This is how one Reddit user told it:

In New Zealand, the number of Facebook users has stayed the same over the last 3 months. 13-15 years olds are leaving at the same rate as their parents are joining.

It’s a perfect encapsulation of children’s eternal struggle to escape their parents. While the stat is not completely true, no one will remember the truth once it hits the front pages of Reddit.

Facebook is in an interesting situation. Over the past few months we’ve heard the latest news of Facebook numbers declining in Canada and the US. But what are the underlying social demands which are causing teens to leave their newsfeed?

A few social trends which have been on the boil have risen to the surface in the past few months:

1. Care factor: zero

Thanks to Facebook, we now know how much we don’t really care about a lot of incidental moments in our friends’ lives. Combined with Facebook’s increased advertising push (which I’ve written about in the past), it seems that people are really starting to glaze over when it comes to Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg has announced some changes to the newsfeed, which I think will have some interesting results when it is entirely rolled out. Zuckerberg is shifting pages we Like to a seperate newsfeed, so that we have one newfeed for our friends, and one for content.

He said, “What we’re trying to do is give everyone in the world the best personalised newspaper we can.”

However, I think this aim of this is to keep people in Facebook, once they’ve grown bored with their friends updates, they switch to the ‘newspaper’ aspect of Facebook to be entertained by content, engagements and news from this alternate feed.

For a lot of teens and adults suffering Facebook fatigue, it is too little too late. Most have already switched to other sources for these micro-entertainment purposes, like Twitter, Tumblr and Reddit.

On top of this, where this new system has rolled out on Facebook for mobile devices, they have done very little to promote framing it in the Zuckerberg describes. Most users would probably not notice brands and pages having slipped off their newsfeed, or if they did, they wouldn’t know how to find it. When I found my feed of pages, it was very much in need of heavy pruning – which was a huge turn off right from the outset.

2. Stop stalking me

The other trend which has been on the rise is micro social networks, or niche social networks. These are private social networks of a handful of people, who have discussions about whatever they want in that space.

For teens, this trend couples with the rise of mobiles, where mobile apps like SnapChat and WhatsApp are the environments where teens are shifting to for their conversations. These apps create the privacy that networks like Facebook don’t have, especially when conversations on Facebook can be viewed by hundreds of acquaintances (and the ‘rentals).

These niche networks are very simple, but meet a core need of online communication, while cutting out the content or entertainment aspect which many social networks thread into their design.

3. What’s in a name?

For Gen Y, one of the most exciting parts of being a teen was anonymity online. There was the opportunity to push boundaries, create, explore and grow. It was a place to trashtalk, ask questions you never dared to in person and  you could wreak havoc without doing any real damage and it was all part of finding yourself. It was messy and chaotic – but something you learnt from which you could apply to the real world.

For the iGeneration, their first exposure to the internet is connected to their real name. With their real phone number. With their real friends. And very real parents.

I think that teenagers are curious to explore the side of the internet where they can stumble around, trash talk, push some buttons and learn about life. I think part of the appeal of when teens enter into the world of Tumblr, Reddit and Twitter is that they can be anonymous and play out other parts of themselves which they cannot in environments tied to their real-world connections.

As for whether Reddit wants to be this environment, that is a whole other kettle of fish….

So where does that leave us?

Some teens are leaving Facebook for a whole variety of factors, but for many teens, Facebook will still be a huge part of their life for many years.

For the older generation who are less willing to explore other social networks or other platforms to create content, we may see that Facebook becomes an environment which is predominately for users above the age of 40, rather than the youth-oriented network it was initially established as.

What do you think? What are the key reasons teens are leaving Facebook – and will Facebook fall because all the cool kids have left?

For nearly a decade, Facebook has been the dominant social network in most of our lives, with the rise and fall of a social network usually only happening on the fringes of the internet. For this reason, most of us haven’t really experienced the loss of a social network. However, I think it’s time we began talking about the loss of social networks, and how they impact us.

Let’s imagine that your local rollerskating club that meets every Tuesday is thrown into disarray because the only rollerskating rink in town is shut down. You try moving the group to a park, but only some people turn up.  One by one people drop off. And then your Tuesday becomes Macaroni and Cheese night curled up with an Agatha Christie novel. The loss of a real-world community is genuinely heartbreaking, and the loss of a community, in the same way as breaking up with a friend, is rarely discussed.

Social media communities are a real community. When a social network closes down, in this example the rollerskating rink, that community is lost. One of the hardest parts, I believe, is actually talking about this loss with people, because it’s easy have it brushed off with ‘it’s just a website’.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen networks like  Google Wave shut down,  Google Buzz shut down, Myspace relaunched (stripping all your old contacts and communities) and Posterous is about to wind down, too. Over the past decade, I suspect countless online forums have also closed. Those communities that are lost are spaces where those that inhabit it daily share their lives, loves and fears with friends who have been met in person and those communicated with online only.

The loss of a social network also means the breakdown of an entire support network for those people that use it. And it’s really tough to regain that community in a new space – especially when that community formed around the way that space functions (for example, the way that forums frame long-form dialogue is really hard to come by on other spaces).

It feels particularly cruel when you know that when a social network is downsized, it is usually due to a strict number-crunching process of a business stripping off the fat. The fact that we have no control over whether these spaces live or die can be incredibly frustrating when it is announced that these spaces are shutting down – and there’s nothing we can do about it.

In the end, we cannot control when social networks make big decisions which affect our lives like this, but we can certainly begin talking about it more.

For a few years now there have been members of the online space who have predicted Facebook’s downfall. Maybe it’s part of Australia’s tall-poppy syndrome – how can one company stay top dog for so long; or maybe it’s because the fall of Rome has set a precedent. We’ve seen the establishment of rival social networks in an attempt to capitalise on this shift from Facebook, such as Diaspora and App.net, but as of yet with little traction – people still, day in, day out, use Facebook.

Over the past month Facebook has made some changes to it’s Edgerank algorithm, which affects the way that news stories are served to people based on their interactions with them, which has affected brands, and, for the first time, consumers. These are two different activities around sponsored stories which are frustrating users of Facebook which might be the first steps toward a movement away from Facebook.

There have been several articles which discuss Facebook’s Edgerank changes for brands: in short, historically, when a Fan page made a post, only about 20% of fans saw those posts. In the past few weeks, Community Managers have noticed that posts which should have reached a wider audience are reaching a lot less. Like 5% – 12%.

Facebook claims that this that this is to separate ‘the boys from the men’, to ensure that fans receive the updates which are most engaging and relevant to them, not simply Likebaiting. If a post has more likes and comments, it will increase the exposure of that post. The theory is that we must work hard to create engaging content which is most relevant to fans – which sounds fair enough. But what if the content which was engaging fans last month now simply isn’t reaching fans for them to interact?

For those with the freedom to increase their marketing spend, the simple answer is that Facebook has created the ability for each post to be sponsored to reach a greater number of fans. So in order to reach the amount of people which we organically reached a month ago, we now need to pay.

Smaller businesses have been effectively priced out of the market and it’s a wonder they don’t turn to other social networks which they have been cultivating which have the same if not greater exposure without having to pay per post. However, we are still in the hands of a third-party site, being completely disempowered as the web underclass with no control of the platform which we’re on.

Those who have been lucky enough to have marketing budget to spend on Facebook, have been suffering the ramifications of their sponsored stories turning up un newsfeeds of not just their fans, but of average users. It’s being branded as spam – which is a damning association for a brand to have.

Facebook advertising has often been accepted by users because it’s either in the sidebar, unobtrusive, or opt-in, such as Liking a Fan Page. When posts are shared because a friend interacts with it, this was also understood – it is the action of someone you know, not a brand. However, now advertising on the newsfeed is not opt-in, Community Managers are now dealing with huge volumes of rage directed at their company because they are ‘spamming their newsfeed’.

Sponsored Stories are the only form of advertising currently on Facebook Mobile, so browsing the newsfeed on mobile means that suggested pages and sponsored posts feel like they flood the feed. Of Facebook’s 1 billion users, 604 million access Facebook on a mobile device. With a large number of people using mobile as their core access of Facebook, it’s easy to see why ads in the newsfeed are becoming a point of frustration.

Irrespective of whether both advertisers and consumers become frustrated with Facebook’s new advertising model, there seems to be no alternative social networks to turn to – although Google Plus is making traction as a viable alternative.

As to whether these changes will entice people to shift to other networks or simply abandon social networking because they’ve lost faith in social networks as a whole is yet to be seen.

On the other weekend I saw an adorable anime called Arriety – an interpretation of The Borrowers, which you may know from the books, or the terrible John Goodman film from the 90s. The premise of the story is that little people, smaller than our thumb, borrow items which are discarded about our homes – a cube of sugar, a pin, a millimetre of sticky tape. The culture of ‘borrowing’ in Arriety would be seen by others as theft – but these items which are taken are pieces which are unnoticed and are morphed into something for a whole new use. A pin becomes a sword, a match becomes a lantern, sticky tape gives you spiderman hands.

I’d like to talk about borrowing and how our culture uses digital media to feed, recycle and create. Our online culture has become one of borrowing – we piggyback off information, creations, words and stories which are already on the web. Sometimes we reference these sources, with a nifty little hyperlink, but often we don’t – there is simply no way of sourcing the origin of a meme.

No longer is the dominant form of communication on the web static pages written by individuals – whether these be journalists or bloggers. The internet seems like was built on the premise of linking an encyclopaedia – that one person would create a lengthy piece of information, and to link to other sources using hyperlinks. However, today, we source our stories and entertainment from across the web – our jokes are memes pulled from a pastiche of sources as they evolve, we torrent movies from someone anonymous on the otherside of the globe. This is our culture – we borrow.

The internet today is community driven, community written and exists by a mass of voices coming together. The most popular platforms on the web – Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia – are written by millions of voices.

Should we be creating a new kind of internet which tags information in a new way, since our culture is now one of borrowers?

Could we consider building an internet where we don’t need to hyperlink information, but it is already tagged, so that when we share it, or edit it, we can always trace the original source? Could we keep the functionality, the simplicity of the web, but add a means to source and attribute original authours? Whether this is finding the original creator of a meme, an original tweet, or tracking down a production company and sending them a few dollars for a series we’ve torrented – could there be a new way to tag data to reflect our new use of the internet?

With new cloud-based services and operating systems (I’m looking at you Google Chrome) could this be facilitated more easily? Is there a need for this?

I’m not hearing people protesting in the streets for this – but I wonder if this is a tool which this new kind of internet needs – a way of mapping the travel of information or sources as it morphs from place to place.

What do you think? Is it time to update the internet? Afterall, the internet was conceived and constructed over 50 years ago – along with video tapes, super glue and Mr Potato Head.