Why is Facebook still so insanely popular? ( midwest.social )

I read "it's dying" by people on Discord and Reddit all the time, but the numbers prove otherwise. It's been going up this entire time and sitting over 3 billion MONTHLY ACTIVE USERS!

I feel like the bubble around people on other platforms saying "who uses Facebook anymore lol" is kind of wild given the numbers. Keep in mind these are active users not just abandoned accounts.

PriorityMotif ,
@PriorityMotif@lemmy.world avatar

Marketplace and local groups for the tea.

EmptySlime ,

This is pretty much the entire reason my wife still uses it at all.

MyTurtleSwimsUpsideDown ,
  1. It’s established
  2. It is a general purpose platform: it has personal posting, business listings, messaging, groups, communities, photos, news, clip format video, live streaming, p2p sales, business sales, event coordination and advertising, payment processing and cash sharing, games…
    Most other platforms do one or several of those things much better than FB, but FB is good enough for lots of people. It’s a one stop shop, and it does a fair job at cross pollinating the various aspects of its platform. It has enough stuff to keep to keep users engaged even if their interest wanes from one or more particular platform components.
MrFunnyMoustache ,

Yeah, not surprised at all. I know many people for whom Facebook is 90% of their internet usage, and some people I know use the words 'Facebook' and 'internet' interchangeably. Personally, I deleted my account well over a decade ago.

I wonder if we could see how many new users each year (without bots), I'd wager their growth is pretty stagnant because they already have so many users that nearly every person has an account.

Dagamant ,

I wonder how many of those active users are people who only use messenger because their friends use messenger. Or people who have auto login turned on and click a link from search results.

Monthly active users is a fairly deceptive metric for a social media platform because ANY activity can count you as an active user and Facebook has massive reach.

technomad ,

I finally deleted mine the other day. No goodbyes, no fanfare, just dumped it like the garbage it is. No regrets.

jeze64 OP ,
@jeze64@midwest.social avatar

Nice!

Th4tGuyII ,
@Th4tGuyII@kbin.social avatar

Yeah - I do find it odd when people say Facebook is dying, because it really isn't. Unless Zuckerberg pulls a Musk anytime soon, it isn't going anywhere - unlike Xitter, Facebook is an advertising juggernaught that makes more than enough money to keep itself afloat.

And that's not even mentioning Facebook groups, news pages, business pages, the market place, etc.. they've got fingers in many different pies, and it shows.

And even more, while it may not be popular amongst tech savvy folks, it is still insanely popular amongst regular folks. I for one can vouch that a significant proportion of my non-techy friends use either it or Instagram as their primary social media.

Hell, that's why messenger is up there too - everyone has Facebook, so everyone has messenger, making it extremely convenient to message people you know. It's certainly why I use it a lot, it's where my friends are.

Meta dominates social media even now - just look at your list. Of the top seven, over half of them are Meta.

whaleross ,
@whaleross@lemmy.world avatar

Because that is where the regular people are and I for one won't be bothered to try convince them otherwise because I know it is futile. I'll just check in every now and then to keep in touch with them and that's why I'm still there.

Today ,

Your grandma and all your aunts and uncles and cousins are there, so there's a certain amount of checking for weddings and funerals.

The new restaurant on the corner has the menu on their Facebook page before there's a Google maps link to it.

Concert venues put their calendar, lineup, and set times on it

School districts and local communities post their snow days, park events, theater schedule, library events, stuff like that and it's easier to see that all in one place instead of going to each of their websites.

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I don't use it, but I would assume because if the people you know are on it, leaving it means that you can't talk to them.

Social media is an example of a type of system that benefits from network effect; the value rises as something like the square of the number of users. That is, there's value in using the system because other people use it.

Systems that benefit from network effect are going to be pretty hard to shift people off of.

In practice, it's probably not really the square of users -- most people don't interact with or even have the realistic possibility of interacting with billions of people. But they do interact with "pools" -- not an official term, just something I'm making up here -- of people that might be a subset of that. Some might be friends and associates, the sort of thing that hovers around Dunbar's number, maybe 150. There might be a broader pool of people with similar interests that one might interact fleetingly with, a broader pool that speaks the same language, etc. And once a lot of people in such a "pool" are in a given system, it increases the value to an individual a lot, because those are the people that the system lets them speak to and lets them hear. If you leave for a competing system, you give up connectivity to all the people in that pool.

That creates a collective switching barrier, and a potent one. The point of social media is to communicate; if nobody else uses it, it has essentially zero value.

There's also an individual switching barrier created by UI familiarity -- that discourages anyone from using a given system, isn't really specific to social media, but it explains why anyone would tend to want to avoid switching away from a system that they are familiar with, all else held equal.

In the case of social networks like Reddit, a moderator might have built up personal reputation and a userbase for their particular group. I don't know how Facebook group moderation works, but let's say that it works the same way as on Reddit. If you switch to a Facebook alternative, you lose the status, plus the network effect from that particular group. That's another individual switching barrier.

In the case of social networks like Reddit, which use pseudonyms, you accrue reputation associated with a pseudonym. I know a handful of pseudonyms on the Threadiverse that are knowledgeable or trustworthy. That gets zeroed out when you switch a network; people lose both the status and the knowledge of the reputations of others, don't know who to trust. There are ways to deal with that particular one, like having a bot that everyone trusts that tells a new Fediverse account to send a particular random comment, waits for a Reddit account to send a message and then endorses a particular user on the Threadiverse as also being a user on Reddit. But...if you look at the Fediverse today, it doesn't have a mechanism for that. And if people running social media like Facebook or Reddit discovered some kind of process like that, they'd probably have an interest in shutting it down, doing what they could to disrupt that transfer mechanism. That's another individual switching barrier.

The combination of all of these switching barriers makes it pretty tough for someone to leave, and it's one reason why social networks have value -- because you're getting your hands on information about and access to a large userbase that will have a hard time switching away.

I don't actually know if there is some kind of alternative that aims to do the same thing that Facebook does. Reddit isn't it, and Twitter isn't it, though they do do some vaguely-related things. But, okay, let's say that something like that exists.

It's really hard to get a person to switch, because if they do so in isolation, they smash into the switching barrier associated with network effect.

And because you have to have everyone do this at the same time, you have a collective action problem. You propose that everyone switch from Facebook to -- for example -- Fedibook on the Fediverse. If everyone switched concurrently, nobody would hit the barrier to switching from network effect. But...it's hard to convince everyone to do so. Maybe some people are sick or busy that day and don't want to put the time in at the same time. Some people aren't going to want to do it -- they aren't going to want to put in the time to learn a new system and build new workflows around it, maybe learn new client software. It's like switching from Windows to Linux -- someone may have put many years into learning Windows, and that's experience that in part goes away if they switch to Linux; for them, that's a large individual switching barrier. Some percentage of people feel, based on a quick assessment, that the individual switching barriers above dominate, make a switch from Facebook not worthwhile even if they are willing to participate in a mass concurrent switch. Maybe some people think that Fedibook is technically-superior to Facebook and would have used it if each had 0 users and were put side-by-side, but don't want to deal with trying to coordinate a concurrent switch. And because you can't get a simultaneous collective switch going due to those reasons, every individual user thinking about switching is going to face the big collective switching barrier -- being cut off from lots and lots of other people.

camr_on ,
@camr_on@lemmy.world avatar

There are plenty of people for whom Facebook may as well be the entire Internet. Not just demographic groups but entire countries. It's definitely in decline with the demographic that uses Reddit, Lemmy, and discord -- but several billion average users don't disappear overnight

takeheart ,

Yup, in many of the world's poorer regions Facebook has partnered up with cell phone providers to provide free access to the Facebook ecosystem and a limited number of other sites but not the general internet. This means for instance that if someone posts a newspaper article you can't even check up on the source without incurring extra costs. For millions of people Facebook therefore is the de facto Internet experience.

https://theconversation.com/facebooks-free-access-internet-is-limited-and-thats-raised-questions-over-fairness-36460

sbv ,

I live in a rural community. Facebook has more or less replaced the web here.

Businesses post their hours, specials, and information on Facebook. Some of them don't have websites. The rec centre has a hard time keeping their website up to date, but the Facebook group is always accurate. Newspapers have closed down, so a Facebook group keeps people apprised of what's going on (it seems to be pretty accurate, since everyone in town is part of it, people involved in events chime in). Kids and adults sports groups advertise and tell their members what's going on via Facebook groups.

It's a shitty medium, since the Facebook algorithm mixes trash advertisements with town-specific events, but it seems to suffice for the town's needs.

I suspect it isn't just my town. The network effect is strong, so I suspect there are niche communities where Facebook is verging on ubiquitous.

phoneymouse ,

I find this so annoying. I don’t use Facebook, so if you post info about your business on there, I just won’t see it and won’t use your business.

sturlabragason ,

Yeah I found out the same when I moved back to Iceland. Buying a used car? Renting an apartment? Staying up to date on the parents groups in school, kids sports, any events by any business or group? Contacting any person?

Being forced to hand over all my personal information just to do any of the above really doesn’t sit well with me 😑

cryptosporidium140 ,

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

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    muse ,
    @muse@fedia.io avatar

    Funny, I was told my friends would miss me too. Them never reaching out after I left Facebook determined that to be a lie

    Zerlyna ,
    @Zerlyna@lemmy.world avatar

    It took almost six months for my best friend to notice I deleted my account. ;(

    ArbitraryMary ,
    @ArbitraryMary@lemmy.world avatar

    Bots?

    ghostrider2112 ,

    It has to be a lot of that. probably a lot of accounts that people use for stalking. also, i know quite a few old people that have at least 5-10 accounts due to the amount of times that they have forgotten their password/been hacked.

    I know I’m only one person, but I personally know many people around the world that never use it. There’s no way that 40% of the world has an account on Facebook, let alone logs in every month. I deleted my own account last month.

    jeze64 OP ,
    @jeze64@midwest.social avatar

    Accounts sitting untouched due to lockouts wouldn't be counted as active. Also Facebook added the ability to create alternate profiles tied to your main account so multiple accounts haven't been necessary for some time.

    Andromxda ,
    @Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

    Easy answer: Boomers

    jeze64 OP ,
    @jeze64@midwest.social avatar

    That's not true though.

    Stats

    Source

    Pronell ,

    I have never been a Facebook user so I'm mostly guessing.

    But I think there was a heyday where people spent a great deal of time on there.

    Now they don't. They just log on when it's needed to get ahold of someone or check a specific niche community.

    Thus it's dying because the ad revenue is way down. It's in decline not because it lacks users, but because they no longer spend hours there.

    Rhynoplaz ,

    This sounds accurate to me. I have an account, and there are certain people that I use Messenger for, but I haven't updated my status or shared anything in about ten years.

    Riven ,
    @Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

    I also wonder what they consider an active user. Would logging in through Facebook to play a mobile game count? What about just logging in through Facebook on any site to get an account on that site? I know I probably check my Facebook once every 3 months to check up on fam but other than that I don't use it.

    someguy3 ,

    I can only think logging in, so yes.

    cavaloris ,

    I would agree with this. I recently removed Facebook all together but prior, I would only scroll my unseen and log the F out.

    bl4ckblooc ,

    My brother is in the ICU right now, and everything is being co-ordinated on Facebook. It’s how we are letting people know updates, and how we get a hold of people.

    Facebook is really the only social media platform that lets you find people somewhat easily from their name.

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