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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

#531
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…

But what's the point of traveling to places if you can't tell all your friends about all the places you are traveling to? Or books you're reading? Etc.

Although I suspect this is sarcasm you do raise a good point. Even as someone who has traveled a lot including pre-Internet, now that I have gotten used to the idea of essentially live bragging about where I am, its hard to turn that reflex off.

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

#532
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he means "written in ink" in the sense that something you post cannot be erased, much like how if you write something with a pen, vs with a pencil.

Same thing as HN btw. Ive known a few European citizens asking for their posts and account deleted, and was refused point blank. Remember that. We're being used here just as much as on the FAANG platforms.

HN have a stated (though difficult to find) policy of removing content on request:

We don't delete comments outright except when the author requests it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16698937#16728471

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

#533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but there is no stigma against Facebook, the stigma is against "old people" and wherever they happen to be.

That isn't what I'm saying. When I hear teens and college students talking bad about Facebook, they aren't mentioning old people (though that probably is the root cause), they are saying Facebook by name. They are saying "Facebook sucks" not "Old people suck, old people use Facebook, ergo I am declining from using Facebook for now until I too am an old person".

It sucks because you can't freely post anything there, without people (family / coworkers) judging you. I don't want to broadcast to that group of people. If I need to talk to them it's personal or in small groups, so that's done in instant messengers.

The only people I would like to broadcast to are close friends or strangers on the internet.

I don't have that many close friends, so a bigger IM group is enough for that. (I guess Instagram might work if you have lots of "close" friends.)

That leaves only my need to anonymously talk to the internet. So Twitter, reddit, personal blogs?

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

#534
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…

Have a look here [0]. It's a personal essay, but there are a lot of resources, in the links especially, which go into detail about how your worries around manipulation etc. are in fact true.

http://matthewbrecher.com/socialmedia.html

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

#535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took me about 10 years to finally "get Twitter". I used to use it for professional reasons, posting what I considered relevant content. For the most part no one really cared. The engagement was almost always nil. Sort of like saying something intelligent, out of the blue, to a crowded stadium of people doing the same thing. Then, 2 years ago I created a new account that ONLY focused on a personal hobby of mine: re…

^this is how I use twitter as well. Thriving community in this tiny corner of the web, focusing on neat electronics projects and interesting tech or creative hobbies.

^^This is how I use twitter too. Mostly small selection of communities on the web that we all share our experience's and help each other out.

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

#536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took me about 10 years to finally "get Twitter". I used to use it for professional reasons, posting what I considered relevant content. For the most part no one really cared. The engagement was almost always nil. Sort of like saying something intelligent, out of the blue, to a crowded stadium of people doing the same thing. Then, 2 years ago I created a new account that ONLY focused on a personal hobby of mine: re…

Sounds a lot like going back to the anonymous/pseudonymous usenet groups and forums that we had before 'social networking' became a buzzword. Why use Twitter for such things, given its limitations? Why not use a blog, personal site, or forum where instead of just posting a link you can also write your thoughts about it, etc.? I get not wanting to bother with running a personal site or maintain a blog, but there are t…

> Why use Twitter for such things, given its limitations?

It has limitations, but it also has a lot of reach. A blog might not reach the people you are trying to share things with.

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

#537
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 s…

Anecdotal but same here. I've deleted the app as I didn't like how it takes too much memory (200-500MB) and syncs with the phone's photo gallery. Most of the people I know in my age group (early 20s) have also deleted the app yet still continue to use messenger and the browser version.

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

#538
post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Angry political screeds are hard to filter out nowadays. A sign of the times. A lot of people are just really pissed off right now. I also think a lot of people that used to ignore politics realized that it matters...

Things are so weird now. We should feel good that everyone is engaged in dialogue about our grand civic project, right? But when you actually stare out onto the landscape of discussion, there isn't a valuable exchange of ideas to observe. While political opinions are more numerous, they're divorced from evidence and calcified. As useful as no opinion, and possibly worse. (Then again, that's my opinion, right?)

Maybe that suggests we aren't engaging in dialogue? I think ubiquitous social media access is destroying the cultural "melting pot".

The cost of communication, price and latency, has always defined the structure of our communities. Letters, cars, phones, internet, every invention expanded the reach of individual "community" while cost acted as friction to prevent bad ideas from gaining too much momentum - individuals still had to engage with their local community too.

Social media finally brought the cost to essentially zero. We can talk to anyone or about anything at any time. Great for early adopters and their critical/creative tendencies, but mass adoption by consumers has enabled mass tribalist tendencies to fully decouple from proximity constraints. This might be the "boiling point" for historical conflicts, but "supercritical" seems more appropriate here.

Media consolidation has been synonymous with consolidation of broadcasting viewer opinions and their political parties - many unhappy with both choices but faced with the false dichotomy of "their guy" and "the enemy". Meanwhile grass-roots are numerous but now diffuse and ineffective, cut off from broadcasting influence and digitally disconnected.

Hopefully society starts correcting back to offline engagement. Anecdotes suggest we are, but undoing the damage will still take a while.

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

#539
post #197
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet the Facebook employees who pushed to buy Instagram are feeling pretty justified right about now. But still, I'm not sure if Instagram can be monetized to the same degree as Facebook was in the last decade, especially as they continue to wreck their brand with privacy abuses (note that I'm not a privacy hawk).

You mean to ruin a secondary platform? I've all but stopped using Instagram for the same reason I've all but stopped using FB... there are just too many ads to scroll past to see what I'm actually there to see (the people I'm friends with/following). Every other post now seems to be an ad/sponsored post. Both platforms have gone overboard to the point that I only visit maybe once/week now instead of daily. I also don…

I just flag every ad as spam. After a day or 2 I never saw an ad on Instagram again.

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

#540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took me about 10 years to finally "get Twitter". I used to use it for professional reasons, posting what I considered relevant content. For the most part no one really cared. The engagement was almost always nil. Sort of like saying something intelligent, out of the blue, to a crowded stadium of people doing the same thing. Then, 2 years ago I created a new account that ONLY focused on a personal hobby of mine: re…

Sounds a lot like going back to the anonymous/pseudonymous usenet groups and forums that we had before 'social networking' became a buzzword. Why use Twitter for such things, given its limitations? Why not use a blog, personal site, or forum where instead of just posting a link you can also write your thoughts about it, etc.? I get not wanting to bother with running a personal site or maintain a blog, but there are t…

I think a lot of the appeal of twitter and fb is a matter of perspective, that it's more appealing to people who barely were on the internet before these apps. A lot of these users never even knew web forums existed, and I hear them now after seeing those and they complaint because it's "too complicated" and "too much to read"

Extrapolate that and compare it to these same kids going to apps like instagram or tiktok which are even more visually-heavy (and less text) with content that it's even simpler and more optimized for user reach than user participation.

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