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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

#52
They are just going from FB to Instagram:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/22/teens-abandoning-facebook-st...

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.

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

#53

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 Mess…

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.

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

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anytime I speak with someone on Messenger, I mention my cellphone # and email. Gotta prime that OOB comms pump, otherwise you'll never break free. If only there was a Messenger API to setup an autoresponder with alternate contact info...

Are not there some messenger bot which could do this?

Sounds like it's time for Trillian to have a reboot just like Winamp did recently :-)

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

#55
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 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.

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

#57
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 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.

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

#58
post #49

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…

Same here. Logging out made me stop and realize that I was compulsively opening new Facebook tabs.

[deleted]

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

#59
post #48

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 Mess…

This seems tragically normal on Android. Uber is over 200MB. YouTube is 175MB! Yes, just the app not the cached data.

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.

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

#60

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 Mess…

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.

You can if you use Opera Mini, for some reason.
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