https://www.xda-developers.com/uninstall-carrier-oem-bloatwa...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 )
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.
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...
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.
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.
I don't use it for anything other than to have my CV there and messaging with recruiters, though.
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.
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!).
Never knew that was an option, but shutting it down just seems logical when you see the aggressive lock-in they are doing.
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.
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
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)
There is the principal of who owns the device... But that is a slightly different topic.
Or make two accounts and my main one only follow positive/uplifting/motivational accounts.
Related: what's the best for one part of the system, may not be the best for the entire system.
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.
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.
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.
So any service that feels slightly abusive gets its own email like that, and then ignored usually.
Do it too often and with too much urgency, and eventually you will be utterly ignored.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Could this be mixed w people unliking and hence the number doesn't change?