[sveme]

Have we reached peak Facebook yet? I started using Facebook quite early in my country and used it mostly as a social network, communicating and exchanging stuff with friends from all over the world. A couple years later I deleted my account, being disgusted by the potential abusive potential of all the information Facebook had. I came back years later as it became THE tool for ad hoc social initiatives and a way to follow news from things of importance to you, like the local climbing gym or a band I like. Though I did not use it as a social network, I nevertheless used it. That is currently changing and I experience Facebook fatigue.

The comment sections are either empty, used as a notifier for friends or are right-wing/left-wing troll battle fields. Everyone seems overly emotional to get the most likes and bubble to the top. I removed subscriptions for newspapers to not accidentally have to stumble upon the inanen comments, something I dreaded only with youtube comments so far. Have the social network aspects of Facebook (and youtube) been destroyed by fatigue, other ways (WhatsApp?) of exchanging stuff immediately and ideological troll battles?

[CodingGuy]

If Google Trends is somewhat right, we've definitely reached peak Facebook: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook

[alehul]

This is likely more indicative of society:

A. Becoming more computer-literate and going straight to sites as opposed to always Googling it before clicking, even once familiar with the URL, which won't correlate to usage

B. Visiting the site enough for AutoFill to take effect, which is ever-so-slightly inverse in correlation in terms of search popularity to site popularity

Here's a FB-related search term people will still use, even with AutoFill for Facebook, as some evidence. The rise is a similar pattern, but lacking the major drop: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook...

[nostrademons]

[facebook] was the most common search query when I was at Google (roughly the period covered by this graph), and [facebook login] would alternate between #2 and #3. Neither of your options seem likely at all to me - over the time I was there, I witnessed people becoming more likely to navigate to sites via Googling them rather than clicking, not less. The trend is even more pronounced with mobile, where basically nobody types in a URL, they use voice search and speak the name of the site.

I would bet on the Facebook mobile app being a major cause, though. Instead of hitting the web version at all, they're opening the mobile app.

[Waterluvian]

Do people really voice search for things like that? Aside from drivers going hands-free, I have never seen a colleague or friend use voice commands where it wasn't just for the novelty.

[nostrademons]

I do, and I've heard a bunch of my friends do it. On Android voice recognition is both fairly reliable and really easy, so why not?

[Waterluvian]

Yeah it absolutely is reliable and easy. I just haven't seen it catch on among my circles. Interesting.

[prodmerc]

Yes, I like voice search.

I still won't use "OK Google", because it's the new Bluetooth headset, only douchebags use it in public. Come on Google, how much do you lose by allowing custom phrases?

[prodigal_erik]

More than one would be good, but it's probably hard to explain to layman how to choose a phrase for which they can create an accurate model that's so cheap it can run continuously.

[maverick_iceman]

Also consider that people are less likely to use voice search if they are around others. So that might explain why you haven't seen friends/colleagues do it.

[maverick_iceman]

I use voice search all the time, even in a desktop. It's much faster than typing.

[alehul]

With the native iOS app being released in 2012, the timeline would be perfect for that, yeah.

Does the mobile app take away that much usage from the web? I can see how it'll increase overall usage as people will use FB when they otherwise couldn't, but I imagine anyone who could be using it on a computer will still use the web version over a mobile app (web seems more functional, especially so with the recent Facebook/Messenger division).

[nostrademons]

A lot of workplace usage has shifted to mobile. Many workplaces will monitor all your Internet usage, and so once mobile became available, many people decided that rather than letting their employers know how much time they waste during the day, they'd use their own private Internet connection for that.

We saw a similar effect at Google with porn queries, particularly during the day. As soon as image search came to mobile Google, many porn queries moved to mobile; as of 2013 porn queries were twice as likely on mobile search as desktop.

[autokad]

80% of facebooks revenue comes from mobile, so i wouldnt be surprised if that contributed a lot.

however, i dont see how facebook being #2 and #3 among searches means anything against the fact that most people either dont close facebook or as soon as they type 'f' facebook.com is autocomplete. unless you get to see how many autocompleted hits they are getting, you are experiencing a selection bias

[deadowl]

Was that also the case with people googling google.com? https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=google.com

[brockvond]

I agree with this... also the rise of predictive searching in browsers and the omnibar etc.

[perseusprime11]

Also, why would you search for facebook anymore since everyone knows facebook.com site at this point.

[jacquesm]

Because search is the new navigation, whether you like it or not.

[pizzetta]

Yep, it's the new navigation because of search noted above and because of typo squatters with malware.

[forrestthewoods]

Not on mobile. Not to launch an app.

[Frqy3]

I never type in URLs directly. It is either a single click on the menu bar/blank tab, or else I go via a search engine to reduce the risk of landing on a typo squatter.

[netsharc]

I've seen several ads on TV and billboards which just say "Search for $brandname $productname" instead of a URL.

[nerdponx]

If this were true, we'd see similar drops in other popular sites like Amazon and Apple and Google itself.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=facebook...

[brilliantcode]

This shows the underlying utility of Facebook compared to other tech giants distilled in to a really generic scenario.

- You go to Google to research what to buy.

- You go to Amazon to give Amazon your hard earned money.

- You go to Facebook to brag what you bought.

Yet the market cap of Facebook rivals those two with far less revenue and highest multiplier.

This cannot last.

[AnthonyMouse]

In theory the reason for this is that Facebook is "stickier" than Google or Amazon. If Google search isn't working for you, you can switch to something else in a heartbeat. If Facebook isn't working for you, you have to get all your friends to switch to something else before you can.

The problem is this is also going to be Facebook's downfall at some indeterminate future date. Because if some other social network ever becomes more popular than Facebook, Facebook is over.

[chongli]

if some other social network ever becomes more popular

This is why Facebook buys out anything new that looks like it might threaten Facebook's dominance.

[AznHisoka]

Most people can't switch from google to something else in a heartbeat...

we can email our friends, text them or meet them in the bar though.

[idiot_stick]

I'm relatively tech savvy, but I'm not sure my significant other would know where to go if Google was down. DDG or even Bing are not top of mind. What else is there?

[thehardsphere]

There's precedent for this: MySpace.

[adventured]

In fact it can last. Your information is wrong.

Amazon has a radically higher multiple than Facebook. About six times higher, being charitable with Amazon's flaky net income.

Facebook will hit $13 or $14 billion in net income for fiscal 2017. Explain to me how a 27 or 28 pe ratio is unsupportable when you're growing net income at 30% or higher.

Meanwhile Google is growing its net income at 18% with a PE of 30. A far more lopsided ratio than Facebook has now, and one that is going to get much worse in just the next four quarters.

So you're wrong on both counts. Facebook has the superior value proposition based on valuation to net income + factoring growth rate.

[brilliantcode]

please provide souces

[sqeaky]

I knew those people where out there, but there are almost as many people googling "google" as "youtube". Why? How many just want to get to google, and how many or doing something intelligent?

[nostrademons]

I used to think this was dumb as well, until I realized that if you type "google" into the address bar of Chrome, Firefox, or Safari (possibly IE too, I haven't used it since IE6), it runs a Google search. Nobody ever bothers with the .com anymore; why should they, when just typing the name of the site in will get to it? So a sizable number of people who go to Google Search get there by running a Google Search.

Also, a surprisingly large fraction of users cannot touch-type. They've been trained to go to Google to search, so they type in g-o-o-g-l-e-ENTER and get where they intended, and never notice the autocomplete suggestions showing up in the Omnibox or the fact that they could just type their whole query in and get answers.

[anxrn]

Agree. Another factor is mobile usage. The % of users that use Facebook _exclusively_ as an app is likely trending up as well.

[portman]

According to Google Trends we reached "peak Google" in 2013:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Google

What's actually happened is that fewer people are using search engines as their app launcher, because they are using the smartphone home screen instead.

[rm999]

Isn't that a plot of people who search Google for the term "google"? If so, I imagine it's something people who are familiar with computers and the internet do not do often.

[the_rosentotter]

No comparable web properties have the dropoff that Facebook has (twitter, eBay, craigslist, even Yahoo which seems to be fading faster into irrelevance by the day).

[astrodust]

Maybe Google did peak and now people are treating search engines as some white-label service that they're utterly indifferent to the provider of.

[brilliantcode]

That graph looks scary for Facebook. Yet the share prices have not corrected to reflect it.

1 Tunisia 100

2 Turkey 95

3 Venezuela 95

4 Ecuador 87

5 Peru 86

6 Algeria 84

7 El Salvador 81

8 Serbia 77

9 Colombia 75

10 Dominican Republic

Notice that none of the developed economies are showing up in the top 10. The dollar per user must be falling as users are increasingly coming from smaller economies which means less amount of ad revenue dollars.

It makes sense why Zuckerberg is crazy for China. Without another spurt of user base growth, Facebook's share price will not be sustainable.

[nostrademons]

Mobile, mobile, mobile. In 2010 everybody would hit Facebook multiple times a day from their workplace. In 2017 nobody in the developed world uses their work computer to access Facebook, they pop open the Facebook app on their phone or have it open 24/7 on their home computer. The people left doing the Google -> Facebook routine are those in developing countries who either don't have mobile phones or don't have app-capable mobile phones.

[funkyy]

If they could make an official Facebook app less resource hogging, more user-friendly and usable on older mobile phones, they would be back in the game. But their app is probably the worst app you can have on your phone. It's terrible, slow and a joke. I would expect such an app from Verizon or GoDaddy, not from Facebook.

[ikeyany]

https://mbasic.facebook.com

[funkyy]

Not an app, it's a solution for some. Their official app sucks.

[toephu2]

They have already had this for over a year, it's called Facebook Lite.

[funkyy]

It's not main app, its secondary.

[hutzlibu]

"are those in developing countries who either don't have mobile phones or don't have app-capable mobile phones."

As far as I know, they rather have a cheap smartphone, than a PC ...

[demoo]

There is no sign of average revenue per user decreasing. Even in US & Canada, ARPU increased from $13.7 in Q4 2015 to $19.81 in Q4 2016 [1].

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/01/facebook-q4-2016-earnings/

[murukesh_s]

That is due to the mobile usage eating into desktop's. Zuckerberg realized it long before us and hence the whatsapp & Instagram acquisitions.

[isomorphic]

As an aside, I added Twitter to that for a sense of scale: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook... (Short version: Facebook dwarfs Twitter.)

However, the "Interest by region" is amusingly topical.

[SirensOfTitan]

Princeton researchers used the same flawed methodology: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/22/facebook-...

[appleflaxen]

This might be the phenomenon by which ubiquitous things become part of the setting rather than the focus/subject.

I've seen the point made with the railroad, and with the internet.

If you look at other tech terms, they are all "declining":

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=mobile,c...

[dosgonlogs]

Nope, not even close. That just shows that people started accessing Facebook through Smartphone apps, where the decline starts is where mobile use exploded.

[jgalt212]

so funny, May 2012 = 100, now = 37. yet over that time frame FB claims to have doubled their monthly active user numbers. something does not add up.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

[onewaystreet]

More like it's become ubiquitous.

[brockvond]

super interesting.

[brockvond]

I unfollowed like 85% of my "friends" on facebook this past year... probably 75% of all the news sources I used to enjoy and left all the groups but the professional ones I still like and because I have FB Messenger... i don't miss any of it and people can message me. I have a youtube sub list and podcasts for "news" and if i wanna see my buddy's feed... i can just go look. It's a void; I'm enjoying meeting people for drinks or meals so much more now. Life is better.

[AznHisoka]

I think one of the most perverse and increasingly popular reasons people are still stubbornly using FB is to look at images of their crushes. nothing more.

[return0]

I am glad facebook exists, to keep all that garbage siloed and away from me. As a non-user, i enjoy a slightly cleaner web.

[brilliantcode]

It's like being invited to a party you didn't want to go to because people were douchey and pleasantly finding out they ditched you to snort cocaine leaving you to enjoy the empty premise catering to your demand for solitude.

[enraged_camel]

The silo leaks quite a bit. Every other website has Facebook logins and Facebook comment threads, or screenshots of conversations from Facebook. It's pretty bad.

[routelastresort]

Check out Fanboy lists for uBlock Origin: https://www.fanboy.co.nz/

Also, there are several extensions specifically for blocking social media tracking, which also block comment sections (and you can still go directly to Facebook)

[marchenko]

Unfortunately, the silo leaks sentient radioactive waste that follows you home and rifles through your mail and personal effects for saleable data. And it may be making your neighbors in the silo slightly ill.

[astrodust]

We can just call it the "alternate-web".

[westiseast]

Fake web.

[puranjay]

Imagine memes on Hacker News.

[darpa_escapee]

Today's Facebook experience feels like the 1998 AOL silo if it had a 'Friends' keyword.

[MrDosu]

I deleted my Facebook account when I started tracking my time for productivity reasons. For me it was a MASSIVE destruction of man hours just idling around reading nonsense. Against my worries meaningful social interactions haven't suffered and I still keep in touch with people all over the world...

[paulpauper]

have we reached 'peak car' 'peak operating system' yet or 'peak computer'? I think Facebook is going to be with us for a very long time and will continue to thrive. Yeah, the comments and posts suck sometimes (I don't use it) but hundreds of millions are addicted to it.

[dredmorbius]

We've seen a number of peaks, at least on a temporary basis.

"Peak air travel" by aircraft departures occurred in 2001, and by total passenger miles, I believe hit around 2007. There's some wiggling around that, in that load factors and seat pitches allow for aircraft to carry more passenger miles on average. But the US DOT's 2000 forecasts for aviation fuel were high by a factor of 50% or so for ~2013. (I've not checked the data since.)

"Peak car", by passenger miles driven seems to have hit much of the US also around the 2007-8 financial crisis. But if you look at underlying trends, as early as 1990 or thereabouts ownership and miles driven were softening markedly particularly in the Pacific Northwest.

"Peak Computer", in terms of traditional desktop (and laptop) sales is well behind us. Mid-to-late 2000s IIRC. Several factors at play, including market saturation, a stagnation in computer capabilities (CPU speed, RAM, disk, and a bunch of other factors have more-or-less been in a holding pattern, though energy usage has fallen markedly), and the increased convenience of the Internet in your pocket making mobile devices far more attractive. We may be seeing backlash to that (security, privacy, burnout, etc.). There remains the point that computing devices are fundamentally difficult for much of the population to use.

Social networks can grow quickly, but also crash with devastating speed. Understanding just what it is which makes them attractive ... and unattractive ... is a key point to understanding their strength. Or weakness.

[autokad]

yeah, myspace, friendster, digg

[FabHK]

orkut

[nosuchthing]

Users migrated to Facebook from other popular social networks.. it doesn't take much to gain critical mass

[paulpauper]

Some migrated from Myspace and other networks, but Facebook was able to capture the invaluable older demographic who had never used social networking before and are less inclined to switch. Facebook was able revolutionize communication much in the same way the car did for transportation.

[gaius]

Facebook was able to capture the invaluable older demographic

Yes and no. It captured people while they were 20-somethings and has so far managed to hold onto many of them into their 30s and even 40s via its networking effect. But the last thing the next generation want to use is something that the previous generation used. So it's a blessing and a curse.

[dredmorbius]

Largely by being "The Harvard Network". A point I've long made, and recently discoverd that dana boyd has hammered as well.

Facebook is no longer Harvard.

[mtgx]

Facebook is not an industry. It's a product in an industry.

A similar question would read "Have we reached peak AOL?" or "Have we reached peak Windows?"

[astrodust]

Peak AOL happened a while back, and peak Windows has already happened, it's getting murdered by non-PC devices.

Anything can peak, products and industries alike.

[nibs]

All my friends, immediate and extended family communicate over Signal. <50% use Facebook, login once a week and are horrified by the posts, log back out. We are probably not typical users of technology, but Signal is our core communication tool now.

[kristianc]

It's probably now worth thinking about Facebook more as a giant advertising VC house more than as 'Facebook.com'.

Facebook's main asset is its social graph and cross device map, which only Google currently has anything comparable too.

Any time a new type of app, ad unit or social trend becomes popular (group chat replacing FB groups for instance), they will buy it before it gets traction. Instagram has a much nicer ad unit format than Facebook, and appeals to a more upscale audience.

[onewaystreet]

> Have the social network aspects of Facebook been destroyed by fatigue

Combating this is partly why Facebook bought WhatsApp and spun out Messenger into its own app.

[paulpauper]

Facebook is so big it can just buy anything that competes with it ,but Whats App may be too big

[igniteflow]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it owns WhatsApp

[kayoone]

FB aquired WhatsApp in 2014 for 19Bn. WeChat however, could be too big for anyone of the US giants to swallow.

[RugnirViking]

Considering I have yet to hear of WeChat, I doubt that.

[paulpauper]

meant snapchat is too big