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.
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.
Here's the kicker, which I think others have pointed out, but I want to say this succinctly:
First, to quote the article:
> The big gainer, interestingly, is under the same roof as Facebook. It's their co-owned Instagram
Now, to my point: The average person does not care about privacy, just the illusion of privacy (I suspect people reading this site intuitively know this. At some level, nearly everyone is in different ways, it turns out.)
Instagram provides that illusion by not injecting opinionated content into your feed (The most obvious example: you aren't seeing injected news stories in your Instagram feed, generally its only ads and people you follow, and the ads are marked)
Rest assured, they're getting their data's worth, maybe not the same way, but photos (particularly metadata on the photos that most smart phones, for instance, default collect) are just as (if not more so) valuable, not to mention there are still a myriad of other ways of collecting privacy intrusive data about users.
Hows about that?
(just to show my assertion is not completely unfounded, check out this survey:
The survey says: 9 out of ten americans care deeply about privacy (particuarly around data privacy and collection)
Yet, our actions, even faced with the outright knowledge of those very things being actively and routinely violated by services, is not enough for people to leave platforms for good, simply, people shift between social media outlets, like those leaving Facebook over privacy concerns yet still continue to use Instagram, in fact, Instagram is projected to grow as noted in this article, in part because of people migrating away from Facebook)
I think focusing only on privacy is a mistake. Every single person I’ve talked to that has deleted Facebook has done so because it did not improve or enrich their lives whatsoever, in fact, they saw it as a net negative. Why do people feel the need to endlessly browse pictures and statements by loose connections? Not one person I’ve talked to has mentioned privacy.
Yes, many of those people are on Instagram, but some of those have also left IG because they’re seeing the exact same strategy they saw executed on Facebook now being used on Instagram.
I’ve actually seen more people using private iCloud photo shares. I think FB as a whole has exaggerated how many people actually want to share and connect with random people or loose connections.
I think FB and people in general dramatically overstate how many connections they'll lose if they quit Facebook. I quit Facebook 9 years ago, but haven't lost a connection I cared about. I did lose connection with real people that were a net negative in my life, though
No one wants choice either. Having 100 social media apps on your phone is not ideal. We want one choice that is also a good choice. That seems virtually impossible when companies are motivated only by profit and only kept in check by customers having a better choice or by government regulation.
If facebook was driven purely by the motivation to help people stay in touch with their friends and to find events going on it would be a truly wonderful platform. Virtually every issue on facebook comes from seeking profits. At least problems from facebooks side anyway. There is also the social issues of propaganda and jealousy but facebook would have more time to deal with these when they aren't making the company more money.
Agreed, as noted in the survey I linked to, 9 out of 10 people (in accordance to this survey, but even its more realistically 7 out of 10, its still a lot of people) claim to. I think its a few things:
1. Awareness. I don't think people are aware of how/what services are collecting data and how that data can be collected
2. Influence. Its hard, I imagine, for a lot of people to drop social media altogether. Its not all vanity. My wife has a disability that sometimes leaves her bedridden for weeks. Without social media, she wouldn't be able to communicate with our friends unless they call/text/come over, which they do, but its not always feasible one of those things will happen, so following them on Instagram and chatting via Facebook Messenger is really helpful in keeping her spirits up in those times.
3. Inertia. I think a lot of the current outrage against Facebook has been media driven, in particular, I think after Trump got elected -
(just a side note here before I continue, I'm talking about a criticism of media in general, not democrat vs republican politics or anything of the sort)-
I have a strong feeling, that I can't really substantiate, so take it as you will, of course (I acknowledge I could be wrong), large main stream news outlets started digging around about the mechanics of that election, and stumbled into the Cambridge Analytica scandal as a result, increasingly their practices came under fire, in part because I think some large media organizations (rightly, in my opinion) blame their data harvesting practices on getting Trump elected in the first place.
This also brings up another point I find so sad: despite the openness of the internet, the mass media still reigns supreme in being able to influence the masses, and I (anecdotally) feel like the power of freely and ubiquitously available knowledge via the internet has not had the impact on this sort of thing that one would have hoped. It was one of the promises of the internet in the 90s, that we would all vastly become more informed and it would take vastly less effort (and it does, if you are looking for it).
I did not leave Facebook because of privacy concerns. That's your biggest mistaken assumption.
I work on Big Data for a living and know how inept companies are at actually doing anything useful with personal data. The data being generated is massive and the vast amount of it is random and useless.
My reason for reducing my social media presence is the Like count next to every thought expressed. By adding a publicly visible number next to every expressed human thought, you influence behavior and thinking. This has all kinds of consequences that tech corps and society are waking up to - ledger.humanetech.com
That is why I have consciously reduced my social media usage.
> Instagram provides that illusion by not injecting opinionated content into your feed (The most obvious example: you aren't seeing injected news stories in your Instagram feed, generally its only ads and people you follow, and the ads are marked)
What Facebook content do you consider "injected"? AFAIK, the only things in feed are:
1) Posts, events, shares, etc from people or pages that you follow
2) Posts that your friends have interacted with (liked, commented on, etc)
I think it's number 2. I don't particularly want to see what my random stuff my friends are liking or commenting on. I know Instagram provides this too, but it's separate from the main feed.
I don't think the migration is caused by privacy concerns. Facebook has become ridiculously bloated with all kinds of features up to the point where it starts resembling enterprise software rather than an online consumer service. Even I, a techie, sometimes have hard times understanding how to do this or that in Facebook.
On the other hand, Instagram is plain simple and understandable.
> Now, to my point: The average person does not care about privacy, just the illusion of privacy (I suspect people reading this site intuitively know this. At some level, nearly everyone is in different ways, it turns out.)
>Instagram provides that illusion by not injecting opinionated content into your feed (The most obvious example: you aren't seeing injected news stories in your Instagram feed, generally its only ads and people you follow, and the ads are marked)
I think you're right about the content that people like being missing, namely shared video and images, but wrong about the underlying reason people prefer that stuff being gone. The content is vastly different on Instagram 90% of the stuff I see is at least tangentally the life/art/activities of the people I follow. It may be a heavily edited near fake version but it's not the 100th 5 minute craft video or a reshared news story from that (more than) slightly kooky uncle.
I think the general lack of a share button (there are ways to 'reinsta' [I believe that's the term] but from the people I follow that's fairly rare and it's mostly sharing art) leads to a materially different type of content. Maybe this is just a byproduct of the different groups in both though Facebook is the older platform for me so there's a lot of people I don't particularly care about anymore on there and Instagram being newer (and not positioned to me as the primary social hub so there's less pressure to follow everyone) I have a more curated list of followers.
Finally Instagram is just much easier to consume to me since it's mostly just the visual snapshot of some activity with less generic shared content and much less video.
TL;DR: I'm not sure it's the privacy differences (perceived or real) between Facebook and Instagram rather than the content differences. ie more things directly related to the people/groups I follow.
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.
It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving.
The problem with Facebook, is that either it's boring, or it's not boring, and in that case it's often far worse. Facebook latched onto the fact that outrage measures as "engagement" then other people latched onto that fact and started to use Facebook for their own outrage mongering purposes.
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.
So one company, three brands?
If I were to start my own crowdfunding app, I'd have one app with three "skins" and three different brands, each a different level of "edginess." In the Terms of Service would be the discretion for the site to "shift" your account from one of the three to another. The only effect of this, would be to shift the public information around the creator and subscriptions from one site to another. I would do this, so that "maintaining our brand" would never become an issue in funding creators, even edgy or downright controversial ones.
It seems to me that it takes "energy" to get people to change. Change being one of how they think about something, how they respond to something, or what they spend their time on. As far as I can tell, there are three very well known and very well studied energy pools that can be amplified and then tapped, one is fear, one is anger, and one is reward.
With fear and anger, a process is set up to increase levels in the target, while simultaneously offering a solution vector (ie a change in behavior that will address the fear or anger). I am sure psyche majors can quote all sorts of work here on that aspect of things.
For web companies, if your revenue is derived by ads, and you can only get people to click on your ads if they are looking at your page, it seems using fear and anger to drive people to page after page would be the best strategy to maximize their exposure to ads.
"outrage measures as engagement" is a perfect summary of the effect. The feedback loops are horribly exploitative.
I was never that engaged in Facebook, just checked it once a week. Then I started helping managing a private forum (for Michigan entrepreneurs) and got invited into another one. Now I'm on FB a couple of times a day.
Having the chance to engage with bright people who share my passion was the key. But the majority of my family has never been on Facebook.
This has been a common refrain from a lot of people. Facebook seems to have a lock on community it’s discussion forums for all sorts of small groups.
It works since basically everyone is on it and you don’t have to make people register and create an account as a barrier to entry. People used to have email listservs instead, but I think there is so much email marketing now that the signal to noise ratio on most people’s personal accounts approaches 0.
If someone could create a platform for an online discussion forum that doesn’t require signing up for a new service, will notify you of activity, and is free that would probably help a lot of people move over. NextDoor might have been able to, but they’re too focused on specific geographic neighborhoods and they have a serious racism problem.
I have a pseudonym FB account that I am forced to maintain for this reason (specialist interest groups). It's the new phpbb even though it completely sucks as a forum tool. The same questions get asked over and over. But worse is better I guess.
I went to great lengths to keep my account completely anonymized, so the suggested friends list is a hilarious cross-section of global randos. Of course being a pseduonym account I could be banned at any moment.
This is why I liked Reddit so much when I have discovered it.
You get thematic subreddits for these kind of discussions, and you didn't even need a full-fledged account. Just a nickname. No email confirmation, no phone authentication, no anything.
> you don’t have to make people register and create an account as a barrier to entry
Cool, I had not realized that Facebook now allows non-members to post and participate in their forums. That's really great! Not sure where on Facebook it is one can do that, but I'll be on the look out now that I know they've added this.
> latched onto the fact that outrage measures as "engagement" then other people latched onto that fact and started to use Facebook for their own outrage mongering purposes.
So this must be your assessment of twitter as well? Same current observation, Same predicted outcome?
I wish they'd accommodate news and opinion in the same way. Maybe that way, they could keep their employees out of the business of censoring the internet in line with their particular biases.
>one app with three "skins" and three different brands, each a different level of "edginess."
They aren't a tech company as such but this reminded me of Coca Cola. There's Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Coke No Sugar plus whatever flavored variations they are currently doing. They are all slight variations on more or less the same product but it gives people the feeling that they are making a choice.
I think Coke No Sugar is supposed to be the replacement for Coke Zero. They also aren’t identical as Zero/No Sugar uses stevia as the sweetener while Diet Coke uses Aspartame.
I will bit the rebranding of Zero to No Sugar might have also been an attempt to get ahead of legislation to tax sugary drinks.
I deleted my account years ago, but ended up creating a fake account under a fictitious identity for the odd event organized through Facebook. I log in every so often just to see what's up. It appears to be a mixture of paid content and two random friends posting memes.
I have to think people are deriving some value from it, but I cannot imagine what it is.
Just like with twitter, it all depends on who you follow; Some content is dramatically better than others. And just like with twitter, most of the content is essentially garbage.
Agreed. And I think this is one reason I love FB and can't stand Twitter. I kept buying into the "follow important people on Twitter" and it's just crap. I don't care what a noted Icelandic volcanologist retweeted about canaries. I don't care what my favorite F1 driver retweeted about english football. I don't care. I don't follow "influencers" because I don't care what they think, but I thought at least getting things from the horse's mouth, as it were, would be interesting, but it's just not.
I follow friend and family on facebook. If they post crap, it's because they have stupid things to say. I don't have many friends who I think are stupid.
Obviously you can follow celebrities on facebook and only follow friends on twitter but it doesn't feel like they're made for that use case, the 'reverse' of what I use it for.
Obviously you can follow celebrities on facebook and only follow friends on twitter but it doesn't feel like they're made for that use case, the 'reverse' of what I use it for.
Someone here not long ago on HN opened my eyes to the 'lists' feature of Twitter, it's been a remarkable improvement for me with the platform. "IRL" friends in one list, "Net" friends in another, sports commentary (because that's a thing I'm into), etc. etc. Crap is more or less 'siloed'.
I wish twitter promoted the feature more, to be honest, I think it can help with some of the gripes you have, if not for you maybe for others as it did with my experience on the platform.
Following interesting people generally has nothing to do with following celebrities.
People could post the same stuff on FB, Twitter, or email lists the hard part is finding stuff worth subscribing to. It’s really more about what platform creators use, and Twitter’s lightweight nature means a lot of interesting things end up on it.
I feel the same way about twitter. The only time I ever visit is when some service I use isn't working and I want to see if they've said anything about it being down (or it's just me).
I have to think people are deriving some value from it, but I cannot imagine what it is.
I know a couple of people who don't have any Facebook "friends" connected to their accounts, but they follow brands and companies they're interested in keeping up with.
It's sort of like RSS, but with more companies on board.
I barely use facebook's website, I don't post anything but keep a account around for family, folks who want to use messenger and the odd event/group. It's a bit like having that hotmail address from highschool for the odd person who has that as your only contact point. I kept AIM and ICQ around for a long time for that reason.
I think younger folks have migrated to Instagram, snapchat, etc. where they actually post/use the platform.
This is what I've done as well. Fake name, profile, wildly random answers to profile questions and thumbs up to anything if I remember of have times. I only use the account to follow a couple of local businesses. Facebook is welcome to all the income that account provides them.
If you linked it to your real phone number or any of your real friends who have you in their contacts (which they've most likely shared with Facebook), you're not fooling FB.
Integrating the backends of the messaging systems, not the frontends. There will still be separate apps called "Messenger," "Whatsapp," "Instagram," etc., but they'll just be different fixtures set on top of identical plumbing.
... in much the same way that Ford (say) could design one car and then sell it to very different audiences as the Ford Taurus, Mercury Sable, and Lincoln Continental.
> The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years.
I actually found some great rugs (owners did not know what they had!) and furniture on the FB marketplace. Much better finds than on craigslist, and easier to verify that the seller is a human.
Craigslist was tainted by the unsavory element of prostitution and stolen goods and isn’t a resource that I seek out. Facebook marketplaces seem like what eBay was in the 90s.
If I'm buying a used piece of furniture or whatever, I don't give a shit about prostitution going on elsewhere on the site.
What's really hurt Craigslist is all the scammers. You can't post anything of value on there without some scammer responding and telling you they're going to send you a cashier's check and have a personal assistant pick it up.
You don't have this problem at all on Facebook AFAICT. When someone responds to your ad on Facebook Marketplace, it's a real person who actually wants to buy your old junk.
The scammers aren’t there because of prostitution, both categories are there because Craigslist attracts unsavory parties and does little or nothing to police them.
Indeed. There sure are a lot of accusations of FB lying in these comments, but it seems people have no problem upvoting much more obvious lies like "FB hasn't launched any new features in 2 years".
The point doesn't still stand, but I'll save you all the googling: FB launched Watch on August 9, 2017. You could also say "only in the last year" and it'd be easy to find something else with 2 minutes of googling.
> It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving
Email hasn't had any new features added in decades, and people still use it.
For me, Facebook is a tool. I use it to organise events and groups, and communicate with people.
There's no other tool that works as well. I can have all my messages, groups, and events in one place. Almost everyone I know uses Facebook as well, so it's centralised.
Speaking of event management, one very useful feature that Facebook has added recently is integrated payments for events. You can set up a Facebook event that has tickets, and people can purchase and pay for tickets through FB without having to go to the external ticket sales platform (moshtix, eventbrite etc.). I'm not sure if you can do ticketing directly through Facebook or if you need an external service, I haven't set up any events with tickets. Anyway, it's a very useful feature as it saves me having to sign up for different ticket platforms.
You may be missing a whole bunch of people like me who refuse to use facebook. And you'll just never know how many. If there's an event that is solely organized through facebook, I just don't go. If that means I miss out, I miss out.
I read your post as you were some sort of event planner or something, not that you were using it in a personal group of friends. Please forgive the misunderstanding. I see a lot of groups/businesses that use facebook exclusively to communicate and organize events (like the local paintball field) and they are missing out on some people (I have no idea how to quantify how many). I'm sure they're reaching more people now (using facebook) than they were using whatever old method they were using.
Unless Facebook figures out a way to address this, it's the start of a death spiral. The only thing that makes Facebook interesting is the people it can connect you to. If a few of them leave, the place becomes a little more boring than it used to be... which leads a few more of them to get bored and leave, which makes the place a little more boring... which leads more people to get bored and leave, etc. What started as a few snowflakes turns into an avalanche.
It's kind of the photo-negative version of the positive feedback loop Facebook enjoyed on its way up. Back then, each new person who joined created an additional incentive for other people to join, which gave them tremendous upward velocity. But the same dynamic running in reverse could send them downward just as quickly.
I've always wondered that, and is it an inherent 'flaw' with social media platforms, and FB just got so big that the coming decline will be just as catastrophic as MySpace and Friendster, but from a much greater height?
FB has obviously made very very smart acquisitions in WhatsApp and Instagram. I get the feeling these were primarily made because of the excellent data they had through their VPN app tracking service (as you could see the hypergrowth in real time and know exactly who to pick and how aggressively to go after). I'm sure they have or are working very hard on some alternative to this (maybe buy metadata off ISPs or become a network/transit carrier in their own right so they can see the IPs where stuff is going?).
But I do wonder if all social networks just are fads. You have a problem that as the network gets bigger, it starts becoming less interesting to you. Your social circles start overlapping (you don't want to post anything because it may offend someone, coworkers, grandparents, children), which stops everyone posting, which causes the whole thing to grind to a halt and become less interesting.
Instagram is almost unusable due to the ads. Every 3 or 4 posts you see an ad. The only way Instagram isn't obnoxious is on the desktop, in a browser, with an ad-blocker installed.
I love WhatsApp, but they haven't found good ways to monetize it yet and one of these days they'll ruin it.
One feature (limitation) of Instagram is that you can't include clickable links in a post message. So if you're running a business or are a personality of interest, you might share something that your followers might actually care to look into in more depth off-platform.
But then you have to tell them to check your profile for your one allowed link, go to your site, search for the product/blog/video - or you pay for an ad with links enabled.
> It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving.
I'm not much of a user myself, but among my friends that use it heavily I've noted a number of complaints that it has gotten HARDER to use for their primary use: keeping up with friends.
Their issue isn't that FB has become stale or boring, but that it has actively LOST ground relative to their purpose.
> 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.
No one wants to install ANOTHER app just to talk to you. Most of us already have at least 3 messaging apps they use on a daily basis and probably a whole lot more they use on a weekly basis.
I think there's a lot of "chat app fatigue." I've personally had 5 or 6 on my phone in the past year and you'd have to drag me kicking and screaming into installing even one more of the damned things.
Signal work all right, but it doesn't feel very polished. Notifications are a bit wonky, and the unread message icon never shows up on the home screen icon.
I'm gonna try and coin the term: "The facebook parodox"
It's the problem where you have cross-generational social media infused with varying socio-economic levels you find that people online want to align with their tribe BUT ALSO want to be connected with you because of a physical connection.
Prior social networks were already "pre-aligned":
Myspace: Majority School Peers/Friends +-4 years Twitter: Industry networking/interest based
Facebook is "everything". I've hit this moment where I don't want to add "2nd degree" or "loose" connections on facebook because I don't think it will enhance our relationship, if anything it could drive a wedge between us. I see these people 1-2 a year, and in person, it's great, but online, it's horrible.
The only way I can get along with my friends and family is through the strict community guidelines of HN - we just can't handle the raw exposure of email or SMS, and the algorithmic preprocessing of Facebook makes it even worse. We plan parties by encoding times and dates in the whitespace of our posts about JS frameworks. I found out that my brother was getting married by decoding the carefully placed typos in a post of his about the housing crisis in SF. I know it sounds dystopian, but engagement-maximization strategies are ruining everything else, and direct exposure is simply untenable.
I deleted my personal account years ago when it became evident that Facebook was little more than a reprehensible consumer surveillance utility, failing at the original value proposition of keeping in contact with friends.
I maintain a company page through an otherwise content-free account. As a corporate user I find Facebook slow and difficult to navigate.
All social networks die. They either fail to achieve critical mass, or they do and it turns out the mass was mostly composed of bovine scatology.
Note:- I have been off FB for the past 5 years or so.
As much as I hate FB and its abhorrent privacy policies, there are a very large population who do not care about privacy. I have some in my household who don't and FB's latest financial results prove it.
Everyone cares about privacy. They just aren't keenly aware that they're losing it. If you meet someone who doesn't care about privacy, ask them, can I borrow your phone and browse through your contacts, your conversations, and your pictures? Almost nobody will say yes unless they are very close to and intimate with you.
I think John Oliver did a pretty good job of framing the Snowden revelations in terms of "the NSA can see your penis". That's a good angle to make people care.
I don't think your analogy is very good. it's true that many (maybe even most) people have secrets that they would be embarrassed to share with their friends, family, or coworkers. if you asked them whether they would be okay with letting some stranger who they would never meet look through their phone, they might not do it for free, but I bet a lot of people would do it for $5-10.
That's not it. Offering people 10 bucks won't change that most say "no" when you ask them to borrow their phone and snoop through everything. Instead, it's that the whole loss of privacy is impersonalised. When you see my face, the face of someone who just asked to borrow your phone, when it's clear a person is going to be looking through it, that's when you say "no".
But when Facebook is harvesting data about you, it doesn't feel like a person is doing it. It feels like some abstract machine or algorithm or a faceless corporation is doing it. They even promise that humans aren't individually looking at your data. So people bank on that impersonality. The data may be collected, but who cares, nobody is actually really looking at it, right?
The truth is that people do often look at it, despite all the promises and everything. That's what you have to convey and that's what John Oliver was trying to establish with his angle.
Sure, when you ask people they tell you they care about Privacy. But their actions prove otherwise. And actions are what matter. It’s an unfortunate situation but that’s just the reality of it, like it or not. I don’t.
>The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years.
If I recall, correctly, the last major feature (read: that had any fanfare) was when they added the ability to have hi-res photos (and more of them), which was timed with the release of the Transformers movie? So, yeah, it's been a hot minute since they did anything substantial.
I actually preferred the simpler design FB had back in 2013 or so before the big redesign. After that everything seemed to get busier and louder. Usability took a hit after that IMO.
I've not used Facebook in any personal capacity but the same thing happened to Twitter, especially in the speed department. Twitter is so slow now that I don't use it.
I couldn't agree more and don't forget about "aggregator" type accounts that just steal original content from other users. I am predicting that Instagram will last another 2-3 years before people get tired of the non-stop ads and spam.
> It seems to me that the overall interest in Facebook is decreasing
Google Trends never lies. Some say that people have learned they don't have to search for Facebook, but the trend for Facebook follows the 'myspace curve of disengagement':
Note that people never type 'whatsapp' into a browser.
I think that social media is always going to be fickle. Google and search is a much better bet for the product being relevant in years to come.
Facebook is also a black hole. It is very rare that something written on Facebook is noteworthy enough to be shared outside of Facebook, here for instance.
Anecdotally, I work with teenagers and none of them have a Facebook pages. It's viewed as a place for old people and parents.
For me personally, it's almost impossible to deal with. Way too many political posts from my friends and family.
It's probably best use for me is local events and an occasional major event from a friend/family member.
Still, I find myself going there less and less.
From a small business standpoint, it's just not worth the time, effort and money to advertise there. It's much more effective to focus on getting referrals with my current clients.
I really wish there was a paid social media service that everyone used. I would gladly pay $5-$10 a month for something that didn't sell my data.
Most people use Facebook these days to keep track of their acquaintances from various stages in life: high school friends, college friends, former coworkers, people you meet at parties etc.
In that regard it’s not very useful to teenagers who are already in the same building as their entire network every day (their school). Plus teenagers don’t want to hang out where their parents do. When I was in school part of facebook’s appeal was the fact that parents couldn’t get on even if they wanted due to the .edu email requirement!
> For me personally, it's almost impossible to deal with. Way too many political posts from my friends and family.
Bingo, that's what's doing it for me.
Before the 2016 presidential election, Facebook was fun. It was also a great way to get news.
But now, what I'm finding is that a lot of people on Facebook just don't know how to behave in a public forum. It makes it painful, because someone always knows someone who's a jerk online.
I really don't know what changed, to be honest. Did Facebook change, or did too many people come to the party?
Facebook began as an exclusive social network for upper-class students. Gradually it grew to encompass not just all of America, but the entire world. It turns out, many of us well educated people don't really want to network or socialize with poorly educated people. Police started monitoring our activities, so the events all but disappeared.
The world changed, too. Facts used to matter; we read books and the newspaper, not 25 reasons to be an idiot on Buzzfeed. Truth used to matter; less of the nation was as polarized. It was easier to get along without people shoving their ignorant political ideas in your face. Then 2016 happened, with the Russian trolls and other psyops used against us, and some of us realized we'd fucked up by buying into and encouraging others to join this network and others like it.
I could probably go on for a lot longer, but that's the gist of it.
If facebook had any notion that their users are also still customers and important in that regard, despite revenue coming from their data consumers, they may have been inclined to care about state-based psyops campaigns victimizing their users. Instead, I think a corporate philosophy of exploitation prevailed.
I'm not even sure how to properly characterize how condescendingly out of touch your comment is.
I was on Facebook before it opened to the general public, and it wasn't some ivory tower of intelligent thought where the educated could avoid mingling with the dumb. It was full of stupid social media stuff then too.
After Facebook opened up, my "poorly educated" uncle was content using Facebook to simply socialize with family and friends in 2012 when today he does nothing but share right-wing memes.
What changed is FB had to make money - and they discovered "outrage" sells. That's the full answer. It has nothing to do with the lower-class crowding up your social network lol.
All of these complaints about the various superficial reasons for Facebook's decline I think are missing the forest for the trees.
The "grow fast monetize later" model that social media companies use, along with the user being the product, inevitably acts as a template for bait and switch.
All degradation of user experience stems from that. Of course using a social media platform during its "growth phase" is going to be a lot more of a pleasant experience than using that same platform when it's trying to maximize revenue.
I feel like the major change was who started using Facebook: people who had never "interneted" before. When it first launched and was limited to .edu emails everyone on the platform had grown up online. Before we had Facebook we said and shared a whole lot of dumb stuff anonymously and figured out the real-world consequences of our online actions. We "trolled" a wikipedia article about elephants with John Stewart and learned about "fake news" from Bonsai Kittens and pop-up ads promising we'd just become millionares. We "socialized" on AIM, LiveJournal, Xanaga and MySpace. For early Facebook users, Facebook was just one of many destinations on the internet.
But for most of today's Facebook users Facebook is the internet and they missed out on their internet training wheels. Facebook has merely replaced AOL for a generation of people who will now take any "article" their friend posted at face value, share it with all of their friends, and then angrily complain about "mainstream media" when their phone blows up in the microwave instead of charging like the "news" told them it would.
Sorry if I was unclear as I was trying not to malign baby boomers but I was referring to the 50+/not tech savvy crowd on Facebook, not the young internet users of today.
Please be careful with the "50+" comments, ha! Not there yet but closer than I'd like to admit, and I grew up during the sweet spot of modern computing. My biased opinion is that Gen X had it best in this regard.
facebook, twitter, youtube all have gone down hill since gamergate in my opinion. Russia, Nazis, and 4chan learned how to leverage social networks and SEO to spread misinformation and noise.
Wait a second. Did you just lump 4chan in with Russian Intelligence (I assume that's what you meant by Russia and not the entirety of the nation) and Nazis? You should have thrown the Boogie Man and Satan in for good measure. You know, you can go to 4chan and check it out. You won't get turned into "an operative" or anything. It might not be the den of murderers and thieves its been portrayed as.
The politics has destroyed the friendliness. Same goes for Twitter, to some extent; even for us political junkies. The constant drip of miserable stupidity of others is just exhausting.
I just started unfollowing (for people I actually interact with, or might need to) or unfriending (for people I will never see again, and don't want to) people who post overly political bullshit.
I don't mind a bit of politics, Australia is going to hell in a handcart and the least people can do is raise awareness. But I don't like inflammatory (and often completely fake) bullshit.
I can now scroll my newsfeed (which I don't actually do that often) without getting high blood pressure.
Anecdotally (I don't live in America), every teenager has a Facebook account. Not a single person has WhatsApp. Instagram is used but not nearly as much as Facebook. (When people cross-post pictures you see the FB post has 3x - 10x the number of likes as the Instagram post.)
There are zero political posts. Zero. I've never seen one.
If my feed were full of political stuff, I'd also be sick of it. But feed is exclusively full of what friends & acquaintances are doing.
For me, it's the interface. It's just really complicated and slow. And I can't communicate with followers without paying. Advertising on FB is not really worth it, in most cases.
Purely anecdotal but when I could have moved to FB I held back because Myspace was more interesting. I eventually moved to FB as I got older, because.. I was older. My interests changed.
To some degree this may be an experience with the youth today, in time. Or not, I have no idea
IMO this is part of why Facebook's user base is so resilient. From what I see, younger people experiment more, looking for something that fits their identity, what their friends use, what's new, etc. They also have more time and incentive to explore new apps. By younger people I mean teenagers, high-school and younger.
Older people, it seems to me, are more utilitarian. By older people I mean college and up. They use Facebook for events, or because the social world is harder to navigate in college/later in life than when you're in high school and your friends are neighbors or classmates.
Perhaps this is just my experience, or maybe I'm just very off on how I read this, but it's a thought. I don't think Facebook is trying to be interesting— I think they're just shooting for useful and "sticky".
> I really wish there was a paid social media service that everyone used. I would gladly pay $5-$10 a month for something that didn't sell my data.
There was App.net, which attempted to be a fee-based better Twitter, but of course not everyone used and eventually shut down.
The only way to have a social network that everyone uses and is fee-based, would be to take one of the free ones and start charging...but then everyone would leave.
> I would gladly pay $5-$10 a month for something that didn't sell my data.
Hmm. Facebook has something like 2 billion profiles. Of course, most of them wouldn't pay $5/month - say that only one percent would. 20 million profiles times $5/month = $100 million/month. It might be worth it for someone to try to build such a thing...
An anecdotal story about this - a couple of years ago I built a paid, ad-free privacy-focused social network, did several Show HNs for it and even here, in a community that seems quite receptive to the idea in principle, there was extremely low interest in it.
I got probably 50 sign-ups over a few Show HNs, no more than 4/5 upvotes and comments on the most well-received Show HN, and those who came in just posted one or two test posts, found obviously that nobody else was on there and left never to be seen again. Obviously none converted to a paid account (you could get 10 connections for free then afterwards pay $2/month).
Bootstrapping any social network, let alone a paid one, is hard. But I did try :-)
It is super hard to bootstrap, but sites like Facebook and Twitter already have hundreds of millions of users. Can't they run an experiment - something like "no ads/tracking for $5 (or whatever amount) per month" and see if there are any takers? If 20M sign up, that is 100M revenue per month.
Maybe they considered it and then rejected it as not viable?
For a few months now I've been toying with the idea of a "mutual data fund." A social network that collects & anonymizes user data, pools the data on behalf of all users (similar to how a mutual fund pools investor cash), and the data is "invested" (sold to advertisers) by a management company (like an investment adviser) with the data always under the ownership and control of an independent Board of Trustees (same as a mutual fund). Just like a mutual fund, the "returns" from the data would be used to pay the investment adviser for operating costs + some flat % and the rest of the returns would be allocated to users on a pro-rata basis. So the people who use the platform more or share higher-quality content get more "shares" (the investment kind, not the social media kind) of the ad revenue than those who aren't on the site often or share fake news or just annoy the crap out of everyone else.
Most users probably wouldn't make a whole lot of money on the platform but they'd have privacy and ownership of their data and they might end up with $5 or $10 after a year on the platform.
I’d be beyond shocked if even one percent of all Facebook users would pay $5/month for it. I think the only population of users who’d consider doing so are the intersection of those who are affluent (by Western standards), are extremely opposed to Facebook ads, and use it enough to consider paying for it.
I’d be surprised if you could get 1% of the US population of users to consider it, let alone the global population. You’d realistically be looking at single to very low double digit millions of users at the maximum.
The problem with the non ad driven model is that to you 5$ might be nothing, but some people 5$ is an impossible sum of money to spend a month on entertainment. Ads allow companies to offer first world products to customers who could desperately use technology to help them connect and trade in their local communities.
I think the discussion on privacy and ad based platforms should really be orthogonal.
> I think the discussion on privacy and ad based platforms should really be orthogonal.
Except that those two things are inseparable. The privacy problems are a direct result of the desire of the advertising industry to be able to target people based on their behavior, which necessitates spying on everyone.
If we could somehow eliminate that targeting, then we could discuss the two as separate topics.
I'm not sure losing that age group has much to do with Facebook's scandals.
This is purely anecdotal, but with my daughter and her social group, Facebook stopped being a service of interest to them quite a while back. Not because of data issues, but because (to use my daughter's words) "Facebook is for businesses and old people".
Not parent, but I am a college student at a large university in the US. Instagram is just huge, for the entire [university] population here. Snapchat is still used but not as common - Instagram is eating up Snapchat's userbase. GroupMe is used by the entire population for group chatting, and many males (especially more 'nerdy' guys) use Discord as the preferred general chat application.
Snapchat is the most annoying platform I have ever experienced for messaging. Disappearing messages (with no option for them to stick around) is literally an anti-feature.
Instagram is just annoying, because it's an image sharing platform being used as a messaging platform. I actually get annoyed when people message me on Instagram, because it means that their messages to me are scattered over different platforms.
Steam? Can you please elaborate, I am getting old I didn't even know steam had a social component. (except people leaving reviews, or posting to game forums about parts of the game)
Steam has a pretty robust messaging system including multi-user rooms and voice chat, etc. They're directly competing with Discord on that front now. There's groups and communities and other social components as well, though I'm not as familiar with those.
Oh yeah definitely, it's got nothing to do with privacy, it's just not a platform geared towards younger people, because it's a platform that caters to older people.
Kids these days don't give a shit about privacy. Why would they?
> Kids these days don't give a shit about privacy.
I'm not so sure that's true. At least, it's not true among the kids that I personally know.
What is true is that they have a more pragmatic view of the issue than us oldsters -- they view it as more like a monetary exchange: they understand and care about privacy, but they're willing to pay for a service by giving some of it up if they think the value they're receiving justifies it.
That's not the same as not caring. Just the opposite, it's caring enough to make conscious decisions about how to valuate it.
Because their entire history will be a matter of public record, and as we have seen repeatedly over the last few years, a wrong tweet from ten years ago can break an entire career, and I only see this getting worse. The kids who take care of what they expose to the public will spare themselves a lot of potential trouble.
Obviously this should not only be an issue of the kids. In an ideal world parents would be conscious of their kids online behavior.
I’m sure readers on HN are excited about the day of privacy reckoning but I stopped using Facebook because the news feed sucks. I’ll stare at a photo of someone I don’t remember trying to recall how I know them and then for the next month it’s photos and videos and requests for travel recommendations from them until I block them. It’s clear despite all the data Facebook has collected the company has no clue who I care about or what I’m interested in.
I think the news feed sucks even if it’s a picture of current contacts. It probably always has, I mean, there must be a reason Facebook wanted news, brands and whatever else there.
I just never followed things, so right now the most exciting part of my FB news feed is the commercials for board-game kickstarters.
I still use Facebook though. It’s still the best place to organise events with friends because it’s still the only platform everyone is on. I wish it wasn’t, but because the various other platforms and messaging app didn’t share an open protocol, no other platform has “everyone”.
Eventually when enough people quit FB, no platform will be good at organising events. Or maybe we will finally agree to use e-mail. :p
I only use Facebook for Messenger for the same reasons - everyone is on it. If that wasn't the case I'd happily delete my account.
The thing about Messenger is it's pretty good too. My wife and I used to use iMessage. When I switched to Android last year we decided to try Telegram. Notifications are often not send and calls are buggy at best. Messenger just works though, just like iMessage did.
It feels like Facebook now contains all of the negative parts of social media - complaining, arguing, chain posts, fake news, relatives, etc. While Instagram now has all the pleasant parts - pretty photos of families, vacations and food! So these days I find myself using Instagram regularly and Facebook almost never.
Having said that, I'll never leave Facebook until something else replaces it. It's the only place I have to keep in touch with a couple hundred people I would otherwise have no contact with. And it's still common for various groups of people I know to use it for event planning.
I also find myself having to share invites and news with people I know who are not on Facebook. They appreciate it, but I consider it a pain in the ass that they could easily resolve by getting a Facebook account again and just checking it once a week.
Instagram to me seems like the worst parts of social media, in that it's a vanity feeding mechanism amplified. Which in turn makes it an anxiety inducing experience if you aren't doing "cool things" that make other people jealous.
I enjoy using IG but I don’t follow many real people. I follow organizations, brands, etc. I like seeing their new stuff as well as any news such as sales, new releases, etc. I follow photographers and artists. It’s essentially a feed of stuff I like.
I wouldn’t follow “real” people unless they’re close friends. Don’t want to see people’s lunches or vacations.
I guess I view it from the other end of that spectrum. It's a place where I get ideas of places to go and things to do/see/eat. Plus I enjoy seeing the people I care about doing things that make them happy. I want my friends to show off the best parts of their lives.
But I'm also very particular about who I follow, unlike on Facebook where I'm friends with every old coworker, classmate and family member.
Instagram is social McDonalds. Quick gratification from pretty pictures of friends doing cool shit, ranked so that the prettiest friends appear on your newsfeed first.
Try putting a serious post on Instagram, nobody will see it and it will fall flat.
Meanwhile I put out a post on Facebook asking for help (after my house was burgled) and had about 15 people messaging me within a couple of hours willing to come around to my place and lend me a hand.
You can't even share links on Instagram, so I'm sure that the GoFundMe that was set up to help cover the money that was stolen from me would've gotten a lot less money than it has.
I like Instagram as an entertainment platform for looking at cool photos, and for posting the occasional photo myself (never of myself, always landscape of event photography), but it's absolute trash as a social media platform.
I consume Instagram like TV (they even launched IGTV, although I don't use it and it's terrible). People mostly don't get anxiety from watching TV. Maybe it has to do with the fact I don't use Instagram as SNS.
I suppose if you use IG like that then sure. For me, I follow other photographers and online "zines", so my IG is full of other artists. "Influencers", celebrities, and meme accounts are banished from my feed. In turn, I only post the photos I want to be public, that I'd sell as prints or show in a gallery.
If you follow the vanity stream then you're going to see exactly that, but IG can be a totally different experience. For me, it's a fantastic source of inspiration and a way to see what other artists are doing.
Now, for me the only use FB has left is a dumping ground for my photos that the older members of my family want to see but whom are not on IG yet.
I travel a lot and enjoy taking pictures and sharing them with friends so Instagram was a lot harder for me to give up then Facebook. I just disabled my account though and so far it feels like a positive move. Instagram isn't entirely without benefits but overall it just started to feel like an obligation and a distraction.
couple hundred people I would otherwise have no contact with
Not being snarky, this is a genuine question - If you can't make the effort to email these people every other month or so, then do you really care that much about them? I can understand the difficulties in visiting in person, or even phone calls - many people don't like phone calls these days, but email/SMS? This sounds more like you have a passing curiosity about these people than genuinely caring about them
Facebook is quite good as a contact list. It’s a good way to get ahold of random people you might have trouble getting in touch with otherwise. Email, phone and addresses change but a Facebook id typically does not. They can keep their “engagement” though.
It’s a terrible contact list. They don’t actually give you the details you need to contact people!
If the user in question actually uses Facebook, then it can act as a messaging service. But if someone, for instance, sent me a Facebook message, they would never receive a response, because I would learn about it approximately 6 months later when I do my annual login.
Messenger works as a standalone app, I've found it easier to message people there instead of friending them where they'll live in my feed forever even once they cease to be relevant.
facebook shot themselves in the foot with their constant attempts to bring the news sites to their platform. It used to be about virtual sheep, and then it became a place where apparently people chatter endlessly about politics. One has to wonder if politics is the best way to keep your users engaged or the most profitable.
Social media is weird. At the beginning of this year I unfriended everyone and unsubscribed from every group/page except for a couple parent groups of schools my kids are at.
It was odd how it felt like betrayal to unfriend people I know and love. Though experiencing those feelings for something as dumb as FB did confirm to me how evil social media is.
The human mind isn't really configured to handle social media. It feels so personal.
We only show trace numbers of people leaving social media altogether. They're obviously just transferring their usage. The big gainer, interestingly, is under the same roof as Facebook. It's their co-owned Instagram.
We already knew this. Another day on HN, another clickbait FB post.
I live in a somewhat large gated community that has a pretty active facebook group. The group is somewhat loosely moderated by the HOA (for better or worse) so in general people stay on-topic and neighborly. It's great for asking for recommended contractors, asking if somebody has a thing they can borrow, etc. This is one of the few things that keeps me on facebook.
Of course facebook is a terrible venue for this group - with its algorithmic feed, horrible search, and showing "notifications" when nothing of consequence has actually happened. If there were a more prevalent network I'm sure the group would move but there's really no other alternative that already has a critical mass of users and people aren't going to sign up for a new service unless everyone else in the neighborhood is already there.
Nextdoor is terrible. I get push notified of every lost cat or dog. Or whenever the local grocery store is out of cabbage. Or "suspicious people" walking around. I can't find a way to get any value out of it.
The bane of Nextdoor. Every person within 100 yards is suspicious, especially if they have "Hair color: african" (I kid you not, this one is from my neighborhood Nextdoor).
Nextdoor is awful. I think the idea was really good, but I've really just come to learn that by and large, my neighborhood is full of idiots. I guess the whole reason for social media is that we can choose who to be around, whereas we can't chose our neighbors. I only lasted about a month before the constant barrages of arguing over leash laws, petty snide comments, and self promoting 'handymen' drove me away.
I'm going to go against the grain here and say that I really like Facebook and think that overall it's a good platform with some flaws.
Right now I'm messaging 2 different groups and about 5 different people, while organising an event that's happening in a few weeks, and organising supplies and camping for a festival on the weekend. After this festival in the weekend, I can post the photos I took on Facebook, where everyone can tag each other in the photos, so they can be easily found.
For me it's an integrated social and event management platform. It works incredibly well for this purpose. If I need to find a generator for an event, I can ask in a group chat, or even put up a timeline post asking for one, and it will probably manifest. I had a friend who's laptop died and he needed a temporary replacement, so he put up a post and later that afternoon was in front of a new laptop.
There are some really shitty features that I hate about Facebook though, to the point that they induce anxiety. For messenger, being able to see when people were last active and when messages have been seen really makes my anxiety build up. I know that people aren't ignoring me and just take time to reply, because I do exactly the same myself, but it still plays in the back of my mind.
The second really shitty feature is that the people you interact with more are the people you keep seeing on your newsfeed or at the top of your messenger. I had a bit of conflict with a friend a while back, so we were giving each other some space to cool down. I kept seeing all her posts at the top of my newsfeed, and she kept appearing on the top of my contacts list for messenger, Facebook would even give me notifications that "Alice and 89 others have responded to events near you tomorrow". It actually did my fucking head in to the point where it was causing significant problems with my mental wellbeing.
I understand exactly why Facebook does this, to increase activity and engagement. But fuck it pisses me off.
> It actually did my fucking head in to the point where it was causing significant problems with my mental wellbeing.
You could have turned off seeing updates from her. That would not solve all the things you mentioned but it should in almost all cases suffice.
Friends giving each other space is maybe a thing but not being able to handle seeing her name pop up at all is a very extreme state of affairs about which I would suggest consulting with someone.
I think it's unfair to expect a feature that caters to that. You cannot just full ignore somebody in real life either, e.g. friends mentioning her name.
Facebook does in fact allow you to block a person or unfriend them. If you and your friend are in agreement about giving each other space, those two options should be enough from a reasonable feature expectation standpoint.
If you are friends with someone and interact a lot it's obvious and generally a good thing that Facebook highlights them. Facebook cannot know on its own that you are currently "not actually" friends with someone.
As I've said before repetedly, in order to use facebook effectively, you need to do everything you can to avoid the algorithm.
What I mean by that is that you don't want facebook deciding what you see. Instead, you want to control your feed as much as possible. I've found that to be true to some extent for every social media platform.
With facebook, the best way to do this seems to be to create a "friend list" of all of the people whose posts you want to see, and then bookmark it so you can use it as your main portal to facebook. When viewing the list, you'll see the posts and shares of everyone in that group (in chronological order) and nothing else. Nothing about who liked what or who commented on what.
Now, go to the list, scroll through everyone's posts until you see something you remember from last time you were on, and that's it. You're done with facebook unless you want to post something.
Similarly, my portal to youtube is the subscription feed. If I want to see recommendations, I'll go looking for them. On reddit I tend to browse r/all with a pretty extensive block list. Whatever I can do to stop algorithms from deciding what I see.
just for organisational purposes I feel whatsapp or wechat groups do a lot of what you're describing (except for the ease of photo tagging), and it leaves out all the stressful and annoying newsfeedy things you get on facebook. Which I think is pretty crucial, because that's all the social and data and ad driven stuff that facebook essentially runs on.
In general there seems to be, especially among younger people, a tendency back towards smaller communities, fewer strangers, less agitation and so on. Youtube, Patreon and Twitch creators seem to be particularly successful.
The positive features you mention are related to network effects or essentially to Facebook's "first mover advantage". As I see it, you should consider Facebook as merely the incumbent in this "connecting" role, i.e. don't give the Facebook organization any credit for the market position they find themselves in. The software must be adequate enough but that's a separate issue from FB's immense asset, its subscribers.
Going cold turkey is never easy. If you're having trouble withdrawing, consider what I did over the past few years:
1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone; next
2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone; then
3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone; then
4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally
5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.
It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account. But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?" (It's been months since I've cared to log into Facebook. Feels more like trudging through spam in an old e-mail inbox, now, than anything compelling.)
I quite like the plugins that remove the newsfeed too - or unfollow (not unfriend) everyone. It's a nice intermediate step so you can still use events and messages, but the most annoyingly addictive bit is gone. The light versions of the apps can be a useful step too.
Finally, after logging out - deactivating your account, and then deleting your account (or better, getting a trusted friend to do so for you) are the last steps. (If you're interested in UX, are you a little bit curious what the UX for those two is like?)
I've blocked ads ever since ad blockers were a thing. Facebook have finally managed to consistently get past uBlock Origin, and seeing ads in my news feed for the first time is really, really annoying me. They look similar enough to real posts that I read them automatically before I realise, which I find really disturbing. It's enough that I'm seriously contemplating not using Facebook any more.
If you use the facebook.com website (not the app) they are _torturing_ HTML to get ads past the blockers. Stuff like putting every letter in a separate span or div, weird encoding tricks, etc.
I closed my Facebook account around 2012, maybe even earlier. Recently I had to reactivate it (oh, and that's when I found out that Facebook never deleted my account). It still active but I simply don't use it. And I believe that's the best compromise for most people. It's still there, and if you need to lookup someone, for instance, just log in. Elsewise, just don't use it.
> How the study was conducted: A total of 1,500 persons were interviewed to explore Americans’ use of digital platforms and new media. From January 3rd through February 4th, 2019, telephone interviews were conducted with respondents age 12 and older who were selected via Random Digit Dial (RDD) sampling through both landline phones and mobile phones. The survey was offered in both Spanish and English. Data was weighted to national 12+ U.S. population estimates.
I wouldn’t put much faith in this estimate. While facebook’s is probably an overestimate of people actually engaged in their platform, this survey doesn’t seem very useful to me.
I am always sad to see responses like this. Statistics is a very well-defined mathematical discipline, and any good research firm will use weighting techniques to adjust for demographic-based likelihood of response. The results they get from this are very accurate.
If you have concerns about Edison's methodology or application of standard survey weighting then I think that could be a fruitful conversation. But implying that 1,500 responses can't be predictive for a country of 350 million is woefully misinformed.
Phone surveys were accurate when robocalls and cellphones didn't exist. Now you're only sampling the people who aren't discerning enough to reject unknown numbers.
Having concerns about their methodology would imply that they've actually shared it. The closest they get is a hand-wavy answer to the discrepancies between Facebook's data and their own:
> We're saying, "Do you currently use Facebook?" Facebook is probably measuring it on, “Do you ever open the app, or do you ever use it on any level?”
That answer doesn't event make sense. Given that Edison have gone to the press to promote their report and this particular number, you'd expect them to have a good answer on the discrepancies. They should definitely know what the Facebook numbers represent, especially given Facebook publicly disclose their definition of an active user in SEC filings.
Fair. I do commonly do social statistics myself and have to deal with worse. My gripe was moreso that it's a random digit dialing survey (which I think would be full of bias for a purpose like this) instead of the actual usage statistics that facebook provides. Also, sampling is simply a hard thing to do. And their definition of leaving is pretty poor.
Also if we want to get nitpicky, while there is a significant drop between 2017 and 2018, there is no significant drop between 2019 and 2018 (62% -> 61%, p value of .57), despite the headline being 'Facebook Usage Continues to Drop' :)
Also, any methodology problems can be mitigated by the fact that they did the same survey with the same methodology in 2017, and compared their results. You expect to get better accuracy by asking people then and now "do you use Facebook?" than by asking them now "do you use Facebook, and did you use it two years ago?"
Is there a specific reason you doubt the estimate, or is your problem that the sample size is small? Small sample sizes don’t imply incorrect conclusions.
EDIT: To whoever has downvoted this, I politely (but urgently) recommend you read up on statistical significance. The idea that a small sample size implies a study’s findings are unreliable is one of the most widely held misconceptions in modern statistics.
I disabled my Facebook account 4 years or so ago and didn't miss it. That said, I now have a daughter with an extremely rare genetic disorder. Although there are a number of databases out there specifically to help parents find other families with rare genetic disorders, we didn't find anyone until we resorted to Facebook. This is only one anecdote, but from my personal experience thus far, Facebook is still unfortunately the best place to find a needle in a haystack.
This is my same experience. Son has JIA. There is a JIA-specific website that connects you to JIA-specific support groups.... but there are none active near me, and I live in a very big city. I expressed this frustration to my wife who uses Facebook often, and she joined an active JIA community in moments.
I guess now we have two anecdotes. That makes us a statistic, I think?
(edit: typo) FB has completely swallowed the Groups space. We are new parents and my wife connects with other new parents in a local group specific to our son's age cohort. FB Marketplace is also very useful, as other people have mentioned. I got off FB services a few months ago, but would join again if they had a standalone Groups app.
Someone switching from FB to Instagram does not genuinely count as someone leaving Facebook; they are just switching to a different implementation of Facebook owned by the same company.
And the only reason most of them are switching is to follow the herd. They don't want to be left behind in some place where they are not able to obtain as much validation (fishing for likes and followers). That type of personality needs to be "where everyone else is".
Their lives are exactly the same, except with a different social networking application.
I was a regular user of Facebook, now I'm not. I never used Instagram, but I can see that becoming as tedious as Facebook for people who do. I use WhatsApp every 5 minutes, but I don't think Facebook monetises it yet to any large degree. I have a hunch that as people leave the "whimsical" platforms, only the universally useful WhatsApp will continue to hold on to users. If they don't monetise it, they may well have to operate it at a loss. If they do monetise it and become greedy by killing the UX with ads, people leave anyway. They've got a very fine balancing act ahead of them. It won't be easy for Facebook.
The headline is disingenuous. I suspect a lot of folks are taking away from the headline that Facebook the company is on the ropes, however looking into the primary source[1] indicates that they are only talking about Facebook the product. The press is not making that distinction here. A vast amount of people leaving "Facebook" are just going to Instagram.
Facebook says their North American monthly active users have increased 1% since 2017. Edison Research says there are 6% fewer US users since 2017.
I'm curious to understand the reason for this discrepancy. Edison says,
We're saying, "Do you currently use Facebook?" Facebook is probably measuring it on, "Do you ever open the app, or do you ever use it on any level?"
Here's how Facebook defines monthly active users:
We define a monthly active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, or used our Messenger app (and is also a registered Facebook user), in the last 30 days as of the date of measurement.
So is Edison's explanation reasonable? Maybe people only think they "use" Facebook when they scroll through the feed - and people are still using it for other purposes.
It's obvious that Facebook is having some challenges from the dramatic increase in the number of inline ads (promoted posts). FB is scrambling to generate enough revenue to avoid spooking investors.
What the investors will be missing if they abandon Facebook, however, is that Facebook has one of the most valuable data droves in history. Long after the kind of dark patterns and data collection policies used by Facebook have been outlawed, the trove that has already been collected will provide AI with plenty of information on human behavior for many decades into the future.
Imagine if you are studying the human genome and you are forced to stop collecting new DNA samples after you only have 1.74 Billion samples collected. Not a bad place to be in considering that no new competitors will be allowed to collect samples in the way FB does today in the "wild west" of privacy violation.
They'd actually somewhat recently taken steps to reduce the number of posts, and instead push advertisers to bid more for fewer impressions. If successful, this has the impact of getting them more revenue with a better UX since there are fewer ads and in theory higher-quality brand advertisers who can afford more for those impressions.
Deleted facebook years ago and never regretted it. It's always the same people posting the same stuff. It's simply just boring for me because I'm not interested in personal lives of people. Twitter on the other hand is great for news updates and it's the only mainstream social network I use.
Enron and Arthur Anderson weren't going to lie on their quarterly filings either. Not saying it's true or false, but there's also the possibility that user count methodologies can change to create the appearance of growth.
It's rich that you created an account specifically to make this comment. Lying on financial reports is not uncommon and there are high profile examples, so a sweeping appeal to honesty on the part of a multi billion company caught lying in the past is foolish.
I co-run a small board game group in SF, and we have been using FB for years to organize events.
I've considered moving to eventbrite or meetup.com, but the app buy in with FB and FB messanger means we can post an update or send an IM and assume people see it, which isn't the case with either alternative, unless people check email.
I really wish there was a ubiquitous open standard open source IM client, so people could download one client and use it for everything.
I'm with you, and I didn't mind XMPP (having implemented a Jabber server before, it wasn't all bad)
Same deal with IRC (which I think is the best protocol wise).
They all suffer from the same problem: the openness of the standard is not data collection inclusive. The upside is better privacy, the downside is its incredibly hard to fight spam in such wide open systems.
Also, for a the briefest of overviews about the some notable issues with mass adoptions on XMPP, check this:
Thanks for the link, very interesting document, it really shows an impressive scale.
And for the metrics, it's probably coming from the fact that a lot of people use Messenger without using Facebook, but it's still considered "using Facebook".
> Regarding social media, the latest study finds the number of current users of Facebook continues to drop. The study shows an estimated 15 million fewer users of Facebook than in the 2017 report. The declines are heavily concentrated among younger people.
What are people's thoughts on not deleting FB to better secure your personal identity. In the context of leaving google's services, I see people say that they sit on their email so no one else can take it, but I never see that sentiment about deleting fb.
Is it just that the bar to successfully impersonate someone via fb is higher and email is lot easier to manipulate?
I am particularly interested because I am planning on deleting my personal fb soon.
It's easy to not delete and stop using to serve your purpose. I loathe facebook et al., but some employers (fewer and fewer these days) want to see my online presence. To not have a facebook was considered strange, so for that reason, I keep it around. However, as far as maintaining an identity, or holding on to your custom facebook url, that’s a non-issue. Delete away, and create again—facebook is intelligent enough to reconnect you to all those people if need be. Personal identity is strengthened by other's endorsement. That's easy to get again with FB, especially if you're who you really are. It's difficult to take someone’s identity in that sense and it be valuable to the person doing it.
I wonder if Facebook UX researchers review feedback from threads like this? This seems like useful qualitative information for them to improve their product.
But then again, I wonder if their target population is different. In that case, it could be that Facebook is being strategic on what things to prioritize and they're banking on certain sub-populations, because they can't win over everyone, for their bottom-line?
Many new innovative companies are being founded in this space and those that are successful are richly rewarded (by selling to FB). The system is working exactly how it is supposed to.
Also remember that in the US it's perfectly legal to be a monopoly. What is illegal is abusing your monopoly position by engaging in unfair practices (which is a rather fuzzy and hard-to-prove thing).
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