Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

I didn’t see anyone else mention this, but to me it is a problem of facebook’s own making. They drove personal content off the site when they pushed videos and pictures by “viral marketing” firms onto it. They replaced groups (inherently personal) with pages, then scrambled to try and bring groups back years later. They turned the wall to spam from various garbage apps that were given permission to crap all over it by default interspersed with ads and machine-generated content (“a picture of you from three years ago”).<p>In their zeal to gain IM users, they replaced messages with chat, removing the inhibition that kept people from using messages for one liners. Then they made you always online, supplanting Facebook itself entirely with something that could be replaced by any other real-time communication app. Once phones became nicer to use and there were alternatives to the lag and limitations of SMS, people had no reason to log into Facebook to chat with their friends because Facebook has trained non-IMers to IM and they no longer needed Facebook to do it.<p>Users would have killed for high-resolution photos (Facebook would make pictures so tiny and so low resolution that they’d become unrecognizable and all talent that went into composing them or editing them would be lost, and they couldn’t contain text or captions because that would be compressed away) or the ability to create albums. A dozen apps existed to shoehorn that functionality in via the Flickr api. Then they had to go buy Instagram to win those users back.<p>Now people just post major life events to share with people they didn’t bother communicating them to via another, more personal means of communication once a year or so.

From my readings, something Facebook has been struggling with for a couple years is getting people to post more personal updates.<p>Thus their Newsfeed changes de-prioritizing articles, and thus (I figure) their experiments such as showing short posts in large font sizes, and enabling MySpace-like gradient backgrounds on text posts...<p>This dynamic makes me recall something: Anyone remember how back in the day (like 2006) Facebook had a feature called &#x27;Wall-to-Wall&#x27; conversations? You would go to a friend&#x27;s profile and just write a message, they would go to your &#x27;wall&#x27; and reply, and mutual friends could see the conversation.<p>These days between the Newsfeed, comments on posts, and Messenger, the only reason I would post on another friend&#x27;s profile is to wish them a happy birthday. That whole ethos of just having informal personal conversations with college friends on Facebook is gone.

Posting on Facebook, right now, is like updating your resume (like LinkedIn) for personal life. It just feels too &quot;public&quot;. Sure, you can tweak your social network into different privacy levels. But, that just doesn&#x27;t feel intuitive or effortless. The exclusivity factor which initially propelled the network is simply not there. At the peak of the facebook madness, you had a need to post whenever anything happened. Now, its just the big ticket items.<p>I think people login more due to habit than to post personal updates. I doubt the current college going kids even login at all. Today, you update facebook only on special occasions like marriage, birth of a child, graduation or when people go out to visit places etc. Previously, like 7 to 8 years back, people used to post very personal things, knowing that only their friends are on the network. It definitely, felt safe. It Again, maybe my gen aged a bit during the last 8 years, I don&#x27;t know. If anyone posts anything too personal right now, it feels like a violation of social norms. Like crying in public with everyone watching.<p>No matter how many tweaks Facebook makes to their Newsfeed, I doubt quality engagement from what I saw 7 to 8 years back will return.<p>People just shifted to mobile apps like Whatsapp and have different social groups there. This feels very natural and organic. You have a few small groups of maybe 10 to 15 people max per group who all know you intimately and maybe a couple of larger groups with 50 plus members. This usually an alumni group of some kind. Even the larger groups get tiring if there are too updates and many frequently opt out after a tiff.<p>I just feel the era of publicly sharing personal information on web based social networks is over. If there is somekind of a decentralized privacy oriented mobile app that has the same functionality as whatsapp and it gets widely adopted, then it might be game over for the big companies in the social networking space. Even though Whatsapp is owned by facebook. It feels very safe and personal to share updates.

Some notes from the results they just released:<p>Revenues: - 4Q revenue $12.97 billion, estimate $12.55 billion (range $12.15 billion to $12.91 billion) (Bloomberg data)<p>- 4Q EPS $1.44<p>- 4Q daily active users 1.40 billion, estimate 1.41 billion (Bloomberg News) (3 estimates)<p>- 4Q monthly active users 2.13 billion, estimate 2.13 billion (BN) (3 estimates)<p>- 4Q mobile ad revenue as percentage of ad revenue 89%<p>- 4Q advertising rev. $12.78 billion<p>General:<p>- increased headcount: it was 25,105 as of December 31, 2017, an increase of 47% year-over-year.<p>- This is the first-ever decline Facebook has had in North American users. Daily active users growth in US &amp; Canada fell to 184 million, compared to 185 million in Q3.<p>Related to new US Tax Plan<p>- There&#x27;s a one-time mandatory transition tax on accumulated foreign earnings and a reduction of the corporate income tax rate to 21 percent, effective Jan. 1, 2018. Facebook&#x27;s provision for income taxes increased by $2.27 billion and its diluted EPS decreased by $0.77 for both the fourth quarter and full year 2017.

For people using uBlock Origin who want to hide all of the noise on their Facebook and truly see what their friends are posting, here are some useful filters:<p>facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(&#x2F; commented on this.&#x2F;)<p>facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(&#x2F; replied to a &#x2F;)<p>facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(&#x2F; liked this post from &#x2F;)<p>facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(&#x2F; liked this.&#x2F;)<p>facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(&#x2F; commented on a post from &#x2F;)<p>facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(&#x2F; reacted to this.&#x2F;)<p>facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(&#x2F;&#x27;s cover photo.&#x2F;)<p>facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(&#x2F; likes &#x2F;)<p>facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(&#x2F; are now friends.&#x2F;)<p>facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(&#x2F; is interested in an event.&#x2F;)<p>facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(&#x2F;Sponsored&#x2F;)<p>facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(&#x2F;Suggested Post&#x2F;)<p>facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(&#x2F;A video you may like&#x2F;)<p>facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(&#x2F; shared &#x2F;)<p>!facebook.com##u_fetchstream<p>!facebook.com##._4-u2[id*=&quot;u_fetchstream&quot;]<p>I got tired of seeing seemingly hundreds of, &quot;Your friends reacted to this ad page 5 months ago&quot; or &quot;Here&#x27;s another advertisement disguised as a page you might be interested in.&quot; I realized after I implemented these that I see maybe 2 or 3 new posts a day from my 500 friends, and of these posts the majority of them are political in nature and don&#x27;t interest me. The only reason I still continue to use FB is for the messenger app as I still think it&#x27;s the most convenient compared to other platforms.<p>Here&#x27;s what my feed looks like with the rules implemented (they aren&#x27;t FULLY currently up to date either because FB continually updates the phrases, but good enough for me). I also hid a lot of the junk on the sidebar with the element picker. I have no interest in using FB as a platform for buying and selling and the &quot;News Ticker&quot; (if you can call it &quot;News&quot;) is just tabloid garbage. I have 4 posts in the past day before I get the &quot;There are no more posts to show right now&quot; message.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;AbBnPo3.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;AbBnPo3.png</a>

Am I the only one who views Facebook by Most Recent? They don&#x27;t make it easy, and I don&#x27;t think you can default to it, but I just point all my bookmarks to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;?sk=h_chr" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;?sk=h_chr</a><p>Still though, Facebook could be so much better. The problem is that a profit-driven social media site is always going to have different goals than its users. Free ones seem to never gain traction. Currently, most of my friend groups are switching to Discord, but that&#x27;s basically just going back to IRC without having to understand NickServ and such.<p>As many others have pointed out though, Facebook got bland when everyone&#x27;s parents joined. Private groups somewhat help, but it really does need to be more directly baked in to the design. It&#x27;s far too late for that now, but I dream one day someone will finally make the Facebook killer. Until then, I use Facebook, because it benefits me more than not using it. Shallow interaction, peoples kids, etc? That can easily be fixed. For me, the boost in mood I get from reconnecting to old friends makes it worth all the pain. I was a hold out too, and didn&#x27;t join until ~5 years ago?<p>I think the problem is it&#x27;s almost a utility at this point. Most everyone I know (non-techy crowd) is on it. If you aren&#x27;t, you truly do miss out, which sucks. But do you know anyone who doesn&#x27;t work, or want to work at Facebook who would say &quot;I love Facebook!&quot; Tweak all you want, but it&#x27;s too much a behemoth to love.

Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter usage are all down.<p>People are just spending less time on social media apps for some reasons these days.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.similarweb.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;social-media-usage" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.similarweb.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;social-media-usage</a>

Main problem is that Facebook is too public in that most friends are actually acquaintances. People are less likely to share intimate updates with acquaintances and instead will only post generic neutral, non-controversial things which dont’t drive deep engagement.

Surely this has something to do with the sheer number of users they have, right? There&#x27;s only like 8 billion people on Earth and Facebook has 2 billion monthly active users. If you take away 1.5 billion people in China who can&#x27;t&#x2F;don&#x27;t use Facebook, this means that it has 2 billion out of like ~6.5 billion possible users. And many of those people are either children (&lt;13 years old), don&#x27;t have reliable access to internet, and&#x2F;or have no use for social media. So it really doesn&#x27;t seem <i>that</i> bad to me (unless I&#x27;m missing something important).

Who and why uses Facebook today anyway? All my friends use messenger apps like WhatsApp or Telegram to communicate to people they know in real life, sites like Reddit and HN to communicate to random crowd sharing their interests and Instagram to share pictures they take. I personally feel like Facebook is a concept fading into the past.<p>UPDATE: The only thing I used to use Facebook for a couple of years ago when I had more spare time was finding events to attend for fun. Does anybody know a good alternative? There probably is a special app just for this. Another useful feature of Facebook seems to be the groups directory: there are groups in WhatsApp and Telegram but they are harder to find - isn&#x27;t there a project building a directory of them already?

My preference would be to never see anything, ever, that was shared more than say 50 times. As soon as something is “viral” It’s usually just a timekill. It’s not relevant to me.<p>So a simple tweak to the news feed would be to just stop showing me what my friends “like” or “re-share”. Just show me what they say, or post or show directly. That’s it.<p>For a really dramatic change: remove the ability to pass on content alltogether.

I am effectively banned from facebook.<p>I was on the platform a few years ago, but deleted my account and didn&#x27;t miss it at all. Then, a couple months ago, I became interested in a new Chinese amateur radio transceiver, and the best source of English information was through a Facebook group of a couple hundred owners. So naturally, I joined facebook, joined the group, and had several weeks of a <i>really</i> enjoyable experience. I didn&#x27;t add any friends or pictures or anything like that; I had no interest in <i>really using</i> Facebook with people I knew in real life, and as a result my newsfeed was an endless list of really great discussions about amateur satellites, straight key century club, Xiegu transceivers, etc. I think what set it apart from something like Reddit is the civility that comes when you make hams post with their real name.<p>Then, all of a sudden, &quot;You Can&#x27;t Log In Right Now&quot;. I was actually forced to <i>upload an image of my face</i> to get back into the site. This was a sort of funny thing to ask, because I didn&#x27;t have any images of myself on the site up to that point-- so how are they supposed to know what I look like, anyway? (I&#x27;m being sarcastic here, I&#x27;m sure that Facebook has my face profiled in their databases somewhere.) So I uploaded my photo, a handful of days went by, and then I was allowed back in, and again started using Facebook as an awesome discussion platform full of meaningful interactions with people that shared a common interest with me.<p>A couple weeks go by, and yet again, &quot;You Can&#x27;t Log In Right Now&quot;. I upload my face again, but this time I&#x27;ve never been unbanned. I think it&#x27;s been this way for over a month now. I still get email notifications with subject lines like, &quot;See what people are talking about in your group AMSAT North America&quot;, but when I click &quot;Read Post&quot;, I&#x27;m not able to view the content. (I also can&#x27;t unsubscribe from the emails, as editing email settings is hidden behind a login prompt, which I am obviously not able to get through. I also can&#x27;t file a bug report about the lack of ability to unsubscribe... because that, too, is hidden behind a login prompt.)<p>It&#x27;s just so incredibly ironic that as soon as I started using facebook for content I was interested in, instead of seeing political posts from people I went to middle school with, I get permabanned on suspicion of being a fake account.

This is a chance before the U.S mid-terms for them to prove to the public they&#x27;ve learned from their mistakes..<p>1). prevent the spread of fake news.. they need a better solution than the user-tagging bs if an article is valid or not. there was a scientologist that had an account that wasn&#x27;t active for 5+ years, that started posting how puerto rico wasn&#x27;t that bad when the storm first hit. why is this account not being banned or suspended when people are reporting it and they&#x27;re reposting pictures from texas claiming it to be all good.<p>2). prevent outside interference with elections. the first baby step is if they&#x27;re accepting rubles for political ads targetted at americans, ban it. simple as that. then it&#x27;ll get more complex and interesting handling proxies doing the dirty deed. the hearing w&#x2F; congress was pathetic and makes fb even more untrustworthy.<p>3). ban fake accounts &#x2F; tie in a real human behind the account. 100000 fake users means a lot less to me if i&#x27;m an advertiser than 10 real people.<p>even though pretty much everyone i know is on facebook, i&#x27;m itching for another platform with better integrity to jump ship to.

I don’t think anyone really cares about societal impact. IMO, Facebook is a faddish activity that many people have turned into a defacto obligation.<p>People are getting Facebook fatigue. In my social circle, Facebook use seems to have switched to Instagram.<p>Personally, I check on it once a week now to keep up with a few friends who I don’t see anymore. It’s an effort, because Facebook refuses to show me what I want to see, and I need to specifically search for people.

From the analyst covering &quot;They’ve warned about a decline in one of the basic fundamental financial drivers.&quot; which was &quot;changes in the fourth quarter that cut the number of viral videos in people’s news feeds. Those tweaks, and others, have already reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours a day, he noted.&quot;<p>I am going to assume that FB is smart enough to have figured out how to trim the 50m hour engagement # from an ad cohort that is likely not that profitable or important.<p>Because guess what - the brand advertisers that elevate overall CPM already don&#x27;t want to be in your shitty viral cat video, or your stupid publishers-gaming-FB with autogenerated content.<p>I would go a step further and predict that within this quarter we see an internal FB study for advertisers suggesting that their algorithm that trimmed that 50m in hours has actually IMPROVED the value of the advertising by a commiserate level.

Respect for journalism is as much about avoiding headlines like this that sneakily imply some sort of baseless causation via - in this case - the word &quot;After&quot; as it is about bad science in Fox News coverage of global warming.<p>When we let poor journalism like this headline go uncontested we erode public trust.

The only people I know that still use Facebook are people over 50 years old, and to them it is crack cocaine that consumes their whole life. I think not growing up with things like this their whole life, they have been ill prepared for it when it breaches their world.

It seems like nobody at Facebook is allowed to play the long game.<p>In the long game, quality wins. In the long game, an organization that puts quality of information at top priority persists and becomes a long-lived resource for civilization.<p>Like Google has become a persistent Web search resource, setting aside its short-lived ancillary forays into more clickable, trivial services.<p>So long as Facebook prioritizes viral clickbait, so long will it be in danger of collapse, irrelevance, and extinction. That&#x27;s ok with me.

I feel they have crossed several lines in their constant push for engagement, to the point where, previously, a notification from Facebook was generally worth my time (and directly related to an action a friend has taken), whereas now, most of the notifications are irrelevant, effectively short term boosting engagement at the cost of mid&#x2F;long term engagement drop. I have flat out disabled notifications from Facebook at this point.

I think with all the high profile hyperpoliticization of who and what gets into the Facebook feed of the average person, the idea that Facebook is a private space where friends create their own private worlds together has been destroyed. Now it&#x27;s just another public space like Twitter and that essentially makes people not want to post personal stuff on it. This has also led to the opening in the market that Snapchat filled and a bit of a revival of twitter.

I wonder if the cause really is the news feed. What if it was the first decline ever and then they made some quick algorithm changes.<p>Then they went public with it, before releasing the numbers

The title makes it seem like the growth slowed after the questions on societal impact were raised. I think the growth stalled years ago and has been declining even before the questions were raised.

Maybe it&#x27;s slowing because they hit over 1.4B people? I doubt people are concerned about societal impact, regardless of what the media would love you to believe.

As an aside here, I would be cautious of attributing declining growth on Facebook to pretty much anything. They are the first company in the history of our species to take market saturation to such extremes. They have more than 2 billion active monthly users, and growing.<p>The issue they have is that there are only 3-4 billion internet users in the entire world. Their growth is predictably going to hit an asymptote at some point in the near future - they are simply running out of people.<p>That also poses an interesting issue from a company perspective. We still live in a world where endless growth is expected. But with a ad-driven service the only way to make more money is to get users to view&#x2F;click and otherwise interact with even more ads, or to otherwise increase the efficiency of ads. And that in general achieves little other creating a worse user experience, no matter how clever the packaging and delivery.

Since the newsfeed changes I noticed that I spent a bit more time on my FB feed. Normally I would see one of those idiotic posts, and wonder WTF was I doing on the site. Now I actually see stuff from friends (pics and stories), and I linger a bit more to see what&#x27;s going on. Clearly I&#x27;m not the real FB demographic though.

Hope Google shares latest YouTube hours tomorrow and we can compare. Last quarter Google shared<p>&quot;As I mentioned in the last earnings call, YouTube now has over 1.5 billion users. On average, these users spend 60 minutes a day on mobile. &quot;<p>Which I guess means 1.5 billion hours a day of YT use daily. Be interesting to compare to FB.

I would shorten this to &#x27;Facebook User Growth Slows&#x27;

Instead of Facebook flailing about trying to come up with the best news feed algorithm to please everyone they should just give the consumer a choice. Imagine an &quot;algorithm store&quot; that lets developers build and publish ranking algorithms that users can buy and use.

I wonder if we as humans at some future point would evolve to understand and consume only sane and specialized content based on lessons of Facebook? History and behavioral psychology tells us people don&#x27;t learn from the past just because they simply can&#x27;t recall it.<p>BUT perhaps what might work, and only hope, is a spectacular fall of this kind of interaction model(and the business) so that no one touches it with a 10 ft pole for some time. Like the terrible Nazi stuff of WWII.<p>Hopes of healthy competition in the industry and the democratization of quality content in a way that precludes brand loyalty, will probably never happen as long as Facebook lives. It will just acquire and buy its way to monopolize everything.

From the article: &quot;Yes, the time spent on Facebook in the quarter declined by 5 percent, but it was by Facebook’s design, executives said, in order to promote a higher quality experience. Yes, there was a dip in North American user numbers for the first time ever, but only because Facebook is already so dominant in the region.”<p>Can someone explain why a &#x27;higher quality experience&#x27; didn&#x27;t lead to more active monthly users in North America? I would have thought there were people who hadn&#x27;t checked out Facebook for a few months, but now start using it more regularly.

Good.<p>The less people use Facebook, the better and healthier society becomes.

I think both time on site and engagement are narrow metrics to judge a site&#x27;s usefulness and effectiveness.<p>Reduced engagement on Facebook is probably a good thing for society, but it could arguably mean it&#x27;s also achieving it&#x27;s goals as a social platform more succinctly.<p>As an advert stream of course, that&#x27;s bad. But I suspect an amount of truth in Zuckerberg&#x27;s somewhat altruistic new vision.

&gt; &quot;<i>We made changes to show fewer viral videos to make sure people&#x27;s time is well spent. In total, we made changes that reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours every day.</i>&quot;<p>Weren&#x27;t the changes to the news feed just announced? This sounds like spin. They planned all along for people to stop using our service. Right.

1- charge advertisers more, for less. Pay to get back what you had.<p>2- sink the fb fangs deeper into users by promoting &#x27;engagement&#x27; content i.e. stuff with better hooks.<p>3- market the increase in time spend on site, Q418 to the very advertisers.<p>Brand cryptonite. He holds the poison and the medicine. Depending on public sentiment they dish out the doses of each accordingly.

It feels like Facebook started out as Geocities and has ended up as your cranky aunts forwarded chain e-mail.

Okay, that ship is sinking. Time to burn it; Facebook has long outlived the usual online social network lifetime. What&#x27;s the next one we jump to this time?<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.qwantz.com&#x2F;index.php?comic=3240" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.qwantz.com&#x2F;index.php?comic=3240</a>

&gt; Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that those changes have already reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours a day.<p>Or, to put this another way, people have saved 50 million hours that they formerly spent scrolling past stupid videos and memes they&#x27;d already seen on Reddit.

It feels like they want to move towards being more &quot;useful&quot;, a la WeChat:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.ycombinator.com&#x2F;lessons-from-wechat&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.ycombinator.com&#x2F;lessons-from-wechat&#x2F;</a>

There are like 3 of my friends who I like and want to hear things from, but they post about 10x per day. Facebook has decided that because of this volume ALL I WANT TO SEE IS THESE 3 FRIENDS&#x27; POSTS. It&#x27;s irritating. I wish I could fall back on Twitter to show me everything, but now between &quot;tweets you may have missed&quot; and randomly showing me posts (4 or 5 times) that other people have liked, it&#x27;s feeling more and more like Facebook, just with different people.

Encourage more personal photos. And ban links from Newsfeed. It&#x27;s really that simple.

The stock has already recovered and is above $190 now (up 3.6% vs. close).

Why is this article so certain this related to fake news correction?

when you already have a large percentage of the online user base you are going to have to 1) wait for that underlying user base to grow 2) offer something new to capture people you dont have with your current product<p>They have reached the point where its a lot easier to lose someone then gain someone. I dont think its societal impact ... its people getting older and dropping off while at the same time its really hard to replenish that use base when already have so many of the young people already on your site.<p>So maybe they need to understand user rentention vs aging , I think that would be a place to look, societal impact ... no one uses or drops a product becuase of societal impact.<p>How many diamonds and how many electronics or clothes do we use that have a dubious labor practices. Its the product quality that speaks loudest.

What could they possibly be doing with 25,000 staff? That is insane.