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

(www.marketplace.org)
1293 points rmason | 5 comments | 06 Mar 19 20:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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no_wizard ◴[07 Mar 19 02:55 UTC] No.19325224[source]▶
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)

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1. badfrog ◴[07 Mar 19 04:22 UTC] No.19325480[source]▶
> 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)

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"

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2. qazwse_ ◴[07 Mar 19 05:14 UTC] No.19325685[source]▶
I think it's number 2. I don't particularly want to see what my random stuff my friends are liking or commenting on. I know Instagram provides this too, but it's separate from the main feed.
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3. usrusr ◴[07 Mar 19 07:32 UTC] No.19326213[source]▶
And the reverse: I use facebook for very little else than to run my hobby life (and it's been transformational at that!), but my non-hobby network is still connected to the account and I don't want to annoy them with a flood of deeply specific posts (in part because life demands keeping a facade of being a somewhat normal person). So much self-censoring because it would be shown to an uninterested audience I care about.
4. silveroriole ◴[07 Mar 19 07:32 UTC] No.19326215[source]▶
Back in the day you didn’t have “pages that you follow,” you had interests listed on your profile. These later became pages that you were automatically signed up to, which the relevant companies post ads on. My feed rapidly became mostly adverts which I’d never actually signed up to receive, and it was more effort to fix it than to just stop checking Facebook.
5. dannyr ◴[07 Mar 19 07:59 UTC] No.19326326[source]▶
When I used to visit Facebook, I get "Popular On Your Network" stories.

I consider #2 as injected. Basically, any content that was not directly posted by a "friend" to share to their network.