I would also be interested in seeing what is happening with activity per user, not just estimates of the total numbers of accounts. My own sense, admittedly largely impressionistic based on what I see among my friends, is that many account have 'gone dark' in that users are no longer logging in, or log in occasionally to check out what their friends are doing but almost never post anything themselves. Right now out of well over two hundred people on my list of friends, I would guess that not more than a dozen or two are active users, and there may be a few more dozen who post something every once in a while, and that the rest are dormant, either because they no longer log in, or because they log in but no longer post.
My own thought is that along with Facebook's well-known and really annoying penchant for adding new features that abruptly release personal information and require tinkering with privacy controls to reign back in, another key problem is that the user experience is largely unmanageable. Facebook's interface seems designed to pressure use to share everything with everyone, and connect with everybody.
I am sure that people would like and use more frequently a service that made it easy to compartmentalize their online presence, sharing some things with colleagues at work, other things with family, other things with classmates, and so forth. Basically, Facebook makes it too difficult to direct status updates or shares to particular groups of friends, and segregate these different groups from each other. While it offers the ability to create lists of friends, those lists are not very useful. At some point in the past I took advantage of the ability to create lists of friends defined by how I knew them, for example, high school classmates, college classmates, and so forth, but right now from a practical standpoint those lists are almost useless. At the web page interface, directing an update to friends on a particular list requires several clicks: first the little padlock, then Custom, then I have to enter the name of the list, then click on specific people, then type the first few characters of the list. And the mobile app doesn't allow any selection of friend lists at all.
I wonder how many people find themselves in the same situation as I am, where there are things they would like to share with particular groups of friends, as they have defined them on lists, but the process for doing so is so cumbersome that they simply don't bother, and restrict themselves to posting only the most innocuous of updates about the weather, a sandwich they just ate, or the price of gas. I often see news articles or videos or other websites I would like to share with specific sets of friends, but I shudder at how cumbersome the process is, and don't even bother.
I would like to be able to designate a small number of my lists as favorites for sharing, for example, "Work", "Family", "College Classmates" so that they would show up immediately when I click on the padlock, along with existing choices like "Everyone" "Friends" "Friends of Friends" etc. This would give me finer control over who I share what with, and make me more likely to update my status. Along these lines, it no longer seems possible, or at least easy, to specify which friends apps share information with.
Along these lines, once I have defined subsets of friends, I would like to be able to click on the name of the list and see a feed based on the updates from people on that list, with a default that if I post any updates while in that view, they will be visible only to the friends in that list. I could have sworn there used to be a feature like this, whereby I could look at updates only for friends on a particular list, but that seems to have disappeared.
Facebook seems to offer a partial remedy with its groups feature, but the drawback of that is that it requires people to join a group. I really don't want to run around organizing groups. I would just like to be able to broadcast to selected subsets of friends, without worrying whether they are in a group or not.
Another admittedly petty annoyance that I have with Facebook is that its People You Might Know feature doesn't have a "No" button that I can click, and will prevent that person from ever being suggested again without actually blocking them. I gave up using the People You Might Know quite a while ago because every time I saw it, I had to wade through a long list of people I didn't recognize, or who I really had no interest in, before I came across someone that I actually wanted to friend. I found that I can prevent people from being suggested by blocking them, but that is a cumbersome procedure. I can't for the life of me figure out why they don't offer a feature like this, since presumably it would increase the efficiency of help them train their algorithms. LinkedIn has a feature like this and it makes the People You May Know feature there much more useful. I can plow through the list of people every once in a while and cull out the people I don't know, so at any given time the new people it is suggesting are more likely to be people I actually know. This is related to my general complaint about the Facebook user interface being unmanageable, and aimed at getting everyone to connect with everyone. Why keep suggesting the same people to me if I have passed them over dozens of times already?
Oh well. I guess I'll stick with Facebook until something better comes along, but in the meantime, update less often. I really think they would be well-served by imposing a moratorium on adding new features, and back up and spend some time cleaning up the user interface to make it easier to compartmentalize our presence.
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