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

By far the biggest factor that had me stopping checking Facebook, and indeed LinkedIn, is number of utterly fictitious notifications they generate. There was a time a few years back when that red dot made me drop everything to check FB, but these days it’ll be some completely bullshit message they’ve made a notification out of. Feels like they got greedy for my attention and killed the golden goose there. I check it about once a day now, and in the browser not the app. If the notifications were still meaningful I’d probably still have the app and all the metadata that sent them.

Exactly. I removed FB from my mobile devices for just this reason.

It really feels like some companies like Facebook are flying blind by using A/B testing everywhere and ignoring the long term effects of the changes they do.

(cries in Samsung)

They probably A/B tested it for a fortnight, found out that it worked, and never considered folks would catch on. It drove me away checking FB, too.

You can use adb to uninstall apps like FB and Chrome in a few minutes, with your phone connected to a computer

https://www.xda-developers.com/uninstall-carrier-oem-bloatwa...

Dear God I installed LinkedIn a couple months back and their endless bs notifications made me realize that I don't need it. It doesn't give me anything. Why is it sending me 2-3 notifications a day when I have 5 friends who's profiles arent even actively used?

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.

This is the same for me. I feel obligated to maintain an account and check it once in a while since I have a lot of family and friends who aren't local who do still use it (though most have transitioned from using it as a way to update people on their lives to using it as a place to effortlessly repost memes), but I'm incredibly put off by Facebook's increasingly irrelevant and desperate attempts to get my attention.

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 works because applications truly aren’t being fully uninstalled from the device, they are just being uninstalled for the current user

Disable it in app settings, that effectively uninstalls it.

Investors want to see engagement metric graphs go up. Execs tie compensation to getting that metric up. Product delivers by mandating more alerts. Payday.

LinkedIn sends me notifications that say "you might have new notifications" and then when I click it out turns it I'm all up to date. Not sure if this is on purpose or just really bad qa.

Exactly this. Death by a thousand paper cuts, is another.

Or Hacker News is wrong.

Even more annoying is the same thing that they do with email notifications. They seem to keep inventing new "categories" of notifications all the time that I haven't yet opted out of - basically because I seem to be only able to opt out of just that specific category that they just sent me an email about, when I click on the "don't want to receive any more of these mails" link below the message.

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.

I also do not understand the Linked-in notifications at all. They send an e-mail like '5 job changes' which I actually find interesting to learn about.

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?

> when I click it out turns it I'm all up to date. Not sure if this is on purpose ...

Read the first three words (my highlight) and there's the answer

Twitter has started to do that too. Notifications went from focussing on significant interactions — such as someone liking or retweeting a tweet, or following you — to 'someone you follow just tweeted' — what's the point of that notification? It's happening all the time! Notifications get devalued as companies desperately try to promote their product.

When cheating is allowed to win, cheaters will win

I started like you, last year... then a couple days ago realized I hadn't checked it since mid January. And we're on March, that's a new record.

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.

I have a seperate facebook@ mail address and I simply never check it. Did so before switching hosters last year and saw that about 8k mails had piled up since 2011. Crazy folks.

Totally agree. The three things which have driven me away are:

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.

LinkedIn is just a list of my previous jobs that allows recruiters to spam me with job offers. Completely disabled the notifications and was considering deleting the whole thing

after about 3 or 4 iterations of me reviewing my email setting, I got seriously fed up and I've gone for the nuclear option: all my facebook emails are marked as spam and binned.

I opted out of all emails altogether - I only check my notifications once in a while. I've never missed anything of value.

They are making sure to give you red dots/numbers multiple times per day, if you login multiple times per day.

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.

That has resulted in me disabling notifications and now I won't know if someone @me or responded to a tweet.

Those useless notifications made the whole product useless for me.

I didn't know about mbasic and chat working. Thanks.

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.

For me the worst part about LinkedIn is the aggressive redirect to appstore on mobile when clicking on mail links. This is borderline malware behaviour.

I wonder if you can still post to Facebook by email. Having this automatically loop would make me happy.

I don’t have an account so can’t check and the instructions for doing it all seem dated.

I used this method on my friends'/family phones where I can't just flash an AOSP-based ROM. That will change now that I found out about debloating through ADB.

mbasic is a life saver: chat, plus fast load times!

Then why do you still check it?

It looks like facebook is engaged in a race to the bottom, against it’s own metrics. The easiest way to be engaged is to repost memes and fake news shock posts, so the most engaged users are meme posters and fake news trolls, so features that cater to meme posting and trolling get the most bang for buck, so they’re getting trapped in a cycle of circulating ever increasing torrents of drivel.

My 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.

> But it stopped being interesting

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 )

No kidding. With how smart they are and all the AI that goes on behind the scenes, I don't understand why I continue to get notifications when friend X 'adds to their story'. I have never once watched anyone's story. And I don't plan on starting. Aren't they smart enough to understand that this is just adding cognitive overhead and detracting from my immersion in a meaningful experience? Seriously, not rocket science. These UX people should get that.

Yup, it has become staggering.

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.

This x100. Totally mirrors the sentiment in my sibling comment. Somewhere along the line they lost sight of creating an experience and each facebook product became focused on improving their metrics and notifications became the weapon of choice. They so obviously need to reign in all of these different teams, reduce clutter, and get back to basics - starting with a good user experience.

Annoyingly, what's kept me on it is the fact that some super-niche private groups (that would otherwise be ideally suited to a forum or subreddit) have sprung up that have content that I simply can't get anywhere else.

Exact same thing for me ! I uninstalled both twitter and facebook app when I realized they were faking notifications for me to open their apps, since I guess they need that for their DAU bs. Since then, I check twitter once a week in a browser mode, and facebook once a day with the firefox container.

For me this aggression is good, it makes me avoid that site, spending maybe a minute every 2 months on that wasteland of salarymen and networkers.

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...

I tried setting up email filters based on subject and keywords, I currently have around 15-20 but it's a futile attempt, they keep changing everything, they've even changed the language. It really feels like I'm harassed by a beggar at this point.

>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.

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.

You are maybe being downvoted as you stated it so bluntly, but I'm not sure your point is without merit.

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.

UK here as well, I remember a couple of years back my teenage son saying "Facebook is for old people".

LinkedIn is completely awful in every possible way, but I'm a freelancer and a lot of clients seem to find me there, so it's vital for my work.

I don't use it for anything other than to have my CV there and messaging with recruiters, though.

Isn't A/B testing pretty much going to behave like a steepest ascent hill climbing? At each micro decision point you take what looks like the 'best' option but that means you can get stuck in local maxima?

I wonder if they even do their A/B testing right. In my experience (none at facebook) accidental p-hacking is rampant in the tech industry, with trials being cut short or prolonged by the tester who's staring at a graph of the results in real time.

But no replying on the comments to your posts, it seems, which is quite annoying.

Fortunately google have helped me deal with facebook by dumping all their emails into a "social" tab which I rarely bother to look at.

Don't forget the constant shitposting by your friends and (ex)coworkers to make themselves appear very smart and hardworking. I've always felt LinkedIn is 300% the cancer that Facebook is because of all the virtue-signalling, pompous fakery and outright lying that occurs there.

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.

If it's not running and doesn't send you notifications or demand updates, do you care all that much?

Most of their "AI" is just applied statistics. Train a statistical classifier to classify "events a user wants to see" then run it in prod and elevate the results to notifications. Run an A/B trial (quite possibly p-hacked) to determine if people actually like it. Ignore the false positive rate (e.g. the rate at which you're annoying people) if you think it's arbitrarily small enough. When people ask how you determine which events to turn into notifications tell them The Algorithm decides it and let their imaginations, seeded by pop culture science fiction, run wild about what sort of superhuman synthetic intelligence you have pent up in your computers when really all you've got is a glorified bayesian spam filter.

Yep, same for me. They want addicts not users.

And real people stop playing.

That is: LinkedIn users will stop being users.

Yeah. Notifications is useful, even great, when used sparingly, appropriately.

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.

If on Android I recommend the Facebook Lite app. Its not as obnoxious and on Android you can tell the OS to ignore all notifications from an app.

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!).

Seems like that is discontinued: https://www.lifewire.com/post-updates-and-upload-photos-by-e...

Never knew that was an option, but shutting it down just seems logical when you see the aggressive lock-in they are doing.

It definitely looks like the effects of Goodhart's law [0] operating internally, somewhere their KPIs are measuring just the clicks, views or e-mails sent instead of the spirit of those actions (engaging users, turning passive users into active ones, etc.).

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

I’m in the same boat as the GP: no emails allowed, notifications disabled. I also go back to check in the app about a couple times per week (and I’ve never missed anything of value, either). I guess it’s the residual concession to a very strong and deeply engrained habit, combined with the fact that there are some people I don’t have any other line of communication to/from, so it makes sense to maintain the toehold on the platform.

> Feels like they got greedy for my attention

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

Correct.

If you have a change that improves your metric initially but damages it in the longer term, and your A/B test only detects the short initial effect, you can execute your A/B test perfectly and still get the wrong result.

Yeah, I'm a very passive FB user and have removed all the FB battery draining crap from my phone, so I don't get meaningful notifications very often, but I'm checking it out at least every few days out of habit. It's always showing me a bunch of notifications for completely random things, like some new random post in marketplace group I'm participating, but no notification for the 50 other new posts in there or other groups. Or somebody I haven't spoken to in years is going to some event I never heard about. At this point I don't even see them as notifications, just a list of random things that happen and don't affect me.

I use mbasic and can reply to comments on posts.

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)

> I've never missed anything of value.

How can you be sure of that if you didn't see it?

The full fat messenger is the most annoying app I have ever used. It's like a small child constantly trying to get your attention when you are busy with other tasks.

It’s completely absurd.

In many ways no. NB the same can be achieved by disabling the App in settings?

There is the principal of who owns the device... But that is a slightly different topic.

There was a point when I got fed up and unsubscribed from all notifications from everything. Now I only operate in pull-mode. I check my things 1-2 times a day and I receive zero notifications. My life is much better now!

It's still there when you check it once in a while, just you don't need to be distracted by it constantly. I also have turned off notifications for all social media and email. I feel happier and embrace having peace being okay with maybe missing out on something.

There is some useful content and updates in the groups I am a member of.

Yeah, they have Messenger Lite, but I rather not have two apps for the same website. You can go on Messenger.com though if you want a web only experience.

You can almost get a glimpse of the financial health of a company by the number of bullshit messages they send you. The trend is especially important. Just like you i’ve noticed facebook getting spammier and spammier, starting from the middle of last year. Which means things were probably starting to smell funky around that period

The page notifications are infuriating. I'm a co-owner of my mother's business page (barely a business really, almost more of a hobby). She can barely use Facebook and just uses the page for basic communication with a few dozen people but she/we are constantly bombarded by notifications about HOW MANY USERS we could reach AND WHY DON'T YOU BOOST THIS POST. Hey, your customers haven't heard from Facebook in 10 minutes! Why don't you give them another notification!?

I was never a twitter person until recently, as in the last month or so. I've had an account for years and never really used it. And wow. Going from reddit (was a huge addict) to twitter reminds me of when I went from forums to reddit/digg. I've barely used reddit in the last month. The deluge of posts at all hours is incredibly addicting. I may need to block it or scorch earth my followings.

Or make two accounts and my main one only follow positive/uplifting/motivational accounts.

I have made hundreds of thousands of dollars through people I have met on LinkedIn, and I continue to make money through them. In business, networking is key. It’s not going to find you clients on its own, but it definitely aids in that process if you use it to network or prospect.

facebook feels more and more like traditional tv or the web portals like yahoo! or msn. we've moved on! they went backwards.

Too bad Google Inbox has only a couple weeks left till it's retired. :(

Well, i will probably see the comment on my post after a week or two and respond then.

Messenger.com on the computer.

To avoid missing anything of value!

This is interesting but I don't think I fully understand. Do you mind dumbing it down for me?

I think the bigger problem is that A/B only measures certain things and following it blindly can have you descending in important ways that are hard to measure.

Global vs local maximum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxima_and_minima

Related: what's the best for one part of the system, may not be the best for the entire system.

I’m not sure why this company is still allowed to send mail. Why can’t their mail servers be blacklisted?

Interestingly that's exactly how algorithms make things go viral. They pick up on things that get a quick reaction with complete disregard for what happens in the long term. Jaron Lanier explains this in his talks [0].

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.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc_Jq42Og7Q

I filter messages that contain the Unsubscribe word.

I've been auto-deleting emails from * @facebook * for 8 years. Never fails.

There's nothing preventing you from setting up your own blacklist/filter. OTOH, most people don't care about this, and would be outraged if their mail provider started blocking facebook's mail.

Once it text messaged and emailed every contact in my phone telling them to join. It was like 2 unintentional clicks from the home screen.

I’m not sure if they would. It seems to me that, at best, the email has zero value to an enthusiastic Facebook user, because they are routinely engaged with the site, and have the app installed on their mobile device to receive the notifications directly. The emails are redundant to them and an unnecessary load on the internet infrastructure.

I'm pretty sure Facebook got this strategy from LinkedIn too.

My breaking point was when they fucking texted me that I had "notifications" when I hadn't logged in for a while. No doubt those notifications were that someone is going to an event I don't care about somewhere within a 100 miles of me.

I’m predisposed to expect shameless self promotion in so many business contexts that it seems “acceptable if annoying” to find on a business networking site. I’m not usually there to look at the “feed” anyway.

USA here - I was at a meeting where a teenager was speaking. He was mentioning some other social media platform and said, as an aside, "That's like Facebook for you old people."

Omg...so simple...so brilliant.

Same thing with twitter; every tweet is a notification it seems *facepalm

Yeah - I did understand there was an implied "like you" in his statement :-)

Not that I've used Facebook much!

Once per day? That's a lot. I wouldn't call that "stop checking Facebook". You are still a MAU (monthly active user) in their statistics.

In the short term. Long term probably not a great idea.

> 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.

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.

Anecdata, but this was a big factor for me as well. Having joined somewhat early, they had me with the red badge like Pavlov with his bell. It was effective because of the variable reward. I logged in to see if there was a red badge. Now there’s always a red badge.

This sounds like a stupid question, but it's a consequence of Google using a ridiculous product name: how do I tell if I'm using Inbox?

> I still write to share my thoughts on something... catches my friend's attention because of the "novelty" of writing something of my own

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.

This is also how I do it and one of the reasons I encourage people to own their own domain and email (among other reasons). I have used dreamhost since 2007 but I am really not happy about their recent move to a non-foss webmail. (to atmail from squirrel) Besides that though they are pretty awesome.

So any service that feels slightly abusive gets its own email like that, and then ignored usually.

Inbox.google.com - they also have separate apps

Right. In that case I'm not and never have been using Inbox, but I still got the separated lowercase-i-inbox from https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox

I logged in for the first time in a few weeks recently. Out of 50+ notifications, literally only 1 was something I cared about seeing. I wish I were exaggerating.

The boy who cries wolf <-> The app that notifies

Do it too often and with too much urgency, and eventually you will be utterly ignored.

Wow this is perfect! It wouldn't work well for my work email where I need tk keep track of emails from service providers etc, but this is perfect for personal emails. Thanks :)

> Even more annoying is the same thing that they do with email notifications.

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.

> I’ve stopped granting any app not email or IM notification rights.

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.

Disabling is better than nothing, but it's no substitute for actually uninstalling.

Try having a business page on Facebook! Anytime you log in, they will create some new notification that you know is not true. "5 people have viewed X business, try posting again." Or "1 new person liked X business" then you check and the number of likes is the same. Which is pretty easy to check when the number of likes is in the 2-3 digit range.

Typical example: you arrive at a crossroads A where both ways work for you, so you choose the one with less traffic. Then at crossroad B you do the same, and then at C, and finally you arrive at destination D.

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.

Totally agree! Ever since they added story updates into the notifications screen, it has totally lost meaning. That and friends attending random events, etc. It used to actually mean something.

I never did give Facebook my phone number, thank god

Yes, but it gets more complicated because there's a time factor too.

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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19325816

I've posted this before but Instagram actually creates fictitious notifications when you stop using the app. That prompted me to delete it altogether.

Lol yeah, that's them not even bothering making up an excuse to pester you. They're literally just trying to snag a hook on you for nothing.

Personally it's never seemed like a valuable resource in that regard to me. How do you go about this and how much success do you see?

ha aha. seems like all those PMs and mountains of engineers Facebook/linkedIn is hiring aren't helping their product much. They've got money to burn, so I don't think this is going to change anytime soon.

This is what lead me to switch to using their website on mobile, rather than the app. The same goes for LinkedIn, which I had the app for perhaps a week before I got fed up with its bullshit. I still have messenger for the tiny number of people who don't use WhatsApp or Signal.

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.

This is an indication that user commitment is very low on Facebook.

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.

haha, I know the feeling.

Every single post I make "Performs better than 95% of posts on my page" ... "Click here to boost NOW!".

Ugh.

It’s mostly passive, to be honest. About 20-30 recruiters reach out daily, so I typically tell them that I’m only willing to work remote contracts (if I’m not looking for something full time) with a bill rate of $125 / hour or more. It only takes one out of a hundred to come back with an opportunity that brings in 20-25k per month for six plus months that I can do in addition to my day job to make the effort well worth it.

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.

I saw your comment and thought to myself I haven't seen any emails from LinkedIn in a while. Then I remembered why - https://i.imgur.com/J4d4VLk.png

I don't recall ever explicitly doing so. I'm sure something I did gave them implicit permission to siphon it off my phone when I had the app installed.

> This is an indication that user commitment is very low on Facebook.

> 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.

They are starting to kill the attractiveness of instagram too. I get more notifications a day from spam accounts requesting to follow me or send me messages that my use of the app has declined substantially over the last year.

I managed to get the emails under control (IIRC, there are only about two or three dozen different types you have to individually opt of, and they haven't been aggressive about adding new ones to that list), so I never have to check the app. The only think I want a notifications for are event invites, and that's pretty much what I have.

> I wonder if you can still post to Facebook by email. Having this automatically loop would make me happy.

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.

It's the same for LinkedIn and it really sucks.

I haven't logged in for a long time and they've started sending me text message notifications about friends posting photos.

That would match my usage pattern, so I guess you are correct. I'm using Facebook only rarely and am definitely and completely away from it for several days or even weeks between periods of usage.

out of curiosity, what work do you do remotely?

Nowadays, mostly Elixir, Ruby, and React development.

Are you sure these are false? I am really skeptical of that.

Could this be mixed w people unliking and hence the number doesn't change?

Thanks a lot for the tip. Guess I'll have to try it that way and see.