heavy dose of IT-industry echo chambering going on here to be honest.

Point of interest: I severely dislike facebook, so not trying to justify anything on their behalf. I just don't see the idea that "facebook is dying" among any peers in any social circles I'm part of. I do wonder if it's different in the United States.

> What matters is the DAU or daily active users. I'd be willing to bet that number is dropping.

I think what really matters is something like user actions/day. Anecdotally, Facebook engagement seems to be growing down but perhaps not yet in a way that would show up as a DAU drop (which I assume counts someone with even the barest interaction with the site as "active").

Is that with or without the bots?

It wouldn’t surprise me if the real number was under a billion. Which is still a big number but it means growth was over along time ago.

They are all old. Facebook will probably still be functioning for the next 40 years until it's users finally die and then it's over.

But Instagram users aren't, and there's nothing stopping Facebook from buying whatever the next generation of youth start using to replace Instagram when its time comes.

The question is can they make enough cash to make the model perpetual.

> there's nothing stopping Facebook from buying whatever the next generation of youth start using to replace Instagram when its time comes.

Hopefully antitrust law will stop them, because with a behemoth like Facebook buying up every new, exciting social network real innovation, especially in monetization, will continue to be a myth.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/376128/facebook-global-u...

> They are all old.

It doesn't appear to strictly be the case.

So, basically Facebook still has a lifetime at least an eon long in tech years? The World Wide Web is not even 40 years old yet.

They might be all old in US and Europe. But in India and other third world countries Facebook seems to be doing OK with young people.

Facebook makes far more money per user in the US or Europe. Third world activity won't be able to make up for the revenue drop if the bottom falls out of Facebook's first world properties.

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