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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

#271

Post by banku_brougham »

ashelmire wrote: post #73
gwbas1c wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'…

Lots of things changed. Facebook began as an exclusive social network for upper-class students. Gradually it grew to encompass not just all of America, but the entire world. It turns out, many of us well educated people don't really want to network or socialize with poorly educated people. Police started monitoring our activities, so the events all but disappeared. The world changed, too. Facts used to matter; we rea…

If facebook had any notion that their users are also still customers and important in that regard, despite revenue coming from their data consumers, they may have been inclined to care about state-based psyops campaigns victimizing their users. Instead, I think a corporate philosophy of exploitation prevailed.

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

#272

Post by exodust »

sleavey wrote: post #44

I've blocked ads ever since ad blockers were a thing. Facebook have finally managed to consistently get past uBlock Origin, and seeing ads in my news feed for the first time is really, really annoying me. They look similar enough to real posts that I read them automatically before I realise, which I find really disturbing. It's enough that I'm seriously contemplating not using Facebook any more.

> I'm seriously contemplating not using Facebook any more.

You talk the talk but can you walk the walk?

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

#273

Post by mercutio2 »

pixelrevision wrote: post #174
standardUser wrote: post #109

It feels like Facebook now contains all of the negative parts of social media - complaining, arguing, chain posts, fake news, relatives, etc. While Instagram now has all the pleasant parts - pretty photos of families, vacations and food! So these days I find myself using Instagram regularly and Facebook almost never. Having said that, I'll never leave Facebook until something else replaces it. It's the only place I h…

Facebook is quite good as a contact list. It’s a good way to get ahold of random people you might have trouble getting in touch with otherwise. Email, phone and addresses change but a Facebook id typically does not. They can keep their “engagement” though.

It’s a terrible contact list. They don’t actually give you the details you need to contact people!

If the user in question actually uses Facebook, then it can act as a messaging service. But if someone, for instance, sent me a Facebook message, they would never receive a response, because I would learn about it approximately 6 months later when I do my annual login.

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

#274

Post by hnick »

bad_user wrote: post #38
kojackst wrote: post #10

Note: 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…

Instagram is almost unusable due to the ads. Every 3 or 4 posts you see an ad. The only way Instagram isn't obnoxious is on the desktop, in a browser, with an ad-blocker installed. I love WhatsApp, but they haven't found good ways to monetize it yet and one of these days they'll ruin it.

One feature (limitation) of Instagram is that you can't include clickable links in a post message. So if you're running a business or are a personality of interest, you might share something that your followers might actually care to look into in more depth off-platform.

But then you have to tell them to check your profile for your one allowed link, go to your site, search for the product/blog/video - or you pay for an ad with links enabled.

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

#275

Post by resters »

It's obvious that Facebook is having some challenges from the dramatic increase in the number of inline ads (promoted posts). FB is scrambling to generate enough revenue to avoid spooking investors.

What the investors will be missing if they abandon Facebook, however, is that Facebook has one of the most valuable data droves in history. Long after the kind of dark patterns and data collection policies used by Facebook have been outlawed, the trove that has already been collected will provide AI with plenty of information on human behavior for many decades into the future.

Imagine if you are studying the human genome and you are forced to stop collecting new DNA samples after you only have 1.74 Billion samples collected. Not a bad place to be in considering that no new competitors will be allowed to collect samples in the way FB does today in the "wild west" of privacy violation.

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

#276

Post by falcrist »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #182

I'm going to go against the grain here and say that I really like Facebook and think that overall it's a good platform with some flaws. Right now I'm messaging 2 different groups and about 5 different people, while organising an event that's happening in a few weeks, and organising supplies and camping for a festival on the weekend. After this festival in the weekend, I can post the photos I took on Facebook, where e…

As I've said before repetedly, in order to use facebook effectively, you need to do everything you can to avoid the algorithm.

What I mean by that is that you don't want facebook deciding what you see. Instead, you want to control your feed as much as possible. I've found that to be true to some extent for every social media platform.

With facebook, the best way to do this seems to be to create a "friend list" of all of the people whose posts you want to see, and then bookmark it so you can use it as your main portal to facebook. When viewing the list, you'll see the posts and shares of everyone in that group (in chronological order) and nothing else. Nothing about who liked what or who commented on what.

Now, go to the list, scroll through everyone's posts until you see something you remember from last time you were on, and that's it. You're done with facebook unless you want to post something.

Similarly, my portal to youtube is the subscription feed. If I want to see recommendations, I'll go looking for them. On reddit I tend to browse r/all with a pretty extensive block list. Whatever I can do to stop algorithms from deciding what I see.

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

#277

Post by vageli »

diminoten wrote: post #134
socrates1998 wrote: post #27

Anecdotally, 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…

I just unsubscribed from all of the folks on FB that post political stuff. Maybe they should make that a global option, something like "Hide Political Stories" or something.

How would you classify a political story?

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

#278

Post by jsemrau »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #110
stcredzero wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving. The problem with Facebook, is that either it's boring, or it's not boring, and in that case it's often far worse. Facebook latched onto the fact that outrage measures as "engagement" then other people latched onto that fact and started to use Facebook for their own outrage mongering purposes. Still, Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong…

So much this: outrage measures as "engagement" And yes it affects Twitter as well. It seems to me that it takes "energy" to get people to change. Change being one of how they think about something, how they respond to something, or what they spend their time on. As far as I can tell, there are three very well known and very well studied energy pools that can be amplified and then tapped, one is fear, one is anger, an…

I read that the "engagement" measure supported the Trump presidency since their ads were more clickbait than content-driven [1]

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/02/27/analysis-trumps-faceb...

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

#279

Post by justaguyhere »

standardUser wrote: post #109

It feels like Facebook now contains all of the negative parts of social media - complaining, arguing, chain posts, fake news, relatives, etc. While Instagram now has all the pleasant parts - pretty photos of families, vacations and food! So these days I find myself using Instagram regularly and Facebook almost never. Having said that, I'll never leave Facebook until something else replaces it. It's the only place I h…

couple hundred people I would otherwise have no contact with

Not being snarky, this is a genuine question - If you can't make the effort to email these people every other month or so, then do you really care that much about them? I can understand the difficulties in visiting in person, or even phone calls - many people don't like phone calls these days, but email/SMS? This sounds more like you have a passing curiosity about these people than genuinely caring about them

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

#280

Post by HeavyStorm »

I closed my Facebook account around 2012, maybe even earlier. Recently I had to reactivate it (oh, and that's when I found out that Facebook never deleted my account). It still active but I simply don't use it. And I believe that's the best compromise for most people. It's still there, and if you need to lookup someone, for instance, just log in. Elsewise, just don't use it.
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