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Comment by kojackst | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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?

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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

> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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?

>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.

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.

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 §

> Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition

TikTok

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