I honestly think that Facebook has gone backwards pretty quickly over the last few years. I'm not sure what their internal metrics look like, but I would hazard a guess and say that long term users tend to spend far less time on the site as the years pass.
Anecdotally, most of the people I know are looking for an excuse to stop using Facebook because they no longer enjoy browsing the site, but they are locked in because people use it for event planning and they have a fear of missing out.
I think the site can continue to rely on these kinds of network effects to keep users active and signing in, but whether it keeps the company insulated from competition or profitable with users spending enough minutes on the site is another question entirely.
I agree with your sentiments. It's actually completely broken for my uses now. The only use it has for me is looking at things my friends have been up to - photos, updates, that sort of thing.
But now the weird algorithm they have gets it completely wrong. I get treated to an endless feed list of stupid cat photos from someone I haven't spoken to since high school, and yet a close friend posts a picture of them with the kids at the beach and it never shows up, probably because they only post once per month.
I try and click 'most recent' for my feed and then the dates get inverted and I end up seeing something posted a month ago.
Notwithstanding all the inserted sponsored stories (whatever, I get that they need to pay the bills), the fact that the newsfeed isn't any longer a newsfeed, but an algorithmically curated list of what it thinks I might like means that it has become useless and unreliable. Sure I can probably tweak settings to get it to work again, but why not just have it the way it was?
I check it less and less and I will probably drop off altogether in the next year or so. The network effect can work in reverse - if none of your friends are using it any longer, there is less incentive to use it yourself.
I much prefer Twitter as it is right now - it just shows your feed and it's up to you to add/remove people who contribute to your feed. Add some simple innovations to Twitter like an easy way to make a group of followers private for tweets, and the ability to load albums rather than single photos for tweets, and it would completely replace Facebook for my personal use.
The other problem Facebook faces is like that of any fashion label, movie franchise or performer - becoming old hat. There will become a point where Facebook is something that your parents use, and therefore to be avoided at all costs. But when the parents feel like using it less, and the kids won't go there, I can see lots of trouble heading down the pike.
To quote Mark Zuckerberg 'what we found is that users hate making lists'.
The problem is not that one person posts too much spam - it's that I don't ever get to see other peoples posts at all. I don't want to have to make a list of my 'important friends'. I want to see it all, I can easily work the scroll bar to get past the bits I don't want to see.
Anecdotally, most of the people I know are looking for an excuse to stop using Facebook because they no longer enjoy browsing the site, but they are locked in because people use it for event planning and they have a fear of missing out.
I think the site can continue to rely on these kinds of network effects to keep users active and signing in, but whether it keeps the company insulated from competition or profitable with users spending enough minutes on the site is another question entirely.