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

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1293 points rmason | 1 comments | 06 Mar 19 20:30 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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nikkwong ◴[07 Mar 19 09:44 UTC] No.19326766[source]▶
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.
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1. darkpuma ◴[07 Mar 19 10:32 UTC] No.19326980[source]▶
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.