Facebook tanked yesterday on the stock exchange, Twitter following suit today after confirming a decline in user figures (I guess that's what happens when you indiscriminately ban people ). Is this the beginning of the end for the social media giants? Are people's habits changing? Only anecdotal, but on the rare occasions I do log into Facebook these days I find that there aren't that many posts made by my friends and that my timeline is just full of random stuff - adverts, posts made by friends of friends etc. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Twitter Shares Plunge 17% as Monthly Users Decline
Over $119bn wiped off Facebook's market cap after growth shock

Hallelujah!

it was hideously over valued so you could just say its a normal market correction

If Facebook would just stop pissing about with their algorithms, maybe fewer people would abandon it?

I see two main risks for any kind of social media:
1. Stronger focus on data privacy, both in terms of legislation like GDPR but also increased privacy consciousness in society, including people's awareness that they are actually the product instead of the client.
2. for the algorithms, the balance on the thin line between censorship and filtering out truly bad stuff (whatever that might be) while protecting freedom of speech

Facebook doesn't do really well in both areas and will be doomed to fail in the long term.

We will be seeing more FB fans shortly, looking for more unsanitised platforms (with more viewpoint diversity).

No sympathy for the suckers who signed up for it tbh.

Who cares about viewpoint diversity?

The truth is that FB has become very hard to abandon and while I see the occasional person leaving it... its way too practical and there is honestly no comparable alternative (except of WeChat in one single market on the planet). With practical I mean:
- a lot of social events, restaurants and everything not corporate lives exclusively on Facebook. Because creating and promoting and event or a small business there is easier than doing a whole website.
- a lot of websites use "log in with facebook" as the easier choice to have another 500 accounts on some ecommerce website you only ever buy something once...
- I have lived in a couple of countries and I love to stay in contact with people I do not see every day or even year. Before FB would I simply lose the contact to somebody who moves as often as I did.


That's just the most obvious ones...


Bottom line: GDPR rightfully pisses right into FBs business model. That must hurt and it should, because their business model is ridiculous. But they still have a huge potential for advertisers and are there to stay... even if they collect a little less data. If FB would do a bit better in their PR and react a little better to the critics... they could have dropped way less than they did.

they won't be folding anytime soon, recently been trying to get sponsorship from companies for our group, first thing they wanted to know was how many instagram followers we had, what was our facebook page etc

Easy come easy go... anyone remember MySpace??

I’m still probably one of the few people without a Twitter account. I don’t see the need for having one and probably will never have one.

Same here.

Of course Facebook can‘t expand forever and along will come the `next big thing`- as it will - and FB will go the way of `Freinds Reunited`.

Today‘s Social Media Giants will fall to the sling of a new David. (Wow that was kinda poetic.)

I don't think so. Their data is worth billions and targeted ads will remain a thing. So if people for whatever reason use less of the original social network will they use their financial power to buy stuff that helps them to collect more information on people. Lets say a popular messaging app like WhatsApp, or some photosharing service like instagramm. The network is not the core of the business... its just the tool to collect user data. The actual business is to sell advertisement. Not just within Facebook but anywhere online.

It will go up again, its not the first time this happens... one way or the other they will drag back the people...

FB will die of low traffic, because it slows their data harvest. Old data is good for sh... for nothing. FB only lives off new data so it can stir attention to current advertisers. Internet heros, echo chambers and stalking friends and family is starting to bore people, so traffic slows. I know it is not as extreme but people's interest in entertainment is fickle, you can only pay so much attention to so much drama..

Drama? What kind of shite are you following on Facebook?

I get linguistics memes, holiday photographs and pictures of bookshelves. There's more drama in our kitchen at breakfast time than I get on Facebook!

How?

Memes?

Communication is a basic human need. The tools change, the need stays the same. The current big tech players have an unbelievable amount of cash, we are talking about comparable levels of the total economy the British East India corporation had in its best time... no matter what the next tools will be, the current guys can buy them. In the past did big companies often make the mistake to not predict the future well. So far did Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft everything to not prevent new tools to emerge but to simply buy stuff up and control them. Just think of how disruptive some start up called Skype once was and what it is today...

I'd think Skype is out of fashion, my vid conferences are on Zoom. I can't picture FB attention engineers failing to predict/control traffic so much that it tanked so much these past few days, FB also got a really big fine a week ago or so, I forgot why. I don't think it is just the recent data protection business doing it. People need privacy, FB doesn't really give it, when you think about it. Insta livestyles...gets old? Oversaturation?