Users Abandon Facebook After Cambridge Analytica Findings
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
For me personally, I use FB primarily to keep in touch with friends, family and old colleagues who are spread all over the world. It is purely a contact tool, and not really used to market products of services etc., so my attachment is purely an emotional one.
However, I must admit that this latest episode has really hammered my trust in the platform FAR more than any other previous ones (and there have been many). Yesterday, for the first time ever, I went through my FB settings and removed a lot of personal information as well as stagnant apps that I had approved YEARS ago from my permitted apps list.
I am also seriously reconsidering what I do post on there from now on, as well as drastically reducing the number of times I post. I've also turned off location tracking for the FB app on my phone, and am considering deleting it altogether and just sticking to the web platform.
Will I change my mind in a months time? It's unlikely, but who knows? I like being able to talk to family that are literally on the other side of the world, and it is too hard for me to get them all to adopt Telegram or any other communication tool outside of FB Messenger, so I may find myself drawn back in.
There's only 1 person I wish to stay in touch that I talk to exclusively on Messenger. I think I will have to persuade them to install another app. Admittedly it will be WhatsApp, which is also Zuckerberg's tool for "dumb fucks".
(1) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-m...
I use both - if a contact is on both signal and whatsapp I use signal.
I think signal is the best of these with whatsapp second. Everything else is equal last. This ranking will no doubt change in the coming years with upstart competition doing communication with proper encryption. I look forward to it.
In recent times my attention has been drawn to the amount of time wasted on random Youtube videos. Youtube is more difficult since the service actually has value to me. Somehow restricting my access to only videos from my subscriptions could be a possible solution.
I deleted my account in 2010 and there was absolutely no change in my daily behavior, but then I wasn't a chronic addict either. Honestly, if users haven't figure out by now that their privacy is utterly void when they use Facebook they absolutely don't care.
For lots of people, it's "don't value their privacy over being able to keep in touch with friends and family", not merely convenience.
Keeping in touch with friends & family is too important to ditch entirely, and having everyone switch to a different platform is very hard. That said, my whole extended family uses whats app nowadays...
I think the classic site’s days are numbered but it will be a while before it does a complete shutdown, if ever. At that point Facebook might decide to just completely redesign it into something different and recapture the lost audience.
Some of my cousins/colleagues used to be active but now they have got fed up of FB.
Amusingly, none of them ditched FB because 'Oh FB is evil mass surveillance system'. What I sense is people are getting fed up with FB.
Sadly, it is Whatsapp which has taken the place of FB.
I see it differently. Looking at it from a stats perspective, people who just login and don't scroll are also pretty valuable for Facebook since they're still come under the DAU and MAU numbers. They're counted for the ad impressions, and subsequently ad revenue.
Even though Facebook has prioritized friends' posts, bulk of the content (even though it can be not the most important) I think for most people is by pages and companies. Who I don't think are going to change in any way after this event.
It's still a great communication tool without the users who post though.
And people who don't use it now also manage to keep in touch with people they care about just fine.
I miss the movies sometimes (just wish they were a bit cheaper) and binge watching is horrible for your health (not just physically but mentally as well -- teaches you how to be an addict).
Amazon, while convenient, has destroyed an entire economic subsystem in it's wake and destroyed a way of life that was more communal and social to one that is more isolated and reclusive.
Finally, people more and more these days are trying to find ways to detach from their smartphones (I think your comment wrongly assumes Apple "created" the smartphone -- they did not)
The three things you listed are pure technology. Staying in touch with people you care about and making time to do so is not an inherently technological undertaking.
Then all the sudden a week or so ago they freaked out and I was like - no worries, remember that one time I switched your text messages?
My family primarily communicates in texts, phone calls, and in person. So this was relatively easy, myself and the other half the family either stopped using Facebook years ago, or never used it in the first place.
Easy really, and not necessary
It's like they are going out of their way to be creepy at this point.
I have good friends who would rather drop contact entirely than having to have an account on website that is not at least deeply privacy-conscious. In this sense I would rather claim that whether this statement holds or not strongly depends on the kinds of persons that your social circle contains.
If you must use messenger in mobile,
works
I'd bet my house it is the former.
I think on HN we understandably make assumptions about the general population due to the bubble we live in. The reactions to other privacy scandals e.g. wikileaks or Snowden was actually pretty muted. John Oliver did a great piece when he met Snowden for example: literally pointing out that almost everyone he asked on the streets of New York had no idea who he was (https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/4x3pvm/john-olive...). So the idea of a mass exodus from Facebook is extremely unlikely.
Oct 2016: Snapchat Beats Instagram and Facebook as the Top Social Platform for Teens
http://www.adweek.com/digital/snapchat-beats-instagram-and-f...
May 2017: AppAnnie report: "On any given day in the US, 35% of Snapchat’s daily users cannot be reached by Facebook, 46% can't be reached by Instagram and 58% can’t be reached by Messenger" the report says.
https://mashable.com/2017/05/03/snapchat-users-facebook/#2Pm...
Oct 2017: Snapchat Furthers Its Lead As Teens’ Favorite Social Platform, BUT [Instagram is Reportedly "a Better Bet" for Marketers]
So if what I just wrote is somewhat true, the commonality between Cambridge Analytica and teens preferring Snapchat to Facebook is actually privacy or lack thereof (perceived or otherwise).
As for mass exodus - Hotmail, MySpace, Flickr, Yahoo... Where does one draw the line - is Facebook invincible?
I believe that more people care about privacy than they themselves realise. It's only a question of how much it'll take for patience to be tested. Keep in mind that easy-technology (the iPhone) has only been around for hardly more than 10 years; a lot of "non-geeky" people are still learning the ropes of how to balance their digital and physical lives.
Also don't forget that this is only one piece of bad news that Facebook has had of late. We're still wondering how useful online advertising really is, and how often it's gamed by ad click-fraud, etc. Aside from that, I can't comment on where FB's share price might be at any future point from now; not that I should even care.
Edit: With reference to big companies and which ones can eventually fail, I recommend reading Benjamin Graham's "The Intelligent Investor".
Remember the outrage about Apple slowing down iPhones and iPads? Or the outrage about Apple's and Google's tax avoidance schemes?
My bet is nobody's going to talk about this incident 6 months from now and FB's stock price will have more than recovered.
The media have been pumping out a lot of articles, but 40,000 tweets is really nothing.
Facebook has 2.2 billion monthly active users - that's 75% of all humans who have internet access. I think Facebook will probably exist for the rest of human history. They'll be a multiplanetary social network, and they'll probably still be running when the sun becomes a red giant.
We do have other approaches. That I can obtain your employment contract, take your picture as you walk in and out of buildings and when you visit the beach, figure out your birth day and who you hang out with...
...doesn't mean I'm allowed to or freely share/sell every detail of your life.
We could for example create a license or permit for gathering a type of data. Like: If you are a dating agency you can ask for peoples sex. If you are a head hunter you may gather data on employment history. If you have a taxi service you can ask for peoples address.
We could also adopt a government issued key for things like signing petitions.
Where the data is stored could also be subject to regulation. Its possible to keep access logs with specific justification for each bit of sensitive information accessed.
Twitter is primarily designed to help you share information with the world. Most of the information you provide us through Twitter is information you are asking us to make public. ... Twitter broadly and instantly disseminates your public information to a wide range of users, customers, and services, including search engines, developers, and publishers that integrate Twitter content into their services, and organizations such as universities, public health agencies, and market research firms that analyze the information for trends and insights. When you share information or content like photos, videos, and links via the Services, you should think carefully about what you are making public.
I could swear an earlier version even pointed out that tweets you delete are not gone, because, by the time you delete it, it's already been permanently archived by a zillion third parties. I can't find anything about that in the current version, though.
I suppose Twitter's in an easier spot here, though. Like they say, Twitter's for talking to the whole world. Whereas, when people use Facebook, they typically use it to communicate with a more intimate circle.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2011/11/faceb...
The potential for abuse is smaller if we use independent services for all of those different things, even if those services aren't any more trustworthy than Facebook.
No major tech company has shown such disdain for the privacy for its users and
No tech company (at least no customer facing tech company) has driven the handling of user privacy this badly into the gutter.
So much went wrong over the years with Facebook and user privacy (normally followed by a mealy mouthed bullshit apology, same as you see now) that they do not deserve any more benefit of a doubt.
Threatenting to sue the publications uncovering this tragedy is just about the icing on the cake.
And yes, I "deleted" my account some 4 years ago.
2. Having said that, spreading the awareness of this problem (as people are doing with this hashtag/campaign) is a good thing.
3. Maybe you can't avoid being in some database, but you can be in fewer databases with less information, and make it harder to aggregate all the information about you.
4. What do you suggest, resigned fatalism? Of course, you can do something. Avoid Google products, avoid Facebook, use a VPN, avoid tracking cookies, etc. - there's a ton you can do. Use different emails for different purposes, for example.
5. If enough people start caring about this, then companies will (have to) take note.
Additionally, re-building a social presence on another network would be a lot of work for many users. There's a certain dopamine rush to making a post and getting a ton of likes. In the short term, users are not going to get that kind of engagement if they move shop to another platform.
I just use web.messenger.com to contact them. That is the only value for me.
I think it would be awesome if users really did delete their facebook accounts if they thought these actions crossed some line. But the article cites ~50,000 #deletefacebook mentions. Come on, 50k hashtag shares is evidence of "Users Abandon..."? it then proceeds to document case studies of people leaving. The article title would imply that users truly did see this action as a last straw and are leaving in droves, and it seems that is the narrative that the writer wanted to write about.
Is that truly happening though? I'd love to see the data, but I don't think they will delete their accounts. Why would the writer elect to write an article fitting a narrative for which there is little data? Surely, the more interesting article would be "Are users deleting their accounts? Why not?" That I would read and find interesting.
I think it's reasonable to assume that if 50k people tweeted about it, a far larger number probably took action (active tweeters are just a small subset of the population) or are at least thinking about reducing usage or deleting.
Deleting facebook has been a topic of conversation in my circle for months since I did it ~4 months ago or so. It's definitely on people's radar as far as other media seems to indicate (we've had anti-facebook threads daily for months on HN), and my friends (mostly tech people and very active facebook users) have almost all reduced their usage significantly.
At minimum the Cambridge Analytica scandal will have to be addressed. If users are leaving the platform, that would need to be reported too.
If it looks like FB is shitting bricks, then we know they're hella scared, which means enough people deleted it to scare them.
I don't really think it's reasonable to make any extrapolation, as there are also opposite arguments.
A brief search on the hashtag shows that most of it's typical "social stuff" - sarcastic remarks, jokes, pictures etc.
Also, I also wouldn't take what social users says as action. There's always been the meme of "I'M GOING TO LEAVE FACEBOOK...!!!", yet Facebook kept growing. Rather, I'd assume it's very typical rage venting.
Few actually follow through and delete.
The other thing in FB's favor here is how incredibly difficult it is for an average user to actually delete, vs. suspend, their FB account. I helped a non-techie friend with it recently and it took about 45 minutes. It wouldn't accept the user's password for deletion even though it worked to login. After 2-3 password changes, it finally worked.
(As most here know the actual account deletion page is hidden behind a barely visible link in ... a locked filing cabinet in the basement, guarded by a venomous snake...)
These "Delete Facebook" campaigns are nothing new. They used to spread around Facebook like chain letters all the time (maybe less between then and now, I don't really know since I haven't used it much), always about privacy something, and all the people posting them were always right back to their normal Facebook usage the next week as if nothing happened. Maybe this time it'll stick a little more among the small group of people who are invested in this kind of thing, but I'm not holding my breath.
More seriously though, it's not unusual for newsroom editors to modify or even completely rewrite article headlines.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... ("Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.")
TIL on HN, if a someone deletes a parent comment, the children get promoted to the top.
Not everyone needs to delete Facebook - only a sufficient number of "core" users whom others look up to need to stop using it. That alone can cripple a network or sub-network. Remember that the number of users that C.A. pulled from wasn't that huge of a number so network effects can work both ways (consider Snapchat and several recent celebrity disendorsements, for example).
The easiest way for most to start "deleting" is by deactivating. Do an experiment: deactivate for a week and see what's the worst that can happen. It can always be undone.
It's representing the views of people who have quit facebook over Cambridge Analytica and explaining why they did it.
Writing your take on the article is probably in the works and probably takes a lot more time than 2-3 days. Reporting on something is what newspapers mainly do. Analysis and opinion usually comes later and from other sources.
Since it is public and real name social network, I have to be extra careful sharing anything that might be offensive to any member of my 'friends'. This kind of self-censorship is pretty stressful, I end up just shutting up.
Novelty and fun is gone from this platform for me.
My dream is a cryptocurrency based social network, so that those running p2p nodes can also get paid. Also the end clients can compete with each other for the interface part - dumb/some-algo based (Facebook can also be one of the clients ;-))
It's amazing how different other people's timelines can look. I was at a friend's place and he deliberately doesn't unfollow anyone or anything, and likes to engage with viral videos and memes. His timeline is filled with memes and viral stuff. He loves it. Great for him.
Just make your timeline what you want it to be, like how your Twitter follow list is. Get your news elsewhere and subscribe to multiple periodicals across the spectrum.
This wasn't about the data sharing. I was aware of this all along. I also didn't delete my account. All data 'breached' has been sucked out long ago. It was just that I realized Facebook made me feel worse. I was constantly engaged with championing causes I feel passionate about. However, I did realize that for all my activity I achieved fairly little, and that the daily 'triggers' and 'write-offs' didn't function as a relieve, but rather as a self-reinforcing of a feeling of perpetual anger and discomfort.
I do miss some of the social interactions with friends and acquaintances with whom FB was the only link left. I kept Messenger and occasionally use that still to communicate more directly.
I don't think I will go back to FB (or similar social networks), even if they would solve the 'privacy' issues. I currently feel this type of 'long distance/low threshold' social paradigm is more harmful than beneficial to our psychological makeup.
But this time it's not just people, it's political parties and whole countries that are being affected.
I'd love to see some kind of reporting/study on why on average the general public does not respond to events you mention like Snowden/Manning/OWS/Bank Bailout and others. I mean at one point in time social movements in the US got things done like Temperance Movement, Womens Voting Rights, Civil Rights Movement etc...
Maybe there is a larger narrative here that I'm missing, like each of these things are part of the anti-corporate movement or something.
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/277843-snowden-revel...
People aren't "too busy" to waste a lot of time on Facebook. If anything, tight time constraints would make people not use Facebook in the first place.
Stopping the NSA or changing Wall Street requires significant political power and cooperation, stopping Facebook from snooping on you requires individuals to stop using a website and maybe install a browser extension.
They're not comparable at all.
Facebook are the agent of foreign states, we must control our own critically important infrastructure! (cheers) Free internet for all! (more cheers)
Populism is so hot right now.
You're conflating two things. If the US somehow lost all steel foundries without being able to spin things up in a reasonable amount of time, we're screwed in a war. You must indeed make sure that you're self-sufficient in things that are essential for living in case you're cut off due to circumstances.
I'm not quite sure what your point is.
To them, Facebook is the internet. They don't have email accounts. They don't use the browser. They don't search the web. I met someone in a small town who never even used the maps feature. I tried to think of what value the true internet might bring them, but when I suggested that "you can search for news and read other things", the response was that they already did that with the Facebook App.
One guy handed me his phone, so I could add myself as a friend on his Facebook. While I started typing my name, I noticed his search history... and to him, Facebook was even a substitute for what people in the USA might use Incognito mode for!
I would call Facebook their internet portal, but it's not really a portal to anything - Facebook is just the entire internet to them.
Buzzfeed (yes, Buzzfeed) did an excellent writeup of Myanmar, that mirrors what I saw there: https://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/fake-news-spreads-tru....
“Nobody asks, they don’t care about the email,” he said, explaining that most don’t know that creating an email address is free, and easy. “No one is using that. They have Facebook.”
Since you are as surprised as I was a month back, I've looked further and concluded that buzz feed actually funds very high quality journalism (yes yes shocking I know) and presents facts from both sides. They do it using the money generated from click baits. I'd even make what will sound like a hyperbole , if you are the sort that wants truth on both sides of political spectrum and not just an echo chamber , go to buzz feed, and not NY TIMES or wapo.
There are more than 2 sides to a story.
They’re not just click bait, they do create incredibly biased content.
Would you really say that Buzzfeed's bias strains your credulity, or is it more likely that you simply disagree with them?
You can't see that a video shaped entirely by left-wing identity politics that blames all men for the crimes of a few, that ignores practical realities contributing to the issue, has a left-wing bias? Are you serious?
I recall at the time that people kept nitpicking over the misspelling of a bank (in a way that suggested people of a certain expertise never make spelling errors, which is simply untrue). It was a sensational story at the time, but all one needs to do now is to look back and compare it to what we know now.
Yes and at one time AOL occupied a similar role. And everyone moved out of the walled garden and onto the real internet just fine.
This time they have algorithms that can prevent you from wanting to leave.
I doubt it's the same thing.
In which developing countries does Facebook have a "monopoly" over internet infrastructure?
The Guardian has a couple of decent writeups about it too:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/01/facebook-free-...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/27/facebook-...
I guess the concern is that people will confuse Facebook for the Internet, and they’ll think they’re getting the Internet for free. It then becomes very difficult for a real ISP offering full Internet access to enter the market.
I don’t know if they have “monopolies”, as OP claimed, but these are the countries where they operate:
Like others have said with elections, this all started long ago with social, CA just happened to do it better this time. Even without them, sophisticated targeting can still be developed regardless, so it's just a matter of money and audience reach.
I think the thing to take away from all this is that people don’t like it.
Our societies have democratic principles; governments can (and have a duty to) prevent sophisticated targeting from non-consensual data collection and if it’s not what people want.
You can make an argument that it is what people really want because they’re too desperate, ignorant or subjugated to consider anything else, so the serfs must be farmed.
Let’s find out!
That said, I probably won't delete my account. It remains the only way many of my friends plan events. It exists, for me, solely so I can be invited to things. I imagine there are many others like me. Like it or not, I suspect this is a blip for FB.
It's the other way around, he's being reached by other people through FB. What good would it do to make an account where his friends are not?
You don't need to rely on a single closed-garden platform for communication. F*book sole purpose as a corporation is built around harvesting as much personal data about you as possible and selling it to the highest and most nefarious bidder.
Rational, perfectly selfish agents in an environment of frictionless transactions might still invite me to events if I were off their social media platform. Humans will not.
What makes you so sure he's a sleazebag?
Hmm typically when someone says that people are "dumb fucks" it usually means they are simply incredibly naive /s
Facebook's business model doesn't depend on Mark Zuckerberg's "magic". It will continue to grow or break regardless of whether he's at the helm or not. Users, advertisers, competitors and governments will have to be the ones to decide.
Saying that Zuckerberg is a sleazebag based on a snippet of a private conversation he had 15 years ago when he was a college student is a stretch.
It's entirely possible that you're a much better person than Mark Zuckerberg. That doesn't make him a bad person.
I also remember being 20 and I said much worse things than calling a bunch of people dumb fucks in private conversation.
I've used Facebook a fair bit over the past decade and only deactivated it two months ago, after Zuckerberg signalled his intentions for 2018. I see a deactivated account as being a precursor to finding a way to test, properly obfuscate and then really delete.
So compared to doing nothing, I am in the process of deleting as much as possible. I don't want to participate with events, groups or with people who might be encouraged by me staying (this assumes that they care, of which some do; so it is my responsibility to help pull them away).
Read this: http://www.salimvirani.com/facebook/
There is also the issue of damage done. Facebook knows a lot about me, too much, but the competing service might not. Switching to other services means giving them a lot of the information I already regret I gave Facebook.
So in the end - unless one convinces both one self and all contacts to switch to “traditional” social networking such as a phonebook, a list of email addresses, blogs for photos, secure chat apps - one must consider what the alternative “integrity cost” to Facebook is.
People have to be pulled not just from Facebook but to something else (unless they agree to the phonebook style social network - which nearly no one will). But what?
For those who are light users - my best guess is that they'll either not see the problem and continue, or switch to a more addictive platform (Twitter). You might choose to hand out a not-Facebook contact detail or alternative preferred method of events notification and this will probably contribute something to nudging another person toward a particular direction (if it's as simple as handing out a secure chat app and letting others know they exist, that could be a good thing)
For moderate and heavy users, they might deactivate and then delete Facebook and learn from that experience and then be wary of all social media from that point on and choose to go outside more to ride a bike in their local area, etc.
It's all worth considering.
Exactly. Didn't people know all the proprietary social networks are spyware+adware? That's the way they earn money. BTW Ghostery says it knows 92 trackers in the social media category.
I think we become a part of the problem if we simply assume all users are just like us and know all about the negatives of tech. Facebook evidently didn't anticipate/address it early enough despite all that talent - did they really want this Cambridge Analytica situation to happen? What are we doing to fix this?
I know people have proposed alternatives like Mastodon or Diaspora*, but I don't think they're good alternatives either compared to gradually giving them up to learn old offline alternatives: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/jobs/quit-social-media...
As for Steemit, I think this "feature" is most absurd. I hope it never takes off:
https://steemit.com/faq.html#Can_I_delete_or_deactivate_my_a...
> "Can I delete or deactivate my account?"
> "Accounts can not be deactivated or deleted. The account along with all of its activity is permanently stored in the blockchain."
My impression of this whole scandal, is that where you are on the political spectrum affects how you see it. I think a lot of the anger at Facebook is not because of what they did, but what they people see as the consequence from it, mainly the election of Donald Trump.
Facebook cannot afford to alienate both halves of the partisan divide at the same time. There is a substantial portion of the Left that at least partially blames Facebook for Donald Trump's election. Given that, I wonder if in the near future they will try to position themselves as a more conservative friendly company than the other Silicon Valley tech players.
And what's the proportion who would still vote for Trump today?
Is this really such a big deal for Facebook?
Suppose 50000 persons delete their Facebook everyday, then it will just lose 1,825,0000 users one year, not counting new users joining Facebook every year. And Facebook has 2 billion users.
Edit: The number lost in one year is 1,825,0000, not 1,825,000.
But that's still only .00857 of 2.13 billion daily actives.
Also, Facebook relies on a critical mass of users; if 75% of my friends leave, I'll probably leave, then large swaths of the social networks begins unthreading?
jk I've never Facebooked.
So to me the value is that everyone I know is there. Not just 95% but 99%. So if even a fraction left, I could much easier just leave. My "social circle" on facebook could quickly just disappear, and I suspect this goes for lots of other people. Because the strength of facebook is that every social group is connected - but that will be how the cancer spreads too.
Come to think of it, I have a 4th account. And how many do the botfarms have?
If this catches on, FB can turn into Myspace in few years. It will still have billion or so active users, but FB's stock valuation will crash until it's P/E ratio will be something like 4-5.
Also, I suspect many millions have already abandoned facebook and were using other platforms, they just left their account around just in case. Now, they have a wee bit of signaling, for practically no cost, so they go delete their account, and can happily pronounce on whatever currently-popular- social media platform, how they "dont even have" a facebook account triumphantly (no doubt missing the irony).
I simply do not believe 1/3 of the planet is on Facebook.
I am not. Half of the planet does not have access to clean drinking water, I do not believe they are on Facebook either.
What % of American voters users Facebook? I would be surprised to see over 80%. Nothing has adoption rates that high.
It's a lot easier to ship a phone somewhere than to ship clean drinking water.
(There are a lot of people who do not have access to clean water but have a cell phone.)
Only 1/2 of the planet is even on the Internet. Yet they have 2B MAU?
WhatsApp has 1.5 billion monthly actives.
It makes perfect sense that a global social network that dominates in most countries not named China, could get to two billion users.
I must have seen hundreds of skeptical statements on HN over the years about how Facebook can't have X number of users. I've never once seen any supporting evidence against their general scale. Not once, not ever. And again in this thread, skeptics and zero supporting evidence against Facebook having two billion users.
In their favor is extreme data: dozens of large and persistent research efforts put into studying use, by external parties. That spans everything from traditional media usage polling agencies, to large media ratings firms, to ad companies, to competitors, to services that see wide-spread use of Facebook-login, to Web traffic tracking services that indicate massive adoption. It also includes the massive usage that is seen on the iOS and Android app stores. The sole rebuttal possible, is to say: it's all fake! without any equally massive supporting evidence.
Companies like Google would have a very large interest in destroying Facebook by pointing it out, and Google would know as well as anyone if Facebook were lying to such an extreme degree.
The majority of people behave by classical Pavlovian conditioning: they'll get addicted for what gives them immediate pleasure even if it brings them pain in the long run. That's why we have so much obesity, tobacco, cocaine and opioids. This is why FB will keep thriving.
Interesting that you mention obesity, tobacco, cocaine and opiods because not all of those problems are inevitable for all societies. Personally, I think the two most misused technologies from last century is the car (invented late 19th century, but mostly innovated on in the 20th), and television. We've been here before, and the problems can be fixed so long as the answer isn't "more technology".
As for cigarettes, Australia has led the world in curbing smoking rates through a number of "socialist" measures. I don't know enough about the other two but I don't think it's as bad as in America.
a) MySpace wasn't actually that popular (was your mum on it for example?) so there weren't many network effects.
b) It looked clean, unlike the eye-stabbing experience of MySpace
c) It was more secure than MySpace because only people from your university could see your profile.
Things are different now so you're never going to have success with that strategy (although the university-based access thing could potentially work again).
I think what will kill Facebook now is the sheer volume of low quality content on it - not just adverts but "Dave tagged you in this meme", and "Jen shared this gif of a cute dog" and "Remember what you were doing one year ago today!".
It's just, not very pleasant. You can tame it by using an ad blocker and unsubscribing from most of your friends... but even then there are some post types you can only "See less of" (yeah right), and it's .. just... crap.
This privacy thing is bullshit. It was an obvious problem in 2012 and nobody quit over it then. They removed the API in 2015. Why would people quit now?
a) Kids are finding they don't want to join what their parents are on. Heck, I don't want to stay on what parents (whom I knew from before they were parents) are on.
b) Elon Musk just said: "Looks lame anyway" - don't get "clean" and not-lame mixed up - most of Facebook does look lame in 2018 once people see past the window dressing; I actually think nearly every single company/personal page out there is a potential liability, often with not that much to gain (depends on the social media manager employed of course).
c) And university people are realising that Eternal September has arrived.
I have one simple answer to your last line (reflecting from my personal experience of being on Facebook for longer than I should have): For me, it was the straw that broke the camel's back.
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-north-america-daus-...
I went and had a look at Vero, but it doesn't allow posting text, only associated with an image, movie, link or book. I checked how Diaspora was going, but the most popular pods have 2K users, and there are no pods in NZ or even Australia.
I guess I should get off my chuff and set up a New Zealand pod, but life is full enough already without taking that on.
Maybe we should all go back to blogging.
It's following the same model as WhatsApp of it being free to join for anyone up until a certain point and then they'll charge money.
And yes, I do love the thought of Vero being bought by Facebook at some point in the future, too.
I would like to use Twitter more, but I don’t like the ads. I would gladly pay $50/year for ad free Twitter. I like Gnu Social, but not enough like-minded people to follow.
I spend 20 minutes a month in FaceBook, but jump through hoops not to be tracked.
Their huge amount of data is their strongest competitive advantage.
However, what ads are you referring to on Twitter? Promoted tweets (DuckDuckGo's comes to mind)? Because apart from that, I don't recall seeing any when using uBlock Origin.
I also can't really recall many intrusive ads when using the official Android app - perhaps I'm already so far in that I don't see them anymore.
To be honest, I wouldn't be upset if all social media and news websites were to become paywalled tomorrow. Perhaps I would then get back into books again (even free ones from the local library).
It's mostly geeks on there, and it'll still be a few years before my Mum can use it, but that's the way I like it. Facebook is mostly just a photo feed of what I'm up to for my family now.
I use Firefox with uBlock and a few others, but Google has me by my mobile device.
The best thing I've found for social media ads is to manually click on ads that are way off-base and reply to the posts. Now I have lots of ads for pedialyte and vinyl releases of video game soundtracks - which I have no use for.
https://www.fightcyberstalking.org/how-to-block-your-website...
I remember when this chart[3] first made the rounds. If this didn't convince people that facebook is evil. I don't know what will
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/11/facebook-...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/21/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg...
Unless CNN went SO amateurish that you only show a back head of interviewer and you never show him with the journalist together!
I say that because your friends retain their friend count, and that's a big part of FB-identity. Also, you can always pick it back up when "they" fix the problem (which isn't fixable).
I made my act public, left a message with contact info as my last message, and then deleted all my "friends" (which was, honestly, a pretty nice reminder of folks I hadn't spoken with in a while). Finally, I bcc'd them on an email so I could stay in touch. I can always reply-all that email if I need to spam them with news/info/etc...
it's not a perfect solution, but it's the best I could come up with on my own, and I'm advising my friends to do the same.
I had been using a false name on my primary FB since I started the account in ~2008... funny anecdote, I once got a popup on my real account with a question about my "fake" profile: "Is this a real person?" Yes, of course... and now I'm going to make a post on my wall asking my friends to please say "yes" if they got the same question.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
Yes, I know they make money other ways. But if no one uses the news feed, their ad revenue will take a noticeable hit. Most of the negatives come with the endless feed/scroll in the first place. I still spend time on Facebook, but only when I want to. No endless scroll, and I don't miss a thing when it comes to groups/events/messaging.
Plus then privacy loss is not just for you but the shadows you cast (shadow profiles for those who never logged in based on relationships and inferences from live users)
Wouldn't it be great if, as a start, everyone moved to a secure not-going-to-sell-your-data organisation for instant messaging.
Then, if Whisper Systems could just bring out some magic Facebook alternative, well, that would be just amazing.
We should care about this stuff, we should try to influence our friends and family.
Ideally people should move off Facebook, but I don't think most of people's friends (including mine) care about this event that much.
[1]: https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/1084673321594605
Network effects. It's hard to switch if not all of your contacts also switch.
I didn't say initially that I meant Signal more as a straight replacement for Whatsapp, not FB.
The first question my friends would ask is "I tried signal but I couldn't see a way of posting photos and getting likes...or planning an event. It doesn't look like facebook at all, just a chat app!
Facebook the platform is so extremely large and so useful to so many. Most people (including me!) would struggle to set up a photo album from my vacation that my friends and family can see and comment on, but other people can not.
Any serios attempt at displacing facebook needs to solve ALL of the things facebook solves. And unfortunately while solving them separately (one chat app, one photo app, one calendar app...) is much better for integrity - it's almost useless from a usability standpoint to have to manage multiple social graphs.
But marketing this application is nearly impossible, because it doesn't have any extra features. It just has phone numbers [contact details], and that doesn't excite users to spend time getting it set up.
So I concluded that this is something that has to be done from the OS vendor side. We need an extension to the CardDAV protocol, and we need vendors to implement it.
They may have '2 billion' users, but they're super vulnerable to an exodus of even 5% of them in terms of income, if they're from the right regions.
(This is based on my hazy recollection of stats which had a US FB user worth $35USD to FB in income, where someone from the developed world drew in <$1USD)
Wait until people find out about the Facebook pixel.
https://assets.propublica.org/images/articles/_threeTwo2000w...
via:
https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-enabled-advertis...
https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-disc...
and many more.
edit to add... this is like some sort of Russian roulette. ignoring the Russian connection pun, that's still a funny joke.
It seems to me that zuckerburg cares about ad revenue, which means he needs eyeballs and needs to keep them for as long as possible. And, he has proven to care very little about privacy. Therefore, for those who can't shake the habit 100%, cutting back to one day a week is a good way to get the connections you need while slicing into the attention getting ad revenue.
It reminds me to remind myself: A project that seemed quixotic a month ago suddenly has potential and value. You need to start developing such things when the market is in the 'quixotic' stage in order to have them ready when the world suddenly understands. Congratulations to those who started months or years ago.
"It's just another thing I have to pay per month: Netflix, Spotify, etc."
People have mental budgets, and maybe their psychological good will in balancing those budgets get drained over time for things like recurring payments that aren't on a bigger scale ($100+) and aren't 100% necessary like internet.
People need "friends" and they get them where they can. As a society, we deserve and owe our selves better than this. There are FOSS alternatives which are nearly as good. This is as fine a time as any to turn up the pressure on our friends, and to work for solutions that don't/can't sell us out (intentionally, or accidentally).
1) No good sales pitch starts with the price. What benefits you offering that will entice them?
2) You don't need to do everything a larger competitor does to disrupt. You just need to do one area better and have a slice of the audience cares a lot about that thing. What's the thing?
However, I'm pretty sure that at the end of the day if companies start withdrawing their funding for Facebook ads, the platform's shine will drop sharply.
So far apart from Mozilla, there really hasn't been any comment from the corporate side. I suppose it's a bit of the chicken and the egg problem - Fb has a lot of data so companies want targeted advertising and companies paying for it leads Fb to collect data.
It may serve as an example for other service providers that there is a risk of losing their customers base if they screw up too.
As of today google, twitter, fb, apple really have carte blanche from consumers since they know most consumers are not going to lift a finger and the whole thing will be forgotten in a week due to short attention span of most consumers.
It can't be, that one company has so much power.
But I will stop posting, liking, and commenting. Let’s slowly starve the monster.
That said, I've never clicked an add nor engaged with some silly quiz.
If FB allows these reports to be shown in their feeds. /s
I think people fleeing from Whatsapp or Instagram would be real news.