Facebook exodus: Nearly half of young users have deleted the app
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
I left Facebook when I read some press release about it being designed from the outset to make you feel bad because it keeps you engaged; hoping someone agrees with something you liked or shared and the dopamine hit it releases. I don’t like feeling manipulated and manipulation is facebooks modus operandi. All to track everything I do around the internet to sell me ads for $12/person/year in revenue.
I left Twitter for basically the same reason and when I’d stick on the site refreshing it all day hoping someone noticed the well thought out point I spent 3 hours putting together only to realize no one cares. Leaving both after about a week feels like when I have taken breaks from caffeine. It sucks at first but after a week, you feel refreshed and clean. I’m sure drug abstinence feels similar.
My father went down the rabbit hole of Facebook and shares political crap constantly, flooding peoples news feeds. There’s a feature on Facebook that lets you silently unfollow people so they’re on mute. Everyone of my family members who are Facebook friends with my dad have done this to him and don’t see anything he posts. He’s shouting into a black hole thinking the whole world is paying attention while in reality no one is.
He has said things that the man I grew up with would never have said and Facebook/ talk radio is to blame. We’re all vulnerable to it, which is why I try and stay away from it.
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/dont-believe-lies-just-people-...
It's worse than facebook as far as the "get attention" vibe.
Granted all social media is about getting attention, and I don't think there is anything wrong with it necessarily. Attention is nice, there is good reason for it, but when the message is so tailored to just that and there isn't anything else, I don't know what the point is.
I recently switched careers from a long networking career to web development and thought I'd take another spin on Twitter, but rather I just get sites that paste a link to their website, and hordes of people posting programming truisms or career / resume / coding lifestyle fodder .... so little feels like that person wrote it, so much feels like what those people thing "a commercial about me" should be.
---
As for your other notes about the impact on people. It is horrifying. I see some relatives posting terrible things and I wish saying "but you've never met any of those people" had the impact that it should... but it doesn't.
What I realized recently is that Facebook is built in a way that makes it really hard to have a real conversation. People only share links and shout their opinions with no real place for exchange.
It became work to make Facebook worthwhile.
Such a signal, combined with actual research on the veracity and tone of the post could be combined to highlight places where people need help and where bad actors might be plying their wares.
But I don't honestly expect anyone in management at Facebook to advocate such a system.
How is it with all our technology, the cutting edge are these digital septic tanks (or sewers if you live in the city)?
I have my facebook only to announce big events and let immigration officers know that I love my wife very much by having a detailed photo album of all our interactions over many years.
It's incredibly annoying that at this juncture I have to keep it because of what other people / entities want rather than myself. This is why I refuse to use LinkdIn instead of job boards or the career sites for the company.
The aggressive commercialization of Social Media has been the greatest failure to be borne out of the internet and our society will be suffering its effects for many years. At least the stockholders (who are probably too darn old to use the site) are very happy.
Edit: I also very much appreciate the irony of spending so much time and energy on posting on Hacker News!
I think some people unconsciously know this, but they fail to act on it due to the addictive nature of the product, creating false excuses to justify their account (it doesn't matter how important you think you are, no one cares really).
Others are completely oblivious to what Facebook is doing to them. I don't think there is any hope for them. Facebook will continue to use them to squeeze every bit of free time they have into pointless egocentric activity.
The Brainwashing Of My Dad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXTjz2H57rE
FWIW I now have my own blog (not associated with HN, yet) that I use to type out my thoughts on things. I've shared it with a few people in my life that I think might care. The act of it being a blog instead of posts on Facebook is very intentional, and I don't care that not many see it. It is more of a journal.
I would be interested in the values for other platforms. I think it builds a more tangible argument when explaining the hidden costs of using various "free" products.
It's an uncomfortable topic to broach, but you can't blame everyone else but your father for the opinions he holds.
I'll confess I actually like using Facebook because it allows me to keep engaged and in touch with family with much less effort than before -- but whatever timeline changes they keep doing, I now see the same stories on my scroll. If I log in five times during the day, i see the same set of stories each of the five times.
Result: I don't check it as much, dont want to check it as much. So much for ranking functions.
Facebook, I've been signed up since you first opened up to non-edu accounts.. you're telling me there's nothing at all more to display?
Not sure where that's going to pop up next.
Facebook in 2007 was also mostly about friends, and not selling me stuff that it couldn't possibly know I was interested in unless my movements over the entire internet were being tracked.
The unmutable spam in my inbox forced me to turn off all Facebook mail notifications, and the user-hostile behavior made me hate the platform and not want to come back to it, almost out of spite.
I'll bet these underhanded tactics performed great in A/B testing. But big picture, they should not be surprised that people are leaving in droves after deliberately degrading user experience.
FB can always promote Instagram or Whatsapp into their main money cow.
I'd like to delete it entirely but at the moment too many people still use messenger to contact me.
If only there was a Messenger API to setup an autoresponder with alternate contact info...
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/22/teens-abandoning-facebook-st...
FB can shift its model to becoming like priceline. Just try to buy up all the social networks. For example most travel site you probably use are owned by priceline. The same way Facebook could maybe buy up other social networks.
It's easy to get cynical about this but what I like about Instagram as opposed to facebook is that it's superficial by design. That makes it way less of a "thing".
It doesn't pretend like it truly "manages your social life" like facebook does, it's just funny pictures your extroverted friend posts. Instagram stories are gone after 24 hours. They're temporal. I know people who post 10 or 20 things a day on stories and maybe a pic here and there every couple of weeks otherwise.
Similarly, WhatsApp is SMS. SMS running through facebook but it's not very organized, either. My friend deleted WhatsApp, now we text via SMS and I see no difference. A group I was part of decided to use Telegram, so I just made a Telegram account, no friction whatsoever, there's no reason to feel like you're leaving something behind. People in Europe use it because mobile internet is way cheaper than paying for SMS since a text message via mobile internet is like a couple of bytes of traffic. Same with images. Group chat is nice. But it's all not very... connected.
It doesn't really make a profile, old messages are basically just an archive that nobody bothers to look through. I'm aware that facebook probably runs every machine learning algorithm ever invented through that data but from a user's perspective, it's way less of a "world", it's just one tool to share messages/pictures. It's not your life. Social networks aren't "just facebook" anymore and they're way less centralized that way.
It's been 8 years (the first iPad was released in 2010) and the platform has certainly proven itself not to be a fad.
Instagram looks like an actual joke on my iPad Pro 12".
Actually, most travel sites you use are probably owned by Expedia, then priceline.
Together, they own every single major web sites about travel.
It's also logical. I mean, what can you do when you are the market leader already.
They seem to have moved to more of a distributed social media system. That is, they don't seem to have a central place where they communicate with friends. They seem to move between texts, facetime, tumblr, instagram, phone calls (!), etc. in a fluid manner. Anything except for Facebook (which has a negative stigma these days). They don't seem to be tied down to any one platform anymore.
The nice thing about the other platforms isn't that they don't have "old people" on them. It's specifically that your parents and relatives won't even think to add you on, say, Snapchat.
Also note that the apps that teens mostly do interact with parents through now, consist mostly of group-chat apps like Messenger or WeChat, where there is an explicit separation of social contexts (the groups you're chatting with), such that you don't need to worry about your relatives seeing anything as long as you don't put it in your family group.
From my perspective, the very best action that I can take, in order to limit his vulnerability later on in life, is to just start educating him on how to act appropriately online. But I can only base that education on the view that I've built up of these gargantuan and ever-multiplying systems of manipulation, which leads back to my main worry: I know that there will come a time when I can no longer keep my view of these systems up-to-date, and by extension, help to keep my son educated about his and my own vulnerabilities to them. I find myself worrying a lot about his future these days...
Aah. Just like how we moved from text, the mall, AIM, Yahoo!, CokeMusic/Habbohotel, MySpace, and phone calls (!), etc. in a fluid manner.
everything changes, and yet nothing changes
I also hold a monthly gamedev meetup, which would be utterly impossible without Facebook. The attendance has grown from 5 to 30 people in a few months and is now helping jump start the game development scene in the country (not because of my meetup).
Despite this, I have a deep hatred towards the platform and can't stand how people around me get locked into feedback loops of endless scrolling. I uninstalled the app on my phone a year ago, kept messenger. Also, I haven't seen the news feed in more than 2 years, after installing a plugin that blocks it. The productivity gains were and still are immeasurable.
I see the platform as a versatile and useful tool to help connect with others and I hope that Facebook will try to improve it and remove some of its ethically questionable features, but it's still evil.
It's a necessary evil.
People make such a big deal out of how impossible their social lives would be without Facebook but never actually try it. I honestly don't get it.
I have an amusing anecdote about being the one friend without Facebook.
Someone told me about a birthday party- they told me where it was and what time to be there. They did not tell me that our group was not actually invited and our arrival would be a surprise.
The rest of the group was half an hour late. I was not. They all wanted to arrive together and were delayed, but no one filled me in on the new time.
And that's the story about how I awkwardly attended a party for 30min where I knew no one but the birthday woman and it was obvious to everyone that I was not actually invited.
All was well once my friends arrived. Still, what a nightmare that was.
So either I can be there and find out about them, or I can hope someone I know notices them and notifies me.
Both are terrible options.
That only works if they already know you. If you wanna start something new, it might benefit from having the outreach that facebook has.
Really all I want is a solid app that's only Facebook's event system and friend lists and nothing else.
But I can't see any growth-motivated company ever making that and just stopping there. I'd even pay for it, if I thought they wouldn't try to make more money after that. Maybe it would have to be a non-profit.
My co-founder and I are building a groups and events system (like Meetup) that has a friends list and things like instant messaging. Our business model at the moment is freemium with ads and a limited organizer experience (you can create small groups/events) or we are offering a small subscription ~$5/mo. The subscription model removes the ads, unlocks all organizer features, and removes all limits on organizing groups/events such as being able to create a hierarchical organization with the tooling to manage it.
We are currently in YC Startup School as Geddy at geddy.io and we plan to launch soon.
I believe you still need a FB account.
1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone;
2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone;
3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone;
4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally
5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.
It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account. But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?"
# ~/unfuckfacbook.sh
#!/bin/bash
sed -i '' s/'^127.0.0.1 facebook.com'/'#127.0.0.1 facebook.com'/ /etc/hosts
sed -i '' s/'^127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com'/'#127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com'/ /etc/hosts
sed -i '' s/'^127.0.0.1 m.facebook.com'/'#127.0.0.1 m.facebook.com'/ /etc/hosts
sleep 30
say "Hey asshole, get off Facebook"
sleep 30
~/fuckfacbook.sh
It helpped for a while but at some point I had to just commit to not checking it. I have some legitimate business I have to do on there sometimes (I'm a musician and I need more side-guy gigs), so I post updates from insta (which is less addicting to me) or if I open it I commit to not scrolling and browsing but just checking alerts.
It's so fcking creepy though... I mean, I'm legitimately an alcoholic but I can (when I want to, which is usually all the time these days) at least not _start_ drinking... but if I stopped drinking for a couple of days and the bottle of scotch in my cabinet sent me an email trying to get me to drink, I'd have to pour it out.
Step 5 is tricky to accomplish as I need facebook to login to a bunch of websites.
I'm not saying FB is good, I just say that this fight is already lost, delete FB account or not.
But Facebook did it to themselves. I just opened up Facebook on desktop. Above the fold, I have "People you may know" whom I've never heard of. Nothing above the fold is very relevant. Some of my horse-owning friends have posted some things, but I have to dig to find them.
Two years ago, I was shown what my friends were doing. Now Facebook puts all the crap up top. Facebook's ideas of what to show me are strange. Burning Man infrastructure groups? A double-wide house trailer in Fremont? Huh? No wonder people are fed up.
They're down at Myspace level now.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/16/17022162/facebook-two-fac...
I'm also suspicious on principle of statistics which suggest but don't actually show what they're trying to measure. If nearly half of young adults have really stopped using Facebook, surely there's a more direct statistic showing it.
Now, we don't know how big of an effect perceived popularity has on other self-reports of past actions, but we have plenty of reason to believe it plays a significant role.
People, the concept of "revealed preferences" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference) is highly relevant here. What people say in surveys is often garbage, for all kinds of reasons, social desirability bias among them. This article is useless compared to actual measurements of people's phone and time.
It also tells them that the App apparently dosn't give value to users and something has to change on their side (whatever "something" might be, might be reputation or features or overall experience or ...)
My usage is way down and I barely check it, maybe once in a couple weeks, but after I check it I get a sudden uptick in notifications. Mostly "friend suggestions". There's nothing new about them. In many cases they've suggested them before. But it seems like they just want to slide into my notifications and keep that red badge lit up and just trigger me to open up the app. But not too much.. after I ignore it for awhile they die down, probably so I don't uninstall entirely. Then the cycle repeats a couple weeks later.
And I could be wrong but it looks like they removed the ability to turn off friend suggestion notifications. You can turn just about everything else off but not that one. Hmmmm...
For example, they could have created workspaces for people to create teams and collaborate and build things, manage communities and projects have real facility to build create and run organizations with Facebook being the profile glue and communications channel.
They have had less-than-mediocre efforts on all of these. And their system stinks of every kind of digital fraud you can imagine from inflated and fake metrics across the board, to data breaches and leaks, a UX that is labrynthian etc.
With the money And resources they have, why don't we see the fruits of Vision that could be available to them.
Their cell phone was a flop, their engagements feel cancerous and they are basically a new-money-elite building moats around old-boy-exclusionist thinking.
If I could have multiple views of my identity depending on the context that would be pretty neat and more analogous to the way people present themselves in the real world. Huge missed opportunity on Facebook's part and now it's way too late.
My other hot take is that the interaction design of Facebook is just much too heavy when compared to Instagram or Tinder. If I go on Facebook it's guaranteed 15 minutes of time just to kind-of get into the flow and see a bunch of friends' statuses and maybe click on their profiles. Instagram on the other hand you can just pick up and scroll through pictures for a few minutes and then put down — the interaction feels lighter weight and less burdensome.
For example, Facebook messenger should be the best way to communicate with someone, yet it's surpassed by even one of their own subdivisions (Whatsapp).
I'm curious how much of an effect that rumor had on this finding.
Then we watched a random TV show on Netflix. During the show, two characters discussed a very specific medical method of improving their chances of bearing a child. Literally minutes later, she was getting ads for this type of conception therapy. We are both past child bearing age and have not discussed it in probably 20 years. We had never even heard of the specific type of process. We had never looked it up or read anything about it. It definitely came from something listening to our household, but we don't know what. It was way too specific to have been random chance.
We don't fall into the demographics for such an ad in any way. We have Apple devices with Siri, but that seems unlikely given their privacy policies. We don't have any Amazon or Google home devices (or any other types of their devices). She's on FB, and I'm not, so we think it was probably either her laptop or phone listening. She's had mic access on her phone turned off for Facebook and no other apps were running, but these apps have a way of finding their way around such permissions.
I suspect they have much more information than what we tell them, and I mean raw data, not what's derived from collaborative filtering or other techniques. I wonder if our ISPs, streaming services, banks, visa, etc, share data. Maybe it's just the trackers all over the internet.
Getting ads for a specific product the day after discussing it in person could be luck... or not.
The fact of the matter is, the company's modus operandi is to collect as much information from you as possible. Their business model is spyware.
Whether the application currently records conversations or not is almost immaterial. You know that if they could get away with it, they would.
The app has enough permissions that when coupled with Facebook's data analytics it amounts to a similar invasion of privacy.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
They were slurping up text massages and collecting call logs, IIRC. So the rumor isn't too far from the truth.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/faceb...
I have troubles convincing myself it’s not true because it just happens on an almost bi-daily basis - it’s too accurate and it regularly involves things either my friends or I have definitively not typed but only spoken about.
It’s creepy as hell.
Later on in the evening my brother had ads for soldering iron in the Facebook app.
So it totally can be a coincidence, or not.
Not only that, but I've actually experienced first-hand, and witnessed many of my friends experiencing depression and anxiety from the constant scrolling. The 'desire to be seen or heard' factor really plays in to an overall sense of toxicity and negativity that there have actually been a number of psychology studies on.
Overall, I find, contrary to say, HN, which I still spend too much time on (but mostly when I'm bored at work, ha), there is no bar of quality on Facebook. It's a cesspool of humanity's worst sides, especially if you consider the privacy violations of the medium itself.
In fact, it's actually becoming a faster and faster race to the bottom. (Can we all remember this year of 2018 started with 'Tide Pods'?)
Even Reddit has some quality control.
All that said, I expect FB (the social media network, not the company) to peak and shrink, at some point. It just seems more like something that exists for a certain period of time.
Imagine a movie set in 2034. Do FB notifications ping the characters' AR lenses?
If you think of long-lived tech companies, they tend to have a very deep moat (oracle, msft, intel) and/or terrific execution ability (amazon, google, foxconn, apple). Facebook hasn't shown execution ability like that yet. Their moat isn't that deep.
Probably true in the US. But FB is still growing overseas.
> Facebook hasn't shown execution ability like that yet. Their moat isn't that deep.
Their moat is pretty deep. They own 4 out of the top 6 social media platforms.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
All their properties are growing worldwide (even FB). And the fastest growing platform in the US for young adults is instagram. Guess who owns instagram?
Also, it's not necessarily just Facebook HN likes to shit all over. From what I've seen it's Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple. They all kind of get their time in HN's 'hate spotlight'. (Oh, and it's not as big of a company, but Magic Leap is up there, too. :P )
There is, if anything, a bias towards favouring Apple products, but it's not nearly as fanboy/fangirl-ish as it is on the rest of the 'net. It seems at least HN'ers, even those who favour Apple, are, for the most part, also willing to admit it's bad practices.
And that's a pretty strong claim that Facebook is the internet for a lot of folks. What about YouTube? Google? Wikipedia? (Especially for students?) :/
Facebook never clicked for me. I deleted it, went back, still couldn't make it work, deleted it again, started a new account and was banned. Whatevs. It seems to not click for a lot of folks inclined to hang in spaces like HN. Some folks who never really got it and perhaps felt left out that "everyone else was on it" may take glee in watching it fall and may feel some sense of vindication or the like.
There are truly terrible things being fostered by Facebook in some parts of the world, such as some developing countries. If you care about human rights, it's not unreasonable to feel like Facebook is a pox upon humanity and deserves to die.
(Complete 180 from the last point:) Facebook is a seemingly trivial thing. Taking glee in watching it burn can be good distraction from worse things happening in the world.
Finding a "bad guy" to blame things on helps a lot of people feel better about their own life choices, whether that is reasonable or not.
Humans just aren't monoliths. There is no single uniform answer here. There are around 5 million visitors a month to HN and however many of them are happy to see FB go down, each will have myriad different reasons for feeling that way.
Isn't that hyperbole?
Or rather, that might be a demographic they never lose. Might explain why they were big on "internet.org". Anyone with options seems to have found better places to hang out (shocking - even IRL).
Maybe the better prediction is quitting FB is like quitting the soi-dissant "social" network thing. Is that a bad thing?
Facebook's daily user numbers havn't dropped at all. So either they're moving to IG, or people say a lot of things in surveys.
EDIT: Meant to specify, the numbers in this comment are US only.
My feeling is that if(or when) things go bad for facebook it will happen rather precipitously. Like a bubble popping. i.e. Like the real estate implosion of 2008.
Long gone was the interesting content in my feed, I only had indoctrinated contacts posting either poor quality content or misinformation.
I think facebook lost me when they stopped the chronological feed, which is also why I closed my Instagram account.
Now also Strava is making their feed sorted by some magic with no option to make it chronological :( I can't quite understand this trend.
Then the client started spying on me, so I switched to the web mobile version. Then they removed chat from that. Oh well, I can text people instead.
I'm not playing their game, behaving like they want me too, they want mindless drones, f' them.
I'm very close to deleting my account, but my daughter posts the grandkids pics, so I'm stuck for now.
They want a race to the bottom, they are doing a good job with their damn authoritarian forceful methods. Already filtering what I view, its really worthless now.
But now that I think about it, it's obviously like any addiction. An alcoholic can't just have a beer every once in a while, and I'm sure it's just as unhealthy for a lot of people to have Facebook on their phones. So, this sounds like a healthy trend.
Relavent: https://www.davidparkinson.com/beware-consumption-the-silent...
Also relavent: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat... [I use this and swear by it... destroys your news feed when you do login to facebook]
People just aren't designed for this kind of supersaturated communication, the overwhelming need to share and show-off against the whole world, the complete lack of privacy, and the fact that nothing is ever forgotten. It's definitely not healthy, and I think the worst is still to come.
There are a ton of groups with website exchanges. It's also great to find virtual assistants and content writers. We also have a group for our city where things like cars, couches and other stuff gets posted. The same for jobs, models and other topics. I can hire a bunch of people, buy websites and trade stuff just using Facebook.
I'm 20y/o, so I guess I'm part of the relevant user group. All I can say is that it's still very useful. I never comment or like anything, though. I'm basically using it for business.
I don't think that I would use Instagram or Snapchat in the same way. I recently bought an Instagram account with 10k followers to get into this stuff, but I don't see the value of it (yet). It feels shallower than Facebook (which is pretty hard).
edit: When I think about it - Facebook gives me easy access to a lot of people and services. Does somebody know any alternatives (hiring people, trading stuff and websites, local groups) when Facebook's user base leaves the platform?
edit2: Reading through the comments - am I the only one who uses Facebook as a means to do business? I thought that more people on HN would use it for that.
What is the brass tacks right way forward for us to create or embrace a system to define ethical behavior on the web, and to expose unethical behavior. What about enforcement? How can this be done in a way that ensures freedom? Or is it impossible to police the web?
I see a few ways forward:
- Status quo, private companies making individual actions internally, driven with a fiduciary responsibility for profit.
- A benefit corp offering some auditing, credibility, and feedback layer on the web as a paid/freely available service.
- Public firewall-as-a-service sort of wiki + LD API that gives users the ability to control their own subscriptions to information filters, flags, and warnings.
- Global internet police authority.
Full Disclosure: that last one was bait.
I think Facebook's decline is great. For too long it has sucked all the life out of the social networking space. Perhaps now we can see some real competition and innovation.
Overall, 26 percent have deleted the app, while 42 percent have taken a break of several weeks or more.
Something's off. I don't know. How many people are we talking about? 80 millions? In the US alone? Really? We need more source here.
'A new survey finds XX% of users aged _ to _ have rode their bike to work instead of driving this past year' does not mean that people are giving up their car.
Ever since Facebook unnecessarily divided their application into two, (Facebook and Messenger), I've pretty much sworn off it. But there's one simple reason, beyond the constant privacy concerns, that no single person should consider putting this app on their iOS device.
Facebook's iOS app currently sits at a staggering, literally almost unbelievable 316.7MB! Yes, 316.7MB. Almost a third of a GB. What. The. Hell.
Messenger is 139.4MB! What on earth QA process do these guys have where they consider this to be even remotely okay on non-storage-expandable devices, especially in the days where we still had 8GB iPhones?
On an 8GB iPhone, (which I understand are not in a lot of use at the moment, but still), which ends up having closer to 6-7GB of space, that would mean that Facebook + Messenger alone would take up 1/10th-1/14th of your space.
I miss the days when there was a 50MB-100MB limit on applications being downloaded over 3G/LTE/cellular. This was fantastic. Every company I worked for demanded I was able to trim the application size down to under 100MB so that there was a fair chance for everyone to be able to download it.
Many of my friends are still on 16GB iPhones and the size alone is the first reason they remove the app.
The second reason being the functionality offered does not match the app size.
The third reason being the general public is starting to visibly see the lack of value Facebook adds in our lives, and even the toxicity of the addiction of constantly scrolling.
You can do almost everything you can do within the Facebook app simply by logging into Facebook on your browser.
Protip (source: I am an iOS developer of 8+ years): If you'd like people to use and keep your application on their device that usually has extremely limited storage capacity, or at least non-expandable storage, you'd better ensure the application actually offers a significant value over that of not having the application installed.
Messenger's video chat, et cetera, makes it worthwhile. But it's also three times as small as the Facebook app. So, while Facebook's application provides almost no value at more than 300MB, Messenger is able to pack infinitely more functionality into 1/3rd the size.
What the hell are these guys doing wrong? Where's QA?
I don't think that bodes well for Facebook, that's not the demographic anyone wants as far as I know. Like Snapchat after Kylie Jenner's tweet, this survey is the canary in the coal mine telling investors to get out.
On the contrary, that's the demographic everyone wants, older people have more money to spend. Of course, having only this demographic is not great long term, since the younger generations lead the way to adoption. But short term they'll continue to make money.
Overall, 26 percent of survey respondents say they deleted the app"
I think the second sentence is more accurate, but of course, it's not as provocative as 44%.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
I will say that for myself, I still have Facebook on my phone but I do everything I can to use it as rarely as possible.
I should also add the caveat that because of the "public" nature of my former job (and to a certain extent, my current job), I have been unable to use Facebook like a normal person since late 2007 and so my investment in it as an actual social network is far less than might be the case for others, who like me, joined in college, and then saw it as a catalyst for lots of other things.
So, it's quiet, and almost unnecessary, and easy enough to live with by checking in periodically. Mostly people hiking and running on weekends, or posting a thing about their kid, get a bit of social love...
But really, among me and my 40somethings, almost no actual activity. And so, if the 20somethings don't use it a whole lot either, what's Facebooks future?
I replaced it with a shortcut on the home screen to the mobile version of the Facebook website in Safari. I use the AdGuard plugin on iOS to remove the primary reason I was getting sick of the Facebook iOS app - the FORCED "Stories" banner at the top of the news feed.
Not only is the newsfeed much lighter and cleaner on mobile.. but ads are blocked, notifications are "opt-in" (the shortcut on the home screen doesn't show notifications), analytics are probably less detailed, and I don't have to deal with that shitty stories bar taking up the first quarter of my screen every time I open the Newsfeed.
I think most commenters here missing the major point against Facebook for many young users: being forced to use your real identity (and only one account).
As already mentioned, most young people have switched to Instagram and find Facebook embarrassing.
That made sense.
What I was surprised to learn was that almost everyone has more than one account - often three or more.
This is actually the killer hidden feature of Instagram - easy to manage privacy.
So one has a main account, possibly public, that is OK for parents and strangers to see.
Then they have a private account for friends.
Then possibly a third account for close friends. This is one that nudes/sexual/illegal content is posted on.
Make a minimalistic, lightweight, not gobbling RAM or storage app, and I'd probably use it again.
Sure FB is morphing, but it’s not clear that Facebook Corp hasn’t set itself up a tidy bulwark against the decline of Facebook.com in NA & Europe. They might have. If they have, then they’ll continue to make money just fine.
FB have a lot of hope riding on Marketplaces, but it's viability is entirely down to FB being so ubiquitous.
Product suggestion (graph is still their core business, obviously), and being able cross promote their products to a captive audience. They basically can't pivot because everything they want to do relies on finding ways to leverage the data they generate.
Can't figure out where they're heading in the longer term tbh. Would fully expect IG Marketplaces to follow in the next couple of years.
It can’t be good for their bottom line that I don’t see many ads or any sponsored pages.
Was this already somehow priced in, or what?
So now younger people mainly use Instagram? Or what?
Then Facebook stopped showing me those posts in the feed, and my "engagement" went rapidly to 0. I suspect they found out that people seeing only opinions similar to theirs spend more time in-app...
Every once in a while I get an alert about a birthday for someone I met once when I was in college 20 years ago... one day I'll figure out how to shut all of that off it's really annoying.
This story is almost two months old. And I believe it's been on HN before.
After deleting Facebook, I have published a paper on Arxiv, Beat Georgia Tech at a robotics competition, and improved my GPA.
Nowadays, I spend my time on Reddit, Twitter, and HN for ML Papers/Software Updates and Launches and stuff like that.
26% of 3400 respondents to a survey in May had deleted the app from their phones at some point in the preceding year.
The 26% number is adults, total. The 44% number is people 18-29.
Methodology is very shakey for a sample of young people. Results are also just weird—I’m a young person (24) and very few people I know have deleted FB.
Also, If I release a new open source project or a new book, I like to use FB, Twitter, and G+ to announce it.
Additionally, we're still vulnerable to a lot of the same attacks that impacted us in the 2016 election.
These networks still hold your private connection graph, know what you're reading, can target you precisely with ads, etc.
I'm building an app named Polar which is an offline-first document management system for people that read large numbers of PDFs and technical documentation.
I want to integrate social support and while I will probably support posting to Twitter + Facebook for people who want to I also want to work on building out some sort of distributed IPFS and / or filecoin style storage and collaboration.
Unfortunately, I think the space is still a big early for this. Another approach could be to just build a security protocol using group encryption. You could see your public data by others and anything that was shared socially but NO ONE ELSE could see your social data.
Right now the problem is that Facebook can see ALL your private and semi-private data and that's INSANELY dangerous.
IPFS/Filecoin/SIA would be a neat way to go. I would urge you to look into mastodon as well as twitter and fb. It is growing, its federated, and generally more in line with our privacy beliefs.
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So instead, I just leave it installed but with all push-notifications, location-usage, etc. disabled, and then kill it right after I'm done using it to log into something.
Is it possible some sort of B-Corp or Foundation could run an ethical social networking product that put respecting and serving its users as a first principle?
Could an offering out-compete today's products and gain significant user-ship?
Is a post-Facebook world better?
And humanity can return to normal human communication without a count influencing every behaviour and thought.
They can still use the counts behind the scenes to surface popular content and whatever else they do with it.
Only when the alternative follows some of the principles you stated.
Edit: Oh, also, if it means we see less zombie-scrolling.
2. Who needs the app anyway? Facebook apps had always been ridiculous - outrageously heavyweight, coming with extra surveillance built-in and hardly doing anything the website can't.
Speaking of focus, one thing I want to focus less on is the continual security/privacy nightmare of using Facebook to post content. Either I want to know 100% it's public (Twitter/Instagram/Blogs) or it's essentially[0] 100% private and hopefully short lived (private insta, snapchat).
[0]: Obviously not PGP private and etc. But from a practical perspective. On Facebook you can do graph searches to identify someone based on a few pieces of data. On snapchat you have to already know their username and be added to see anything on their story or in messages to you. etc.
Too much power.
Also - Instagram is exploding and they are tightly intertwined.
All of the younger adults I know left FB for Snap and the left Snap for instagram. Even many of my friends have limited FB now and mainly use instagram.
When they made their super aggressive push for the messenger app and disabled message support on the regular FB app, there was no reason to keep the FB app around. I never installed the FB messenger app though, it required access to just about everything on my phone so I never dared installing it.
Then they disabled the messenger feature on the mobile version of their website, and everybody stopped using FB messenger altogether. Problem solved.
That feels like a fairly small sample. Then from that to look at some subset (i.e., 18 to 29) feels even more suspect.
Also, best I can tell, this survey was self-reported.
This is worthy of at-the-bar discussion, but let's not take it too seriously otherwise; at least not until the data is better.
It is a super small sample, they do not even allude to what percentage of those votes were in the 18 - 29 category.
The provided pdf from the original Pewresearch article seems pretty bare -> http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/1/201...
I see this happen quite regularly on Hacker News, a bit strange for a rational/fact based community to behave.
Tweeted the researched -> https://twitter.com/ajaxdavis/status/1057046359218388992
I found that I didn't miss it in the least.
6 years ago it was the place to be...now? I hang mostly on Twitter.
I tried to have discussions but no one wants to discuss there views.
People are agreeing or are extremely against it
I still use it on my desktop.
Honestly, at some point I realized it was making me miserable. Why would I want to keep doing something that makes me unhappy? So I stopped.
Yet the total user base in the US is something over 100mm - how would you possibly consider 3,400 people be indicative of an entire demographic?
Edit: Yes, I'm aware of statistics and how they work ^_^ It is more that I'm skeptical of the conclusion being based of a sample truly diverse enough to be confident in
A reason I had: I will not support company that is having so much questionable practices as google has.
Tasks, done in two years:
- flashed android with Lineage + Microg (now it is much easyer - https://lineage.microg.org/ - no more google spyware on my phone
- redirected all my web traffic (all devices) trough ssh tunnel to home server where http://www.squid-cache.org/ is cleaning my web traffic from trackers, including caching cdns forever
- set up my own "cloud" (https://nextcloud.com/) to sync files, contacts and calendars
- set up my own mail server (postfix, dovecot)
- deleted my google account(s)
- banned all known google domains using hosts files on all devices
- removed google chrome from all devices
- stopped using google, replaced by duckduckgo - I no longer get so many results, but they are relevant instead of paid ads.
I am googless. And seeing sharp ;)
The hardest thing was to stop typing google into address bar. And stopped using "I googled...".
Everything else was simple.