Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

marketplace.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 635 posts

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

#371

Post by edejong »

Matheus28 wrote: post #338
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…

It really feels like some companies like Facebook are flying blind by using A/B testing everywhere and ignoring the long term effects of the changes they do.

Exactly this. Death by a thousand paper cuts, is another.

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

#372

Post by tjoff »

JohnFen wrote: post #176
ilovecaching wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with the non ad driven model is that to you 5$ might be nothing, but some people 5$ is an impossible sum of money to spend a month on entertainment. Ads allow companies to offer first world products to customers who could desperately use technology to help them connect and trade in their local communities. I think the discussion on privacy and ad based platforms should really be orthogonal.

> I think the discussion on privacy and ad based platforms should really be orthogonal. Except that those two things are inseparable. The privacy problems are a direct result of the desire of the advertising industry to be able to target people based on their behavior, which necessitates spying on everyone. If we could somehow eliminate that targeting, then we could discuss the two as separate topics.

They really aren't though. It's just that that is the stance the big players have. And the reason they have that stance might be because it is the only stance that can motivate their existence.

You can still target content rather than users.

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

#373

Post by thirdsun »

autoconfig wrote: post #357

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…

I think a lot of that has moved to WhatsApp - at least here in Germany people create and participate in groups for all kinds of social circles and activities:

From never ending, ongoing groups, like family, friends, clubs / sport teams or work to temporary and occasional groups dedicated to events like birthdays, travel with friends, festivals, etc.

The concept of groups is easy to grasp and it's much simpler than organizing Facebook in a similar way. It includes people who don't have a Facebook account (all they need is a phone number and even grandma can join in) and participating feels much less public than posting anything on Facebook.

Of course I imagine Facebook won't mind that transition and development all that much.

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

#374

Post by fwn »

elamje wrote: post #265
tombert wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition You're not wrong, but I find it a bit frustrating how much resistance I get whenever I try and suggest using Signal instead of Whatsapp. As far as I can tell, it has pretty much all the features of Whatsapp that I use, without all the spying.

Genuinely curious, how is WhatsApp spying? I thought they were encrypted? Are they not end to end encrypted like Keybase or signal?

They are end to end encrypted. There's apparently a lot of meta data (like the people one communicates with, etc.) that can still be accessed by Facebook.

It also nudges users to enable cloud backups which in practice means that everyone has them enabled (...which in practice means that all your messages are unencrypted in the other person's cloud storage.)

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

#376

Post by ashishb »

kristianc wrote: post #349
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…

> 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?"

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

#377

Post by Kiro »

Matheus28 wrote: post #338
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…

It really feels like some companies like Facebook are flying blind by using A/B testing everywhere and ignoring the long term effects of the changes they do.

Or Hacker News is wrong.

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

#378

Post by usrusr »

qazwse_ wrote: post #327
badfrog wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instagram provides that illusion by not injecting opinionated content into your feed (The most obvious example: you aren't seeing injected news stories in your Instagram feed, generally its only ads and people you follow, and the ads are marked) What Facebook content do you consider "injected"? AFAIK, the only things in feed are: 1) Posts, events, shares, etc from people or pages that you follow 2) Posts that your…

I think it's number 2. I don't particularly want to see what my random stuff my friends are liking or commenting on. I know Instagram provides this too, but it's separate from the main feed.

And the reverse: I use facebook for very little else than to run my hobby life (and it's been transformational at that!), but my non-hobby network is still connected to the account and I don't want to annoy them with a flood of deeply specific posts (in part because life demands keeping a facade of being a somewhat normal person). So much self-censoring because it would be shown to an uninterested audience I care about.

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

#379

Post by silveroriole »

badfrog wrote: post #315
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…

> Instagram provides that illusion by not injecting opinionated content into your feed (The most obvious example: you aren't seeing injected news stories in your Instagram feed, generally its only ads and people you follow, and the ads are marked) What Facebook content do you consider "injected"? AFAIK, the only things in feed are: 1) Posts, events, shares, etc from people or pages that you follow 2) Posts that your…

Back in the day you didn’t have “pages that you follow,” you had interests listed on your profile. These later became pages that you were automatically signed up to, which the relevant companies post ads on. My feed rapidly became mostly adverts which I’d never actually signed up to receive, and it was more effort to fix it than to just stop checking Facebook.

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

#380

Post by bencollier49 »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #267
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…

Anecdotally (I don't live in America), every teenager has a Facebook account. Not a single person has WhatsApp. Instagram is used but not nearly as much as Facebook. (When people cross-post pictures you see the FB post has 3x - 10x the number of likes as the Instagram post.) There are zero political posts. Zero. I've never seen one. If my feed were full of political stuff, I'd also be sick of it. But feed is exclusiv…

Where do you live?
Post reply on HN