From what I've read in various places the concern isn't people leaving, but certain groups (mostly young demographics) not bothering to join. This means that user numbers are relatively stagnant and that active user numbers will be falling as will average engagement (or whatever marketers measure these days).
I've seen some evidence of this: younger members of my hobby groups are not on there, or are just because the group is and they don't use it for anything else but receiving group updates.
in FBs earnings report this week MAU were up 6% vs. last year, far from stagnant.
But no bad vibes allowed there
so two out of three are facebook properties.
I've seen a few people point out that the MSM is actually mad because FB really has the same business model, they are just far more effective and profitable at implementing it. MSM has been pushing controversial stories for decades to boost their ratings, FB just used algorithms to do it rather than humans.
At its core this is about the traditional media's profit margins and cultural power being eaten up by FB and tech in general
Most FB users don't matter.
The people who do matter are the advertisers, and by most accounts a lot of them are very unhappy (for a range of reasons, and mostly not about whatever the latest "PR crisis" is.)
Facebook themselves have been pushing this angle so they’re probably very grateful any time someone repeats it!
It’s very convenient because it allows them to dismiss pretty much any reporting about them as biased. In reality though, the source of this story, NY Times, is more profitable than it’s been in a long time and the majority of that profit is coming from subscriptions, not ads. ProPublica, a non profit with zero ads has also done some excellent work covering Facebook. They don’t have the same business model as FB and never have.
This isn’t true for every media outlet out there but to write off any critical coverage of FB because “it’s the media” feels wildly shortsighted to me. The advice is “consider the source” not “dismiss based on the source”.
I think there’s a reflexive kind of “independent” mindedness that’s actually very collective: the assumption that everything the mass media publishes is false. The correct independent minded approach is to examine the evidence provided. From my analysis I’m not sure what’s fake here.
"Hate" in the sense of "ideologues being haters as usual", not like "KKK members".
That seems overblown. I can remember individual writers doing opinion pieces that, especially in retrospect, had a certain "Kids need to get off my lawn" quality to them. Various online traditional news pubs also tried to plug into the "blogosphere" in various ways.
But none of this really rose to the level of a war.
Exactly, conveniently they are over dramatizing a story about their main competitor on the advertisement dollars market.
Most people don’t care about data privacy.
Most people don’t care about usurious payday loans.
Most people don’t care about wetlands preservation.
Most people don’t care about search-and-seizure abuses.
How are the two models similar?
Nothing's going to change in any sort of official sense. Facebook will naturally decay while the rest of the company plans to leave it behind like a hermit crab crawling out of its shell to find a bigger one, as we are already witnessing with "Metaverse".
There's also the question of what "moving away from Facebook" means. Does it mean deleting your account? What if you check your messages once a month, are you still a Facebook user? Only Facebook really knows what impact this has had on their user base and they have every incentive to pick and choose metrics that paint them in the best light.
Then again FB could end up in the “thing bad --> ban it!” corner, but I doubt it.
There's a PR effort to manufacture a PR crisis... But by and large, it has seemed rather ineffective outside the filter bubble.
It seems like the news is trying to prescribe a reality, instead of describing it.
FWIW, the problem with this idea, except from being an ad hominem of sorts in that it attacks the message via the messenger, is that the individual journalist doesn't actually hold the opinions that we ascribe to "the media".
Some young writer at the New York Times isn't upset because Facebook robbed them of the position of power they once had and cut their income by 70% because they never had that power. And since they are the Times, they aren't exactly unhappy with their career, either.
Every time there is an article about the privacy implications of ad tracking, something things it's a great indictment to point out how many trackers the article page loads. Yet that only proofs how independent journalists are. In that industry, getting some ad customer to boycott your publisher is almost as good as a Pulitzer, and if it means nobody gets a raise... well, at least you got the story.
Thanks for putting that into words. It perfectly describes the uncanny feeling that I often feel while reading both left-leaning and right-leaning American news media, and why I've made a large conscious effort to scale back my consumption as much as possible.
> “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
I'm curious which filter bubble you're referring to. The HN filter bubble (a lot of people don't seem to like Facebook)? The gamer filter bubble (many in that community were upset when Facebook accounts became required for Oculus)? The media filter bubble (as evidenced by this reporting)?
There seem to be a lot of different filter bubbles that think Facebook is a shit company. Maybe these don't add up to much, or maybe they do. Time will tell.
My argument is that all of the slow down in usage (i.e. Apple's iOS changes, younger demographics ditching FB and Instagram for TikTok) would all have happened even if none of this reporting happened.
And, on a personal anecdotal level, I use Facebook less because the experience just has gotten so shitty and tiresome. Having lots of experience in the "usage optimization" industry, I think there is a real danger Facebook optimizes for the short term (outrage! scrolls! clicks!), but at some point many of us just get tired of outrage. Again, that trap was likely to happen even without any reporting.