This isn't something new. When I was a teenager there was a whole load of pre-social-network blogging platforms, then along came Myspace, then Bebo, then Facebook. <i>Everybody</i> spent hours every night on MSN messenger.<p>The aspects that I use facebook for most - keeping in touch with fairly widely spread social groups - are not really relevant to a 13 year old. I don't think I'd have needed anything as complex as Facebook when I was 13. 13 year olds like to message each other, be it via SMS, IM or some social networking platform du-jour. Their messages are disposable nonsense that don't really need anything like the complexity of Facebook.
There's a meta conversation to be had here about how this 13-year old girl had a well written op-ed piece posted on Mashable. Her bio there links to hellogiggles[1] where she is apparently a regular contributer. Arguably not the most prestigious publications nor the best writing, but I am still super impressed with her work.<p>[1]: <a href="http://hellogiggles.com/author/ruby-karp" rel="nofollow">http://hellogiggles.com/author/ruby-karp</a>
Good.<p>EDIT: My overly clever pithiness that doesn't add to the discussion stems from having seen too many similar posts for every social network or mobile app since the early 2000s. Any service that relies heavily on everyone buying in will eventually lose steam, in part for cultural reasons[1] and also because other companies find areas where they can improve and desires that hadn't been tapped yet.<p>So, for a big social network to survive for decades and become an entrenched part of everyone's lives, it has to become like infrastructure. I suppose one way to do that is to continually buy new hot companies, as Facebook did to Instagram. Instagram too shall pass.<p>But when I read the headline, I did wish her friends were just finding new interests, and the new interests were taking too much time and leaving none to spend on FB.<p>[1] Imagine that Seinfeld was still being produced to this day.
I'm 30. All my friends use facebook and it's been very hard for me to leave. I have left though and literally have lost contact with people merely because they always forget to invite me to things, and we've gone our separate ways. When I joined The Facebook, it was just a fun place for college kids. When I left it was a mega evil empire where you could lose your job, be put in prison, get lectures from concerned parents, and upset people. That's not fun, so I've logged off forever now.
<i>Now, when we are old enough to get Facebook, we don’t want it. By the time we could have Facebooks, we were already obsessed with Instagram. Facebook was just this thing all our parents seemed to have.</i><p>There's a lot of unintentional irony in that statement.
"A Facebook", "An Instagram", "We all had Instagrams", am I the only person who finds this incredibly annoying?<p>"Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet"
Well this was obvious. When Facebook started, your parents, and grandparents had no idea what it was. And therefore it was interesting. Now, it's like a perfunctory listing of every human you know, including family members. It's like a phonebook. Employers look at it. Your Mom sees it. Is that fun? No, it's just mundane. Teenagers today see their parents using it all the time and think, well, what can I do on there that's fun? Ya.. Tell my grandma I did well in math class. Whupeee.<p>When we 30 somethings were young, our rents knew nothing of what we did online. And isn't that what we liked about it, at least in part?
I read this particular part with great interest<p><pre><code> Facebook is also a big source of bullying in middle
school. Kids might comment something mean on a photo of
you, or message you mean things. This isn’t Facebook's
fault, but again, it does happen there. If my mom heard I
was getting bullied on Facebook, she would tell me to
quit right away.
</code></pre>
The power wars have caught on Facebook too.
I'm no Facebook fanboy, but to the criticism about what happens when your friends share incriminating posts, I exasperatedly say: quit complaining and learn to use your privacy and sharing settings.<p>The issue of bullying is a serious and valid criticism though. I'm glad social networks weren't a thing when I was a teenager.
Amusingly, Facebook is primed to be disrupted by a college social network.<p>College is a high density social time in your life, and you're making a ton of new friends; those attributes among others make it ideal to escape the Facebook network effect.<p>No teenager really wants to hang out on the same social network as their parents.
This is true of my niece and her friends. When she was 11 and early 12, she was kinda obsessed with facebook, mainly because it was forbidden. But, now that she can get on it, she doesn't care much. Instagram, Snapchat, and sms are the way they all communicate. She thinks about getting a facebook account just to talk to the adult relatives that she likes and so she can annoy her mum with silly pics, but that's essentially putting facebook in the old people camp. And, knowing her laziness, I think in the end she probably won't even bother with it.
I've always felt that facebook was a better contacts management system than what came before, the "social" bit e.g. snooping on other peoples lives was just a really good way of keeping you engaged because it didn't exist before in such an accessible way.<p>I kind of wonder though whether we won't see a kind of craigslist aftermath effect, where craigslist comes along and provides a service which everyone wanted and then other startups choose particular niches and attempt to do them better.
Once you start to have a wider social network and meet new people (i.e., when multiple middle schools feed into a single high school, you can drive and develop friendships with people in other districts), email-like messaging by real name because a killer app and Facebook dominates.<p>I could not imagine, for example, navigating the landscape of my new college class of '17 online on a pseudonymous service like Instagram. Facebook is perfect for this.
I only use Facebook to message other people and nothing else. Didn't look at all the other stuff (games and all that crap) for years. Also my usage of FB has declined rapidly lately. Mostly I and my buddies use better services for just messaging.<p>but: for me IRC is still around and never gets old. None of these fancy new social whatever stuff will beat it.
While I still have my facebook account, I've completely stopped posting updates. The number one reason is my dad and auties and uncles turn every post I make into a family conversation and theres nothing lamer than having your party photos discussed by your parents