U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says

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.

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?

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!

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.

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.

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.

Maybe they should make that a global option, something like "Hide Political Stories" or something.

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.

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.

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 :-)

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

To some degree this may be an experience with the youth today, in time. Or not, I have no idea

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".

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?

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.

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.

You can still target content rather than users.

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.

Are you speaking for yourself here?

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.

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.

I do have a few really great closed groups on there. Groups filled with people helping each other out. These are where I still find value on the platform.

AI to the rescue though, this feels like something you can teach.