I'm not sure losing that age group has much to do with Facebook's scandals.
This is purely anecdotal, but with my daughter and her social group, Facebook stopped being a service of interest to them quite a while back. Not because of data issues, but because (to use my daughter's words) "Facebook is for businesses and old people".
Oh yeah definitely, it's got nothing to do with privacy, it's just not a platform geared towards younger people, because it's a platform that caters to older people.
Kids these days don't give a shit about privacy. Why would they?
> Kids these days don't give a shit about privacy.
I'm not so sure that's true. At least, it's not true among the kids that I personally know.
What is true is that they have a more pragmatic view of the issue than us oldsters -- they view it as more like a monetary exchange: they understand and care about privacy, but they're willing to pay for a service by giving some of it up if they think the value they're receiving justifies it.
That's not the same as not caring. Just the opposite, it's caring enough to make conscious decisions about how to valuate it.
The kids I know (my teenage siblings) genuinely don't give a shit, and neither do their friends, or their friends' friends.
Nor do the many many kids on YouTube or Twitch.
Not a single one of the children I just mentioned understand, care about, or are willing to pay to keep their privacy, in any form.
And they're right. It doesn't matter, because nothing happens when you lose your privacy on the Internet, not even remotely approaching the risks we take and accept in our daily lives (driving, swimming, walking outside, etc.).
Because their entire history will be a matter of public record, and as we have seen repeatedly over the last few years, a wrong tweet from ten years ago can break an entire career, and I only see this getting worse. The kids who take care of what they expose to the public will spare themselves a lot of potential trouble.
Obviously this should not only be an issue of the kids. In an ideal world parents would be conscious of their kids online behavior.
Not parent, but I am a college student at a large university in the US. Instagram is just huge, for the entire [university] population here. Snapchat is still used but not as common - Instagram is eating up Snapchat's userbase. GroupMe is used by the entire population for group chatting, and many males (especially more 'nerdy' guys) use Discord as the preferred general chat application.
Snapchat is the most annoying platform I have ever experienced for messaging. Disappearing messages (with no option for them to stick around) is literally an anti-feature.
Instagram is just annoying, because it's an image sharing platform being used as a messaging platform. I actually get annoyed when people message me on Instagram, because it means that their messages to me are scattered over different platforms.
Steam? Can you please elaborate, I am getting old I didn't even know steam had a social component. (except people leaving reviews, or posting to game forums about parts of the game)
Steam has a pretty robust messaging system including multi-user rooms and voice chat, etc. They're directly competing with Discord on that front now. There's groups and communities and other social components as well, though I'm not as familiar with those.
This is purely anecdotal, but with my daughter and her social group, Facebook stopped being a service of interest to them quite a while back. Not because of data issues, but because (to use my daughter's words) "Facebook is for businesses and old people".