Note I wrote my father in law when he had gone too far down the rabbit hole and legitimately worried about the poison it spreads around his demographic:
I left Facebook when I read some press release about it being designed from the outset to make you feel bad because it keeps you engaged; hoping someone agrees with something you liked or shared and the dopamine hit it releases. I don’t like feeling manipulated and manipulation is facebooks modus operandi. All to track everything I do around the internet to sell me ads for $12/person/year in revenue.
I left Twitter for basically the same reason and when I’d stick on the site refreshing it all day hoping someone noticed the well thought out point I spent 3 hours putting together only to realize no one cares. Leaving both after about a week feels like when I have taken breaks from caffeine. It sucks at first but after a week, you feel refreshed and clean. I’m sure drug abstinence feels similar.
My father went down the rabbit hole of Facebook and shares political crap constantly, flooding peoples news feeds. There’s a feature on Facebook that lets you silently unfollow people so they’re on mute. Everyone of my family members who are Facebook friends with my dad have done this to him and don’t see anything he posts. He’s shouting into a black hole thinking the whole world is paying attention while in reality no one is.
He has said things that the man I grew up with would never have said and Facebook/ talk radio is to blame. We’re all vulnerable to it, which is why I try and stay away from it.
I don't even know what Twitter is for except mutual high fives over the most superficial "look at me" memeish stuff.
It's worse than facebook as far as the "get attention" vibe.
Granted all social media is about getting attention, and I don't think there is anything wrong with it necessarily. Attention is nice, there is good reason for it, but when the message is so tailored to just that and there isn't anything else, I don't know what the point is.
I recently switched careers from a long networking career to web development and thought I'd take another spin on Twitter, but rather I just get sites that paste a link to their website, and hordes of people posting programming truisms or career / resume / coding lifestyle fodder .... so little feels like that person wrote it, so much feels like what those people thing "a commercial about me" should be.
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As for your other notes about the impact on people. It is horrifying. I see some relatives posting terrible things and I wish saying "but you've never met any of those people" had the impact that it should... but it doesn't.
It took me about 10 years to finally "get Twitter". I used to use it for professional reasons, posting what I considered relevant content. For the most part no one really cared. The engagement was almost always nil. Sort of like saying something intelligent, out of the blue, to a crowded stadium of people doing the same thing.
Then, 2 years ago I created a new account that ONLY focused on a personal hobby of mine: retro-computing. I posted photos, links to cool articles, experiences from my workbench, etc. To my surprise, I began to get a lot of engagement. Like, 25-50X more than what I used to ever get on my professional persona's account.
I made a point to only follow back people who posted similarly to my own laser-beam focus. This takes a lot of time, but I have cultivated a stream of content I very much enjoy reading and scanning in my off-hours or lunch breaks. If you post about politics, or food, or cats, or simply whine or are acidic by nature, I don't follow those accounts back. I'm looking for good vibrations for a pastime hobby - that's it. And to my surprise (and those that know me personally and professionally that I've explained this to) it has worked beautifully for that. No one is a jerk and no one is trolling, none of that.
I've actually made several online friends around the country and the world as a result of the past 2+ years on Twitter.
Now, is my experience normal? No. If I were to guess it's probably in the top 2% in terms of the joy it brings me (vs. the rest of the user population who just hates to even look at Twitter anymore). And I totally get that.
I hope the service keeps going for my own greedy self-interests. But I also recognize that Mastadon may be the future, too. Or something else.
It's sort of how I changed my usage with Facebook. I deleted my personal account and created an anonymous account on FB that only is used for FB Groups (in, yes, the same hobby). These are closed groups that are moderated.
And holy smokes. It works.
Go figure.
Remove the YOU from social media, and use it to have fun about whatever it is you do to have fun, and it can actually be ... fun.
I think you're really on to something here. The details are different, but it reminds me of how I use social media.
Most of my engagement consists of a private Slack groups with groups of friends who enjoy discussing various topics. (And within these groups I tend to subscribe to only the channels that I find more interesting.) Similarly, on Instagram I have one account where I follow a group of close friends I've mostly had since high school, and another where I mostly follow a bunch of car related channels I like. Having that separation and ability to go and seek out a specific kind of content is fantastic. (As opposed to just being subjected to a fire hose "feed" of whatever an algorithm thinks will be engaging.)
Actually, I resisted RSS in the past for much the same reason. Even though you curate the feed, I vastly preferred having a bookmarks folder of blogs and other sites I followed, which I could then pick and choose from to suit my mood, than to have it all served up in a reader.
It would be nice to see things move more in this direction. For example, the default Facebook view, rather than a general news feed, could be a set of groups you belong to, along with ad-hoc groups of interconnected contacts, encouraging you to pick what genre of updates or conversations suits your current mood. Even then I don't know if it would be siloed enough to capture the same benefits, but it would be a step in the right direction I think.
I emailed slack about a year ago suggesting that they were totally missing the boat on slack as a social network. I am in 4 slacks and only one of them is professional. They were not interested.
They've got a lot on their plates already; probably best not to try and dive full into social network for now. Plus you'd have to be really careful not to lose the separation that makes it good in the process.
Sounds a lot like going back to the anonymous/pseudonymous usenet groups and forums that we had before 'social networking' became a buzzword.
Why use Twitter for such things, given its limitations? Why not use a blog, personal site, or forum where instead of just posting a link you can also write your thoughts about it, etc.? I get not wanting to bother with running a personal site or maintain a blog, but there are tons of hobby forums.
Personally, I never got the appeal of Twitter, and while I did enjoy early Facebook, since it jumped the shark I use it primarily as a long-term contact list for people that I don't talk to very often so that we'll still have a way to connect if one of us changes email addresses/phone numbers before the next time we talk.
> Why use Twitter for such things, given its limitations? Why not use a blog, personal site, or forum where instead of just posting a link you can also write your thoughts about it, etc.?
I actually do. I run a forum that I treat like a blog and link to my posts (and other members' posts) of interest.
I think a lot of the appeal of twitter and fb is a matter of perspective, that it's more appealing to people who barely were on the internet before these apps. A lot of these users never even knew web forums existed, and I hear them now after seeing those and they complaint because it's "too complicated" and "too much to read"
Extrapolate that and compare it to these same kids going to apps like instagram or tiktok which are even more visually-heavy (and less text) with content that it's even simpler and more optimized for user reach than user participation.
I use Facebook in the same way you do - for participating in local motorsports. All the clubs organize via Facebook groups, so it's the only practical way to stay active in the sport. I'm using the personal account that I've had since 2005 but I don't post anything publicly anymore.
What makes Facebook stand out here to me is just how difficult they've made for people to do create isolated social networks on a personal level, at least in my experience. It is possible to limit your Facebook feed to friends and family and filter out people spewing garbage memes and obnoxious political points. However, I have not yet found a way to turn off Facebook's annoying habit of trying to "prioritize" posts in your news feed even if you do not want to. There seems to be no way to say "I want to see all of the posts in chronological order from a select group of friends". Even the "most recent" news feed order does not seem to work as advertised, often skewing stuff posted a couple of days ago towards the top.
I do have some family members on Facebook and in the past I would use Facebook to do things like share vacation photos, intended mainly for family members and close friends and the like. This now seems like an impossible task to do reliably -- there's no way I know that someone who hasn't seen my photos and want to will see it, from my perspective. So for me it's back to the ol' Smugmug and email. (I imagine there are other social networks that are able to work like I want, but most of my family isn't on it, and all of my family has email. This just works for me.)
Facebook does have "groups" which do work quite well as you mentioned, and Facebook works well from my perspective as an announcement / engagement platform for businesses and hobbies. Much of their core social network however seems broken to me personally.
(Regarding the parent linked article, I'm kind of curious where they are going to though and a better understanding of the reasons behind the shift. Most articles I've Googled don't seem to dive very deeply into these things beyond vague demographic musings like "Facebook isn't cool for teenagers" and mentioning Instagram and Snapchat as the replacement. The analysis level isn't even standard media depth to me, even more so than usual. If I look for articles on other things in relative decline where I do have a fair bit of insight -- like say NASCAR racing -- the general media articles actually seemed to (sometimes) make an effort to explain the often seem to make more efforts at explaining the declines, because the reasons are often multi-faceted. I have to believe that any Facebook decline is driven by a lot more details than "my parents are on Facebook".)
I did the same thing with trying to avoiding politics and entertainment, and just following programmers and development thought leaders. Yeah... They almost all wind up being political too. I simply cannot find a way to find interesting accounts that don't wind up talking about politics and current events. I don't care. I don't want to use Twitter for that, but apparently, Twitter doesn't want me to use the service for anything ELSE. (And, before someone suggests it, yes, my list of muted words is already long.)
A few years ago I remember trying out twitter and following John Gruber. Back then I was interested in what he had to say about Apple, but instead I got a mix of Apple stuff and, IIRC, inane baseball updates. I remember thinking that it felt like a real step back to have such a mixed feed, compared to just subscribing to his daringfireball.net RSS feed.
^this is how I use twitter as well. Thriving community in this tiny corner of the web, focusing on neat electronics projects and interesting tech or creative hobbies.
>Remove the YOU from social media, and use it to have fun about whatever it is you do to have fun, and it can actually be ... fun.
This doesn't change the fact that 99% of things people give credit for to social media can be easily done without mediation through a multi-billion dollar corporation.
Neither does it change the fact that Twitter and Facebook have a whole slew of horrible social effects. Centralization of the web, political polarization, emergent mobs trying to ruin people's lives, rise in depression and suicide rates, normalization of global surveillance, normalization of censorship, etc, etc.
Jaron Lanier has some interesting thoughts on the economy behind some of this:
Thing is the overwhelming majority of social network users just couldn't be bothered to use other solutions before this, and can't be bothered to do so now. How many were on online forums for example?.
>Thing is the overwhelming majority of social network users just couldn't be bothered to use other solutions before this
Did you ever stop to think why? It's not like the barrier of entry was high. People simply did not find it worth their time. Chances are, big social media isn't worth their time either, but people are kept there by social pressure and purpose-built addiction mechanisms. And you're spinning it as if this is some kind of positive thing.
Connectivity is like food. The benefits to the person don's scale linearly. Forums and IM were already above the bare minimum. They were like a hearty meal. Social media today is like having a binge eating disorder.
I sort of do the same thing. Mostly hobby/interest stuff.
I have a hard and fast rule of not friending anyone I see regularly or have a real private or personal relationship with (No family, no neighbors, no current coworkers). Avoids so much drama.
It's the same for me on reddit. After following only the subreddits that interest me, the engagement upped my knowledge and enthusiasm. Prior to that I didn't get reddit at all - now it supplements my HN addiction.
Twitter is about following tiny businesses, imho. Youtubers, independent journalists, local shops, local media, local politicians. It's RSS for z-list internet famous people.
Although it pretends that replies are equivalent to top-level tweets, they're not really. It's just that there's a reply thread attach to everything.
Basically, CNN will tell you what your head of state did. Your regional media will tell you what your legislative representative did if it was newsworthy.
Twitter lets you keep tabs on your city councilman.
If the only way to watch local businesses is to join a global centralized network that snagged 335 million international users, something somewhere is really broken.
Not necessarily. It's not outrageous for a large system to incorporate different scopes, even simultaneously. The architecture of the internet itself is a good example of that.
Medical twitter is fairly positive and a great way to learn about new papers and interact with educators and researchers. Check out the #foamed (Free Open Access Medicine) hashtag. I usually try to avoid following political people and keep my feed science-focused.
I've noticed more people in tech posting mostly political stuff nowadays, when I followed them because of their tech posts. I had to go back and prune my feed to get away from all the bile. Angry political screeds are hard to filter out nowadays.
> Angry political screeds are hard to filter out nowadays.
A sign of the times. A lot of people are just really pissed off right now. I also think a lot of people that used to ignore politics realized that it matters...
Things are so weird now. We should feel good that everyone is engaged in dialogue about our grand civic project, right? But when you actually stare out onto the landscape of discussion, there isn't a valuable exchange of ideas to observe.
While political opinions are more numerous, they're divorced from evidence and calcified. As useful as no opinion, and possibly worse. (Then again, that's my opinion, right?)
Maybe that suggests we aren't engaging in dialogue? I think ubiquitous social media access is destroying the cultural "melting pot".
The cost of communication, price and latency, has always defined the structure of our communities. Letters, cars, phones, internet, every invention expanded the reach of individual "community" while cost acted as friction to prevent bad ideas from gaining too much momentum - individuals still had to engage with their local community too.
Social media finally brought the cost to essentially zero. We can talk to anyone or about anything at any time. Great for early adopters and their critical/creative tendencies, but mass adoption by consumers has enabled mass tribalist tendencies to fully decouple from proximity constraints. This might be the "boiling point" for historical conflicts, but "supercritical" seems more appropriate here.
Media consolidation has been synonymous with consolidation of broadcasting viewer opinions and their political parties - many unhappy with both choices but faced with the false dichotomy of "their guy" and "the enemy". Meanwhile grass-roots are numerous but now diffuse and ineffective, cut off from broadcasting influence and digitally disconnected.
Hopefully society starts correcting back to offline engagement. Anecdotes suggest we are, but undoing the damage will still take a while.
>The cost of communication, price and latency, has always defined the structure of our communities. [..] Social media finally brought the cost to essentially zero.
Worse. It brought it in the negative, at least perceptually.
> We should feel good that everyone is engaged in dialogue about our grand civic project, right?
It is people trapped in their echo chambers. Some chambers are better than others (some, much better, but alas). I personally don't hold much hope for things to ever get de-calcified without some kind of large-scale real-world incident to force it. It is almost like two entirely different species of humans at this point who are almost incapable of empathising with each other.
(and note, in many cases, refusing to empathise.... I refuse to empathize with alt-right supporters for example.)
Democracies have never been about evidence, they are about making sure the "rulers" enjoy the support of the people and are strongly incentivised to listen to the concerns of said people. Democracies have a long and storied history of being arbitrary and unfair in defiance of evidence.
In light of that, I'd suggest interpreting political opinions as "I think this person understands what my problems are". When I mentally add that to the end of a political rant usually the rant moves from incomprehensible railing against reality to something rational, but disagreeable.
It's really not "now", it's just that the tables have turned. For the previous two terms, the other party was in power, and the out-of-power people could only whinge about it. And that's the same thing that's happening now.
Your observation is only true in the ephemeral surface. there is no moral equivalence. there is no legal equivalence. What is your purpose in this deflection?
Twitter is really useful for sharing content at conferences or other events with a clear hashtag.
Other than that, and perhaps sharing more substantive articles/blog posts/etc to a wider audience, it's at best silly, and at worse, well...much worse.
I have found that Twitter has been pretty muted for the last couple of years at conferences. Seems like more of the conversation goes on in a slack (that you have to be invited too, or know about).
I have found that the machine learning research community uses twitter pretty effectively. I don't tweet myself, but I do follow a good number of other researchers and often find interesting papers and results through the venue. It's much more effective than scouring the arXiv.
I get a lot of value from Twitter's AI and computer graphics communities, but I used to see a lot of retweeted political garbage too. I found that Twitter's "mute words" feature works wonders. After muting about 100 words ("trump", "obama", "republican", "democrat", "evil", "lied", "nazi", that obnoxious hand clap emoji, etc) it's like a whole different place. Much less rage-inducing.
I dont post anything on Twitter. I follow a bunch of journalists, local activists and local politicians. Using it like this, I mostly get links to articles, or local news events. So for me, I’ve found it’s a great way to follow the news. And I follow a couple funny people so that as I scroll through depressing news stories to read, I get an occasional laugh too. And i only follow a couple dozen people, most who tweet infrequently.
So that’s all to say that there are less common uses of these platforms than you might know. Also, because of how I use it, Twitter doesn’t bother showing me any ads. I get about one ad a week. Go figure.
I recently muted every Twitter account that wasn’t either individual people tweeting about their lives (predominantly in the “hilarious quotes from small children” genre) or NBA news. Man was that a relief. Twitter can be absolutely toxic but if you never read replies or follow randoms and you curate carefully, it’s fine.
I think a huge feature for that is “mute”. Being publicly observed to follow a Twitter without actually seeing its content is, shamefully enough, important and useful a lot more than you’d think.
I basically use Twitter for what I would use Facebook. I follow people I consider friends online and see their updates. I don't look at my timeline even, I just look at the stuff my friends post and share, the only time I see something from an account I don't follow is when a friend shares it. As a platform for keeping touch with a few dozen people you like, it's pretty good.
I don't think Twitter was made for something, other than to broadcast sms, which it can't even be used for since they doubled their limit.
I will tell you what I use it for: follow interesting people, and pictures of cute animals. My goto rule of thumb for the first is, are they saying something where you go "hu?" in a positive way?
Don't disagree with your views on Twitter but if you think of Twitter as only mutual high-fives then I'd be interested in your point of view on Instagram. :)
As a small business owner, I find Twitter useful for sharing news on product updates, articles/tutorials and new features. Ironically, this has cost me $0.0 so far.
My sister has gone down the same rabbit hole. She really thinks she's "fighting the good fight" by posting a fresh outrage every day. She's glued to a changing handful of posts, replying rapid-fire to anyone who disagrees. I used to post (4-5 times per year) photos of my vacations, but I don't want to feed the whole lifestyle porn/envy cycle.
> She really thinks she's "fighting the good fight" by posting a fresh outrage every day.
I have a few people in my feed who do this, from both sides. It almost feels like they've turned into nothing but meme/share-bots. It gets so annoying that I should probably block them already.
If you try to call out the content, you either get childishly shouted down because you're on "the other side", or called out as "the problem" because you don't agree with their group-think.
> or called out as "the problem" because you don't agree with their group-think.
It feels good to have someone verbalize this.
I can't enjoy much social media anymore because there's an expectation that discussing anything opinionated requires a preface about what side you're on.
Making a politically neutral statement means you're with the enemy (where the enemy is on the side opposite whoever reads your neutral statement).
I'm not even referring to politics or discussion of world events: even more futurist/what-if thoughts about how society works/could work.
HN is the calmest place to have a discussion with someone, because no one's looking for clues about your personal beliefs and what side you're ostensibly warring for.
9 times out of 10, only the content of your comment seems to matter. As it should be.
> HN is the calmest place to have a discussion with someone, because no one's looking for clues about your personal beliefs and what side you're ostensibly warring for.
just scroll to the bottom where everything is downvote-collapsed already, anything that isn't Silicon Valley political echo chamber isn't really discussed holistically and garners the same "you're the enemy" or "you're not in the middle if you don't already agree with me" response as other networks
need a patch for this
My thoughts are that Americans need a credible external threat for unity, and currently we don't have one. The Cold War thing jumped the shark decades ago and just doesn't have unifying consensus as being a problem for America, the religious extremist story has fallen apart with everyone knowing its all part of our cozy relationship with the House of Saud. So here we are
It's hard to argue with people who think that a debate is won by finding the best ad-hominem put-down. It's probably not even worth trying, unless you enjoy a kind of rational trolling where you state your case and ignore the responses.
I used to waste time doing this and would argue with right-winger family who was brainwashed by Fox news. I finally realized no matter how good your points are, and no matter how eloquently said or rationally stated you will just flat out never convince someone or change their opinion on policy based on a facebook discussion. Literally the only thing arguing politics on there does is polarize people, and further entrench everyone onto their already premade opinions. I started putting myself in their shoes and realized how futile their arguments were because I'd never consider a right wing perspective. Then I realized what a waste of time it was to even engage at all. I unfollowed everyone, stopped logging in and have been a lot happier. If I want to check up on someone specifically I search them and go straight to their page. Otherwise I don't even bother reading the timeline anymore. I went from daily checking facebook to about 2x a month. It's awesome.
This may not be received well, but I’ll try anyway. Yeah debate can definitely be polarizing, but I appreciate people that bring a reasoned argument to the table without being conflicting. When that happens I have a little more faith in humanity even when their opinions are different than my own. It’s a give and take and it sounds like in your situation you felt like you were the only one trying to have a civil discussion. That is exhausting.
Honestly if I talk/debate with someone long enough I can tell if they won’t be convinced, but sometimes it’s not the person you are debating that you are going to convince, but someone on the sidelines. Honestly the people that are most vocal are likely the ones that are already polarized and irrational, but that doesn’t mean the world is full of irrational people. Sometimes I believe not participating in an online debate is the right thing to do, but on the other hand the only way the tone will change about politics is if people change it.
I think you make a good point and I'd be open to having rational discussions about it, but these are people posting "O'Bummer" Obama memes... imo just not even worth wading into. They're not looking for my input, as the poster below mentioned they just post as a rallying cry to get likes from their other right wing family members.
Wow. Thanks for the way you put this out. This is exactly how I was feeling / what I was experiencing. So I went ahead, and installed my own MatterMost instance with friends.
What I realized recently is that Facebook is built in a way that makes it really hard to have a real conversation. People only share links and shout their opinions with no real place for exchange.
I understand that. My Facebook profile is mostly empty to an outsider, and even to many of my so-called friends. Hehe!
I said that because the more I think about it, the more I find social media platforms don't really help me stay in touch with anyone. I mean, yeah, I can see they got a third kid or that hunting season was great this year, but nothing near a real conversation around a coffee or a beer.
That's why I started using MatterMost ,an open source Slack clone, or like I tell my less tech-savvy friends: IRC on steroids. (IRC was the go to choice when we were teens)
This is actually why I don't visit facebook often, I had to spend so much time curating all of the echo chamber effects and political posts. My entire feed got flooded with crazy stuff and none of it was anything I actually wanted to hear about. I wanted to hear about people in my life but those who posted popular shares got all the exposure. It has become a platform to yell at people and to echo chamber each other. Having real conversations is impossible.
It would be uniquely refreshing if Facebook would apply an overlay to every post that gave it a true/false and hate/love rating. This makes an interesting 2 x 2 box score and for a while I was looking at some NLP to pull out common themes and rate them, but I realized that if you just used a bi-variable version of the "like" widget you could have people moderate.
Such a signal, combined with actual research on the veracity and tone of the post could be combined to highlight places where people need help and where bad actors might be plying their wares.
But I don't honestly expect anyone in management at Facebook to advocate such a system.
> It would be uniquely refreshing if Facebook would apply an overlay to every post that gave it a true/false and hate/love rating.
It would instantly be weaponized. Already, right-wing groups specialize in taking down antifa and LGBT pages on Facebook or Twitter by abusing the report feature. To make it worse, Facebook apparently automatically locks pages upon getting a high number of reports in a short timeframe.
You can bet that anything not from Fox News or Infowars would be flag-abused as "fake news" in an instant.
The one my in-laws have on all day is Glenn Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Levin. It's a constant stream of angry/crazy white guy. Even the late night isn't a refuge. Whatever the show is that used to be Art Bell is quasi-political now.
It astounds me that Facebook still has as many users as it has but that there isn't also an exodus of employees from Facebook. You have to be really drunk on the koolaid to think that your company is doing anything good in the world. Twitter the same.
How is it with all our technology, the cutting edge are these digital septic tanks (or sewers if you live in the city)?
This is basically how I felt back in 2014 after I pretty much stopped using all social media.
I have my facebook only to announce big events and let immigration officers know that I love my wife very much by having a detailed photo album of all our interactions over many years.
It's incredibly annoying that at this juncture I have to keep it because of what other people / entities want rather than myself. This is why I refuse to use LinkdIn instead of job boards or the career sites for the company.
The aggressive commercialization of Social Media has been the greatest failure to be borne out of the internet and our society will be suffering its effects for many years. At least the stockholders (who are probably too darn old to use the site) are very happy.
Edit: I also very much appreciate the irony of spending so much time and energy on posting on Hacker News!
Exactly. The manipulative and unproductive nature go hand in hand and were the two things that made me quit all social networks except for LinkedIn (where I see the value that I get is higher than the time that I invest there).
I think some people unconsciously know this, but they fail to act on it due to the addictive nature of the product, creating false excuses to justify their account (it doesn't matter how important you think you are, no one cares really).
Others are completely oblivious to what Facebook is doing to them. I don't think there is any hope for them. Facebook will continue to use them to squeeze every bit of free time they have into pointless egocentric activity.
Yep. I've heard of this movie but haven't watched it yet - though my sibling assures me it is a copy of our experience with our parents. They were conservative/moderate at one point, but now regurgitate radical right-wing talking points without defending them, and say that "everyone just reads what they want to believe" but applies it only to me and my New York Times, moreso than them and their literal fake news peddling outlets.
FWIW I now have my own blog (not associated with HN, yet) that I use to type out my thoughts on things. I've shared it with a few people in my life that I think might care. The act of it being a blog instead of posts on Facebook is very intentional, and I don't care that not many see it. It is more of a journal.
That movie reminds me of my own family and it is so sad. I think they got radicalized when they retired and had nothing to do other than sit around watching Fox and listening to Rush Limbaugh. They used to be normal, reasonable people and now they're absolute nutters.
But what's the point of traveling to places if you can't tell all your friends about all the places you are traveling to? Or books you're reading? Etc.
Although I suspect this is sarcasm you do raise a good point. Even as someone who has traveled a lot including pre-Internet, now that I have gotten used to the idea of essentially live bragging about where I am, its hard to turn that reflex off.
I was trying to be sarcastic. :)
Some of my friends keep posting pics and status updates and sometimes I realize that all they think while traveling is... Letting their friends know where they are and what they are doing.
I'd be really interested to know how you got to "$12/person/year".
I would be interested in the values for other platforms. I think it builds a more tangible argument when explaining the hidden costs of using various "free" products.
Have a look here [0]. It's a personal essay, but there are a lot of resources, in the links especially, which go into detail about how your worries around manipulation etc. are in fact true.
It sounds like he is infected with something very similar to a religion. Religious ideas are very hard to change. For every rational argument, there's a doctrine-based reply.
Do you have a source for that extraordinary claim that Facebook was designed from the outset to make people unhappy, and that people use Facebook more when they are made unhappy?
I realized I was checking facebook a lot each day whenever I had a spare moment, but didn't have anything really interesting happening, and I wanted to engage more with those around me and have more time for down-time thinking. So I deleted the app, knowing that making the threshold higher for checking it would reduce my usage, now I might check facebook once a month on my desktop, and still nothing happening, so it is super brief. My life is better, I feel better, my relationships are better, and I don't miss it at all.
Slightly different scenario on my side -- I want to use it, but the timeline has gotten so limited it doesn't draw me in as much. (No, i'm not on blocked lists. But strange things happen, e.g., Facebook has decided that despite my brother and I being friends and being marked "close" and not blocking each other, we dont see many of each others' posts.)
I'll confess I actually like using Facebook because it allows me to keep engaged and in touch with family with much less effort than before -- but whatever timeline changes they keep doing, I now see the same stories on my scroll. If I log in five times during the day, i see the same set of stories each of the five times.
Result: I don't check it as much, dont want to check it as much. So much for ranking functions.
I want to check FB once a week or two to catch up on how my friends are doing, but the FB ranking also fails me. All I get is viral click-bait and none of the meaningful news of friends. One friend was sick, another launched an app... i found out about all this after. No reason to log in anymore.
While I'm sure FB's algos are somewhat to blame for this, it's hard to estimate just how much content has been driven away by the site since the halcyon days of 2007-2012. Most of the reason I left was because none of my friends posted photos or thoughts any more -- folks just started sharing links and regurgitating talking points without generating any original content, so I left because I have HN/Reddit for that (with better curation tools, at that). Facebook was a good place when all of my friends used it for messaging and sharing their lives, but at some point everyone I knew started to use instagram and snapchat for those things.
Snapchat has mostly been killed by monetization, but instagram is still on life support for now. Losing the chronological timeline was quite the blow, though. Is it really that hard to balance "pleasant place to share my life" and "shove ads into my face"?
I've actually been seeing "No more posts" a lot recently. I scroll through two pageloads of content and then it tells me there's nothing more to display.
Facebook, I've been signed up since you first opened up to non-edu accounts.. you're telling me there's nothing at all more to display?
Honestly, I feel the same a bit. Like the company itself is cancerous - their complete lack of regard with the way they let hate spread on their platform is shameful. But...I've been on since the old days. I remember when it was actually a community platform and all your friends were there. That was pretty cool.
I've never been a huge Facebook app user but the company definitely has me hooked on Whatsapp. All my friends, family, business partners, seem to have gravitated to Whatsapp and WhatsApp groups. It feels like Facebook.app is dead, Long live Facebook (Inc)...
I believe that is how Facebook dies. Not people deleting their account, they’ll just stop checking their feed, because it’s spam and stuff friends likes or share and no longer posts about their life.
I stopped posting because of the whole thing about social media written in ink. I'm not posting something which may be held against me, or have me randomly shamed in the future because the nuance of my joke was lost in text. When I last posted in 2007, the internet seemed to be a much different, friendlier place.
Facebook in 2007 was also mostly about friends, and not selling me stuff that it couldn't possibly know I was interested in unless my movements over the entire internet were being tracked.
I honestly do like seeing pics of my friends and their many animals. I like knowing what events people are going to. Other than that, I don't care.
I can't post without feeling like an attention seeker; because that's how I see most people who do post. It's to the point where I stopped sharing things I think my friends might actually find interesting... I'm out here all by myself in the end.
The risk/reward of posting humor on the internet nowadays is terrible. Reward is maybe a few of your friends find it funny, maybe it gets ignored. Risk is someone is offended, you lose your livelihood and become an internet pariah because someone organized an angry mob against you on some Discord. Maybe someone doxes you, finds your address and starts harassing you at your home. The internet in 2018 is kind of a terrible place.
> The risk/reward of posting humor on the internet nowadays is terrible.
Doing so under your own name, yes. That's why I think places like Reddit are better suited to these kinds of silly things, assuming you don't get doxxed, which can happen.
I am careful about what I let get out on the Internet. I’m more concerned about being embarrassed about some of the juvenile arguments I got in using my real name on Usenet back in the day than what I post on FaceBook.
Any company that wouldn’t want to hire me because they find my bleeding heart libertarian pro-capitalist views offensive is not a company I would want to work for. Hell they would probably be confused about where I stand on most things.
I'd love to know what happened, because I'm honestly not sure what it was. I just remember posting fearlessly about all sorts of random stuff I'd ashamed to think I put on the internet nowadays.
I think he means "written in ink" in the sense that something you post cannot be erased, much like how if you write something with a pen, vs with a pencil.
I used to use it daily, but now basically do not interact with it at all. I left because a year ago I spent a week away from it, and when I logged back in it was insanely spammy and clingy with irrelevant "your friend liked this post" notifications that I literally couldn't turn off.
The unmutable spam in my inbox forced me to turn off all Facebook mail notifications, and the user-hostile behavior made me hate the platform and not want to come back to it, almost out of spite.
I'll bet these underhanded tactics performed great in A/B testing. But big picture, they should not be surprised that people are leaving in droves after deliberately degrading user experience.
That pretty much exactly describes me - I never did delete the app on my phone but I can't remember when I last opened it. I just have no interest in checking it anymore.
Yes, that's how I see and use Facebook as well. It's there if someone not close enough to have my phone number wants to reach me, but other than that I simply don't open and use the app, let alone post content. It's just not worthwhile to me.
This is exactly how my leaving facebook started. After a few months without the app I logged out on desktop, and then it wasn't long until I deactivated my account.
I'd like to delete it entirely but at the moment too many people still use messenger to contact me.
I wonder how long that will continue. I get so many spam calls every day (about a dozen now) that I am looking towards a future where I don't have a POTS number.
So this is just my two-cents based on working for a VOIP company for a couple years, but I noticed a few patterns, specifically the industry-wide pressure to compete with Twilio, that seem to make it easier to spam text/calls.
1.) VOIP providers have low-barriers to sign-up (typically just a credit card fraud check + check to see if IP or address is from certain countries where fraud calls are common). The up-side to this is that it makes the user experience more friendly to real customers b/c they don't have to wait around, but the downside is that any spammer semi-familiar with the checks that get done can sign up and start sending spam calls for a day or two before most places get complaints and shut them down. The fact that many voip providers allow users to set their Display Id to anything too without any approval also is also really convenient for spammers (ie, there aren't usually ways to immediately detect when a user fraudently set their Caller Id to the name of a bank or something)
2.) APIs everywhere. Twilio got big in part b/c it made APIs available, but the smaller providers are catching up and also adding APIs for texting and calling services. Spammers can automate their spam and re-use the scripts between different accounts when they get banned, so it makes sending out spam texts easier too.
3.) VOIP companies actually are ok with some degree of spam, as long as the spammers pay their bills. So they don't have a motivation to actually stop all of it. Instead of blocking all spam-ish calls outright, some places will just make a deal so that some callers (identified by having a high rate of unanswered calls + very short length calls) pay a higher rate to compensate for potential reputation damage. This is meant for legal cold-calling I imagine, but in practice, they don't know what is actually being said on those phone calls.
I imagine a large part of it is the dramatic lower barrier thanks to services like twilio and competitors. They enable a lot of really cool tech but the programatic access to the phone network like that makes all that stuff significantly easier
Yeah used to be it'd be the opposite. We'd try desperately try to migrate everyone to using something like Messenger (eg: AIM or ICQ) because we couldn't count on our number remaining the same.
Oh man that brings back fond memories of creating Trillian 0.73-0.74 skins! I was just thinking the other day that I should make an app for Mac that lets you skin it via XML in the same way. Away with the conformity of Aqua and Aqua Dark, let creativity reign free!
But you could use the Bitlbee FBMQTT Plugin [1] and WeeChat's scripting functionality to implement it for your personal account. Probably an afternoon's worth of work if you have a VPS or t1.micro lying around to run a daemon on for a few months :)
I did this one time and my account ended up in a broken state where friends couldn't send me messages in long-running one-on-one Messenger chats (they got some mystery error like "This user is not accepting messages right now."). Group chats still worked and I could send messages to those same long-running Messenger conversations.
Re-activating the Facebook side of the account resolved the issue. Caveat deactivator.
Better yet I wish Events were integrated into messenger, but part of me thinks Facebook knows it that a substantial portion of users would probably stick to messenger and never visit the news feed ever again because that's the only thing many of us care about.
Yep. It currently explicitly states this and does it by default when you get to the final deactivation step. Previously it was an option you had to notice and click.
Checking Facebook became the digital equivalent of looking in the fridge. You already know what’s in there, but you look anyways. Eventually people get over this. I notice far fewer of my friends seem to be posting and using it.
FB can shift its model to becoming like priceline. Just try to buy up all the social networks. For example most travel site you probably use are owned by priceline. The same way Facebook could maybe buy up other social networks.
It's easy to get cynical about this but what I like about Instagram as opposed to facebook is that it's superficial by design. That makes it way less of a "thing".
It doesn't pretend like it truly "manages your social life" like facebook does, it's just funny pictures your extroverted friend posts. Instagram stories are gone after 24 hours. They're temporal. I know people who post 10 or 20 things a day on stories and maybe a pic here and there every couple of weeks otherwise.
Similarly, WhatsApp is SMS. SMS running through facebook but it's not very organized, either. My friend deleted WhatsApp, now we text via SMS and I see no difference. A group I was part of decided to use Telegram, so I just made a Telegram account, no friction whatsoever, there's no reason to feel like you're leaving something behind. People in Europe use it because mobile internet is way cheaper than paying for SMS since a text message via mobile internet is like a couple of bytes of traffic. Same with images. Group chat is nice. But it's all not very... connected.
It doesn't really make a profile, old messages are basically just an archive that nobody bothers to look through. I'm aware that facebook probably runs every machine learning algorithm ever invented through that data but from a user's perspective, it's way less of a "world", it's just one tool to share messages/pictures. It's not your life. Social networks aren't "just facebook" anymore and they're way less centralized that way.
Honestly I'd imagine this is on purpose. Facebook wouldn't want their platforms to overlap too much anyway-- wouldn't that be putting all eggs in one basket, in terms of vision for the future of social interaction?
There's bets they're clearly taking across companies (like stories), and they definitely are trying to flow traffic between Instagram and Facebook, but to some degree they've kept each app their own and that has only worked in their favour so far.
Does anyone else find it super-strange that, as what is consistently one of the top ten iOS applications in the App Store, and a massive company now purchased by an even more massive company, Instagram can not be bothered to produce a native iPad app?
It's been 8 years (the first iPad was released in 2010) and the platform has certainly proven itself not to be a fad.
Instagram looks like an actual joke on my iPad Pro 12".
They’ve tested it time and time again, most recently last year. There’s less posting of images and stories which they figured would lower engagement across the app in general if there was marginally less content (they see it as their high growth crown jewel). I suspect when growth plateaus we’ll see the iPad app
But that's a lame argument: I don't expect iPad to be the primary device for posting, but you should be able to have a fine consuming experience in it.
It feels like running a 640x480 app on a 4k capable screen.
It's a joke that they would ignore what a crappy experience it is.
I believe they have focused on their web app for this. Turning it into a home screen based web application has been far better. Not as great as a native app, but better than the iPhone one scaled up!
Is there some one-click way to "bottle" web apps like this on demand? I'm thinking of something that does some light crawling, fills its cache up, shims xmlhttprequests for static data, and sandwiches it in a shell. It wouldn't be perfect, but it could always fall back on the real site when its cache falls through..
Priceline actually got renamed to Booking Holding earlier this year, to reflect the fact that Booking.com is by far the largest part of their turnover.
Expedia have hotels.com, the main competitor to booking. The plane business and the hotel business are of similar size from what I've seen. Both huge and shadowing everything else.
I just got back from a three week vacation, and the travel-specific site I used most was TripAdvisor. I also used a lot of sites not specific to travel (like google maps and reddit).
Does TripAdivsor not qualify as a "major website about travel"? I don't actually know what share of travel-related web traffic they get, and I realize that Expedia and Priceline both own lots of other sites in the space.
What percentage of TripAdvisor does Expedia still own? The stock looks to be mostly held by various mutual funds although I didn't look very closely and may be missing something.
That's just accounting. Doesn't matter. Businesses are not run independently, they share some employees and services.
When you join the company, they will explain you the portfolio of brands and how they link together. A user might leave a site and spend money somewhere else, but it's alright as long as it stays in the family.
They're independently owned. You could argue that it was just accounting if the two businesses had the same or similar ownership while being two separate entities, but they're two different publicly traded companies with substantially different ownership. They also don't share a single board member. Can you provide some sort of substantive indication that they're operating together (today, as compared to prior to the TripAdvisor spinoff)?
I bet the Facebook employees who pushed to buy Instagram are feeling pretty justified right about now. But still, I'm not sure if Instagram can be monetized to the same degree as Facebook was in the last decade, especially as they continue to wreck their brand with privacy abuses (note that I'm not a privacy hawk).
You mean to ruin a secondary platform? I've all but stopped using Instagram for the same reason I've all but stopped using FB... there are just too many ads to scroll past to see what I'm actually there to see (the people I'm friends with/following). Every other post now seems to be an ad/sponsored post. Both platforms have gone overboard to the point that I only visit maybe once/week now instead of daily. I also don't have any FB related apps on my phone since they all share data with FB and want access to every possible damn permission. I just visit the sites in my desktop browser now (and sign out when done). So, they better be charging a LOT more for the ads they show as I don't think I'm in the minority here by visiting a lot less often due to the complete over-saturation of them.
I'm not arguing that they're doing good things with it; I'm not an Instagram user. I was only observing that Instagram's rise is conveniently (for Facebook) occurring during Facebook's fall.
I've been doing the same for months, and I still see ads. The only effect I see is that ads are worse & worse with every day passing. At some point I hope advertisers will understand that Facebook is wasting their money on people like me. They ought to demand to Facebook that users hostile to ads are not targeted anymore...
Instagram is better positioned for monetization because of:
A) Stories and TV like content to compete with Snap
B) Ads integrated into their proprietary browser (aka Instagram app)
C) Sponsored live events
They’ve essentially made a closed ecosystem without having to rely on a desktop browser and they’re more mobile centric than Facebook. Furthermore, Visual content is the basis for IG and it lends itself better for monetization.
If anything, IG works better for facebook and its users because it's more honest. It's a platform for photo and video sharing and loads of people just use it to voluntarily follow brands anyway. In some ways, instagram is facebook's distilled product - rather than a directory which became everything, it's just a feed of content, so the terms and user expectations are different.
I hate Instagram more than FB. Everybody become some sort of "influencer" there, everybody is selling something!!!??!! On top of that 1 out of 3 posts is an AD. I don't have it on my phone anymore.
There are far, far, too many ads. But the ads are at least more tasteful than on most platforms. If you keep your list of follows < 100 or so (and take care to cull any accounts that get too spammy -- limiting yourself to people you know personally is a good strategy for this), Instagram is a pretty pleasant platform to check once a day, especially if your friends use Stories.
That being said, it suffers from Facebook syndrome to the extent that you literally have to fight the platform to make it usable. I'm holding out for some kind of federated hybrid of instagram/facebook in the near future with a chronological timeline and a reasonable volume of ads (to keep the lights on)/subscription option.
> WhatsApp and Instagram acquisitions needed approvals from EU before they could continue.
What would it mean for a US based company if they decided to acquire two other US based companies and US regulators approved it, but EU regulators didn't?
What would happen if the company went forward with the acquisition anyway?
Most likely, the company would be fined and ordered to either sell off the company or agree to some other set of penalties. If they refused to pay the fine or perform their penalties, they could be banned from operating in the EU. They'd be unable to advertise in the EU, make deals with EU companies, employ people and set up datacentres in the EU, etc etc.
Companies like Facebook aren't "US based" in any way that means anything except for where their CEO normally works and which stock exchange their shares are traded on - they have operations that are central to their business all over the world, and many of those can be disrupted.
They will have to satisfy regulators from all major regions where they want to operate. Non-compliance results financial, or criminal penalties or not being allowed to operate in EU.
In theory FB could just agree with EU that they will cease all operations in EU and leave in peace, but that would effectively kill FB over long term. Competitors would crush them. Imagine a mobile carrier who can't make calls to EU or email provider who can't sent or receive calls from EU. FB is in the same situation. It's a social network. Value for the users comes from connections.
Every international company negotiates some kind of deal if they want to stay international.
"Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony"
at least can be halted by the disapproval of antitrust regulators.
That's the key though, they can continue to try until someone sits up and takes notice. Depending on the regulatory climate at any given time a company will have varying degrees of success with this before they are stopped outright before buying any more competition. Either that or they suddenly start abusing their positions such that people/other companies complain enough for regulators to take notice of them.
Not just them. Almost everybody does that. Just a few weeks ago saw a documentary that explained that the same happens in dating apps/websites, for instance.
It's also logical. I mean, what can you do when you are the market leader already.
I have teenagers and college-age kids and I'm not surprised in the least. They openly consider Facebook to be a platform for old people.
They seem to have moved to more of a distributed social media system. That is, they don't seem to have a central place where they communicate with friends. They seem to move between texts, facetime, tumblr, instagram, phone calls (!), etc. in a fluid manner. Anything except for Facebook (which has a negative stigma these days). They don't seem to be tied down to any one platform anymore.
I don't think there's any sort of "stigma." There's just the fact that, since "old people" are on Facebook—and that likely includes your parents and other relatives—they all expect you to add them as a Facebook friend. At which point you won't be able to be yourself on Facebook any more, because they can observe any of your "broadcast" activity.
The nice thing about the other platforms isn't that they don't have "old people" on them. It's specifically that your parents and relatives won't even think to add you on, say, Snapchat.
Also note that the apps that teens mostly do interact with parents through now, consist mostly of group-chat apps like Messenger or WeChat, where there is an explicit separation of social contexts (the groups you're chatting with), such that you don't need to worry about your relatives seeing anything as long as you don't put it in your family group.
I think this is the biggest factor. Nobody wants their family to be snooping on their every action, especially if it is a long distance family member that you normally only see a few times a year at best or someone you live with every day. With close friends you have a field of similar interests you can discuss, with total internet strangers you can say or do anything and if people don't like it then nothing happens, but with family members and parents it is a field of potential landmines for tons of kids where everything they say and post needs to be catered to not upset those who have power over their lives.
I don't know. Recently I was at an event where an older teen was giving a speech where he mentioned some social media platform and then explained, "That's like Facebook for you old people". That got quite a laugh, but in my experience there really is a stigma among young people that Facebook is only for old people.
That isn't what I'm saying. When I hear teens and college students talking bad about Facebook, they aren't mentioning old people (though that probably is the root cause), they are saying Facebook by name. They are saying "Facebook sucks" not "Old people suck, old people use Facebook, ergo I am declining from using Facebook for now until I too am an old person".
It sucks because you can't freely post anything there, without people (family / coworkers) judging you. I don't want to broadcast to that group of people. If I need to talk to them it's personal or in small groups, so that's done in instant messengers.
The only people I would like to broadcast to are close friends or strangers on the internet.
I don't have that many close friends, so a bigger IM group is enough for that. (I guess Instagram might work if you have lots of "close" friends.)
That leaves only my need to anonymously talk to the internet. So Twitter, reddit, personal blogs?
Knowing that my 2-year-old son will very likely not even consider participating in Facebook (when he gets to that age) is pretty refreshing. It gives me hope that in the time between now and then, we'll be able to figure out how to communicate effectively in the distributed internet age. In the same vein, it worries me because it's totally plausible to think that the problems of today will be dwarfed by the problems of my son's age.
From my perspective, the very best action that I can take, in order to limit his vulnerability later on in life, is to just start educating him on how to act appropriately online. But I can only base that education on the view that I've built up of these gargantuan and ever-multiplying systems of manipulation, which leads back to my main worry: I know that there will come a time when I can no longer keep my view of these systems up-to-date, and by extension, help to keep my son educated about his and my own vulnerabilities to them. I find myself worrying a lot about his future these days...
He's growing up in a future that will be better than today by almost any measure.
The news just like to report bad events more and it biases our view.
'Enlightenment Now' by Pinker really explains it - we shouldn't be so pessimistic, as Obama said if you could choose any time up until now in which to exist (without being able to pick the conditions of your birth) you would choose today.
I’ve noticed that most young people don’t use Facebook until they graduate from college, become an adult and move away from home and want to keep in touch with people. Why use Facebook when your friendship circle is people you see every day?
Maybe, but at least my college-age kids have friends that are all over the country (including back here in their home state) and they don't use Facebook to keep in touch with them.
People always complain about younger people not getting it, but to me this sounds like a new generation of internet users actively self-regulating their social media use.
There's just no way I could keep myself up to date with local events without Facebook. I live in a post-soviet country so Snapchat and Instagram are considered pretty niche here so every social event is always documented on Facebook.
I also hold a monthly gamedev meetup, which would be utterly impossible without Facebook. The attendance has grown from 5 to 30 people in a few months and is now helping jump start the game development scene in the country (not because of my meetup).
Despite this, I have a deep hatred towards the platform and can't stand how people around me get locked into feedback loops of endless scrolling. I uninstalled the app on my phone a year ago, kept messenger. Also, I haven't seen the news feed in more than 2 years, after installing a plugin that blocks it. The productivity gains were and still are immeasurable.
I see the platform as a versatile and useful tool to help connect with others and I hope that Facebook will try to improve it and remove some of its ethically questionable features, but it's still evil.
It is evil but it's really not as necessary as you think. I'm known to ALL of my friends and ALL of my family as someone who will not ever be on Facebook. You know what they do? They call me. Or text me. Or email me. And I never miss out on events. Even people I rarely interact with know how to, and do reach me outside of Facebook.
People make such a big deal out of how impossible their social lives would be without Facebook but never actually try it. I honestly don't get it.
Same, however in my experience people like us will be left out of the loop when there are last minute changes to the event. Just last week I nearly missed a weekly public activity: the venue changed last minute and they only posted about that on Facebook. If a friend hadn't told me, I'd have gone to the usual place.
I have an amusing anecdote about being the one friend without Facebook.
Someone told me about a birthday party- they told me where it was and what time to be there. They did not tell me that our group was not actually invited and our arrival would be a surprise.
The rest of the group was half an hour late. I was not. They all wanted to arrive together and were delayed, but no one filled me in on the new time.
And that's the story about how I awkwardly attended a party for 30min where I knew no one but the birthday woman and it was obvious to everyone that I was not actually invited.
All was well once my friends arrived. Still, what a nightmare that was.
I haven't had Facebook in going on seven years. Not once has someone said anything like, "I only sent the invite out on Facebook. I forgot to invite you!"
As a counterpoint, I've made it clear to my friends I don't check facebook, and have missed out on events or only found out about them because they came up in passing conversation, specifically because they sent out a facebook invite and assumed it would reach me. Then when I mention I hadn't heard about it I always hear "Oh right, I forgot you don't check facebook". As the only person in my friend circle who doesn't use the platform, it seems almost unthinkable to the rest that someone would do that. Is it poor behavior on my friends' part? Perhaps, but it's not a hill I'm willing to die on.
I suspect the difference is that they still "see" you there. So my friends can't see me, even if they're looking for me and maybe that triggers a reminder in their minds that they need to call/text/whatever me.
One challenge I face, though, is that I'm unwilling to let my Facebook account break out of its silo by linking it to anything else (and of course I'd love to kill it entirely) so event discovery becomes more challenging without the private groups I'm currently a member of and family/friends information FB currently holds.
> I'm known to ALL of my friends and ALL of my family as someone who will not ever be on Facebook. You know what they do? They call me. Or text me. Or email me.
That only works if they already know you. If you wanna start something new, it might benefit from having the outreach that facebook has.
I recently joined a gym and have met several people there I now call friends. They also all know I'm not on Facebook so these new friends text me (usually) when they want to get in touch outside of the gym.
Guys, you're proving what everybody is starting to realize; Facebook has become masters at making people addicted to them. Every excuse I see like this one is nothing more than justification for an addiction. I hear it all the time. Me: "I'm not on Facebook." Them: "Oh, I could never do that" and then the proceeds to outline some extenuating circumstance that they claim is unique to them which is in fact unique to NOBODY. Because Facebook is that good at making people addicted to it.
I challenge you to try it. Disable your account for six weeks and see how you feel. If you're miserable, fine. Go back. But at least try it!
Really all I want is a solid app that's only Facebook's event system and friend lists and nothing else.
But I can't see any growth-motivated company ever making that and just stopping there. I'd even pay for it, if I thought they wouldn't try to make more money after that. Maybe it would have to be a non-profit.
My co-founder and I are building a groups and events system (like Meetup) that has a friends list and things like instant messaging. Our business model at the moment is freemium with ads and a limited organizer experience (you can create small groups/events) or we are offering a small subscription ~$5/mo. The subscription model removes the ads, unlocks all organizer features, and removes all limits on organizing groups/events such as being able to create a hierarchical organization with the tooling to manage it.
We are currently in YC Startup School as Geddy at geddy.io and we plan to launch soon.
My main concern is that if you're in startup-crazy VC-funded world, you're eventually going to try to make more money, somehow, off my presence on your site -- through selling data or advertising or whatever.
If I do join it, I'll immediately leave when that happens. But if I think it might happen, I won't join it. The thing that would get me really interested would be a promise (ideally a legally restrictive one, like being a B-corp or a non-profit) that that won't happen.
I think that everyone (at least in my age group?) is slowly becoming enormously skeptical of companies offering services. I _want_ to use a service forever and have it be good and trustworthy. But in practice I feel like I'm getting tricked and manipulated at every turn, which is just slowly turning me into a luddite.
Definitely not interested. I want something that provides a service for money and won't about-face to trying to milk me for growth, ad revenue, and commodified personal data.
(I promise, I am not shilling) Meetup (meetup.com) lets you make a group for I think $20/month (group participants can contribute to help the organizer) and is perfect for organizing events, sending calendar invites, providing a group forum and mailing list. I have been using it for about 10 years to keep up with local tech groups and it works great.
I love meetup and have found it extremely useful in a new city to try and meet people with similar hobbies. But I've also found there are basically two types. The people who are truly passionate about a hobby and are willing to take losses occasionally and the groups that are sponsored for an obvious reason. In Japan, where I discovered the site, there were lots of groups that just wanted to get native English speakers so they members didn't need to pay for English classes. In America most of the tech events are simply put on by companies who are looking to hire. Often times the events are still worth it and enjoyable, but it's definitely disappointing if you go to one and don't realize the underlying reason for the group existing. I've found the ones put on by the passionate people to be the most worthwhile and worth the more expensive dues.
> Just like there is no turning back for gaming. F2P elements in nearly everything including paid games!
There are plenty of paid games that do not include any kind of microtransaction. I'd consider the paid-games ecosystem to be surprisingly healthy these days. But to be fair, it's all console/PC. Mobile games are likely to remain a F2P wasteland.
Sounds neat. Any chance you could put something on your site about your, like, philosophy?
Facebook and similar make me wary of getting excited about anything which seems superficially good without first understanding the underlying intentions of the creators.
I did this. In the following sequence, over a few years, and am now to step 5:
1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone;
2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone;
3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone;
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?"
# ~/unfuckfacbook.sh
#!/bin/bash
sed -i '' s/'^127.0.0.1 facebook.com'/'#127.0.0.1 facebook.com'/ /etc/hosts
sed -i '' s/'^127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com'/'#127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com'/ /etc/hosts
sed -i '' s/'^127.0.0.1 m.facebook.com'/'#127.0.0.1 m.facebook.com'/ /etc/hosts
sleep 30
say "Hey asshole, get off Facebook"
sleep 30
~/fuckfacbook.sh
~/fuckfacbook.sh just undoes the hosts file work
It helpped for a while but at some point I had to just commit to not checking it. I have some legitimate business I have to do on there sometimes (I'm a musician and I need more side-guy gigs), so I post updates from insta (which is less addicting to me) or if I open it I commit to not scrolling and browsing but just checking alerts.
It's so fcking creepy though... I mean, I'm legitimately an alcoholic but I can (when I want to, which is usually all the time these days) at least not _start_ drinking... but if I stopped drinking for a couple of days and the bottle of scotch in my cabinet sent me an email trying to get me to drink, I'd have to pour it out.
If you're using macOS, you'll need to do sed -i "" ... (put an empty string argument after the -i flag). If the second to last argument on the command line is -i, I think on the version of sed that ships with most distros, sed assumes that the argument to -i is the empty string and that the last argument in the command is the pattern. The version that ships with macOS, on the other hand, always treats the argument after -i as the extension to use for the backup file.
One extra step you can do (somewhere between 2 and 3) is change your profile pic and your cover photo to messages advertising your intent to disengage from Facebook. That serves two functions: 1) it lets people who want to reach you know they shouldn't use Facebook to do so, and 2) it makes the withdraw visible and social, which may encourage others to follow.
I'm logged out on my phone. Logged in through desktop in Chrome but have the "News Feed Eradicator for Facebook" chrome extension installed and am only logged in from my specific "personal" container in firefox, and all of that is enough of an obstacle for me to not spend much time on it.
I'm on step 4. Already feeling liberated. On Twitter, I unfollowed any political accounts or accounts which were overly toxic. My mood is better and I feel far less distracted.
Great, now you have one less company selling your data out of thousands. And remember that FB will still retain your profile forever and continue build on it via shadow profile - from everyone you know, and probably from bartering data with other companies you still use. From Google/Apple powering your OS, from Cell operator collecting info with baseband chip, thousands of them.
I'm not saying FB is good, I just say that this fight is already lost, delete FB account or not.
facebook owns whatsapp too. I already did all 5 of thsoe steps some time ago... but I have friends in certain parts of the world where whatsapp is the only app. Not sure how to curtail that one.
You could try and get them on Wire or Signal. But it's an uphill battle, unfortunately. Let's wait and see until Facebook fucks up WhatsApp, then try again.
But Facebook did it to themselves. I just opened up Facebook on desktop. Above the fold, I have "People you may know" whom I've never heard of. Nothing above the fold is very relevant. Some of my horse-owning friends have posted some things, but I have to dig to find them.
Two years ago, I was shown what my friends were doing. Now Facebook puts all the crap up top. Facebook's ideas of what to show me are strange. Burning Man infrastructure groups? A double-wide house trailer in Fremont? Huh? No wonder people are fed up.
I deleted the app because I was sick of getting notifications somewhere along the lines of “your friend just commented on a photo” or “your friend recently liked a post”. I tried turning off all notifications that weren’t directly related to my content and Facebook still sent me these types of notifications. So I said that I would just use the website instead of getting these notifications (at least 2 a day). I want an app that provides a means to connect with old friends rather than gossip about their comments/likes. I feel like they are doubling down on being a gossip machine.
This was the straw that finally made me delete everything. For a few days/week I was getting text messages for notifications even though I had them disabled and had even deleted the app (deleted app out of the frustration you mentioned). I couldn't escape it.
Oh, so it was a bug, huh? I found it so irritating that I just removed my phone number from my facebook account altogether, because I couldn't find any setting that would make them stop texting me.
This. I had my account disabled for a while and only recently re-enabled it. I try to check it once a week and 95% of the notifications aren't relevant.
Facebook really has no draw to it anymore other than the convenience of messaging people that you don't have other lines of communication with. Going through my feed, it's 95% spam consisting of friends sharing stock pictures with spiritual quotes, self motivational quotes, etc. It's difficult to filter through that for some people you want to keep tabs on because they share annoying junk from 50 different sources, requiring me to manually block every single one to keep them off my feed. I didn't use it for several years and it had very few negatives. The only thing I missed out on was not reconnecting with old friends. FB is for the older crowds now, it's lost all appeal to the younger generations. Hell, I'd rather see myspace revived than have FB be popular again. At least myspace let you get creative.
"Deleted app" is not necessarily a good metric, considering that I prefer to use Facebook on my mobile phone as a web page instead of the app, simply because I like it that way. It's simply a more consistent and less intrusive experience IMO. Facebook is nagging me with Facebook Lite ads because it thinks that I don't have resources on the phone to run the app, but that's not the case at all.
"Deleted app within the past year", however, is probably about as good as you're going to get. And c'mon, you know as well as I do that the percentage of people who deleted the app (especially "within the last year") simply because they prefer the web version has to be single digit percentages at best. "Yeah, but, I've got special case that I'll generalize to the population..." is not a refutation.
I don't know. I've also deleted the app but continue to use the web version of Facebook. I think a lot of people just don't use Facebook in a way that's consistent with the mobile app experience.
I'm also suspicious on principle of statistics which suggest but don't actually show what they're trying to measure. If nearly half of young adults have really stopped using Facebook, surely there's a more direct statistic showing it.
Anecdotal but same here. I've deleted the app as I didn't like how it takes too much memory (200-500MB) and syncs with the phone's photo gallery. Most of the people I know in my age group (early 20s) have also deleted the app yet still continue to use messenger and the browser version.
I would say yours is the edge case. For US users, when they see an on-screen message saying "There's way more features in the app", they go ahead and download the app, and soon forget they ever even accessed it as a mobile website. FB has deliberately hobbled its mobile site in slow increments over the years to drive the maximum possible number of users to the app.
I stopped using Facebook because of their mobile site sabotage. Switched to the desktop version on my phone for a while, but at one point I stopped and thought "why am I fighting with Facebook to use it the way I want?" And just gave up.
Self-reporting measuring how socially popular respondents think an action is vs. their actual actions is likely a more significant issue (we know this from, e.g., comparisons of actual election results to pre- and post-retirement polls; immediately pre-existing polls tend to be very close to the actual results, post election polls of how people say they voted consistently show a much better result for the declared winner than the actual election results.)
Now, we don't know how big of an effect perceived popularity has on other self-reports of past actions, but we have plenty of reason to believe it plays a significant role.
People, the concept of "revealed preferences" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference) is highly relevant here. What people say in surveys is often garbage, for all kinds of reasons, social desirability bias among them. This article is useless compared to actual measurements of people's phone and time.
It is a relevant metric since it reduces notifications being sent to you and reduces the information Facebook can gather (no tracking of what else is going on on the hone etc.)
It also tells them that the App apparently dosn't give value to users and something has to change on their side (whatever "something" might be, might be reputation or features or overall experience or ...)
I've done the same for a couple years now but it means I don't get those instant notifications, I'm not responding to anything right away. Maybe every day or two I check it for five minutes. That's not leaving the app but it's definitely not the kind of user they're looking for
I think Facebook is juicing their DAU metrics by gaming people with "friend suggestion" notifications.
My usage is way down and I barely check it, maybe once in a couple weeks, but after I check it I get a sudden uptick in notifications. Mostly "friend suggestions". There's nothing new about them. In many cases they've suggested them before. But it seems like they just want to slide into my notifications and keep that red badge lit up and just trigger me to open up the app. But not too much.. after I ignore it for awhile they die down, probably so I don't uninstall entirely. Then the cycle repeats a couple weeks later.
And I could be wrong but it looks like they removed the ability to turn off friend suggestion notifications. You can turn just about everything else off but not that one. Hmmmm...
The biggest failure in FB afaiac, is the complete package of utility to truly connect people with tools.
For example, they could have created workspaces for people to create teams and collaborate and build things, manage communities and projects have real facility to build create and run organizations with Facebook being the profile glue and communications channel.
They have had less-than-mediocre efforts on all of these. And their system stinks of every kind of digital fraud you can imagine from inflated and fake metrics across the board, to data breaches and leaks, a UX that is labrynthian etc.
With the money And resources they have, why don't we see the fruits of Vision that could be available to them.
Their cell phone was a flop, their engagements feel cancerous and they are basically a new-money-elite building moats around old-boy-exclusionist thinking.
To my mind one of the major mistakes Facebook made was that they never made any effort to implement identity segmentation. I don't want a picture of me from college with a solo cup in each hand visible to any prospective employer and therefore would never want my Facebook profile to take the place of the one I have created for myself on LinkedIn.
If I could have multiple views of my identity depending on the context that would be pretty neat and more analogous to the way people present themselves in the real world. Huge missed opportunity on Facebook's part and now it's way too late.
My other hot take is that the interaction design of Facebook is just much too heavy when compared to Instagram or Tinder. If I go on Facebook it's guaranteed 15 minutes of time just to kind-of get into the flow and see a bunch of friends' statuses and maybe click on their profiles. Instagram on the other hand you can just pick up and scroll through pictures for a few minutes and then put down — the interaction feels lighter weight and less burdensome.
I completely agree. They have all the users but their core product is shambolic.
For example, Facebook messenger should be the best way to communicate with someone, yet it's surpassed by even one of their own subdivisions (Whatsapp).
Anecdotal obviously, but I'm surprised at how pervasive the "Facebook listens to your conversations through the app" rumors are, even among the more technically literate.
I'm curious how much of an effect that rumor had on this finding.
I have seen this first hand. At one point, I think I had figured this out because I the Facebook app had access to "Siri results", and "Siri results" is just about anything you do on your phone. We turned off Siri results, but we would still be discussing something out loud like "maybe we should go to Bali some day" and lo and behold, my wife would see ads for Bali in her Facebook stream within 1-2 hours.
I want to add one more thing. The ads weren't just for a travel destination. It would be something totally out of character for us like "Let's build a tree house and rent in out on AirBnb" and there would be ads for renting out tree houses.
They weren't analyzing voice, but what they are doing gets them just as much or more data.
- They watch how quickly you scroll through the news feed at what you pause on, even briefly.
- They have ad deals with many of the sites you probably visit so can determine many of your search terms and interests even if you didn't search those things through Facebook itself.
- They have your friend & family graph and Facebook messenger context. Even if you personally didn't say something, maybe you mentioned it to a friend at some point and they searched it or discussed it in a chat.
Sure but did you have any other interaction with the internet about these topics? Did you search Google for tree house building codes? Did you search Pinterest or Instagram for ideas?
I have heard this anecdote many times but I don't believe Facebook is actually recording everything we say. Mostly because I don't think our phones have that kind of battery life. I do think they have data on essentially everything you do online.
I wonder if it is also possible they associate you with searches your friends have done after being in the same location? So if you chat about going to Bali with your friends or co-workers, and one of them searches for Bali flights, they then display Bali ads to the entire group.
This is true, they are known to monitor location all the time and display ads like this. They will also suggest people to be friends if they find you guys hang out in person a lot.
I've seen this firsthand as well. I don't know that it was Facebook, but that was the only thing that seemed plausible at the time. My wife had been saying that she'd been getting creepy ads that appeared to be based on things she said out loud. I dismissed it as, "Oh, but you were talking about that because you read about it earlier, and the app noticed you read that story." She wasn't convinced.
Then we watched a random TV show on Netflix. During the show, two characters discussed a very specific medical method of improving their chances of bearing a child. Literally minutes later, she was getting ads for this type of conception therapy. We are both past child bearing age and have not discussed it in probably 20 years. We had never even heard of the specific type of process. We had never looked it up or read anything about it. It definitely came from something listening to our household, but we don't know what. It was way too specific to have been random chance.
We don't fall into the demographics for such an ad in any way. We have Apple devices with Siri, but that seems unlikely given their privacy policies. We don't have any Amazon or Google home devices (or any other types of their devices). She's on FB, and I'm not, so we think it was probably either her laptop or phone listening. She's had mic access on her phone turned off for Facebook and no other apps were running, but these apps have a way of finding their way around such permissions.
Some "smart TV"'s can phone home with TV usage data. I wouldn't be too surprised if there was a shazzam like thing in some smart TV's that can detect certain advertisements.
Did she type any related query into a search engine or browsed some related travel sites (that happened to have Facebook like buttons on them) in-between two events?
I thought it was just a rumor until I experienced it firsthand. I was walking down a long hallway at work with a coworker between meetings. At one end of the hallway my zipper broke on my backpack. We walked and talked about backpack zippers though the corridor while I held my phone in my hand walking. She and I were talking about if you could sew in a new zipper or you'd have to buy an entirely new backpack. And if you could hand-sew in the new zipper or if you'd need a sewing machine. When we got to our next meeting we were 10 minutes early so I logged into facebook. BOOM- ZIPPER ads and backpack ads. I'd search for nothing about zippers, hadn't googled zippers, and my backpack zipper had just broken at the previous meeting. Literally the only way it could have known about that to show me those ads had been that it was listening via my microphone.
Here is another anecdote. I was talking to a friend through a WhatsApp voice call. During the call he told me that he had just bought an air hockey table. Later that day when I logged in to Facebook, I see an ad for an air hockey table. Creeped the hell out of me.
Whether or not they are actually listening to conversations, the effect is the same; ads that are way too personal.
I suspect they have much more information than what we tell them, and I mean raw data, not what's derived from collaborative filtering or other techniques. I wonder if our ISPs, streaming services, banks, visa, etc, share data. Maybe it's just the trackers all over the internet.
Getting ads for a specific product the day after discussing it in person could be luck... or not.
> I suspect they have much more information than what we tell them, and I mean raw data, not what's derived from collaborative filtering or other techniques. I wonder if our ISPs, streaming services, banks, visa, etc, share data. Maybe it's just the trackers all over the internet.
They absolutely do. You should download your FB data, if you have an account. It's basically a list of everywhere you've shopped/been/etc. 95% of it you likely didn't share intentionally. It's quite shocking.
Your friend's friend says the Facebook app tracks conversations. Do you
a) Vaguely agree that Facebook is awful, and removing the app is a good idea,
b) Start explaining how a detailed log of every app user's location, time spent reading each story, typing speed, searches, lists of other apps used (or in use), full lists of contacts, calendar events, text messages, phone call history, photographs, nearby WiFi networks and battery statistics can be combined with website-based Facebook use and tracking cookies on other sites, allowing Facebook to create a detailed profile of each user, and that's why they showed the creepily-relevant advert.
I would usually choose (a), unless the discussion is specifically about data privacy. (b) is not literally listening, but it's close enough for a casual discussion.
The claim was not that they were listening to calls (which they also directly claim they don't do, according to your article), it was that Facebook listens to you through the app. They've also explicitly stated they don't do that, as well.
no effect for me, personally. my reasons for deleting the app and halting usage of facebook was entirely based on the plethora of toxic/useless content that just made me want to punch most of my friends in the face.
My wife and I conduct experiments. The first was shouting “dog food” multiple times in earshot to our google home and phones. Sure enough a chewse.com pamphlet came in the mail a few days later with a discount for the website. We’ve mentioned some pretty eclectic things and found ads on Hulu correspond. I had heard some story or myth that Target could predict pregnancies based on customer’s purchase habits [1], and half believed it. Now I really do.
> Anecdotal obviously, but I'm surprised at how pervasive the "Facebook listens to your conversations through the app" rumors are, even among the more technically literate.
They were slurping up text massages and collecting call logs, IIRC. So the rumor isn't too far from the truth.
I’m curious as to whether it’s a rumour. I’m an iOS developer, and I know how difficult and seemingly implausible these rumours are, but the causal evidence to the contrary I’ve experienced is too ‘Black Mirror’ for my liking, or others.
I have troubles convincing myself it’s not true because it just happens on an almost bi-daily basis - it’s too accurate and it regularly involves things either my friends or I have definitively not typed but only spoken about.
While anything's possible, it would be pretty shocking and a big blow to Apple if Facebook figured out how to, on iOS (I can't speak for Android):
* Record audio if the app's killed completely
* Record audio with microphone permission disabled
* etc.
All of which have been claimed and seem unlikely.
The far more likely scenario is that we're much more predictable than we think. Remember the target controversy when they figured out a teenage girl was pregnant before she had told her parents [1]? That happened in 2012. Imagine how much more advanced things have become since then.
I understand these things. I explained that explicitly. I had already seen that post.
But I explained that I'm a developer. I used the term 'implausible', and, yes, given legal requirements and whatnot there would have to be some extremely shady activity going on, but what I'm trying to explain is that whatever is going on has nothing to do with text or anything except spoken voice and occurs on such a regular basis to not just myself but other friends of mine that even though I absolutely know from a scientific perspective it's almost technically impossible, I literally have troubles believing it's technical implausibility/impossibility over the fact that it is simply happening.
That's how messed up and creepy it is. And I'm certainly not the only one saying or experiencing this. Many of the incredibly intelligent and talented developers at the major bank I work at have also experienced this and have extreme troubles explaining it. Many of the brilliant minds here at HN are having to say similar things.
It's like something out of Scooby-Doo. I want to pull the mask off the bad guy, but it really feels like one of those one-offs where the monster is real.
I'm a developer too and I know it doesn't sound technically possible, but after FB's behavior it really wouldn't surprise me. Collecting copies of every SMS from Android phones via Messenger when it only advertised using Messenger to send/receive SMS alongside FB messages? Downright lies and abusive to privacy.
Most of us knew how poor Facebook's developer data policy was and no one cared until Cambridge Analytica. I'm just waiting for this voice scandal to happen in the next year or two.
There are a lot of sources for error here. 1. You may pay more attention to ads you wouldn't have noticed. 2. Something prompted you to say what you said and Facebook may be aware of that cause. 3. Your behavior may change as a result of having said it and Facebook may pick up on that.
There is a solution to all this. A (repeated) double blind experiment.
Pick two phrases. Say one so the phone can hear and one so it can't. It's very important you don't know which is which. You could eg have a friend put the phone in one of two rooms.
Are you sure that your friends haven't searched for whatever FB suggested? Perhaps not even the exact thing but something similar or associated (e.g. searched for dog treats, sees ads for dog beds)? Have you visited a place that sells that thing with location services enabled? Do your friends express a lot of interest in the things advertised (posts, pictures, comments on any FB platform)? Do you spend a decent amount of time with these friends? What about other people that use the same home/work networks that you do?
Being able to accurately predict what you might be interested in, or at least interested enough to click on is how FB makes their money. That is where a bulk of their R&D spend goes. Couple that with the fact that humans are creatures of habit and relatively predictable, and you can end up with the notion that FB or Google must be listening in on everything you are saying.
> Are you sure that your friends haven't searched for whatever FB suggested?
Absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, in several instances. Too many, at this point.
>> Perhaps not even the exact thing but something similar or associated (e.g. searched for dog treats, sees ads for dog beds)?
Definitely not. These things are often obscure, and many times, said in jest, and never repeated via texts, and certainly never looked up in a serious context.
>> Have you visited a place that sells that thing with location services enabled?
I keep all of my location services disabled by default. I do enough development to know that's a poor idea.
>> Do your friends express a lot of interest in the things advertised (posts, pictures, comments on any FB platform)?
No, again, I think it's that these things are often said or suggested in a joking manner that really throws my friends and I off a lot of the time.
>> Do you spend a decent amount of time with these friends? What about other people that use the same home/work networks that you do?
For sure. I spend a lot of time with a lot of my friends, and again, these things are observed by co-workers as well, our security is extremely tight at my office, so the idea that could be exploited in any way by something like Facebook is disturbing at best.
Frankly, the fact that you have to ask me these things alone is evidence enough as-is that there is an insane amount of intrusiveness going on.
This came up (albeit regarding Instagram ads) at a Seattle conference I was at a couple of weeks ago. It was during a talk about the future of video ads. An FB engineer was one of the panelists, so an audience member relayed a story of him having a conversation about a product with a friend, and then seeing an ad for that exact product in his Instagram timeline.
Here's my anecdote. In March my brother and I were visiting my father on holidays. My brother jokes to him that even on vacation he brings a soldering iron (he makes an esp* open source webradio player as a retirement project), and that was the end of it.
Later on in the evening my brother had ads for soldering iron in the Facebook app.
When anyone technically inclined tries to explain the difference, laypeople just hear a lawyer saying: "Well, they don't do exactly that, but they do the entire list of other things you could ever brainstorm that are in the same class as that. And a dozen more gross things you are just learning exist as part of this clarification."
While anything's possible, it would be pretty shocking if Facebook figured out how to, on iOS (I can't speak for Android):
* Record audio if the app's killed completely
* Record audio with microphone permission disabled
* etc.
All of which have been claimed.
The far more likely scenario is that we're much more predictable than we think. Remember the target controversy when they figured out a teenage girl was pregnant before she had told her parents [1]? That happened in 2012. Imagine how much more advanced things have become since then.
I don't know why this got downvoted, while the question "does FB listen in on you" may not have a definitive answer, the answer to the question "does FB messenger look at your conversation text" is "yes": http://time.com/money/5227844/facebook-reviews-private-messa...
Does it use your private messages for advertising? It seems like "no" for now, but nothing is stopping them.
The majority of the feed was what looked like irrelevant spam, ads or political arguing. It has essentially no positive value anymore so I deleted my account.
I feel like the Facebook timeline has just become a dumping ground for rehashed memes, vaguebooking, unchecked 'facts', unfounded opinions, and, worse, blatantly false information that causes people to lash out to their so-called 'friends' when they're presented a different perspective.
Not only that, but I've actually experienced first-hand, and witnessed many of my friends experiencing depression and anxiety from the constant scrolling. The 'desire to be seen or heard' factor really plays in to an overall sense of toxicity and negativity that there have actually been a number of psychology studies on.
Overall, I find, contrary to say, HN, which I still spend too much time on (but mostly when I'm bored at work, ha), there is no bar of quality on Facebook. It's a cesspool of humanity's worst sides, especially if you consider the privacy violations of the medium itself.
In fact, it's actually becoming a faster and faster race to the bottom. (Can we all remember this year of 2018 started with 'Tide Pods'?)
I'm not the OP but methinks the two are related. There was a time back in the day when FB gave me updates on what my friends were doing. And then one day - somewhere between 2008, when I stopped using it, and 2013, when I tried it again for a few months, stopped, and only came back 3 or 4 times since - it became mostly memes, cat videos, feel good stuff, what have you.
I've yet to bring myself to delete the account, since I get occasional messages I care about and it's convenient to lookup someone's email you've lost. I would if that wasn't the case.
I'm always suspicious of stats like this. Is it cherry-picked? Does it mean what it sounds like it means? Do young users just delete-n-reinstall apps more often than older users? Is 44% higher than last year...?
All that said, I expect FB (the social media network, not the company) to peak and shrink, at some point. It just seems more like something that exists for a certain period of time.
Imagine a movie set in 2034. Do FB notifications ping the characters' AR lenses?
If you think of long-lived tech companies, they tend to have a very deep moat (oracle, msft, intel) and/or terrific execution ability (amazon, google, foxconn, apple). Facebook hasn't shown execution ability like that yet. Their moat isn't that deep.
> All that said, I expect FB (the social media network, not the company) to peak and shrink, at some point. It just seems more like something that exists for a certain period of time.
Probably true in the US. But FB is still growing overseas.
> Facebook hasn't shown execution ability like that yet. Their moat isn't that deep.
Their moat is pretty deep. They own 4 out of the top 6 social media platforms.
All their properties are growing worldwide (even FB). And the fastest growing platform in the US for young adults is instagram. Guess who owns instagram?
Why is HN so eager to document the downfall of facebook? First, realize that for a large part of its demographics, facebook is the internet, and when they quit they 'll leave the internet altogether (provided that there 's not another new platform that absorbs them). Second, other social media are having far bigger leakages (snapchat) but that doesn't seem to concern anyone.
Because Facebook has a particular history of just...being evil, for lack of a better word. I heard about the SnapChat leak, but I seem to hear about privacy invasions from Facebook on a weekly, if not bi-daily basis.
Also, it's not necessarily just Facebook HN likes to shit all over. From what I've seen it's Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple. They all kind of get their time in HN's 'hate spotlight'. (Oh, and it's not as big of a company, but Magic Leap is up there, too. :P )
There is, if anything, a bias towards favouring Apple products, but it's not nearly as fanboy/fangirl-ish as it is on the rest of the 'net. It seems at least HN'ers, even those who favour Apple, are, for the most part, also willing to admit it's bad practices.
And that's a pretty strong claim that Facebook is the internet for a lot of folks. What about YouTube? Google? Wikipedia? (Especially for students?) :/
that's a pretty strong claim that Facebook is the internet for a lot of folks
It's just reality. There's some deal people in a lot of less-wealthy countries get where they get free FB chat on their phones, but can't see FB pictures, don't have googling/internet etc. It's extremely common in many countries, I know about it because many of my friends around the world have that.
Most of the comments on this page seem similarly to ignore/not be aware of what's happening in most of the world. Young people not caring about FB? Is that just in the US or something? I don't know, but in most of the world (Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America at least) people young and old are posting pics of themselves and their friends, commenting on each others pics, chatting, just like they ever did.
For me its the general sense that Facebook + most mainstream social media has been having a negative effect on society, both in terms of socialization and unethical invasions of privacy. The fact that for a large part of the world that facebook is "the internet" is a rather negative thing in my mind - its a devil's bargain that the US and the west is grappling with, while the benefits are still outweighing the costs for developing areas.
I fear we set that up with the "outrage" culture to trigger clicks for ads. Nuance disappeared from most public conversation on online newspapers, and things started getting black and white.
I mostly don't read these articles, but some random observations:
Facebook never clicked for me. I deleted it, went back, still couldn't make it work, deleted it again, started a new account and was banned. Whatevs. It seems to not click for a lot of folks inclined to hang in spaces like HN. Some folks who never really got it and perhaps felt left out that "everyone else was on it" may take glee in watching it fall and may feel some sense of vindication or the like.
There are truly terrible things being fostered by Facebook in some parts of the world, such as some developing countries. If you care about human rights, it's not unreasonable to feel like Facebook is a pox upon humanity and deserves to die.
(Complete 180 from the last point:) Facebook is a seemingly trivial thing. Taking glee in watching it burn can be good distraction from worse things happening in the world.
Finding a "bad guy" to blame things on helps a lot of people feel better about their own life choices, whether that is reasonable or not.
Humans just aren't monoliths. There is no single uniform answer here. There are around 5 million visitors a month to HN and however many of them are happy to see FB go down, each will have myriad different reasons for feeling that way.
For the developing countries I know about (SE Asia in particular) it’s definitely still very much in the positive range - it’s adding real value. The downside has yet to hit I think.
> First, realize that for a large part of its demographics, facebook is the internet, and when they quit they 'll leave the internet altogether
Isn't that hyperbole?
Or rather, that might be a demographic they never lose. Might explain why they were big on "internet.org". Anyone with options seems to have found better places to hang out (shocking - even IRL).
Maybe the better prediction is quitting FB is like quitting the soi-dissant "social" network thing. Is that a bad thing?
>>181 million daily users to ... 181 million daily users.
My feeling is that if(or when) things go bad for facebook it will happen rather precipitously. Like a bubble popping. i.e. Like the real estate implosion of 2008.
Note this is among American users. With Facebook moving into other markets (see East Asia where their introduction and use might have helped kick off the crisis in Myanmar) drops in the US could easily be covered up by increase elsewhere.
They added a indicator "You’re All Caught Up" when you've seen all new posts on the feed. Of course there can be some posts below the indicator that you haven't seen.
Now also Strava is making their feed sorted by some magic with no option to make it chronological :(
I can't quite understand this trend.
It's a symptom of the way our industry works. Pick a metric and over optimise it.
Say you pick the "time to like a post" metric, then as an employee you're incentivised to put the most click-baitee article at the top.
Now if you pick the "number of ads displayed in feed without drop-out" you may have something similar too.
Rince and repeat and you end up with the mess we see.
Regarding Instagram, I noticed they started to retain posts from the timeline. So they encourage compulsive checking it the app.
Open it once : it shows 2 new posts, close it and open it again, 2 more posts, both old by at least a few hours.
They just rewarded your brain for checking the app compulsively. Once I noticed that I couldn't unsee it, and I closed my account.
I _think_ strava is just when a user actually posted to srava, it used to be when they did the ride, but you would miss friend's rides if they only update strava the next day. I slightly preferred the old way, but it isn't too bad so far.
I asked them about it and they told me the feed is sorted based on what they think is most interesting. They have a survey about it at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/NewStravaFeed
I stopped playing facebook games when they tried to get me to log in every hour, to water or take care of someone's farm. Sorry, I dont need another Job...
Then the client started spying on me, so I switched to the web mobile version. Then they removed chat from that. Oh well, I can text people instead.
I'm not playing their game, behaving like they want me too, they want mindless drones, f' them.
I'm very close to deleting my account, but my daughter posts the grandkids pics, so I'm stuck for now.
They want a race to the bottom, they are doing a good job with their damn authoritarian forceful methods. Already filtering what I view, its really worthless now.
For a while I couldn't understand this "delete facebook" trend. I've had a Facebook account forever, but have never felt the desire to waste my life endlessly reading garbage on there. I set it up to give me notifications in three cases: when someone contacts my business page, and when my wife or my mom posts something (the latter being very infrequent, usually pictures of my kids!) Otherwise I use it for a few local groups I care about (motorsports mostly) and to look up an old friend occasionally. Occasionally I'll glance through my feed when doing one of those other things—maybe once a month or so?
But now that I think about it, it's obviously like any addiction. An alcoholic can't just have a beer every once in a while, and I'm sure it's just as unhealthy for a lot of people to have Facebook on their phones. So, this sounds like a healthy trend.
I feel like Facebook has been squeezing their users for revenue more and more over the past couple years, and the result is a terrible user experience. At this point, I'm lucky if 10% of the content I see on Facebook is content I actually care about. Young users have a lot less time and history invested in Facebook, so it's no surprise to me that they're leaving.
I'm extremely glad that I was of the generation that only saw iPhones after college. The instant connectivity of social media is nice in some aspects, but I can't imagine growing up in this environment.
People just aren't designed for this kind of supersaturated communication, the overwhelming need to share and show-off against the whole world, the complete lack of privacy, and the fact that nothing is ever forgotten. It's definitely not healthy, and I think the worst is still to come.
Same. I deleted Facebook a couple years ago when it was revealed that it was reducing battery life by a double digit percentage even if you never launched the app -- its background processing was that greedy. Anecdotally my phone definitely lasted longer once I deleted it.
The mobile web version works for those rare occasions when I need to check it on the go. I'm definitely never installing their app again; I simply don't trust them to prioritize my needs over theirs (even in regards to mobile resources).
They don't give any real control of notifications (you can do some broad stuff, but they try to spam you with irrelevant notifications at every opportunity), and they burn up battery. I switched to just checking it via the browser for those reasons.
I'm using Facebook every day to search for affiliate marketing websites and niche sites that I can buy.
There are a ton of groups with website exchanges. It's also great to find virtual assistants and content writers. We also have a group for our city where things like cars, couches and other stuff gets posted. The same for jobs, models and other topics. I can hire a bunch of people, buy websites and trade stuff just using Facebook.
I'm 20y/o, so I guess I'm part of the relevant user group.
All I can say is that it's still very useful. I never comment or like anything, though. I'm basically using it for business.
I don't think that I would use Instagram or Snapchat in the same way. I recently bought an Instagram account with 10k followers to get into this stuff, but I don't see the value of it (yet). It feels shallower than Facebook (which is pretty hard).
edit: When I think about it - Facebook gives me easy access to a lot of people and services. Does somebody know any alternatives (hiring people, trading stuff and websites, local groups) when Facebook's user base leaves the platform?
edit2: Reading through the comments - am I the only one who uses Facebook as a means to do business? I thought that more people on HN would use it for that.
So HN, many of us have worked on User Experiences, Analytics Pipelines, User Graphs and other such technologies. Many of us have seen, participated in or personally built systems that, upon reflection and among new laws and news about privacy travesties, may be a source of regret. Besides the excellent work at darkpatterns.org, I'm not aware of any real 'rules of the road' outside of privacy laws, nor if I had a serious concern how to properly report it.
What is the brass tacks right way forward for us to create or embrace a system to define ethical behavior on the web, and to expose unethical behavior. What about enforcement? How can this be done in a way that ensures freedom? Or is it impossible to police the web?
I see a few ways forward:
- Status quo, private companies making individual actions internally, driven with a fiduciary responsibility for profit.
- A benefit corp offering some auditing, credibility, and feedback layer on the web as a paid/freely available service.
- Public firewall-as-a-service sort of wiki + LD API that gives users the ability to control their own subscriptions to information filters, flags, and warnings.
The irony is that as Facebook tries to recapture young people by stuffing the app with Stories and other youth-oriented features, it puts off older users like me, who will never, ever use Stories, while still not being cool enough to attract the kids.
I think Facebook's decline is great. For too long it has sucked all the life out of the social networking space. Perhaps now we can see some real competition and innovation.
A new survey of more than 3,400 U.S. Facebook users finds that 44 percent of users ages 18 to 29 have deleted the app from their phones in the past year.
Overall, 26 percent have deleted the app, while 42 percent have taken a break of several weeks or more.
Something's off. I don't know. How many people are we talking about? 80 millions? In the US alone? Really? We need more source here.
This also, by no means, spells 'the end' of FB. They allude to as much in the article, but personally I've deleted / reinstalled FB multiple times this year (along with Snap and Insta), as an effort to decouple myself from the digital dopamine IVF.
'A new survey finds XX% of users aged _ to _ have rode their bike to work instead of driving this past year' does not mean that people are giving up their car.
Between the God-awful performance of the Facebook web site itself (on my 2018 15" MacBook Pro i9/32GB RAM/512 GB SSD, it still manages to make the fans spin. Loud.), and the ludicrous file size of the Facebook app, any developer worth their salt would actually have to wonder if optimization is something Facebook actively ignores.
Ever since Facebook unnecessarily divided their application into two, (Facebook and Messenger), I've pretty much sworn off it. But there's one simple reason, beyond the constant privacy concerns, that no single person should consider putting this app on their iOS device.
Facebook's iOS app currently sits at a staggering, literally almost unbelievable 316.7MB! Yes, 316.7MB. Almost a third of a GB. What. The. Hell.
Messenger is 139.4MB! What on earth QA process do these guys have where they consider this to be even remotely okay on non-storage-expandable devices, especially in the days where we still had 8GB iPhones?
On an 8GB iPhone, (which I understand are not in a lot of use at the moment, but still), which ends up having closer to 6-7GB of space, that would mean that Facebook + Messenger alone would take up 1/10th-1/14th of your space.
I miss the days when there was a 50MB-100MB limit on applications being downloaded over 3G/LTE/cellular. This was fantastic. Every company I worked for demanded I was able to trim the application size down to under 100MB so that there was a fair chance for everyone to be able to download it.
Many of my friends are still on 16GB iPhones and the size alone is the first reason they remove the app.
The second reason being the functionality offered does not match the app size.
The third reason being the general public is starting to visibly see the lack of value Facebook adds in our lives, and even the toxicity of the addiction of constantly scrolling.
You can do almost everything you can do within the Facebook app simply by logging into Facebook on your browser.
Protip (source: I am an iOS developer of 8+ years): If you'd like people to use and keep your application on their device that usually has extremely limited storage capacity, or at least non-expandable storage, you'd better ensure the application actually offers a significant value over that of not having the application installed.
Messenger's video chat, et cetera, makes it worthwhile. But it's also three times as small as the Facebook app. So, while Facebook's application provides almost no value at more than 300MB, Messenger is able to pack infinitely more functionality into 1/3rd the size.
What the hell are these guys doing wrong? Where's QA?
Don't worry: they've been slowly hobbling the mobile site to make the application more and more attractive. iirc you can't even message on the normal (non-basic) mobile site any more: it just shows a splash screen requesting that you download messenger. And of course their site uses screen dimensions and user agents to decide to force you onto mobile even if you request desktop.
It's worse than that. Even if you check the "Desktop site" box on Chrome for Android, every time you type a word in the messenger box and press space, it's deleted.
You have to go a long way to make anything that bad, it can't be accidental.
You can still get to it via normal means. You don't have to use the desktop site. What you do is go to facebook.com, check the "desktop site" option in the browser... page refreshes, you're in "mobile view" still (m.facebook.com), click messages icon.... now you're able to message people just fine. Works fine for me. I use Brave (which is not much different than Chrome on Android).
Code size is a function of engineer and feature count, since each engineer makes x lines of code per day. For example, there is a craigslist app in fb, a city guide app, an events app and so on, things that could be separate apps and companies on their own.
No. Code size is based on a thing called optimization. If your application is too big, and it's because you think that there's too many engineers because there's too much code because the final application is three times as large as it has any right to be, then you have a problem of too many cooks in the kitchen.
If you're ignoring optimization in favour of hiring more people, you, as a software company, have your priorities so out of whack I'm not sure how to even offer a suggestion onto how to move forward.
I'll repeat: the application needs to have value. If I had Facebook installed, it would be by at least 100MB the largest application on my iPhone, next to GarageBand.
tl;dr: if optimization is not part of your development process, your development process is not good. This isn't something that can be argued.
You seem to be convinced that you've solved the application size problem that literally thousands of engineers have been working on for years. Or that you've got more insight into the engineering tradeoffs made at the company.
I can assure you that the facebook CLIENT application is not rocket science and not worth 350M of disk. Maybe those thousands of engineers are looking at it from the wrong angle, yes, absolutely posible. Maybe they are not focusing on it too, but in something else.
You seem to be convinced that there is any way in hell an application that is a client for an existing web service that is little more than a glorified RESTful client needs to be more than 300MB.
You’re either not aware how these kinds of applications are constructed, or you’re perhaps not familiar with just how simple putting an application together like this is. The other response to this comment says a very similar thing.
Yes. I can confidently say as an iOS developer of 8+ years if I was given a chance to manage this application I would certainly be doing the hell of a better job.
If you don’t think you could, that’s cool, but I’ve made my living developing these types of applications since the App Store’s beta, and similar to when I hear an absolutely shitty pop song with mysogonistic or materialistic lyrics funded by some multi-million-dollar artist I say ‘I can do better,’ because, frankly, most musicians worth their salt could.
It doesn’t matter how successful a company is, how much talent they have, if there are too many voices talking over each other nobody is heard. And poor decision making is affecting the app’s bottom line of usage at this point.
When I say I can do better, it’s not coming from arrogance, the Facebook app is actually just that poor that any other direction that it’s current one would be an improvement. The statistic that OP posted alone proves that.
If Facebook has even 25-30 people on their iPhone app, on the client side, they have way too many. We’re talking about pulling existing info from a server and re-displaying it. At what point, other than the tiny shell required to display that information, maybe about 100-150MB at most, is that extra 150-200MB coming from?
If Facebook’s API were open for third-party FB applications, I’m sure I’d not be the first to whip up a minimalistic, small-sized, easy-to-use, far more intuitive application in a month or two of casual dev time. I did a similar thing for Twitter. It’s not hard.
Is it so much more likely that whole extra let’s say 150MB needs to be there than it’s likely that there’s simply too many cooks in the kitchen and optimization is being completely ignored?
You obviously have the experience level to get a job at facebook. Go do that (or some other big tech co) and you will understand why their apps are so large.
Some other candidates: linked in, twitter, uber, lyft, youtube, snapchat, gmail. Binary size is a problem issue at all of them and they would appreciate an expert such as yourself to solve it. You could get a staff engineer position and make half a million a year!
First of all, the Facebook app is literally an entire operating system unto itself, among other things. Like someone pointed out, there's an entire Craigslist, an entire Snapchat, an entire Yelp, an entire YouTube, an entire web browser and so much more stuffed into a single app. On top of that, there are probably thousands of A/B tests and divergent code paths that are running simultaneously. Even if you have a feature, you probably have the code to switch between 10 different variants of that feature. There's also complex real time user instrumentation, media storage and backup features, tons of custom animation frameworks, networking frameworks, caching frameworks and on and on and on. The level of complexity and the millions of man-hours worth of code backing that app is insane.
At this point, it shouldn't be surprising in the slightest that the app is a cool ~300megs. Could it be better? Sure, and I'm sure they're working on it. After all, look at their developing country strategy and the stuff they do with "Facebook For Every Phone" to shave off every last byte from their apps: https://code.fb.com/android/how-we-built-facebook-lite-for-e...
If you look at the incentives, it's NOT in their best interests to make updates hard. That's not how they make money and in developing countries it actively costs them business. It's not that they're intentionally bloating the app just to mess with you....it's just that there's really that much going on in the app, along with it maybe being a little sloppy too.
Look, I have my beef with Facebook just like everyone else does to an extent....but this whole app size argument you seem to be spending a lot of energy on just has no legs if you truly understood the problem space.
I mean this is what you said: "We’re talking about pulling existing info from a server and re-displaying it". We _are not_ talking about that. The problem space is much much much larger than that (I mean they're running machine learning models on-device, doing real time facial recognition, leveraging AR in their custom cameras, streaming real-time data, among other things). I think you are severely overestimating your knowledge of the topic and I implore you to truly take a step back and re-evaluate what people are trying to tell you here.
I would expect that the FB client app does a lot more than you would expect it does. There are probably features in there for gamers, businesses, marketers, sellers, etc.
Yes you could build out 90% of the app that most people use in a smaller download in a couple months, that's not really noteworthy though.
The key word there is trade offs, and it’s clear, if the client is 300+ MB, that the engineers there are trading off smaller size for something (faster development, code reuse, etc.)
You and parent are probably both right. They obviously could make the client 30MB or even 3MB, but choose not to because they find other things more important.
I mean, you also work at Fb. Maybe you are biased? I have a middle line Moto-E phone and installing fb app or messenger app totally makes the phone unusable. Surely something went wrong along the way?
I feel that, idiotically, as phone sizes increased, app creators seem to think it's okay to double, triple, or quadruple the size of their original applications. Without adding anything significant on top of what was there to start.
This is ludicrous. We are not gaining anything by having extra storage space if everything we had installed on our devices suddenly doubles or triples in size, because, hell, it can.
I miss the days when there was a 50MB-100MB limit on applications being downloaded over 3G/LTE/cellular. This was fantastic. Every company I worked for demanded I was able to trim the application size down to under 100MB so that there was a fair chance for everyone to be able to download it.
I'm not sure if that statistic changed, but it must have, because now not only do people not give a damn, it's like they actively see how much space their stupid service can take up on our phone before we get sick of it and save that room for more music, movies, or photos.
It's basically the Jevons paradox - as cost of compute power decreases, it encourages increased use, and as the result, the gains can be more than offset by the increased demand.
Not that these things aren't replaceable/fixable, but the only two features keeping me on Facebook is 1) I have 2 active FB groups I would like to continue participating in and 2) I get most event invites from friends through FB events and would not want to be excluded/forgotten because I decided to delete my account.
I never wanted to disable the app, only disable notifications. The app however, made this impossible. It kept having popups and kept redirect to settings to re-enable them. The popups were so bad it made using the app without push notifications impossible. So I just deleted it instead.
I am 32 years old and had been a facebook user since I was in college (2004). I completely deleted all of my post history and shut down my account about 6 months ago and can say I feel really good about the decision. I realize now that I thought I was staying more connected with my friends, though I was just using it to keep an eye on what is going on in there lives. Whereas now, I find that I actually take the time to meet up with more friends and connect with them in person. It has obviously dramatically decreased the number of people that 'connect with' (watch through my news feed), but maximized the quality and depth of relationships with people I actually care about.
Most of them are on instagram and whatsapp anyway. Besides, teens stopped using email too, doesn't mean they don't start using it once they turn into adults on the workforce.
My Mom and her generation are the only ones I know around me still using Facebook. They eat it up, they can't get enough of it like crack, since it is many of their first exposure to social media in their lifetime.
I don't think that bodes well for Facebook, that's not the demographic anyone wants as far as I know. Like Snapchat after Kylie Jenner's tweet, this survey is the canary in the coal mine telling investors to get out.
> that's not the demographic anyone wants as far as I know
On the contrary, that's the demographic everyone wants, older people have more money to spend. Of course, having only this demographic is not great long term, since the younger generations lead the way to adoption. But short term they'll continue to make money.
I refrained from installing FB on my phone at the last refresh. I don't mind FB, I even like it pretty well, but the app feels like it's constantly gathering data about myself, my friends, where I go, how long I'm there, etc., etc. The value proposition just isn't there for what I get from FB in exchange for the data they're getting. I still use the web FB, and that's fine.
"Pew surveyed more than 3,400 U.S. Facebook users in May and June, and found that a whopping 44 percent of those ages 18 to 29 say they've deleted the app from their phone in the last year. Some of them may have reinstalled it later.
Overall, 26 percent of survey respondents say they deleted the app"
I think the second sentence is more accurate, but of course, it's not as provocative as 44%.
The second sentence is only referring to the whole population though right? 26% of all participants have deleted the app but 44% of those aged 18 to 26 have deleted it which is dangerous as that is the target demographic for Facebook.
This last Wednesday was the first day that I scrolled to the bottom of my feed and it said something like "There are no more posts to show." I only check once a day and never post or comment. The vast majority of posts are not from friends, especially not those my age, but of pages I once "liked". Facebook is a ghost town.
I never used FB very much, but comments on some sites I frequent are FB-hosted. As a result I don't comment, but in the last year whenever I look at them these comment sections are inevitably chock-filled with spam. Why does e.g. ESPN think they're getting something valuable out of that business relationship?
We certainly need a better Facebook. More customizable, more feature-rich yet more lightweight, not corrupted to the core with surveilance and ads. Facebook just had never been user-oriented. Even its Russian clone vk.com had always been much much better than the original (sadly nowadays it's completely owned by the russian Federal Security Bureau and is moving away from the great UX it used to have too). There seem to be many efforts in the field of "federated" social networks nowadays but I certainly don't want to host my social network account myself (as this means hardware dependance and a chance to get hacked) and the functionality they offer seems limited (i.e. I want first-class (not twitter-style post-like) editable comments, markdown support in posts, media embedding etc).
I have reduced my usage of facebook considerably. I keep the app on my phone, but only check it once or so a day. I can't use it on my desktop, as I have blocked all of its domains (including tracking domains) in my hosts file. As soon as I blocked tracking and reduced my usage, I noticed that I started to get push notifications about things that I wasn't directly related to, but facebook thought I would be interested in (previously I only got notifications about comments to my own posts and replies). This also corresponded with around the timing of Zuckerberg's congressional testimony, so I'm not sure if this more aggressive notification strategy has happened for everybody, or just those of us that have actively disengaged from the platform.
What will be interesting to observe is if this will correlate to usage. Anecdotally, it seems like it will -- but it's also possible that mobile usage of the proper app will simply yield to Messenger and that the desktop will be used other ways.
I will say that for myself, I still have Facebook on my phone but I do everything I can to use it as rarely as possible.
I should also add the caveat that because of the "public" nature of my former job (and to a certain extent, my current job), I have been unable to use Facebook like a normal person since late 2007 and so my investment in it as an actual social network is far less than might be the case for others, who like me, joined in college, and then saw it as a catalyst for lots of other things.
I deleted my account and recently created a new one to try out selling a product through ads. We'll see if it can deliver commercial value to me. I know a lot of people find social value through chat on there, but it's really lacking in that department for me.
When Facebook introduced a "News feed" and also allowed news and fake news (i.e. non-personal updates) to advertise and proliferate, it really just became "forwards from grandma" which has always been around. It's just much more extreme now.
I don't have Facebook or Messenger on my phone... but it was pretty easy because the people I'm friends with on Facebook almost invariably never post. There's a really small group of people who "Like" my post, and sometimes I like theirs, but the actual discussions, or interactions about substantive matters, are almost dead in my crowd.
So, it's quiet, and almost unnecessary, and easy enough to live with by checking in periodically. Mostly people hiking and running on weekends, or posting a thing about their kid, get a bit of social love...
But really, among me and my 40somethings, almost no actual activity. And so, if the 20somethings don't use it a whole lot either, what's Facebooks future?
I deleted the app over a year ago as well. Best move ever.
I replaced it with a shortcut on the home screen to the mobile version of the Facebook website in Safari. I use the AdGuard plugin on iOS to remove the primary reason I was getting sick of the Facebook iOS app - the FORCED "Stories" banner at the top of the news feed.
Not only is the newsfeed much lighter and cleaner on mobile.. but ads are blocked, notifications are "opt-in" (the shortcut on the home screen doesn't show notifications), analytics are probably less detailed, and I don't have to deal with that shitty stories bar taking up the first quarter of my screen every time I open the Newsfeed.
May have been mentioned elsewhere in the comments, but I haven't read through all.
I think most commenters here missing the major point against Facebook for many young users: being forced to use your real identity (and only one account).
As already mentioned, most young people have switched to Instagram and find Facebook embarrassing.
That made sense.
What I was surprised to learn was that almost everyone has more than one account - often three or more.
This is actually the killer hidden feature of Instagram - easy to manage privacy.
So one has a main account, possibly public, that is OK for parents and strangers to see.
Then they have a private account for friends.
Then possibly a third account for close friends. This is one that nudes/sexual/illegal content is posted on.
Deleted my facebook but forgot how many of my other accounts I used facebook as signing up (another eye opener) So I reactivated my facebook to start migrating my accounts just to use my email as auth. Hopefully soon I can delete my facebook
The real question is what this really means for their bottom line. Young people not joining / leaving Facebook was predicted a decade ago. (“Who wants to join a social network with your mom?”, was the question.) But they also own what appears to be the biggest alternative platform, Instagram. On top of this, they’re still growing in APAC and other regions where they haven’t yet reached saturation (ie NA and Europe)
Sure FB is morphing, but it’s not clear that Facebook Corp hasn’t set itself up a tidy bulwark against the decline of Facebook.com in NA & Europe. They might have. If they have, then they’ll continue to make money just fine.
I made a Social Media Facebook app https://2fb.me but Iv'e never used Messenger, or Instagram outside of testing their functionality and haven't posted a Facebook update in over a year. I occasionally react to posts. Yet as far as Social Media, Twitter, the most depressing site of all still manages to suck in a lot of my time. Am I a weirdo? Man, does the internet need to change. It's all the same. VR gamerooms? Non of this will help Facebook. The network effect that made it popular is already working it's way in reverse.
I know the study didn't cover it but would be interesting to measure the change in Instagram usage at same time. Anecdotally a lot of people I know have become active on Instagram and stopped posting to FB.
Is an interesting one, assuming they struggle to get new users on the main platform.
FB have a lot of hope riding on Marketplaces, but it's viability is entirely down to FB being so ubiquitous.
Product suggestion (graph is still their core business, obviously), and being able cross promote their products to a captive audience. They basically can't pivot because everything they want to do relies on finding ways to leverage the data they generate.
Can't figure out where they're heading in the longer term tbh. Would fully expect IG Marketplaces to follow in the next couple of years.
I'm on an Android where the Facebook program came default. I've never logged into the site using my device, and I never will. But thanks to the way Alcatel, TracFone, and Facebook have it worked out, the best thing I can do is "Force Stop" and "Disable" the program rather than uninstall it and remove it from my device. It definitely makes me worried about logging into any website - even in "Incognito Mode", because it says to me that someone wants to know what I'm doing whether I like that or not.
I deleted my account. A comment on an HN article a few weeks ago prompted me to see if, after six months, it was really deleted. Nope still there. Waiting to see if it will delete properly this time.
I don’t use the various pages and feeds, I only use the calendar feature. Pics of friends’ kids are better on Instagram and the feed is occupied by a tiny fraction of my friends with their crusade of choice. I just don’t read it. I suspect I’m not alone in this usage pattern - I have effectively stopped using the “traditional” Facebook but I’m still a regular visitor because of a few features such as the calendar.
It can’t be good for their bottom line that I don’t see many ads or any sponsored pages.
To be "successful" (be visible) on "classical" social media (vs. something like HN), it seems like you have to do certain things every day - that change depending on the current algorithm ("engagement"). So classical social media (for me, FB and IG) became sort of a job. In the end, doing the social media job instead of my other "jobs" (work, family, art, etc.) isn't that interesting anymore, so I've slowed down my active use.
I have difficulty reconciling news like this against Facebook's stock price. Yes, they're growing in the rest of the world still, but America has the number one large scale source of highly monetizable advertising targets. The survey was carried out on the 5th of September when Facebook was at $167, it's now at $141 and that's with an avalanche of other recent issues to pile onto this.
I've always felt that average people want to be anonymous. The internet is a place to remove your filters and be honest about what you think. You don't have to worry about people judging you and treating you differently based on your ideas. Facebook doesn't solve that problem at all, it exacerbates it. Facebook is a place you go to be judged by everyone you know. People fundamentally don't want that drama.
After 13 years I recently deleted my entire account. I have more time and I have less admin. I will miss messages from old acquaintances but that's ok.
Plenty of people have reasons not to use Facebook but I believe it mainly just became uncool. Mostly because parents started showing up everywhere. But when something becomes unpopular then people stop using it without actually needing a rationale. Human behavior is largely dictated by subconscious social effects and the rational brain comes up with explanations after the fact.
So now younger people mainly use Instagram? Or what?
The same thing that makes holiday dinners a chore, having to endure all of your friends and relatives uninformed opinions, is now making Facebook a chore.
That was actually the reason I used it for example. There was a lot of discussion about political topics, even with uninformed people. I liked that - it was sometimes wasted effort, but it was partly done for the audience, to prevent people spreading bullshit everywhere.
Then Facebook stopped showing me those posts in the feed, and my "engagement" went rapidly to 0. I suspect they found out that people seeing only opinions similar to theirs spend more time in-app...
I would like to wholesale get it off my phone but I find that other apps require fb login and so I have to reinstall it... I really do not want it on my phone and I also reject their recruiter inquiries every other month too.
Every once in a while I get an alert about a birthday for someone I met once when I was in college 20 years ago... one day I'll figure out how to shut all of that off it's really annoying.
I deleted Facebook because it was downright toxic.
I don't need to know what everyone else is doing, I need to focus on my own and my own goals and passions.
After deleting Facebook, I have published a paper on Arxiv, Beat Georgia Tech at a robotics competition, and improved my GPA.
Nowadays, I spend my time on Reddit, Twitter, and HN for ML Papers/Software Updates and Launches and stuff like that.
> Members of the American Trends Panel were recruited from several large, national landline and cellphone RDD surveys conducted in English and Spanish. At the end of each survey, respondents were invited to join the panel.
Methodology is very shakey for a sample of young people. Results are also just weird—I’m a young person (24) and very few people I know have deleted FB.
I was on a bit of a Facebook diet and considering getting rid of it. Then I got a 3D printer and joined a few Facebook groups focused on owners of that printer, and it breathed new life into my Facebook experience. It can be a great information exchange and community, once you just get rid of all the friends and family stuff on it.
I will go against the grain, a bit, here: I do think there is some value in FB: once a week I go on for 5 minutes (I time myself) and try to quickly look at stuff family and friends have posted, at least what FB’s algorithms choose to show me.
Also, If I release a new open source project or a new book, I like to use FB, Twitter, and G+ to announce it.
What we need are VIABLE solutions to social platforms... While people are deleting Facebook they're NOT deleting Instagram.
Additionally, we're still vulnerable to a lot of the same attacks that impacted us in the 2016 election.
These networks still hold your private connection graph, know what you're reading, can target you precisely with ads, etc.
I'm building an app named Polar which is an offline-first document management system for people that read large numbers of PDFs and technical documentation.
I want to integrate social support and while I will probably support posting to Twitter + Facebook for people who want to I also want to work on building out some sort of distributed IPFS and / or filecoin style storage and collaboration.
Unfortunately, I think the space is still a big early for this. Another approach could be to just build a security protocol using group encryption. You could see your public data by others and anything that was shared socially but NO ONE ELSE could see your social data.
Right now the problem is that Facebook can see ALL your private and semi-private data and that's INSANELY dangerous.
As someone who basically reads only technical pdf's and long form articles, your software looks cool, I am definitely going to check it out!
IPFS/Filecoin/SIA would be a neat way to go. I would urge you to look into mastodon as well as twitter and fb. It is growing, its federated, and generally more in line with our privacy beliefs.
You could make your app Solid compliant - I would love a good social network UI on top of Solid, especially if it could import all the FB data into your Solid repository. https://solid.mit.edu/
I've been thinking about this a bit, and my main concern about SOLID powering a social network is that it would thrash Pods from users with thousands of friends requesting thousands of documents on the same pod every x seconds, which might work for commercial servers but end up being a DDOS on smaller Pods.
I guess I'm worried about the power need to do this at scale, and that we'll end up with something analogous to bitcoin mining pools where there's few practical options for the average user.
It's a good point, simply solved by people with a bunch of friends needing a reliable POD. I think the point of Solid is that you pay for service, even if it's a small fee. So if you have huge social needs, you might have to pay a bit more for a reliable POD.
I want to delete the Facebook app, but apparently it's needed on iOS for other apps to "Login with Facebook."
So instead, I just leave it installed but with all push-notifications, location-usage, etc. disabled, and then kill it right after I'm done using it to log into something.
"Login with Facebook" without the app will just use the browser on your device and you can continue login into apps using your fb account without the app.
About a year ago i listed a car on facebook and craigslist at the same time, and it ended up selling on facebook. I check it a few times a day(does blogging about it count against that) and mostly use it to post pics to family, troll friends. I also started my account about a year ago.
Is it possible some sort of B-Corp or Foundation could run an ethical social networking product that put respecting and serving its users as a first principle?
Could an offering out-compete today's products and gain significant user-ship?
Too bad I can't remove Facebook from my Galaxy S7 edge originally; had to root to remove some ads. Who the fuck decided it would be a good idea to prevent the removal of bloatware on this shit? It's like a worse version of the Superfish adware.
It was the notifications that were the last straw for me. If I can't figure out how to 100% disable your notifications in 5 minutes, your app is gone. I'm sure it's possible but apparently as a software engineer I'm not smart enough.
I reiterate: if it's not obvious within 5 minutes of poking around the app settings, I'm uninstalling the app. If they cared about user autonomy they would have a note in the app settings explaining how to do what you suggest at the OS level.
I'm on Android. I have no doubt something like this is possible there as well, but again if the app doesn't explain to me how to do this then it's obvious they have no respect for my agency and I'm uninstalling their crap.
I log on via desktop browser once every six months and always post essentially the same update: "I am still alive". Then I delete older updates and log out. When my update stops getting likes, I know I can finally leave Facebook forever.
1. They probably just don't realize Instagram is Facebook and even worse.
2. Who needs the app anyway? Facebook apps had always been ridiculous - outrageously heavyweight, coming with extra surveillance built-in and hardly doing anything the website can't.
There are too many apps causing too many dopamine hits. How is anyone supposed to do the meaningful work or gain the appropriate skills in the supposedly AI/ML dominated future without doing deep work away from these things? Everyone deletes these apps and turns their phones to gray scale so they can focus.
Speaking of focus, one thing I want to focus less on is the continual security/privacy nightmare of using Facebook to post content. Either I want to know 100% it's public (Twitter/Instagram/Blogs) or it's essentially[0] 100% private and hopefully short lived (private insta, snapchat).
[0]: Obviously not PGP private and etc. But from a practical perspective. On Facebook you can do graph searches to identify someone based on a few pieces of data. On snapchat you have to already know their username and be added to see anything on their story or in messages to you. etc.
What? Are saying the existence of apps makes it impossible to study/do work? This makes no sense. You could make the same (flawed) claim about tv, books, newspapers, sports, friends, etc.
If you can't concentrate because of these apps you can't do work. Yes, it happens to me and I've seen it happen to others. The fact is that the internet and other tech has likely made everyone, but particularly those who grew up with technology, more susceptible to ADD/ADHD like symptoms.
The key with things like Facebook, which makes them different, is not that it takes you away as much as they are designed to trigger dopamine levels in ways TV, books, etc that you mentioned never could. Constantly and at a very high rate. You can't be thanked 100x times by friends... unless you have a super popular post with comments and reactions and now you can. You can't read 10-20 sensational articles back to back on a newspaper like you can on an endlessly scrolling page or even watching videos on Facebook ( I have ended up losing hours on this before). There are fundamental differences which let them do what previous mediums or activities could do but in a way which our brains are simply not equipped to deal with without intervention. It's similar to refined sugar or highly refined anything works. By itself it isn't bad except it's addictive and often leads you astray from your self-set goals.
So, in fact, it makes total sense that people would realize this and increasingly control or remove it from their lives. And more importantly that they'd focus on using only a few of them not every single app there is. Which means two things: 1) people are wary of being sucked in like this and 2) they are likely not willing to leave an app/network where they already spend their time.
Having companies that worth 1 trln isn't ideal. I don't mind tech giants breaking down into smaller, still huge though, companies. Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon... Why the hell do they need to do (own) everything?
The numbers may not show up very well as people still use FB as 'single sign on' type thing. What we really need is more specificity in the data to know what's going on.
Also - Instagram is exploding and they are tightly intertwined.
I still use the app but lots of people that used to post have stopped so isn't as interesting any more. Its a bit sad as I have friends and relatives all over the world I never see and FB was great to keep track of them all.
These are the younger generation of Facebook's (former) users, and the main reason they have deleted the app is because of Facebook's insistence on using short-term revenue maximizing dark patterns.
The app itself is pretty shitty, takes a ton of space on the phone and performance is meh. Also a good reason to delete the app, something which has nothing to do with being or not being a user of Facebook.
My extended family uses WhatsApp basically as a social feed.
All of the younger adults I know left FB for Snap and the left Snap for instagram. Even many of my friends have limited FB now and mainly use instagram.
I deactivated my account a little over a year ago and it was a great decision...when I opened it the internet was a much friendlier place and full of promise, but it doesn’t feel that way anymore.
I am neither young (57) or US based (Cape Town) and decided to delete my facebook account mainly because it made people I know behave badly and myself as well. I really dont miss it at all
Are there similar studies on non-US markets? As an Australian 20-something, this seems like an absurdly high number. I'd like to see if this exodus is mainly a US thing.
I rage quit facebook when i scrolled the the end of my news feed and it told me i needed more friends. I dont need the computer telling me i need more friends.
This is the exact reason I deleted the app about 3 years ago, haven't looked back since.
When they made their super aggressive push for the messenger app and disabled message support on the regular FB app, there was no reason to keep the FB app around. I never installed the FB messenger app though, it required access to just about everything on my phone so I never dared installing it.
Then they disabled the messenger feature on the mobile version of their website, and everybody stopped using FB messenger altogether. Problem solved.
Facebook is half-open (Twitter and G+ are similar) aka fenced yard. Instagram is fully walled garden. You cannot compete a fully closed network, because each of them are incomparable. You could compare fenced yards by telescoping them.
> "Pew surveyed more than 3,400 U.S. Facebook users in May and June, and found that a whopping 44 percent of those ages 18 to 29 say they've deleted the app from their phone in the last year."
That feels like a fairly small sample. Then from that to look at some subset (i.e., 18 to 29) feels even more suspect.
Also, best I can tell, this survey was self-reported.
This is worthy of at-the-bar discussion, but let's not take it too seriously otherwise; at least not until the data is better.
I see the same. Maybe because it's stating the obvious? That said, when you read the comments it's as if so often the obvious has been ignored. Such is the effects of confirmation bias?
It didn't have anything useful for me. Just a bunch of people I vaguely knew complaining about things that diddn't affect me. Combined with the marketed crap, spyware, and adblocker circumvention it was actively detrimental to go there.
I use Facebook way less than I used to...but I use Instagram way way more than I used to. So, I'm not sure it's all doom and gloom for Facebook as a company.
You obviously didn't read the article. "The survey measures only the core Facebook app, not Facebook-owned Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, all of which remain popular and offer a lot of room for revenue growth."
I obviously was not commenting on the article's content directly but on the doom and gloom scenario that others have, regarding the fall of Facebook (as a company.) Hence I said "as a company" in my original post.
There is a funny poll on the page by the link: Which do you trust the most? Google (49%), Facebook (4%), Twitter (12%), President Trump (35%). I understand trusting the president is a political opinion and many people may trust him but why the heck do so many people trust Google? Don't they realize Google intentionally owns them even more than Facebook does?
I see. Well. This is what I love about Google+ (the best social network ever IMHO): it doesn't ask you who are your friends and who are not, just whose posts seem interesting to you and who would you like to share what you post with.
I use Facebook only for its login capabilities and to occasionally send messages to people whose phone numbers I don't have. I have the app currently, but usually I delete it because its notifications are irritating. I fall into the older end of that age range.
It doesn't matter, those same users will use the mobile web version instead. More importantly, Instagram usage has gone way up in that cohort. The title is pure clickbait.
That's the sad truth - this is just reporting the method of use. Other posters in this thread reported uninstalling the app to save phone resources, and instead use Facebook from a browser on their phone.
> Pew surveyed more than 3,400 U.S. Facebook users in May and June, and found that a whopping 44 percent of those ages 18 to 29 say they've deleted the app from their phone in the last year. Some of them may have reinstalled it later.
Yet the total user base in the US is something over 100mm - how would you possibly consider 3,400 people be indicative of an entire demographic?
Edit: Yes, I'm aware of statistics and how they work ^_^ It is more that I'm skeptical of the conclusion being based of a sample truly diverse enough to be confident in
Statistics can be used to infer trends from a much larger population than surveyed as long as you take steps to ensure a random group of people from the main population are surveyed
Statistically 3,400 is a large (read statistically significant) sample size. If the participants were appropriately sampled, it can be indicative of a trend.
Is that though for that large of a population? I guess I'm just skeptical of the sampling in that small of a population to establish a pretty sweeping conclusion.
Good job States, I wonder if you will be smart enough to go with the google. It is the sam sh*t but in a different camouflage. IT guys, do you dare (or you are vendor locked in - the votes/downvotes will prove it)?
A reason I had: I will not support company that is having so much questionable practices as google has.
Tasks, done in two years:
- flashed android with Lineage + Microg (now it is much easyer - https://lineage.microg.org/ - no more google spyware on my phone
- redirected all my web traffic (all devices) trough ssh tunnel to home server where http://www.squid-cache.org/ is cleaning my web traffic from trackers, including caching cdns forever
I left Facebook when I read some press release about it being designed from the outset to make you feel bad because it keeps you engaged; hoping someone agrees with something you liked or shared and the dopamine hit it releases. I don’t like feeling manipulated and manipulation is facebooks modus operandi. All to track everything I do around the internet to sell me ads for $12/person/year in revenue.
I left Twitter for basically the same reason and when I’d stick on the site refreshing it all day hoping someone noticed the well thought out point I spent 3 hours putting together only to realize no one cares. Leaving both after about a week feels like when I have taken breaks from caffeine. It sucks at first but after a week, you feel refreshed and clean. I’m sure drug abstinence feels similar.
My father went down the rabbit hole of Facebook and shares political crap constantly, flooding peoples news feeds. There’s a feature on Facebook that lets you silently unfollow people so they’re on mute. Everyone of my family members who are Facebook friends with my dad have done this to him and don’t see anything he posts. He’s shouting into a black hole thinking the whole world is paying attention while in reality no one is.
He has said things that the man I grew up with would never have said and Facebook/ talk radio is to blame. We’re all vulnerable to it, which is why I try and stay away from it.
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/dont-believe-lies-just-people-...