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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

#331

Another reason why all the talk of antitrust against Facebook is ridiculous. Instagram will be in a similar position a couple years from now too.

Facebook is half-open (Twitter and G+ are similar) aka fenced yard. Instagram is fully walled garden. You cannot compete a fully closed network, because each of them are incomparable. You could compare fenced yards by telescoping them.

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

#332
post #326

I have teenagers and college-age kids and I'm not surprised in the least. They openly consider Facebook to be a platform for old people. They seem to have moved to more of a distributed social media system. That is, they don't seem to have a central place where they communicate with friends. They seem to move between texts, facetime, tumblr, instagram, phone calls (!), etc. in a fluid manner. Anything except for Face…

I don't think there's any sort of "stigma." There's just the fact that, since "old people" are on Facebook—and that likely includes your parents and other relatives—they all expect you to add them as a Facebook friend. At which point you won't be able to be yourself on Facebook any more, because they can observe any of your "broadcast" activity. The nice thing about the other platforms isn't that they don't have "old…

I don't know. Recently I was at an event where an older teen was giving a speech where he mentioned some social media platform and then explained, "That's like Facebook for you old people". That got quite a laugh, but in my experience there really is a stigma among young people that Facebook is only for old people.

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

#333

I have teenagers and college-age kids and I'm not surprised in the least. They openly consider Facebook to be a platform for old people. They seem to have moved to more of a distributed social media system. That is, they don't seem to have a central place where they communicate with friends. They seem to move between texts, facetime, tumblr, instagram, phone calls (!), etc. in a fluid manner. Anything except for Face…

I’ve noticed that most young people don’t use Facebook until they graduate from college, become an adult and move away from home and want to keep in touch with people. Why use Facebook when your friendship circle is people you see every day?

Maybe, but at least my college-age kids have friends that are all over the country (including back here in their home state) and they don't use Facebook to keep in touch with them.

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

#334
post #283
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you. Really all I want is a solid app that's only Facebook's event system and friend lists and nothing else. But I can't see any growth-motivated company ever making that and just stopping there. I'd even pay for it, if I thought they wouldn't try to make more money after that. Maybe it would have to be a non-profit.

https://www.facebook.com/local/ I believe you still need a FB account.

Definitely not interested. I want something that provides a service for money and won't about-face to trying to milk me for growth, ad revenue, and commodified personal data.

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

#335
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They added a indicator "You’re All Caught Up" when you've seen all new posts on the feed. Of course there can be some posts below the indicator that you haven't seen. Now also Strava is making their feed sorted by some magic with no option to make it chronological :( I can't quite understand this trend.

I _think_ strava is just when a user actually posted to srava, it used to be when they did the ride, but you would miss friend's rides if they only update strava the next day. I slightly preferred the old way, but it isn't too bad so far.

I asked them about it and they told me the feed is sorted based on what they think is most interesting. They have a survey about it at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/NewStravaFeed

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

#336
post #320
post #298

Note I wrote my father in law when he had gone too far down the rabbit hole and legitimately worried about the poison it spreads around his demographic: I left Facebook when I read some press release about it being designed from the outset to make you feel bad because it keeps you engaged; hoping someone agrees with something you liked or shared and the dopamine hit it releases. I don’t like feeling manipulated and m…

I don't even know what Twitter is for except mutual high fives over the most superficial "look at me" memeish stuff. It's worse than facebook as far as the "get attention" vibe. Granted all social media is about getting attention, and I don't think there is anything wrong with it necessarily. Attention is nice, there is good reason for it, but when the message is so tailored to just that and there isn't anything else…

I have found that the machine learning research community uses twitter pretty effectively. I don't tweet myself, but I do follow a good number of other researchers and often find interesting papers and results through the venue. It's much more effective than scouring the arXiv.

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

#337
post #320
post #298

Note I wrote my father in law when he had gone too far down the rabbit hole and legitimately worried about the poison it spreads around his demographic: I left Facebook when I read some press release about it being designed from the outset to make you feel bad because it keeps you engaged; hoping someone agrees with something you liked or shared and the dopamine hit it releases. I don’t like feeling manipulated and m…

I don't even know what Twitter is for except mutual high fives over the most superficial "look at me" memeish stuff. It's worse than facebook as far as the "get attention" vibe. Granted all social media is about getting attention, and I don't think there is anything wrong with it necessarily. Attention is nice, there is good reason for it, but when the message is so tailored to just that and there isn't anything else…

Twitter is really useful for sharing content at conferences or other events with a clear hashtag.

Other than that, and perhaps sharing more substantive articles/blog posts/etc to a wider audience, it's at best silly, and at worse, well...much worse.

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

#338
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've seen this firsthand as well. I don't know that it was Facebook, but that was the only thing that seemed plausible at the time. My wife had been saying that she'd been getting creepy ads that appeared to be based on things she said out loud. I dismissed it as, "Oh, but you were talking about that because you read about it earlier, and the app noticed you read that story." She wasn't convinced.

Then we watched a random TV show on Netflix. During the show, two characters discussed a very specific medical method of improving their chances of bearing a child. Literally minutes later, she was getting ads for this type of conception therapy. We are both past child bearing age and have not discussed it in probably 20 years. We had never even heard of the specific type of process. We had never looked it up or read anything about it. It definitely came from something listening to our household, but we don't know what. It was way too specific to have been random chance.

We don't fall into the demographics for such an ad in any way. We have Apple devices with Siri, but that seems unlikely given their privacy policies. We don't have any Amazon or Google home devices (or any other types of their devices). She's on FB, and I'm not, so we think it was probably either her laptop or phone listening. She's had mic access on her phone turned off for Facebook and no other apps were running, but these apps have a way of finding their way around such permissions.

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

#339
post #41

Why is HN so eager to document the downfall of facebook? First, realize that for a large part of its demographics, facebook is the internet , and when they quit they 'll leave the internet altogether (provided that there 's not another new platform that absorbs them). Second, other social media are having far bigger leakages (snapchat) but that doesn't seem to concern anyone.

Because Facebook has a particular history of just...being evil, for lack of a better word. I heard about the SnapChat leak, but I seem to hear about privacy invasions from Facebook on a weekly, if not bi-daily basis. Also, it's not necessarily just Facebook HN likes to shit all over. From what I've seen it's Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple. They all kind of get their time in HN's 'hate spotlight'. (Oh, and it's no…

that's a pretty strong claim that Facebook is the internet for a lot of folks

It's just reality. There's some deal people in a lot of less-wealthy countries get where they get free FB chat on their phones, but can't see FB pictures, don't have googling/internet etc. It's extremely common in many countries, I know about it because many of my friends around the world have that.

Most of the comments on this page seem similarly to ignore/not be aware of what's happening in most of the world. Young people not caring about FB? Is that just in the US or something? I don't know, but in most of the world (Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America at least) people young and old are posting pics of themselves and their friends, commenting on each others pics, chatting, just like they ever did.

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

#340
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even know what Twitter is for except mutual high fives over the most superficial "look at me" memeish stuff. It's worse than facebook as far as the "get attention" vibe. Granted all social media is about getting attention, and I don't think there is anything wrong with it necessarily. Attention is nice, there is good reason for it, but when the message is so tailored to just that and there isn't anything else…

Twitter is really useful for sharing content at conferences or other events with a clear hashtag. Other than that, and perhaps sharing more substantive articles/blog posts/etc to a wider audience, it's at best silly, and at worse, well...much worse.

That does sound like a useful use.
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