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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

#361
post #62

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…

For me, it's the interface. It's just really complicated and slow. And I can't communicate with followers without paying. Advertising on FB is not really worth it, in most cases.

And buggy, for example, a chat message I'm writing, getting lost because I switch to another browser tab (and the chat window is there too but empty / not synchronized, eventually causing the lost update bug).

And on my wide screen, 30'', the chat window is just like 2x1 cm large.

And on the events page, I choose to display today's or tomorrow's events. Then Facebook displays events from not those days.

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

#362

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…

> Hows about that?

All I put on Instagram are landscapes and some cityscapes. I do not see like giving away any privacy doing that. Alas, phot-sharing days of Instagram are in the past and stories get more and more annoying every day without any option not to see them :(

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

#363
I'm old enough to remember when online social networking meant logging onto a BBS and chatting with whoever else was also connected.

To me, Facebook is just another BBS that has pushed past its prime and is overloading me with candy (cough ANSI graphics, boo! cough) in order to keep me connected - its an age-old formula, and while the density of information being pushed is orders of magnitude greater than it was back in the 1200bps day, the mechanics are still the same.

So what was old is new again.

And just like the BBS era, we seem to be fitting on a curve where the potential for disruption is very real.

What I perceived happen to the Golden BBS Age is, the users grew up. They became a bit more technically competent. They learned to use other tools ("Winsock, TCP/IP") that - at first, were quite daunting - but once mastered, gave them wider access to a far broader range of information sources - the Internet.

So perhaps there is some of this factor occurring here, too. People are tired of the man-behind-the-curtain technological manipulation of Facebook and its related services, just like we tired of tyrannical BBS ops booting us for wrong reasons back in the day.

So, where will the sophisticated new, liberating technology come in? Like, back in the end-of-BBS days, there were a lot of tool vendors selling shovels and pick axes along the road - the "Winsock for Dummies" and "Easy TCP/IP" products that made BBS'es irrelevant.

Is it IPFS? Is it Mastodon?

I believe, if there is hope, it lies in the OS vendors.

Just like these additional services eventually became integrated (nobody needs to install a TCP/IP stack any more - you've already got one), social networking needs to become a feature of the OS.

Trouble is, the OS vendors have been mostly asleep at the wheel for too long, having been lured into walled gardens themselves.

But, if there is hope, its in the eventual integration of advanced technologies into the default, out of the box, OS stack, such that there is no need for a centralised monopoly of subversion any longer. Imagine if Microsoft or Apple decided to nuke the scene, and add IPFS and Mastodon tech to the default stack. This would wipe Facebook out in a matter of months - just like happened to BBS's when the Internet finally got the tools from smart vendors that were needed to make intelligent Users again...

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

#364

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…

> It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving. I'm not much of a user myself, but among my friends that use it heavily I've noted a number of complaints that it has gotten HARDER to use for their primary use: keeping up with friends. Their issue isn't that FB has become stale or boring, but that it has actively LOST ground relative to their purpose.

Fb needs you to be able to filter the news feed.

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

#365

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…

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.

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

#366
I hope they can figure out how to make it work over at Facebook. I would happily pay for a service that clearly stated how they use my personal information, and curates news and provides a platform to interact with friends on/offline, as well as with a greater community. But it doesn’t do any of that well. & that’s why I deleted my account.

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

#367

Whenever the topic of Facebook gets brought up I see a lot of comments on how "the news feed sucks". That it's filled with hateful comments. Leaving facebook is great because it takes toxic people out of your lives! What seems to be missing from the conversation is that Facebook to a large extent is what you make it to be. _You_ decide who to follow, who to keep as your friend, whose post you want to see. There is no…

If what things end up on the timeline aren’t a simple result of what feeds you select, that makes the feed one sees less under one’s control, doesn’t it?

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

#368

Whenever the topic of Facebook gets brought up I see a lot of comments on how "the news feed sucks". That it's filled with hateful comments. Leaving facebook is great because it takes toxic people out of your lives! What seems to be missing from the conversation is that Facebook to a large extent is what you make it to be. _You_ decide who to follow, who to keep as your friend, whose post you want to see. There is no…

There's some things you can't influence though.

There's, for example, no way to disable page invite notifications.

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

#369

The crazy thing is, for me, Facebook was actually useful for following news ever since Google Reader died. I spent quite a bit of time following many pages (people and businesses) in order to stay up to date on news, and I was incredibly happy at the results. I even went the extra effort to unfollow "Friends" that I didn't want to offend by unfriending. Facebook simply screwed up everything. They removed custom lists…

I still use it as a news feed: even with no sorted posts and all the weakness you pointed out, i found no other aggregator like FB. Notifications send no warning on my smartphone (i disabled them all), except the red dot inside the app: i click once in a while, just to "cleanse" it.

I believe they know that social media are subjected to fashion just like everything else: the best way to keep on riding the way is peraphs be the one who kill the old (fb) while nurturing the new (Instagram/whatsapp). In this manner, the numbers are always growing - and that's the only metric they care about.

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