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

#451

Post by digitalixus » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 10:31 AM UTC

intellix wrote: post #407

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 is just a list of my previous jobs that allows recruiters to spam me with job offers. Completely disabled the notifications and was considering deleting the whole thing

Don't forget the constant shitposting by your friends and (ex)coworkers to make themselves appear very smart and hardworking. I've always felt LinkedIn is 300% the cancer that Facebook is because of all the virtue-signalling, pompous fakery and outright lying that occurs there.

It's the digital, more obnoxious version of a kid screaming ME ME ME at the sports team draft for adults. All those bullshitters with too much time on their hands (ironically at work) begging for the attention of recruiters and prospective employers to hire them.

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

#452

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 10:32 AM UTC

dbdjfjrjvebd wrote: post #350

propogandist wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use adb to uninstall apps like FB and Chrome in a few minutes, with your phone connected to a computer https://www.xda-developers.com/uninstall-carrier-oem-bloatwa...

> This works because applications truly aren’t being fully uninstalled from the device, they are just being uninstalled for the current user

If it's not running and doesn't send you notifications or demand updates, do you care all that much?

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

#453

Post by darkpuma » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 10:32 AM UTC

nikkwong wrote: post #432

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…

No kidding. With how smart they are and all the AI that goes on behind the scenes, I don't understand why I continue to get notifications when friend X 'adds to their story'. I have never once watched anyone's story. And I don't plan on starting. Aren't they smart enough to understand that this is just adding cognitive overhead and detracting from my immersion in a meaningful experience? Seriously, not rocket science…

Most of their "AI" is just applied statistics. Train a statistical classifier to classify "events a user wants to see" then run it in prod and elevate the results to notifications. Run an A/B trial (quite possibly p-hacked) to determine if people actually like it. Ignore the false positive rate (e.g. the rate at which you're annoying people) if you think it's arbitrarily small enough. When people ask how you determine which events to turn into notifications tell them The Algorithm decides it and let their imaginations, seeded by pop culture science fiction, run wild about what sort of superhuman synthetic intelligence you have pent up in your computers when really all you've got is a glorified bayesian spam filter.

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

#454

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 10:36 AM UTC

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?"

Much easier to appoach these the other way round: I could choose not to cook at home, but that would cost me a fortune, so I never stopped doing it. Best way to avoid expenses is not to commit to them in the first place.

Same goes for avoiding exploitative apps: never install apps unless there's no alternative. Block all ads. Deny all notifications, especially on the desktop browser. No, I won't send you my location.

It's annoying to have to maintain a wall of "no" but it saves problems in the long run.

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

#455

Post by Brakenshire » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 10:36 AM UTC

tumetab1 wrote: post #418

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That has resulted in me disabling notifications and now I won't know if someone @me or responded to a tweet. Those useless notifications made the whole product useless for me.

Yep, same for me. They want addicts not users.

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

#456

Post by philshem » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 10:46 AM UTC

I deleted my Face&#*k account in 2010. But I can't remember exactly when I created the account. Based on my user ID (17502xxx), is it possible to determine roughly when I created my account?

For the record, Facebook in the early days, when it was only colleges in the Northeast US, was wild, wild fun.

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

#457

Post by puranjay » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 10:47 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 don't have Facebook, but I do have Instagram. For some reason, the ads I see on Instagram are wildly untargeted. Like some Dallas based real estate company advertising to me, even though I'm based out of India

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

#458

Post by josteink » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 10:52 AM UTC

wallace_f wrote: post #402

riazrizvi wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investors want to see engagement metric graphs go up. Execs tie compensation to getting that metric up. Product delivers by mandating more alerts. Payday.

When cheating is allowed to win, cheaters will win

And real people stop playing.

That is: LinkedIn users will stop being users.

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

#459

Post by josteink » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 10:54 AM UTC

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #399

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.

Yeah. Notifications is useful, even great, when used sparingly, appropriately.

But nobody does that, so I’ve stopped granting any app not email or IM notification rights.

You reap what you saw: no “engagement” for you.

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

#460

Post by giancarlostoro » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 10:56 AM UTC

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…

If on Android I recommend the Facebook Lite app. Its not as obnoxious and on Android you can tell the OS to ignore all notifications from an app.

The lite version of Facebook is probably the only worthy version, I just wish it could be firewalled so you know when it tries to use network access and lock it down to just when you open the app.

I assume Lite Android apps arent allowed to use much data but I could be making a bad assumption. It still saves on battery life at least.

I agree though they would notify me of potential friends and they were never ever people I knew or wanted to be friends with (because I didnt know them!).