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

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

#391

Post by distant_hat »

A large part of the problem for Facebook, at least personally, is that its too popular. Initially I only had my college friends on it. With them I had a different dynamic and different kinds of things I'd share. Then the first wave of relatives (cousins, etc) joined. This leads to more content on your feed, but you have to be more careful about what you'd share since its going to reach a different network. Also, its weird if your boss or colleagues want to join your network. Then the oldies joined, parents and grandparents, that means either you set up elaborate rules for who can see what, and remember to set them up every time you update something, or you post bland content that you don't mind anybody seeing. I am not off Facebook, but my engagement has gone down to about a couple of times a week. Their notifications are increasingly meaningless and I am not the only one doing this.

On the other hand, I feel Facebook as a company is doing great. WhatsApp is incredibly popular for exactly the reasons Facebook itself is not, private groups that you can share stuff with as needed. Less chance of people seeing material you did not intend for them.

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

#392

Post by dannyr »

badfrog wrote: post #315
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…

> Instagram provides that illusion by not injecting opinionated content into your feed (The most obvious example: you aren't seeing injected news stories in your Instagram feed, generally its only ads and people you follow, and the ads are marked) What Facebook content do you consider "injected"? AFAIK, the only things in feed are: 1) Posts, events, shares, etc from people or pages that you follow 2) Posts that your…

When I used to visit Facebook, I get "Popular On Your Network" stories.

I consider #2 as injected. Basically, any content that was not directly posted by a "friend" to share to their network.

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

#393

Post by hanspeter »

joering2 wrote: post #352
hanspeter wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the problem was lack of choice, why do the large majority of all Facebook users never change their privacy settings? Or why did hundreds of thousands of users actively choose to share their data with a random company called Cambridge Analytica? The problem is not lack of choice. The problem is that people don't care.

Slight correction: since 9/10 said they care about their privacy, its more that they are not educated on what Facebook does with their data, or how to limit their own exposure. Lack of education != ignorance.

Maybe they do care about their privacy, they just care more about sharing stuff and more about looking at videoes than they care about looking at ther privacy settings. The media has been all about Facebook and privacy for many, many years. Facebook have had popup dialogs on user feeds asking users to check their privacy settings. People are not uneducated about it. They just don't care enough to change their behavior or make an active change on their settings.

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

#394

Post by whouweling »

thatoneuser wrote: post #345
peteretep wrote: post #334

By 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…

Dear God I installed LinkedIn a couple months back and their endless bs notifications made me realize that I don't need it. It doesn't give me anything. Why is it sending me 2-3 notifications a day when I have 5 friends who's profiles arent even actively used? If it did something useful, like find me clients for the work I do then sure - I'll give them my attention. He'll, I'll pay good money for that! But I don't gi…

I also do not understand the Linked-in notifications at all. They send an e-mail like '5 job changes' which I actually find interesting to learn about.

But when I click any of the links this information is nowhere to be found. So after a while I don't click on the links anymore and my engagement goes down.

Seems like a lot of the decisions are focused based on quick-wins engagement instead of an long lasting useful experience for the user?

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

#395

Post by logifail »

lordnacho wrote: post #365
thatoneuser wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear God I installed LinkedIn a couple months back and their endless bs notifications made me realize that I don't need it. It doesn't give me anything. Why is it sending me 2-3 notifications a day when I have 5 friends who's profiles arent even actively used? If it did something useful, like find me clients for the work I do then sure - I'll give them my attention. He'll, I'll pay good money for that! But I don't gi…

LinkedIn sends me notifications that say "you might have new notifications" and then when I click it out turns it I'm all up to date. Not sure if this is on purpose or just really bad qa.

> when I click it out turns it I'm all up to date. Not sure if this is on purpose ...

Read the first three words (my highlight) and there's the answer

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

#396

Post by sinatra »

ashishb wrote: post #376
kristianc wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The survey says: 9 out of ten americans care deeply about privacy (particuarly around data privacy and collection) This is a problem with focus groups. Ask people 'do you care about your privacy', and almost everyone will answer yes. There's almost zero social cost to answering that question in the affirmative. On the other hand, there's a good deal of social sacrifice in leaving these platforms for good. More like…

Exactly. Asking someone "do you want to have more savings?" is meaningless. Everyone will say yes. The right question to ask is "will you cook at home to save $10000 a year?"

And even out of the majority of people who will say, “yes, they’ll cook at home to save $10K,” only a small percent of those will actually do so.

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

#397

Post by nearbuy »

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 rarely use Facebook these days, and the reason has nothing to do with privacy. There's simply nothing interesting on Facebook to pull me back.

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

#398

Post by hanspeter »

CaptainZapp wrote: post #354
hanspeter wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the problem was lack of choice, why do the large majority of all Facebook users never change their privacy settings? Or why did hundreds of thousands of users actively choose to share their data with a random company called Cambridge Analytica? The problem is not lack of choice. The problem is that people don't care.

Or why did hundreds of thousands of users actively choose to share their data with a random company called Cambridge Analytica? They certainly have never chosen to do so. You can accuse them of participating in some innane quiz, but it was exactly the big scandal that not only the participants' data, but also that of their friends was sucked and resold to Cambridge Analytica without their knowledge by the "researcher…

All participants have actively clicked a button to confirm that they would give Cambridge Analytica access to their profile data and data from their friends. The scandal was not that the data was collected without the participants knowledge. The scandal was that they used the data for something else, than what they initially had told the participants.

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

#399

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

peteretep wrote: post #334

By 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…

Twitter has started to do that too. Notifications went from focussing on significant interactions — such as someone liking or retweeting a tweet, or following you — to 'someone you follow just tweeted' — what's the point of that notification? It's happening all the time! Notifications get devalued as companies desperately try to promote their product.
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