Facebook users drop in the US and Canada • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#101

Post by goombastic » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 2:37 PM UTC

EwanToo wrote: post #84

jonknee wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you just not follow the spammers on twitter and be fine?

Not really, when they message you whenever you mention a keyword they're tracking on (e.g. ipad), then all you can do is manually block them. It's a fairly painful process, and considering how much visibility Twitter has of each twitter client, their automatic anti-spam process should actually be much more effective than it currently is.

Try the proxlet add-on in chrome. I think it helps you block people, hash tags, for set periods of time etc.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#102

Post by goombastic » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 2:42 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #71

tintin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you could call LinkedIn a social network. It can be nice to find out about an old friend, but most of it is pure business. So I'm not surprised about the survey.

The best thing about LinkedIn for me is their recommendations system. Whenever I'm looking at people's profiles on LinkedIn, I'm looking at their work history and their recommendations, the other stuff being basically useless. And mostly I value recommendations coming from people I know. So it's a social network and I think it is more pure and valuable than the Facebook graph since on LinkedIn you only want a thousan…

The recomendations aren't going anywhere these days. I distrust people with a huge number of recommendations and when you read through, you understand it's a mutual favors system. Not that mutual favors are bad, just that most of it so shallow.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#103

Post by noarchy » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 2:46 PM UTC

grandalf wrote: post #48

Suppose you're in a room with 5 close friends having a conversation. You're comfortable, animated, energetic, outgoing. In the midst of this engrossing conversation 400 other acquaintances silently enter the room. Suddenly you notice them and realize they can all hear every word you're saying. Most people find this scenario a bit socially uncomfortable and clam right up. Facebook's growth has created this scenario fo…

You can wall off groups of people within Facebook, but the effort required to do this is beyond the motivation level that I'd expect most Facebook users (myself included) to have. Like privacy, making Facebook more tolerable to use is an opt-in thing, requiring proactive measures by the user.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#104

Post by threejay » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 2:49 PM UTC

I deleted facebook about six months ago because it was a huge stressor that added very little value to my life. I have too many subsets of friends, which makes it impossible to maintain one personality without offending someone. This just isn't how human's interact and I think it will eventually kill off facebook, unless they find some way to mitigate it.

For reference: 1) Highschool friends and family who are incredibly religious/right wing/etc 2) Friends from skiing, many of whom make a living on the mountain, who are about as vile as one can imagine 3) Friends from college or work, which consists mostly of PharmD's, MD's, and nurses. 4) Other random friends from startup stuff, partys, etc

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#105

Post by sin7 » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 3:09 PM UTC

windsurfer wrote: post #86

jcitme wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a problem inherent in any form of social media. Unfortunately, it's not easily fixed. You need to find a way to strike a balance between rewarding content creation and punishing spam, and the line in thin.

Reddit seems to do a great job.

Don't kid yourself. Reddit has gotten to the point where reposts continue to make the front page because even if a lot of people have seen it, not all have. And I have noticed that the same comments will garner karma.

The problem with websites like Reddit is that they suffer from the so called black swans. A good post can garner karma in the thousands, but a bad one will only have a negative one or two. So, reposting is a great strategy especially when new content is so hard to come by.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#106

Post by EwanToo » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 3:25 PM UTC

hugh3 wrote: post #93

EwanToo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, when they message you whenever you mention a keyword they're tracking on (e.g. ipad), then all you can do is manually block them. It's a fairly painful process, and considering how much visibility Twitter has of each twitter client, their automatic anti-spam process should actually be much more effective than it currently is.

I just keep my tweets protected. Seems to work.

That pretty much stops any serendipity when it comes to people following you - very few people are going to click follow on a protected feed just to see whether they're saying interesting things about their local area or a technology are they work in?

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#107

Post by jsz0 » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 3:31 PM UTC

neilk wrote: post #52

jsz0 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's settled for the next decade or so at least. With 687 million users if each user spent 15 minutes switching to an alternative it would take a combined time investment of about 20,000 years for Facebook to disappear. Of course they don't have to lose all their users to become irrelevant.. If Facebook's growth stopped today and they began to lose users at a rate of about 90,000 per day it would take 10 year…

By that logic, MySpace is also unchallengeable. There's a class of kids out there who are 12 right now; by the time they're 16 or 18 are you sure they're going to want Facebook accounts? According to researcher danah boyd, these kids will probably have created and disposed of many different social networking accounts by that time.

I'm not suggesting Facebook is unchallengeable just that it will take much longer due to the enormous number of users. The exodus from MySpace took several years with about 1/4th less users. So a 10 year timeframe seems completely reasonable to me when you're talking about almost 700 million users. I just can't see how that happens in 4-6 years as you suggest. Facebook would have to stop growing entirely and begin losing hundreds of thousands of users per day to a competitor.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#108

Post by hugh3 » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 3:32 PM UTC

EwanToo wrote: post #106

hugh3 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just keep my tweets protected. Seems to work.

That pretty much stops any serendipity when it comes to people following you - very few people are going to click follow on a protected feed just to see whether they're saying interesting things about their local area or a technology are they work in?

Yeah, it all depends on how you use twitter.

I use my twitter feed for stuff which is too boring or offensive to inflict upon my entire facebook friends list.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#109

Post by golgo13 » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 3:41 PM UTC

I am personally seeing the growth from Mexico. In the past month, a large chunk of my cousins have added me. But like others have said, most of their updates are from the Spanish version of Farmville, etc.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#110

Post by Padraig » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 3:41 PM UTC

teej wrote: post #22

moultano wrote: post #19

Anyone know their methodology? I clicked around a bit and couldn't find any information. Without knowing more my prior would attribute it to a bug.

The methodology is basically using the Facebook Ad Tool. The tool let's you target a set of users for your ads and tells you the size of that population. The article clearly discloses the inherent issues at play. > Going forward, we’ll be watching closely to see what longer-term trends emerge. Bugs in the Facebook advertising tool that we draw this information from, seasonal changes like college graduations, and othe…

Other factors like Facebook finding and removing spam accounts, users enabling privacy features, etc. seem like a much more likely cause.

I could see people getting bored / busy and not bothering to use it any more, but it's unbelievable that 1.5 million would delete their accounts in one month.