that sounds like a drop in the ocean that is fb's massive and growing userbase
replies(2):
I wonder how many people there are like me, with nearly dead accounts but could still be 'counted' if you wanted to.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
https://www.marketplace.org/2019/03/06/tech/exclusive-look-n...
I wouldn’t put much faith in this estimate. While facebook’s is probably an overestimate of people actually engaged in their platform, this survey doesn’t seem very useful to me.
It seems to me that the overall interest in Facebook is decreasing. The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years. It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving.
Still, Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition. We don't see any news about their user base decreasing and news channels don't seem to dislike them. Facebook is doing a good job making sure their biggest three platforms are seem as independent from one another, keeping Instagram and WhatsApp almost free from controversy.
Personally I see no loss for them here. Besides, they will promptly acquire any new players that look promising, or shamelessly copy them as they did with Snapchat.
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".
https://www.edisonresearch.com/infinite-dial-2019/
> Regarding social media, the latest study finds the number of current users of Facebook continues to drop. The study shows an estimated 15 million fewer users of Facebook than in the 2017 report. The declines are heavily concentrated among younger people.
https://www.slideshare.net/webby2001/infinite-dial-2019
Slide 9-14 or so contain the relevant demographic and year-over-year breakout.
I actually found some great rugs (owners did not know what they had!) and furniture on the FB marketplace. Much better finds than on craigslist, and easier to verify that the seller is a human.
https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service
For me personally, it's almost impossible to deal with. Way too many political posts from my friends and family.
It's probably best use for me is local events and an occasional major event from a friend/family member.
Still, I find myself going there less and less.
From a small business standpoint, it's just not worth the time, effort and money to advertise there. It's much more effective to focus on getting referrals with my current clients.
I really wish there was a paid social media service that everyone used. I would gladly pay $5-$10 a month for something that didn't sell my data.
[0] the credited article for the story, linked in the second sentence https://www.marketplace.org/2019/03/06/tech/exclusive-look-n...
I love WhatsApp, but they haven't found good ways to monetize it yet and one of these days they'll ruin it.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-insta...
[1] https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-speaks-on-whats...
Bingo, that's what's doing it for me.
Before the 2016 presidential election, Facebook was fun. It was also a great way to get news.
But now, what I'm finding is that a lot of people on Facebook just don't know how to behave in a public forum. It makes it painful, because someone always knows someone who's a jerk online.
I really don't know what changed, to be honest. Did Facebook change, or did too many people come to the party?
I have to think people are deriving some value from it, but I cannot imagine what it is.
If you have concerns about Edison's methodology or application of standard survey weighting then I think that could be a fruitful conversation. But implying that 1,500 responses can't be predictive for a country of 350 million is woefully misinformed.
As much as I hate FB and its abhorrent privacy policies, there are a very large population who do not care about privacy. I have some in my household who don't and FB's latest financial results prove it.
You're not wrong, but I find it a bit frustrating how much resistance I get whenever I try and suggest using Signal instead of Whatsapp. As far as I can tell, it has pretty much all the features of Whatsapp that I use, without all the spying.
Jack Dorsey was on the Joe Rogan podcast with , of all people, his lawyer and got called out for censoring and gave a lot of non-answers.[1] if you read the youtube comments it's almost 100% negative on the direction they've been going with censorship on that platform and Jack's lack of candor as to what exactly they're trying to do.
Edit: Why the downvotes? Did I trigger some sort of HN Godwin's law by mentioning Americans outside the San Francisco/LA political bubble as a possible cause of Twitter's loss of popularity?
I can’t wait to see the commodification and decentralization of the services fb provides. Identity, chats, content distribution and subscription, events etc.
My accountant still has an @aol email. I hope to see the same reaction to fb pages, events etc.
In that regard it’s not very useful to teenagers who are already in the same building as their entire network every day (their school). Plus teenagers don’t want to hang out where their parents do. When I was in school part of facebook’s appeal was the fact that parents couldn’t get on even if they wanted due to the .edu email requirement!
I think John Oliver did a pretty good job of framing the Snowden revelations in terms of "the NSA can see your penis". That's a good angle to make people care.
I guess now we have two anecdotes. That makes us a statistic, I think?
EDIT: To whoever has downvoted this, I politely (but urgently) recommend you read up on statistical significance. The idea that a small sample size implies a study’s findings are unreliable is one of the most widely held misconceptions in modern statistics.
Hmm. Facebook has something like 2 billion profiles. Of course, most of them wouldn't pay $5/month - say that only one percent would. 20 million profiles times $5/month = $100 million/month. It might be worth it for someone to try to build such a thing...
I love the political posts that are thoughtful, informative and spark real discussion.
So, maybe, one or two in the past three years.
Is it just that the bar to successfully impersonate someone via fb is higher and email is lot easier to manipulate?
I am particularly interested because I am planning on deleting my personal fb soon.
Of course facebook is a terrible venue for this group - with its algorithmic feed, horrible search, and showing "notifications" when nothing of consequence has actually happened. If there were a more prevalent network I'm sure the group would move but there's really no other alternative that already has a critical mass of users and people aren't going to sign up for a new service unless everyone else in the neighborhood is already there.
Facebook began as an exclusive social network for upper-class students. Gradually it grew to encompass not just all of America, but the entire world. It turns out, many of us well educated people don't really want to network or socialize with poorly educated people. Police started monitoring our activities, so the events all but disappeared.
The world changed, too. Facts used to matter; we read books and the newspaper, not 25 reasons to be an idiot on Buzzfeed. Truth used to matter; less of the nation was as polarized. It was easier to get along without people shoving their ignorant political ideas in your face. Then 2016 happened, with the Russian trolls and other psyops used against us, and some of us realized we'd fucked up by buying into and encouraging others to join this network and others like it.
I could probably go on for a lot longer, but that's the gist of it.
It’s crazy how many places FB wormed it’s way into.
I'm not much of a user myself, but among my friends that use it heavily I've noted a number of complaints that it has gotten HARDER to use for their primary use: keeping up with friends.
Their issue isn't that FB has become stale or boring, but that it has actively LOST ground relative to their purpose.
The problem with Facebook, is that either it's boring, or it's not boring, and in that case it's often far worse. Facebook latched onto the fact that outrage measures as "engagement" then other people latched onto that fact and started to use Facebook for their own outrage mongering purposes.
Still, Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition. We don't see any news about their user base decreasing and news channels don't seem to dislike them. Facebook is doing a good job making sure their biggest three platforms are seem as independent from one another, keeping Instagram and WhatsApp almost free from controversy.
So one company, three brands?
If I were to start my own crowdfunding app, I'd have one app with three "skins" and three different brands, each a different level of "edginess." In the Terms of Service would be the discretion for the site to "shift" your account from one of the three to another. The only effect of this, would be to shift the public information around the creator and subscriptions from one site to another. I would do this, so that "maintaining our brand" would never become an issue in funding creators, even edgy or downright controversial ones.
I’d be surprised if you could get 1% of the US population of users to consider it, let alone the global population. You’d realistically be looking at single to very low double digit millions of users at the maximum.
I think the discussion on privacy and ad based platforms should really be orthogonal.
So this must be your assessment of twitter as well? Same current observation, Same predicted outcome?
I follow friend and family on facebook. If they post crap, it's because they have stupid things to say. I don't have many friends who I think are stupid.
Obviously you can follow celebrities on facebook and only follow friends on twitter but it doesn't feel like they're made for that use case, the 'reverse' of what I use it for.
> We're saying, "Do you currently use Facebook?" Facebook is probably measuring it on, “Do you ever open the app, or do you ever use it on any level?”
That answer doesn't event make sense. Given that Edison have gone to the press to promote their report and this particular number, you'd expect them to have a good answer on the discrepancies. They should definitely know what the Facebook numbers represent, especially given Facebook publicly disclose their definition of an active user in SEC filings.
Having said that, I'll never leave Facebook until something else replaces it. It's the only place I have to keep in touch with a couple hundred people I would otherwise have no contact with. And it's still common for various groups of people I know to use it for event planning.
I also find myself having to share invites and news with people I know who are not on Facebook. They appreciate it, but I consider it a pain in the ass that they could easily resolve by getting a Facebook account again and just checking it once a week.
And yes it affects Twitter as well.
It seems to me that it takes "energy" to get people to change. Change being one of how they think about something, how they respond to something, or what they spend their time on. As far as I can tell, there are three very well known and very well studied energy pools that can be amplified and then tapped, one is fear, one is anger, and one is reward.
With fear and anger, a process is set up to increase levels in the target, while simultaneously offering a solution vector (ie a change in behavior that will address the fear or anger). I am sure psyche majors can quote all sorts of work here on that aspect of things.
For web companies, if your revenue is derived by ads, and you can only get people to click on your ads if they are looking at your page, it seems using fear and anger to drive people to page after page would be the best strategy to maximize their exposure to ads.
"outrage measures as engagement" is a perfect summary of the effect. The feedback loops are horribly exploitative.
1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone; next
2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone; then
3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone; then
4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally
5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.
It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account. But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?" (It's been months since I've cared to log into Facebook. Feels more like trudging through spam in an old e-mail inbox, now, than anything compelling.)
I think younger folks have migrated to Instagram, snapchat, etc. where they actually post/use the platform.
I sincerely hope so!
https://www.facebook.com/help/212802592074644?helpref=faq_co...
The thing that convinces me FB isn't going away is my dad using groups to debate wood working.. he's never participated in anything online before.
It'll be interesting to see how many realize they don't need Facebook in their lives and simply don't come back.
Email hasn't had any new features added in decades, and people still use it.
For me, Facebook is a tool. I use it to organise events and groups, and communicate with people.
There's no other tool that works as well. I can have all my messages, groups, and events in one place. Almost everyone I know uses Facebook as well, so it's centralised.
Speaking of event management, one very useful feature that Facebook has added recently is integrated payments for events. You can set up a Facebook event that has tickets, and people can purchase and pay for tickets through FB without having to go to the external ticket sales platform (moshtix, eventbrite etc.). I'm not sure if you can do ticketing directly through Facebook or if you need an external service, I haven't set up any events with tickets. Anyway, it's a very useful feature as it saves me having to sign up for different ticket platforms.
I actually preferred the simpler design FB had back in 2013 or so before the big redesign. After that everything seemed to get busier and louder. Usability took a hit after that IMO.
Kids these days don't give a shit about privacy. Why would they?
What's really hurt Craigslist is all the scammers. You can't post anything of value on there without some scammer responding and telling you they're going to send you a cashier's check and have a personal assistant pick it up.
You don't have this problem at all on Facebook AFAICT. When someone responds to your ad on Facebook Marketplace, it's a real person who actually wants to buy your old junk.
Unless Facebook figures out a way to address this, it's the start of a death spiral. The only thing that makes Facebook interesting is the people it can connect you to. If a few of them leave, the place becomes a little more boring than it used to be... which leads a few more of them to get bored and leave, which makes the place a little more boring... which leads more people to get bored and leave, etc. What started as a few snowflakes turns into an avalanche.
It's kind of the photo-negative version of the positive feedback loop Facebook enjoyed on its way up. Back then, each new person who joined created an additional incentive for other people to join, which gave them tremendous upward velocity. But the same dynamic running in reverse could send them downward just as quickly.
I don't mind a bit of politics, Australia is going to hell in a handcart and the least people can do is raise awareness. But I don't like inflammatory (and often completely fake) bullshit.
I can now scroll my newsfeed (which I don't actually do that often) without getting high blood pressure.
Of course people are leaving and don't trust them.
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.
There was App.net, which attempted to be a fee-based better Twitter, but of course not everyone used and eventually shut down.
The only way to have a social network that everyone uses and is fee-based, would be to take one of the free ones and start charging...but then everyone would leave.
If I recall, correctly, the last major feature (read: that had any fanfare) was when they added the ability to have hi-res photos (and more of them), which was timed with the release of the Transformers movie? So, yeah, it's been a hot minute since they did anything substantial.
Instagram is social McDonalds. Quick gratification from pretty pictures of friends doing cool shit, ranked so that the prettiest friends appear on your newsfeed first.
Try putting a serious post on Instagram, nobody will see it and it will fall flat.
Meanwhile I put out a post on Facebook asking for help (after my house was burgled) and had about 15 people messaging me within a couple of hours willing to come around to my place and lend me a hand.
You can't even share links on Instagram, so I'm sure that the GoFundMe that was set up to help cover the money that was stolen from me would've gotten a lot less money than it has.
I like Instagram as an entertainment platform for looking at cool photos, and for posting the occasional photo myself (never of myself, always landscape of event photography), but it's absolute trash as a social media platform.
I got probably 50 sign-ups over a few Show HNs, no more than 4/5 upvotes and comments on the most well-received Show HN, and those who came in just posted one or two test posts, found obviously that nobody else was on there and left never to be seen again. Obviously none converted to a paid account (you could get 10 connections for free then afterwards pay $2/month).
Bootstrapping any social network, let alone a paid one, is hard. But I did try :-)
I know a couple of people who don't have any Facebook "friends" connected to their accounts, but they follow brands and companies they're interested in keeping up with.
It's sort of like RSS, but with more companies on board.
I've had no interest in using my Facebook since it became Babybook, and maybe I'll poke at it once a month to see if I've missed someone's huge life event (you know, other than people having babies)... but that's it - I just have no more interest in surrendering my thoughts, photo copyrights and what's left of my privacy there anymore.
IME, Facebook Marketplace is far from free of scams and stolen merchandise. That's why some people call it Fencebook.
Many new innovative companies are being founded in this space and those that are successful are richly rewarded (by selling to FB). The system is working exactly how it is supposed to.
Google Trends never lies. Some say that people have learned they don't have to search for Facebook, but the trend for Facebook follows the 'myspace curve of disengagement':
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=f...
Note that people never type 'whatsapp' into a browser.
I think that social media is always going to be fickle. Google and search is a much better bet for the product being relevant in years to come.
Facebook is also a black hole. It is very rare that something written on Facebook is noteworthy enough to be shared outside of Facebook, here for instance.
Also if we want to get nitpicky, while there is a significant drop between 2017 and 2018, there is no significant drop between 2019 and 2018 (62% -> 61%, p value of .57), despite the headline being 'Facebook Usage Continues to Drop' :)
US system is designed to be anti-markets and pro business, so you have a point. Good for startup, good for FB, bad for consumer and competition.
It's still against what anti-trust law was supposed to be.
But I'm also very particular about who I follow, unlike on Facebook where I'm friends with every old coworker, classmate and family member.
I'm curious to understand the reason for this discrepancy. Edison says,
We're saying, "Do you currently use Facebook?" Facebook is probably measuring it on, "Do you ever open the app, or do you ever use it on any level?"
Here's how Facebook defines monthly active users:
We define a monthly active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, or used our Messenger app (and is also a registered Facebook user), in the last 30 days as of the date of measurement.
So is Edison's explanation reasonable? Maybe people only think they "use" Facebook when they scroll through the feed - and people are still using it for other purposes.
Except that those two things are inseparable. The privacy problems are a direct result of the desire of the advertising industry to be able to target people based on their behavior, which necessitates spying on everyone.
If we could somehow eliminate that targeting, then we could discuss the two as separate topics.
But when Facebook is harvesting data about you, it doesn't feel like a person is doing it. It feels like some abstract machine or algorithm or a faceless corporation is doing it. They even promise that humans aren't individually looking at your data. So people bank on that impersonality. The data may be collected, but who cares, nobody is actually really looking at it, right?
The truth is that people do often look at it, despite all the promises and everything. That's what you have to convey and that's what John Oliver was trying to establish with his angle.
Right now I'm messaging 2 different groups and about 5 different people, while organising an event that's happening in a few weeks, and organising supplies and camping for a festival on the weekend. After this festival in the weekend, I can post the photos I took on Facebook, where everyone can tag each other in the photos, so they can be easily found.
For me it's an integrated social and event management platform. It works incredibly well for this purpose. If I need to find a generator for an event, I can ask in a group chat, or even put up a timeline post asking for one, and it will probably manifest. I had a friend who's laptop died and he needed a temporary replacement, so he put up a post and later that afternoon was in front of a new laptop.
There are some really shitty features that I hate about Facebook though, to the point that they induce anxiety. For messenger, being able to see when people were last active and when messages have been seen really makes my anxiety build up. I know that people aren't ignoring me and just take time to reply, because I do exactly the same myself, but it still plays in the back of my mind.
The second really shitty feature is that the people you interact with more are the people you keep seeing on your newsfeed or at the top of your messenger. I had a bit of conflict with a friend a while back, so we were giving each other some space to cool down. I kept seeing all her posts at the top of my newsfeed, and she kept appearing on the top of my contacts list for messenger, Facebook would even give me notifications that "Alice and 89 others have responded to events near you tomorrow". It actually did my fucking head in to the point where it was causing significant problems with my mental wellbeing.
I understand exactly why Facebook does this, to increase activity and engagement. But fuck it pisses me off.
It's inconvenient for me, but I'm happy enough to accomodate them.
(The numbers for DAUs and MAUs do not include Instagram, WhatsApp, or Oculus users)
https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2018/Q4...
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.
And the only reason most of them are switching is to follow the herd. They don't want to be left behind in some place where they are not able to obtain as much validation (fishing for likes and followers). That type of personality needs to be "where everyone else is".
Their lives are exactly the same, except with a different social networking application.
In general there seems to be, especially among younger people, a tendency back towards smaller communities, fewer strangers, less agitation and so on. Youtube, Patreon and Twitch creators seem to be particularly successful.
Finally, after logging out - deactivating your account, and then deleting your account (or better, getting a trusted friend to do so for you) are the last steps. (If you're interested in UX, are you a little bit curious what the UX for those two is like?)
In a way, it would be like shadowbanning, but more open.
We are all better off in a world where Facebook and Google face an economic harm if they abuse their monopoly power. I don't think consumer action is the best way to cause that harm, but it is the way that is available to everyone on this forum.
And for the metrics, it's probably coming from the fact that a lot of people use Messenger without using Facebook, but it's still considered "using Facebook".
Someone here not long ago on HN opened my eyes to the 'lists' feature of Twitter, it's been a remarkable improvement for me with the platform. "IRL" friends in one list, "Net" friends in another, sports commentary (because that's a thing I'm into), etc. etc. Crap is more or less 'siloed'.
I wish twitter promoted the feature more, to be honest, I think it can help with some of the gripes you have, if not for you maybe for others as it did with my experience on the platform.
I was on Facebook before it opened to the general public, and it wasn't some ivory tower of intelligent thought where the educated could avoid mingling with the dumb. It was full of stupid social media stuff then too.
After Facebook opened up, my "poorly educated" uncle was content using Facebook to simply socialize with family and friends in 2012 when today he does nothing but share right-wing memes.
Having the chance to engage with bright people who share my passion was the key. But the majority of my family has never been on Facebook.
I wouldn’t follow “real” people unless they’re close friends. Don’t want to see people’s lunches or vacations.
You could have turned off seeing updates from her. That would not solve all the things you mentioned but it should in almost all cases suffice.
Friends giving each other space is maybe a thing but not being able to handle seeing her name pop up at all is a very extreme state of affairs about which I would suggest consulting with someone.
I think it's unfair to expect a feature that caters to that. You cannot just full ignore somebody in real life either, e.g. friends mentioning her name.
Facebook does in fact allow you to block a person or unfriend them. If you and your friend are in agreement about giving each other space, those two options should be enough from a reasonable feature expectation standpoint.
If you are friends with someone and interact a lot it's obvious and generally a good thing that Facebook highlights them. Facebook cannot know on its own that you are currently "not actually" friends with someone.
I maintain a company page through an otherwise content-free account. As a corporate user I find Facebook slow and difficult to navigate.
All social networks die. They either fail to achieve critical mass, or they do and it turns out the mass was mostly composed of bovine scatology.
The "grow fast monetize later" model that social media companies use, along with the user being the product, inevitably acts as a template for bait and switch.
All degradation of user experience stems from that. Of course using a social media platform during its "growth phase" is going to be a lot more of a pleasant experience than using that same platform when it's trying to maximize revenue.
https://iandanielstewart.com/2017/06/16/the-golden-age-falla...
It's the problem where you have cross-generational social media infused with varying socio-economic levels you find that people online want to align with their tribe BUT ALSO want to be connected with you because of a physical connection.
Prior social networks were already "pre-aligned":
Myspace: Majority School Peers/Friends +-4 years Twitter: Industry networking/interest based
Facebook is "everything". I've hit this moment where I don't want to add "2nd degree" or "loose" connections on facebook because I don't think it will enhance our relationship, if anything it could drive a wedge between us. I see these people 1-2 a year, and in person, it's great, but online, it's horrible.
Bots will take up their place, and clueless companies will keep on wasting dollars by the millions.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucerogers/2019/01/18/will-it-...
But for most of today's Facebook users Facebook is the internet and they missed out on their internet training wheels. Facebook has merely replaced AOL for a generation of people who will now take any "article" their friend posted at face value, share it with all of their friends, and then angrily complain about "mainstream media" when their phone blows up in the microwave instead of charging like the "news" told them it would.
I bet the decline is not uniform - does anyone know which age ranges are down (or up)?
No.
FB knows my number indirectly via friends anyway but I have not ever given it permission to actually admit to knowing it. I never will. To be fair, I have never received a call that I could attribute to FB abusing that chain of cough trust.
I don't follow...
Most users probably wouldn't make a whole lot of money on the platform but they'd have privacy and ownership of their data and they might end up with $5 or $10 after a year on the platform.
People could post the same stuff on FB, Twitter, or email lists the hard part is finding stuff worth subscribing to. It’s really more about what platform creators use, and Twitter’s lightweight nature means a lot of interesting things end up on it.
They aren't a tech company as such but this reminded me of Coca Cola. There's Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Coke No Sugar plus whatever flavored variations they are currently doing. They are all slight variations on more or less the same product but it gives people the feeling that they are making a choice.
But then again, I wonder if their target population is different. In that case, it could be that Facebook is being strategic on what things to prioritize and they're banking on certain sub-populations, because they can't win over everyone, for their bottom-line?
FB has obviously made very very smart acquisitions in WhatsApp and Instagram. I get the feeling these were primarily made because of the excellent data they had through their VPN app tracking service (as you could see the hypergrowth in real time and know exactly who to pick and how aggressively to go after). I'm sure they have or are working very hard on some alternative to this (maybe buy metadata off ISPs or become a network/transit carrier in their own right so they can see the IPs where stuff is going?).
But I do wonder if all social networks just are fads. You have a problem that as the network gets bigger, it starts becoming less interesting to you. Your social circles start overlapping (you don't want to post anything because it may offend someone, coworkers, grandparents, children), which stops everyone posting, which causes the whole thing to grind to a halt and become less interesting.
If you follow the vanity stream then you're going to see exactly that, but IG can be a totally different experience. For me, it's a fantastic source of inspiration and a way to see what other artists are doing.
Now, for me the only use FB has left is a dumping ground for my photos that the older members of my family want to see but whom are not on IG yet.
To some degree this may be an experience with the youth today, in time. Or not, I have no idea
I don't feel it's my place to ask them to share the pictures and updates another way, so I'm remain basically a read only FB user.
If there were a simple way to tee those things into some other feed, I'd leave FB as well.
We already knew this. Another day on HN, another clickbait FB post.
It works since basically everyone is on it and you don’t have to make people register and create an account as a barrier to entry. People used to have email listservs instead, but I think there is so much email marketing now that the signal to noise ratio on most people’s personal accounts approaches 0.
If someone could create a platform for an online discussion forum that doesn’t require signing up for a new service, will notify you of activity, and is free that would probably help a lot of people move over. NextDoor might have been able to, but they’re too focused on specific geographic neighborhoods and they have a serious racism problem.
I will bit the rebranding of Zero to No Sugar might have also been an attempt to get ahead of legislation to tax sugary drinks.
Older people, it seems to me, are more utilitarian. By older people I mean college and up. They use Facebook for events, or because the social world is harder to navigate in college/later in life than when you're in high school and your friends are neighbors or classmates.
Perhaps this is just my experience, or maybe I'm just very off on how I read this, but it's a thought. I don't think Facebook is trying to be interesting— I think they're just shooting for useful and "sticky".
Obviously this should not only be an issue of the kids. In an ideal world parents would be conscious of their kids online behavior.
You get thematic subreddits for these kind of discussions, and you didn't even need a full-fledged account. Just a nickname. No email confirmation, no phone authentication, no anything.
Please be careful with the "50+" comments, ha! Not there yet but closer than I'd like to admit, and I grew up during the sweet spot of modern computing. My biased opinion is that Gen X had it best in this regard.
There are zero political posts. Zero. I've never seen one.
If my feed were full of political stuff, I'd also be sick of it. But feed is exclusively full of what friends & acquaintances are doing.
Maybe they considered it and then rejected it as not viable?
If the user in question actually uses Facebook, then it can act as a messaging service. But if someone, for instance, sent me a Facebook message, they would never receive a response, because I would learn about it approximately 6 months later when I do my annual login.
But then you have to tell them to check your profile for your one allowed link, go to your site, search for the product/blog/video - or you pay for an ad with links enabled.
What the investors will be missing if they abandon Facebook, however, is that Facebook has one of the most valuable data droves in history. Long after the kind of dark patterns and data collection policies used by Facebook have been outlawed, the trove that has already been collected will provide AI with plenty of information on human behavior for many decades into the future.
Imagine if you are studying the human genome and you are forced to stop collecting new DNA samples after you only have 1.74 Billion samples collected. Not a bad place to be in considering that no new competitors will be allowed to collect samples in the way FB does today in the "wild west" of privacy violation.
What I mean by that is that you don't want facebook deciding what you see. Instead, you want to control your feed as much as possible. I've found that to be true to some extent for every social media platform.
With facebook, the best way to do this seems to be to create a "friend list" of all of the people whose posts you want to see, and then bookmark it so you can use it as your main portal to facebook. When viewing the list, you'll see the posts and shares of everyone in that group (in chronological order) and nothing else. Nothing about who liked what or who commented on what.
Now, go to the list, scroll through everyone's posts until you see something you remember from last time you were on, and that's it. You're done with facebook unless you want to post something.
Similarly, my portal to youtube is the subscription feed. If I want to see recommendations, I'll go looking for them. On reddit I tend to browse r/all with a pretty extensive block list. Whatever I can do to stop algorithms from deciding what I see.
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/02/27/analysis-trumps-faceb...
Not being snarky, this is a genuine question - If you can't make the effort to email these people every other month or so, then do you really care that much about them? I can understand the difficulties in visiting in person, or even phone calls - many people don't like phone calls these days, but email/SMS? This sounds more like you have a passing curiosity about these people than genuinely caring about them
I meant the users like my 60 year old father who was recently "Facebook hacked" when he accidentally hit the "insert" button on his keyboard.
First, to quote the article:
> The big gainer, interestingly, is under the same roof as Facebook. It's their co-owned Instagram
Now, to my point: The average person does not care about privacy, just the illusion of privacy (I suspect people reading this site intuitively know this. At some level, nearly everyone is in different ways, it turns out.)
Instagram provides that illusion by not injecting opinionated content into your feed (The most obvious example: you aren't seeing injected news stories in your Instagram feed, generally its only ads and people you follow, and the ads are marked)
Rest assured, they're getting their data's worth, maybe not the same way, but photos (particularly metadata on the photos that most smart phones, for instance, default collect) are just as (if not more so) valuable, not to mention there are still a myriad of other ways of collecting privacy intrusive data about users.
Hows about that?
(just to show my assertion is not completely unfounded, check out this survey:
https://www.pewinternet.org/2015/05/20/americans-views-about...
The survey says: 9 out of ten americans care deeply about privacy (particuarly around data privacy and collection)
Yet, our actions, even faced with the outright knowledge of those very things being actively and routinely violated by services, is not enough for people to leave platforms for good, simply, people shift between social media outlets, like those leaving Facebook over privacy concerns yet still continue to use Instagram, in fact, Instagram is projected to grow as noted in this article, in part because of people migrating away from Facebook)
Posting is warfare.
I've considered moving to eventbrite or meetup.com, but the app buy in with FB and FB messanger means we can post an update or send an IM and assume people see it, which isn't the case with either alternative, unless people check email.
I really wish there was a ubiquitous open standard open source IM client, so people could download one client and use it for everything.
Unfortunately, this happens way too often.
I'm with you, and I didn't mind XMPP (having implemented a Jabber server before, it wasn't all bad)
Same deal with IRC (which I think is the best protocol wise).
They all suffer from the same problem: the openness of the standard is not data collection inclusive. The upside is better privacy, the downside is its incredibly hard to fight spam in such wide open systems.
Also, for a the briefest of overviews about the some notable issues with mass adoptions on XMPP, check this:
I went to great lengths to keep my account completely anonymized, so the suggested friends list is a hilarious cross-section of global randos. Of course being a pseduonym account I could be banned at any moment.
1. Awareness. I don't think people are aware of how/what services are collecting data and how that data can be collected
2. Influence. Its hard, I imagine, for a lot of people to drop social media altogether. Its not all vanity. My wife has a disability that sometimes leaves her bedridden for weeks. Without social media, she wouldn't be able to communicate with our friends unless they call/text/come over, which they do, but its not always feasible one of those things will happen, so following them on Instagram and chatting via Facebook Messenger is really helpful in keeping her spirits up in those times.
3. Inertia. I think a lot of the current outrage against Facebook has been media driven, in particular, I think after Trump got elected -
(just a side note here before I continue, I'm talking about a criticism of media in general, not democrat vs republican politics or anything of the sort)-
I have a strong feeling, that I can't really substantiate, so take it as you will, of course (I acknowledge I could be wrong), large main stream news outlets started digging around about the mechanics of that election, and stumbled into the Cambridge Analytica scandal as a result, increasingly their practices came under fire, in part because I think some large media organizations (rightly, in my opinion) blame their data harvesting practices on getting Trump elected in the first place.
This also brings up another point I find so sad: despite the openness of the internet, the mass media still reigns supreme in being able to influence the masses, and I (anecdotally) feel like the power of freely and ubiquitously available knowledge via the internet has not had the impact on this sort of thing that one would have hoped. It was one of the promises of the internet in the 90s, that we would all vastly become more informed and it would take vastly less effort (and it does, if you are looking for it).
>Instagram provides that illusion by not injecting opinionated content into your feed (The most obvious example: you aren't seeing injected news stories in your Instagram feed, generally its only ads and people you follow, and the ads are marked)
I think you're right about the content that people like being missing, namely shared video and images, but wrong about the underlying reason people prefer that stuff being gone. The content is vastly different on Instagram 90% of the stuff I see is at least tangentally the life/art/activities of the people I follow. It may be a heavily edited near fake version but it's not the 100th 5 minute craft video or a reshared news story from that (more than) slightly kooky uncle.
I think the general lack of a share button (there are ways to 'reinsta' [I believe that's the term] but from the people I follow that's fairly rare and it's mostly sharing art) leads to a materially different type of content. Maybe this is just a byproduct of the different groups in both though Facebook is the older platform for me so there's a lot of people I don't particularly care about anymore on there and Instagram being newer (and not positioned to me as the primary social hub so there's less pressure to follow everyone) I have a more curated list of followers.
Finally Instagram is just much easier to consume to me since it's mostly just the visual snapshot of some activity with less generic shared content and much less video.
TL;DR: I'm not sure it's the privacy differences (perceived or real) between Facebook and Instagram rather than the content differences. ie more things directly related to the people/groups I follow.
Yes, many of those people are on Instagram, but some of those have also left IG because they’re seeing the exact same strategy they saw executed on Facebook now being used on Instagram.
I’ve actually seen more people using private iCloud photo shares. I think FB as a whole has exaggerated how many people actually want to share and connect with random people or loose connections.
On the other hand, Instagram is plain simple and understandable.
They monetize the heck out of the data. Why not just use something that doesn't? Be the change you want to see.
What Facebook content do you consider "injected"? AFAIK, the only things in feed are:
1) Posts, events, shares, etc from people or pages that you follow
2) Posts that your friends have interacted with (liked, commented on, etc)
3) Ads that are marked as "promoted"
If facebook was driven purely by the motivation to help people stay in touch with their friends and to find events going on it would be a truly wonderful platform. Virtually every issue on facebook comes from seeking profits. At least problems from facebooks side anyway. There is also the social issues of propaganda and jealousy but facebook would have more time to deal with these when they aren't making the company more money.
This approach opens up exciting new opportunities for market segmentation via badge engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badge_engineering
... in much the same way that Ford (say) could design one car and then sell it to very different audiences as the Ford Taurus, Mercury Sable, and Lincoln Continental.
I work on Big Data for a living and know how inept companies are at actually doing anything useful with personal data. The data being generated is massive and the vast amount of it is random and useless.
My reason for reducing my social media presence is the Like count next to every thought expressed. By adding a publicly visible number next to every expressed human thought, you influence behavior and thinking. This has all kinds of consequences that tech corps and society are waking up to - ledger.humanetech.com
That is why I have consciously reduced my social media usage.
It was odd how it felt like betrayal to unfriend people I know and love. Though experiencing those feelings for something as dumb as FB did confirm to me how evil social media is.
The human mind isn't really configured to handle social media. It feels so personal.
Cool, I had not realized that Facebook now allows non-members to post and participate in their forums. That's really great! Not sure where on Facebook it is one can do that, but I'll be on the look out now that I know they've added this.
I just never followed things, so right now the most exciting part of my FB news feed is the commercials for board-game kickstarters.
I still use Facebook though. It’s still the best place to organise events with friends because it’s still the only platform everyone is on. I wish it wasn’t, but because the various other platforms and messaging app didn’t share an open protocol, no other platform has “everyone”.
Eventually when enough people quit FB, no platform will be good at organising events. Or maybe we will finally agree to use e-mail. :p
The thing about Messenger is it's pretty good too. My wife and I used to use iMessage. When I switched to Android last year we decided to try Telegram. Notifications are often not send and calls are buggy at best. Messenger just works though, just like iMessage did.
Or why did hundreds of thousands of users actively choose to share their data with a random company called Cambridge Analytica?
The problem is not lack of choice. The problem is that people don't care.
https://www.xda-developers.com/uninstall-carrier-oem-bloatwa...
If it did something useful, like find me clients for the work I do then sure - I'll give them my attention. He'll, I'll pay good money for that! But I don't give a flying fuck thaty friend just graduated or a colleague got some award. I don't give a fuck and I'm sure as fuck not gonna play this game where we all pretend theirs any value in these things that email didn't accomplish 10 years ago.
Notifications used to be things I cared about, these days they are things like "This person knows a person who is the mother of a person on your friends list. Add Friend?"
I just block the notifications now and log into Facebook every couple of days in a browser and quick scan the feed.
This facebook culture of needing this centralized service to dictate whether or not you exist as an individual is complete bullshit and I reject it outright. The idea that we're trading away true autonomy for the "ease of social interaction via the web" when most facebook interaction actually is people looking at the endless feed of nonsense/memes/political garbage on the news feed, and not any kind of meaningful 1-on-1 messaging, is the ultimate farce.
Furthermore, whats even worse about the facebook normalization thats occurring, is this idea that, "oh, you don't have $(OUR_OFFERING)? What's wrong with you? How can I possibly reach out to you?"
What do people really get out of facebook? I'd be willing to wager that there is no value creation occurrring. Either you're wealthy enough that they'll figure out how to hook up your anonymized profile info in such a way that you will get sold useless nonsense, or you're poor enough that they will try to dominate what your impression is of the "broader Web experience"
Why are we all paying $(MAX_INT) dollars a month on a cell phone subscription if we're all supposedly intimately connected via Internet platforms? Meanwhile, people feel more depressed than they've ever felt before, and socialization is declining across all quantifiable dimensions. So either I'm missing something, or its just a huge joke at everyone's expense.
I finally got around to deleting my facebook recently and while, as with all addictions, has been challenging, I feel myself slowly taking my life back from the social media theatre that has taken over human life over the last decade, give or take a few years.
This is a problem with focus groups. Ask people 'do you care about your privacy', and almost everyone will answer yes.
There's almost zero social cost to answering that question in the affirmative.
On the other hand, there's a good deal of social sacrifice in leaving these platforms for good.
More likely - they don't care about privacy as much as they say they do and are leaving Facebook because it has become a polluted river of crap.
I was grandfathered into this experience and it no longer appeals to me today as an adult. I suspect this phenomenon is affecting other early adopters as well. Can anyone else relate?
They certainly have never chosen to do so. You can accuse them of participating in some innane quiz, but it was exactly the big scandal that not only the participants' data, but also that of their friends was sucked and resold to Cambridge Analytica without their knowledge by the "researchers".
After working in a fin-tech for a while, I realized how greedy these companies are for data, and how useless they render it. I was amazed by the scarcity of talent and overwhelming amount of routine job I encountered and lack of diversity of projects and space for free thinking.
Anyway, I got rid of FB/Insta years ago(4-5 maybe), and recently I also closed LinkedIn acc. as well, I have low tolerance to BS and self-glorified business gurus. I'd rather do something meaningful in my everyday life)))
Cheers.
Your anecdotal experience isn't evidence businesses aren't doing anything with data collection which would be worrying to consumers or that privacy concerns are overrated. And yes, this is what that paragraph of yours is implying.
If your company didn't have a strategy for analytics, it doesn't mean others do not either. The mere fact that users get used to that practice is already a win to those who wish to take advantage of that information.
Not to mention that the greatest threat comes from sharing and connecting those databases, so what may have been random and useless may find significance when sold to other aggregators.
Facebook simply screwed up everything. They removed custom lists a few months ago, so instead of chronological posts that I could navigate with lists, it's now back to a single algorithm-based feed. Many of the people I spent time unfollowing continue to blast me with notifications for literal shit posts that I can't disable. Did you notice that when you swipe a notification in the feed, there's no way to "Hide all notifications like this" or "Hide notifications for Events from xxxx"? It's unbelievable what Facebook is doing to ruin the experience. It's now impossible to disable specific categories of notifications or from people, without just unfriending them.
I moved back to Twitter and barely touch Facebook now. The product decisions are just plain frustrating. It's now no longer an app for following news.
And on my wide screen, 30'', the chat window is just like 2x1 cm large.
And on the events page, I choose to display today's or tomorrow's events. Then Facebook displays events from not those days.
All I put on Instagram are landscapes and some cityscapes. I do not see like giving away any privacy doing that. Alas, phot-sharing days of Instagram are in the past and stories get more and more annoying every day without any option not to see them :(
To me, Facebook is just another BBS that has pushed past its prime and is overloading me with candy (cough ANSI graphics, boo! cough) in order to keep me connected - its an age-old formula, and while the density of information being pushed is orders of magnitude greater than it was back in the 1200bps day, the mechanics are still the same.
So what was old is new again.
And just like the BBS era, we seem to be fitting on a curve where the potential for disruption is very real.
What I perceived happen to the Golden BBS Age is, the users grew up. They became a bit more technically competent. They learned to use other tools ("Winsock, TCP/IP") that - at first, were quite daunting - but once mastered, gave them wider access to a far broader range of information sources - the Internet.
So perhaps there is some of this factor occurring here, too. People are tired of the man-behind-the-curtain technological manipulation of Facebook and its related services, just like we tired of tyrannical BBS ops booting us for wrong reasons back in the day.
So, where will the sophisticated new, liberating technology come in? Like, back in the end-of-BBS days, there were a lot of tool vendors selling shovels and pick axes along the road - the "Winsock for Dummies" and "Easy TCP/IP" products that made BBS'es irrelevant.
Is it IPFS? Is it Mastodon?
I believe, if there is hope, it lies in the OS vendors.
Just like these additional services eventually became integrated (nobody needs to install a TCP/IP stack any more - you've already got one), social networking needs to become a feature of the OS.
Trouble is, the OS vendors have been mostly asleep at the wheel for too long, having been lured into walled gardens themselves.
But, if there is hope, its in the eventual integration of advanced technologies into the default, out of the box, OS stack, such that there is no need for a centralised monopoly of subversion any longer. Imagine if Microsoft or Apple decided to nuke the scene, and add IPFS and Mastodon tech to the default stack. This would wipe Facebook out in a matter of months - just like happened to BBS's when the Internet finally got the tools from smart vendors that were needed to make intelligent Users again...
I believe they know that social media are subjected to fashion just like everything else: the best way to keep on riding the way is peraphs be the one who kill the old (fb) while nurturing the new (Instagram/whatsapp). In this manner, the numbers are always growing - and that's the only metric they care about.
You can still target content rather than users.
From never ending, ongoing groups, like family, friends, clubs / sport teams or work to temporary and occasional groups dedicated to events like birthdays, travel with friends, festivals, etc.
The concept of groups is easy to grasp and it's much simpler than organizing Facebook in a similar way. It includes people who don't have a Facebook account (all they need is a phone number and even grandma can join in) and participating feels much less public than posting anything on Facebook.
Of course I imagine Facebook won't mind that transition and development all that much.
It also nudges users to enable cloud backups which in practice means that everyone has them enabled (...which in practice means that all your messages are unencrypted in the other person's cloud storage.)
Regretfully, this was not the case for me. I tried tweaking my news feed to my preferences for multiple years and it still showed me crap that made me sad. More importantly, mindlessly scrolling my news feed was a time sink, and I found it very difficult to stop. I was definitely addicted to it, in the same way that I experienced addiction to chocolate to cope with my PhD.
I broke the addiction for myself by using a news feed blocker recommended by a friend. Recently, I deleted all the content off my facebook in the hope it would discourage other people from interacting with facebook. The addictive properties of facebook are all in instagram, even if it is less toxic, so I hold it in similar disdain.
And every time, they gladly acknowledge that I will not receive any more messages of that kind.
"Okay, you won't get any more mails about new messages from friends. Okay, you won't get any more mails about stuff your friends liked. Okay, you won't get any more mails about stuff some other random people liked. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new stuff posted in groups you joined. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new stuff posted in groups you did not join, but we think you might be interested in. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new photos posted by your friends. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new photos of cats posted on Facebook. Okay, you won't get any more mails about news articles with dogs in the title. Okay, you won't get any more mails about postings your friends liked that complain about the weather and were written by women of age 35-40."
Okay, admittedly the last three were exagerrated, but all the categories before have been actual "notification categories" that I successfully opted out of, before I put a generic Facebook email filter in my mailbox, because apparently nothing else is able to stop their overly-specific-category-generation-engine from spewing out new categories to keep me busy opting out of.
The similar scenario happened with news agregator similar to digg - at the beginning wykop was aimed for powerusers, IT professionals but quickly idea was extended and included content of various type. Userbase grow had an upward trend which of course lead again to monetization; ads, sponsored content, microblog, shameless promotion of certain political agendas were introduced and at the same time, the content quality heavily piked down. Site still operates today under third - if I'm not mistaken, owner but I'm no longer there since interaction with biased content and teenager, 20-something trolls is not appealing at all.
So yeah, I believe it's pretty the same thing everywhere: a simple service idea is successful, userbase grows and revenue sources are needed. Sources are being introduced along with new features but content quality starts to drop. Unpopular decisions are made leading users to migrate in search for better and simple alternatives.
On the other hand, I feel Facebook as a company is doing great. WhatsApp is incredibly popular for exactly the reasons Facebook itself is not, private groups that you can share stuff with as needed. Less chance of people seeing material you did not intend for them.
But when I click any of the links this information is nowhere to be found. So after a while I don't click on the links anymore and my engagement goes down.
Seems like a lot of the decisions are focused based on quick-wins engagement instead of an long lasting useful experience for the user?
I'm not in the "I'm leaving Facebook once and for all", actually I don't have that intention whatsoever, I am (was) a normal, active user. But it stopped being interesting. The kind of interaction Fb promotes is similar to twitter; in the first years I could see my friends showing off their breakfast or sharing their thoughts about something, now everything is 3rd-party articles, photos, videos, and complaining... LOTS of complaining (via sharing a relevant article they just read).
Ironically I still write to share my thoughts on something, without photos or shocking videos, and it catcyes my friend's attention because of the "novelty" of writing something of my own instead of just sharing some link.
Btw I've NEVER wanted to install Fb apps, especially since they forced everyone to have the Messenger app if you want to chat. Always used m.facebook.com for checking out, and mbasic. for chat (with the added benefit of the crappy UI pushing me out from using it...). Similarly, Twitter is another service I use, and never wanted their app installed, instead I use their website. The same reason frequent use of Reddit is out of the question for me.
1) the proliferation of notifications
2) filling my feed with auto-play videos
3) the fact that fewer and fewer of my friends actively use it
Just as rising membership creates a positive feedback loop through network effects, so declining membership does the opposite.
The other main reason is that since buying a smart phone, I can access the one feature of FB that I use - messenger - while avoiding the rest. I now only log into my account to check my notifications every week or two, to see if I've been invited to anything.
It's no surprise that Facebook also seemed to chase the golden goose, but now that the main page is nothing but outrage or divisive news people are leaving in droves because they're fed up with seeing the same, day after day.
1) On mobile Chrome, in a not private tab, I flag an ad served via the FB ad network, to be precise it was on imgur.
2) On my smartphone, I strictly and only use FB with https://mbasic.facebook.com in mobile Chrome in a private tab. I never logged in in the not private tab.
3) I log-in to FB in the private tab a couple of minutes later and I get a notification that they received and reviewed the complaint from 1)
That was a huge WTF moment for me yesterday - I would love to learn on how they do it and why they think that's something the user would be happy to experience.
The good news is facebook has failed at creating a product that is truly lasting, so they have to keep this charade up of constantly reinventing the time-waster product.
It's usually stuff like "X posted something after a long while of not posting" or "Y will participate in an event near you". Utterly useless notifications about people I don't interact with.
This is a mixture of bad UX and dark UX patterns. They are puppeteering a corpse here.
I'm also deleting as many apps as possible. Even Instagram works quite well without the app. Less uncontrollable spying, less battery usage, no annoying notifications, more free memory, more blocked ads and trackers.
Is it condescending to acknowledge that it was a network for a fairly elite group of young people to start, and that it lost appeal when it became for everyone? Of course there wasn’t much intelligent discussion, everyone was under 25. But it was part tinder, part aim / livejournal, part social calendar; I don’t think it’s been those things for many years now.
Incidentally, the iOS Twitter client also shows tweets in your feed which your followers liked. And you can't turn that off. I don't understand that feature at all and it made me switch to a third-party client.
1. Title implies Facebook is going down.
2. Body clarifies that everyone is just using InstagramMy girls are 14 and 15 in the UK. None of their friends use facebook, and that’s not just their social circle. Facebook is just not a thing for them. The only reason they use it at all is because there is one out of school club that posts their upcoming activities on a FB page, so they literally log in once a week to check that page and they’re done. They do heavily use Instagram and WhatsApp though, so they’re not entirely out of the FB sphere.
A concise version of the "I don't care what happens to these people" fatal to tales ...
( https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EightDeadlyWords )
I frequently get notifications on my personal page to say my business page has a notification. That notification turns out be to "Your users have not heard from you in a while, write a post".
I get this all the time, even when I have written a post within the last five hours.
I would say on average I get 5 notifications per day that are utterly useless.
I never installed the app but as your parent comment said, it's so spammy, I had that fear since they do a lot of mail spam. If they made their mobile website usable, they would've had more than a minute of my engagement...
People stopped making posts about their daily lives, removing the thing that attracted most of us to Facebook to begin with: The possibility of following the life of friends and family, even if we don't have the chance to see and talk to them in real life as often as we would like.
As post by real people have died out, ads, promotions and link spam have taken over and now fill our "news feed", making Facebook less interesting.
If Facebook didn't have private groups, users would be leaving much faster. Still, it's interesting that none of Facebooks strategies seems to revolve around getting people to post more original and personal content.
I quit Facebook last year, and maybe I would have stayed, if they had a feature that would allow me to hide everything not directly posted by friends. Then again, maybe not, it would have left me with very little content.
It was very clear cut at the time, Twitter did a 180° and left RSS along with lean HTML and got super slow and noisy (so much for adtech.) Facebook started changing its appearance compulsively and adding random crap. Then it removed itself from search engines for vendor-lock maxima.
The HN audience do not necessarily represent the mean/mode user, and Facebook are in a numbers game really.
I agree with most of the sentiment above - I wish I could filter posts that are just attachments, 3rd party junk, and tune the algorithm to show me posts from a core set of friends, but I also recognise I don't use FB like a most people, I imagine.
I don't use it for anything other than to have my CV there and messaging with recruiters, though.
A couple of years ago, friends lived abroad for 3 years and used Facebook as their primary means of communication with people back home. I think that was when I started to check Facebook more often. Sometimes every week.
It's the digital, more obnoxious version of a kid screaming ME ME ME at the sports team draft for adults. All those bullshitters with too much time on their hands (ironically at work) begging for the attention of recruiters and prospective employers to hire them.
Same goes for avoiding exploitative apps: never install apps unless there's no alternative. Block all ads. Deny all notifications, especially on the desktop browser. No, I won't send you my location.
It's annoying to have to maintain a wall of "no" but it saves problems in the long run.
For the record, Facebook in the early days, when it was only colleges in the Northeast US, was wild, wild fun.
But nobody does that, so I’ve stopped granting any app not email or IM notification rights.
You reap what you saw: no “engagement” for you.
The lite version of Facebook is probably the only worthy version, I just wish it could be firewalled so you know when it tries to use network access and lock it down to just when you open the app.
I assume Lite Android apps arent allowed to use much data but I could be making a bad assumption. It still saves on battery life at least.
I agree though they would notify me of potential friends and they were never ever people I knew or wanted to be friends with (because I didnt know them!).
Never knew that was an option, but shutting it down just seems logical when you see the aggressive lock-in they are doing.
I wish social media needed more social proofs to try and weed out certain types of problematic accounts. I only finally went back to Facebook once it was open for everybody. Deleted it a few times now keep it for family only. I dont go on it every waking day though.
LinkedIn turned into a place where I go to answer some messages that could be good opportunities in the future, and only when I don't feel overwhelmed by recruiters' contacts.
If you have that friend on FB then, because he sometimes posts things about cars and it gets heated, that's what FB like try for you to engage with.
FB seeks and promotes "engagement" over "quality of experience" so it will always try to make you anger (it leads to more engagement) than to have a fulling experience.
If the algorithm can only work with chill people and very alike... it will still try to find what divides and "engages" that group of people.
But it didn't happen. Very rarley are there any picture galleries. And lots of stuff other people share? Always the same.
So the realization set in that it isn't that interesting to have a social network.
I only need a chat and we replaced our family chat with whatsapp.
Bingo. Every time I check Facebook there's at least one "notification". It's always one of
* A page I own has x new views
* A friend or two is interested in an event (not even going to, interested in)
* You have memories on this day
Aside from Messenger for a few ongoing group convos my Facebooking time is mostly limited to interest groups at this point, and I'd happily jump ship with them if they moved to a self-hosted forum or mail list
Assume this in every situation and you'll never be disappointed ;)
What's saved it, IMO, is the similar deluge of stories about political in-fighting taking place in WhatsApp groups.
The available conclusions to the reader of the two angles on it are: 1) politicians are organising terror attacks; 2) there is no causal relationship between WhatsApp and terror attacks
... one of which seems eminently more reasonable than the other; so thankfully that's where we are.
Amusingly it also came under fire from politicians in the opposite direction in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal: far from wanting to peek at end-to-end encrypted data (as called for whenever it's used by terror groups) they then wanted assurances that the data hadn't been snooped on or passed to third-parties!
I thought about having a 'fake' account, but having a 'real' one with photos and friend list helps a lot to earn trust from buyers.
Then, when I have nothing to sell, I disable my account again.
I just checked the details and (for example) I click under the post: "2 scratches 'pon wood" (sorry I have language set to Pirate but it's the equivalent of "2 comments").
This takes me to a page showing the post, comments beneath, and a text field for me to reply into.
So it's there, just check the various links under each post to see what's available. Actually I've yet to find anything that I can't do on mbasic. I've thought something was missing several times (turning off notifications for specific groups springs to mind) but always found a way to do it eventually. It's often a hideous UX but I like how ugly mbasic is, it's FB without the sugar so you can taste how bitter it really is :) (for anybody wanting to say something like "if it's so horrible why do you still use it", it's something I do reluctantly because I have a few geographically distant friends who I like to keep in contact with and who always message me through FB)
And now they are engaging in this fake notification scheme (same with twitter and LinkedIn)...
As i explained in another post, facebook is only useful for me because of the marketplace...
There is the principal of who owns the device... But that is a slightly different topic.
I realized I really had never gone to anyones actual profile page in maybe a year or two. Hell, the last profile I may have actually taken more than a cursory glance at was my ex when we first started dating. I guess nobody else does either when you can just @them.
With that said I do feel very out of the loop but it's allowed me to focus on my own life and I'm on a social media cleanse (doh, hn) anyway.
Interestingly enough I do keep having feelings about reopening it but I permanently deleted so I can't and I'm glad I did. Prior to that I had temporarily closed it and reopened it a handful of times.
All problems that people care about but the average person cannot tackle autonomously.
And that's why societies implemented regulatory bodies (often through national governments, but that's not a requirement).
GDPR is a small step in that direction.
Or make two accounts and my main one only follow positive/uplifting/motivational accounts.
So I went there and friended them. It was kind of fun or interesting for a few posts but, the only one I was most interested in talking to, I talk to on the phone or email more often than Facebook. The rest is idle chit-chat about people and things I know nothing about or care about.
So now my Facebook involvement never goes further than to visit the login page, see if I have the red notification icon that someone posted something directly to me and, if not, leave.
Lately I’ve unfollowed/unfriended everyone I dont feel I have a relationship to.
People of my class 1996 or whatever? Gone. That’s not my social circle anymore. Etc. You get the picture.
But still FB insisted on showing all kinds of uninteresting garbage instead of posts from people I know.
So now I’m no longer checking Facebook. And they did it to themselves.
I deleted FB last year but when I did use it it was purely as a messaging platform.
My personal gmail about 10 years ago turned into more of a graveyard for spam and receipts than a communication platform.
Related: what's the best for one part of the system, may not be the best for the entire system.
Contrast this with something like Google Maps: It's a privacy nightmare too, but it's also incredibly useful.
The title could be "Instragram gaining millions of users in the US" but I guess that doesn't sell as well.
Also, facebook may be losing users in the US, but it's gaining users overseas. So overall, facebook's overall user count is going to continue to climb for a while.
A few of us have been dropping off and now we're starting to use chat programs (groupme, now Discord) to socialize.
I have to stay on to keep track of goings on in my amateur radio hobby, which as you'd expect is chock full of old men, a majority of which are on Facebook. I think the generational lag has finally caught up to them.
So features on social media are decided based on short term gains and posts on social media are promoted like that too. It's like an entire industry forgot their parents warnings about thinking about the future.
Not as much of a concern here, but nefarious governments around the world are quite good at doing awful things with this data as well.
12-34 is a very wide range. While I do know a few people toward the high end of that age range who did have FB accounts and deleted them, I wonder how much of the drop in this bracket is because younger people are simply never signing up for FB accounts.
I recall when FB was immersive because it provided you content which you relate to - people you know, people you follow, interests that makes you feel that this social tool is enriching your life. Nowadays, FB is like a river with too much garbage on it. You won't enjoy swimming, much less even enjoy what you are seeing.
In short, the formats of the sites make all the difference. CL was created to preserve anonymity and not be a centralized social network, but that feature is also its undoing because it facilitates scamming.
Except that, unlike the constant barrage of advertisement and "viral" content, your post will not even be shown to all your friends. And you don't get to know which ones will see it and which ones will have no idea you ever wrote anything.
I can see that kind of uncertainty putting people off from spending effort on writing nice personal posts & thoughts.
Note that it's up to Facebook whether your friends ever see your post in their feed. It can't catch their attention if they never see it. The feed algorithm is way too whimsical for me to want to rely on.
It's an odd platform. They have a lot of great features for outreach and discovery of local events and groups of people, leveraged by the strong network effect. For contact with local groups of people with similar interests, and for planning events, for group communication, it is an effective tool and one that has enriched my life in substantial ways.
The one thing that I really hate is the front page feed. It was probably a great business decision on their part to emphasize microblogging, as it definitely increased engagement in the platform. It also turned everyone into memelords who just re-share funny cat pictures, pyramid schemes and incendiary political propaganda. I tried just filtering that out with the "see fewer posts like this", but I turns out that people just don't really post anything but image macros and articles anymore.
So any service that feels slightly abusive gets its own email like that, and then ignored usually.
Indeed you can. By "inseparable", I don't mean technically inseparable, I mean that the advertising industry has decided that personally targeted ads are the only sort of value. That means that, unless there is some sort of sea change in the industry, the two things are inseparable in practice.
If I see an ad, I can safely assume that it comes with spying. I'll be right far, far more often than I'll be wrong.
Even then, it won't save them the money. Like anything else, if you want to save the money - you have to move it out of your regularly accessed account, and put it somewhere else, ideally an account you can't withdraw as easily from.
So - when you cook for your family to save the money - you need to then (immediately) move the money you would normally spend for dinner (perhaps minus the amount for ingredients, time, and power - if you feel it necessary) over to that other account.
But most people never do that, I'd wager.
Instead, that extra money stays in their primary account, which they then likely spend on something else. So their savings continue to be zero (or likely less), and they continue to wonder where their money goes...
Do it too often and with too much urgency, and eventually you will be utterly ignored.
I then soon joined Twitter and consciously curated who I followed. I felt [and still do feel] fine about being on Twitter.
Some months ago I rejoined Facebook. I am consciously curating who I do and don't "friend" or follow. So far, so good. Yes, I am noticing the now-expected targeted ads ... but I prefer them, to be honest. Market me tickets to the Fandango showing of 'Logopolis' please; even if I don't buy, that's much more useful than the usual random jar of some guy's snake oil you'd offer me 20 years ago. Is this me being Institutionalized on tracking? Maybe, but there is an "after the uncanny valley" for tracking/advertising just like there is for robotics and AI. I'm interested to see how that works in relation to echo chambers.
If you've tried it, how do you think Facebook's classifieds compare to NextDoor's classifieds?
I can't say if it's a content problem associated to the normalization of social apps as a whole (probably a bit) or the changing of the LI algo to push this stuff to the top (probably also attributable), but it's certainly diminished my general experience.
That said, LinkedIn is still very useful for recruiting and being recruited insofar as it is a widely-used database for professional information. I just don't recommend using it casually.
Oh, so much this, especially with LinkedIn. The email problem is, in the end, what got me to delete my LinkedIn account a couple of years back. And I STILL get frequent emails from them.
Yeah, I hit that point quite a while back. I no longer want any application or service to give me notifications or send me emails. Almost nobody seems to be able to use those things in an appropriate way.
I did the same, around the same time, and my experience was the same as yours.
I would go even further -- I found that after I quit Facebook, my connections with the people I actually care about increased rather than decreased once the intermediary was removed and we had to start communicating directly with each other.
I honestly don't think that there is much social sacrifice involved in leaving these platforms. I think there's a good deal of fear of social sacrifice, though.
However, it turns out the heavy traffic at the other A branch was just for a few miles and then it was actually empty after that --- you took optimum local decisions at each step but since you weren't able to look at the big picture, you didn't actually choose the globally optimal route.
As others have pointed, this is related to the mathematical concepts of local and global maxima: sometimes your optimization algorithm happily stops when it finds a local maximum, ignoring the much better global maximum because it didn't actually traversed the whole search domain.
That said, any bets that FB's user count will magically continue to increase quarter over quarter?
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.).
If you're A/B testing each change for 2 weeks, but the negative impacts of it only happen after a few months (like what the parent post mentioned [1]), then while you're in a local maxima right now, it'll slowly sink, along with all your neighborhood of choices.
You can think of it as a function that returns the current value and another function that you have to use for the next time step. Sorta like f(a, b, c, ...) = (y, \a_2 b_2 c_2 ... -> ...). Steepest ascent hill climbing doesn't work well for finding good long term local maxima, since you don't know how long it takes until it stabilizes (or if it ever does). The best you can do is guess it'll stabilize in X amount of time, but if X is too small, you might end up stuck in a really bad local maxima.
And no, obviously not ever person I know is worth emailing or calling on the phone on some regular basis. That doesn't mean I don't want to know them.
It's been good. I've taken to disabling notifications and uninstalling apps for most sites, I don't need them telling me when I should be looking at stuff, and mobile sites have improved a lot. It's all become much more intentional on my part.
Ironically, the annoying anti-patterns that sites like LinkedIn use to encourage you to switch to their app instead of their mobile website just encourage me to use them less overall. LI is probably the worst, along with Reddit.
I don't have an issue with most of the content of my FB feed itself, because most of the people I'm friends with don't post crap. I'm not friends with people I don't actually want to stay in touch with and I mute the small number that overdo the minion memes. My feed consists largely of stuff about my friends and reletives that I find, at worst, uninteresting and skippable. I don't seem to have all the "crazy people" problems that a lot of people seem to complain about (perhaps I'm just lucky that my family are pretty normal). I find twitter is much worse for things like political share-spam or vague-tweeting, but I'm pretty focused in who I follow there too, and turn retweets off for anyone who is a bit of a retweet spammer.
I find it funny when people complain about Facebook because their feed is full of their MLM hawking aunt or the rantings of some odd "friend". I think there is a lot wrong with Facebook, but you can't blame them for your friends and family. That's like inviting a load of people to a pub for your birthday, then leaving a bad Yelp review because the company was bad.
As long as users are actively involved there is no need to send emails.
Sending emails is a (bad) trick to make people curious and make them login to your platform again.
I think the Facebook app is just 'dead' and Facebook is lucky to have Instagram.
There’s so much work out there - let recruiters find it for you and be super selective if you already have income. After a while, repeat business will allow you to raise your bill rates. A motivated engineer willing to put in the work can pull in $300-$400k per year, even in middle America, without trying to source work for themselves.
> As long as users are actively involved there is no need to send emails.
IIRC, Facebook sends those messages only when they've detected an account's usage dropping off. When I was a regular user, I never got them; but when I stopped logging in for days or weeks at at time, they got more intense.
They're a deliberately designed mechanism to keep addicts hooked.
Nope, and you can't reply to messages either (you used to). It's actually so bad that they don't even show you the message content in the email notifications, to better lure you back to their site.
Whatever engineer who worked to implementing those regressions was being an asshole.
Could this be mixed w people unliking and hence the number doesn't change?
