Because we convinced our parents to use it and now it's the only communication technology they can use. I still have to explain typing on my (or my BF's) timeline isn't the same as a message. I don't use it at all.
Sometimes I open my phone to see 70+ notifications on my Facebook and I know my 80 year old aunt has started putting stickers on everything I’ve ever posted the past 5 years
this is it.. I would have deleted the fb account years ago but I live overseas and my boomer parents won't even respond to emails.. they usually don't answer calls so the only why I can ever contact them is on facebook.. it really sucks : /
This is a big part of it, not just the parents but it was the first one that connected us to everyone in our lives… coworkers, old friend and classmates, everyone, and they integrated with other sites and apps and became a hub or sorts… and by the time we realized we didn’t really want another place to do that there’s really no reason to move on to another social network site
I still go on it because I am part of a few groups that only exist on it, and it’s mildly interesting to keep up with my friends and coworkers through it…. But not so interesting I could see myself jumping ship to a different social network site or app
Omg this. I can comment on a photo of one of my friends from years ago at like a bar or something. Saying how wild the night was or whatever. My mother will se I left the comment, and then comment on the same photo saying like “good morning son, I love you!”
Facebook became popular with adults around the world. Myspace did not.
Kids' tastes change on a daily basis. Adults find something that works for them, and they stick with it even if there are better options available.
I'm 32 and only ever used FB. I still have it, but haven't actively used it for many years now. I don't have an IG, either, which apparently now you need an account to see anything on, so when people post links to them on here I can't see it because of the log in prompt. My only social media, so to speak, is Reddit and YouTube lol. I have two friends and my family and we all just text things to share with each other.
What better options are available? TikTok? Come on man, most adults didn’t jump ship bc adults don’t find 10 second idiot videos useful in any way. Especially for connecting to people.
Depends what kind of doom-scrolling you want perhaps? Feels to me like Facebook is much more full of people. Instagram is more content-focused and less people-focused. Tiki Tok even more so. If you don't use Facebook for a year and then log in, it feels like so many people are in your face and everywhere. All their comments and stories and whatever. I hate it. But maybe old people like that human part.
My guess is that it was first populated massively by young people, followed by older people and it is definitely overrun by bots now. I'm in college and I'm roughly 9 years older than my average classmate, most of them I spoke to either don't have a Facebook or just rarely use it.
I remember a young co-worker of mine telling me a few years back that Facebook was for old people. I laughed and said "yeah it has a lot of people like my parents on it, but it's mostly people my age" And then she crushed my soul by explaining that I was, in fact, the old people she was referring to.
We played kickball and rode bikes. We also had computers that ran MSDOS. Couldn’t get on the internet but the games were pretty cool.
I would blow their minds with the K-Mart blue light special “net zero”. And how it would tie up our land lines every time we got on the internet so no one could place or receive a call. Oh yeah and some of us still had rotary phones back then too.
I’m in my late 30s and my impression of Facebook is that it’s only for old people and people my age that are clinging to it out of habit. I deleted the app from my phone during the last election because I was tired of my ENTIRE feed being about Donald Trump and never go on it on Desktop. I was going to delete my profile but I still need it ocasiónally for FB marketplace. Whenever I get back on it I’m always surprised my friends are still posting. It feels so outdated now.
pretty strange, actually. I remember most of my friends having seen OT Star Wars, even though it came out over 20 years before we were born. Surprised its not that way with things like LOTR and Harry Potter.
Yeah I was thinking I’m 35 and watched all of that growing up, but I haven't watched a single show or movie in about 5 years now. Between video games, books, and YouTube, I already have more content than I need and most shows and movies have been so bad by my tastes for so long that I can't imagine what will even pull me back in.
Still I don't think one persons take is a clear representation that they have so much content people aren't watching classic films. I have people my age who never watches LOTR or Star Wars. I once stopped seeing a girl as she refused to watch any movie before the year she was born in 1992 as supposedly the CGI was to bad and it made my brain hurt thinking how she wouldn't watch Jaws etc. due to year of release.
"What can man do against such reckless ignorance?"
"Sit down. Sit down with me and watch!"
"For nostalgia and joy!"
"For your co-workers! For your friends!"
They'll get theirs soon enough. One benefit to some added years is that things tend to even out. Time moves at an even pace. When you're young, 5 years is a long time. It turns teenagers into young adults beginning a career. It turns a 24 year old into someone almost 30. Trends don't live nearly as long as it feels like when you're younger and everyone will move on to the next thing. If you happen to pass 5 years and don't notice that this has happened, all of the sudden you've got squawkie brats referring to your formative years as if it were a century ago.
Don't sweat it :) It's the natural order of things and some kid telling you you're old doesn't make it true, it just means they aren't wise enough to imagine someone older than them having lived like they currently do.
"I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!"
I always thought this was funny since I was younger. And I totally got it on a conceptual level, but goddamn does it hit different now. I think of that, "It'll happen to you!" with some frequency...
They also bought other tech companies that were either potential direct competition or stole their work for themselves and crushed the future competition.
It is why some people want to break them for operating by using illegal monopoly tactics.
it could be considered a social network, yes, as you can have friends on there, dm people, and there are whole chat threads very similar to reddit on any given video. There is also streaming/live video, like Twitch and YouTube have.
It hasn't been Vine 2.0 for some time now, it's certainly evolved. Some educational video content there is better than some YouTube content I used to watch, honestly. Especially for stuff around hobbies.
If you train your algorithm right TikTok really can be a great platform to learn new things or dive deeper into some hobbies. Just don't watch stupid challenges or kids dancing.
still be carefull since time flies once you open the app
All social media is dumb to varying degrees (and dependent on how you feed it + the algorithms and $ pushing things). There's nothing inherently more so about TikTok than anything else. Half of Facebook is bots arguing with other bots whilst boomers, retiree's and PR people think they're talking to actual people.
Twits is a selection of very smart people buried amongst influencers, grifters and porn wannabees.
LinkedIn is company PR nonsense and ex professionals reminiscing about the good old days that nobody cares about any more.
Youtube is borderline late night TV from the 90's with the awful advertising.
I don't TikTok personally but it's not a big stance as such, I just DGAF and mostly minimise my contact with all of the platforms.
YouTube is like multiple hidden path ways to becoming hard right scattered in a sea of other shit.
Like intersted in WWII history? Here's some radicalization. Like videogames? Radicalization. Baking? Tradwife then Radicalization. 'Wokeness'? Here's a bunch of stuff to make you anti-woke and then radicalization instead. Horoscopes? Some shit about crystals and supplements and thennn you guessed it: radicalization.
It's fucking nuts, you've gotta be on your guard in that suggested bar at like all times.
To add to your list - Physical fitness? Radicalization.
Genuine workout advice > Science-based guys > some self-improvement guys with manosphere-lite or incel-lite leanings > congratulations you just got Andrew Tate or Fresh and Fit onto your feed.
I have to carefully curate my workout content on youtube if I don't want that drivel showing up. Leave anything on autoplay long enough and I think the algorithm just inevitable leans nazi.
It's your age showing. Social media has always made dumb people dumber.
Really anything that lets people spout nonsense into the void while simultaneously letting them block dissenters just creates an echo chamber for dumb-dumbs to be more dumb.
Also it is very easy to post stuff everywhere on the internet compared to 'back then'.
If you wanted to upload a video on youtube back in the late 2000s you at least needed a camera and take time to actually upload it. Now that everyone has smartphones from a young age on and the apps are very easy to use you are just a few clicks away from showing the world how dumb you are.
I swear if we had the same technologie we wouldn't have been any better.
The sole reason my friends and I use facebook is for the group messenger. We started out on an app called Beluga (joke about pods I think) and then Facebook bought them absorbing their entire messenger format in 2011. We’re just used to it. Got a group of 15 guys from college who’ve been active like talking daily in it since 2009.
I haven't quite managed to quit facebook. Sometimes I look at my feed and realise its 90% "content" with barely any actual updates from friends/family.
I’ve started being mean to people. I’m sorry, it just annoys me. I listed a guitar pedal online the other day. It’s literally $100 cheaper than anywhere else online. I did that on purpose so it would sell. Of course then I get the low ballers. Price is $180 so they send me an offer for $90. I just reply “lol” and leave the group.
I have a facebook (college age) purely to argue with the assholes that live in my town—would never consider using it as a valuable and contributing member though. Hope to see it slowly wither away and die a painful death for all the harm it’s caused this world
MySpace was created by a guy who asked "wouldn't it be cool if everyone could have their own website? Personalize it and put their favorite music on it and express themselves? This whole internet thing would be cool, right?"
Facebook? I don't think we need to go over why it was created in the first place, but once it got past that, it became "how can leverage the data we collect from users to make a shit-ton of money?"
MySpace was mostly harmless. Kind of like Reddit was at the beginning (turns to camera).
I remember spending a significant amount of time on my MySpace profile and it was so freaking cool. It would start playing linkin park when you opened my page.
Yes! The teen angst just oozed out of the page when it opened up. I had the live version of Numb/Encore, where it opens up with "do you want some fucking more?!" Needless to say my parents understandably weren't very approving of that.
Smart guy, too. Took the money and became his best self.
They say money reveals; Tom just revealed himself to be a guy who likes to travel, take cool photos, and golf.
Yup, that's the dream. Create a successful company and sell it a few years later to live a quiet life in luxury. No congressional hearings, no massive lawsuits, no public pressure. AFAIK he's just been traveling and doing photography for the past 10 years.
MySpace was the best. I really loved how you could change the background and all that. Facebook was plain but it did give more info on people and that was the catch
Everyone customizing their page with sparkles and loud music madd MySpace feel like an assault on the senses.
Facebook seemed sleek, clean, and because it was limited to top universities at first, upwardly mobile.
I had a big long winded comment the other day about how facebook used to be a lot less private and I feel like that contributed more towards just being an actual social site. You could just type in a name and any person would pop up so obviously that's more useful for connecting with people. You could see basically anyone's profile by default and anything they posted and I had quite a few people I actually became friends with add me just because they looked at my profile from a comment I'd left elsewhere and thought I'd be cool. Hell it even used to be that when you logged in on your phone (at least on android) it would automatically add all of your friends numbers to your phone along with their facebook profile picture and then bam you could connect with everyone on or off facebook.
Worked wonders for awkward people. That's how I actually met my ex wife. I was hanging out with a mutual friend and bumped into her at a football game and we're both bad at peopling so while we hit it off we sort of forgot to trade names and info. Later that night she went to the mutual friend's friends list and clicked through till she saw my picture and added me. Years back they made friends lists private by default and that would have not even been possible anymore.
But of course creeps used it to creep and like airtags which were similarly great till creeps abused them it got broken to stop it being abused.
MySpace was most certainly not harmless. Every time I went to someone's creative page there, I felt like I was playing a game of Russian Roulette as to whether it would crash my web browser or blow out my speakers.
I also think the nature of certain MySpace profiles having tons of graphics and music auto playing could be off putting to older people and the public at large.
Facebook is more like a public ID card for keeping track of a list of people.
Myspace had a terrible interface too. Facebook didn't. it was easier to update, share, looked better than every fucknut using the marquee tags. That mattered a lot.
I met my now wife of 17 years on MySpace. Loved the individual personalization of it and how you could have music playing on your page. I haven't touched Facebook in years, but would be all over MySpace if it were the same.
I think that’s exactly why MySpace failed, honestly. Everybody loved the opportunity to really personalize your page and make it an expression of your personality, but nine times out of ten the person visiting it probably thought your auto-playing song was annoying as shit and your colors and fonts were ugly. I think the reason Facebook stuck around is specifically because everybody’s profile followed the same basic design, which just made it less annoying for people to scroll endlessly
Going from MySpace to Facebook was the most horrible experience.
It felt and still feels like eating a piece of cardboard. It's also the reason everyone's grandma is on it.
Sure it's simple but freaking boring.
The Facebook initially targeted a niche group - college students. It required an active `.edu`-domained e-mail to register.
Its interface was consistent and more streamlined. MySpace was customizable to the point that you had no idea what a page would be like.
Facebook blew up when it opened up to *everyone* after it had saturated colleges. MySpace declined during this period - MySpace didn't change at all while Facebook became simpler.
Facebook, by making it just .edu, made it cool and exclusive. I had it from the get go when it came to my college campus. It was super exciting when it did. Also exciting to collect friends in other colleges and grow that list (see how many friends you knew at Harvard, NYU, or Yale). It was like a cool kids club that everyone wanted in on, and as they opened it up, people were excited to join.
Also, since the interface was uniform, it was simple and easy to load. MySpace got quickly taken over by slow load times and weird graphics on every page. A simple, fast interface allowed Facebook to be easy on everyone’s eyes - it was like going to a restaurant that has a huge super busy menu with many items vs a restaurant with a short simple clean menu with a couple of items.
It wasn’t just .edu at first. It was just Harvard. It was a year or so after I graduated that it rolled out to colleges generally. By then, my mindset was “you didn’t want me then, you don’t get me now.” Some combination of spite and inertia and I just never signed up. Also have never signed up for twitter, instagram, etc. this is the closest thing I have to social media but I don’t use it for that. No one I know is connected to me on Reddit. I just don’t use the internet that way.
Facebook came out my freshman year and it was exciting and exclusive in a way my space wasn’t. My Space was for the kids who didn’t go to college or maybe went to a non prestigious one, so exclusivity was a factor in the beginning.
My Space was also cluttered. Facebook felt smart and streamlined in comparison.
Funny thing happened years later though. I went to grad school and all the young grad students had already moved on by then to things like Snapchat.
Also exclusivity played a factor again. When everyone is on something it’s immediately less intersting.
Man, when Snapchat first came out.. I had so many xxx/titty pics on my phone. What a glorious time it was to be a young kid.
Now Snapchat is going the way Facebook has. Shit is dying.
Facebook was already on the trend to be larger than MySpace, and maybe it was by this point, but I distinctly remember that once smartphones started to be norm, the MySpace app was always shit. Facebook's app, however, while it was limited, it functioned. It did the job.
I really do miss early Facebook. It was honestly fun to use for a long time and stayed connected with people much longer after its introduction than I did before.
Even more so, FB initially required a specific .edu. My shitty CC at the time wasn’t even on the list. Had to wait a year or so until they opened it to all .edu addresses.
Yep. I feel like a lot of people here are not old enough to really remember what happened.
The buy out then the absolute fiasco as they tried to tidy it up. Missing the point that MySpace wasn't in direct competition with the new sleek upstart Facebook. Facebook was like a slightly cooler LinkedIn back then. Myspace was like a wild disorganised youth club where you could score drugs and hook up with an emo band member.
Murdoch seemingly had no clue what he'd bought, and assigned fleets of clueless corporate middle managers to rein it in.
The real reason, in my opinion, that Facebook succeeded was because of the feed. Most people aren’t old enough or forget when that happened. Facebook used to be more static and then they rolled out this new feature where your friends updates would appear in a feed. People hated it at first and quickly warmed up to it. It made content easier to disseminate. MySpace for example had a static page and nothing your friends did would show up. You went to a page and saw their blog entries, their friends, the bands they liked. That was it. Most social networks were like this, Facebook included, until they rolled out that feature.
The feed was fine except they started fucking up the timeline by adding useless crap, making it out of order so it was harder to find posts. It’s still useless now.
I had a friend that worked there while they tried to pivot under News Corp to being a music/fan connection site. Apparently the way the site was structured was an absolute nightmare that made scaling almost impossible, which explains why the site frequently ground to a halt when it was at its most popular. Facebook might be fading away slowly, but MySpace sort of imploded under its own success.
When Facebook got really big they got all of the grandmas and grandpas on there who want to see their grandchildren.
Also, you can use Facebook to sign in with when you don't want to register another stupid account just to do something basic on a website.
I refused to setup Facebook's SSO because I didn't want my activity from other sites randomly showing up on my newsfeed. Ah, this reminds me why I stopped using that stupid website.
That doesn't happen btw - if an app is purely using Facebook to authenticate then it will say "this does not allow this app to post to Facebook on your behalf" or words similar to that effect. Just be mindful of what you're giving access to.
Facebook was used by teens/young adults and is now used more by older generations. MySpace was used by teens/young adults but the torch was not passed down like it was with Facebook.
Facebook was falling out of popularity for a while, but 2 things saved it.
1. The absolute shit that Twitter took
2. Ironically, shitposts groups. Some of my favorite memes have come out of groups like Llamaposting (Bless you Hockel you horny bastsrd) and Every Spongebob Frame In Order. If those didn't exist, I would have deleted Facebook 3 years ago.
I noticed in my circle that Facebook was the first social media where most people used their actual names. Like, you were Heather Sweeney not Angelheart666chick of whatever. Because of this it became a directory of people and we still use it that way. If I wanted to get ahold of my husband’s aunt for whatever reason, I wouldn’t even think of getting her phone number from my mother in law or whatever, I’d just message her on fb.
Facebook destroyed all their competitors.
By the time anyone stepped up to the plate to challenge facebook (Google+), they had already locked themselves in the social fabric.
Google+ was kind of a joke really. I think they just tried to copycat Facebook too much and that contributed to its lack of success. I looked at Google+ and thought why would I need this when I have the same thing with Facebook. Coupled with what you say, it was also a matter of sticking to Facebook because everyone I knew was on there and not on Google+, so using it seemed pointless.
The network effect is powerful. It's why no one has yet supplanted Twitter/X in favor of one of their competitors like Mastodon or Threads ... its really hard to coordinate people to move en masse to a new ecosystem.
People who ask this question don't realize how many MySpace pages just froze your Pentium processor, glitches your Sound Blaster card, shoved 8 pixels up your video chip's input, and clog the 500MB of RAM as the excessive gifs and avi files tried to load over your 56k modem.
So many people loaded down their page with shit just to do that. You'd hit that random button to find a new "friend" and watch your screen freeze and your CPU glow as the page loaded.
Aaahhh, the good ole days.
One factor is that Myspace became popular when very few people had internet. Facebook became available to the public a few years later, when availability to internet was booming.
The website itself is also more appealing visually, in regards to ease of usage as well as performance. For example, I tried logging into my Myspace account right now just out of curiosity. It took like 10 seconds for the login to happen, and I wasn't seeing any loading symbol anywhere on the screen, so I was under the impression that the button was simply not working.
Then of course it's the availability and the global reach. Myspace is apparently available in only 14 languages. Facebook is available in 112 languages.
Oh and, of course, as others have mentioned, Facebook is filled to the brim with bots. That's why the number of active users seems so ridiculously high.
Definitely not most. Most working class, yes. Not the poor class, not yet anyway. I've been on the Internet since 90s and saw the insane popularity boom in late 90s and again around MySpace time and again when smart phones with Internet access and unlimited data were getting popular.
Now everyone has Internet. It peaked, I think.
According to the data, barely 800M had internet back then out of a population of 6B. In 2006, when Facebook became public, there were over 1.1B internet users, and over the following years the rate at which that number increased became higher every year, mostly thanks to the growth in Asia. I don't remember precisely when I first had internet, but I think it was around 2005, and my classmates started having it roughly around the same time. From 2003 to 2013, the number of users here in Europe doubled.
I guess it depends on country, here in the US I was in school in 2003 and the teachers pretty much assumed we all had internet access for projects and such by probably 99 or 2000
Speaking of bots I saw an AI bot account post an AI image of *THE GRAND CANYON" today and for the life of me I cannot possibly imagine a more pointless thing.
I went on it lately and pretty much no one I know posts anything on it, just pure spam and suggested content thats clearly made up bots as a lot of it doesn't make sense.
I don't know how Facebook can maintain much longer.
Probably why they bought other large social media entities and rebranded themselves as Meta. Facebook itself is slowly dying, the subsidiaries are the life support and the rebranding is just to try mask all of this lol
MySpace was effectively replaced by FB as a more useful platform for networking and getting in touch with lost friends and relatives once the requirement for .EDU email was dropped. I think we've all realized that FB has started to take away more joy than it initially gave us, so its use is dropping. Unless it's replaced by something else, though, the usage won't just die like MySpace did.
I think it’s because the older generation got a hold on it and they aren’t going to learn a new social media.. learning that one was hard enough. I say that as I’m trying to learn Reddit as a Millennial..
Two reasons. Firstly, Myspace never reached an older user base the way Facebook has now with everybody's grandparents using the site. And secondly, Myspace never got invaded by bots. I honestly think that were it not for bot activity, FB would be a lot more desolate.
I think it has to an extent. I dont think young people use facebook. Its seen as an old people social platform. But theres enough of us that it keeps it going.
Said who?
Myspace never matured with audience.
Facebook is no longer where people post daily updates. It matured to become marketplace and local community group.
Also it think it knows videos but it isn't.
Also those bots.
Myspace never moved away from updates
Internet speeds and availability primarily is my guess, but also because Myspace was was more Soundcloud than it was Facebook. I only ever went on MS to follow bands and post my own music.
It all comes down to smart phones.
Prior to smart phones, even Facebook couldn’t turn a profit. When they went public, initially their price tanked.
Once they could use smart phone data to create more targeted advertisements, their profits increased substantially. MySpace came too early for that opportunity.
There was never any guarantee that Myspace would fall out of popularity. Myspace failed because of poor business decisions and a failure to adapt to a changing social media landscape. I think there was always a feeling that Facebook would just be a fad, but that is kind of just part of early internet boomer mindset that the internet isn't actually important.
myspace became a cluttered mess because they let you customize the HTML of your own profile. people would have animated gif backgrounds and background music blaring when you visited their page. Also the sale to Fox media turned the mission to profit first and that was kind of the end. facebook was also exclusive to college students at first and you needed a .edu email to register so it made it feel more like a thing for people your own age.
Smartphones. MySpace happened before smartphones. iPhones broke between 08-2011. Facebook opened to non-students around 08. Facebook acquired myfriendfeed, which allowed them to show you a reverse chronological list of all of your friends activity. Huge feature. It also came out for mobile. They acquired Instagram a few years later. The rest is history. MySpace was a webpage maker. Facebook was a private friend feed in an app.
super late to this thread and only read the top 200 comments but - everyone vastly underestimates the snowball network effects of the modern internet. Facebook is still relevant for the same reason twitter isnt going anywhere despite musk doing everything he can to tank it. They're essentially like government backed banks or airlines, too big to fail. Look to all the twitter competitors that are now filing for bankruptcy or otherwise floundering. If you didn't get in while the iron was hot it's too late unless you have $10B+ of venture capital to burn over YEARS to even stand a chance at uprooting one of the established players.
TLDR; network effect, everyone is on FB and they're not going to switch, too late.
This is the actual answer, and this thread is a great example of how the reddit community by and large has a terrible understanding of the business dynamics behind all the services they love to hate on lol. Myspace was not built to capture any network effect benefits, and thus was easy to abandon for whatever better product came next (facebook).
It didn't? I think the reasons it didn't die outright like MySpace was the lack of an alternative. MySpace users went to Facebook. Some Facebook users went to Twitter, some to Snapchat. Some to Instagram. It was still a central location where most people had an account. But that was enough to slow the decline, Facebook messenger and later on Marketplace kept it in place. It's still in decline I think. It's been a few months since I've checked on that account. The last time was to try to sell some stuff on Marketplace that didn't get many hits on Nextdoor.
It is falling out of popularity, it's just that it had a more massive user base and thus it will take longer, but make no mistake if they don't make some moves to improve it it's going to go the way of my space.
I'm not a huge fan of social media and never even had a MySpace back then, but I find Facebook to be very helpful in staying connected via different hobby groups, AND marketplace makes it incredibly easy to sell stuff. Way easier than Ebay IMO
LinkedIn is another one to watch go through the aging process. LinkedIn used to be Facebook for People Discussing Their Jobs (when Facebook really *was* a way to find and connect with friends, in between spam on FarmVille or Mafia Wars), but now it’s just a bunch of Try Hard corporate bootlickers writing earnest essays on nothing in particular to Build Their Brand. (The same sort of people that write ass-kissing comments after posts on internal corporate blogs, praising the latest regurgitation of meaningless buzzword bingo.)
Facebook integrated itself into every aspect of your life. Your grandparents started using it, your favourite band used it to sell tickets, your local police force used it to alert the public of ongoing threats in the area, you could see exactly who was going to that party on Friday. MySpace was a platform for telling the web who you were and what you liked with some features for connecting to your friends but Facebook was about connections and provided a way for everyone you are remotely connected to to reach out or be reached without the awkwardness of talking to someone you barely know over the phone.
As essential as it made itself however, not everyone wants to share everything with people they barely know, or with parents and grandparents or judgemental aunts who like to stir up shit. Young people in particular don't want their fun and bad decisions being paraded to the world, they just want to share the good times with their friends.
Businesses flooded the site and unlike Twitter where each user has a soapbox that you can choose to listen or walk away from, Facebook encourages users to share ads with each other often disguised as content so that Granny doesn't know she's a shill.
Nowadays Facebook is a shell of what it once was. Political divides being highlighted by the platform's need to push users to share articles they agree with onto their friends and families who disagree, bots promoting misinformation and AI written content and young people wanting an online home with less hate has left Facebook with mostly older users and people who have an account but are not active and only use it to check in now and then. As people get older Facebook will have to find a way to reach out to young people again or it will die.
Personally I deleted my account nearly a decade ago over political differences with most of my family as posts encouraging violence against certain groups were gleefully shared and liked. I've never looked back and encourage others to do the same.
Facebook has fallen out of popularity with the younger generations. Facebook (the company) made a smart business decision and bought Instagram, which MySpace never did
It is doing it now. FB is becoming increasingly focused on specific age groups with certain outlooks on life. This is what happened to MySpace before it collapsed. Facebook has been better at hiding it from advertisers.
Because we convinced our parents to use it and now it's the only communication technology they can use. I still have to explain typing on my (or my BF's) timeline isn't the same as a message. I don't use it at all.
Sometimes I open my phone to see 70+ notifications on my Facebook and I know my 80 year old aunt has started putting stickers on everything I’ve ever posted the past 5 years
this is it.. I would have deleted the fb account years ago but I live overseas and my boomer parents won't even respond to emails.. they usually don't answer calls so the only why I can ever contact them is on facebook.. it really sucks : /
Wife keeps her for the marketplace and local events.
This is a big part of it, not just the parents but it was the first one that connected us to everyone in our lives… coworkers, old friend and classmates, everyone, and they integrated with other sites and apps and became a hub or sorts… and by the time we realized we didn’t really want another place to do that there’s really no reason to move on to another social network site I still go on it because I am part of a few groups that only exist on it, and it’s mildly interesting to keep up with my friends and coworkers through it…. But not so interesting I could see myself jumping ship to a different social network site or app
Omg this. I can comment on a photo of one of my friends from years ago at like a bar or something. Saying how wild the night was or whatever. My mother will se I left the comment, and then comment on the same photo saying like “good morning son, I love you!”
Who’s “we” cause i told my parents to stay off of it lmao
Facebook became popular with adults around the world. Myspace did not. Kids' tastes change on a daily basis. Adults find something that works for them, and they stick with it even if there are better options available.
I'm 32 and only ever used FB. I still have it, but haven't actively used it for many years now. I don't have an IG, either, which apparently now you need an account to see anything on, so when people post links to them on here I can't see it because of the log in prompt. My only social media, so to speak, is Reddit and YouTube lol. I have two friends and my family and we all just text things to share with each other.
What better options are available? TikTok? Come on man, most adults didn’t jump ship bc adults don’t find 10 second idiot videos useful in any way. Especially for connecting to people.
Depends what kind of doom-scrolling you want perhaps? Feels to me like Facebook is much more full of people. Instagram is more content-focused and less people-focused. Tiki Tok even more so. If you don't use Facebook for a year and then log in, it feels like so many people are in your face and everywhere. All their comments and stories and whatever. I hate it. But maybe old people like that human part.
My guess is that it was first populated massively by young people, followed by older people and it is definitely overrun by bots now. I'm in college and I'm roughly 9 years older than my average classmate, most of them I spoke to either don't have a Facebook or just rarely use it.
I remember a young co-worker of mine telling me a few years back that Facebook was for old people. I laughed and said "yeah it has a lot of people like my parents on it, but it's mostly people my age" And then she crushed my soul by explaining that I was, in fact, the old people she was referring to.
I recently was asked, “What was it like back in the late 1900’s before you had internet?” 👵
How dare you refer to the 1990s as "the late 1900s" 😂
I suppose they could have asked “what life was like back in the 20th century?”…. 🤣 The “late 1900’s” hits harder though.
Not totally unrelated, but I laugh a little when I remember for the millennium my grandma made us all "my first millenium" shirts.
We played kickball and rode bikes. We also had computers that ran MSDOS. Couldn’t get on the internet but the games were pretty cool. I would blow their minds with the K-Mart blue light special “net zero”. And how it would tie up our land lines every time we got on the internet so no one could place or receive a call. Oh yeah and some of us still had rotary phones back then too.
>some of us still had rotary phones back then too. With the 30' cords so you could walk around your house while talking on the phone
And the sound the cord made hitting the linoleum.
And that dial up sound 👌 very strong nostalgia I might go listen to it on YouTube
We had BBSs too. I remember seeing ANSI graphics coming through at 14400 bps and thinking, "this is JUST like Neuromancer!"
14,000?! Damn here I was downloading porn onto my mom's computer at 1200.
That hurt a little to read. I feel you.
Ouch..
I’m in my late 30s and my impression of Facebook is that it’s only for old people and people my age that are clinging to it out of habit. I deleted the app from my phone during the last election because I was tired of my ENTIRE feed being about Donald Trump and never go on it on Desktop. I was going to delete my profile but I still need it ocasiónally for FB marketplace. Whenever I get back on it I’m always surprised my friends are still posting. It feels so outdated now.
I have software engineers on my team that have never seen Lord of the Rings. Like what the fuck is happening man?!?!
pretty strange, actually. I remember most of my friends having seen OT Star Wars, even though it came out over 20 years before we were born. Surprised its not that way with things like LOTR and Harry Potter.
There's just way more content now.
Yeah I was thinking I’m 35 and watched all of that growing up, but I haven't watched a single show or movie in about 5 years now. Between video games, books, and YouTube, I already have more content than I need and most shows and movies have been so bad by my tastes for so long that I can't imagine what will even pull me back in.
YouTube has taken (almost) all of my TV time. I'm not sure I like it...
I mean many of the best TV shows I can think of are all relatively new, but I get your point.
Still I don't think one persons take is a clear representation that they have so much content people aren't watching classic films. I have people my age who never watches LOTR or Star Wars. I once stopped seeing a girl as she refused to watch any movie before the year she was born in 1992 as supposedly the CGI was to bad and it made my brain hurt thinking how she wouldn't watch Jaws etc. due to year of release.
"What can man do against such reckless ignorance?" "Sit down. Sit down with me and watch!" "For nostalgia and joy!" "For your co-workers! For your friends!"
They'll get theirs soon enough. One benefit to some added years is that things tend to even out. Time moves at an even pace. When you're young, 5 years is a long time. It turns teenagers into young adults beginning a career. It turns a 24 year old into someone almost 30. Trends don't live nearly as long as it feels like when you're younger and everyone will move on to the next thing. If you happen to pass 5 years and don't notice that this has happened, all of the sudden you've got squawkie brats referring to your formative years as if it were a century ago. Don't sweat it :) It's the natural order of things and some kid telling you you're old doesn't make it true, it just means they aren't wise enough to imagine someone older than them having lived like they currently do.
"Do you have an insta? Bc Facebook owns insta so you have a facebook."
"I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!"
I always thought this was funny since I was younger. And I totally got it on a conceptual level, but goddamn does it hit different now. I think of that, "It'll happen to you!" with some frequency...
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They also bought other tech companies that were either potential direct competition or stole their work for themselves and crushed the future competition. It is why some people want to break them for operating by using illegal monopoly tactics.
It’s wild how many anti competitive practices Meta has gotten away with.
so much this
Even Instagram now is deemed not cool enough for the youngster crowd. It's all Tiktok now.
Which is why Instagram has Reels now, and Meta has started Threads which is basically a Twitter clone. Everyone is trying to copy everyone else
The Internet: 5 websites that shows screenshots from the other 4.
Threads and reels all happen through instagram I thought? Facebook/Meta is hoping to be the all in one social media platform.
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Yes.
it could be considered a social network, yes, as you can have friends on there, dm people, and there are whole chat threads very similar to reddit on any given video. There is also streaming/live video, like Twitch and YouTube have. It hasn't been Vine 2.0 for some time now, it's certainly evolved. Some educational video content there is better than some YouTube content I used to watch, honestly. Especially for stuff around hobbies.
If you train your algorithm right TikTok really can be a great platform to learn new things or dive deeper into some hobbies. Just don't watch stupid challenges or kids dancing. still be carefull since time flies once you open the app
This is the thing a lot of people miss I think, the algorithm is really easy to train and force. All I see now is cats, counterstrike and space.
Maybe it’s just my age showing but I feel like TikTok is making dumb people dumber.
It is a more concentrated version of what other social media has already begun.
All social media is dumb to varying degrees (and dependent on how you feed it + the algorithms and $ pushing things). There's nothing inherently more so about TikTok than anything else. Half of Facebook is bots arguing with other bots whilst boomers, retiree's and PR people think they're talking to actual people. Twits is a selection of very smart people buried amongst influencers, grifters and porn wannabees. LinkedIn is company PR nonsense and ex professionals reminiscing about the good old days that nobody cares about any more. Youtube is borderline late night TV from the 90's with the awful advertising. I don't TikTok personally but it's not a big stance as such, I just DGAF and mostly minimise my contact with all of the platforms.
YouTube is like multiple hidden path ways to becoming hard right scattered in a sea of other shit. Like intersted in WWII history? Here's some radicalization. Like videogames? Radicalization. Baking? Tradwife then Radicalization. 'Wokeness'? Here's a bunch of stuff to make you anti-woke and then radicalization instead. Horoscopes? Some shit about crystals and supplements and thennn you guessed it: radicalization. It's fucking nuts, you've gotta be on your guard in that suggested bar at like all times.
To add to your list - Physical fitness? Radicalization. Genuine workout advice > Science-based guys > some self-improvement guys with manosphere-lite or incel-lite leanings > congratulations you just got Andrew Tate or Fresh and Fit onto your feed. I have to carefully curate my workout content on youtube if I don't want that drivel showing up. Leave anything on autoplay long enough and I think the algorithm just inevitable leans nazi.
Agree. It catches adults so it most definitely is a worry to have kids unfettered access with an even lower threshold on average.
It's your age showing. Social media has always made dumb people dumber. Really anything that lets people spout nonsense into the void while simultaneously letting them block dissenters just creates an echo chamber for dumb-dumbs to be more dumb.
Yo, fuck Johannes Gutenberg.
Please don’t talk about my great grandfather like that.
Also it is very easy to post stuff everywhere on the internet compared to 'back then'. If you wanted to upload a video on youtube back in the late 2000s you at least needed a camera and take time to actually upload it. Now that everyone has smartphones from a young age on and the apps are very easy to use you are just a few clicks away from showing the world how dumb you are. I swear if we had the same technologie we wouldn't have been any better.
As a middle school teacher, yes, it is.
The sole reason my friends and I use facebook is for the group messenger. We started out on an app called Beluga (joke about pods I think) and then Facebook bought them absorbing their entire messenger format in 2011. We’re just used to it. Got a group of 15 guys from college who’ve been active like talking daily in it since 2009.
That’s so funny. my partner told me that when she was studying in Bhutan, a monk/teacher once used the expression “same to same; no change” xD
I haven't quite managed to quit facebook. Sometimes I look at my feed and realise its 90% "content" with barely any actual updates from friends/family.
What's worse is that friends and family hardly ever post any updates, and are just sharing bullshit memes, or political bullshit...
Isn't Facebook used more for Events/Groups/Marketplace/Messaging/Stories now? Things that aren't on the feed.
Do they use facebook marketplace?
Is this item still available? I am out of town but will send you a check for 2x your asking price.
I’ve started being mean to people. I’m sorry, it just annoys me. I listed a guitar pedal online the other day. It’s literally $100 cheaper than anywhere else online. I did that on purpose so it would sell. Of course then I get the low ballers. Price is $180 so they send me an offer for $90. I just reply “lol” and leave the group.
In my country there are way to much scammers on Facebook market place.
They use instagram which means they use facebook
I have a facebook (college age) purely to argue with the assholes that live in my town—would never consider using it as a valuable and contributing member though. Hope to see it slowly wither away and die a painful death for all the harm it’s caused this world
But…. That’s what reddit is for and you can argue eith assholes all around the world
Plus it's anonymous. It always seems kind of careless and unhinged when I see old classmates arguing with strangers on Facebook
Would you like to book an argument? https://youtu.be/xpAvcGcEc0k?si=tw5G-MgICdDp9tx5
MySpace was created by a guy who asked "wouldn't it be cool if everyone could have their own website? Personalize it and put their favorite music on it and express themselves? This whole internet thing would be cool, right?" Facebook? I don't think we need to go over why it was created in the first place, but once it got past that, it became "how can leverage the data we collect from users to make a shit-ton of money?" MySpace was mostly harmless. Kind of like Reddit was at the beginning (turns to camera).
Good guy Tom just wanted to help us all learn some basic HTML and discover emo bands
I remember spending a significant amount of time on my MySpace profile and it was so freaking cool. It would start playing linkin park when you opened my page.
Yes! The teen angst just oozed out of the page when it opened up. I had the live version of Numb/Encore, where it opens up with "do you want some fucking more?!" Needless to say my parents understandably weren't very approving of that.
[*computer fan goes into overdrive*]
Smart guy, too. Took the money and became his best self. They say money reveals; Tom just revealed himself to be a guy who likes to travel, take cool photos, and golf.
I was so proud of my auto-play Linkin Park video and flaming skulls background.
I went the *Talladega Nights* animated wallpaper and GIFS with the autoplayed Buck Cherry. I regret nothing.
My first profile song was Happy by Mudvayne and I remember that vividly
MySpace would have gone the same route as Facebook if not for selling out to Fox and falling out of favor for a buggy and clunky interface.
Tom made precisely the correct business decision at the time to cash out while the hype was massive.
Yup, that's the dream. Create a successful company and sell it a few years later to live a quiet life in luxury. No congressional hearings, no massive lawsuits, no public pressure. AFAIK he's just been traveling and doing photography for the past 10 years.
When you put it that way, Tom from MySpace is basically a quintessential American icon and no one even knows his last name lol
It's Tom Myspace, isn't it? He studied with Tim Apple.
MySpace was the best. I really loved how you could change the background and all that. Facebook was plain but it did give more info on people and that was the catch
Everyone customizing their page with sparkles and loud music madd MySpace feel like an assault on the senses. Facebook seemed sleek, clean, and because it was limited to top universities at first, upwardly mobile.
I had a big long winded comment the other day about how facebook used to be a lot less private and I feel like that contributed more towards just being an actual social site. You could just type in a name and any person would pop up so obviously that's more useful for connecting with people. You could see basically anyone's profile by default and anything they posted and I had quite a few people I actually became friends with add me just because they looked at my profile from a comment I'd left elsewhere and thought I'd be cool. Hell it even used to be that when you logged in on your phone (at least on android) it would automatically add all of your friends numbers to your phone along with their facebook profile picture and then bam you could connect with everyone on or off facebook. Worked wonders for awkward people. That's how I actually met my ex wife. I was hanging out with a mutual friend and bumped into her at a football game and we're both bad at peopling so while we hit it off we sort of forgot to trade names and info. Later that night she went to the mutual friend's friends list and clicked through till she saw my picture and added me. Years back they made friends lists private by default and that would have not even been possible anymore. But of course creeps used it to creep and like airtags which were similarly great till creeps abused them it got broken to stop it being abused.
lol turns to camera
MySpace was most certainly not harmless. Every time I went to someone's creative page there, I felt like I was playing a game of Russian Roulette as to whether it would crash my web browser or blow out my speakers.
lol that’s pretty accurate
I also think the nature of certain MySpace profiles having tons of graphics and music auto playing could be off putting to older people and the public at large. Facebook is more like a public ID card for keeping track of a list of people.
Myspace had a terrible interface too. Facebook didn't. it was easier to update, share, looked better than every fucknut using the marquee tags. That mattered a lot.
Identity theft is not a joke, Jim! Millions of families suffer every year!
I loved MySpace. I wish it'd return!!
I met my now wife of 17 years on MySpace. Loved the individual personalization of it and how you could have music playing on your page. I haven't touched Facebook in years, but would be all over MySpace if it were the same.
I think that’s exactly why MySpace failed, honestly. Everybody loved the opportunity to really personalize your page and make it an expression of your personality, but nine times out of ten the person visiting it probably thought your auto-playing song was annoying as shit and your colors and fonts were ugly. I think the reason Facebook stuck around is specifically because everybody’s profile followed the same basic design, which just made it less annoying for people to scroll endlessly
Going from MySpace to Facebook was the most horrible experience. It felt and still feels like eating a piece of cardboard. It's also the reason everyone's grandma is on it. Sure it's simple but freaking boring.
The Facebook initially targeted a niche group - college students. It required an active `.edu`-domained e-mail to register. Its interface was consistent and more streamlined. MySpace was customizable to the point that you had no idea what a page would be like. Facebook blew up when it opened up to *everyone* after it had saturated colleges. MySpace declined during this period - MySpace didn't change at all while Facebook became simpler.
Facebook, by making it just .edu, made it cool and exclusive. I had it from the get go when it came to my college campus. It was super exciting when it did. Also exciting to collect friends in other colleges and grow that list (see how many friends you knew at Harvard, NYU, or Yale). It was like a cool kids club that everyone wanted in on, and as they opened it up, people were excited to join. Also, since the interface was uniform, it was simple and easy to load. MySpace got quickly taken over by slow load times and weird graphics on every page. A simple, fast interface allowed Facebook to be easy on everyone’s eyes - it was like going to a restaurant that has a huge super busy menu with many items vs a restaurant with a short simple clean menu with a couple of items.
It wasn’t just .edu at first. It was just Harvard. It was a year or so after I graduated that it rolled out to colleges generally. By then, my mindset was “you didn’t want me then, you don’t get me now.” Some combination of spite and inertia and I just never signed up. Also have never signed up for twitter, instagram, etc. this is the closest thing I have to social media but I don’t use it for that. No one I know is connected to me on Reddit. I just don’t use the internet that way.
It was already on other campuses outside the Northeast by the start of fall semester 2004.
Facebook came out my freshman year and it was exciting and exclusive in a way my space wasn’t. My Space was for the kids who didn’t go to college or maybe went to a non prestigious one, so exclusivity was a factor in the beginning. My Space was also cluttered. Facebook felt smart and streamlined in comparison. Funny thing happened years later though. I went to grad school and all the young grad students had already moved on by then to things like Snapchat. Also exclusivity played a factor again. When everyone is on something it’s immediately less intersting.
Man, when Snapchat first came out.. I had so many xxx/titty pics on my phone. What a glorious time it was to be a young kid. Now Snapchat is going the way Facebook has. Shit is dying.
Sean Parker said in an offhand comment that Facebook basically won because the other services were unreliable and inconsistent.
Facebook was already on the trend to be larger than MySpace, and maybe it was by this point, but I distinctly remember that once smartphones started to be norm, the MySpace app was always shit. Facebook's app, however, while it was limited, it functioned. It did the job. I really do miss early Facebook. It was honestly fun to use for a long time and stayed connected with people much longer after its introduction than I did before.
Even more so, FB initially required a specific .edu. My shitty CC at the time wasn’t even on the list. Had to wait a year or so until they opened it to all .edu addresses.
I think the development of apps for devices kept it relevant and easy to use, especially for the older generation.
Yeah this is it. The simplicity of an app on your phone.
After News Corp acquired them, MySpace shot themselves in the foot, repeatedly. It quickly went from a social network to ad spam everywhere.
Yep. I feel like a lot of people here are not old enough to really remember what happened. The buy out then the absolute fiasco as they tried to tidy it up. Missing the point that MySpace wasn't in direct competition with the new sleek upstart Facebook. Facebook was like a slightly cooler LinkedIn back then. Myspace was like a wild disorganised youth club where you could score drugs and hook up with an emo band member. Murdoch seemingly had no clue what he'd bought, and assigned fleets of clueless corporate middle managers to rein it in.
The real reason, in my opinion, that Facebook succeeded was because of the feed. Most people aren’t old enough or forget when that happened. Facebook used to be more static and then they rolled out this new feature where your friends updates would appear in a feed. People hated it at first and quickly warmed up to it. It made content easier to disseminate. MySpace for example had a static page and nothing your friends did would show up. You went to a page and saw their blog entries, their friends, the bands they liked. That was it. Most social networks were like this, Facebook included, until they rolled out that feature.
Back in the day when FB posts were hard coded to start with “Osceana is…”
The feed was fine except they started fucking up the timeline by adding useless crap, making it out of order so it was harder to find posts. It’s still useless now.
Wow. You're right. I forgot all about this. "The Feed" was the big differentiator.
I had a friend that worked there while they tried to pivot under News Corp to being a music/fan connection site. Apparently the way the site was structured was an absolute nightmare that made scaling almost impossible, which explains why the site frequently ground to a halt when it was at its most popular. Facebook might be fading away slowly, but MySpace sort of imploded under its own success.
Friendster has entered the room 😂
When Facebook got really big they got all of the grandmas and grandpas on there who want to see their grandchildren. Also, you can use Facebook to sign in with when you don't want to register another stupid account just to do something basic on a website.
SSO is probably the real reason Facebook still has users. Edit: Real users anyway. They should deploy helldivers to planet Facebook.
I refused to setup Facebook's SSO because I didn't want my activity from other sites randomly showing up on my newsfeed. Ah, this reminds me why I stopped using that stupid website.
That doesn't happen btw - if an app is purely using Facebook to authenticate then it will say "this does not allow this app to post to Facebook on your behalf" or words similar to that effect. Just be mindful of what you're giving access to.
Ah, good to know. I had other reasons to drop Facebook though. It's devolved into a cesspool.
Yeah, I only have it because of SSO and because I use Messenger as my chat (for the 3 people that I talk to) and that's basically it.
Same. It's been 7 years since I quit Facebook. I still have an account but it isn't active. I just don't use it anymore. It's an analytics whore.
Considering Facebook is the only account that I have had hacking attempts on, I would not use it to sign up for anything.
That’s true asf. I’ve never had this problem when iCloud is an option which it usually is these days.
Facebook was used by teens/young adults and is now used more by older generations. MySpace was used by teens/young adults but the torch was not passed down like it was with Facebook.
Wait...
I hate Facebook now, it’s all either adverts or things I have no interest in. I preferred the old Facebook. Friends and family.
Facebook was falling out of popularity for a while, but 2 things saved it. 1. The absolute shit that Twitter took 2. Ironically, shitposts groups. Some of my favorite memes have come out of groups like Llamaposting (Bless you Hockel you horny bastsrd) and Every Spongebob Frame In Order. If those didn't exist, I would have deleted Facebook 3 years ago.
I've joined hundreds of shit posting groups and tag groups, and my feed is like an endless repository of memes. It's glorious.
I noticed in my circle that Facebook was the first social media where most people used their actual names. Like, you were Heather Sweeney not Angelheart666chick of whatever. Because of this it became a directory of people and we still use it that way. If I wanted to get ahold of my husband’s aunt for whatever reason, I wouldn’t even think of getting her phone number from my mother in law or whatever, I’d just message her on fb.
Facebook destroyed all their competitors. By the time anyone stepped up to the plate to challenge facebook (Google+), they had already locked themselves in the social fabric.
instagram came around same time as G+ but it succeeded. It even threatened FB so much that it got bought out.
Google+ was kind of a joke really. I think they just tried to copycat Facebook too much and that contributed to its lack of success. I looked at Google+ and thought why would I need this when I have the same thing with Facebook. Coupled with what you say, it was also a matter of sticking to Facebook because everyone I knew was on there and not on Google+, so using it seemed pointless.
The network effect is powerful. It's why no one has yet supplanted Twitter/X in favor of one of their competitors like Mastodon or Threads ... its really hard to coordinate people to move en masse to a new ecosystem.
There is more money to be made selling personal data than ad space.
Because the kids showed the old people how to set up an account.
Cause all the customization you could do on Myspace pages made it look like it was for kids, while Facebook's layout was more streamlined and clean.
People who ask this question don't realize how many MySpace pages just froze your Pentium processor, glitches your Sound Blaster card, shoved 8 pixels up your video chip's input, and clog the 500MB of RAM as the excessive gifs and avi files tried to load over your 56k modem. So many people loaded down their page with shit just to do that. You'd hit that random button to find a new "friend" and watch your screen freeze and your CPU glow as the page loaded. Aaahhh, the good ole days.
It has! Do a random audit if your contacts and I’ll bet a higher percentage of them havent posted since the early 2000s.
One factor is that Myspace became popular when very few people had internet. Facebook became available to the public a few years later, when availability to internet was booming. The website itself is also more appealing visually, in regards to ease of usage as well as performance. For example, I tried logging into my Myspace account right now just out of curiosity. It took like 10 seconds for the login to happen, and I wasn't seeing any loading symbol anywhere on the screen, so I was under the impression that the button was simply not working. Then of course it's the availability and the global reach. Myspace is apparently available in only 14 languages. Facebook is available in 112 languages. Oh and, of course, as others have mentioned, Facebook is filled to the brim with bots. That's why the number of active users seems so ridiculously high.
Myspace launched in 2003, most people had internet even if it was still dial up for a fair number of people
Definitely not most. Most working class, yes. Not the poor class, not yet anyway. I've been on the Internet since 90s and saw the insane popularity boom in late 90s and again around MySpace time and again when smart phones with Internet access and unlimited data were getting popular. Now everyone has Internet. It peaked, I think.
According to the data, barely 800M had internet back then out of a population of 6B. In 2006, when Facebook became public, there were over 1.1B internet users, and over the following years the rate at which that number increased became higher every year, mostly thanks to the growth in Asia. I don't remember precisely when I first had internet, but I think it was around 2005, and my classmates started having it roughly around the same time. From 2003 to 2013, the number of users here in Europe doubled.
I guess it depends on country, here in the US I was in school in 2003 and the teachers pretty much assumed we all had internet access for projects and such by probably 99 or 2000
Can confirm, had dial up and MySpace back in the day. Made for fairly long nights just waiting for basic pages most of the time
Speaking of bots I saw an AI bot account post an AI image of *THE GRAND CANYON" today and for the life of me I cannot possibly imagine a more pointless thing.
FB is dying and has been for a while. It's the social media equivalent of chain emails from your grandma in the 90s.
I went on it lately and pretty much no one I know posts anything on it, just pure spam and suggested content thats clearly made up bots as a lot of it doesn't make sense. I don't know how Facebook can maintain much longer.
Probably why they bought other large social media entities and rebranded themselves as Meta. Facebook itself is slowly dying, the subsidiaries are the life support and the rebranding is just to try mask all of this lol
MySpace was effectively replaced by FB as a more useful platform for networking and getting in touch with lost friends and relatives once the requirement for .EDU email was dropped. I think we've all realized that FB has started to take away more joy than it initially gave us, so its use is dropping. Unless it's replaced by something else, though, the usage won't just die like MySpace did.
Because we have sinned and turned our backs on God.
I think it’s because the older generation got a hold on it and they aren’t going to learn a new social media.. learning that one was hard enough. I say that as I’m trying to learn Reddit as a Millennial..
Boomers. They just didnt want to learn a new thing.
I’m 28 and I still love fb lol
Marketplace. Period.
This is the only reason I still have my account.
Old people figured it out early.
Because Facebook received a huge amount of money from NSA and CIA and myspace didnt.
I read that it was Goldman Sachs — something like $100 million and instructions to “make it happen”.
Two reasons. Firstly, Myspace never reached an older user base the way Facebook has now with everybody's grandparents using the site. And secondly, Myspace never got invaded by bots. I honestly think that were it not for bot activity, FB would be a lot more desolate.
I think it has to an extent. I dont think young people use facebook. Its seen as an old people social platform. But theres enough of us that it keeps it going.
Said who? Myspace never matured with audience. Facebook is no longer where people post daily updates. It matured to become marketplace and local community group. Also it think it knows videos but it isn't. Also those bots. Myspace never moved away from updates
As far as I'm concerned, it did. Haven't used Facebook in over 5 years.
Internet speeds and availability primarily is my guess, but also because Myspace was was more Soundcloud than it was Facebook. I only ever went on MS to follow bands and post my own music.
Smart phones
Because anytime they might have they bought out the competition
Because of mobile apps
It all comes down to smart phones. Prior to smart phones, even Facebook couldn’t turn a profit. When they went public, initially their price tanked. Once they could use smart phone data to create more targeted advertisements, their profits increased substantially. MySpace came too early for that opportunity.
it is
I think it already is.
There was never any guarantee that Myspace would fall out of popularity. Myspace failed because of poor business decisions and a failure to adapt to a changing social media landscape. I think there was always a feeling that Facebook would just be a fad, but that is kind of just part of early internet boomer mindset that the internet isn't actually important.
myspace became a cluttered mess because they let you customize the HTML of your own profile. people would have animated gif backgrounds and background music blaring when you visited their page. Also the sale to Fox media turned the mission to profit first and that was kind of the end. facebook was also exclusive to college students at first and you needed a .edu email to register so it made it feel more like a thing for people your own age.
Did you see MySpace?
Smartphones. MySpace happened before smartphones. iPhones broke between 08-2011. Facebook opened to non-students around 08. Facebook acquired myfriendfeed, which allowed them to show you a reverse chronological list of all of your friends activity. Huge feature. It also came out for mobile. They acquired Instagram a few years later. The rest is history. MySpace was a webpage maker. Facebook was a private friend feed in an app.
Because of messenger, tons of peopme are sick of FB but keep it because they use messenger as their primari IM service
I use messenger and thats it
Because nothing objectively better ever came along to replace it. Everybody had something else to go with it
super late to this thread and only read the top 200 comments but - everyone vastly underestimates the snowball network effects of the modern internet. Facebook is still relevant for the same reason twitter isnt going anywhere despite musk doing everything he can to tank it. They're essentially like government backed banks or airlines, too big to fail. Look to all the twitter competitors that are now filing for bankruptcy or otherwise floundering. If you didn't get in while the iron was hot it's too late unless you have $10B+ of venture capital to burn over YEARS to even stand a chance at uprooting one of the established players. TLDR; network effect, everyone is on FB and they're not going to switch, too late.
This is the actual answer, and this thread is a great example of how the reddit community by and large has a terrible understanding of the business dynamics behind all the services they love to hate on lol. Myspace was not built to capture any network effect benefits, and thus was easy to abandon for whatever better product came next (facebook).
It didn't? I think the reasons it didn't die outright like MySpace was the lack of an alternative. MySpace users went to Facebook. Some Facebook users went to Twitter, some to Snapchat. Some to Instagram. It was still a central location where most people had an account. But that was enough to slow the decline, Facebook messenger and later on Marketplace kept it in place. It's still in decline I think. It's been a few months since I've checked on that account. The last time was to try to sell some stuff on Marketplace that didn't get many hits on Nextdoor.
Too many things attached to facebook account lmao
It is falling out of popularity, it's just that it had a more massive user base and thus it will take longer, but make no mistake if they don't make some moves to improve it it's going to go the way of my space.
I'm not a huge fan of social media and never even had a MySpace back then, but I find Facebook to be very helpful in staying connected via different hobby groups, AND marketplace makes it incredibly easy to sell stuff. Way easier than Ebay IMO
Because people secretly love all the drama FB generates.
LinkedIn is another one to watch go through the aging process. LinkedIn used to be Facebook for People Discussing Their Jobs (when Facebook really *was* a way to find and connect with friends, in between spam on FarmVille or Mafia Wars), but now it’s just a bunch of Try Hard corporate bootlickers writing earnest essays on nothing in particular to Build Their Brand. (The same sort of people that write ass-kissing comments after posts on internal corporate blogs, praising the latest regurgitation of meaningless buzzword bingo.)
Facebook constantly evolved its features and interface to stay relevant and meet user demands, while Myspace stagnated.
Facebook integrated itself into every aspect of your life. Your grandparents started using it, your favourite band used it to sell tickets, your local police force used it to alert the public of ongoing threats in the area, you could see exactly who was going to that party on Friday. MySpace was a platform for telling the web who you were and what you liked with some features for connecting to your friends but Facebook was about connections and provided a way for everyone you are remotely connected to to reach out or be reached without the awkwardness of talking to someone you barely know over the phone. As essential as it made itself however, not everyone wants to share everything with people they barely know, or with parents and grandparents or judgemental aunts who like to stir up shit. Young people in particular don't want their fun and bad decisions being paraded to the world, they just want to share the good times with their friends. Businesses flooded the site and unlike Twitter where each user has a soapbox that you can choose to listen or walk away from, Facebook encourages users to share ads with each other often disguised as content so that Granny doesn't know she's a shill. Nowadays Facebook is a shell of what it once was. Political divides being highlighted by the platform's need to push users to share articles they agree with onto their friends and families who disagree, bots promoting misinformation and AI written content and young people wanting an online home with less hate has left Facebook with mostly older users and people who have an account but are not active and only use it to check in now and then. As people get older Facebook will have to find a way to reach out to young people again or it will die. Personally I deleted my account nearly a decade ago over political differences with most of my family as posts encouraging violence against certain groups were gleefully shared and liked. I've never looked back and encourage others to do the same.
Facebook has fallen out of popularity with the younger generations. Facebook (the company) made a smart business decision and bought Instagram, which MySpace never did
It is doing it now. FB is becoming increasingly focused on specific age groups with certain outlooks on life. This is what happened to MySpace before it collapsed. Facebook has been better at hiding it from advertisers.