Facebook’s newest ploy to bring back teen users is a meme app called LOL

Facebook’s seemingly never-ending quest to make itself appealing to younger, teenage smartphone owners has now resulted in an app called LOL. According to TechCrunch, LOL is a simple piece of software featuring a feed of memes and GIFs categorized by topics like “animals” and “pranks,” and Facebook is currently testing it with 100 high school users with the consent of their parents. It seems LOL’s design is reminiscent of Snapchat’s Discover tab, and it will offer algorithmically curated bundles of videos users can scroll through using an interaction similar to toggling through Instagram Stories, with share and reaction buttons underneath. 

According to TechCrunch, LOL is being deployed at the moment as a replacement for Facebook Watch, the company’s video-centric tab that hosts a mix of user-generated and professional videos from news organizations, traditional entertainment companies, and shows ordered directly by Facebook. However, Facebook is apparently not designing LOL as a Watch replacement in any way, and it’s currently unclear if it will exist within Facebook or as a standalone app. “We are running a small-scale test and the concept is in the early stages right now,”

Facebook has a long history of trying and failing to cater to teen audiences. Those users initially flocked to Snapchat years ago and have since never really returned to the main Facebook app at the magnitude that originally helped the social network take off on college campuses more than a decade ago. Now, although Snapchat has largely ceded its role as the most mainstream and popular digital hangout space to Facebook-owned Instagram, Facebook is still struggling to make its primary mobile app appealing to the demographics more desirable to advertisers. 

Starting more than five years ago with its Snapchat clones Poke and Slingshot, Facebook has tried its hand at a number of different experiments, usually in the form of a standalone app. Beyond Slingshot, there was the mobile-first web forum reimagining called Rooms and an earlier Stories-style collaborative video app Riff. All three of those were shut down back in December 2015, while Poke was killed off in 2014. 

Since then, Facebook has tried to either acquire its way to teen popularity or clone an upcoming app early enough to crush it. In October 2017, Facebook hopped on the anonymous social network trend kicked off by Yik Yak and other apps by acquiring tbh, which it shut down less than a year later alongside its fitness app Moves and its Android dialer Hello. Most notably, Facebook has been keeping its eye on Houseparty, a group video chat app popular among teenage users created by Meerkat founder Ben Rubin’s company, Life on Air, Inc. Facebook cloned Houseparty into an app of its own called Bonfire, and it’s since done the same to Chinese meme remixing and short-form video app TikTok with its own take on the format called Lasso. 

Needless to say, Facebook is eager to tap into a market both deemed lucrative by advertisers and seen as the breeding ground for new and cutting-edge developments in internet culture. It’s not clear LOL will fare any better than any of Facebook’s previous attempts here, but it’s surely a sign that the company is not giving up any time soon.