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I hope I'm wrong but I think this in no way bringing facebook down.

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 mean, I just went and installed signal on my whole families phones one druken evening (I have 7 sets of aunt's and uncle's, no small feat). Now we communicate all through signal and they didn't even realize it helped them lol

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

That’s a good coup. Did it bleed into your family’s other circles outside the family at all?

Easy if you have physical access to your families devices. But if you're on the other side of the world, bit hard to convince grandma.

I'd argue a lot if not probably the majority of users of Facebook are read only. What matters is really whether the minority of users who actively post are leaving or not. These are the most affected by privacy concerns. Once enough of them do, the platform dries out and its end will accelerate.

In my case, most of my friends have no FB account or they have deactivated the account long ago. Few other have accounts but they practically never posted anything.

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.

>What matters is really whether the minority of users who actively post are leaving or not.

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.

Obviously passive users are important for FB's bottom line, but I think what GP is saying is that if all the active users leave (even if media companies/pages don't, just the friends who post), it will cause an exodus of passive users.

Sure, if all will. But most won't, and that won't change things. The 'enough' in GP's comment should pretty much be 80%+, which we all know won't happen.

It's still a great communication tool without the users who post though.

That’s a good point. Are you just assuming the majority of users are read-only or is that informed by some other source? I would probably assume something similar as far as posts and less for comments, but as far as just liking things, I would assume almost everybody who logs in does that on a regular basis. They probably do it a lot less but logging in and browsing but not liking anything seems a little uncanny to me. I mean it makes sense if you just don’t see anything you like but that doesn’t seem like a likely habit to sustain itself.

My own personal experience of seeing the majority of the posts in my feed coming from a minority of my contacts. And a lot of people use facebook just to keep track of what distant relatives and acquaintances have become, not because they feel like sharing everything in their life with the world.

This is the only real demise of fb or any other large player. Another service catches on that is not directly competitive, and then adds features to gradually replace the incumbent.

Facebook owns Whats App. It's one of the first thing they acquired with IPO money.

Then what on earth was the WhatsApp CEO thinking when he told people to abandon Facebook?

He wised up? Many former FB execs and top employees have started speaking out, having major changes of opinion, against what they created.

Guilty that he'd knowingly sold everyone on WhatsApp out to Facebook?

Ex-CEO. He cashed out already, so he can say whatever he wants.

Good thing Facebook owns WhatsApp and Instagram. They’ll be fine. Losing a few million won’t hurt since they have > 1 Billion users

They'll eventually gain those users back anyways and make the loses back when they have a strong 4th quarter.

also just FB Messenger. I use Messenger almost exclusively to talk to friends in my area. We have other IM options in theory, but end up reaching for Messenger because of how well it works.

Not to mention most of my non-tech friends have no idea something even just happened with Facebook.

Whatsapp is also owned by facebook.

The reason I still invest in Facebook as a company is because of their ownership in these other platforms.

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.

> Keeping in touch with friends & family is too important to ditch entirely, and having everyone switch to a different platform is very hard.

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.

I haven't logged in for about five-six months now, and FB started bothering my friends to hit me up on messenger to lure me back in.

Facebook has some really cult like behavior reinforcement: "you have posted to data in a row and people are responding"

It's like they are going out of their way to be creepy at this point.

WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, I assume they share all the data they wish to.

This is a false dichotomy, Facebook is in no way required or even useful to keep in touch with anyone.

Indeed, people kept in touch with friends and family just fine before Facebook.

And people who don't use it now also manage to keep in touch with people they care about just fine.

This says nothing. People shopped online before Amazon; watched movies before Netflix, and used smartphones before Apple started making them

This says a lot.

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)

You comment is ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. As such I would say your own comment says nothing.

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.

Where i think Facebook fills a gap is that it creates the feeling that you are in touch with someone without having to go to the effort of phoning/emailing 1:1/physically meeting, in some ways I think there is a guilt mitigation built in there somewhere. When I compare how may parents keep in touch with friends & family through regular calls and meeting I think we have definitely lost something personally and as a society. How much more personal is a one on one conversation can be compared to a facebook post. I always thought there was room for a network that would require a physical meeting occasionally.

Wait, if someone tells you they find Facebook useful to keep in touch with friends, you'd tell them they're wrong?

It's absolutely not the only way to do so, and it's a false dichotomy to say quit facebook == don't get in touch with your friends.

The two billion facebook users indicate that managing social activity/network online is a product actually in pretty high demand.

I mean do we really think Facebook is the only company with data problems? Is switching to something different really going to make a difference? Deleting your Facebook won't get rid of your data. Google, Microsoft, Twitter, your ISP, your cell carrier all have so much data on you. At this point you are out there in someone's database somewhere. Unless you haven't been on the grid at all which clearly anyone on HN is on the grid. So not sure what we think #DeleteFacebook will really do?

It annoys me that you're getting downvoted with no replies. I completely agree with you. The only way to stop your data from being spread across the web is to never put it there in the first place. I feel like federated systems (Mastodon, Diaspora*, et al) will only make it more difficult to remove your data, because now it's spread across 100 individual servers in 100 individual countries with 100 individuals doing their own thing. It ends up being even MORE permanent in the end, IMO.

One thing I respect about Twitter, is that they spell this out fairly clearly in their privacy policy:

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.

There is no end. I suspect multi generational data to be endlessly more nasty.

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.

Absolutely. You got to think: "what am I getting out of this; is it really worth it?". Maybe you'll then realize that it's best to keep your data out of somebody else's computer.

I think it's better for 10 different companies to each have 1/10th of your data rather than one company having all of it. Facebook has grown to the point where they're just too big. They have pretty much every person I've ever known as a user. Those users have the app (or multiple apps) installed on their phones, upload all their photos, do much of their messaging, plan their events, etc. within Facebook. Plus Facebook owns a bunch of other properties with huge user bases.

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.

2 points to your comment:

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.

1. Agreed, private action is not enough, public (political) action (as happened in the EU) is needed in addition.

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.

The point, I think, is to send a message. Yes, the damage is done. But public pressure to #DeleteFacebook might force Facebook to be a little less cavalier with billions of people's personal data, respect previous agreements with the FTC [0], etc. in the future.

[0] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2011/11/faceb...

It should be #providenodataanymore

> The question is - will this be just a minor blip to Facebook and then normal services will resume after the indignation wears off? Or will it the beginning of the end of the social media dominance of the platform?

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.

I suppose it all depends on how much user attrition you would say constitutes a "mass exodus." How many millions of former users would that be? Or what percentage from what high-point? By these following reports, there's been a mass exodus in terms of usage among the much-sought-after teenage demographic, and that's been happening from Facebook to Snapchat for at least two years now:

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]

https://www.marketingcharts.com/digital/social-media-80744

Sure, I agree that "mass exodus" is ill-defined. I have nothing to back this up, but I think we can both agree that it is extremely unlikely Cambridge Analytica really has anything to do with the teenagers preferring Snapchat to Facebook.

From what I've been able to gather, teens prefer creating "ephemeral" less-curated content in favour of throwing up "permanent" posts to Facebook (for all/too many to see) until it's past its use by date. So in a sense, they may or may not be more conscious of being seen by their parents who are mostly tech-savvy (compared to past generations anyway).

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".

A year or so ago I noticed I would wake up and the first thing I did was load up Facebook in my phone. I deleted the app, and what do I do? i still open it on my phone's browser. So I changed my password to 32 characters generated by Keepass, and make sure I logged out of it on my phone. I'm still logged in on the desktop, but nowadays it's pretty quiet anyway. Thr last few days I've been using a Chrome extension (1) to delete stuff from my wall, reasoning that just like real life interactions, it's okay to forget things (well I did download my archive/went through my activity logs and saved them as HTML files).

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...

Similar story here: a while back I installed a browser extension to delay the loading of unproductive sites that I was habitually visiting just to distract myself from tasks, imposing a 30 second wait barrier. What it's revealed is that there are some sites that I'm very willing to wait 30 seconds to visit (e.g. if there's a certain song on YouTube that I want to play in the background), but not once have I ever bothered to wait 30 seconds for Facebook to load. My fingers instinctively type the domain, the delay page appears, and then I close the tab. Makes it easy to realize how little value Facebook was providing me.

Similarly, I moved all my reddit subs to multis, so my homepage there is empty. In the last months the time I spent there has dropped to less than single-digit percentages of how much I spent in the past.

Do you mind sharing what browser extension this is?

Comcast

Touché! BWAHAHAB

Delayed Gratification does this - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/delayed-gratificat...

I had a similar behaviour years ago. I deleted the app from my phone, but then after a short while logged in via my phone's browser. A short while after that I chose to 'delete' my account (after backing up the archive of course). Since it gives you 30 days to reconsider your decision, I thought if I really missed facebook that much I'd log in within the 30 days. It's been years since and I haven't had the slightest desire to be apart of facebook.

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.

you probably need to down regulate your dopamine response in general for all aspects of your life. try reading a book, concentrating for periods of time, not concentrating for periods of time, a long walk, or meditation. over time you can overcome automatic behavior, its probably healthier for you anyway

For me it had entered muscle memory, whenever I was slightly bored and craving that dopamine hit my fingers would do “splat-t fa return” without even really thinking about it. Took a few weeks to fully unlearn that!

And that has now happened to me with HN... On the plus side; the content (not least the comments) is much more valuable

if you have to convince. Try signal. As good as whatsapp, in most ways, better in others. Signal did whatsapp's encryption.

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.

Have you tried Wire? (Similar protocol as Signal, more polished apps)

which chrome extension are you using, plz?

This one: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-m...

I highly recommend deleting the fb app from your device to prevent it listening on you, tracking location, draining your battery and bombarding you with notifications.

If you must use messenger in mobile,

https://mbasic.facebook.com/

works

They also say, in the mobile web version, that there are Stories, that can only be viewed in the app. Nope, desktop mode is enough (of course).

One can also request the FB site be reloaded as the desktop version - less painful than mbasic.

Does https://touch.facebook.com/ still work ? Last time I checked, it was a halfway house between mbasic and the desktop version.

It will be a minor blip. Most users are utterly addicted and don't value their privacy over their convenience despite what they say.

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.

> don't value their privacy over their convenience

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.

As if FB is the single way to to do that

I have a phone for that.

By bets are on minor blip. Every large company is going through a shitstorm every once in a while. Now it's FB's turn. The media loves this and pushes the matter as much as possible as it translates directly into clicks (and therefore revenue).

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 outrage about Just Eat shifting fees onto their customers ... but a distant memory, and this was like, a month ago or something.

Minor blip for sure. There's a media frenzy, but I only personally know two people who are even talking about it, and even they're not totally sold on jumping ship just yet. They've also known better than to post personal information on there (and I've posted bogus personal information just to mess with FB, which I heartily recommend to everyone. False information is better for your privacy than no information).

Yes, even my developer friends mostly have no idea something is hapenning.

I had deactivated my account a year or two ago, and turned it back on to "permanently delete" my account. The most prominent UX option about deleting your account on their privacy page is is an opt-in for deleting your account after you die (...)

> The hashtag #DeleteFacebook appeared more than 10,000 times on Twitter within a two-hour period on Wednesday, according to the analytics service ExportTweet. On Tuesday, it was mentioned 40,398 times, according to the analytics service Digimind.

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.

I think it will be a minor blip. There's been such a drum beat about FB being bad for privacy over the years that most users probably don't care. I know it's just one data point, but none of my friends have mentioned this latest episode.

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.

will be like #deleteUber . People don't care.

I'd recommend deleting the app and just using the mobile site to save your battery.

I removed FB app, deleted everything in FB except my friends list.

I just use web.messenger.com to contact them. That is the only value for me.