FB in the initial days was useful. Now its full of crap and spam articles. Stopped visiting many years back. LinkedIn is still useful for connections. But I believe they need to change their algorithm and policies to make sure the users don't flock to the other networks.
U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says
381–390 of 635 posts
Re: U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says
#382Whenever the topic of Facebook gets brought up I see a lot of comments on how "the news feed sucks". That it's filled with hateful comments. Leaving facebook is great because it takes toxic people out of your lives! What seems to be missing from the conversation is that Facebook to a large extent is what you make it to be. _You_ decide who to follow, who to keep as your friend, whose post you want to see. There is no…
This is an oversimification. I have hundreds of friends on Facebook but the algorithm somehow does an amazing job of choosing my top ten most toxic friends and highlighting their most toxic posts. Unfriend all of them and it finds the next top ten most toxic. Saying “Facebook is what you make it to be” ignores the fact that Facebook does a fine job of making itself be pretty terrible.
Re: U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says
#383Anecdotally, I work with teenagers and none of them have a Facebook pages. It's viewed as a place for old people and parents. For me personally, it's almost impossible to deal with. Way too many political posts from my friends and family. It's probably best use for me is local events and an occasional major event from a friend/family member. Still, I find myself going there less and less. From a small business standp…
> For me personally, it's almost impossible to deal with. Way too many political posts from my friends and family. Bingo, that's what's doing it for me. Before the 2016 presidential election, Facebook was fun. It was also a great way to get news. But now, what I'm finding is that a lot of people on Facebook just don't know how to behave in a public forum. It makes it painful, because someone always knows someone who'…
Same bingo. My hypothesis (at least for the Facebook I see, that is of course a minuscule fraction) is that FB is mostly used now by people with an agenda (self promotion, spreading of an ideology, marketing, political campaign, whatever). Therefore, any disagreement is immediately treated as a threat. Ultimately FB has become a dark forest for casual users. The fun is gone.
Re: U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says
#384The crazy thing is, for me, Facebook was actually useful for following news ever since Google Reader died. I spent quite a bit of time following many pages (people and businesses) in order to stay up to date on news, and I was incredibly happy at the results. I even went the extra effort to unfollow "Friends" that I didn't want to offend by unfriending. Facebook simply screwed up everything. They removed custom lists…
Exactly. It feels very much like giant company syndrome. Some directors picked metrics like "frequency of fresh content on top of newsfeed," then that metric become a goal for some manager a few levels down, and when metrics become goals, they stop being good metrics. Nobody with the power to stop it would have been focused on "average value of content item," and everybody else had a motivation to get whatever content their group was in charge of some visibility, so it's more or less inevitable that it'd all go to shit.
Re: U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says
#385Note: personal opinion bellow It seems to me that the overall interest in Facebook is decreasing. The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years. It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving. Still, Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition. We don't see any news about their user base decreasing and news channels…
I deleted my personal account years ago when it became evident that Facebook was little more than a reprehensible consumer surveillance utility, failing at the original value proposition of keeping in contact with friends. I maintain a company page through an otherwise content-free account. As a corporate user I find Facebook slow and difficult to navigate. All social networks die. They either fail to achieve critica…
I realized that the only people I was in contact with were people I didn't really wanted to have contact with... Not all 'friendships' are worth upholding, very few are actually.
P.S.: never seen 'BS' expressed so eloquently...
Re: U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says
#386Whenever the topic of Facebook gets brought up I see a lot of comments on how "the news feed sucks". That it's filled with hateful comments. Leaving facebook is great because it takes toxic people out of your lives! What seems to be missing from the conversation is that Facebook to a large extent is what you make it to be. _You_ decide who to follow, who to keep as your friend, whose post you want to see. There is no…
>What seems to be missing from the conversation is that Facebook to a large extent is what you make it to be.
Regretfully, this was not the case for me. I tried tweaking my news feed to my preferences for multiple years and it still showed me crap that made me sad. More importantly, mindlessly scrolling my news feed was a time sink, and I found it very difficult to stop. I was definitely addicted to it, in the same way that I experienced addiction to chocolate to cope with my PhD.
I broke the addiction for myself by using a news feed blocker recommended by a friend. Recently, I deleted all the content off my facebook in the hope it would discourage other people from interacting with facebook. The addictive properties of facebook are all in instagram, even if it is less toxic, so I hold it in similar disdain.
Re: U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says
#387Facebook is the next AOL or Yahoo, I've been saying this for years. They have a critical flaw in their design and in their philosophy, technological innovation can't fix this either.
Re: U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says
#388By far the biggest factor that had me stopping checking Facebook, and indeed LinkedIn, is number of utterly fictitious notifications they generate. There was a time a few years back when that red dot made me drop everything to check FB, but these days it’ll be some completely bullshit message they’ve made a notification out of. Feels like they got greedy for my attention and killed the golden goose there. I check it…
Even more annoying is the same thing that they do with email notifications. They seem to keep inventing new "categories" of notifications all the time that I haven't yet opted out of - basically because I seem to be only able to opt out of just that specific category that they just sent me an email about, when I click on the "don't want to receive any more of these mails" link below the message.
And every time, they gladly acknowledge that I will not receive any more messages of that kind.
"Okay, you won't get any more mails about new messages from friends. Okay, you won't get any more mails about stuff your friends liked. Okay, you won't get any more mails about stuff some other random people liked. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new stuff posted in groups you joined. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new stuff posted in groups you did not join, but we think you might be interested in. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new photos posted by your friends. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new photos of cats posted on Facebook. Okay, you won't get any more mails about news articles with dogs in the title. Okay, you won't get any more mails about postings your friends liked that complain about the weather and were written by women of age 35-40."
Okay, admittedly the last three were exagerrated, but all the categories before have been actual "notification categories" that I successfully opted out of, before I put a generic Facebook email filter in my mailbox, because apparently nothing else is able to stop their overly-specific-category-generation-engine from spewing out new categories to keep me busy opting out of.
Re: U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the migration is caused by privacy concerns. Facebook has become ridiculously bloated with all kinds of features up to the point where it starts resembling enterprise software rather than an online consumer service. Even I, a techie, sometimes have hard times understanding how to do this or that in Facebook. On the other hand, Instagram is plain simple and understandable.
When I first joined Facebook after jumping ship from Myspace, it was really simple to use with minimal intrusion of media clickbait which is in stark contrast to the bloated and highly optimized for engagement monstrosity it has become today. I was grandfathered into this experience and it no longer appeals to me today as an adult. I suspect this phenomenon is affecting other early adopters as well. Can anyone else r…
I joined 10 years ago after the local equivalent of classmates become utterly useless which mean creators had to seek for revenues and that included but wasn't limited to sponsored profiles of local brands and famous people, virtual currency (you could spend on ridiculous pictures that were meant to enrich your profile and interaction with people), games, annoying promotion of their twitter-alike microblog nobody had idea how to use and which caused great uproar. Service was of course filled with ads of which most controversial one was sucking out your profile picture to dump you an customized credit card ad. Before those "improvements" it was a good place to reconnect with people you knew but since it was something new and unknown, a lot of them had no idea how to use it and made fool of themselves or deliberately used it as dating site - hell, at some point profiles of prostitutes of both sexes started to appear. Facebook largely dethroned naszaklasa in upcoming years but IMO didn't improved social skills of most people who carried those along to the new network. The service was sold but still operates and it's popular among less experienced with technology people.
The similar scenario happened with news agregator similar to digg - at the beginning wykop was aimed for powerusers, IT professionals but quickly idea was extended and included content of various type. Userbase grow had an upward trend which of course lead again to monetization; ads, sponsored content, microblog, shameless promotion of certain political agendas were introduced and at the same time, the content quality heavily piked down. Site still operates today under third - if I'm not mistaken, owner but I'm no longer there since interaction with biased content and teenager, 20-something trolls is not appealing at all.
So yeah, I believe it's pretty the same thing everywhere: a simple service idea is successful, userbase grows and revenue sources are needed. Sources are being introduced along with new features but content quality starts to drop. Unpopular decisions are made leading users to migrate in search for better and simple alternatives.
Re: U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says
#390And this was their best decision imho.