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Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

As the article stated, it's difficult to overcome the "grandma factor" -- once something becomes so pervasive as to be near-universal, even among persons unlikely to be clued in, its cool factor is diminished if not completely obliterated.

Some groups actively crave differentiation, and teenagers seeking to assert their independence are prominent among them. It can be difficult to express and explore in the way teenagers seek when you know all your grandparents, great grandparents, uncles, aunts, great uncles, great aunts, cousins, second cousins, etc. will be reading, as they surely will when you post on Facebook.

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As a 19 year old, I will say that from my perspective, this "coolness" factor is seriously overblown and misunderstood. Facebook was never "cool," even when I first got Facebook back in 9th grade, when I was around 14 years old. Facebook was always a highly addictive and vital necessity - a social utility, the lack of which meant losing touch with friends, not being invited to events, and generally missing out on a large amount of social interaction. It was never cool and I never saw how coolness or differentiation had anything to do with it.

Likewise, Snapchat is not "cool." Snapchat is pretty maisntream now (among my peers). It's popular because it's fun. All my peers use Snapchat as picture messaging for frivolous photos you wouldn't put on Facebook/Instagram.

Facebook was very cool ~2006-2007, when I was a teen.

I think, like anything popular with teens, these services lose novelty fast.

Facebook was very cool, right before it was open to the public.

It was cool for people not familiar with the internet, for others it was just another social place, like the island in your kitchen.

> Facebook was never "cool," even when I first got Facebook back in 9th grade, when I was around 14 years old

At the time Facebook was cool, it wasn't open to 14 year olds...

A bit blunt but, yeah. Facebook was arguably a lot more cool when you at least needed an .edu address to get on. (Or a bit before or after that point depending on your perspective.)

And a very specific .edu or .ac.uk at that. It's easy to be cool when you are leveraging exclusivity already.

Yes, but my point is that Facebook's ascendancy extended well into the period after Facebook lost it's "coolness," so concerns over FB's decline are overblown.

"a social utility, the lack of which meant losing touch with friends, not being invited to events, and generally missing out on a large amount of social interaction"

And according to the article (and my own, admittedly limited, survey of teens and "tweens" I know), that utility value doesn't exist anymore. Now, you could argue that the thing they are moving to is also facebook under a different name (instagram)... but I suspect it would be just as ephemeral as a "required" social network as the facebook itself has proven to be.

I actually think the value increases as you get older (through college-aged), as your social networks fragment and split off.

When I was in high school my FB friends were mostly people I saw day-to-day anyway, so FB merely consisted of keeping in the loop with the social activity of people I would see in person every day anyway. So I can totally understand why once-core FB activities are moving to Instagram/Snapchat/Twitter, as a sort of unbundling function (in the sense that each service separately does a slice of FB).

But now that I'm off to college, FB is the only way I keep in meaningful touch with people from HS, people I've met randomly over the years, people from summer programs, etc.

I just don't share this vision. You either have -real- friends, or you have acquaintances. Facebook is not for real friends. If people are your friends and want to stay in contact with you, they will - like they did before Facebook existed.

Agreed. Sadly most of my "friends" are replacing real person-to-person dates, coffees etc. with Facebook chatting.

You might as well argue that a telephone isn't for "real" friends that you see in the street every day. The truth of a modern lifestyle is that people are very mobile. I can remember losing touch with people for a few years back when your email address was from your college or employer, two moves and you were gone - until the world agreed that we'd use Facebook as a self-updating address book.

until the world agreed that we'd use Facebook as a self-updating address book

And that's a valuable function, and I suspect probably the reason Facebook has seen the longevity it has.

It seems very vulnerable to disruption, though. Given a self-updated directory that others can use to find you if you change contact details, and maybe given also a single sign-on mechanism that you can use with arbitrary, separate services like photo sharing and gaming, what is Facebook's USP?

Their biggest barrier to competition has for a long time been the "everyone is on Facebook" networking effect. If it's only the occasional dissenter who isn't, then organising stuff and communicating using Facebook is easier than many alternatives, whatever Facebook does to their UI/UX/privacy policy. As soon as a significant fraction of people you actually care about aren't on Facebook any more -- and significant in this context doesn't need to be anything like the majority -- that compelling advantage just evaporates.

(Yes, I'm a Facebook dissenter as an individual, and a sceptic about the long-term viability of their business in its current form as an investor.)

Just outside the village where I grew up there's a hill called America Hill. Two brothers walked up that hill together, then said goodbye walked down opposite sides, because one was going to America, and both knew they'd never see each other again.

Maybe in other villages there were other brothers who cared more about each other, and so one stayed who would rather have gone, or went who would rather have stayed. But I don't think that's a particularly positive view to take.

If facebook allows us to remain friends with more people, rather than ruthlessly pruning our friendships down to the few we can maintain purely in person, surely that's a good thing.

I found the short story of "America Hill" surprisingly touching, thanks for posting it.

exactly! Fb is useful when you have a long list of friends from different places and phases of your life, like HS, college, summer camps, events, trips, etc. You cant keep in touch with them all the time on chat apps, simply because you dont always have something to talk about. Its nota a "real" friend or not issue, it's simply a matter of not having things to talk about. But on FB, you can come across some interesting post by that person, and connect over that.

The thing I find interesting about referring to Facebook as a social utility is how different that angle is than just being "social" and that's it.

Instagram (and others) may be more "cool" at this point than Facebook, but they absolutely do not provide the same level of usefulness. Private messages, events with invitations, groups, the level of organization for photos, etc all together in one place connected to everyone you care about is indeed "useful." It's just straight up inefficient to organize events and share specific information on Instagram, Twitter or like services. It's because of this I feel they will continue to thrive, as teens will still use them for the "utility" and other services for the new, trendy social interactions.

"Coolness" can be handled by branding/skinning and merge/acquisition. When Instagram was cooler than Facebook Photos, Facebook merged/acquired.

A social networking site loses its appeal when those ex-coworkers you don't like start "friending" you.

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