Facebook exodus: Nearly half of young users have deleted the app • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by ddebernardy » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 5:53 PM UTC

stephengillie wrote: post #26

izzydata wrote: post #19

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.

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.

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

#62

Post by brightball » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 5:53 PM UTC

brobdingnagians wrote: post #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…

The only thing that keeps me on it is that college football season is really entertaining.

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

#63

Post by adtac » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 5:54 PM UTC

samfisher83 wrote: post #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.

Wouldn't that be a case of abusing their market position to anti-competitively protect their market share? The same thing Microsoft was sued for?

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

#64

Post by kingnothing » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 5:54 PM UTC

anderspitman wrote: post #51

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.

You can easily do that at the OS level.

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

#65

Post by cft » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 5:54 PM UTC

samfisher83 wrote: post #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.

But they are running out of potential sites to buy. I wonder if they have offered to buy Reddit?

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

#66

Post by phreeza » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 5:56 PM UTC

MattBearman wrote: post #30

brobdingnagians wrote: post #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…

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.

Wait, you can deactivate your account and still use messenger?

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

#67

Post by jleedev » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 5:57 PM UTC

lambda_lover wrote: post #43

lostgame wrote: post #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 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.

Javascript-free mobile site that lets you send messages: https://d.facebook.com

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

#68

Post by arbol » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 5:57 PM UTC

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.

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

#69

Post by lostgame » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 5:57 PM UTC

lambda_lover wrote: post #43

lostgame wrote: post #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 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.

A nice hack around that is using their GSM site.

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

#70

Post by dymk » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 5:57 PM UTC

lostgame wrote: post #53

woolvalley wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

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's not the case.