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

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1293 points rmason | 2 comments | 06 Mar 19 20:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.406s | source
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kojackst ◴[06 Mar 19 21:48 UTC] No.19323205[source]▶
Note: personal opinion bellow

It seems to me that the overall interest in Facebook is decreasing. The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years. It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving.

Still, Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition. We don't see any news about their user base decreasing and news channels don't seem to dislike them. Facebook is doing a good job making sure their biggest three platforms are seem as independent from one another, keeping Instagram and WhatsApp almost free from controversy.

Personally I see no loss for them here. Besides, they will promptly acquire any new players that look promising, or shamelessly copy them as they did with Snapchat.

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tombert ◴[06 Mar 19 22:17 UTC] No.19323471[source]▶
> Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition

You're not wrong, but I find it a bit frustrating how much resistance I get whenever I try and suggest using Signal instead of Whatsapp. As far as I can tell, it has pretty much all the features of Whatsapp that I use, without all the spying.

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elamje ◴[07 Mar 19 02:17 UTC] No.19325036[source]▶
Genuinely curious, how is WhatsApp spying? I thought they were encrypted? Are they not end to end encrypted like Keybase or signal?
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1. fwn ◴[07 Mar 19 07:25 UTC] No.19326189[source]▶
They are end to end encrypted. There's apparently a lot of meta data (like the people one communicates with, etc.) that can still be accessed by Facebook.

It also nudges users to enable cloud backups which in practice means that everyone has them enabled (...which in practice means that all your messages are unencrypted in the other person's cloud storage.)

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2. elamje ◴[07 Mar 19 19:39 UTC] No.19331429[source]▶
Oh no. I see