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

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1293 points rmason | 3 comments | 06 Mar 19 20:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.68s | source
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peteretep ◴[07 Mar 19 05:44 UTC] No.19325816[source]▶
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.
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Matheus28 ◴[07 Mar 19 05:53 UTC] No.19325847[source]▶
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.
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1. darkpuma ◴[07 Mar 19 10:22 UTC] No.19326940[source]▶
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.
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2. michaelt ◴[07 Mar 19 11:32 UTC] No.19327231[source]▶
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.
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3. teleclimber ◴[07 Mar 19 14:20 UTC] No.19328155[source]▶
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