While it might affect Facebook’s bottom line for a short while, until users start moving away from FB nothing really will change. Advertisers will come back.
>"While it might affect Facebook’s bottom line for a short while, until users start moving away from FB nothing really will change. Advertisers will come back."
Counterpoint: users already have moved away, and that's why advertisers are able to do this without hesitation now. FB is still growing in the third world, but I don't know a single person in the US under 30 that still uses it.
As a Uni student, I still see people use Facebook, but it's a select group of people. It's the same < 5% of the people I interact with regularly. Most people I know use Facebook just for events so you can invite someone to a fundraiser or party.
On the other side, I see Instagram doing fantastic among my friends, and it gets way less hate from them, despite being very openly owned by Facebook (it says it on the splash screen).
Yes, but they use another "social app" that happen to be owned by Facebook the corporation. Even though I don't like Facebook and its founder, I have to say he was clever enough to avoid the fate of MySpace, which just stopped to be fashionable and died. Even if Facebook.com will start going down there is still Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp that are still "cool".
Speculative: Before enough users start moving away maybe Facebook will figure out how to make it a legal requirement for us citizens to have a Facebook.
You laugh now ... you can buy me a drink in 10 years or so.
My signals for suspecting this Or something like it being a near future outcome are a result of not connected observations.
1) the amount of sharing we already do. 20 years ago my family / social interactions would find it nearly impossible to even bother entertaining the current status of privacy. The idea you basically HAVE to have a cell phone and email to get any decent paying job, traffic cameras everywhere, and now corporations pushing their black box ML and hardware into municipalities / vetting with police support
2) volunteering approx EVERY biometric a person has to skip a line at airport screening (Clear, the company facilitating this)
3) political adversity to privacy and encryption
4) hacker news. Where I hope and aspire to participate in the best most curious and supportive manner. I held the conversations here in high regard and told outsiders of how productive and intelligent the conversations are (they are). Yet I frequently find many downvotes when I comment in opposition to Facebook, slightly less common re google etc.
5) in takeaway I have observed cultural changes, market, political and security practices changing... all in a direction of - whatever this possible, seems not good, and seems highly unlikely but valuable to entities in power - might actually happen.
