Very true in my experience. While many (maybe 60%) still have an account, they basically do nothing with it. If you're a Facebook employee you may see that number of signups number and go "yeah they are using it" but the amount of use is VERY different from what I can tell.

Generally I'm very in agreement with the parent: The older won't want to use Facebook for dating, the younger would never look to Facebook.

That said, I'd go even farther and say the original claims are offbase here. First, teens absolutely have multiple personas they show, but they tend to be privacy circle based in that there are maybe 3/4 levels and they share increasingly more/less with each level.

Not only that, Facebook knows this. Instagram launched "close friends" explicitly because everyone was using "sinstas" and "finstas" to post to a smaller subset of people.

To me, all of this says that Facebook is probably targeting an older market of maybe say Match/OkCupid users who aren't used to a type of Hinge style interface. Anyone I know on Hinge would laugh you out of the room if you asked them to switch to Facebook dating.

Another anecdata, but our kid's babysitter (also 16) doesn't have a Facebook account, and neither does her twin sister. They both have IG and Snap though. She said the same thing: "Facebook is for old people".

Also my 20 year old cousin didn't have a FB account until he went to college and was forced to get one to join some local FB groups. But he only uses it for that. Otherwise he's on IG and Snap.

They use FB Messenger for sure. From what I hear it's still popular among younger cohorts.

My comment was specifically about Facebook.com and acknowledged that younger users are moving to instagram. I didn't say younger people are leaving all Facebook-owned subsidiaries.

Similarly, I referenced my circle of friends—who are not hacker news people—as not using Facebook either.

Which is why I shared the opinions and behaviours of my brother, who is 16. He's that next generation.