U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says | Hacker News Reader

U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says

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1,293 pointsrmason595 comments

By far the biggest factor that had me stopping checking Facebook, and indeed LinkedIn, is number of utterly fictitious notifications they generate. There was a time a few years back when that red dot made me drop everything to check FB, but these days it’ll be some completely bullshit message they’ve made a notification out of. Feels like they got greedy for my attention and killed the golden goose there. I check it about once a day now, and in the browser not the app. If the notifications were still meaningful I’d probably still have the app and all the metadata that sent them.

Exactly. I removed FB from my mobile devices for just this reason.

(cries in Samsung)

You can use adb to uninstall apps like FB and Chrome in a few minutes, with your phone connected to a computer

https://www.xda-developers.com/uninstall-carrier-oem-bloatwa...

> This works because applications truly aren’t being fully uninstalled from the device, they are just being uninstalled for the current user

If it's not running and doesn't send you notifications or demand updates, do you care all that much?

In many ways no. NB the same can be achieved by disabling the App in settings?

There is the principal of who owns the device... But that is a slightly different topic.

Disable it in app settings, that effectively uninstalls it.

I used this method on my friends'/family phones where I can't just flash an AOSP-based ROM. That will change now that I found out about debloating through ADB.

Disabling is better than nothing, but it's no substitute for actually uninstalling.

It really feels like some companies like Facebook are flying blind by using A/B testing everywhere and ignoring the long term effects of the changes they do.

Exactly this. Death by a thousand paper cuts, is another.

Or Hacker News is wrong.

You are maybe being downvoted as you stated it so bluntly, but I'm not sure your point is without merit.

The HN audience do not necessarily represent the mean/mode user, and Facebook are in a numbers game really.

I agree with most of the sentiment above - I wish I could filter posts that are just attachments, 3rd party junk, and tune the algorithm to show me posts from a core set of friends, but I also recognise I don't use FB like a most people, I imagine.

Isn't A/B testing pretty much going to behave like a steepest ascent hill climbing? At each micro decision point you take what looks like the 'best' option but that means you can get stuck in local maxima?

Correct.

This is interesting but I don't think I fully understand. Do you mind dumbing it down for me?

Global vs local maximum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxima_and_minima

Related: what's the best for one part of the system, may not be the best for the entire system.

Typical example: you arrive at a crossroads A where both ways work for you, so you choose the one with less traffic. Then at crossroad B you do the same, and then at C, and finally you arrive at destination D.

However, it turns out the heavy traffic at the other A branch was just for a few miles and then it was actually empty after that --- you took optimum local decisions at each step but since you weren't able to look at the big picture, you didn't actually choose the globally optimal route.

As others have pointed, this is related to the mathematical concepts of local and global maxima: sometimes your optimization algorithm happily stops when it finds a local maximum, ignoring the much better global maximum because it didn't actually traversed the whole search domain.

I think the bigger problem is that A/B only measures certain things and following it blindly can have you descending in important ways that are hard to measure.

Yes, but it gets more complicated because there's a time factor too.

If you're A/B testing each change for 2 weeks, but the negative impacts of it only happen after a few months (like what the parent post mentioned [1]), then while you're in a local maxima right now, it'll slowly sink, along with all your neighborhood of choices.

You can think of it as a function that returns the current value and another function that you have to use for the next time step. Sorta like f(a, b, c, ...) = (y, \a_2 b_2 c_2 ... -> ...). Steepest ascent hill climbing doesn't work well for finding good long term local maxima, since you don't know how long it takes until it stabilizes (or if it ever does). The best you can do is guess it'll stabilize in X amount of time, but if X is too small, you might end up stuck in a really bad local maxima.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19325816

I wonder if they even do their A/B testing right. In my experience (none at facebook) accidental p-hacking is rampant in the tech industry, with trials being cut short or prolonged by the tester who's staring at a graph of the results in real time.

If you have a change that improves your metric initially but damages it in the longer term, and your A/B test only detects the short initial effect, you can execute your A/B test perfectly and still get the wrong result.

Interestingly that's exactly how algorithms make things go viral. They pick up on things that get a quick reaction with complete disregard for what happens in the long term. Jaron Lanier explains this in his talks [0].

So features on social media are decided based on short term gains and posts on social media are promoted like that too. It's like an entire industry forgot their parents warnings about thinking about the future.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc_Jq42Og7Q

They probably A/B tested it for a fortnight, found out that it worked, and never considered folks would catch on. It drove me away checking FB, too.

Dear God I installed LinkedIn a couple months back and their endless bs notifications made me realize that I don't need it. It doesn't give me anything. Why is it sending me 2-3 notifications a day when I have 5 friends who's profiles arent even actively used?

If it did something useful, like find me clients for the work I do then sure - I'll give them my attention. He'll, I'll pay good money for that! But I don't give a flying fuck thaty friend just graduated or a colleague got some award. I don't give a fuck and I'm sure as fuck not gonna play this game where we all pretend theirs any value in these things that email didn't accomplish 10 years ago.

Investors want to see engagement metric graphs go up. Execs tie compensation to getting that metric up. Product delivers by mandating more alerts. Payday.

When cheating is allowed to win, cheaters will win

And real people stop playing.

That is: LinkedIn users will stop being users.

In the short term. Long term probably not a great idea.

LinkedIn sends me notifications that say "you might have new notifications" and then when I click it out turns it I'm all up to date. Not sure if this is on purpose or just really bad qa.

> when I click it out turns it I'm all up to date. Not sure if this is on purpose ...

Read the first three words (my highlight) and there's the answer

Lol yeah, that's them not even bothering making up an excuse to pester you. They're literally just trying to snag a hook on you for nothing.

I also do not understand the Linked-in notifications at all. They send an e-mail like '5 job changes' which I actually find interesting to learn about.

But when I click any of the links this information is nowhere to be found. So after a while I don't click on the links anymore and my engagement goes down.

Seems like a lot of the decisions are focused based on quick-wins engagement instead of an long lasting useful experience for the user?

For me the worst part about LinkedIn is the aggressive redirect to appstore on mobile when clicking on mail links. This is borderline malware behaviour.

For me this aggression is good, it makes me avoid that site, spending maybe a minute every 2 months on that wasteland of salarymen and networkers.

I never installed the app but as your parent comment said, it's so spammy, I had that fear since they do a lot of mail spam. If they made their mobile website usable, they would've had more than a minute of my engagement...

It definitely looks like the effects of Goodhart's law [0] operating internally, somewhere their KPIs are measuring just the clicks, views or e-mails sent instead of the spirit of those actions (engaging users, turning passive users into active ones, etc.).

LinkedIn turned into a place where I go to answer some messages that could be good opportunities in the future, and only when I don't feel overwhelmed by recruiters' contacts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

LinkedIn is just a list of my previous jobs that allows recruiters to spam me with job offers. Completely disabled the notifications and was considering deleting the whole thing

LinkedIn is completely awful in every possible way, but I'm a freelancer and a lot of clients seem to find me there, so it's vital for my work.

I don't use it for anything other than to have my CV there and messaging with recruiters, though.

Don't forget the constant shitposting by your friends and (ex)coworkers to make themselves appear very smart and hardworking. I've always felt LinkedIn is 300% the cancer that Facebook is because of all the virtue-signalling, pompous fakery and outright lying that occurs there.

It's the digital, more obnoxious version of a kid screaming ME ME ME at the sports team draft for adults. All those bullshitters with too much time on their hands (ironically at work) begging for the attention of recruiters and prospective employers to hire them.

I’m predisposed to expect shameless self promotion in so many business contexts that it seems “acceptable if annoying” to find on a business networking site. I’m not usually there to look at the “feed” anyway.

I have made hundreds of thousands of dollars through people I have met on LinkedIn, and I continue to make money through them. In business, networking is key. It’s not going to find you clients on its own, but it definitely aids in that process if you use it to network or prospect.

Personally it's never seemed like a valuable resource in that regard to me. How do you go about this and how much success do you see?

It’s mostly passive, to be honest. About 20-30 recruiters reach out daily, so I typically tell them that I’m only willing to work remote contracts (if I’m not looking for something full time) with a bill rate of $125 / hour or more. It only takes one out of a hundred to come back with an opportunity that brings in 20-25k per month for six plus months that I can do in addition to my day job to make the effort well worth it.

There’s so much work out there - let recruiters find it for you and be super selective if you already have income. After a while, repeat business will allow you to raise your bill rates. A motivated engineer willing to put in the work can pull in $300-$400k per year, even in middle America, without trying to source work for themselves.

out of curiosity, what work do you do remotely?

Nowadays, mostly Elixir, Ruby, and React development.

Thanks a lot for the tip. Guess I'll have to try it that way and see.

Once it text messaged and emailed every contact in my phone telling them to join. It was like 2 unintentional clicks from the home screen.

This is the same for me. I feel obligated to maintain an account and check it once in a while since I have a lot of family and friends who aren't local who do still use it (though most have transitioned from using it as a way to update people on their lives to using it as a place to effortlessly repost memes), but I'm incredibly put off by Facebook's increasingly irrelevant and desperate attempts to get my attention.

Notifications used to be things I cared about, these days they are things like "This person knows a person who is the mother of a person on your friends list. Add Friend?"

I just block the notifications now and log into Facebook every couple of days in a browser and quick scan the feed.

Even more annoying is the same thing that they do with email notifications. They seem to keep inventing new "categories" of notifications all the time that I haven't yet opted out of - basically because I seem to be only able to opt out of just that specific category that they just sent me an email about, when I click on the "don't want to receive any more of these mails" link below the message.

And every time, they gladly acknowledge that I will not receive any more messages of that kind.

"Okay, you won't get any more mails about new messages from friends. Okay, you won't get any more mails about stuff your friends liked. Okay, you won't get any more mails about stuff some other random people liked. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new stuff posted in groups you joined. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new stuff posted in groups you did not join, but we think you might be interested in. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new photos posted by your friends. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new photos of cats posted on Facebook. Okay, you won't get any more mails about news articles with dogs in the title. Okay, you won't get any more mails about postings your friends liked that complain about the weather and were written by women of age 35-40."

Okay, admittedly the last three were exagerrated, but all the categories before have been actual "notification categories" that I successfully opted out of, before I put a generic Facebook email filter in my mailbox, because apparently nothing else is able to stop their overly-specific-category-generation-engine from spewing out new categories to keep me busy opting out of.

I have a seperate facebook@ mail address and I simply never check it. Did so before switching hosters last year and saw that about 8k mails had piled up since 2011. Crazy folks.

I wonder if you can still post to Facebook by email. Having this automatically loop would make me happy.

I don’t have an account so can’t check and the instructions for doing it all seem dated.

Seems like that is discontinued: https://www.lifewire.com/post-updates-and-upload-photos-by-e...

Never knew that was an option, but shutting it down just seems logical when you see the aggressive lock-in they are doing.

> I wonder if you can still post to Facebook by email. Having this automatically loop would make me happy.

Nope, and you can't reply to messages either (you used to). It's actually so bad that they don't even show you the message content in the email notifications, to better lure you back to their site.

Whatever engineer who worked to implementing those regressions was being an asshole.

It's the same for LinkedIn and it really sucks.

This is also how I do it and one of the reasons I encourage people to own their own domain and email (among other reasons). I have used dreamhost since 2007 but I am really not happy about their recent move to a non-foss webmail. (to atmail from squirrel) Besides that though they are pretty awesome.

So any service that feels slightly abusive gets its own email like that, and then ignored usually.

after about 3 or 4 iterations of me reviewing my email setting, I got seriously fed up and I've gone for the nuclear option: all my facebook emails are marked as spam and binned.

I opted out of all emails altogether - I only check my notifications once in a while. I've never missed anything of value.

Then why do you still check it?

I’m in the same boat as the GP: no emails allowed, notifications disabled. I also go back to check in the app about a couple times per week (and I’ve never missed anything of value, either). I guess it’s the residual concession to a very strong and deeply engrained habit, combined with the fact that there are some people I don’t have any other line of communication to/from, so it makes sense to maintain the toehold on the platform.

I managed to get the emails under control (IIRC, there are only about two or three dozen different types you have to individually opt of, and they haven't been aggressive about adding new ones to that list), so I never have to check the app. The only think I want a notifications for are event invites, and that's pretty much what I have.

There is some useful content and updates in the groups I am a member of.

To avoid missing anything of value!

> I've never missed anything of value.

How can you be sure of that if you didn't see it?

It's still there when you check it once in a while, just you don't need to be distracted by it constantly. I also have turned off notifications for all social media and email. I feel happier and embrace having peace being okay with maybe missing out on something.

I tried setting up email filters based on subject and keywords, I currently have around 15-20 but it's a futile attempt, they keep changing everything, they've even changed the language. It really feels like I'm harassed by a beggar at this point.

I filter messages that contain the Unsubscribe word.

Omg...so simple...so brilliant.

Wow this is perfect! It wouldn't work well for my work email where I need tk keep track of emails from service providers etc, but this is perfect for personal emails. Thanks :)

I've been auto-deleting emails from * @facebook * for 8 years. Never fails.

Fortunately google have helped me deal with facebook by dumping all their emails into a "social" tab which I rarely bother to look at.

Too bad Google Inbox has only a couple weeks left till it's retired. :(

This sounds like a stupid question, but it's a consequence of Google using a ridiculous product name: how do I tell if I'm using Inbox?

Inbox.google.com - they also have separate apps

Right. In that case I'm not and never have been using Inbox, but I still got the separated lowercase-i-inbox from https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox

It’s completely absurd.

I’m not sure why this company is still allowed to send mail. Why can’t their mail servers be blacklisted?

There's nothing preventing you from setting up your own blacklist/filter. OTOH, most people don't care about this, and would be outraged if their mail provider started blocking facebook's mail.

I’m not sure if they would. It seems to me that, at best, the email has zero value to an enthusiastic Facebook user, because they are routinely engaged with the site, and have the app installed on their mobile device to receive the notifications directly. The emails are redundant to them and an unnecessary load on the internet infrastructure.

I'm pretty sure Facebook got this strategy from LinkedIn too.

> Even more annoying is the same thing that they do with email notifications.

Oh, so much this, especially with LinkedIn. The email problem is, in the end, what got me to delete my LinkedIn account a couple of years back. And I STILL get frequent emails from them.

I saw your comment and thought to myself I haven't seen any emails from LinkedIn in a while. Then I remembered why - https://i.imgur.com/J4d4VLk.png

This is an indication that user commitment is very low on Facebook.

As long as users are actively involved there is no need to send emails.

Sending emails is a (bad) trick to make people curious and make them login to your platform again.

I think the Facebook app is just 'dead' and Facebook is lucky to have Instagram.

> This is an indication that user commitment is very low on Facebook.

> As long as users are actively involved there is no need to send emails.

IIRC, Facebook sends those messages only when they've detected an account's usage dropping off. When I was a regular user, I never got them; but when I stopped logging in for days or weeks at at time, they got more intense.

They're a deliberately designed mechanism to keep addicts hooked.

That would match my usage pattern, so I guess you are correct. I'm using Facebook only rarely and am definitely and completely away from it for several days or even weeks between periods of usage.

I haven't logged in for a long time and they've started sending me text message notifications about friends posting photos.

Twitter has started to do that too. Notifications went from focussing on significant interactions — such as someone liking or retweeting a tweet, or following you — to 'someone you follow just tweeted' — what's the point of that notification? It's happening all the time! Notifications get devalued as companies desperately try to promote their product.

That has resulted in me disabling notifications and now I won't know if someone @me or responded to a tweet.

Those useless notifications made the whole product useless for me.

Yep, same for me. They want addicts not users.

I was never a twitter person until recently, as in the last month or so. I've had an account for years and never really used it. And wow. Going from reddit (was a huge addict) to twitter reminds me of when I went from forums to reddit/digg. I've barely used reddit in the last month. The deluge of posts at all hours is incredibly addicting. I may need to block it or scorch earth my followings.

Or make two accounts and my main one only follow positive/uplifting/motivational accounts.

Yeah. Notifications is useful, even great, when used sparingly, appropriately.

But nobody does that, so I’ve stopped granting any app not email or IM notification rights.

You reap what you saw: no “engagement” for you.

> I’ve stopped granting any app not email or IM notification rights.

Yeah, I hit that point quite a while back. I no longer want any application or service to give me notifications or send me emails. Almost nobody seems to be able to use those things in an appropriate way.

I started like you, last year... then a couple days ago realized I hadn't checked it since mid January. And we're on March, that's a new record.

I'm not in the "I'm leaving Facebook once and for all", actually I don't have that intention whatsoever, I am (was) a normal, active user. But it stopped being interesting. The kind of interaction Fb promotes is similar to twitter; in the first years I could see my friends showing off their breakfast or sharing their thoughts about something, now everything is 3rd-party articles, photos, videos, and complaining... LOTS of complaining (via sharing a relevant article they just read).

Ironically I still write to share my thoughts on something, without photos or shocking videos, and it catcyes my friend's attention because of the "novelty" of writing something of my own instead of just sharing some link.

Btw I've NEVER wanted to install Fb apps, especially since they forced everyone to have the Messenger app if you want to chat. Always used m.facebook.com for checking out, and mbasic. for chat (with the added benefit of the crappy UI pushing me out from using it...). Similarly, Twitter is another service I use, and never wanted their app installed, instead I use their website. The same reason frequent use of Reddit is out of the question for me.

I didn't know about mbasic and chat working. Thanks.

I'm also deleting as many apps as possible. Even Instagram works quite well without the app. Less uncontrollable spying, less battery usage, no annoying notifications, more free memory, more blocked ads and trackers.

But no replying on the comments to your posts, it seems, which is quite annoying.

I use mbasic and can reply to comments on posts.

I just checked the details and (for example) I click under the post: "2 scratches 'pon wood" (sorry I have language set to Pirate but it's the equivalent of "2 comments").

This takes me to a page showing the post, comments beneath, and a text field for me to reply into.

So it's there, just check the various links under each post to see what's available. Actually I've yet to find anything that I can't do on mbasic. I've thought something was missing several times (turning off notifications for specific groups springs to mind) but always found a way to do it eventually. It's often a hideous UX but I like how ugly mbasic is, it's FB without the sugar so you can taste how bitter it really is :) (for anybody wanting to say something like "if it's so horrible why do you still use it", it's something I do reluctantly because I have a few geographically distant friends who I like to keep in contact with and who always message me through FB)

Well, i will probably see the comment on my post after a week or two and respond then.

mbasic is a life saver: chat, plus fast load times!

> But it stopped being interesting

A concise version of the "I don't care what happens to these people" fatal to tales ...

( https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EightDeadlyWords )

>Ironically I still write to share my thoughts on something, without photos or shocking videos, and it catcyes my friend's attention because of the "novelty" of writing something of my own instead of just sharing some link.

People stopped making posts about their daily lives, removing the thing that attracted most of us to Facebook to begin with: The possibility of following the life of friends and family, even if we don't have the chance to see and talk to them in real life as often as we would like.

As post by real people have died out, ads, promotions and link spam have taken over and now fill our "news feed", making Facebook less interesting.

If Facebook didn't have private groups, users would be leaving much faster. Still, it's interesting that none of Facebooks strategies seems to revolve around getting people to post more original and personal content.

I quit Facebook last year, and maybe I would have stayed, if they had a feature that would allow me to hide everything not directly posted by friends. Then again, maybe not, it would have left me with very little content.

facebook feels more and more like traditional tv or the web portals like yahoo! or msn. we've moved on! they went backwards.

> Ironically I still write to share my thoughts on something, without photos or shocking videos, and it catcyes my friend's attention because of the "novelty" of writing something of my own instead of just sharing some link.

Except that, unlike the constant barrage of advertisement and "viral" content, your post will not even be shown to all your friends. And you don't get to know which ones will see it and which ones will have no idea you ever wrote anything.

I can see that kind of uncertainty putting people off from spending effort on writing nice personal posts & thoughts.

> I still write to share my thoughts on something... catches my friend's attention because of the "novelty" of writing something of my own

Note that it's up to Facebook whether your friends ever see your post in their feed. It can't catch their attention if they never see it. The feed algorithm is way too whimsical for me to want to rely on.

Totally agree. The three things which have driven me away are:

1) the proliferation of notifications

2) filling my feed with auto-play videos

3) the fact that fewer and fewer of my friends actively use it

Just as rising membership creates a positive feedback loop through network effects, so declining membership does the opposite.

The other main reason is that since buying a smart phone, I can access the one feature of FB that I use - messenger - while avoiding the rest. I now only log into my account to check my notifications every week or two, to see if I've been invited to anything.

Messenger.com on the computer.

They are making sure to give you red dots/numbers multiple times per day, if you login multiple times per day.

It's usually stuff like "X posted something after a long while of not posting" or "Y will participate in an event near you". Utterly useless notifications about people I don't interact with.

This is a mixture of bad UX and dark UX patterns. They are puppeteering a corpse here.

It looks like facebook is engaged in a race to the bottom, against it’s own metrics. The easiest way to be engaged is to repost memes and fake news shock posts, so the most engaged users are meme posters and fake news trolls, so features that cater to meme posting and trolling get the most bang for buck, so they’re getting trapped in a cycle of circulating ever increasing torrents of drivel.

My girls are 14 and 15 in the UK. None of their friends use facebook, and that’s not just their social circle. Facebook is just not a thing for them. The only reason they use it at all is because there is one out of school club that posts their upcoming activities on a FB page, so they literally log in once a week to check that page and they’re done. They do heavily use Instagram and WhatsApp though, so they’re not entirely out of the FB sphere.

UK here as well, I remember a couple of years back my teenage son saying "Facebook is for old people".

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=facebook

USA here - I was at a meeting where a teenager was speaking. He was mentioning some other social media platform and said, as an aside, "That's like Facebook for you old people."

Yeah - I did understand there was an implied "like you" in his statement :-)

Not that I've used Facebook much!

No kidding. With how smart they are and all the AI that goes on behind the scenes, I don't understand why I continue to get notifications when friend X 'adds to their story'. I have never once watched anyone's story. And I don't plan on starting. Aren't they smart enough to understand that this is just adding cognitive overhead and detracting from my immersion in a meaningful experience? Seriously, not rocket science. These UX people should get that.

Most of their "AI" is just applied statistics. Train a statistical classifier to classify "events a user wants to see" then run it in prod and elevate the results to notifications. Run an A/B trial (quite possibly p-hacked) to determine if people actually like it. Ignore the false positive rate (e.g. the rate at which you're annoying people) if you think it's arbitrarily small enough. When people ask how you determine which events to turn into notifications tell them The Algorithm decides it and let their imaginations, seeded by pop culture science fiction, run wild about what sort of superhuman synthetic intelligence you have pent up in your computers when really all you've got is a glorified bayesian spam filter.

Yup, it has become staggering.

I frequently get notifications on my personal page to say my business page has a notification. That notification turns out be to "Your users have not heard from you in a while, write a post".

I get this all the time, even when I have written a post within the last five hours.

I would say on average I get 5 notifications per day that are utterly useless.

This x100. Totally mirrors the sentiment in my sibling comment. Somewhere along the line they lost sight of creating an experience and each facebook product became focused on improving their metrics and notifications became the weapon of choice. They so obviously need to reign in all of these different teams, reduce clutter, and get back to basics - starting with a good user experience.

The page notifications are infuriating. I'm a co-owner of my mother's business page (barely a business really, almost more of a hobby). She can barely use Facebook and just uses the page for basic communication with a few dozen people but she/we are constantly bombarded by notifications about HOW MANY USERS we could reach AND WHY DON'T YOU BOOST THIS POST. Hey, your customers haven't heard from Facebook in 10 minutes! Why don't you give them another notification!?

haha, I know the feeling.

Every single post I make "Performs better than 95% of posts on my page" ... "Click here to boost NOW!".

Ugh.

ha aha. seems like all those PMs and mountains of engineers Facebook/linkedIn is hiring aren't helping their product much. They've got money to burn, so I don't think this is going to change anytime soon.

Annoyingly, what's kept me on it is the fact that some super-niche private groups (that would otherwise be ideally suited to a forum or subreddit) have sprung up that have content that I simply can't get anywhere else.

Exact same thing for me ! I uninstalled both twitter and facebook app when I realized they were faking notifications for me to open their apps, since I guess they need that for their DAU bs. Since then, I check twitter once a week in a browser mode, and facebook once a day with the firefox container.

If on Android I recommend the Facebook Lite app. Its not as obnoxious and on Android you can tell the OS to ignore all notifications from an app.

The lite version of Facebook is probably the only worthy version, I just wish it could be firewalled so you know when it tries to use network access and lock it down to just when you open the app.

I assume Lite Android apps arent allowed to use much data but I could be making a bad assumption. It still saves on battery life at least.

I agree though they would notify me of potential friends and they were never ever people I knew or wanted to be friends with (because I didnt know them!).

The full fat messenger is the most annoying app I have ever used. It's like a small child constantly trying to get your attention when you are busy with other tasks.

Yeah, they have Messenger Lite, but I rather not have two apps for the same website. You can go on Messenger.com though if you want a web only experience.

> Feels like they got greedy for my attention

Bingo. Every time I check Facebook there's at least one "notification". It's always one of

* A page I own has x new views

* A friend or two is interested in an event (not even going to, interested in)

* You have memories on this day

Aside from Messenger for a few ongoing group convos my Facebooking time is mostly limited to interest groups at this point, and I'd happily jump ship with them if they moved to a self-hosted forum or mail list

Yeah, I'm a very passive FB user and have removed all the FB battery draining crap from my phone, so I don't get meaningful notifications very often, but I'm checking it out at least every few days out of habit. It's always showing me a bunch of notifications for completely random things, like some new random post in marketplace group I'm participating, but no notification for the 50 other new posts in there or other groups. Or somebody I haven't spoken to in years is going to some event I never heard about. At this point I don't even see them as notifications, just a list of random things that happen and don't affect me.

There was a point when I got fed up and unsubscribed from all notifications from everything. Now I only operate in pull-mode. I check my things 1-2 times a day and I receive zero notifications. My life is much better now!

You can almost get a glimpse of the financial health of a company by the number of bullshit messages they send you. The trend is especially important. Just like you i’ve noticed facebook getting spammier and spammier, starting from the middle of last year. Which means things were probably starting to smell funky around that period

My breaking point was when they fucking texted me that I had "notifications" when I hadn't logged in for a while. No doubt those notifications were that someone is going to an event I don't care about somewhere within a 100 miles of me.

I never did give Facebook my phone number, thank god

I don't recall ever explicitly doing so. I'm sure something I did gave them implicit permission to siphon it off my phone when I had the app installed.

Same thing with twitter; every tweet is a notification it seems *facepalm

Once per day? That's a lot. I wouldn't call that "stop checking Facebook". You are still a MAU (monthly active user) in their statistics.

Anecdata, but this was a big factor for me as well. Having joined somewhat early, they had me with the red badge like Pavlov with his bell. It was effective because of the variable reward. I logged in to see if there was a red badge. Now there’s always a red badge.

I logged in for the first time in a few weeks recently. Out of 50+ notifications, literally only 1 was something I cared about seeing. I wish I were exaggerating.

The boy who cries wolf <-> The app that notifies

Do it too often and with too much urgency, and eventually you will be utterly ignored.

Try having a business page on Facebook! Anytime you log in, they will create some new notification that you know is not true. "5 people have viewed X business, try posting again." Or "1 new person liked X business" then you check and the number of likes is the same. Which is pretty easy to check when the number of likes is in the 2-3 digit range.

Are you sure these are false? I am really skeptical of that.

Could this be mixed w people unliking and hence the number doesn't change?

Totally agree! Ever since they added story updates into the notifications screen, it has totally lost meaning. That and friends attending random events, etc. It used to actually mean something.

I've posted this before but Instagram actually creates fictitious notifications when you stop using the app. That prompted me to delete it altogether.

This is what lead me to switch to using their website on mobile, rather than the app. The same goes for LinkedIn, which I had the app for perhaps a week before I got fed up with its bullshit. I still have messenger for the tiny number of people who don't use WhatsApp or Signal.

It's been good. I've taken to disabling notifications and uninstalling apps for most sites, I don't need them telling me when I should be looking at stuff, and mobile sites have improved a lot. It's all become much more intentional on my part.

Ironically, the annoying anti-patterns that sites like LinkedIn use to encourage you to switch to their app instead of their mobile website just encourage me to use them less overall. LI is probably the worst, along with Reddit.

I don't have an issue with most of the content of my FB feed itself, because most of the people I'm friends with don't post crap. I'm not friends with people I don't actually want to stay in touch with and I mute the small number that overdo the minion memes. My feed consists largely of stuff about my friends and reletives that I find, at worst, uninteresting and skippable. I don't seem to have all the "crazy people" problems that a lot of people seem to complain about (perhaps I'm just lucky that my family are pretty normal). I find twitter is much worse for things like political share-spam or vague-tweeting, but I'm pretty focused in who I follow there too, and turn retweets off for anyone who is a bit of a retweet spammer.

I find it funny when people complain about Facebook because their feed is full of their MLM hawking aunt or the rantings of some odd "friend". I think there is a lot wrong with Facebook, but you can't blame them for your friends and family. That's like inviting a load of people to a pub for your birthday, then leaving a bad Yelp review because the company was bad.

They are starting to kill the attractiveness of instagram too. I get more notifications a day from spam accounts requesting to follow me or send me messages that my use of the app has declined substantially over the last year.

Here's the kicker, which I think others have pointed out, but I want to say this succinctly:

First, to quote the article:

> The big gainer, interestingly, is under the same roof as Facebook. It's their co-owned Instagram

Now, to my point: The average person does not care about privacy, just the illusion of privacy (I suspect people reading this site intuitively know this. At some level, nearly everyone is in different ways, it turns out.)

Instagram provides that illusion by not injecting opinionated content into your feed (The most obvious example: you aren't seeing injected news stories in your Instagram feed, generally its only ads and people you follow, and the ads are marked)

Rest assured, they're getting their data's worth, maybe not the same way, but photos (particularly metadata on the photos that most smart phones, for instance, default collect) are just as (if not more so) valuable, not to mention there are still a myriad of other ways of collecting privacy intrusive data about users.

Hows about that?

(just to show my assertion is not completely unfounded, check out this survey:

https://www.pewinternet.org/2015/05/20/americans-views-about...

The survey says: 9 out of ten americans care deeply about privacy (particuarly around data privacy and collection)

Yet, our actions, even faced with the outright knowledge of those very things being actively and routinely violated by services, is not enough for people to leave platforms for good, simply, people shift between social media outlets, like those leaving Facebook over privacy concerns yet still continue to use Instagram, in fact, Instagram is projected to grow as noted in this article, in part because of people migrating away from Facebook)

I think they do actually care about privacy but are only ever offered illusion.

The problem really is lack of choice.

Agreed, as noted in the survey I linked to, 9 out of 10 people (in accordance to this survey, but even its more realistically 7 out of 10, its still a lot of people) claim to. I think its a few things:

1. Awareness. I don't think people are aware of how/what services are collecting data and how that data can be collected

2. Influence. Its hard, I imagine, for a lot of people to drop social media altogether. Its not all vanity. My wife has a disability that sometimes leaves her bedridden for weeks. Without social media, she wouldn't be able to communicate with our friends unless they call/text/come over, which they do, but its not always feasible one of those things will happen, so following them on Instagram and chatting via Facebook Messenger is really helpful in keeping her spirits up in those times.

3. Inertia. I think a lot of the current outrage against Facebook has been media driven, in particular, I think after Trump got elected -

(just a side note here before I continue, I'm talking about a criticism of media in general, not democrat vs republican politics or anything of the sort)-

I have a strong feeling, that I can't really substantiate, so take it as you will, of course (I acknowledge I could be wrong), large main stream news outlets started digging around about the mechanics of that election, and stumbled into the Cambridge Analytica scandal as a result, increasingly their practices came under fire, in part because I think some large media organizations (rightly, in my opinion) blame their data harvesting practices on getting Trump elected in the first place.

This also brings up another point I find so sad: despite the openness of the internet, the mass media still reigns supreme in being able to influence the masses, and I (anecdotally) feel like the power of freely and ubiquitously available knowledge via the internet has not had the impact on this sort of thing that one would have hoped. It was one of the promises of the internet in the 90s, that we would all vastly become more informed and it would take vastly less effort (and it does, if you are looking for it).

No one wants choice either. Having 100 social media apps on your phone is not ideal. We want one choice that is also a good choice. That seems virtually impossible when companies are motivated only by profit and only kept in check by customers having a better choice or by government regulation.

If facebook was driven purely by the motivation to help people stay in touch with their friends and to find events going on it would be a truly wonderful platform. Virtually every issue on facebook comes from seeking profits. At least problems from facebooks side anyway. There is also the social issues of propaganda and jealousy but facebook would have more time to deal with these when they aren't making the company more money.

> That seems virtually impossible when companies are motivated only by profit and only kept in check by customers having a better choice or by government regulation.

Assume this in every situation and you'll never be disappointed ;)

If the problem was lack of choice, why do the large majority of all Facebook users never change their privacy settings?

Or why did hundreds of thousands of users actively choose to share their data with a random company called Cambridge Analytica?

The problem is not lack of choice. The problem is that people don't care.

Slight correction: since 9/10 said they care about their privacy, its more that they are not educated on what Facebook does with their data, or how to limit their own exposure. Lack of education != ignorance.

Maybe they do care about their privacy, they just care more about sharing stuff and more about looking at videoes than they care about looking at ther privacy settings. The media has been all about Facebook and privacy for many, many years. Facebook have had popup dialogs on user feeds asking users to check their privacy settings. People are not uneducated about it. They just don't care enough to change their behavior or make an active change on their settings.

Or why did hundreds of thousands of users actively choose to share their data with a random company called Cambridge Analytica?

They certainly have never chosen to do so. You can accuse them of participating in some innane quiz, but it was exactly the big scandal that not only the participants' data, but also that of their friends was sucked and resold to Cambridge Analytica without their knowledge by the "researchers".

All participants have actively clicked a button to confirm that they would give Cambridge Analytica access to their profile data and data from their friends. The scandal was not that the data was collected without the participants knowledge. The scandal was that they used the data for something else, than what they initially had told the participants.

Also object recognition/tagging on Instagram photos

> Now, to my point: The average person does not care about privacy, just the illusion of privacy (I suspect people reading this site intuitively know this. At some level, nearly everyone is in different ways, it turns out.)

>Instagram provides that illusion by not injecting opinionated content into your feed (The most obvious example: you aren't seeing injected news stories in your Instagram feed, generally its only ads and people you follow, and the ads are marked)

I think you're right about the content that people like being missing, namely shared video and images, but wrong about the underlying reason people prefer that stuff being gone. The content is vastly different on Instagram 90% of the stuff I see is at least tangentally the life/art/activities of the people I follow. It may be a heavily edited near fake version but it's not the 100th 5 minute craft video or a reshared news story from that (more than) slightly kooky uncle.

I think the general lack of a share button (there are ways to 'reinsta' [I believe that's the term] but from the people I follow that's fairly rare and it's mostly sharing art) leads to a materially different type of content. Maybe this is just a byproduct of the different groups in both though Facebook is the older platform for me so there's a lot of people I don't particularly care about anymore on there and Instagram being newer (and not positioned to me as the primary social hub so there's less pressure to follow everyone) I have a more curated list of followers.

Finally Instagram is just much easier to consume to me since it's mostly just the visual snapshot of some activity with less generic shared content and much less video.

TL;DR: I'm not sure it's the privacy differences (perceived or real) between Facebook and Instagram rather than the content differences. ie more things directly related to the people/groups I follow.

I think focusing only on privacy is a mistake. Every single person I’ve talked to that has deleted Facebook has done so because it did not improve or enrich their lives whatsoever, in fact, they saw it as a net negative. Why do people feel the need to endlessly browse pictures and statements by loose connections? Not one person I’ve talked to has mentioned privacy.

Yes, many of those people are on Instagram, but some of those have also left IG because they’re seeing the exact same strategy they saw executed on Facebook now being used on Instagram.

I’ve actually seen more people using private iCloud photo shares. I think FB as a whole has exaggerated how many people actually want to share and connect with random people or loose connections.

I like the learning aspect of this. Before i was all in, now i know, this new thing is not for me.

I think FB and people in general dramatically overstate how many connections they'll lose if they quit Facebook. I quit Facebook 9 years ago, but haven't lost a connection I cared about. I did lose connection with real people that were a net negative in my life, though

Self-selecting sample. People who are confident they won't lose any friends they value through leaving FB are significantly more likely to drop the platform.

My point is the lack of confidence is probably unjustified. But perhaps I'm wrong. It's not difficult to imagine that connections people think they have are so shallow that they actually would lose the important ones if they left Facebook.

> I quit Facebook 9 years ago, but haven't lost a connection I cared about.

I did the same, around the same time, and my experience was the same as yours.

I would go even further -- I found that after I quit Facebook, my connections with the people I actually care about increased rather than decreased once the intermediary was removed and we had to start communicating directly with each other.

There's really no substitute for giving a friend a phone call or meeting them for lunch.

I don't think the migration is caused by privacy concerns. Facebook has become ridiculously bloated with all kinds of features up to the point where it starts resembling enterprise software rather than an online consumer service. Even I, a techie, sometimes have hard times understanding how to do this or that in Facebook.

On the other hand, Instagram is plain simple and understandable.

I wonder how many people leaving in the USA are fed up with the endless political fights? It’s why I left.

When I first joined Facebook after jumping ship from Myspace, it was really simple to use with minimal intrusion of media clickbait which is in stark contrast to the bloated and highly optimized for engagement monstrosity it has become today.

I was grandfathered into this experience and it no longer appeals to me today as an adult. I suspect this phenomenon is affecting other early adopters as well. Can anyone else relate?

I joined 10 years ago after the local equivalent of classmates become utterly useless which mean creators had to seek for revenues and that included but wasn't limited to sponsored profiles of local brands and famous people, virtual currency (you could spend on ridiculous pictures that were meant to enrich your profile and interaction with people), games, annoying promotion of their twitter-alike microblog nobody had idea how to use and which caused great uproar. Service was of course filled with ads of which most controversial one was sucking out your profile picture to dump you an customized credit card ad. Before those "improvements" it was a good place to reconnect with people you knew but since it was something new and unknown, a lot of them had no idea how to use it and made fool of themselves or deliberately used it as dating site - hell, at some point profiles of prostitutes of both sexes started to appear. Facebook largely dethroned naszaklasa in upcoming years but IMO didn't improved social skills of most people who carried those along to the new network. The service was sold but still operates and it's popular among less experienced with technology people.

The similar scenario happened with news agregator similar to digg - at the beginning wykop was aimed for powerusers, IT professionals but quickly idea was extended and included content of various type. Userbase grow had an upward trend which of course lead again to monetization; ads, sponsored content, microblog, shameless promotion of certain political agendas were introduced and at the same time, the content quality heavily piked down. Site still operates today under third - if I'm not mistaken, owner but I'm no longer there since interaction with biased content and teenager, 20-something trolls is not appealing at all.

So yeah, I believe it's pretty the same thing everywhere: a simple service idea is successful, userbase grows and revenue sources are needed. Sources are being introduced along with new features but content quality starts to drop. Unpopular decisions are made leading users to migrate in search for better and simple alternatives.

Do you think there is enough abandonment of the core userbase that Facebook can be dethroned?

I really doubt it; they may lost users in long term but not because of new player - they have seem to reached already over-complexity stage with features and thus service will simply become unappealing to existing and new users but that will take time. If they start changing messenger into more discord-slax alike service then they may keep users as this form of communication seems to be getting more popular

If Instagram doesn't heavily customize the ads or the news feed, then how does it extract any value from the data it collects?

Using the data to personalize ads elsewhere? Does Facebook operate a conventional ad network out on the web? (I could not name it, but I assume they do)

Instagram/FB data crossfeeding.

That means IG will lose its value as people stop spending time on FB. So it would have to develop some independent way to monetize its users.

A few seconds of googling: facebook calls their off-site advertising product "audience network". Same model as Google selling ads placed elsewhere than a search engine result page.

> Instagram provides that illusion by not injecting opinionated content into your feed (The most obvious example: you aren't seeing injected news stories in your Instagram feed, generally its only ads and people you follow, and the ads are marked)

What Facebook content do you consider "injected"? AFAIK, the only things in feed are:

1) Posts, events, shares, etc from people or pages that you follow

2) Posts that your friends have interacted with (liked, commented on, etc)

3) Ads that are marked as "promoted"

I think it's number 2. I don't particularly want to see what my random stuff my friends are liking or commenting on. I know Instagram provides this too, but it's separate from the main feed.

And the reverse: I use facebook for very little else than to run my hobby life (and it's been transformational at that!), but my non-hobby network is still connected to the account and I don't want to annoy them with a flood of deeply specific posts (in part because life demands keeping a facade of being a somewhat normal person). So much self-censoring because it would be shown to an uninterested audience I care about.

Back in the day you didn’t have “pages that you follow,” you had interests listed on your profile. These later became pages that you were automatically signed up to, which the relevant companies post ads on. My feed rapidly became mostly adverts which I’d never actually signed up to receive, and it was more effort to fix it than to just stop checking Facebook.

When I used to visit Facebook, I get "Popular On Your Network" stories.

I consider #2 as injected. Basically, any content that was not directly posted by a "friend" to share to their network.

I did not leave Facebook because of privacy concerns. That's your biggest mistaken assumption.

I work on Big Data for a living and know how inept companies are at actually doing anything useful with personal data. The data being generated is massive and the vast amount of it is random and useless.

My reason for reducing my social media presence is the Like count next to every thought expressed. By adding a publicly visible number next to every expressed human thought, you influence behavior and thinking. This has all kinds of consequences that tech corps and society are waking up to - ledger.humanetech.com

That is why I have consciously reduced my social media usage.

Same here.

After working in a fin-tech for a while, I realized how greedy these companies are for data, and how useless they render it. I was amazed by the scarcity of talent and overwhelming amount of routine job I encountered and lack of diversity of projects and space for free thinking.

Anyway, I got rid of FB/Insta years ago(4-5 maybe), and recently I also closed LinkedIn acc. as well, I have low tolerance to BS and self-glorified business gurus. I'd rather do something meaningful in my everyday life)))

Cheers.

I wish I could tell you exactly when it started happening, but the number of vapid and/or histrionic LinkedIn posts floating to the top of my feed has really picked up in the last 12 months or so. What used to be a pretty useful and concise activity feed has started to look more like the uglier sides of your average Facebook feed.

I can't say if it's a content problem associated to the normalization of social apps as a whole (probably a bit) or the changing of the LI algo to push this stuff to the top (probably also attributable), but it's certainly diminished my general experience.

That said, LinkedIn is still very useful for recruiting and being recruited insofar as it is a widely-used database for professional information. I just don't recommend using it casually.

>I work on Big Data for a living and know how inept companies are at actually doing anything useful with personal data. The data being generated is massive and the vast amount of it is random and useless.

Your anecdotal experience isn't evidence businesses aren't doing anything with data collection which would be worrying to consumers or that privacy concerns are overrated. And yes, this is what that paragraph of yours is implying.

If your company didn't have a strategy for analytics, it doesn't mean others do not either. The mere fact that users get used to that practice is already a win to those who wish to take advantage of that information.

Not to mention that the greatest threat comes from sharing and connecting those databases, so what may have been random and useless may find significance when sold to other aggregators.

The cyber criminals who penetrate these companies seem to be a bit better at doing useful things with the data.

Not as much of a concern here, but nefarious governments around the world are quite good at doing awful things with this data as well.

> The survey says: 9 out of ten americans care deeply about privacy (particuarly around data privacy and collection)

This is a problem with focus groups. Ask people 'do you care about your privacy', and almost everyone will answer yes.

There's almost zero social cost to answering that question in the affirmative.

On the other hand, there's a good deal of social sacrifice in leaving these platforms for good.

More likely - they don't care about privacy as much as they say they do and are leaving Facebook because it has become a polluted river of crap.

Exactly. Asking someone "do you want to have more savings?" is meaningless. Everyone will say yes. The right question to ask is "will you cook at home to save $10000 a year?"

And even out of the majority of people who will say, “yes, they’ll cook at home to save $10K,” only a small percent of those will actually do so.

> only a small percent of those will actually do so.

Even then, it won't save them the money. Like anything else, if you want to save the money - you have to move it out of your regularly accessed account, and put it somewhere else, ideally an account you can't withdraw as easily from.

So - when you cook for your family to save the money - you need to then (immediately) move the money you would normally spend for dinner (perhaps minus the amount for ingredients, time, and power - if you feel it necessary) over to that other account.

But most people never do that, I'd wager.

Instead, that extra money stays in their primary account, which they then likely spend on something else. So their savings continue to be zero (or likely less), and they continue to wonder where their money goes...

Much easier to appoach these the other way round: I could choose not to cook at home, but that would cost me a fortune, so I never stopped doing it. Best way to avoid expenses is not to commit to them in the first place.

Same goes for avoiding exploitative apps: never install apps unless there's no alternative. Block all ads. Deny all notifications, especially on the desktop browser. No, I won't send you my location.

It's annoying to have to maintain a wall of "no" but it saves problems in the long run.

You have the exact same pattern around road/airplane/food safety, hygiene and disease control, housing quality, and much more...

All problems that people care about but the average person cannot tackle autonomously.

And that's why societies implemented regulatory bodies (often through national governments, but that's not a requirement).

GDPR is a small step in that direction.

> On the other hand, there's a good deal of social sacrifice in leaving these platforms for good.

I honestly don't think that there is much social sacrifice involved in leaving these platforms. I think there's a good deal of fear of social sacrifice, though.

> Hows about that?

All I put on Instagram are landscapes and some cityscapes. I do not see like giving away any privacy doing that. Alas, phot-sharing days of Instagram are in the past and stories get more and more annoying every day without any option not to see them :(

I rarely use Facebook these days, and the reason has nothing to do with privacy. There's simply nothing interesting on Facebook to pull me back.

I don't have Facebook, but I do have Instagram. For some reason, the ads I see on Instagram are wildly untargeted. Like some Dallas based real estate company advertising to me, even though I'm based out of India

> I don't have Facebook, but I do have Instagram.

Which means you have Facebook in a different costume.

Advertising, and tracking user data are not inherently bad. The user must know what's being tracked, and probably more importantly, the user must be getting something of value in exchange. Facebook is an ever-degrading skinner box, providing less and less value to users while being addictive and malicious.

Contrast this with something like Google Maps: It's a privacy nightmare too, but it's also incredibly useful.

Internet could not be as free as it is without advertising. Facebook and Google need to gain money so that we could use them for free.

> Internet could not be as free as it is without advertising.

I don't think that's true. That's true for certain things, like Facebook and Google, but those sorts of companies do not constitute "the internet".

> tracking user data are not inherently bad.

If that tracking is being performed on people who have not given informed consent, then it is very bad.

Everyone here is celebrating "people leaving facebook" as if it is a victory. People are simply moving from facebook to instragram as instragram is viewed as more "hip" and "young".

The title could be "Instragram gaining millions of users in the US" but I guess that doesn't sell as well.

Also, facebook may be losing users in the US, but it's gaining users overseas. So overall, facebook's overall user count is going to continue to climb for a while.

Note: personal opinion bellow

It seems to me that the overall interest in Facebook is decreasing. The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years. It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving.

Still, Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition. We don't see any news about their user base decreasing and news channels don't seem to dislike them. Facebook is doing a good job making sure their biggest three platforms are seem as independent from one another, keeping Instagram and WhatsApp almost free from controversy.

Personally I see no loss for them here. Besides, they will promptly acquire any new players that look promising, or shamelessly copy them as they did with Snapchat.

> The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years.

I actually found some great rugs (owners did not know what they had!) and furniture on the FB marketplace. Much better finds than on craigslist, and easier to verify that the seller is a human.

I'll second the notion of Facebook Marketplace being a good new feature. You can even pay the seller in-app, which is handy.

Agreed.

Craigslist was tainted by the unsavory element of prostitution and stolen goods and isn’t a resource that I seek out. Facebook marketplaces seem like what eBay was in the 90s.

If I'm buying a used piece of furniture or whatever, I don't give a shit about prostitution going on elsewhere on the site.

What's really hurt Craigslist is all the scammers. You can't post anything of value on there without some scammer responding and telling you they're going to send you a cashier's check and have a personal assistant pick it up.

You don't have this problem at all on Facebook AFAICT. When someone responds to your ad on Facebook Marketplace, it's a real person who actually wants to buy your old junk.

The scammers aren’t there because of prostitution, both categories are there because Craigslist attracts unsavory parties and does little or nothing to police them.

No, that's not correct at all. The difference is that Craigslist has no real accounts. When you get a response to your CL ad, even if the responder has a CL account, you don't see this, you just get a text message or phone call or email. With FB, everything is through the site because of the way it's centralized, and you can see the account and full name of the person who's contacting you. On CL, it's trivial for scammers to respond to ads with automated programs, but on FB they'd have to create a real-looking fake account in your area, complete with pictures, some kind of history, etc., which is a far greater undertaking.

In short, the formats of the sites make all the difference. CL was created to preserve anonymity and not be a centralized social network, but that feature is also its undoing because it facilitates scamming.

Craigslist was tainted by the unsavory element of prostitution and stolen goods and isn’t a resource that I seek out.

IME, Facebook Marketplace is far from free of scams and stolen merchandise. That's why some people call it Fencebook.

>IME, Facebook Marketplace is far from free of scams and stolen merchandise. That's why some people call it Fencebook.

Thats not a new problem though, is it? I dare you to buy used car parts on ebay.

I've been surprised by how good Facebook's local classified ads implementation is, I've been having better success with it than Craigslist.

It's an odd platform. They have a lot of great features for outreach and discovery of local events and groups of people, leveraged by the strong network effect. For contact with local groups of people with similar interests, and for planning events, for group communication, it is an effective tool and one that has enriched my life in substantial ways.

The one thing that I really hate is the front page feed. It was probably a great business decision on their part to emphasize microblogging, as it definitely increased engagement in the platform. It also turned everyone into memelords who just re-share funny cat pictures, pyramid schemes and incendiary political propaganda. I tried just filtering that out with the "see fewer posts like this", but I turns out that people just don't really post anything but image macros and articles anymore.

> I've been surprised by how good Facebook's local classified ads implementation is, I've been having better success with it than Craigslist.

If you've tried it, how do you think Facebook's classifieds compare to NextDoor's classifieds?

Instagram is almost unusable due to the ads. Every 3 or 4 posts you see an ad. The only way Instagram isn't obnoxious is on the desktop, in a browser, with an ad-blocker installed.

I love WhatsApp, but they haven't found good ways to monetize it yet and one of these days they'll ruin it.

I found the instagram app to be unusable as you describe, but https://www.instagram.com works fine on my phone using firefox with an adblocker.

Interestingly enough, direct messaging is only available in app. A workaround had to be created by an ex-Instagram employee.

I guess that explains why I don't think of Instagram as a messaging service. What is the workaround?

One feature (limitation) of Instagram is that you can't include clickable links in a post message. So if you're running a business or are a personality of interest, you might share something that your followers might actually care to look into in more depth off-platform.

But then you have to tell them to check your profile for your one allowed link, go to your site, search for the product/blog/video - or you pay for an ad with links enabled.

> but they haven't found good ways to monetize it yet and one of these days they'll ruin it.

What I think is ad supportted _anything_ turns to crap eventually. It's a toxic business model.

I thought FB was integrating their messaging platforms? That seemed to make all the news rounds a month ago.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-insta...

[1] https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-speaks-on-whats...

When I read that I immediately thought it was a bad decision on Facebook's part.

With all the negative press FB has been receiving, it would seem wise to dissociate Whatsapp and Instagram from FB in the minds of the public.

Integrating the backends of the messaging systems, not the frontends. There will still be separate apps called "Messenger," "Whatsapp," "Instagram," etc., but they'll just be different fixtures set on top of identical plumbing.

This approach opens up exciting new opportunities for market segmentation via badge engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badge_engineering

... in much the same way that Ford (say) could design one car and then sell it to very different audiences as the Ford Taurus, Mercury Sable, and Lincoln Continental.

I don’t disagree, but there seemed to be a lot of a publicity around a backend tech change, and to me, it is that publicity that undoes the whole idea of keeping businesses separated. As a side example, everyone knows that Coke makes Diet Coke, but many don’t know that they make Sprite. The Sprite model seems to be a better approach than FB’s new Diet Coke approach.

Integrating the _backend_ but from the user perspective they remain three distinct brands.

I deleted my account years ago, but ended up creating a fake account under a fictitious identity for the odd event organized through Facebook. I log in every so often just to see what's up. It appears to be a mixture of paid content and two random friends posting memes.

I have to think people are deriving some value from it, but I cannot imagine what it is.

Just like with twitter, it all depends on who you follow; Some content is dramatically better than others. And just like with twitter, most of the content is essentially garbage.

Agreed. And I think this is one reason I love FB and can't stand Twitter. I kept buying into the "follow important people on Twitter" and it's just crap. I don't care what a noted Icelandic volcanologist retweeted about canaries. I don't care what my favorite F1 driver retweeted about english football. I don't care. I don't follow "influencers" because I don't care what they think, but I thought at least getting things from the horse's mouth, as it were, would be interesting, but it's just not.

I follow friend and family on facebook. If they post crap, it's because they have stupid things to say. I don't have many friends who I think are stupid.

Obviously you can follow celebrities on facebook and only follow friends on twitter but it doesn't feel like they're made for that use case, the 'reverse' of what I use it for.

I feel the same way about twitter. The only time I ever visit is when some service I use isn't working and I want to see if they've said anything about it being down (or it's just me).

Obviously you can follow celebrities on facebook and only follow friends on twitter but it doesn't feel like they're made for that use case, the 'reverse' of what I use it for.

Someone here not long ago on HN opened my eyes to the 'lists' feature of Twitter, it's been a remarkable improvement for me with the platform. "IRL" friends in one list, "Net" friends in another, sports commentary (because that's a thing I'm into), etc. etc. Crap is more or less 'siloed'.

I wish twitter promoted the feature more, to be honest, I think it can help with some of the gripes you have, if not for you maybe for others as it did with my experience on the platform.

Following interesting people generally has nothing to do with following celebrities.

People could post the same stuff on FB, Twitter, or email lists the hard part is finding stuff worth subscribing to. It’s really more about what platform creators use, and Twitter’s lightweight nature means a lot of interesting things end up on it.

TBH, twitter's UI is so atrocious and takes up so much real estate, it's less information-dense than FB, somehow. Neither one is good, though.

You can turn retweets off for the people you follow. I follow maybe 100 people who post regularly but only allow retweets from a handful of them. Since I've done so, the quality of my feed has improved dramatically. Usually, when I follow a new person I leave retweets on initially but turn them off after two or three retweets because I'm only interested in what they say originally.

Incidentally, the iOS Twitter client also shows tweets in your feed which your followers liked. And you can't turn that off. I don't understand that feature at all and it made me switch to a third-party client.

Thanks! I didn't realize that, good advice. Didn't notice the 'likes' .. I mean, I'm sure it's bothered me, I just didn't realize why it was happening, just closed twitter every time i saw too much junk.

Years ago I deleted my Facebook account [the "please everything" request, for what that's worth]. I felt so much better after doing so.

I then soon joined Twitter and consciously curated who I followed. I felt [and still do feel] fine about being on Twitter.

Some months ago I rejoined Facebook. I am consciously curating who I do and don't "friend" or follow. So far, so good. Yes, I am noticing the now-expected targeted ads ... but I prefer them, to be honest. Market me tickets to the Fandango showing of 'Logopolis' please; even if I don't buy, that's much more useful than the usual random jar of some guy's snake oil you'd offer me 20 years ago. Is this me being Institutionalized on tracking? Maybe, but there is an "after the uncanny valley" for tracking/advertising just like there is for robotics and AI. I'm interested to see how that works in relation to echo chambers.

I barely use facebook's website, I don't post anything but keep a account around for family, folks who want to use messenger and the odd event/group. It's a bit like having that hotmail address from highschool for the odd person who has that as your only contact point. I kept AIM and ICQ around for a long time for that reason.

I think younger folks have migrated to Instagram, snapchat, etc. where they actually post/use the platform.

Deleted FB account over a year ago.

Always wondered if we could create a lurker account that everyone shares — we share the password and just agree not to change the password, post, etc.

I have to think people are deriving some value from it, but I cannot imagine what it is.

I know a couple of people who don't have any Facebook "friends" connected to their accounts, but they follow brands and companies they're interested in keeping up with.

It's sort of like RSS, but with more companies on board.

This is what I've done as well. Fake name, profile, wildly random answers to profile questions and thumbs up to anything if I remember of have times. I only use the account to follow a couple of local businesses. Facebook is welcome to all the income that account provides them.

If you linked it to your real phone number or any of your real friends who have you in their contacts (which they've most likely shared with Facebook), you're not fooling FB.

They would still be fooling FB and its clients (advertisers) with the garbage metadata.

Note:- I have been off FB for the past 5 years or so.

As much as I hate FB and its abhorrent privacy policies, there are a very large population who do not care about privacy. I have some in my household who don't and FB's latest financial results prove it.

Everyone cares about privacy. They just aren't keenly aware that they're losing it. If you meet someone who doesn't care about privacy, ask them, can I borrow your phone and browse through your contacts, your conversations, and your pictures? Almost nobody will say yes unless they are very close to and intimate with you.

I think John Oliver did a pretty good job of framing the Snowden revelations in terms of "the NSA can see your penis". That's a good angle to make people care.

I don't think your analogy is very good. it's true that many (maybe even most) people have secrets that they would be embarrassed to share with their friends, family, or coworkers. if you asked them whether they would be okay with letting some stranger who they would never meet look through their phone, they might not do it for free, but I bet a lot of people would do it for $5-10.

That's not it. Offering people 10 bucks won't change that most say "no" when you ask them to borrow their phone and snoop through everything. Instead, it's that the whole loss of privacy is impersonalised. When you see my face, the face of someone who just asked to borrow your phone, when it's clear a person is going to be looking through it, that's when you say "no".

But when Facebook is harvesting data about you, it doesn't feel like a person is doing it. It feels like some abstract machine or algorithm or a faceless corporation is doing it. They even promise that humans aren't individually looking at your data. So people bank on that impersonality. The data may be collected, but who cares, nobody is actually really looking at it, right?

The truth is that people do often look at it, despite all the promises and everything. That's what you have to convey and that's what John Oliver was trying to establish with his angle.

Sure, when you ask people they tell you they care about Privacy. But their actions prove otherwise. And actions are what matter. It’s an unfortunate situation but that’s just the reality of it, like it or not. I don’t.

> Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition

You're not wrong, but I find it a bit frustrating how much resistance I get whenever I try and suggest using Signal instead of Whatsapp. As far as I can tell, it has pretty much all the features of Whatsapp that I use, without all the spying.

I'm having some pretty good success getting people to switch to Signal in my family. Keep up the good fight!

I think there's a lot of "chat app fatigue." I've personally had 5 or 6 on my phone in the past year and you'd have to drag me kicking and screaming into installing even one more of the damned things.

No one wants to install ANOTHER app just to talk to you. Most of us already have at least 3 messaging apps they use on a daily basis and probably a whole lot more they use on a weekly basis.

But why WhatsApp is one of those 3 and Signal is ANOTHER app? Not so long ago WhatsApp was ANOTHER. Now it's not. What changed?

I don't remember WhatsApp ever being ANOTHER. It was the first cross-platform messaging app I ever used.

Wikipedia says it was released in January 2009. Google Talk started in August 2005. For a GTalk user, it was "another".

GroupMe works fine

Signal work all right, but it doesn't feel very polished. Notifications are a bit wonky, and the unread message icon never shows up on the home screen icon.

Genuinely curious, how is WhatsApp spying? I thought they were encrypted? Are they not end to end encrypted like Keybase or signal?

They are end to end encrypted. There's apparently a lot of meta data (like the people one communicates with, etc.) that can still be accessed by Facebook.

It also nudges users to enable cloud backups which in practice means that everyone has them enabled (...which in practice means that all your messages are unencrypted in the other person's cloud storage.)

Oh no. I see

I would suggest LINE instead.

> It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving.

I'm not much of a user myself, but among my friends that use it heavily I've noted a number of complaints that it has gotten HARDER to use for their primary use: keeping up with friends.

Their issue isn't that FB has become stale or boring, but that it has actively LOST ground relative to their purpose.

Fb needs you to be able to filter the news feed.

It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving.

The problem with Facebook, is that either it's boring, or it's not boring, and in that case it's often far worse. Facebook latched onto the fact that outrage measures as "engagement" then other people latched onto that fact and started to use Facebook for their own outrage mongering purposes.

So one company, three brands?

If I were to start my own crowdfunding app, I'd have one app with three "skins" and three different brands, each a different level of "edginess." In the Terms of Service would be the discretion for the site to "shift" your account from one of the three to another. The only effect of this, would be to shift the public information around the creator and subscriptions from one site to another. I would do this, so that "maintaining our brand" would never become an issue in funding creators, even edgy or downright controversial ones.

I find that to be a really intriguing idea. Offering a gradient instead of platform ultimatums. Could this scale, is the question?

Could this scale, is the question?

In a way, it would be like shadowbanning, but more open.

YouTube has YouTube Kids plus different levels of content filtering available to users. Similar concept, in a way.

I wish they'd accommodate news and opinion in the same way. Maybe that way, they could keep their employees out of the business of censoring the internet in line with their particular biases.

> latched onto the fact that outrage measures as "engagement" then other people latched onto that fact and started to use Facebook for their own outrage mongering purposes.

So this must be your assessment of twitter as well? Same current observation, Same predicted outcome?

Same current observation, Same predicted outcome?

I sincerely hope so!

So much this: outrage measures as "engagement"

And yes it affects Twitter as well.

It seems to me that it takes "energy" to get people to change. Change being one of how they think about something, how they respond to something, or what they spend their time on. As far as I can tell, there are three very well known and very well studied energy pools that can be amplified and then tapped, one is fear, one is anger, and one is reward.

With fear and anger, a process is set up to increase levels in the target, while simultaneously offering a solution vector (ie a change in behavior that will address the fear or anger). I am sure psyche majors can quote all sorts of work here on that aspect of things.

For web companies, if your revenue is derived by ads, and you can only get people to click on your ads if they are looking at your page, it seems using fear and anger to drive people to page after page would be the best strategy to maximize their exposure to ads.

"outrage measures as engagement" is a perfect summary of the effect. The feedback loops are horribly exploitative.

I read that the "engagement" measure supported the Trump presidency since their ads were more clickbait than content-driven [1]

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/02/27/analysis-trumps-faceb...

I was never that engaged in Facebook, just checked it once a week. Then I started helping managing a private forum (for Michigan entrepreneurs) and got invited into another one. Now I'm on FB a couple of times a day.

Having the chance to engage with bright people who share my passion was the key. But the majority of my family has never been on Facebook.

This has been a common refrain from a lot of people. Facebook seems to have a lock on community it’s discussion forums for all sorts of small groups.

It works since basically everyone is on it and you don’t have to make people register and create an account as a barrier to entry. People used to have email listservs instead, but I think there is so much email marketing now that the signal to noise ratio on most people’s personal accounts approaches 0.

If someone could create a platform for an online discussion forum that doesn’t require signing up for a new service, will notify you of activity, and is free that would probably help a lot of people move over. NextDoor might have been able to, but they’re too focused on specific geographic neighborhoods and they have a serious racism problem.

This is why I liked Reddit so much when I have discovered it.

You get thematic subreddits for these kind of discussions, and you didn't even need a full-fledged account. Just a nickname. No email confirmation, no phone authentication, no anything.

Although now Reddit requires an email address for signup.

I think it's just a UI dark pattern now. It doesn't look like you can skip past the email, but you can. As of last month at least.

You're right. There's an Email field on the first signup page, but you can just click Next and set up an account.

> basically everyone is on it

False.

My SaaS company has a user group on Facebook. It has been great and allowed us to build a strong community among our customers.

And one of my goals for 2019 is to shut that group down and move the conversation into our app.

I have a pseudonym FB account that I am forced to maintain for this reason (specialist interest groups). It's the new phpbb even though it completely sucks as a forum tool. The same questions get asked over and over. But worse is better I guess.

I went to great lengths to keep my account completely anonymized, so the suggested friends list is a hilarious cross-section of global randos. Of course being a pseduonym account I could be banned at any moment.

> you don’t have to make people register and create an account as a barrier to entry

Cool, I had not realized that Facebook now allows non-members to post and participate in their forums. That's really great! Not sure where on Facebook it is one can do that, but I'll be on the look out now that I know they've added this.

>one app with three "skins" and three different brands, each a different level of "edginess."

They aren't a tech company as such but this reminded me of Coca Cola. There's Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Coke No Sugar plus whatever flavored variations they are currently doing. They are all slight variations on more or less the same product but it gives people the feeling that they are making a choice.

I think Coke No Sugar is supposed to be the replacement for Coke Zero. They also aren’t identical as Zero/No Sugar uses stevia as the sweetener while Diet Coke uses Aspartame.

I will bit the rebranding of Zero to No Sugar might have also been an attempt to get ahead of legislation to tax sugary drinks.

From what I've seen, Instagram is nearly 60% marketing/bot activity and ads are ruining the experience.

I couldn't agree more and don't forget about "aggregator" type accounts that just steal original content from other users. I am predicting that Instagram will last another 2-3 years before people get tired of the non-stop ads and spam.

To be fair they added dating. It hasn't been released in the US, but it's out in Thailand, Colombia and Canada.

maybe snapchat use case is so trivial and defined it doesn't need to change §

> It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving

Email hasn't had any new features added in decades, and people still use it.

For me, Facebook is a tool. I use it to organise events and groups, and communicate with people.

There's no other tool that works as well. I can have all my messages, groups, and events in one place. Almost everyone I know uses Facebook as well, so it's centralised.

Speaking of event management, one very useful feature that Facebook has added recently is integrated payments for events. You can set up a Facebook event that has tickets, and people can purchase and pay for tickets through FB without having to go to the external ticket sales platform (moshtix, eventbrite etc.). I'm not sure if you can do ticketing directly through Facebook or if you need an external service, I haven't set up any events with tickets. Anyway, it's a very useful feature as it saves me having to sign up for different ticket platforms.

You may be missing a whole bunch of people like me who refuse to use facebook. And you'll just never know how many. If there's an event that is solely organized through facebook, I just don't go. If that means I miss out, I miss out.

I know exactly how many of my friends don't use Facebook, because I specifically remember which ones they are, so I can message them separately.

It's inconvenient for me, but I'm happy enough to accomodate them.

I read your post as you were some sort of event planner or something, not that you were using it in a personal group of friends. Please forgive the misunderstanding. I see a lot of groups/businesses that use facebook exclusively to communicate and organize events (like the local paintball field) and they are missing out on some people (I have no idea how to quantify how many). I'm sure they're reaching more people now (using facebook) than they were using whatever old method they were using.

Yeah, I'm in the same boat, but it's easy for me because I'm thoroughly unlikable and have few friends anyway.

At least my email doesn't have constant security issues and controversial practices.

Agree on the lack of features front.

I actually preferred the simpler design FB had back in 2013 or so before the big redesign. After that everything seemed to get busier and louder. Usability took a hit after that IMO.

I've not used Facebook in any personal capacity but the same thing happened to Twitter, especially in the speed department. Twitter is so slow now that I don't use it.

Every once in a while some random journalist decides to cry foul about the demise of Google Reader and the death of the Open Web, but the 2013 redesigns of Twitter and Facebook seem more likely to be the cause, both in functionality and policies.

It was very clear cut at the time, Twitter did a 180° and left RSS along with lean HTML and got super slow and noisy (so much for adtech.) Facebook started changing its appearance compulsively and adding random crap. Then it removed itself from search engines for vendor-lock maxima.

> It's becoming boring

Unless Facebook figures out a way to address this, it's the start of a death spiral. The only thing that makes Facebook interesting is the people it can connect you to. If a few of them leave, the place becomes a little more boring than it used to be... which leads a few more of them to get bored and leave, which makes the place a little more boring... which leads more people to get bored and leave, etc. What started as a few snowflakes turns into an avalanche.

It's kind of the photo-negative version of the positive feedback loop Facebook enjoyed on its way up. Back then, each new person who joined created an additional incentive for other people to join, which gave them tremendous upward velocity. But the same dynamic running in reverse could send them downward just as quickly.

I've always wondered that, and is it an inherent 'flaw' with social media platforms, and FB just got so big that the coming decline will be just as catastrophic as MySpace and Friendster, but from a much greater height?

FB has obviously made very very smart acquisitions in WhatsApp and Instagram. I get the feeling these were primarily made because of the excellent data they had through their VPN app tracking service (as you could see the hypergrowth in real time and know exactly who to pick and how aggressively to go after). I'm sure they have or are working very hard on some alternative to this (maybe buy metadata off ISPs or become a network/transit carrier in their own right so they can see the IPs where stuff is going?).

But I do wonder if all social networks just are fads. You have a problem that as the network gets bigger, it starts becoming less interesting to you. Your social circles start overlapping (you don't want to post anything because it may offend someone, coworkers, grandparents, children), which stops everyone posting, which causes the whole thing to grind to a halt and become less interesting.

this happens to MMO servers too, I used to play the game DOFUS years ago and it was one of my favorite places on the internet when first started but then people left the game as they grew up and it was gradually taken over by bots and scammers until it got merged with another server

>The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years.

If I recall, correctly, the last major feature (read: that had any fanfare) was when they added the ability to have hi-res photos (and more of them), which was timed with the release of the Transformers movie? So, yeah, it's been a hot minute since they did anything substantial.

> It seems to me that the overall interest in Facebook is decreasing

Google Trends never lies. Some say that people have learned they don't have to search for Facebook, but the trend for Facebook follows the 'myspace curve of disengagement':

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=f...

Note that people never type 'whatsapp' into a browser.

I think that social media is always going to be fickle. Google and search is a much better bet for the product being relevant in years to come.

Facebook is also a black hole. It is very rare that something written on Facebook is noteworthy enough to be shared outside of Facebook, here for instance.

"Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition"

Telegram is getting popular in some countries where WhatsApp has been very dominant.

I deleted my personal account years ago when it became evident that Facebook was little more than a reprehensible consumer surveillance utility, failing at the original value proposition of keeping in contact with friends.

I maintain a company page through an otherwise content-free account. As a corporate user I find Facebook slow and difficult to navigate.

All social networks die. They either fail to achieve critical mass, or they do and it turns out the mass was mostly composed of bovine scatology.

I realized that the only people I was in contact with were people I didn't really wanted to have contact with... Not all 'friendships' are worth upholding, very few are actually.

P.S.: never seen 'BS' expressed so eloquently...

> The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years.

It should remove features, it has become a bloated abomination with no focus.

I'm gonna try and coin the term: "The facebook parodox"

It's the problem where you have cross-generational social media infused with varying socio-economic levels you find that people online want to align with their tribe BUT ALSO want to be connected with you because of a physical connection.

Prior social networks were already "pre-aligned":

Myspace: Majority School Peers/Friends +-4 years Twitter: Industry networking/interest based

Facebook is "everything". I've hit this moment where I don't want to add "2nd degree" or "loose" connections on facebook because I don't think it will enhance our relationship, if anything it could drive a wedge between us. I see these people 1-2 a year, and in person, it's great, but online, it's horrible.

The only way I can get along with my friends and family is through the strict community guidelines of HN - we just can't handle the raw exposure of email or SMS, and the algorithmic preprocessing of Facebook makes it even worse. We plan parties by encoding times and dates in the whitespace of our posts about JS frameworks. I found out that my brother was getting married by decoding the carefully placed typos in a post of his about the housing crisis in SF. I know it sounds dystopian, but engagement-maximization strategies are ruining everything else, and direct exposure is simply untenable.

I'm still hanging on, solely because it's the easiest way to see new pictures and updates from far flung family members.

I don't feel it's my place to ask them to share the pictures and updates another way, so I'm remain basically a read only FB user.

If there were a simple way to tee those things into some other feed, I'd leave FB as well.

> Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition

TikTok

WhatsApp isn't at all free from controversy - it's had its share of "terror attack orchestrated by WhatsApp [and therefore it's some how to blame]" stories.

What's saved it, IMO, is the similar deluge of stories about political in-fighting taking place in WhatsApp groups.

The available conclusions to the reader of the two angles on it are: 1) politicians are organising terror attacks; 2) there is no causal relationship between WhatsApp and terror attacks

... one of which seems eminently more reasonable than the other; so thankfully that's where we are.

Amusingly it also came under fire from politicians in the opposite direction in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal: far from wanting to peek at end-to-end encrypted data (as called for whenever it's used by terror groups) they then wanted assurances that the data hadn't been snooped on or passed to third-parties!

I want to leave Facebook because it seems like a daily chore of unfollowing people who post shit stuff. Instagram is pretty much just personal photos, no stupid news articles, no "forwards from grandma" type stuff. I like seeing pictures of friends kids, new homes, vacations etc and they pretty much exist in exact duplicate across both properties. So why be on Facebook?

Anecdotally, I work with teenagers and none of them have a Facebook pages. It's viewed as a place for old people and parents.

For me personally, it's almost impossible to deal with. Way too many political posts from my friends and family.

It's probably best use for me is local events and an occasional major event from a friend/family member.

Still, I find myself going there less and less.

From a small business standpoint, it's just not worth the time, effort and money to advertise there. It's much more effective to focus on getting referrals with my current clients.

I really wish there was a paid social media service that everyone used. I would gladly pay $5-$10 a month for something that didn't sell my data.

> For me personally, it's almost impossible to deal with. Way too many political posts from my friends and family.

Bingo, that's what's doing it for me.

Before the 2016 presidential election, Facebook was fun. It was also a great way to get news.

But now, what I'm finding is that a lot of people on Facebook just don't know how to behave in a public forum. It makes it painful, because someone always knows someone who's a jerk online.

I really don't know what changed, to be honest. Did Facebook change, or did too many people come to the party?

Lots of things changed.

Facebook began as an exclusive social network for upper-class students. Gradually it grew to encompass not just all of America, but the entire world. It turns out, many of us well educated people don't really want to network or socialize with poorly educated people. Police started monitoring our activities, so the events all but disappeared.

The world changed, too. Facts used to matter; we read books and the newspaper, not 25 reasons to be an idiot on Buzzfeed. Truth used to matter; less of the nation was as polarized. It was easier to get along without people shoving their ignorant political ideas in your face. Then 2016 happened, with the Russian trolls and other psyops used against us, and some of us realized we'd fucked up by buying into and encouraging others to join this network and others like it.

I could probably go on for a lot longer, but that's the gist of it.

What changed is FB had to make money - and they discovered "outrage" sells. That's the full answer. It has nothing to do with the lower-class crowding up your social network lol.

It really does have to do with that. It ceased being useful as a networking and socializing tool. It was a slow descent, but that’s the truth of it.

All of these complaints about the various superficial reasons for Facebook's decline I think are missing the forest for the trees.

The "grow fast monetize later" model that social media companies use, along with the user being the product, inevitably acts as a template for bait and switch.

All degradation of user experience stems from that. Of course using a social media platform during its "growth phase" is going to be a lot more of a pleasant experience than using that same platform when it's trying to maximize revenue.

Outrage only goes so far though. Using Brexit as an example, when the vote first went through, everyone devoured every bit of content they could regarding it, and the media followed. Then they started printing nothing but outrage until people just gave up and quit following the news. Anecdotal evidence sure, but everyone I know seems to only follow the news in passing now. Every headline. Every article. Every political interview. It all now revolves around this one completely divisive topic. If it's not Brexit it's Trump. It's exhausting.

It's no surprise that Facebook also seemed to chase the golden goose, but now that the main page is nothing but outrage or divisive news people are leaving in droves because they're fed up with seeing the same, day after day.

The lower-class people are the ones who are hooked on outrage and are still using the site. The upper-class people got sick of all the MAGA posts and left.

I'm not even sure how to properly characterize how condescendingly out of touch your comment is.

I was on Facebook before it opened to the general public, and it wasn't some ivory tower of intelligent thought where the educated could avoid mingling with the dumb. It was full of stupid social media stuff then too.

After Facebook opened up, my "poorly educated" uncle was content using Facebook to simply socialize with family and friends in 2012 when today he does nothing but share right-wing memes.

In the first year or two of Facebook, it was basically just students from the highest ranked / most expensive schools in the US. Part of the allure was the way they rolled that out, like an exclusive club. At the time, I don’t believe features like content previews existed - people weren’t sharing news articles much. It was more “social” and less “media”.

Is it condescending to acknowledge that it was a network for a fairly elite group of young people to start, and that it lost appeal when it became for everyone? Of course there wasn’t much intelligent discussion, everyone was under 25. But it was part tinder, part aim / livejournal, part social calendar; I don’t think it’s been those things for many years now.

> The world changed, too. Facts used to matter; we read books and the newspaper, not 25 reasons to be an idiot on Buzzfeed.

https://iandanielstewart.com/2017/06/16/the-golden-age-falla...

If facebook had any notion that their users are also still customers and important in that regard, despite revenue coming from their data consumers, they may have been inclined to care about state-based psyops campaigns victimizing their users. Instead, I think a corporate philosophy of exploitation prevailed.

> It turns out, many of us well educated people don't really want to network or socialize with poorly educated people.

Are you speaking for yourself here?

Do you want to spend your free time reading through a bunch of right-wing MAGA memes? I sure don't.

No, but I'm not ignorant or hostile enough to believe that everyone who didn't go to college is a Trump supporter.

I haven't noticed any change whatsoever since 2016 and Facebook continues to work great for me. But then I don't live in US.

I feel like the major change was who started using Facebook: people who had never "interneted" before. When it first launched and was limited to .edu emails everyone on the platform had grown up online. Before we had Facebook we said and shared a whole lot of dumb stuff anonymously and figured out the real-world consequences of our online actions. We "trolled" a wikipedia article about elephants with John Stewart and learned about "fake news" from Bonsai Kittens and pop-up ads promising we'd just become millionares. We "socialized" on AIM, LiveJournal, Xanaga and MySpace. For early Facebook users, Facebook was just one of many destinations on the internet.

But for most of today's Facebook users Facebook is the internet and they missed out on their internet training wheels. Facebook has merely replaced AOL for a generation of people who will now take any "article" their friend posted at face value, share it with all of their friends, and then angrily complain about "mainstream media" when their phone blows up in the microwave instead of charging like the "news" told them it would.

I'm not sure if I buy that. I would say for most young folks today "The Internet" is YouTube, not Facebook.

Sorry if I was unclear as I was trying not to malign baby boomers but I was referring to the 50+/not tech savvy crowd on Facebook, not the young internet users of today.

Ah, I misunderstood.

Please be careful with the "50+" comments, ha! Not there yet but closer than I'd like to admit, and I grew up during the sweet spot of modern computing. My biased opinion is that Gen X had it best in this regard.

Yes I was trying not to specifically say baby boomers because I know even the oldest user on HN is very much not the type I was trying to refer to.

I meant the users like my 60 year old father who was recently "Facebook hacked" when he accidentally hit the "insert" button on his keyboard.

Same bingo. My hypothesis (at least for the Facebook I see, that is of course a minuscule fraction) is that FB is mostly used now by people with an agenda (self promotion, spreading of an ideology, marketing, political campaign, whatever). Therefore, any disagreement is immediately treated as a threat. Ultimately FB has become a dark forest for casual users. The fun is gone.

Most people use Facebook these days to keep track of their acquaintances from various stages in life: high school friends, college friends, former coworkers, people you meet at parties etc.

In that regard it’s not very useful to teenagers who are already in the same building as their entire network every day (their school). Plus teenagers don’t want to hang out where their parents do. When I was in school part of facebook’s appeal was the fact that parents couldn’t get on even if they wanted due to the .edu email requirement!

For me, it's the interface. It's just really complicated and slow. And I can't communicate with followers without paying. Advertising on FB is not really worth it, in most cases.

And buggy, for example, a chat message I'm writing, getting lost because I switch to another browser tab (and the chat window is there too but empty / not synchronized, eventually causing the lost update bug).

And on my wide screen, 30'', the chat window is just like 2x1 cm large.

And on the events page, I choose to display today's or tomorrow's events. Then Facebook displays events from not those days.

> I would gladly pay $5-$10 a month for something that didn't sell my data.

Hmm. Facebook has something like 2 billion profiles. Of course, most of them wouldn't pay $5/month - say that only one percent would. 20 million profiles times $5/month = $100 million/month. It might be worth it for someone to try to build such a thing...

I’d be beyond shocked if even one percent of all Facebook users would pay $5/month for it. I think the only population of users who’d consider doing so are the intersection of those who are affluent (by Western standards), are extremely opposed to Facebook ads, and use it enough to consider paying for it.

I’d be surprised if you could get 1% of the US population of users to consider it, let alone the global population. You’d realistically be looking at single to very low double digit millions of users at the maximum.

And no one wants a social network with no friends on it.

An anecdotal story about this - a couple of years ago I built a paid, ad-free privacy-focused social network, did several Show HNs for it and even here, in a community that seems quite receptive to the idea in principle, there was extremely low interest in it.

I got probably 50 sign-ups over a few Show HNs, no more than 4/5 upvotes and comments on the most well-received Show HN, and those who came in just posted one or two test posts, found obviously that nobody else was on there and left never to be seen again. Obviously none converted to a paid account (you could get 10 connections for free then afterwards pay $2/month).

Bootstrapping any social network, let alone a paid one, is hard. But I did try :-)

For a few months now I've been toying with the idea of a "mutual data fund." A social network that collects & anonymizes user data, pools the data on behalf of all users (similar to how a mutual fund pools investor cash), and the data is "invested" (sold to advertisers) by a management company (like an investment adviser) with the data always under the ownership and control of an independent Board of Trustees (same as a mutual fund). Just like a mutual fund, the "returns" from the data would be used to pay the investment adviser for operating costs + some flat % and the rest of the returns would be allocated to users on a pro-rata basis. So the people who use the platform more or share higher-quality content get more "shares" (the investment kind, not the social media kind) of the ad revenue than those who aren't on the site often or share fake news or just annoy the crap out of everyone else.

Most users probably wouldn't make a whole lot of money on the platform but they'd have privacy and ownership of their data and they might end up with $5 or $10 after a year on the platform.

It is super hard to bootstrap, but sites like Facebook and Twitter already have hundreds of millions of users. Can't they run an experiment - something like "no ads/tracking for $5 (or whatever amount) per month" and see if there are any takers? If 20M sign up, that is 100M revenue per month.

Maybe they considered it and then rejected it as not viable?

Or maybe they make more off of ads per month than they think any reasonable user would pay.

Yup, all the teenagers I know of are on Discord and Steam.

Way too many political posts from my friends and family.

I love the political posts that are thoughtful, informative and spark real discussion.

So, maybe, one or two in the past three years.

The politics has destroyed the friendliness. Same goes for Twitter, to some extent; even for us political junkies. The constant drip of miserable stupidity of others is just exhausting.

The problem with the non ad driven model is that to you 5$ might be nothing, but some people 5$ is an impossible sum of money to spend a month on entertainment. Ads allow companies to offer first world products to customers who could desperately use technology to help them connect and trade in their local communities.

I think the discussion on privacy and ad based platforms should really be orthogonal.

Facebook could charge different prices in different geoip zones, like IP licensing does.

That's difficult, because in some cases the barrier to entry is having some way to pay. They might be able to afford 10 cents, but they don't have any means to submit that 10 cents into the system. They don't have a credit or debit card, probably not even a bank account to begin with.

> I think the discussion on privacy and ad based platforms should really be orthogonal.

Except that those two things are inseparable. The privacy problems are a direct result of the desire of the advertising industry to be able to target people based on their behavior, which necessitates spying on everyone.

If we could somehow eliminate that targeting, then we could discuss the two as separate topics.

They really aren't though. It's just that that is the stance the big players have. And the reason they have that stance might be because it is the only stance that can motivate their existence.

You can still target content rather than users.

> You can still target content rather than users.

Indeed you can. By "inseparable", I don't mean technically inseparable, I mean that the advertising industry has decided that personally targeted ads are the only sort of value. That means that, unless there is some sort of sea change in the industry, the two things are inseparable in practice.

If I see an ad, I can safely assume that it comes with spying. I'll be right far, far more often than I'll be wrong.

The value of ads is related to the spending power of those advertised to. If $5 is an impossible sum to spend for a user, advertising to them is worth very little as well.

The idea behind Facebook isn't to sell ads, it's to build a social platform for everyone. Sure, those people aren't spending a ton of money yet, but they still deserve to have access to the internet and major services.

I just unsubscribed from all of the folks on FB that post political stuff.

Maybe they should make that a global option, something like "Hide Political Stories" or something.

How would you classify a political story?

Uses the name of any currently elected representative, maybe?

AI to the rescue though, this feels like something you can teach.

I just started unfollowing (for people I actually interact with, or might need to) or unfriending (for people I will never see again, and don't want to) people who post overly political bullshit.

I don't mind a bit of politics, Australia is going to hell in a handcart and the least people can do is raise awareness. But I don't like inflammatory (and often completely fake) bullshit.

I can now scroll my newsfeed (which I don't actually do that often) without getting high blood pressure.

> I really wish there was a paid social media service that everyone used. I would gladly pay $5-$10 a month for something that didn't sell my data.

There was App.net, which attempted to be a fee-based better Twitter, but of course not everyone used and eventually shut down.

The only way to have a social network that everyone uses and is fee-based, would be to take one of the free ones and start charging...but then everyone would leave.

Purely anecdotal but when I could have moved to FB I held back because Myspace was more interesting. I eventually moved to FB as I got older, because.. I was older. My interests changed.

To some degree this may be an experience with the youth today, in time. Or not, I have no idea

IMO this is part of why Facebook's user base is so resilient. From what I see, younger people experiment more, looking for something that fits their identity, what their friends use, what's new, etc. They also have more time and incentive to explore new apps. By younger people I mean teenagers, high-school and younger.

Older people, it seems to me, are more utilitarian. By older people I mean college and up. They use Facebook for events, or because the social world is harder to navigate in college/later in life than when you're in high school and your friends are neighbors or classmates.

Perhaps this is just my experience, or maybe I'm just very off on how I read this, but it's a thought. I don't think Facebook is trying to be interesting— I think they're just shooting for useful and "sticky".

Anecdotally (I don't live in America), every teenager has a Facebook account. Not a single person has WhatsApp. Instagram is used but not nearly as much as Facebook. (When people cross-post pictures you see the FB post has 3x - 10x the number of likes as the Instagram post.)

There are zero political posts. Zero. I've never seen one.

If my feed were full of political stuff, I'd also be sick of it. But feed is exclusively full of what friends & acquaintances are doing.

Where do you live?

I live in Asia.

It's expected that people from group age 20+ will be the last active user base. As far as I know, most teens use Discord, Instagram, they have 0 interest in Facebook.

Snapchat is hands down the number one used app by the teenagers I teach. Then instagram.

for me, I personally check it less and less due to political posts.

I do have a few really great closed groups on there. Groups filled with people helping each other out. These are where I still find value on the platform.

I'm not sure losing that age group has much to do with Facebook's scandals.

This is purely anecdotal, but with my daughter and her social group, Facebook stopped being a service of interest to them quite a while back. Not because of data issues, but because (to use my daughter's words) "Facebook is for businesses and old people".

What does your daughter use to connect with friends? Just curious.

My brother is in that age group and he uses discord and normal text message groups.

Probably less of a suite of tech like FB and more a bunch of small single-purpose apps like snapchat and instagram.

not OP. But instagram, tik tok, vsco, snapchat

Not parent, but I am a college student at a large university in the US. Instagram is just huge, for the entire [university] population here. Snapchat is still used but not as common - Instagram is eating up Snapchat's userbase. GroupMe is used by the entire population for group chatting, and many males (especially more 'nerdy' guys) use Discord as the preferred general chat application.

Snapchat is the most annoying platform I have ever experienced for messaging. Disappearing messages (with no option for them to stick around) is literally an anti-feature.

Instagram is just annoying, because it's an image sharing platform being used as a messaging platform. I actually get annoyed when people message me on Instagram, because it means that their messages to me are scattered over different platforms.

You can keep any message you want by tapping on it. So yeah, you clearly haven't used SnapChat much.

Nerdy girls are on Discord too, although the ratio is skewed heavily in favor of men, at least based on my experience.

> What does your daughter use to connect with friends?

Steam and SMS, primarily. WhatsApp, too, but to a lesser degree.

And, probably, something else that I'm not aware of.

Steam? Can you please elaborate, I am getting old I didn't even know steam had a social component. (except people leaving reviews, or posting to game forums about parts of the game)

Steam has a pretty robust messaging system including multi-user rooms and voice chat, etc. They're directly competing with Discord on that front now. There's groups and communities and other social components as well, though I'm not as familiar with those.

Oh yeah definitely, it's got nothing to do with privacy, it's just not a platform geared towards younger people, because it's a platform that caters to older people.

Kids these days don't give a shit about privacy. Why would they?

> Kids these days don't give a shit about privacy.

I'm not so sure that's true. At least, it's not true among the kids that I personally know.

What is true is that they have a more pragmatic view of the issue than us oldsters -- they view it as more like a monetary exchange: they understand and care about privacy, but they're willing to pay for a service by giving some of it up if they think the value they're receiving justifies it.

That's not the same as not caring. Just the opposite, it's caring enough to make conscious decisions about how to valuate it.

The kids I know (my teenage siblings) genuinely don't give a shit, and neither do their friends, or their friends' friends.

Nor do the many many kids on YouTube or Twitch.

Not a single one of the children I just mentioned understand, care about, or are willing to pay to keep their privacy, in any form.

And they're right. It doesn't matter, because nothing happens when you lose your privacy on the Internet, not even remotely approaching the risks we take and accept in our daily lives (driving, swimming, walking outside, etc.).

Because their entire history will be a matter of public record, and as we have seen repeatedly over the last few years, a wrong tweet from ten years ago can break an entire career, and I only see this getting worse. The kids who take care of what they expose to the public will spare themselves a lot of potential trouble.

Obviously this should not only be an issue of the kids. In an ideal world parents would be conscious of their kids online behavior.

The crazy thing is, for me, Facebook was actually useful for following news ever since Google Reader died. I spent quite a bit of time following many pages (people and businesses) in order to stay up to date on news, and I was incredibly happy at the results. I even went the extra effort to unfollow "Friends" that I didn't want to offend by unfriending.

Facebook simply screwed up everything. They removed custom lists a few months ago, so instead of chronological posts that I could navigate with lists, it's now back to a single algorithm-based feed. Many of the people I spent time unfollowing continue to blast me with notifications for literal shit posts that I can't disable. Did you notice that when you swipe a notification in the feed, there's no way to "Hide all notifications like this" or "Hide notifications for Events from xxxx"? It's unbelievable what Facebook is doing to ruin the experience. It's now impossible to disable specific categories of notifications or from people, without just unfriending them.

I moved back to Twitter and barely touch Facebook now. The product decisions are just plain frustrating. It's now no longer an app for following news.

I still use it as a news feed: even with no sorted posts and all the weakness you pointed out, i found no other aggregator like FB. Notifications send no warning on my smartphone (i disabled them all), except the red dot inside the app: i click once in a while, just to "cleanse" it.

I believe they know that social media are subjected to fashion just like everything else: the best way to keep on riding the way is peraphs be the one who kill the old (fb) while nurturing the new (Instagram/whatsapp). In this manner, the numbers are always growing - and that's the only metric they care about.

Exactly. It feels very much like giant company syndrome. Some directors picked metrics like "frequency of fresh content on top of newsfeed," then that metric become a goal for some manager a few levels down, and when metrics become goals, they stop being good metrics. Nobody with the power to stop it would have been focused on "average value of content item," and everybody else had a motivation to get whatever content their group was in charge of some visibility, so it's more or less inevitable that it'd all go to shit.

It feels like Facebook now contains all of the negative parts of social media - complaining, arguing, chain posts, fake news, relatives, etc. While Instagram now has all the pleasant parts - pretty photos of families, vacations and food! So these days I find myself using Instagram regularly and Facebook almost never.

Having said that, I'll never leave Facebook until something else replaces it. It's the only place I have to keep in touch with a couple hundred people I would otherwise have no contact with. And it's still common for various groups of people I know to use it for event planning.

I also find myself having to share invites and news with people I know who are not on Facebook. They appreciate it, but I consider it a pain in the ass that they could easily resolve by getting a Facebook account again and just checking it once a week.

Instagram to me seems like the worst parts of social media, in that it's a vanity feeding mechanism amplified. Which in turn makes it an anxiety inducing experience if you aren't doing "cool things" that make other people jealous.

I agree with you completely.

Instagram is social McDonalds. Quick gratification from pretty pictures of friends doing cool shit, ranked so that the prettiest friends appear on your newsfeed first.

Try putting a serious post on Instagram, nobody will see it and it will fall flat.

Meanwhile I put out a post on Facebook asking for help (after my house was burgled) and had about 15 people messaging me within a couple of hours willing to come around to my place and lend me a hand.

You can't even share links on Instagram, so I'm sure that the GoFundMe that was set up to help cover the money that was stolen from me would've gotten a lot less money than it has.

I like Instagram as an entertainment platform for looking at cool photos, and for posting the occasional photo myself (never of myself, always landscape of event photography), but it's absolute trash as a social media platform.

I consume Instagram like TV (they even launched IGTV, although I don't use it and it's terrible). People mostly don't get anxiety from watching TV. Maybe it has to do with the fact I don't use Instagram as SNS.

I guess I view it from the other end of that spectrum. It's a place where I get ideas of places to go and things to do/see/eat. Plus I enjoy seeing the people I care about doing things that make them happy. I want my friends to show off the best parts of their lives.

But I'm also very particular about who I follow, unlike on Facebook where I'm friends with every old coworker, classmate and family member.

I enjoy using IG but I don’t follow many real people. I follow organizations, brands, etc. I like seeing their new stuff as well as any news such as sales, new releases, etc. I follow photographers and artists. It’s essentially a feed of stuff I like.

I wouldn’t follow “real” people unless they’re close friends. Don’t want to see people’s lunches or vacations.

It's also the only platform of any kind where I have clicked on ads... on purpose!

I suppose if you use IG like that then sure. For me, I follow other photographers and online "zines", so my IG is full of other artists. "Influencers", celebrities, and meme accounts are banished from my feed. In turn, I only post the photos I want to be public, that I'd sell as prints or show in a gallery.

If you follow the vanity stream then you're going to see exactly that, but IG can be a totally different experience. For me, it's a fantastic source of inspiration and a way to see what other artists are doing.

Now, for me the only use FB has left is a dumping ground for my photos that the older members of my family want to see but whom are not on IG yet.

I travel a lot and enjoy taking pictures and sharing them with friends so Instagram was a lot harder for me to give up then Facebook. I just disabled my account though and so far it feels like a positive move. Instagram isn't entirely without benefits but overall it just started to feel like an obligation and a distraction.

Facebook is quite good as a contact list. It’s a good way to get ahold of random people you might have trouble getting in touch with otherwise. Email, phone and addresses change but a Facebook id typically does not. They can keep their “engagement” though.

Messenger works as a standalone app, I've found it easier to message people there instead of friending them where they'll live in my feed forever even once they cease to be relevant.

It’s a terrible contact list. They don’t actually give you the details you need to contact people!

If the user in question actually uses Facebook, then it can act as a messaging service. But if someone, for instance, sent me a Facebook message, they would never receive a response, because I would learn about it approximately 6 months later when I do my annual login.

facebook shot themselves in the foot with their constant attempts to bring the news sites to their platform. It used to be about virtual sheep, and then it became a place where apparently people chatter endlessly about politics. One has to wonder if politics is the best way to keep your users engaged or the most profitable.

couple hundred people I would otherwise have no contact with

Not being snarky, this is a genuine question - If you can't make the effort to email these people every other month or so, then do you really care that much about them? I can understand the difficulties in visiting in person, or even phone calls - many people don't like phone calls these days, but email/SMS? This sounds more like you have a passing curiosity about these people than genuinely caring about them

I was about to comment on that particular remark too.

Lately I’ve unfollowed/unfriended everyone I dont feel I have a relationship to.

People of my class 1996 or whatever? Gone. That’s not my social circle anymore. Etc. You get the picture.

But still FB insisted on showing all kinds of uninteresting garbage instead of posts from people I know.

So now I’m no longer checking Facebook. And they did it to themselves.

I've gotten back in touch with various people over the years. I can't predict which of the couple hundred people I will have a reason to reach out to in the future. But I know I'll inevitably be happy to be connected to this or that person on Facebook when I pick up a similar hobby or visit a certain place or go looking for some new type of job, etc.

And no, obviously not ever person I know is worth emailing or calling on the phone on some regular basis. That doesn't mean I don't want to know them.

I live in a somewhat large gated community that has a pretty active facebook group. The group is somewhat loosely moderated by the HOA (for better or worse) so in general people stay on-topic and neighborly. It's great for asking for recommended contractors, asking if somebody has a thing they can borrow, etc. This is one of the few things that keeps me on facebook.

Of course facebook is a terrible venue for this group - with its algorithmic feed, horrible search, and showing "notifications" when nothing of consequence has actually happened. If there were a more prevalent network I'm sure the group would move but there's really no other alternative that already has a critical mass of users and people aren't going to sign up for a new service unless everyone else in the neighborhood is already there.

Nextdoor really needs to get it's act together on siloing neighborhood discussions, it's basically built for this.

Nextdoor is terrible. I get push notified of every lost cat or dog. Or whenever the local grocery store is out of cabbage. Or "suspicious people" walking around. I can't find a way to get any value out of it.

>Or "suspicious people"

The bane of Nextdoor. Every person within 100 yards is suspicious, especially if they have "Hair color: african" (I kid you not, this one is from my neighborhood Nextdoor).

Nextdoor is awful. I think the idea was really good, but I've really just come to learn that by and large, my neighborhood is full of idiots. I guess the whole reason for social media is that we can choose who to be around, whereas we can't chose our neighbors. I only lasted about a month before the constant barrages of arguing over leash laws, petty snide comments, and self promoting 'handymen' drove me away.

>If there were a more prevalent network I'm sure the group would move

I'm pretty sure there is one literally Nextdoor...

Going cold turkey is never easy. If you're having trouble withdrawing, consider what I did over the past few years:

1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone; next

2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone; then

3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone; then

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?" (It's been months since I've cared to log into Facebook. Feels more like trudging through spam in an old e-mail inbox, now, than anything compelling.)

I quite like the plugins that remove the newsfeed too - or unfollow (not unfriend) everyone. It's a nice intermediate step so you can still use events and messages, but the most annoyingly addictive bit is gone. The light versions of the apps can be a useful step too.

Finally, after logging out - deactivating your account, and then deleting your account (or better, getting a trusted friend to do so for you) are the last steps. (If you're interested in UX, are you a little bit curious what the UX for those two is like?)

I'm going to go against the grain here and say that I really like Facebook and think that overall it's a good platform with some flaws.

Right now I'm messaging 2 different groups and about 5 different people, while organising an event that's happening in a few weeks, and organising supplies and camping for a festival on the weekend. After this festival in the weekend, I can post the photos I took on Facebook, where everyone can tag each other in the photos, so they can be easily found.

For me it's an integrated social and event management platform. It works incredibly well for this purpose. If I need to find a generator for an event, I can ask in a group chat, or even put up a timeline post asking for one, and it will probably manifest. I had a friend who's laptop died and he needed a temporary replacement, so he put up a post and later that afternoon was in front of a new laptop.

There are some really shitty features that I hate about Facebook though, to the point that they induce anxiety. For messenger, being able to see when people were last active and when messages have been seen really makes my anxiety build up. I know that people aren't ignoring me and just take time to reply, because I do exactly the same myself, but it still plays in the back of my mind.

The second really shitty feature is that the people you interact with more are the people you keep seeing on your newsfeed or at the top of your messenger. I had a bit of conflict with a friend a while back, so we were giving each other some space to cool down. I kept seeing all her posts at the top of my newsfeed, and she kept appearing on the top of my contacts list for messenger, Facebook would even give me notifications that "Alice and 89 others have responded to events near you tomorrow". It actually did my fucking head in to the point where it was causing significant problems with my mental wellbeing.

I understand exactly why Facebook does this, to increase activity and engagement. But fuck it pisses me off.

The positive features you mention are related to network effects or essentially to Facebook's "first mover advantage". As I see it, you should consider Facebook as merely the incumbent in this "connecting" role, i.e. don't give the Facebook organization any credit for the market position they find themselves in. The software must be adequate enough but that's a separate issue from FB's immense asset, its subscribers.

just for organisational purposes I feel whatsapp or wechat groups do a lot of what you're describing (except for the ease of photo tagging), and it leaves out all the stressful and annoying newsfeedy things you get on facebook. Which I think is pretty crucial, because that's all the social and data and ad driven stuff that facebook essentially runs on.

In general there seems to be, especially among younger people, a tendency back towards smaller communities, fewer strangers, less agitation and so on. Youtube, Patreon and Twitch creators seem to be particularly successful.

> It actually did my fucking head in to the point where it was causing significant problems with my mental wellbeing.

You could have turned off seeing updates from her. That would not solve all the things you mentioned but it should in almost all cases suffice.

Friends giving each other space is maybe a thing but not being able to handle seeing her name pop up at all is a very extreme state of affairs about which I would suggest consulting with someone.

I think it's unfair to expect a feature that caters to that. You cannot just full ignore somebody in real life either, e.g. friends mentioning her name.

Facebook does in fact allow you to block a person or unfriend them. If you and your friend are in agreement about giving each other space, those two options should be enough from a reasonable feature expectation standpoint.

If you are friends with someone and interact a lot it's obvious and generally a good thing that Facebook highlights them. Facebook cannot know on its own that you are currently "not actually" friends with someone.

You can actually "take a break" from a friend in newsreel. It mutes them for like 30 days. Don't know if it translates to messenger though

The idea of Facebook was and remains great. This is a story of hubris, plain and simple.

As I've said before repetedly, in order to use facebook effectively, you need to do everything you can to avoid the algorithm.

What I mean by that is that you don't want facebook deciding what you see. Instead, you want to control your feed as much as possible. I've found that to be true to some extent for every social media platform.

With facebook, the best way to do this seems to be to create a "friend list" of all of the people whose posts you want to see, and then bookmark it so you can use it as your main portal to facebook. When viewing the list, you'll see the posts and shares of everyone in that group (in chronological order) and nothing else. Nothing about who liked what or who commented on what.

Now, go to the list, scroll through everyone's posts until you see something you remember from last time you were on, and that's it. You're done with facebook unless you want to post something.

Similarly, my portal to youtube is the subscription feed. If I want to see recommendations, I'll go looking for them. On reddit I tend to browse r/all with a pretty extensive block list. Whatever I can do to stop algorithms from deciding what I see.

We only show trace numbers of people leaving social media altogether. They're obviously just transferring their usage. The big gainer, interestingly, is under the same roof as Facebook. It's their co-owned Instagram.

We already knew this. Another day on HN, another clickbait FB post.

> How the study was conducted: A total of 1,500 persons were interviewed to explore Americans’ use of digital platforms and new media. From January 3rd through February 4th, 2019, telephone interviews were conducted with respondents age 12 and older who were selected via Random Digit Dial (RDD) sampling through both landline phones and mobile phones. The survey was offered in both Spanish and English. Data was weighted to national 12+ U.S. population estimates.

I wouldn’t put much faith in this estimate. While facebook’s is probably an overestimate of people actually engaged in their platform, this survey doesn’t seem very useful to me.

I am always sad to see responses like this. Statistics is a very well-defined mathematical discipline, and any good research firm will use weighting techniques to adjust for demographic-based likelihood of response. The results they get from this are very accurate.

If you have concerns about Edison's methodology or application of standard survey weighting then I think that could be a fruitful conversation. But implying that 1,500 responses can't be predictive for a country of 350 million is woefully misinformed.

Phone surveys were accurate when robocalls and cellphones didn't exist. Now you're only sampling the people who aren't discerning enough to reject unknown numbers.

Having concerns about their methodology would imply that they've actually shared it. The closest they get is a hand-wavy answer to the discrepancies between Facebook's data and their own:

> We're saying, "Do you currently use Facebook?" Facebook is probably measuring it on, “Do you ever open the app, or do you ever use it on any level?”

That answer doesn't event make sense. Given that Edison have gone to the press to promote their report and this particular number, you'd expect them to have a good answer on the discrepancies. They should definitely know what the Facebook numbers represent, especially given Facebook publicly disclose their definition of an active user in SEC filings.

Fair. I do commonly do social statistics myself and have to deal with worse. My gripe was moreso that it's a random digit dialing survey (which I think would be full of bias for a purpose like this) instead of the actual usage statistics that facebook provides. Also, sampling is simply a hard thing to do. And their definition of leaving is pretty poor.

Also if we want to get nitpicky, while there is a significant drop between 2017 and 2018, there is no significant drop between 2019 and 2018 (62% -> 61%, p value of .57), despite the headline being 'Facebook Usage Continues to Drop' :)

Also, any methodology problems can be mitigated by the fact that they did the same survey with the same methodology in 2017, and compared their results. You expect to get better accuracy by asking people then and now "do you use Facebook?" than by asking them now "do you use Facebook, and did you use it two years ago?"

Is there a specific reason you doubt the estimate, or is your problem that the sample size is small? Small sample sizes don’t imply incorrect conclusions.

EDIT: To whoever has downvoted this, I politely (but urgently) recommend you read up on statistical significance. The idea that a small sample size implies a study’s findings are unreliable is one of the most widely held misconceptions in modern statistics.

Social media is weird. At the beginning of this year I unfriended everyone and unsubscribed from every group/page except for a couple parent groups of schools my kids are at.

It was odd how it felt like betrayal to unfriend people I know and love. Though experiencing those feelings for something as dumb as FB did confirm to me how evil social media is.

The human mind isn't really configured to handle social media. It feels so personal.

Try to close your FB account, they’ll make you feel like your killing puppies before you finally get out.

I deleted my FB last year and was really concerned, like you were, about offending people. I messaged my then girlfriend "hey I'm deleting fb" just so she'd know. I have friends that while we're not super close we'd talk a few times a week, usually just sending funny jokes. They didn't see me on messenger so they just texted me. They didn't even realize I'd deleted it. One of my closer friends who invites me to her kids birthdays and what not went to send me an invite and made me an evite when she didn't see my account. She was surprised when I told her I just deleted fb.

I realized I really had never gone to anyones actual profile page in maybe a year or two. Hell, the last profile I may have actually taken more than a cursory glance at was my ex when we first started dating. I guess nobody else does either when you can just @them.

With that said I do feel very out of the loop but it's allowed me to focus on my own life and I'm on a social media cleanse (doh, hn) anyway.

Interestingly enough I do keep having feelings about reopening it but I permanently deleted so I can't and I'm glad I did. Prior to that I had temporarily closed it and reopened it a handful of times.

I've blocked ads ever since ad blockers were a thing. Facebook have finally managed to consistently get past uBlock Origin, and seeing ads in my news feed for the first time is really, really annoying me. They look similar enough to real posts that I read them automatically before I realise, which I find really disturbing. It's enough that I'm seriously contemplating not using Facebook any more.

If you use the facebook.com website (not the app) they are _torturing_ HTML to get ads past the blockers. Stuff like putting every letter in a separate span or div, weird encoding tricks, etc.

Do you examples? That sounds educational.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19115460

> I'm seriously contemplating not using Facebook any more.

You talk the talk but can you walk the walk?

Whenever the topic of Facebook gets brought up I see a lot of comments on how "the news feed sucks". That it's filled with hateful comments. Leaving facebook is great because it takes toxic people out of your lives! What seems to be missing from the conversation is that Facebook to a large extent is what you make it to be. _You_ decide who to follow, who to keep as your friend, whose post you want to see. There is nothing stopping you from simply removing everyone except your family members and your good friends in which case I'd argue it actually becomes a great tool and a net positive.

If what things end up on the timeline aren’t a simple result of what feeds you select, that makes the feed one sees less under one’s control, doesn’t it?

There's some things you can't influence though.

There's, for example, no way to disable page invite notifications.

I think a lot of that has moved to WhatsApp - at least here in Germany people create and participate in groups for all kinds of social circles and activities:

From never ending, ongoing groups, like family, friends, clubs / sport teams or work to temporary and occasional groups dedicated to events like birthdays, travel with friends, festivals, etc.

The concept of groups is easy to grasp and it's much simpler than organizing Facebook in a similar way. It includes people who don't have a Facebook account (all they need is a phone number and even grandma can join in) and participating feels much less public than posting anything on Facebook.

Of course I imagine Facebook won't mind that transition and development all that much.

This is an oversimification. I have hundreds of friends on Facebook but the algorithm somehow does an amazing job of choosing my top ten most toxic friends and highlighting their most toxic posts. Unfriend all of them and it finds the next top ten most toxic. Saying “Facebook is what you make it to be” ignores the fact that Facebook does a fine job of making itself be pretty terrible.

>What seems to be missing from the conversation is that Facebook to a large extent is what you make it to be.

Regretfully, this was not the case for me. I tried tweaking my news feed to my preferences for multiple years and it still showed me crap that made me sad. More importantly, mindlessly scrolling my news feed was a time sink, and I found it very difficult to stop. I was definitely addicted to it, in the same way that I experienced addiction to chocolate to cope with my PhD.

I broke the addiction for myself by using a news feed blocker recommended by a friend. Recently, I deleted all the content off my facebook in the hope it would discourage other people from interacting with facebook. The addictive properties of facebook are all in instagram, even if it is less toxic, so I hold it in similar disdain.

It's not that simple because imagine that you have a friend that's really cool but you can't talk with him about cars because he has unpopular opinions (or dumb) but really likes to argue for them.

If you have that friend on FB then, because he sometimes posts things about cars and it gets heated, that's what FB like try for you to engage with.

FB seeks and promotes "engagement" over "quality of experience" so it will always try to make you anger (it leads to more engagement) than to have a fulling experience.

If the algorithm can only work with chill people and very alike... it will still try to find what divides and "engages" that group of people.

I disabled my Facebook account 4 years or so ago and didn't miss it. That said, I now have a daughter with an extremely rare genetic disorder. Although there are a number of databases out there specifically to help parents find other families with rare genetic disorders, we didn't find anyone until we resorted to Facebook. This is only one anecdote, but from my personal experience thus far, Facebook is still unfortunately the best place to find a needle in a haystack.

(edit: typo) FB has completely swallowed the Groups space. We are new parents and my wife connects with other new parents in a local group specific to our son's age cohort. FB Marketplace is also very useful, as other people have mentioned. I got off FB services a few months ago, but would join again if they had a standalone Groups app.

This is my same experience. Son has JIA. There is a JIA-specific website that connects you to JIA-specific support groups.... but there are none active near me, and I live in a very big city. I expressed this frustration to my wife who uses Facebook often, and she joined an active JIA community in moments.

I guess now we have two anecdotes. That makes us a statistic, I think?

No problem.

Bots will take up their place, and clueless companies will keep on wasting dollars by the millions.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucerogers/2019/01/18/will-it-...

I’m sure readers on HN are excited about the day of privacy reckoning but I stopped using Facebook because the news feed sucks. I’ll stare at a photo of someone I don’t remember trying to recall how I know them and then for the next month it’s photos and videos and requests for travel recommendations from them until I block them. It’s clear despite all the data Facebook has collected the company has no clue who I care about or what I’m interested in.

I think the news feed sucks even if it’s a picture of current contacts. It probably always has, I mean, there must be a reason Facebook wanted news, brands and whatever else there.

I just never followed things, so right now the most exciting part of my FB news feed is the commercials for board-game kickstarters.

I still use Facebook though. It’s still the best place to organise events with friends because it’s still the only platform everyone is on. I wish it wasn’t, but because the various other platforms and messaging app didn’t share an open protocol, no other platform has “everyone”.

Eventually when enough people quit FB, no platform will be good at organising events. Or maybe we will finally agree to use e-mail. :p

I only use Facebook for Messenger for the same reasons - everyone is on it. If that wasn't the case I'd happily delete my account.

The thing about Messenger is it's pretty good too. My wife and I used to use iMessage. When I switched to Android last year we decided to try Telegram. Notifications are often not send and calls are buggy at best. Messenger just works though, just like iMessage did.

I closed my Facebook account around 2012, maybe even earlier. Recently I had to reactivate it (oh, and that's when I found out that Facebook never deleted my account). It still active but I simply don't use it. And I believe that's the best compromise for most people. It's still there, and if you need to lookup someone, for instance, just log in. Elsewise, just don't use it.

The headline is disingenuous. I suspect a lot of folks are taking away from the headline that Facebook the company is on the ropes, however looking into the primary source[1] indicates that they are only talking about Facebook the product. The press is not making that distinction here. A vast amount of people leaving "Facebook" are just going to Instagram.

[1] https://www.edisonresearch.com/infinite-dial-2019/

Most of my friends despise Facebook, but at the end of the day we're still using their other products like WhatsApp and Instagram.

Someone switching from FB to Instagram does not genuinely count as someone leaving Facebook; they are just switching to a different implementation of Facebook owned by the same company.

And the only reason most of them are switching is to follow the herd. They don't want to be left behind in some place where they are not able to obtain as much validation (fishing for likes and followers). That type of personality needs to be "where everyone else is".

Their lives are exactly the same, except with a different social networking application.

Facebook isn't going to lie on their quarterly filings on user growth. It's far more likely this random company's polling methodology is flawed.

Facebook lied about their video engagement numbers for a long time while telling others measuring it that their methodologies were flawed.

Enron and Arthur Anderson weren't going to lie on their quarterly filings either. Not saying it's true or false, but there's also the possibility that user count methodologies can change to create the appearance of growth.

How do you suppose that Enron "weren't going to lie" on their quarterly flyings? This analogy is a bit rich.

It's rich that you created an account specifically to make this comment. Lying on financial reports is not uncommon and there are high profile examples, so a sweeping appeal to honesty on the part of a multi billion company caught lying in the past is foolish.

A bunch of my Facebook friends are taking a break from Facebook for Lent.

It'll be interesting to see how many realize they don't need Facebook in their lives and simply don't come back.

Deleted facebook years ago and never regretted it. It's always the same people posting the same stuff. It's simply just boring for me because I'm not interested in personal lives of people. Twitter on the other hand is great for news updates and it's the only mainstream social network I use.

Facebook says their North American monthly active users have increased 1% since 2017. Edison Research says there are 6% fewer US users since 2017.

I'm curious to understand the reason for this discrepancy. Edison says,

We're saying, "Do you currently use Facebook?" Facebook is probably measuring it on, "Do you ever open the app, or do you ever use it on any level?"

Here's how Facebook defines monthly active users:

We define a monthly active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, or used our Messenger app (and is also a registered Facebook user), in the last 30 days as of the date of measurement.

So is Edison's explanation reasonable? Maybe people only think they "use" Facebook when they scroll through the feed - and people are still using it for other purposes.

using facebook has become a sort of taboo in certain cycles, so people may be misreporting it intentionally

also, a significant drop in users should be detectable by every website which relies significantly on facebook traffic

I have no mercy for them. I have no explanation other than pure evil for the thing which i describe below - happy to hear other thoughts on this.

1) On mobile Chrome, in a not private tab, I flag an ad served via the FB ad network, to be precise it was on imgur.

2) On my smartphone, I strictly and only use FB with https://mbasic.facebook.com in mobile Chrome in a private tab. I never logged in in the not private tab.

3) I log-in to FB in the private tab a couple of minutes later and I get a notification that they received and reviewed the complaint from 1)

That was a huge WTF moment for me yesterday - I would love to learn on how they do it and why they think that's something the user would be happy to experience.

One area I see why FB is losing a lot of users is that there's just too much noise generated, where the content which people may find to some degree useful is being crowded by the same repetitive ads, notifications, (fake) news and headlines that are being circulated around within your interests (friends, followed stuffs, etc.).

I recall when FB was immersive because it provided you content which you relate to - people you know, people you follow, interests that makes you feel that this social tool is enriching your life. Nowadays, FB is like a river with too much garbage on it. You won't enjoy swimming, much less even enjoy what you are seeing.

Original source:

https://www.edisonresearch.com/infinite-dial-2019/

> Regarding social media, the latest study finds the number of current users of Facebook continues to drop. The study shows an estimated 15 million fewer users of Facebook than in the 2017 report. The declines are heavily concentrated among younger people.

https://www.slideshare.net/webby2001/infinite-dial-2019

Slide 9-14 or so contain the relevant demographic and year-over-year breakout.

There are way too many articles about Facebook that are simply:

  1. Title implies Facebook is going down.
  2. Body clarifies that everyone is just using Instagram

Facebook's investor presentation shows MAU stay flat at 242 millions in Q4'18. I don't see a 15 millions drop.

(The numbers for DAUs and MAUs do not include Instagram, WhatsApp, or Oculus users)

https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2018/Q4...

Thanks for the link, very interesting document, it really shows an impressive scale.

And for the metrics, it's probably coming from the fact that a lot of people use Messenger without using Facebook, but it's still considered "using Facebook".

A large part of the problem for Facebook, at least personally, is that its too popular. Initially I only had my college friends on it. With them I had a different dynamic and different kinds of things I'd share. Then the first wave of relatives (cousins, etc) joined. This leads to more content on your feed, but you have to be more careful about what you'd share since its going to reach a different network. Also, its weird if your boss or colleagues want to join your network. Then the oldies joined, parents and grandparents, that means either you set up elaborate rules for who can see what, and remember to set them up every time you update something, or you post bland content that you don't mind anybody seeing. I am not off Facebook, but my engagement has gone down to about a couple of times a week. Their notifications are increasingly meaningless and I am not the only one doing this.

On the other hand, I feel Facebook as a company is doing great. WhatsApp is incredibly popular for exactly the reasons Facebook itself is not, private groups that you can share stuff with as needed. Less chance of people seeing material you did not intend for them.

What are people's thoughts on not deleting FB to better secure your personal identity. In the context of leaving google's services, I see people say that they sit on their email so no one else can take it, but I never see that sentiment about deleting fb.

Is it just that the bar to successfully impersonate someone via fb is higher and email is lot easier to manipulate?

I am particularly interested because I am planning on deleting my personal fb soon.

It's easy to not delete and stop using to serve your purpose. I loathe facebook et al., but some employers (fewer and fewer these days) want to see my online presence. To not have a facebook was considered strange, so for that reason, I keep it around. However, as far as maintaining an identity, or holding on to your custom facebook url, that’s a non-issue. Delete away, and create again—facebook is intelligent enough to reconnect you to all those people if need be. Personal identity is strengthened by other's endorsement. That's easy to get again with FB, especially if you're who you really are. It's difficult to take someone’s identity in that sense and it be valuable to the person doing it.

> some employers (fewer and fewer these days) want to see my online presence.

That's a really huge red flag. I don't think that I'd be willing to risk taking a job with a company that asked for this.

I think their AI is programmed to keep people on the site and therefore they leave bugs in like: When you scroll down and a video pops out, you're suddenly at the top When you like a message in chat, on desktop, you have to hover a few times until it shows up. These are bugs, but they keep you using the site longer.. I just leave when they do that.

Oooh wait, a new one! Every time I go to the site, it says I have 1 unread message, but it goes away when I open messages. This keeps me on the site long enough to look at my messages and click "mark all as unread" again.

Basically if you have any kind of publicly available contact information/presence, and you have friends that really care enough to want to reach out to you for a meaningful, enriching interaction, they can figure out how to reach out to you.

This facebook culture of needing this centralized service to dictate whether or not you exist as an individual is complete bullshit and I reject it outright. The idea that we're trading away true autonomy for the "ease of social interaction via the web" when most facebook interaction actually is people looking at the endless feed of nonsense/memes/political garbage on the news feed, and not any kind of meaningful 1-on-1 messaging, is the ultimate farce.

Furthermore, whats even worse about the facebook normalization thats occurring, is this idea that, "oh, you don't have $(OUR_OFFERING)? What's wrong with you? How can I possibly reach out to you?"

What do people really get out of facebook? I'd be willing to wager that there is no value creation occurrring. Either you're wealthy enough that they'll figure out how to hook up your anonymized profile info in such a way that you will get sold useless nonsense, or you're poor enough that they will try to dominate what your impression is of the "broader Web experience"

Why are we all paying $(MAX_INT) dollars a month on a cell phone subscription if we're all supposedly intimately connected via Internet platforms? Meanwhile, people feel more depressed than they've ever felt before, and socialization is declining across all quantifiable dimensions. So either I'm missing something, or its just a huge joke at everyone's expense.

I finally got around to deleting my facebook recently and while, as with all addictions, has been challenging, I feel myself slowly taking my life back from the social media theatre that has taken over human life over the last decade, give or take a few years.

It's obvious that Facebook is having some challenges from the dramatic increase in the number of inline ads (promoted posts). FB is scrambling to generate enough revenue to avoid spooking investors.

What the investors will be missing if they abandon Facebook, however, is that Facebook has one of the most valuable data droves in history. Long after the kind of dark patterns and data collection policies used by Facebook have been outlawed, the trove that has already been collected will provide AI with plenty of information on human behavior for many decades into the future.

Imagine if you are studying the human genome and you are forced to stop collecting new DNA samples after you only have 1.74 Billion samples collected. Not a bad place to be in considering that no new competitors will be allowed to collect samples in the way FB does today in the "wild west" of privacy violation.

Spooking investors? Aren't they kind of past the point of needing to raise money, and onto the challenge of completing world domination?

They'd actually somewhat recently taken steps to reduce the number of posts, and instead push advertisers to bid more for fewer impressions. If successful, this has the impact of getting them more revenue with a better UX since there are fewer ads and in theory higher-quality brand advertisers who can afford more for those impressions.

The only reason I signed up for Facebook, just five years ago or less, is because someone posted a scientific paper or video there. This post wound up being not worth looking at and I didn't go to Facebook for anything until about three years ago when I went to a funeral and found some long lost relatives I hadn't seen in decades and others I never knew. "Are you on Facebook?", they asked.

So I went there and friended them. It was kind of fun or interesting for a few posts but, the only one I was most interested in talking to, I talk to on the phone or email more often than Facebook. The rest is idle chit-chat about people and things I know nothing about or care about.

So now my Facebook involvement never goes further than to visit the login page, see if I have the red notification icon that someone posted something directly to me and, if not, leave.

Not sure your age range, but I'm an older millenial (mid-30s) and I couldn't tell you the last time I picked up the phone and called someone to chat without intention (making plans, etc) or sent a non-work email that wasn't related to something financial/house-buy/sale related.

I deleted FB last year but when I did use it it was purely as a messaging platform.

My personal gmail about 10 years ago turned into more of a graveyard for spam and receipts than a communication platform.

Well, yes. If I have nothing to say to someone directly, I do not call them but I also do not spray message everything I have to say to everyone on Facebook.

They are going to Instagram though. Thats one of facebook smartest move. Buying all the other social media sites.

This is also one of the biggest failures of the modern antitrust law.

If giants like FB can't innovate and must buy competition to survive despite all the advantages they have, something is wrong.

Counterpoint:

Many new innovative companies are being founded in this space and those that are successful are richly rewarded (by selling to FB). The system is working exactly how it is supposed to.

>The system is working exactly how it is supposed to.

US system is designed to be anti-markets and pro business, so you have a point. Good for startup, good for FB, bad for consumer and competition.

It's still against what anti-trust law was supposed to be.

Also remember that in the US it's perfectly legal to be a monopoly. What is illegal is abusing your monopoly position by engaging in unfair practices (which is a rather fuzzy and hard-to-prove thing).

I deleted my Facebook more than a year ago and never missed it but I had to go back on Facebook multiple times this week because I created a page for my new business and I was surprised how repelling the whole thing was. I was confused why am I disgusted by it but it was really pushing me away.

I lost too many "friends" on Facebook: I knew these people for many years, but I was shocked what they posted - from stupid to incredible things, mostly politics and mostly far left. I started cutting all these people and I was left with less than 20 when I closed my account.

> mostly politics and mostly far left

You're upset that your friends have different political opinions than you? And you're blaming Facebook for this? Why?

It's not difference of opinion that is the problem - it's often quality of argument. Political discussions generally these days are very low quality - not actually trying to work out the best policies that will work best for society. Just posting memes. Little listening. Each side in an echo chamber. People unable to explain why they think things.

Is that wrong? I have virtually no interest in politics. It's unlikely that I'm going to remain friends with anyone who expresses particularly strong political views, left or right. I just don't care, and find it too exhausting to be bothered most of the time. If the only place I see/hear those views is on Facebook, it might be easier to drop Facebook than to drop those friends.

How do you do it? I find myself so wrapped in what feels like a fundamental struggle for our future, which could be so amazing or so horrible depending on the glacial shifts in collective will and which I may be able to influence if only I ignite enough low-bandwidth arguments.

Posting is warfare.

I am kinda curious, what far left things you hear on Facebook? I can't remember every meeting anybody of that political ideology in the US, it would be such a taboo. The most liberal person I can think of is basically a centrist, almost everyone else I've met is center-right.

I am in Europe, not in US. For example, we have a center-right party that wants to abolish private property. Far enough? For me, yes.

That’s still a billion users too many.

I can’t wait to see the commodification and decentralization of the services fb provides. Identity, chats, content distribution and subscription, events etc.

My accountant still has an @aol email. I hope to see the same reaction to fb pages, events etc.

I doubt that reaction will happen. I would expect Facebook to follow Microsoft’s lifecycle instead (which was founded in the same era as AOL).

Anecdotal data; I’ve purposefully stopped posting, liking, commenting, and am transitioning all my business hooked in things to a “business acccount” I’ve made with a goal of deleting the non business one by May 1.

It’s crazy how many places FB wormed it’s way into.

Good, I hope it dies. I don't use Facebook for the obvious reason (privacy) and my family almost refuses to contact me in any other medium. If I didn't take the initiative to contact them via email or phone, they'd forget I existed.

Right we are supposed to believe FB at this point - laughable.

I was a regular user of Facebook, now I'm not. I never used Instagram, but I can see that becoming as tedious as Facebook for people who do. I use WhatsApp every 5 minutes, but I don't think Facebook monetises it yet to any large degree. I have a hunch that as people leave the "whimsical" platforms, only the universally useful WhatsApp will continue to hold on to users. If they don't monetise it, they may well have to operate it at a loss. If they do monetise it and become greedy by killing the UX with ads, people leave anyway. They've got a very fine balancing act ahead of them. It won't be easy for Facebook.

They monetize the data though?

They monetize the heck out of the data. Why not just use something that doesn't? Be the change you want to see.

But they probably use the data to target users with Facebook/Instagram ads. If those platforms go south, then what's the data going to be used for?!

P.S. I use Signal. Problem is no one else does :p

This has been up a while and has a lot of comments, and there is no mention of Cambridge Analytica? A lot of people talk about polarization on Facebook around 2016... that was the intended result of deliberate and concerted efforts. Whether or not user metadata disclosure was done intentionally, the data was then used to radicalize target populations on certain political issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

Of course people are leaving and don't trust them.

My twenty-something friends and I used facebook extensively to run all aspects of our social lives, but now we exclusively use it for messaging and event planning. Nobody reads posts, comments, or notifications unless it has to do with an event.

A few of us have been dropping off and now we're starting to use chat programs (groupme, now Discord) to socialize.

I have to stay on to keep track of goings on in my amateur radio hobby, which as you'd expect is chock full of old men, a majority of which are on Facebook. I think the generational lag has finally caught up to them.

At this point Facebook is so big that "millions leaving" could be people dying, people losing their accounts, etc. It's very small compared to their scale of more than 2 billions users.

That’s true, if that’s where it ends and doesn’t represent a burgeoning trend, and if it doesn’t have a feedback effect leading to greater losses. After all if a fire starts in a mansion, well the fire is tiny and the mansion is huge, why get all excited over nothing? You have to leverage what you know about fire if you want to appreciate the threat it represents to the structure.

The only reason I still have a facebook account is because a friend at the W3C posts interesting stuff there. (Ironically, once of his recurring issues is that we need to take the internet back from the big corporations, yet he's the one keeping me at Facebook.) As soon as he leaves, I will leave too.

A couple of years ago, friends lived abroad for 3 years and used Facebook as their primary means of communication with people back home. I think that was when I started to check Facebook more often. Sometimes every week.

I only haven't deleted my account because of the facebook messenger and all the messages that I have there. I should find a way to back it up to a readable format and delete the thing.

You can download all your chats.

https://www.facebook.com/help/212802592074644?helpref=faq_co...

Even if you feel like it is impossible to leave Facebook, the truth is they make most of their money from ads served while you are in their ecosystem. Just spending less time on their platforms is good for you and good for reducing their relative power in the market.

We are all better off in a world where Facebook and Google face an economic harm if they abuse their monopoly power. I don't think consumer action is the best way to cause that harm, but it is the way that is available to everyone on this forum.

Article discusses the differences in measuring what a user counts as, so the numbers are difficult to pin down exactly. Anecdotally, I still _have_ my account, but no longer log in. It has been 2-3 months now, so I ought to be counted as such - that is, not an active user despite having an account. I don't use insta or whatsapp or messenger either - but I still have my FB account.

I wonder how many people there are like me, with nearly dead accounts but could still be 'counted' if you wanted to.

Yeah, I'm late 20s overeducated and I never post nowadays and go to Facebook once a month or so. My feed is almost dead now and none of my friends post like they used to. Decent amount of activity on Instagram though but not like it used to be with Facebook when I was in college. Though probably because we graduated and grew up I don't know.

I co-run a small board game group in SF, and we have been using FB for years to organize events.

I've considered moving to eventbrite or meetup.com, but the app buy in with FB and FB messanger means we can post an update or send an IM and assume people see it, which isn't the case with either alternative, unless people check email.

I really wish there was a ubiquitous open standard open source IM client, so people could download one client and use it for everything.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Unfortunately, this happens way too often.

Like XMPP https://xmpp.org/ ?

I'm with you, and I didn't mind XMPP (having implemented a Jabber server before, it wasn't all bad)

Same deal with IRC (which I think is the best protocol wise).

They all suffer from the same problem: the openness of the standard is not data collection inclusive. The upside is better privacy, the downside is its incredibly hard to fight spam in such wide open systems.

Also, for a the briefest of overviews about the some notable issues with mass adoptions on XMPP, check this:

https://blog.samwhited.com/2019/02/whats-wrong-with-xmpp/

I wonder if there's a market for a paid Facebook. Charge $5 per month for a Facebook like profile. Communicate with your friends. Share photos. See updates (in chronological order!). No data mining. No advertisements. No "brands". No emotional manipulation to maximize engagement (actually, the less time you spend, the more profitable your $5 is). I'd pay for this if it existed, hopefully enough of my friends would too.

I started reading some comments here and then fired up FB in another tab because I have been away from it for quite a long time. The first post is: "Add a phone number to your Facebook account"

No.

FB knows my number indirectly via friends anyway but I have not ever given it permission to actually admit to knowing it. I never will. To be fair, I have never received a call that I could attribute to FB abusing that chain of cough trust.

Careful not to cut yourself on that edge.

But what is your point? Facebook asked for your phone number, as many services do, and you declined. You assume they have your number already, but they don't use it, but they asked you.

I don't follow...

I wonder if Facebook UX researchers review feedback from threads like this? This seems like useful qualitative information for them to improve their product.

But then again, I wonder if their target population is different. In that case, it could be that Facebook is being strategic on what things to prioritize and they're banking on certain sub-populations, because they can't win over everyone, for their bottom-line?

I stopped using it once my mom wanted to be my friend on FB. Now both my parents use it all the time and are always wondering why I'm not on it.

They optimise what they measure. When I'm on Facebook, I like some type of posts and they continued to show me similar posts, without realising that, I'm coming to the facebook and like those posts but I'm not coming to facebook to like that post. My frequency of visit reducing and I think they do not have any idea why, since all my visit shoes good portion of engagement.

Yes but they're going to Instagram, and the Stories feed is not much better than the newsfeed in terms of developing strong, true interpersonal relationships, not wasting time, and improving onself vs mindless consumption.

The good news is facebook has failed at creating a product that is truly lasting, so they have to keep this charade up of constantly reinventing the time-waster product.

I quit facebook a while ago but then I went back. Not for the posts or updates but because of the market place and seeling groups. It's, by far, the easiest way to sell stuff in Brazil.

I thought about having a 'fake' account, but having a 'real' one with photos and friend list helps a lot to earn trust from buyers.

Then, when I have nothing to sell, I disable my account again.

My biggest disappointment with Facebook is that it - at least my feed - became toxic. There's only post complaining about politics, calling right/left people dumm, and fake news, a lot of fake news.

And now they are engaging in this fake notification scheme (same with twitter and LinkedIn)...

As i explained in another post, facebook is only useful for me because of the marketplace...

I hope they can figure out how to make it work over at Facebook. I would happily pay for a service that clearly stated how they use my personal information, and curates news and provides a platform to interact with friends on/offline, as well as with a greater community. But it doesn’t do any of that well. & that’s why I deleted my account.

I thought FB will become something like family and friends sharing. Taking part in other lives but in an efficient way.

But it didn't happen. Very rarley are there any picture galleries. And lots of stuff other people share? Always the same.

So the realization set in that it isn't that interesting to have a social network.

I only need a chat and we replaced our family chat with whatsapp.

POW for status is so difficult it’s practically nonexistent. Utility hasn’t been increased to compensate for inability to earn social capital.

https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service

Looks like I'm launching Libr (https://librapp.com) at the right time. I started it because of Tumblrs new censorship policies, but it looks like there's a good opportunity to set it apart from Facebook and Twitter and their ML powered unethical tracking

You don't have a privacy policy yet you are asking people for their data.

Hacker news peeps seem to not like FB, giving an impression of a dieing service. But, look at the revenue: "Facebook reported revenue growth of nearly 32 percent in the U.S. and Canada compared to last year, bringing in $8.43 billion in its fourth quarter 2018 compared to $6.39 billion during the same period in 2017."

Being on facebook is like sticking your pant leg in a briarbush. It's random bits of window and content that just tries to cling to you. Nothing about it is fun or engaging. Instagram is quickly going that path as well.

That said, any bets that FB's user count will magically continue to increase quarter over quarter?

> The biggest drop is in the very desirable 12- to 34-year-old group.

12-34 is a very wide range. While I do know a few people toward the high end of that age range who did have FB accounts and deleted them, I wonder how much of the drop in this bracket is because younger people are simply never signing up for FB accounts.

I'm old enough to remember when online social networking meant logging onto a BBS and chatting with whoever else was also connected.

To me, Facebook is just another BBS that has pushed past its prime and is overloading me with candy (cough ANSI graphics, boo! cough) in order to keep me connected - its an age-old formula, and while the density of information being pushed is orders of magnitude greater than it was back in the 1200bps day, the mechanics are still the same.

So what was old is new again.

And just like the BBS era, we seem to be fitting on a curve where the potential for disruption is very real.

What I perceived happen to the Golden BBS Age is, the users grew up. They became a bit more technically competent. They learned to use other tools ("Winsock, TCP/IP") that - at first, were quite daunting - but once mastered, gave them wider access to a far broader range of information sources - the Internet.

So perhaps there is some of this factor occurring here, too. People are tired of the man-behind-the-curtain technological manipulation of Facebook and its related services, just like we tired of tyrannical BBS ops booting us for wrong reasons back in the day.

So, where will the sophisticated new, liberating technology come in? Like, back in the end-of-BBS days, there were a lot of tool vendors selling shovels and pick axes along the road - the "Winsock for Dummies" and "Easy TCP/IP" products that made BBS'es irrelevant.

Is it IPFS? Is it Mastodon?

I believe, if there is hope, it lies in the OS vendors.

Just like these additional services eventually became integrated (nobody needs to install a TCP/IP stack any more - you've already got one), social networking needs to become a feature of the OS.

Trouble is, the OS vendors have been mostly asleep at the wheel for too long, having been lured into walled gardens themselves.

But, if there is hope, its in the eventual integration of advanced technologies into the default, out of the box, OS stack, such that there is no need for a centralised monopoly of subversion any longer. Imagine if Microsoft or Apple decided to nuke the scene, and add IPFS and Mastodon tech to the default stack. This would wipe Facebook out in a matter of months - just like happened to BBS's when the Internet finally got the tools from smart vendors that were needed to make intelligent Users again...

I deleted my Face&#*k account in 2010. But I can't remember exactly when I created the account. Based on my user ID (17502xxx), is it possible to determine roughly when I created my account?

For the record, Facebook in the early days, when it was only colleges in the Northeast US, was wild, wild fun.

I tried joining when they added high schools and you needed a social proof to join. But I was homeschooled so they wouldnt let me on cause nobody knew me from the same school I was registered with. Good job Facebook.

I wish social media needed more social proofs to try and weed out certain types of problematic accounts. I only finally went back to Facebook once it was open for everybody. Deleted it a few times now keep it for family only. I dont go on it every waking day though.

Looks like a small summary of:

https://www.marketplace.org/2019/03/06/tech/exclusive-look-n...

Thanks, we've updated the link from https://www.fastcompany.com/90316249/report-facebook-has-los....

FB in the initial days was useful. Now its full of crap and spam articles. Stopped visiting many years back. LinkedIn is still useful for connections. But I believe they need to change their algorithm and policies to make sure the users don't flock to the other networks.

Re: users giving up Facebook but moving to Instagram, Malinda of Google Translate Sings called it in her "Honest 2018 Christmas Song": https://youtu.be/70QwQ5kgxzk?t=33

These sorts of things normally come and go. So the thing that is currently on top is going to show the greatest decline. There isn't really a lot of analysis required. The implication that something like Facebook might be good for the ages is kinda nuts.

I'm a lot less active on Facebook, but... it's still super useful for coordination, finding people, groups.

The thing that convinces me FB isn't going away is my dad using groups to debate wood working.. he's never participated in anything online before.

I've always been so tempted to leave it Okay so i'll download all my history of data and all that, that's fine I may just go through and see who I care about and let them know im leaving? idk. I think i stay for my grandpa at this point

12-35 is a huge age range (3x!). Either it is a really strange methodology (biding underage and adults? seriously?) or it is to distort the interpretation.

I bet the decline is not uniform - does anyone know which age ranges are down (or up)?

Facebook isnt for the USA anymore right? Their growth across the globe has to be far greater than their USA based growth. They had their time but other websites, several of which they own or have a stake in, are in now.

Facebook actually pretty useful for events and looking up businesses if you have a fake account with no friends. I recently disabled my account but there were things I missed so that's why I made a fake account.

Your shadow profile already has your other account linked, I would bet.

https://browserleaks.com/canvas

They're leaving to Instagram which is Facebook. Some may not realize this.

Facebook is the next AOL or Yahoo, I've been saying this for years. They have a critical flaw in their design and in their philosophy, technological innovation can't fix this either.

The < 35 age demographic are spending more time on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, and this explains also why Facebook's stock has done well recently and is not a concern.

I use Facebook solely for keeping in touch with acquaintances (chat) and planning events on a (mostly) ubiquitous platform.

The blogging/posting functions are pretty much useless to me.

If you combine Instagram they haven't really lost anything.

Exactly. Everyone's leaving Facebook for Instagram, so at the end of the day, basically nothing is changing.

It seems like social networks are inherently fads with low switching costs (how many of your facebook friends do you really need to drag over to the next one).

At one time people thought I was crazy for not being on Facebook, but the more time goes by, the more never getting on Facebook looks like the smart move.

I just don’t log in because it makes me feel terrible and longing.

If they sold my data, then some companies have some really outdated material on me. I’m fine with that.

> the biggest drop is in the very desirable 12- to 34-year-old group

i wonder if millenials and kids are a profitable or desireable demographic these days

AFAICT, Facebook consists solely of one’s baby boomer-aged aunts sharing ridiculous memes and other such factually-challenged posts.

What's the accounting for people who still have Facebook accounts but realistically never or very infrequently check them?

I've had no interest in using my Facebook since it became Babybook, and maybe I'll poke at it once a month to see if I've missed someone's huge life event (you know, other than people having babies)... but that's it - I just have no more interest in surrendering my thoughts, photo copyrights and what's left of my privacy there anymore.

Facebook still has profiles on all 15M of them.

I like to think that it is because of the privacy issues, but in reality I think it is just the experience sucks.

I ended up mostly moving to Instagram because I could follow people's lives and not their political opinions

http://foxie.cool join the new wave!

My new hero's are Smart People who don't use Fbook I call them Mind Athletes who fight for privacy.

I never installed the FB app for the very reason of being metadata spammed for anything.

This isn't really too surprising, I rarely ever go on my own account anymore.

So many lulz. Sure, they're quitting farceblat, but where are they going? The graphics suggest that instagram is picking up the slack, with a little jump for snapchat. With insta owned by facetrash, the headline is highly overblown

As my son said: "Facebook is for old people".

That was about time.

Something seemed very off about FB’s metrics in the past 2-3 quarters. It could be my own bias but I expected to see a more pronounced slowdown/contraction based on my own anecdotal evidence.

Facebook is like a boring family dinner that you have to attend.

Many people kind of _have to_ have a Facebook profile, but definitely check it rarely.

Personally, I keep it only because I have a few apps that use their API.

I'm shocked by the decrease in twitter usage (compared to other social networks) in 2017.[0] I have seen a huge uptick in friends tweeting, mostly in replies to Trump's tweets, and several times a week news stories come to the top of my feed purely generated by a single tweet of his.

[0] the credited article for the story, linked in the second sentence https://www.marketplace.org/2019/03/06/tech/exclusive-look-n...

It does feel like social media as a whole may be peaking, or at least nearing full saturation. People can only take so much. And there are a lot of options these days.

Twitter has been shamelessly deleting a lot of interesting right of center accounts (e.g Thomas Wictor, Imperator Rex) for no good reason, so a lot of people have given up on it for political discussions.

Jack Dorsey was on the Joe Rogan podcast with , of all people, his lawyer and got called out for censoring and gave a lot of non-answers.[1] if you read the youtube comments it's almost 100% negative on the direction they've been going with censorship on that platform and Jack's lack of candor as to what exactly they're trying to do.

Edit: Why the downvotes? Did I trigger some sort of HN Godwin's law by mentioning Americans outside the San Francisco/LA political bubble as a possible cause of Twitter's loss of popularity?

[1] https://youtu.be/_mP9OmOFxc4

He's no Elon Musk...

You're downvoted because a significant fraction of HN readers live in leftist filter bubbles and are never exposed to serious criticisms of their ideas.

> I'm shocked by the decrease in twitter usage

I'm not. Twitter has degraded quite a lot.

leaving facebook? does it even get affected? I think that non-tech guys doesn't give a damn about it.

What's that in percentage?

Where are they going? Instagram? This is not leaving Facebook.

edit: How do you down-vote the fact that Facebook owns Instagram?

and they flock to Instagram

uhh FB + instagram usage > FB usage alone, so where's the loss?

I am leaving a link to what I think should now be an obligatory reference to the Facebook Free Business post by DHH every time this topic comes up: https://m.signalvnoise.com/become-a-facebook-free-business/

Good

The world is finally growing up

Couldn't have happened to a nicer company.

And this was their best decision imho.

lol facebook is probably just deleting a few troll accounts....

that sounds like a drop in the ocean that is fb's massive and growing userbase

Facebook growth numbers haven't been strong lately, but it's still growing [0]. With 2.3B monthly active users 15M isn't much to worry about unless a specifically profitable sub-population is doing the leaving.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

In the country with the highest value per user to advertisers, yes i'd say this is a huge deal.

If it is 15M US users, that's 4.5% of the US population.

You may be an older person, but for anyone with teens an interesting aspect is that they hardly use it.

FB is turning into a "how to talk to grandma" network.

Isn't that what it's supposed to be? Facebook has the market of young people captured pretty broadly with Instagram. I doubt they would appeal so much to older people if they focused in appealing to younger people.

In the US, sure, but globally they are still growing in almost every demographic.

Yep, and if I remember right, that was the same pattern that the prior dominant social platforms saw before they collapsed.

It's amazing how its only acquisitions keeping Facebook alive besides Messenger.

Acquisitions which were developed and grown a great deal after becoming part of the company.

I am not denying that! It's just interesting how the core product is really taking a bad hit lately. I am curious to know where FB would be today without them.

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