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

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1293 points rmason | 4 comments | 06 Mar 19 20:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.864s | source
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socrates1998 ◴[06 Mar 19 22:00 UTC] No.19323322[source]▶
Anecdotally, I work with teenagers and none of them have a Facebook pages. It's viewed as a place for old people and parents.

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.

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AnimalMuppet ◴[06 Mar 19 22:34 UTC] No.19323620[source]▶
> I would gladly pay $5-$10 a month for something that didn't sell my data.

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...

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1. davnicwil ◴[06 Mar 19 23:38 UTC] No.19324118[source]▶
An anecdotal story about this - a couple of years ago I built a paid, ad-free privacy-focused social network, did several Show HNs for it and even here, in a community that seems quite receptive to the idea in principle, there was extremely low interest in it.

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 :-)

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2. elliekelly ◴[07 Mar 19 01:29 UTC] No.19324826[source]▶
For a few months now I've been toying with the idea of a "mutual data fund." A social network that collects & anonymizes user data, pools the data on behalf of all users (similar to how a mutual fund pools investor cash), and the data is "invested" (sold to advertisers) by a management company (like an investment adviser) with the data always under the ownership and control of an independent Board of Trustees (same as a mutual fund). Just like a mutual fund, the "returns" from the data would be used to pay the investment adviser for operating costs + some flat % and the rest of the returns would be allocated to users on a pro-rata basis. So the people who use the platform more or share higher-quality content get more "shares" (the investment kind, not the social media kind) of the ad revenue than those who aren't on the site often or share fake news or just annoy the crap out of everyone else.

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.

3. justaguyhere ◴[07 Mar 19 02:32 UTC] No.19325113[source]▶
It is super hard to bootstrap, but sites like Facebook and Twitter already have hundreds of millions of users. Can't they run an experiment - something like "no ads/tracking for $5 (or whatever amount) per month" and see if there are any takers? If 20M sign up, that is 100M revenue per month.

Maybe they considered it and then rejected it as not viable?

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4. AnimalMuppet ◴[07 Mar 19 03:21 UTC] No.19325291[source]▶
Or maybe they make more off of ads per month than they think any reasonable user would pay.