Why is Facebook still so insanely popular?

I live in a rural community. Facebook has more or less replaced the web here.

Businesses post their hours, specials, and information on Facebook. Some of them don't have websites. The rec centre has a hard time keeping their website up to date, but the Facebook group is always accurate. Newspapers have closed down, so a Facebook group keeps people apprised of what's going on (it seems to be pretty accurate, since everyone in town is part of it, people involved in events chime in). Kids and adults sports groups advertise and tell their members what's going on via Facebook groups.

It's a shitty medium, since the Facebook algorithm mixes trash advertisements with town-specific events, but it seems to suffice for the town's needs.

I suspect it isn't just my town. The network effect is strong, so I suspect there are niche communities where Facebook is verging on ubiquitous.

I have never been a Facebook user so I'm mostly guessing.

But I think there was a heyday where people spent a great deal of time on there.

Now they don't. They just log on when it's needed to get ahold of someone or check a specific niche community.

Thus it's dying because the ad revenue is way down. It's in decline not because it lacks users, but because they no longer spend hours there.

A lot of users are also from poorer countries that lack the means to create their own web infrastructure. Using Facebook to run your business account is easier, cheaper, and more reliable than most alternatives there. Phone carriers and ISP often also have "free"-data for certain social media platforms. You get 1GB+1GB for Facebook/IG/YT/Some Game. So you are stuck in this loop where everything reinforces itself to use Facebook.

1. It’s established
2. It is a general purpose platform: it has personal posting, business listings, messaging, groups, communities, photos, news, clip format video, live streaming, p2p sales, business sales, event coordination and advertising, payment processing and cash sharing, games…
   Most other platforms do one or several of those things much better than FB, but FB is good enough for lots of people. It’s a one stop shop, and it does a fair job at cross pollinating the various aspects of its platform. It has enough stuff to keep to keep users engaged even if their interest wanes from one or more particular platform components.

Many overseas countries have Facebook preloaded on a lot of their phones. They also have data caps but Facebook is exempt from counting towards their data cap.

Facebook was extremely aggressive in getting their software preloaded on all hardware sold in developing areas over the last 20 years. So countries like India (with one and a half billion people by itself) have a large segment of users that think Facebook is the internet. It's Zucks ultimate walled garden.

3 billion of those people likely access Facebook for everything that we think of as online. Commerce, social networking, music, videos, it's all on Facebook.

Marketplace and local groups for the tea.

Lotta people keep Facebook for the marketplace.

Also, a lot of scammers make accounts to use for the marketplace.

The marketplace fluffs the numbers.

Hobby groups. Marketplace. Business page for companies. Everything except its original purpose of keeping up with the lives of your real life friends.

It's dying in the sense that no Millenials really uses Facebook the same way we did as when it first started, and most Gen Z would treat having a Facebook page to be a completely alien concept.

People moved on.

There are plenty of people for whom Facebook may as well be the entire Internet. Not just demographic groups but entire countries. It's definitely in decline with the demographic that uses Reddit, Lemmy, and discord -- but several billion average users don't disappear overnight

Because people have those family members who insist on doing everything on Facebook Messenger, and that Signal or even fucking Whatsapp is too fiddly for them. So everyone ends up with the lowest common piece of shit network, and it counts them as active users whether they actually use it or not and just happens to be checking for messages in the background.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I finally deleted mine the other day. No goodbyes, no fanfare, just dumped it like the garbage it is. No regrets.

In most of developing countries (Africa and SEA) is free and dosnt require an active internet connection, so literally everyone with an old phone has access to it

And even better question is why people still treat the twelfth most popular social media platform like it's an indispensable town square?

I live in Morocco. I keep leaving Facebook for months but I end up going back there even though I don't like it at all. The reason is that all the people I know and all local content is available only through Facebook. There are hardly any Moroccans on the Fediverse, I've only seen like one other person in all my years of using Mastodon. If I wanna see what's going on in the country, the city and anything related to the region then I am obliged to be on Facebook. I suppose this is the case with most developing and non-english speaking countries.

People don't use Facebook, hence you find them on other platforms. They may be thinking that if they don't use it, then nobody does.

But you also have to consider where these people live. It might be "dying" there, while Facebook is getting new users in other markets. I remember watching a video about genocide in Myanmar and the role that Facebook played. Access to Facebook was free if I recall correctly, it was the internet for most people.

It'd be interesting to see data by country.

I still have it because it's still the easiest and most convenient way to message people that you've just met. There's a sort of snowball effect in which having lots of people incentives even more people to stay on the platform. Nobody I know actually uses Facebook as a social media site - they only use it for Messenger.

Although, I've found that more and more people are starting to use SMS as their first choice rather than Messenger

It IS dying, but for the youth. And I'd even say "for the youth that resembles mine"

Yeah - I do find it odd when people say Facebook is dying, because it really isn't. Unless Zuckerberg pulls a Musk anytime soon, it isn't going anywhere - unlike Xitter, Facebook is an advertising juggernaught that makes more than enough money to keep itself afloat.

And that's not even mentioning Facebook groups, news pages, business pages, the market place, etc.. they've got fingers in many different pies, and it shows.

And even more, while it may not be popular amongst tech savvy folks, it is still insanely popular amongst regular folks. I for one can vouch that a significant proportion of my non-techy friends use either it or Instagram as their primary social media.

Hell, that's why messenger is up there too - everyone has Facebook, so everyone has messenger, making it extremely convenient to message people you know. It's certainly why I use it a lot, it's where my friends are.

Meta dominates social media even now - just look at your list. Of the top seven, over half of them are Meta.

I notice Reddit isn't in that list

Old people

It's probably because people on Discord and Reddit aren't fully reflective of the wider world population.

The same goes for Twitter. It's losing users, but there are still lots of them.

They're popular because they offer something to its users. It's truly as simple as that.

I don't use it, but I would assume because if the people you know are on it, leaving it means that you can't talk to them.

Social media is an example of a type of system that benefits from network effect; the value rises as something like the square of the number of users. That is, there's value in using the system because other people use it.

Systems that benefit from network effect are going to be pretty hard to shift people off of.

In practice, it's probably not really the square of users -- most people don't interact with or even have the realistic possibility of interacting with billions of people. But they do interact with "pools" -- not an official term, just something I'm making up here -- of people that might be a subset of that. Some might be friends and associates, the sort of thing that hovers around Dunbar's number, maybe 150. There might be a broader pool of people with similar interests that one might interact fleetingly with, a broader pool that speaks the same language, etc. And once a lot of people in such a "pool" are in a given system, it increases the value to an individual a lot, because those are the people that the system lets them speak to and lets them hear. If you leave for a competing system, you give up connectivity to all the people in that pool.

That creates a collective switching barrier, and a potent one. The point of social media is to communicate; if nobody else uses it, it has essentially zero value.

There's also an individual switching barrier created by UI familiarity -- that discourages anyone from using a given system, isn't really specific to social media, but it explains why anyone would tend to want to avoid switching away from a system that they are familiar with, all else held equal.

In the case of social networks like Reddit, a moderator might have built up personal reputation and a userbase for their particular group. I don't know how Facebook group moderation works, but let's say that it works the same way as on Reddit. If you switch to a Facebook alternative, you lose the status, plus the network effect from that particular group. That's another individual switching barrier.

In the case of social networks like Reddit, which use pseudonyms, you accrue reputation associated with a pseudonym. I know a handful of pseudonyms on the Threadiverse that are knowledgeable or trustworthy. That gets zeroed out when you switch a network; people lose both the status and the knowledge of the reputations of others, don't know who to trust. There are ways to deal with that particular one, like having a bot that everyone trusts that tells a new Fediverse account to send a particular random comment, waits for a Reddit account to send a message and then endorses a particular user on the Threadiverse as also being a user on Reddit. But...if you look at the Fediverse today, it doesn't have a mechanism for that. And if people running social media like Facebook or Reddit discovered some kind of process like that, they'd probably have an interest in shutting it down, doing what they could to disrupt that transfer mechanism. That's another individual switching barrier.

The combination of all of these switching barriers makes it pretty tough for someone to leave, and it's one reason why social networks have value -- because you're getting your hands on information about and access to a large userbase that will have a hard time switching away.

I don't actually know if there is some kind of alternative that aims to do the same thing that Facebook does. Reddit isn't it, and Twitter isn't it, though they do do some vaguely-related things. But, okay, let's say that something like that exists.

It's really hard to get a person to switch, because if they do so in isolation, they smash into the switching barrier associated with network effect.

And because you have to have everyone do this at the same time, you have a collective action problem. You propose that everyone switch from Facebook to -- for example -- Fedibook on the Fediverse. If everyone switched concurrently, nobody would hit the barrier to switching from network effect. But...it's hard to convince everyone to do so. Maybe some people are sick or busy that day and don't want to put the time in at the same time. Some people aren't going to want to do it -- they aren't going to want to put in the time to learn a new system and build new workflows around it, maybe learn new client software. It's like switching from Windows to Linux -- someone may have put many years into learning Windows, and that's experience that in part goes away if they switch to Linux; for them, that's a large individual switching barrier. Some percentage of people feel, based on a quick assessment, that the individual switching barriers above dominate, make a switch from Facebook not worthwhile even if they are willing to participate in a mass concurrent switch. Maybe some people think that Fedibook is technically-superior to Facebook and would have used it if each had 0 users and were put side-by-side, but don't want to deal with trying to coordinate a concurrent switch. And because you can't get a simultaneous collective switch going due to those reasons, every individual user thinking about switching is going to face the big collective switching barrier -- being cut off from lots and lots of other people.

Facebook Marketplace, it is literally the only reason I even use it.

There's literally countries in the world where their phone plans don't support Internet access other than Facebook's walled garden.

Once you establish an institutional presence it's hard to lose market share even if your product sucks.

Where lemmy at? Jk

It looks to me like "social media" breaks down into a few categories: Video/image sharing (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Douyin, Kuaishou); Messaging (WhatsApp, WeChat, FB Messenger, Telegram, Snapchat, QQ); Microblogging (Twitter, Weibo); and tangled fog of pulsating yearning (Pinterest).

Then, there's Facebook, which defies easy categorization. It does all of the above, plus more. It's how people maintain loose connections with other people that they may not talk to every day. What is its competition? Basically, I think it remains popular because it's the default, nothing else can replace it.

Because non technically savvy people get comfortable and it's always difficult to get them to move, so everyone who wants to change, can't because they end up alone and social media only works if you have people to be social with. Younger people will have the same problem with TikTok and the like when their friends age and they want to move. Only new generations start with a clean slate and can get all their friends to start out at the new sites.

3 billion monthly active sure sounds a little excessive. I wonder if there's some shenanigans going on, combining other facebook's services.

A while back I remember hearing "dying" was only accurate in the West, but that was a matter of years ago so it may or may not still be true.

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

This says nothing about how much they use reach platform though. Just logging into Facebook and checking what's up over a month will count here.

People don't really delete their facebook account. Just keep it around. And at one point I'm pretty sure everyone had an account.

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

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

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

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

Because that is where the regular people are and I for one won't be bothered to try convince them otherwise because I know it is futile. I'll just check in every now and then to keep in touch with them and that's why I'm still there.

It fulfils roles as

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

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

elder people

Yeah, not surprised at all. I know many people for whom Facebook is 90% of their internet usage, and some people I know use the words 'Facebook' and 'internet' interchangeably. Personally, I deleted my account well over a decade ago.

I wonder if we could see how many new users each year (without bots), I'd wager their growth is pretty stagnant because they already have so many users that nearly every person has an account.

A significant number of those are not from the USA.

There are billions of morons?