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Comment by sdan | Hacker News Reader

Looking at their growth, it seems they have enveloped the Social Graph and have the most users, incentivizing more users to join and be social with their friends. As long as Facebook's algorithm spews out some posts from friends and a lot of recommended/ads, users I believe will still stay on the platform.

Overtime, people (including myself) have the FOMO and are in a way forced to be addicted to FB.

So as long as FB triggers the small dopamine rush people have when they see they have 10 notifications everytime they're on the site, a majority of people will stay on, regardless of the news.

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I hold the opposite view, Facebook itself has lost social momemtum to Instagram, Twitter and others, and this is eroding their grip on the high value parts of the social graph.

Instagram seems to be coming up a lot as a place people are leaving to from facebook. It’s owned by facebook. I wouldn’t say that is eroding facebook’s access to social data as much as it may seem.

You know Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp, right?

I know, but the point is social networking sites are ephemeral, owning the social graph of older social groups does not ensure dominance of younger social groups.

It does if they they have the same backend. For example, Facebook and Instagram each use your network from the other to for friend suggestions.

But Instagram is FB too so they are not losing anything. People link their accounts and friends and the social graph continues. They push FB connections into IG pretty hard these days.

The notifications have the opposite effect on me. Facebook (recently?) tried to put a "marketplace" button on their iPad app, and the darned thing would show an unread badge every time you opened the app.

After being thoroughly annoyed for a few weeks, i decided to do something about it, and found a way to disable it, only to discover Facebook replaced the "marketplace" icon with a "videos" icon, which now displays it's needy notification icon.

So i took the next logical step, which was to remove the thing from all my devices.

According to Apple's screen time, i now spend <5 minutes a day on Facebook, which is mostly spent checking notifications from friends/family, and _quickly_ scrolling down my news feed scanning for anything interesting.

I've never used Instagram, and i try my best to educate my friends to use iMessage or Signal for messaging instead of Messenger/Whatsapp, but so far i don't have much luck :)

100% agree. It is like telling drugs are bad to crack addicts.

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