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.
Even more annoying is the same thing that they do with email notifications. They seem to keep inventing new "categories" of notifications all the time that I haven't yet opted out of - basically because I seem to be only able to opt out of just that specific category that they just sent me an email about, when I click on the "don't want to receive any more of these mails" link below the message.
And every time, they gladly acknowledge that I will not receive any more messages of that kind.
"Okay, you won't get any more mails about new messages from friends.
Okay, you won't get any more mails about stuff your friends liked.
Okay, you won't get any more mails about stuff some other random people liked.
Okay, you won't get any more mails about new stuff posted in groups you joined.
Okay, you won't get any more mails about new stuff posted in groups you did not join, but we think you might be interested in.
Okay, you won't get any more mails about new photos posted by your friends.
Okay, you won't get any more mails about new photos of cats posted on Facebook.
Okay, you won't get any more mails about news articles with dogs in the title.
Okay, you won't get any more mails about postings your friends liked that complain about the weather and were written by women of age 35-40."
Okay, admittedly the last three were exagerrated, but all the categories before have been actual "notification categories" that I successfully opted out of, before I put a generic Facebook email filter in my mailbox, because apparently nothing else is able to stop their overly-specific-category-generation-engine from spewing out new categories to keep me busy opting out of.
I tried setting up email filters based on subject and keywords, I currently have around 15-20 but it's a futile attempt, they keep changing everything, they've even changed the language. It really feels like I'm harassed by a beggar at this point.
I have a seperate facebook@ mail address and I simply never check it. Did so before switching hosters last year and saw that about 8k mails had piled up since 2011. Crazy folks.
> Even more annoying is the same thing that they do with email notifications.
Oh, so much this, especially with LinkedIn. The email problem is, in the end, what got me to delete my LinkedIn account a couple of years back. And I STILL get frequent emails from them.
after about 3 or 4 iterations of me reviewing my email setting, I got seriously fed up and I've gone for the nuclear option: all my facebook emails are marked as spam and binned.
I started like you, last year... then a couple days ago realized I hadn't checked it since mid January. And we're on March, that's a new record.
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.
>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.
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 didn't know about mbasic and chat working. Thanks.
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.
> 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.
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.
> I still write to share my thoughts on something... catches my friend's attention because of the "novelty" of writing something of my own
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.
Dear God I installed LinkedIn a couple months back and their endless bs notifications made me realize that I don't need it. It doesn't give me anything. Why is it sending me 2-3 notifications a day when I have 5 friends who's profiles arent even actively used?
If it did something useful, like find me clients for the work I do then sure - I'll give them my attention. He'll, I'll pay good money for that! But I don't give a flying fuck thaty friend just graduated or a colleague got some award. I don't give a fuck and I'm sure as fuck not gonna play this game where we all pretend theirs any value in these things that email didn't accomplish 10 years ago.
I also do not understand the Linked-in notifications at all. They send an e-mail like '5 job changes' which I actually find interesting to learn about.
But when I click any of the links this information is nowhere to be found. So after a while I don't click on the links anymore and my engagement goes down.
Seems like a lot of the decisions are focused based on quick-wins engagement instead of an long lasting useful experience for the user?
Investors want to see engagement metric graphs go up. Execs tie compensation to getting that metric up. Product delivers by mandating more alerts. Payday.
LinkedIn is just a list of my previous jobs that allows recruiters to spam me with job offers. Completely disabled the notifications and was considering deleting the whole thing
LinkedIn sends me notifications that say "you might have new notifications" and then when I click it out turns it I'm all up to date. Not sure if this is on purpose or just really bad qa.
I have made hundreds of thousands of dollars through people I have met on LinkedIn, and I continue to make money through them. In business, networking is key. It’s not going to find you clients on its own, but it definitely aids in that process if you use it to network or prospect.
Twitter has started to do that too. Notifications went from focussing on significant interactions — such as someone liking or retweeting a tweet, or following you — to 'someone you follow just tweeted' — what's the point of that notification? It's happening all the time! Notifications get devalued as companies desperately try to promote their product.
It looks like facebook is engaged in a race to the bottom, against it’s own metrics. The easiest way to be engaged is to repost memes and fake news shock posts, so the most engaged users are meme posters and fake news trolls, so features that cater to meme posting and trolling get the most bang for buck, so they’re getting trapped in a cycle of circulating ever increasing torrents of drivel.
My girls are 14 and 15 in the UK. None of their friends use facebook, and that’s not just their social circle. Facebook is just not a thing for them. The only reason they use it at all is because there is one out of school club that posts their upcoming activities on a FB page, so they literally log in once a week to check that page and they’re done. They do heavily use Instagram and WhatsApp though, so they’re not entirely out of the FB sphere.
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.
Isn't A/B testing pretty much going to behave like a steepest ascent hill climbing? At each micro decision point you take what looks like the 'best' option but that means you can get stuck in local maxima?
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.
Totally agree. The three things which have driven me away are:
1) the proliferation of notifications
2) filling my feed with auto-play videos
3) the fact that fewer and fewer of my friends actively use it
Just as rising membership creates a positive feedback loop through network effects, so declining membership does the opposite.
The other main reason is that since buying a smart phone, I can access the one feature of FB that I use - messenger - while avoiding the rest. I now only log into my account to check my notifications every week or two, to see if I've been invited to anything.
I frequently get notifications on my personal page to say my business page has a notification. That notification turns out be to "Your users have not heard from you in a while, write a post".
I get this all the time, even when I have written a post within the last five hours.
I would say on average I get 5 notifications per day that are utterly useless.
The page notifications are infuriating. I'm a co-owner of my mother's business page (barely a business really, almost more of a hobby). She can barely use Facebook and just uses the page for basic communication with a few dozen people but she/we are constantly bombarded by notifications about HOW MANY USERS we could reach AND WHY DON'T YOU BOOST THIS POST. Hey, your customers haven't heard from Facebook in 10 minutes! Why don't you give them another notification!?
This x100. Totally mirrors the sentiment in my sibling comment. Somewhere along the line they lost sight of creating an experience and each facebook product became focused on improving their metrics and notifications became the weapon of choice. They so obviously need to reign in all of these different teams, reduce clutter, and get back to basics - starting with a good user experience.
ha aha. seems like all those PMs and mountains of engineers Facebook/linkedIn is hiring aren't helping their product much. They've got money to burn, so I don't think this is going to change anytime soon.
They are making sure to give you red dots/numbers multiple times per day, if you login multiple times per day.
It's usually stuff like "X posted something after a long while of not posting" or "Y will participate in an event near you". Utterly useless notifications about people I don't interact with.
This is a mixture of bad UX and dark UX patterns. They are puppeteering a corpse here.
This is the same for me. I feel obligated to maintain an account and check it once in a while since I have a lot of family and friends who aren't local who do still use it (though most have transitioned from using it as a way to update people on their lives to using it as a place to effortlessly repost memes), but I'm incredibly put off by Facebook's increasingly irrelevant and desperate attempts to get my attention.
Notifications used to be things I cared about, these days they are things like "This person knows a person who is the mother of a person on your friends list. Add Friend?"
I just block the notifications now and log into Facebook every couple of days in a browser and quick scan the feed.
Try having a business page on Facebook! Anytime you log in, they will create some new notification that you know is not true. "5 people have viewed X business, try posting again." Or "1 new person liked X business" then you check and the number of likes is the same. Which is pretty easy to check when the number of likes is in the 2-3 digit range.
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.
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.
Exact same thing for me ! I uninstalled both twitter and facebook app when I realized they were faking notifications for me to open their apps, since I guess they need that for their DAU bs. Since then, I check twitter once a week in a browser mode, and facebook once a day with the firefox container.
Bingo. Every time I check Facebook there's at least one "notification". It's always one of
* A page I own has x new views
* A friend or two is interested in an event (not even going to, interested in)
* You have memories on this day
Aside from Messenger for a few ongoing group convos my Facebooking time is mostly limited to interest groups at this point, and I'd happily jump ship with them if they moved to a self-hosted forum or mail list
Yeah, I'm a very passive FB user and have removed all the FB battery draining crap from my phone, so I don't get meaningful notifications very often, but I'm checking it out at least every few days out of habit. It's always showing me a bunch of notifications for completely random things, like some new random post in marketplace group I'm participating, but no notification for the 50 other new posts in there or other groups. Or somebody I haven't spoken to in years is going to some event I never heard about. At this point I don't even see them as notifications, just a list of random things that happen and don't affect me.
My breaking point was when they fucking texted me that I had "notifications" when I hadn't logged in for a while. No doubt those notifications were that someone is going to an event I don't care about somewhere within a 100 miles of me.
This is what lead me to switch to using their website on mobile, rather than the app. The same goes for LinkedIn, which I had the app for perhaps a week before I got fed up with its bullshit. I still have messenger for the tiny number of people who don't use WhatsApp or Signal.
It's been good. I've taken to disabling notifications and uninstalling apps for most sites, I don't need them telling me when I should be looking at stuff, and mobile sites have improved a lot. It's all become much more intentional on my part.
Ironically, the annoying anti-patterns that sites like LinkedIn use to encourage you to switch to their app instead of their mobile website just encourage me to use them less overall. LI is probably the worst, along with Reddit.
I don't have an issue with most of the content of my FB feed itself, because most of the people I'm friends with don't post crap. I'm not friends with people I don't actually want to stay in touch with and I mute the small number that overdo the minion memes. My feed consists largely of stuff about my friends and reletives that I find, at worst, uninteresting and skippable. I don't seem to have all the "crazy people" problems that a lot of people seem to complain about (perhaps I'm just lucky that my family are pretty normal). I find twitter is much worse for things like political share-spam or vague-tweeting, but I'm pretty focused in who I follow there too, and turn retweets off for anyone who is a bit of a retweet spammer.
I find it funny when people complain about Facebook because their feed is full of their MLM hawking aunt or the rantings of some odd "friend". I think there is a lot wrong with Facebook, but you can't blame them for your friends and family. That's like inviting a load of people to a pub for your birthday, then leaving a bad Yelp review because the company was bad.
You can almost get a glimpse of the financial health of a company by the number of bullshit messages they send you. The trend is especially important. Just like you i’ve noticed facebook getting spammier and spammier, starting from the middle of last year. Which means things were probably starting to smell funky around that period
Annoyingly, what's kept me on it is the fact that some super-niche private groups (that would otherwise be ideally suited to a forum or subreddit) have sprung up that have content that I simply can't get anywhere else.
If on Android I recommend the Facebook Lite app. Its not as obnoxious and on Android you can tell the OS to ignore all notifications from an app.
The lite version of Facebook is probably the only worthy version, I just wish it could be firewalled so you know when it tries to use network access and lock it down to just when you open the app.
I assume Lite Android apps arent allowed to use much data but I could be making a bad assumption. It still saves on battery life at least.
I agree though they would notify me of potential friends and they were never ever people I knew or wanted to be friends with (because I didnt know them!).
The full fat messenger is the most annoying app I have ever used. It's like a small child constantly trying to get your attention when you are busy with other tasks.
I logged in for the first time in a few weeks recently. Out of 50+ notifications, literally only 1 was something I cared about seeing. I wish I were exaggerating.
Anecdata, but this was a big factor for me as well. Having joined somewhat early, they had me with the red badge like Pavlov with his bell. It was effective because of the variable reward. I logged in to see if there was a red badge. Now there’s always a red badge.
They are starting to kill the attractiveness of instagram too. I get more notifications a day from spam accounts requesting to follow me or send me messages that my use of the app has declined substantially over the last year.
There was a point when I got fed up and unsubscribed from all notifications from everything. Now I only operate in pull-mode. I check my things 1-2 times a day and I receive zero notifications. My life is much better now!
Totally agree! Ever since they added story updates into the notifications screen, it has totally lost meaning. That and friends attending random events, etc. It used to actually mean something.
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
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.
>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.
Your anecdotal experience isn't evidence businesses aren't doing anything with data collection which would be worrying to consumers or that privacy concerns are overrated. And yes, this is what that paragraph of yours is implying.
If your company didn't have a strategy for analytics, it doesn't mean others do not either. The mere fact that users get used to that practice is already a win to those who wish to take advantage of that information.
Not to mention that the greatest threat comes from sharing and connecting those databases, so what may have been random and useless may find significance when sold to other aggregators.
After working in a fin-tech for a while, I realized how greedy these companies are for data, and how useless they render it. I was amazed by the scarcity of talent and overwhelming amount of routine job I encountered and lack of diversity of projects and space for free thinking.
Anyway, I got rid of FB/Insta years ago(4-5 maybe), and recently I also closed LinkedIn acc. as well, I have low tolerance to BS and self-glorified business gurus. I'd rather do something meaningful in my everyday life)))
Exactly. Asking someone "do you want to have more savings?" is meaningless. Everyone will say yes. The right question to ask is "will you cook at home to save $10000 a year?"
> On the other hand, there's a good deal of social sacrifice in leaving these platforms for good.
I honestly don't think that there is much social sacrifice involved in leaving these platforms. I think there's a good deal of fear of social sacrifice, though.
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.
When I first joined Facebook after jumping ship from Myspace, it was really simple to use with minimal intrusion of media clickbait which is in stark contrast to the bloated and highly optimized for engagement monstrosity it has become today.
I was grandfathered into this experience and it no longer appeals to me today as an adult. I suspect this phenomenon is affecting other early adopters as well. Can anyone else relate?
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).
> 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)
Back in the day you didn’t have “pages that you follow,” you had interests listed on your profile. These later became pages that you were automatically signed up to, which the relevant companies post ads on. My feed rapidly became mostly adverts which I’d never actually signed up to receive, and it was more effort to fix it than to just stop checking Facebook.
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.
> 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.
Advertising, and tracking user data are not inherently bad. The user must know what's being tracked, and probably more importantly, the user must be getting something of value in exchange. Facebook is an ever-degrading skinner box, providing less and less value to users while being addictive and malicious.
Contrast this with something like Google Maps: It's a privacy nightmare too, but it's also incredibly useful.
All I put on Instagram are landscapes and some cityscapes. I do not see like giving away any privacy doing that.
Alas, phot-sharing days of Instagram are in the past and stories get more and more annoying every day without any option not to see them :(
I don't have Facebook, but I do have Instagram. For some reason, the ads I see on Instagram are wildly untargeted. Like some Dallas based real estate company advertising to me, even though I'm based out of India
Using the data to personalize ads elsewhere? Does Facebook operate a conventional ad network out on the web? (I could not name it, but I assume they do)
Everyone here is celebrating "people leaving facebook" as if it is a victory. People are simply moving from facebook to instragram as instragram is viewed as more "hip" and "young".
The title could be "Instragram gaining millions of users in the US" but I guess that doesn't sell as well.
Also, facebook may be losing users in the US, but it's gaining users overseas. So overall, facebook's overall user count is going to continue to climb for a while.
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.
> 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?
>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 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.
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.
> 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.
I've been surprised by how good Facebook's local classified ads implementation is, I've been having better success with it than Craigslist.
It's an odd platform. They have a lot of great features for outreach and discovery of local events and groups of people, leveraged by the strong network effect. For contact with local groups of people with similar interests, and for planning events, for group communication, it is an effective tool and one that has enriched my life in substantial ways.
The one thing that I really hate is the front page feed. It was probably a great business decision on their part to emphasize microblogging, as it definitely increased engagement in the platform. It also turned everyone into memelords who just re-share funny cat pictures, pyramid schemes and incendiary political propaganda. I tried just filtering that out with the "see fewer posts like this", but I turns out that people just don't really post anything but image macros and articles anymore.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
this happens to MMO servers too, I used to play the game DOFUS years ago and it was one of my favorite places on the internet when first started but then people left the game as they grew up and it was gradually taken over by bots and scammers until it got merged with another server
> 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 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.
I realized that the only people I was in contact with were people I didn't really wanted to have contact with... Not all 'friendships' are worth upholding, very few are actually.
> 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.
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.
WhatsApp isn't at all free from controversy - it's had its share of "terror attack orchestrated by WhatsApp [and therefore it's some how to blame]" stories.
What's saved it, IMO, is the similar deluge of stories about political in-fighting taking place in WhatsApp groups.
The available conclusions to the reader of the two angles on it are:
1) politicians are organising terror attacks;
2) there is no causal relationship between WhatsApp and terror attacks
... one of which seems eminently more reasonable than the other; so thankfully that's where we are.
Amusingly it also came under fire from politicians in the opposite direction in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal: far from wanting to peek at end-to-end encrypted data (as called for whenever it's used by terror groups) they then wanted assurances that the data hadn't been snooped on or passed to third-parties!
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.
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 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 want to leave Facebook because it seems like a daily chore of unfollowing people who post shit stuff. Instagram is pretty much just personal photos, no stupid news articles, no "forwards from grandma" type stuff. I like seeing pictures of friends kids, new homes, vacations etc and they pretty much exist in exact duplicate across both properties. So why be on Facebook?
>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.
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.
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.
Same bingo. My hypothesis (at least for the Facebook I see, that is of course a minuscule fraction) is that FB is mostly used now by people with an agenda (self promotion, spreading of an ideology, marketing, political campaign, whatever). Therefore, any disagreement is immediately treated as a threat. Ultimately FB has become a dark forest for casual users. The fun is gone.
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.
And buggy, for example, a chat message I'm writing, getting lost because I switch to another browser tab (and the chat window is there too but empty / not synchronized, eventually causing the lost update bug).
And on my wide screen, 30'', the chat window is just like 2x1 cm large.
And on the events page, I choose to display today's or tomorrow's events. Then Facebook displays events from not those days.
> 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.
It's expected that people from group age 20+ will be the last active user base. As far as I know, most teens use Discord, Instagram, they have 0 interest in Facebook.
> 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 :-)
I’d be beyond shocked if even one percent of all Facebook users would pay $5/month for it. I think the only population of users who’d consider doing so are the intersection of those who are affluent (by Western standards), are extremely opposed to Facebook ads, and use it enough to consider paying for it.
I’d be surprised if you could get 1% of the US population of users to consider it, let alone the global population. You’d realistically be looking at single to very low double digit millions of users at the maximum.
Purely anecdotal but when I could have moved to FB I held back because Myspace was more interesting. I eventually moved to FB as I got older, because.. I was older. My interests changed.
To some degree this may be an experience with the youth today, in time. Or not, I have no idea
IMO this is part of why Facebook's user base is so resilient. From what I see, younger people experiment more, looking for something that fits their identity, what their friends use, what's new, etc. They also have more time and incentive to explore new apps. By younger people I mean teenagers, high-school and younger.
Older people, it seems to me, are more utilitarian. By older people I mean college and up. They use Facebook for events, or because the social world is harder to navigate in college/later in life than when you're in high school and your friends are neighbors or classmates.
Perhaps this is just my experience, or maybe I'm just very off on how I read this, but it's a thought. I don't think Facebook is trying to be interesting— I think they're just shooting for useful and
"sticky".
for me, I personally check it less and less due to political posts.
I do have a few really great closed groups on there. Groups filled with people helping each other out. These are where I still find value on the platform.
The problem with the non ad driven model is that to you 5$ 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.
The value of ads is related to the spending power of those advertised to. If $5 is an impossible sum to spend for a user, advertising to them is worth very little as well.
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".
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.
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.
The crazy thing is, for me, Facebook was actually useful for following news ever since Google Reader died. I spent quite a bit of time following many pages (people and businesses) in order to stay up to date on news, and I was incredibly happy at the results. I even went the extra effort to unfollow "Friends" that I didn't want to offend by unfriending.
Facebook simply screwed up everything. They removed custom lists a few months ago, so instead of chronological posts that I could navigate with lists, it's now back to a single algorithm-based feed. Many of the people I spent time unfollowing continue to blast me with notifications for literal shit posts that I can't disable. Did you notice that when you swipe a notification in the feed, there's no way to "Hide all notifications like this" or "Hide notifications for Events from xxxx"? It's unbelievable what Facebook is doing to ruin the experience. It's now impossible to disable specific categories of notifications or from people, without just unfriending them.
I moved back to Twitter and barely touch Facebook now. The product decisions are just plain frustrating. It's now no longer an app for following news.
Exactly. It feels very much like giant company syndrome. Some directors picked metrics like "frequency of fresh content on top of newsfeed," then that metric become a goal for some manager a few levels down, and when metrics become goals, they stop being good metrics. Nobody with the power to stop it would have been focused on "average value of content item," and everybody else had a motivation to get whatever content their group was in charge of some visibility, so it's more or less inevitable that it'd all go to shit.
I still use it as a news feed: even with no sorted posts and all the weakness you pointed out, i found no other aggregator like FB. Notifications send no warning on my smartphone (i disabled them all), except the red dot inside the app: i click once in a while, just to "cleanse" it.
I believe they know that social media are subjected to fashion just like everything else: the best way to keep on riding the way is peraphs be the one who kill the old (fb) while nurturing the new (Instagram/whatsapp). In this manner, the numbers are always growing - and that's the only metric they care about.
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.
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 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.
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 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 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
I've gotten back in touch with various people over the years. I can't predict which of the couple hundred people I will have a reason to reach out to in the future. But I know I'll inevitably be happy to be connected to this or that person on Facebook when I pick up a similar hobby or visit a certain place or go looking for some new type of job, etc.
And no, obviously not ever person I know is worth emailing or calling on the phone on some regular basis. That doesn't mean I don't want to know 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.
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 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.
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.
Readit News
And every time, they gladly acknowledge that I will not receive any more messages of that kind.
"Okay, you won't get any more mails about new messages from friends. Okay, you won't get any more mails about stuff your friends liked. Okay, you won't get any more mails about stuff some other random people liked. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new stuff posted in groups you joined. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new stuff posted in groups you did not join, but we think you might be interested in. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new photos posted by your friends. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new photos of cats posted on Facebook. Okay, you won't get any more mails about news articles with dogs in the title. Okay, you won't get any more mails about postings your friends liked that complain about the weather and were written by women of age 35-40."
Okay, admittedly the last three were exagerrated, but all the categories before have been actual "notification categories" that I successfully opted out of, before I put a generic Facebook email filter in my mailbox, because apparently nothing else is able to stop their overly-specific-category-generation-engine from spewing out new categories to keep me busy opting out of.
As long as users are actively involved there is no need to send emails.
Sending emails is a (bad) trick to make people curious and make them login to your platform again.
I think the Facebook app is just 'dead' and Facebook is lucky to have Instagram.
Oh, so much this, especially with LinkedIn. The email problem is, in the end, what got me to delete my LinkedIn account a couple of years back. And I STILL get frequent emails from them.
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.
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'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.
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.
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 )
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.
If it did something useful, like find me clients for the work I do then sure - I'll give them my attention. He'll, I'll pay good money for that! But I don't give a flying fuck thaty friend just graduated or a colleague got some award. I don't give a fuck and I'm sure as fuck not gonna play this game where we all pretend theirs any value in these things that email didn't accomplish 10 years ago.
But when I click any of the links this information is nowhere to be found. So after a while I don't click on the links anymore and my engagement goes down.
Seems like a lot of the decisions are focused based on quick-wins engagement instead of an long lasting useful experience for the user?
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Those useless notifications made the whole product useless for me.
But nobody does that, so I’ve stopped granting any app not email or IM notification rights.
You reap what you saw: no “engagement” for you.
My girls are 14 and 15 in the UK. None of their friends use facebook, and that’s not just their social circle. Facebook is just not a thing for them. The only reason they use it at all is because there is one out of school club that posts their upcoming activities on a FB page, so they literally log in once a week to check that page and they’re done. They do heavily use Instagram and WhatsApp though, so they’re not entirely out of the FB sphere.
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1) the proliferation of notifications
2) filling my feed with auto-play videos
3) the fact that fewer and fewer of my friends actively use it
Just as rising membership creates a positive feedback loop through network effects, so declining membership does the opposite.
The other main reason is that since buying a smart phone, I can access the one feature of FB that I use - messenger - while avoiding the rest. I now only log into my account to check my notifications every week or two, to see if I've been invited to anything.
I frequently get notifications on my personal page to say my business page has a notification. That notification turns out be to "Your users have not heard from you in a while, write a post".
I get this all the time, even when I have written a post within the last five hours.
I would say on average I get 5 notifications per day that are utterly useless.
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It's usually stuff like "X posted something after a long while of not posting" or "Y will participate in an event near you". Utterly useless notifications about people I don't interact with.
This is a mixture of bad UX and dark UX patterns. They are puppeteering a corpse here.
Notifications used to be things I cared about, these days they are things like "This person knows a person who is the mother of a person on your friends list. Add Friend?"
I just block the notifications now and log into Facebook every couple of days in a browser and quick scan the feed.
Could this be mixed w people unliking and hence the number doesn't change?
Bingo. Every time I check Facebook there's at least one "notification". It's always one of
* A page I own has x new views
* A friend or two is interested in an event (not even going to, interested in)
* You have memories on this day
Aside from Messenger for a few ongoing group convos my Facebooking time is mostly limited to interest groups at this point, and I'd happily jump ship with them if they moved to a self-hosted forum or mail list
It's been good. I've taken to disabling notifications and uninstalling apps for most sites, I don't need them telling me when I should be looking at stuff, and mobile sites have improved a lot. It's all become much more intentional on my part.
Ironically, the annoying anti-patterns that sites like LinkedIn use to encourage you to switch to their app instead of their mobile website just encourage me to use them less overall. LI is probably the worst, along with Reddit.
I don't have an issue with most of the content of my FB feed itself, because most of the people I'm friends with don't post crap. I'm not friends with people I don't actually want to stay in touch with and I mute the small number that overdo the minion memes. My feed consists largely of stuff about my friends and reletives that I find, at worst, uninteresting and skippable. I don't seem to have all the "crazy people" problems that a lot of people seem to complain about (perhaps I'm just lucky that my family are pretty normal). I find twitter is much worse for things like political share-spam or vague-tweeting, but I'm pretty focused in who I follow there too, and turn retweets off for anyone who is a bit of a retweet spammer.
I find it funny when people complain about Facebook because their feed is full of their MLM hawking aunt or the rantings of some odd "friend". I think there is a lot wrong with Facebook, but you can't blame them for your friends and family. That's like inviting a load of people to a pub for your birthday, then leaving a bad Yelp review because the company was bad.
Do it too often and with too much urgency, and eventually you will be utterly ignored.
The lite version of Facebook is probably the only worthy version, I just wish it could be firewalled so you know when it tries to use network access and lock it down to just when you open the app.
I assume Lite Android apps arent allowed to use much data but I could be making a bad assumption. It still saves on battery life at least.
I agree though they would notify me of potential friends and they were never ever people I knew or wanted to be friends with (because I didnt know them!).
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:
https://www.pewinternet.org/2015/05/20/americans-views-about...
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)
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 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.
Your anecdotal experience isn't evidence businesses aren't doing anything with data collection which would be worrying to consumers or that privacy concerns are overrated. And yes, this is what that paragraph of yours is implying.
If your company didn't have a strategy for analytics, it doesn't mean others do not either. The mere fact that users get used to that practice is already a win to those who wish to take advantage of that information.
Not to mention that the greatest threat comes from sharing and connecting those databases, so what may have been random and useless may find significance when sold to other aggregators.
After working in a fin-tech for a while, I realized how greedy these companies are for data, and how useless they render it. I was amazed by the scarcity of talent and overwhelming amount of routine job I encountered and lack of diversity of projects and space for free thinking.
Anyway, I got rid of FB/Insta years ago(4-5 maybe), and recently I also closed LinkedIn acc. as well, I have low tolerance to BS and self-glorified business gurus. I'd rather do something meaningful in my everyday life)))
Cheers.
Not as much of a concern here, but nefarious governments around the world are quite good at doing awful things with this data as well.
This is a problem with focus groups. Ask people 'do you care about your privacy', and almost everyone will answer yes.
There's almost zero social cost to answering that question in the affirmative.
On the other hand, there's a good deal of social sacrifice in leaving these platforms for good.
More likely - they don't care about privacy as much as they say they do and are leaving Facebook because it has become a polluted river of crap.
I honestly don't think that there is much social sacrifice involved in leaving these platforms. I think there's a good deal of fear of social sacrifice, though.
All problems that people care about but the average person cannot tackle autonomously.
And that's why societies implemented regulatory bodies (often through national governments, but that's not a requirement).
GDPR is a small step in that direction.
On the other hand, Instagram is plain simple and understandable.
I was grandfathered into this experience and it no longer appeals to me today as an adult. I suspect this phenomenon is affecting other early adopters as well. Can anyone else relate?
The problem really is lack of choice.
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.
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).
Or why did hundreds of thousands of users actively choose to share their data with a random company called Cambridge Analytica?
The problem is not lack of choice. The problem is that people don't care.
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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)
3) Ads that are marked as "promoted"
I consider #2 as injected. Basically, any content that was not directly posted by a "friend" to share to their network.
>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.
Contrast this with something like Google Maps: It's a privacy nightmare too, but it's also incredibly useful.
If that tracking is being performed on people who have not given informed consent, then it is very bad.
All I put on Instagram are landscapes and some cityscapes. I do not see like giving away any privacy doing that. Alas, phot-sharing days of Instagram are in the past and stories get more and more annoying every day without any option not to see them :(
Which means you have Facebook in a different costume.
The title could be "Instragram gaining millions of users in the US" but I guess that doesn't sell as well.
Also, facebook may be losing users in the US, but it's gaining users overseas. So overall, facebook's overall user count is going to continue to climb for a while.
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.
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.
And yes it affects Twitter as well.
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.
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.
So this must be your assessment of twitter as well? Same current observation, Same predicted outcome?
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 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 think younger folks have migrated to Instagram, snapchat, etc. where they actually post/use the platform.
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.
It's an odd platform. They have a lot of great features for outreach and discovery of local events and groups of people, leveraged by the strong network effect. For contact with local groups of people with similar interests, and for planning events, for group communication, it is an effective tool and one that has enriched my life in substantial ways.
The one thing that I really hate is the front page feed. It was probably a great business decision on their part to emphasize microblogging, as it definitely increased engagement in the platform. It also turned everyone into memelords who just re-share funny cat pictures, pyramid schemes and incendiary political propaganda. I tried just filtering that out with the "see fewer posts like this", but I turns out that people just don't really post anything but image macros and articles anymore.
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.
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[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-insta...
[1] https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-speaks-on-whats...
This approach opens up exciting new opportunities for market segmentation via badge engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badge_engineering
... 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.
With all the negative press FB has been receiving, it would seem wise to dissociate Whatsapp and Instagram from FB in the minds of the public.
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.
I love WhatsApp, but they haven't found good ways to monetize it yet and one of these days they'll ruin it.
What I think is ad supportted _anything_ turns to crap eventually. It's a toxic business model.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
P.S.: never seen 'BS' expressed so eloquently...
It should remove features, it has become a bloated abomination with no focus.
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':
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=f...
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.
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.
Telegram is getting popular in some countries where WhatsApp has been very dominant.
What's saved it, IMO, is the similar deluge of stories about political in-fighting taking place in WhatsApp groups.
The available conclusions to the reader of the two angles on it are: 1) politicians are organising terror attacks; 2) there is no causal relationship between WhatsApp and terror attacks
... one of which seems eminently more reasonable than the other; so thankfully that's where we are.
Amusingly it also came under fire from politicians in the opposite direction in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal: far from wanting to peek at end-to-end encrypted data (as called for whenever it's used by terror groups) they then wanted assurances that the data hadn't been snooped on or passed to third-parties!
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.
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 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.
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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 don't feel it's my place to ask them to share the pictures and updates another way, so I'm remain basically a read only FB user.
If there were a simple way to tee those things into some other feed, I'd leave FB as well.
TikTok
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.
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!
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.
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.
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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.
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.
I love the political posts that are thoughtful, informative and spark real discussion.
So, maybe, one or two in the past three years.
And on my wide screen, 30'', the chat window is just like 2x1 cm large.
And on the events page, I choose to display today's or tomorrow's events. Then Facebook displays events from not those days.
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.
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...
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 :-)
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.
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To some degree this may be an experience with the youth today, in time. Or not, I have no idea
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".
Maybe they should make that a global option, something like "Hide Political Stories" or something.
I do have a few really great closed groups on there. Groups filled with people helping each other out. These are where I still find value on the platform.
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.
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".
Kids these days don't give a shit about privacy. Why would they?
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.
Obviously this should not only be an issue of the kids. In an ideal world parents would be conscious of their kids online behavior.
Steam and SMS, primarily. WhatsApp, too, but to a lesser degree.
And, probably, something else that I'm not aware of.
Facebook simply screwed up everything. They removed custom lists a few months ago, so instead of chronological posts that I could navigate with lists, it's now back to a single algorithm-based feed. Many of the people I spent time unfollowing continue to blast me with notifications for literal shit posts that I can't disable. Did you notice that when you swipe a notification in the feed, there's no way to "Hide all notifications like this" or "Hide notifications for Events from xxxx"? It's unbelievable what Facebook is doing to ruin the experience. It's now impossible to disable specific categories of notifications or from people, without just unfriending them.
I moved back to Twitter and barely touch Facebook now. The product decisions are just plain frustrating. It's now no longer an app for following news.
I believe they know that social media are subjected to fashion just like everything else: the best way to keep on riding the way is peraphs be the one who kill the old (fb) while nurturing the new (Instagram/whatsapp). In this manner, the numbers are always growing - and that's the only metric they care about.
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 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 wouldn’t follow “real” people unless they’re close friends. Don’t want to see people’s lunches or vacations.
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.
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.
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
And no, obviously not ever person I know is worth emailing or calling on the phone on some regular basis. That doesn't mean I don't want to know them.
Lately I’ve unfollowed/unfriended everyone I dont feel I have a relationship to.
People of my class 1996 or whatever? Gone. That’s not my social circle anymore. Etc. You get the picture.
But still FB insisted on showing all kinds of uninteresting garbage instead of posts from people I know.
So now I’m no longer checking Facebook. And they did it to themselves.
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.
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.
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I'm pretty sure there is one literally Nextdoor...