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

Here's the kicker, which I think others have pointed out, but I want to say this succinctly:

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)

> 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)

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.