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Comment by Hokusai | Hacker News Reader

My anecdotal experience is that people, in general, are less engaged with Facebook. What used to be news about friends are now shares of some political news source. And the number of people liking or commenting has gone down.

In my circles, what used to be one hundred likes now is a dozen. Most posts only have one or two likes.

If this trend is similar across Facebook to hide the counts makes sense to hide the lack of interest.

Or, it could be that Facebook has changed and they are changing their business model. My bet is that hey really want to hide the lack of interaction and still don't care for the results of their actions.

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It may because that is the trend as you get older. As a late 20-something my (and my friends) engagement with social media is somewhat reduced. I don't have any content on facebook and don't even have instagram or snapchat. My friends tend to engage less on all of these platforms.

But I'm not sure what I am experiencing is true for other age groups. My boomer generation parents still use facebook heavily as does my early 20s cousin. I suspect there is just a general move away from social media in certain age brackets, but not in others.

It picks up once people start having kids.

https://youtu.be/ziltBdyFxDo

It does - kinda. What I’ve noticed is that as I and friends and relatives my age are having kids the pics aren’t going on FB so much. Instead, perhaps fueled by paranoia of over sharing or distrust in these platforms we post our kid pics on private groups like Apple Photos Shared albums or large family only WhatsApp and Viber groups.

I also feel cognisant that my kid, though they’re too tiny to debate the matter, is too young to give consent to me posting their picture all over social media. So I think something more complex might be going on here.

Or it could be my own cognitive bias reading into the situation and seeing something that isn’t there.

How much of that is just you and your crowd getting older and your social circle getting smaller?

Make some younger and cuter FB friends that have growing social circles because they're in uni and you'll see some impressive numbers on the scoreboard again.

I think this explains a lot more of HNer commentary on FB than people like to admit. "In my personal experience, only old people use FB. My feed is full of parents posting about their children, ugh. FB didn't use to be like this when I was in uni 12 years ago!"

My anecdotal experience is that the "younger and cuter" crowd has moved on to Instagram, or even Snapchat. Many more options in social media than 12 years ago.

There are less options compared to back then.

Nevermind MySpace,friendster, Hi5 or xing you had the biggest aol. Then you had messenger programs (aim, icq, yahoo, msn, etc). You had irc.

You had blogging or photo communities like flickr or meetup.com for events.

Facebook, twitter and reddit were around just not as popular.

Around the time of the parent comment, 12 years ago, Facebook was eating everyone else's lunch.

Friendster was dead, Myspace was in decline (mainly because FB opened up to everyone besides college students), nobody I knew in the USA used Hi5 or xing.

Flickr, meetup, and IRC existed and still exist but they were never the primary social network for the "younger and cuter" college crowd.

If you wanted to connect with your cute classmate 12 years ago, it was almost certain she had a Facebook. It would no longer be certain today.

I actually miss the 2007-era Facebook. No likes, no timeline algorithm, no shares/reposts made for a fun experience at the time.

Young people don't use Facebook anymore. Instagram and Snapchat are where they're at.

> Instagram and Snapchat are where they're at.

This is true, but...

> Young people don't use Facebook anymore.

That's an oft repeated trope, but you sure about that?

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/10/share-of-u-...

The level of engagement of Gen-Z is much lower than previous generations on Facebook, but most college students still use it. The majority of non-Gen-Z Americans are still on Facebook.

Anecdotally, I feel like the way people use Facebook has changed. Most of the people I know who do still use it aren't really using their wall, they're either using messenger, groups, or maybe the marketplace. It also seems like a lot of people my age (early 30s) who say they don't use Facebook, really mean they don't use the wall feature anymore.

If my anecdotal evidence does hold true for the larger population, I think that helps to explain why it feels like everyone is saying they don't use Facebook, but Facebook continues to post solid user numbers.

> most college students still use it

Yeah, they use Messenger to coordinate group projects and homework...

yeah, back in the day random posts were quite common. now i only see major events in peoples lives only. its like a personal life linkedin

Imagine how much has been hidden from you with advertisements in their place.

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