Comment by imagetic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by imagetic | Hacker News Reader

I dealt with a lot of high traffic live streaming video on Facebook for several years. We saw interaction rates decline almost 20x in a 3 year period but views kept increasing. Things just didn't add up when the dust settled and we'd look at the stats.

It wouldn't be the least bit surprised if every stat FB has fed me was blown extremely out of proportion.

I'd say about half my friends in their late 20s to their mid-late 30s have deleted their Facebook. A majority of the other half of people I know have deleted it off their phones. A majority of those are highly educated professionals with a like-minded social circle in the Bay Area. None of which are in the tech industry though.

My parents and their friends seem to use it regularly still, mostly cause it was such a useful communication tool for a network they lost contact with. Replaces an address book for them.

IG seems to be saturating a majority of phone screens I see in passing. Usually stories. I have noticed a decline in my friends circle with that. People are posting a lot less as of recent. As a media person, I'm seeing less return from IG without an immense amount of effort. I believe the feed is far beyond it's max saturation level. The same thing happened to Twitter for me. You either have to go all in and game the system or relinquish all reliance on it as an important media outlet.

There is no statistical base to my findings, just something I have observed.

For me personally, I stopped posting to my wall simply because I felt like it was a waste of time. Very few people actually liked it or responded to it, so why bother? Also the wall is now flooded with "sponsored content" which is just a nuisance if you ask me. The only thing left on facebook for me is basically the groups functions which has certain groups which are useful.

100% been my experience too.

The people most reliant on social media are those that need it for 'staying in touch' or to feed their ego, let's be real.

I know people who live one life online and one life in person without batting an eye.

My experiences with ayahuasca and bufo have made me stop caring so much about social media metrics. Life is so much grander away from 'likes' 'followers' 'comments'.

> My experiences with ayahuasca and bufo...

One of those sentences is not like the others.

Social media is a hall of mirrors that distorts reality and personalities, self-worth even. Entheogens give people the freedom to break free and recalibrate back to a more wholesome and natural identity.

I did searches expecting them to be social media alternatives.

instead you found a doorway to a new paradigm of existence.

Facebook is somehow really good at suppressing key metrics and important stories (and I am not sure how they do it). A good example is the friendly fraud case, which if it had come out pre-IPO, would have probably killed the company, or at the very least made it impossible for them to acquire IG and WA.

I also find it odd that so many investors, stock buyers and advertisers actually trust any of Facebook's self-reported stats.

At this point, I think they have already become the Enron of the tech industry. It may still be a while before the whole thing blows up, but even Enron seemed to be doing really well right up until the moment before the bottom just fell out.

"While it only appeared in the Texas Journal, the Texas regional edition of the Journal, short-seller Jim Chanos happened to read it and decided to check Enron's 10-K report for himself. He didn't think it made sense that Enron's broadband unit appeared to far outpace a then-troubled broadband industry."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal#Timeline_of_down...

I have to assume you being in the Bay Area, friends regardless of tech, might be more prone to things like how they are treating FB? I know of very few people without an FB account. And the majority that don’t have it are in the Bay Area or in tech. It isn’t used a lot anymore. That’s def true. But people still have it in my anecdotal data.

I am neither in sodtware tech industry nor ever been to bay area ( I'm an indian).

From my anecdotal data, I definitely see that most of my friends have either deleted their account or check their accounts may be once in a month. On the other hand, my wife and my mother regularly check facebook (although they post very rarely).

In my experience, the use of FB is definitely falling amongst 'educated' people, although the story is not same with other demographies. But overall people are definitely getting fed up with FB.

So FB is much like Yahoo a generation ago. The cool kids have checked out but the parents are still hanging on.

I host a Mastodon instance for 24 people for $60/yr (from DO) and $8/yr to my registrar. It's federated with most networks available. If there was more of a UI to manage an instance and its federation/blocking, it might be easier to expand interest.

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