If it drifted to being pretty much an all-adults network, Iâd be fine with that. Teens donât add anything to my facebook experience.
Itâs no different in the online world than in the real world, kids donât want to hang out where the grown-ups are. Theyâd rather hang out a lousy place with just other kids their own age than a better place with lots of adults. I can remember when Iâd rather hang out on the hood of a parked car in an abandoned grocery store parking lot with other teens than have gone to the best entertainment place in town with a bunch of adults hanging around it.
I canât say the adults do. Or the interface. Or the psychology of using it.
Any impact on the stock market yet?
You need to have been around long enough to lose contact with good friends to appreciate it.
Maybe thatâs why Zuckerberg is selling his stocks?
One additional factor: on the web, there isnât anything preventing you from having the equivalent of âgeographic diversityâ with a single hostname, or company, or whatever, unlike physical venues that do suffer hard limits on how much they can cram multiple user demographics in without serious compromises.
However, since Facebook is such a beautiful mechanism for surveillance, and its privacy mechanisms(even against other users, obviously nobody has any vs HQ) so dreadful, its appeal to kids was basically a walking dead man the moment adults started to join in nontrivial numbers.
If you are on facebook, preventing substantial leakage to the public at large can be tricky enough; but substantial leakage to âfriendsâ is nearly impossible. So, if Mommy and Daddy and the coach are all on facebook, either you have to hold the line on not being âfriendsâ with them, or itâs just a matter of time, probably not much time, before you suffer compromising data leakage to authority figures. With their continual discouragement of pseudonyms and endless reshuffling of privacy settings, facebook is brutally non-granular (in practice).
Architecturally, there are âsocial networkingâ systems that are probably substantially more amenable to multiple demographics (Google+'s âCirclesâ, say, more accurately model the fact that peopleâs social universes arenât really âfriends/non-friendsâ but a greater number of categories, some of them definitely not compatible with one another); but facebook certainly isnât it, and theyâve actually caused most of the trouble themselves.
Iâm not a Euroteen, but I concur.
Let me guess, the classical ambient music and mosquito buzz got to them. Darn.
If Facebook really is being used by overcontrolling parents to kid themselves into thinking that they have some insight into their teenâs life, then itâs a great giftâto the teen.
Teens are out. Restaurant cashiers, Carnival dancers, and bong smoking herbalists, however, are huge on Facebook.
Or be around long enough to appreciate losing contact with bad friends to dislike facebook.
To pay his âtax billâ. Moar liek stupid tax bill. We being the stupid ones.
No news that teens are embarrassed by their parents. However, FB has a lot more to worry about than generational mixing creating awkward social interactions.
This trend of teens avoiding Facebook already extends to the USA and will grow. US schools systems that have transitioned to online curriculum with school issued laptops have blacklisted Facebook on their networks and the laptops. The kids are finding alternate social outlets, staying ahead of the blacklistings as best they can. My teenage daughter has a FB account she begged us to let her have two years agoâcoincidentally the same year the school system went âall digitalââbut now she and her friends donât touch it because âno one uses itâ. When kids at her school started using Google+, the school attempted to blacklist it, but had to back down when they discovered they were also blacklisting a host of useful Google services.
For FB, this means that students in my city from all demographics, beginning in elementary school, are given laptops that canât access FB. It only takes weeks for these kids to become âonline socialâ and establish habits that escape the censorship and parental oversight. What could FB possibly offer them once they go off to college except isolation from their high school friends?
If FB went dead it would be kind of cathartic, but then Iâd have to find another place to stay in touch with all my other old people friends.
The utility of Facebook drops as it gets bigger. When I first was one Facebook, it was a good way to post up pictures from parties. You have a party, some people take some pictures, and you want a way to send out those pictures to everyone. Maybe you communicate a little over Facebook as well to plan hanging out. Now though? All of those party pictures go to your grandmother. Your within friends chatting now goes to your co-workers. Yeah, Facebook makes some vague effort give you the power to segregate, but the segregation is shoddy, it isnât always clear who can see what, and you always have to worry about Facebook changing who can see what. It is too much work to keep everything from ending up in the same big bin. So, Facebook communications degard down to the lowest common denominator. Sorry, but the communication I have with my grandmother or co-worker is different from what I do with my friends.
When I first got onto Facebook, I wouldnât think twice before posting a picture of a friend sprawled out drunk on the floor because only people that were at the event would see it and we could all laugh good naturedly at it. I would get a beating if I did that now (and deserve it) because me tagging them might mean that their boss or grandmother is going to see the picture.
Facebook for me is now a glorified address book. It is a way to get in contact with people who I talk to so rarely that I donât have their number. Outside of that, it is just spam.
Facebook for me, when I do bother to log in, has become an endless stream of âsharedâ memes, passive aggressive âlike this if you are really my friendâ and the occasional family photo.
I can see why teens would want out. I have almost completely lost interest myself.
Good to see that it is not just me who thinks that it has turned into a permanent awkward family visit.
Sure, it is very useful for staying in touch with some people, but during Facebookâs golden age it seemed that they wanted to position themselves as the hub of everyoneâs online life. Well, thanks, but no thanks.
I certainly donât mind seeing them cut their own throats(the faster the better); but I find the situation somewhat ironic because it is (to no small degree) one of Facebookâs own making.
Back in the day, when they were called âfacebookâ by analogy to the dead-tree publication of the same name that you were issued when you hit campus, their fairly crude friend/nonfriend, public/friends-only structure (while hardly perfect) mapped reasonably adequately to operational reality. You had the people you didnât much care about, and the people who didnât need to be kept from your stash of âyou holding a red cup probably full of boozeâ pictures and your party itinerary.
Now that theyâve gone to letting just anybody in, they either need a security model that resembles peopleâs actual lives (Are mom, dad, and grandma âfriendsâ? Sure. Do I want them making accurate inferences about what Iâm drinking and who Iâm having sex with? Less so.) At present, they seem to have done an almost astonishly poor job of doing anything to deal with that problem.
Itâs still basically just âfriendsâ vs. âanybody elseâ, with massive data leakage within âfriendsâ. Not even the most trivial concessions to obvious categories like âFamilyâ and âColleaguesâ(never mind that âColleaguesâ could be a nice shot across LinkedInâs bow, if they did something useful with it), much less user-defined granularity.
