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Facebook exodus: Nearly half of young users have deleted the app

cnbc.com

11–20 of 593 posts

Re: Facebook exodus: Nearly half of young users have deleted the app

#11
"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%.

Re: Facebook exodus: Nearly half of young users have deleted the app

#12
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.

Re: Facebook exodus: Nearly half of young users have deleted the app

#13
post #3
post #2

"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.

Re: Facebook exodus: Nearly half of young users have deleted the app

#14
post #6

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 wouldn't particularly discourage the rumor.

The app has enough permissions that when coupled with Facebook's data analytics it amounts to a similar invasion of privacy.

Re: Facebook exodus: Nearly half of young users have deleted the app

#15
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.

Re: Facebook exodus: Nearly half of young users have deleted the app

#16
post #2

"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.

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.

Re: Facebook exodus: Nearly half of young users have deleted the app

#20
post #2

"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.

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.

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