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jeze64 @midwest.social

Why is Facebook still so insanely popular?

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.

313 comments

  • 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

  • It was years ago, but I used to work for a US based ISP. I'm a Canadian and the place I was working at had a contract to suppliment their support team.

    My team did enhanced support, beyond what the ISP would deal with. Basically it was remote geek squad type service for people's computers.

    While I was working there in the mid 2000's, there was a Facebook outage. All of Facebook's services were unavailable. We broke records with how many calls we got that day. Almost all of them went something like this:

    Client: "the internet doesn't work!" Tech: can you open a browser and... Client (interrupting) "it says page cannot be displayed!!11" Tech: I understand, can you tell me what it says at the top in the address bar? (Insert some explaining of how to find the address bar) Client: "facebook.com" Tech: okay, I want you to click on that and erase it, then type in google.com, hit enter, and tell me what the page says. Client: " it says Google, with a (some bad description of a text entry field)" Tech: this is Google's website, it loaded from the internet, so your internet works. Facebook is down. Client (without missing a beat): "can you fix Facebook?" Tech: No. (Call ends)

    I'm certain my employer made bank that day, since clients had to pay an extra monthly charge on their internet bill to speak with us, and their support made a point of dumping calls to us whenever they could. If someone wanted to speak to another tech, sure, but you have to buy this service....

    I did not like that job. I actually got a call from an inexperienced Linux user who couldn't get DNS resolution. I tried to coach him over the phone to determine if his internet was working at all. Before I could actually give him an answer, my manager dropped by (he was monitoring the call) and told me to tell him we could not help him, that the support center only supported Windows based systems, since, out of everyone there, I was the only one with enough Linux knowledge to know what to do, and he didn't want to give anyone the impression that we could help with Linux.

    All the guy needed to do was change his resolv.conf to valid DNS servers and he would have been fine. It doesn't work that way anymore, but it did at the time, and I knew it. I did not feel good getting off of that call. It's like, I have the answer, this guy needs the answer, he paid to speak to me, and I really want to help him out, but I would probably lose my job if I do. I was very blunt with him. I said that I could help him, but I wasn't allowed to. He understood, but I still felt like shit. I was too timid to realize my worth, which was part of the reason I was there to begin with.... Now, I would have just made it clear that he'll only get help on this once, and when we hung up, never expect to reach me again, and that nobody here knows what I do about this stuff, then helped him anyways. Fuck that manager. I'm so glad I don't work there anymore.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    • Very insightful post.

      It's interesting to see that the European Union will start to force interoperability of some networks // applications // protocols. This makes it for instance that people who use WhatsApp and Signal messengers can communicate. At least a step in the right direction it seems.

  • Does those number include people that only use the account with other pages widgets? Like "access with your Meta account" and shit like that.

  • It fulfils roles as

    • first place - as some sort of virtual home
    • second place - as you can conduct businesses in it
    • third place - as people congregate in it

    It's large enough that any amount of enshittification is compensated by network effect.

  • I use Facebook. I am not in touch with very many of my relatives. The few that I am in touch with are all on Facebook. I also live a significant distance from pretty much all of my friends and that's a way I can keep in touch with them. On top of that, my brother, who is on the spectrum, prefers to communicate with me that way. In fact, I would probably never hear from him until my mother died if I didn't because he's never called or emailed me.

    But... here is how I use Facebook: I only follow select friends and relatives who aren't too annoying- which means following about 10-15 people and unfollowing all the others, I tell it every time I see an ad I never want to see again, and I am only in groups that are either small and personally significant to me (like the group for my relatives) and a couple of others that I mostly just look at and don't participate in.

    No arguments, no political unpleasantness, nothing that makes me angry or upset unless something bad is happening to someone I care about, and honestly it's not unpleasant. I think I've maybe blocked three people the entire time I've been on Facebook and all three did something personal to me offline that made me decide to cut off contact with them.

    Sure, they're hoovering up my data, but so is everyone else.

  • Network effect. That's why we need to keep the fediverse alive: so futur generation aren't forced to signed into Facebook, Discord or whatever would be (or would have been) trendy.

  • It'll probably stay insanely popular until the boomers die off. They're not gonna switch to another one, but I don't any of the younger gens gravitating toward it.

  • Bunch of useful groups for expats in $country there. The only dedicated platform for expats is internations, and that's so full of scammers and people dedicated to pitch a sale, it's not fun at all.

313 comments