U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says • Hacker News Board

Re: U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says

#291

Post by shrimp_emoji » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 3:03 AM UTC

0xffff2 wrote: post #208

anarchy8 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mostly politics and mostly far left You're upset that your friends have different political opinions than you? And you're blaming Facebook for this? Why?

Is that wrong? I have virtually no interest in politics. It's unlikely that I'm going to remain friends with anyone who expresses particularly strong political views, left or right. I just don't care, and find it too exhausting to be bothered most of the time. If the only place I see/hear those views is on Facebook, it might be easier to drop Facebook than to drop those friends.

How do you do it? I find myself so wrapped in what feels like a fundamental struggle for our future, which could be so amazing or so horrible depending on the glacial shifts in collective will and which I may be able to influence if only I ignite enough low-bandwidth arguments.

Posting is warfare.

Re: U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says

#292

Post by lsiebert » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 3:09 AM UTC

I co-run a small board game group in SF, and we have been using FB for years to organize events.

I've considered moving to eventbrite or meetup.com, but the app buy in with FB and FB messanger means we can post an update or send an IM and assume people see it, which isn't the case with either alternative, unless people check email.

I really wish there was a ubiquitous open standard open source IM client, so people could download one client and use it for everything.

Re: U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says

#293

Post by northwest65 » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 3:11 AM UTC

throwawaymath wrote: post #281

rizzin wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I liked Reddit so much when I have discovered it. You get thematic subreddits for these kind of discussions, and you didn't even need a full-fledged account. Just a nickname. No email confirmation, no phone authentication, no anything.

Although now Reddit requires an email address for signup.

I think it's just a UI dark pattern now. It doesn't look like you can skip past the email, but you can. As of last month at least.

Re: U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says

#294

Post by BartBoch » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 3:12 AM UTC

lsiebert wrote: post #292

I co-run a small board game group in SF, and we have been using FB for years to organize events. I've considered moving to eventbrite or meetup.com, but the app buy in with FB and FB messanger means we can post an update or send an IM and assume people see it, which isn't the case with either alternative, unless people check email. I really wish there was a ubiquitous open standard open source IM client, so people co…

https://xkcd.com/927/

Unfortunately, this happens way too often.

Re: U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says

#295

Post by dd36 » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 3:14 AM UTC

no_wizard wrote: post #287

Here's the kicker, which I think others have pointed out, but I want to say this succinctly: First, to quote the article: > The big gainer, interestingly, is under the same roof as Facebook. It's their co-owned Instagram Now, to my point: The average person does not care about privacy, just the illusion of privacy (I suspect people reading this site intuitively know this. At some level, nearly everyone is in differen…

I think they do actually care about privacy but are only ever offered illusion.

The problem really is lack of choice.

Re: U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says

#296

Post by no_wizard » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 3:14 AM UTC

lsiebert wrote: post #292

I co-run a small board game group in SF, and we have been using FB for years to organize events. I've considered moving to eventbrite or meetup.com, but the app buy in with FB and FB messanger means we can post an update or send an IM and assume people see it, which isn't the case with either alternative, unless people check email. I really wish there was a ubiquitous open standard open source IM client, so people co…

Like XMPP https://xmpp.org/ ?

I'm with you, and I didn't mind XMPP (having implemented a Jabber server before, it wasn't all bad)

Same deal with IRC (which I think is the best protocol wise).

They all suffer from the same problem: the openness of the standard is not data collection inclusive. The upside is better privacy, the downside is its incredibly hard to fight spam in such wide open systems.

Also, for a the briefest of overviews about the some notable issues with mass adoptions on XMPP, check this:

https://blog.samwhited.com/2019/02/whats-wrong-with-xmpp/

Re: U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says

#297

Post by AnimalMuppet » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 3:21 AM UTC

justaguyhere wrote: post #270

davnicwil wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An anecdotal story about this - a couple of years ago I built a paid, ad-free privacy-focused social network, did several Show HNs for it and even here, in a community that seems quite receptive to the idea in principle, there was extremely low interest in it. I got probably 50 sign-ups over a few Show HNs, no more than 4/5 upvotes and comments on the most well-received Show HN, and those who came in just posted one…

It is super hard to bootstrap, but sites like Facebook and Twitter already have hundreds of millions of users. Can't they run an experiment - something like "no ads/tracking for $5 (or whatever amount) per month" and see if there are any takers? If 20M sign up, that is 100M revenue per month. Maybe they considered it and then rejected it as not viable?

Or maybe they make more off of ads per month than they think any reasonable user would pay.

Re: U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says

#298

Post by Simon_says » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 3:22 AM UTC

narrator wrote: post #50

kissickas wrote: post #32

I'm shocked by the decrease in twitter usage (compared to other social networks) in 2017.[0] I have seen a huge uptick in friends tweeting, mostly in replies to Trump's tweets, and several times a week news stories come to the top of my feed purely generated by a single tweet of his. [0] the credited article for the story, linked in the second sentence https://www.marketplace.org/2019/03/06/tech/exclusive-look-n...

Twitter has been shamelessly deleting a lot of interesting right of center accounts (e.g Thomas Wictor, Imperator Rex) for no good reason, so a lot of people have given up on it for political discussions. Jack Dorsey was on the Joe Rogan podcast with , of all people, his lawyer and got called out for censoring and gave a lot of non-answers.[1] if you read the youtube comments it's almost 100% negative on the directio…

You're downvoted because a significant fraction of HN readers live in leftist filter bubbles and are never exposed to serious criticisms of their ideas.

Re: U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says

#299

Post by hnzix » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 3:25 AM UTC

naravara wrote: post #254

rmason wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was never that engaged in Facebook, just checked it once a week. Then I started helping managing a private forum (for Michigan entrepreneurs) and got invited into another one. Now I'm on FB a couple of times a day. Having the chance to engage with bright people who share my passion was the key. But the majority of my family has never been on Facebook.

This has been a common refrain from a lot of people. Facebook seems to have a lock on community it’s discussion forums for all sorts of small groups. It works since basically everyone is on it and you don’t have to make people register and create an account as a barrier to entry. People used to have email listservs instead, but I think there is so much email marketing now that the signal to noise ratio on most people…

I have a pseudonym FB account that I am forced to maintain for this reason (specialist interest groups). It's the new phpbb even though it completely sucks as a forum tool. The same questions get asked over and over. But worse is better I guess.

I went to great lengths to keep my account completely anonymized, so the suggested friends list is a hilarious cross-section of global randos. Of course being a pseduonym account I could be banned at any moment.

Re: U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says

#300

Post by no_wizard » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 3:25 AM UTC

dd36 wrote: post #295

no_wizard wrote: post #287

Here's the kicker, which I think others have pointed out, but I want to say this succinctly: First, to quote the article: > The big gainer, interestingly, is under the same roof as Facebook. It's their co-owned Instagram Now, to my point: The average person does not care about privacy, just the illusion of privacy (I suspect people reading this site intuitively know this. At some level, nearly everyone is in differen…

I think they do actually care about privacy but are only ever offered illusion. The problem really is lack of choice.

Agreed, as noted in the survey I linked to, 9 out of 10 people (in accordance to this survey, but even its more realistically 7 out of 10, its still a lot of people) claim to. I think its a few things:

1. Awareness. I don't think people are aware of how/what services are collecting data and how that data can be collected

2. Influence. Its hard, I imagine, for a lot of people to drop social media altogether. Its not all vanity. My wife has a disability that sometimes leaves her bedridden for weeks. Without social media, she wouldn't be able to communicate with our friends unless they call/text/come over, which they do, but its not always feasible one of those things will happen, so following them on Instagram and chatting via Facebook Messenger is really helpful in keeping her spirits up in those times.

3. Inertia. I think a lot of the current outrage against Facebook has been media driven, in particular, I think after Trump got elected -

(just a side note here before I continue, I'm talking about a criticism of media in general, not democrat vs republican politics or anything of the sort)-

I have a strong feeling, that I can't really substantiate, so take it as you will, of course (I acknowledge I could be wrong), large main stream news outlets started digging around about the mechanics of that election, and stumbled into the Cambridge Analytica scandal as a result, increasingly their practices came under fire, in part because I think some large media organizations (rightly, in my opinion) blame their data harvesting practices on getting Trump elected in the first place.

This also brings up another point I find so sad: despite the openness of the internet, the mass media still reigns supreme in being able to influence the masses, and I (anecdotally) feel like the power of freely and ubiquitously available knowledge via the internet has not had the impact on this sort of thing that one would have hoped. It was one of the promises of the internet in the 90s, that we would all vastly become more informed and it would take vastly less effort (and it does, if you are looking for it).