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

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

#21
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.

Do they not use your conversations for targeted ads? This is news to me, and surprising.

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

#22
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.

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.

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

#23
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.

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

#24
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.

Why do you find that surprising?

The fact of the matter is, the company's modus operandi is to collect as much information from you as possible. Their business model is spyware.

Whether the application currently records conversations or not is almost immaterial. You know that if they could get away with it, they would.

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

#25
post #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%.

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.

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

#26

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.

This isn't about deleting your account. It's about uninstalling the app.

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

#27
Deleted the app last year, then last September asked for all my data, then closed my account.

Long gone was the interesting content in my feed, I only had indoctrinated contacts posting either poor quality content or misinformation.

I think facebook lost me when they stopped the chronological feed, which is also why I closed my Instagram account.

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

#28
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?

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

#29
post #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.

This is about uninstalling the app, not deleting your account.

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

#30

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…

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.

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