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

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'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.

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 )

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.

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)

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.