Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Contrary to a couple of the comments already posted, I'm seeing abandonment of Facebook happening most rapidly among the generation that is now of college age (my oldest son's generation) rather than the generation of Baby Boomers (my generation). I was late to start using Facebook, and now use it heavily (it has replaced email lists for interacting with my circle of friends) but I observe that my son and his friends, when they aren't seeing one another in person, are as likely to use other technologies (no, not email) these days as to use Facebook to converse with one another. Facebook has already lost most of its cachet with the group of users who first began using Facebook when Facebook was restricted to persons with university Internet accounts.

As have all people in my generation, I saw the boom and bust of AOL, and it wouldn't surprise me at all for Facebook not merely to become uncool but also actively to lose money. It's been done before. I've been surprised, actually, at how well Facebook has scaled (I never thought its servers would be able to keep up with so many user actions in real time) and I've been pleasantly surprised too at how well I like to interact even with friends I regularly see in person on Facebook. But I could well believe that something shinier or newer could come along and draw away my friendship network as rapidly as it has been drawn away from other online services in the past.

I think the AOL comparison is very relevant. In the mid-90s, AOL was the first experience of online communication that a huge number of people had, and AOL grew rapidly; but its customer base eventually matured and discovered the broader internet, and AOL declined. There was a period without a hegemonic 'entry-level' online service, and Facebook eventually jumped into that void and dominated it.

But none of these services do anything that wasn't already available via incumbent technologies (which were somewhat inaccessible to non-geeks), e.g. BBSes, Usenet, IRC, IM, web forums, etc., and people have been developing more accessible iterations of these types of technologies (reddit, for example), and people will eventually migrate away from the constrained, privacy-compromising services like Facebook into the wider internet.

People say that the open web is dead, but I think the walled garden approach is never really long-term sustainable.

> I think the walled garden approach is never really long-term sustainable.

You don't think so, because ... ?

If we are to actually _read_ his comment, because of precedents like AOL.

Before AOL there was Compuserve and Delphi. They were all eventually forced to open up their walled gardens.

Facebook is trying to be the middleman in its user's online experience, and we all know what the internet does to middlemen.

People say that the open web is dead, but I think the walled garden approach is never really long-term sustainable.

I'm even more pessimistic than that about it. I think the real lesson of all these predecessors such as AOL is that you can't put a wall around the garden in the first place. You can say you have, but that would be putting your mouth in a place your money shouldn't follow.

People thought nobody would leave the AOL because of network effects - if all your friends are there, and your Internet social life is centered there, then that would create a barrier to exit. What it seems to really create is something more like the effect that happens in real-life social gatherings: For a while people may stay, but only because of social pressure. They're actually ready to leave, they're just waiting for a cue that causes them to be comfortable with leaving. That usually comes in the form of someone else finally deciding to go. That triggers a chain reaction so that all of a sudden, a party that seemed to be still going strong empties out all at once and without much warning.

A lot like the WeLL, AOL, MySpace, etc.

And that trigger can probably happen any time something new attracts a critical mass of early adopters; then the network effect of the walled garden actually become a detriment to the old network as it enables rapid defection to a competitor.

People have been dismissing geek-centric alternativesl like Diaspora for having a built-in limitation on growth, but most communities on the internet - and the internet itself - grew out of geeks gradually building up enough of a user base to pull in everyone else. Maybe it just takes time.

BTW, I received my first Diaspora invite this week.

My teenage niece and her friends are constantly on Facebook. As well as constantly texting each other (We're talking literally 4-5000 texts a month here).

College is a weird out-of-band gap in most people's social lives, and it's not really any meaningful indication of how they will live post-college.

> As well as constantly texting each other (We're talking literally 4-5000 texts a month here).

Using the number of text messages sent/received per month often vastly distorts the picture. When you've got an unlimited texting plan, many of the texts you send are just "yes", "no", "lol", or ":)".

If you're averaging 150 texts per day, does it matter how short they are?

150 is not that much. Think of each text as a sentence in a conversation. So talking to 5 people per day, with only 30 sentences per convo, will put you at 150. Some days (not most days) I'm well over 100 and it never seems like an insane amount.

A professor of mine once told me that their phone bill boomeranged. When he investigated they were shocked to find that their teenage daughter had sent 3700 text in the month she got iPhone. When he asked her to stop, she started using group messaging tools like FB messenger.

Boomerang(v.): Return to the originator, often with negative consequences.

Perhaps you meant "spiked"?

My bad, I have no idea why I used "boomranged". It should've been spiked as you've suggested.

What does 'boomeranged' mean? Went away far, then turned back and hit him in the face?

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