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Comment by badRNG | Hacker News Reader

Don't the constant flamewars push people away from Facebook, thereby reducing engagement in the long run? I quit Facebook several years ago because I honestly just didn't like the experience. It was miserable and I didn't enjoy going to it any longer.

I have the phone numbers of my closest friends and family, why wouldn't I just call or text when I want to talk to them?

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Facebook is following the same playbook that a lot of mobile games are doing. They don't really care about user attrition because most users are low-value. If you're just checking Facebook once or twice a day, you're probably not worth the server time cost to Facebook. What they really are trying to do is target high-engagement users ("whales" in mobile game developer slang) and make the service more addictive for them.

the problem with this analogy is that when you lose a lot of users, you lose the network effect. so even if a user is low-value in terms of their actual engagement, they bring value by luring others in

Apparently most people don't work that way. Or at least it drives up engagement up until a person-specific breaking point.

Anecdotally, I've known several folks who've left Facebook for one reason or another, often at least in part because of the poor experience they had on the platform.

> Or at least it drives up engagement up until a person-specific breaking point.

Surely as this plays out, Facebook will see it's userbase fall out at some point...

My guess is that they've determined what that breaking point is and have optimized for it.

So basically "How much daily misery can we put our users through algorithmically before they break down and uninstall"? Why does anyone who is sufficiently aware of this still use Facebook? Not even as an ethical question, why use something that makes your life miserable?

This reminds me of Jonathan Haidt's "Righteous Minds". One of the key points in the book is that "righteousness binds and blinds". As in, the 'righteousness binds' part is there's a social bond between people who believe the same thing. (And "blinds" is that the righteousness will blind you to certain truths).

I think flamewars are like that. You gotta leave a comment otherwise you feel your side loses out.

I'm a huge fan of "The Righteous Mind" and think it is almost horrifically relevant for our times. Recommended to all.

This is completely anecdotal but at least in my friends circle in the US a lot of people have stopped using Facebook (Messenger is different) or they use it for very specific purposes like Marketplace, specific events, or major life updates. None of those are really engagement driving activities. It seems like most of Facebook's growth is coming from developing nations and older generations who are just now finding about it or haven't bothered moving on to other forms of social media.

'The long run' looks like it's going to play out over three generations, not unlike Big Tobacco.

Not only can you get rich in that sort of time frame, you can retire and let your kids take over. The grandkids will be proper monsters who don't work at all, so they will probably cash out before the lawsuits get teeth.

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