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by JesseAldridge 2481 days ago
> My little brother is 16 and I know he won't use this because no one he knows uses Facebook.

Is this really true? I heard from someone at Facebook that while teenagers say they don't use Facebook, if you look at the stats, they definitely do.
3 comments
adjkant 2480 days ago
Very true in my experience. While many (maybe 60%) still have an account, they basically do nothing with it. If you're a Facebook employee you may see that number of signups number and go "yeah they are using it" but the amount of use is VERY different from what I can tell.

Generally I'm very in agreement with the parent: The older won't want to use Facebook for dating, the younger would never look to Facebook.

That said, I'd go even farther and say the original claims are offbase here. First, teens absolutely have multiple personas they show, but they tend to be privacy circle based in that there are maybe 3/4 levels and they share increasingly more/less with each level.

Not only that, Facebook knows this. Instagram launched "close friends" explicitly because everyone was using "sinstas" and "finstas" to post to a smaller subset of people.

To me, all of this says that Facebook is probably targeting an older market of maybe say Match/OkCupid users who aren't used to a type of Hinge style interface. Anyone I know on Hinge would laugh you out of the room if you asked them to switch to Facebook dating.

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NoodleIncident 2480 days ago
> number of signups

Definitely not. DAU and MAU are what they base their user numbers and big milestones on

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adjkant 2480 days ago
Wrong verbiage, point still stands. Probably a decent number of MAU on Facebook in that range but logging in and checking one thing twice a month is a big usage difference from daily or semi daily sessions that last for minutes, not seconds.
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input_sh 2480 days ago
"Active" there means opened, not actively consumed. I'm "active" almost every day, but the majority of my sessions are below 20 seconds. They mean nothing to Facebook, and they mean nothing to me. Facebook lost the value it had for me.
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jedberg 2481 days ago
Another anecdata, but our kid's babysitter (also 16) doesn't have a Facebook account, and neither does her twin sister. They both have IG and Snap though. She said the same thing: "Facebook is for old people".

Also my 20 year old cousin didn't have a FB account until he went to college and was forced to get one to join some local FB groups. But he only uses it for that. Otherwise he's on IG and Snap.

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8ytecoder 2481 days ago
They use FB Messenger for sure. From what I hear it's still popular among younger cohorts.
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