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Philippines tops world internet usage index with an average 10 hours a day

theguardian.com

21–30 of 98 posts

Re: Philippines tops world internet usage index with an average 10 hours a day

#21
post #5

Unsurprising Philippines is at top of list. World leader in adoption of tech that enables social interaction. From 2007: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-textmessages/... Another. Undated. Avg sms per month per subscriber = 600. Or 20 a day. Which seems low, I'm sure I've seen figures alot higher than this. https://www.techwalla.com/articles/how-to-send-a-text-to-the...

Filipino here, gonna have to agree. Its not really tech adoption but more 'new modes of communication' adoption. We adopted SMS like wildfire and now its the same with Facebook/Messenger. Gonna be a good bet that those 10hrs are disproportionately spent on FB properties. Lack of net neutrality also helps build a bigger FB wall - for most telcos its free to use messenger and facebook.

Re: Philippines tops world internet usage index with an average 10 hours a day

#23
post #20

Data is cheaper than calls. I don't even bother with call or text plans when I'm in the Phils. It costs a reasonable $8/mo to get 8GB of data if you use the right refillable promos. With that said, internet is so darn slow and unreliable it must be messaging services. It's hard to get real work done from the Phils as a remote software developer. Thank goodness for Tmux and SSH.

I have intermittent connectivity issues, and [mosh](https://mosh.org/) has been super helpful with typing lag, reconnecting.

Re: Philippines tops world internet usage index with an average 10 hours a day

#25

>most time spent online is done via mobile devices, with the greatest portion of that time spent on social media A lot of people in Phils seem to have a FB-connected mobile plan where they can chat on FB but not see the pictures on there, although you can send them pictures in the chat. And it only seems to connect them to FB, not the whole internet. Just a messenger app I guess. (Most of my close friends are in the…

Philippines was the number one demographic of the very first large-scale social net - Friendster...

Re: Philippines tops world internet usage index with an average 10 hours a day

#27
There was a PBS documentary not too long ago about workers in the Phillipines tasked with reviewing all content that is posted to websites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

By the looks of it, they may easily match or exceed the daily usage of any internet-addicted person in any country. What is the total number of people employed in that industry there?

Would these types of industries affect the numbers?

Re: Philippines tops world internet usage index with an average 10 hours a day

#28
post #26

Interesting thing I saw just today was the 2nd largest (after English) wikipedia was Cebuano with only about 400,000 less article. And Waray-Waray is 11th! Clearly it's not all facebook.

Well, that sounded suspicious, so I looked it up.

Apparently, 80-90% of the content on the Cebuano and Waray Wikipedias is generated by Lsjbot[1].

I’m thinking of using a similar approach to bump up the number of Arabic Wikipedia articles, but it seems like cheating to me...

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsjbot

Re: Philippines tops world internet usage index with an average 10 hours a day

#29

Filipino internet user here. Can at least say that 10 hours a day for most Filipinos seem accurate enough—most people here are connected to FB Messenger via telcos' free FB promos. And a lot of Filipinos use Facebook like a realtime social lobby, replying to comments and status updates almost instantly. Sadly though, most of the data probably applies to Filipinos in Metro Manila and developed cities, and there's stil…

I visited the Philippines recently, and was shocked at how non-neutral it was. ISPs have promotions like "free half an hour of YouTube per day". It is like the nightmare scenario that we in the rest of the world were warned about. Worse, someone told me that in 2012, internet service was way better, but then they realized they could just throttle everyone down and jack the prices up. And I also had to have a Globe an…

You're right, but it's not about throttling, it's about subsidies. Regardless, data is about a dollar a gig, which is among the cheapest in the world. The fact is, folks don't want to or more likely, can't afford it, so the subsidized plans are more popular.

Re: Philippines tops world internet usage index with an average 10 hours a day

#30
post #28
post #26

Interesting thing I saw just today was the 2nd largest (after English) wikipedia was Cebuano with only about 400,000 less article. And Waray-Waray is 11th! Clearly it's not all facebook.

Well, that sounded suspicious, so I looked it up. Apparently, 80-90% of the content on the Cebuano and Waray Wikipedias is generated by Lsjbot[1]. I’m thinking of using a similar approach to bump up the number of Arabic Wikipedia articles, but it seems like cheating to me... [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsjbot

Well there's my answer! Thanks for figuring that out. I was kind of blown away by the stat.
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