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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

#471

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 Unless Facebook figures out a way to address this, it's the start of a death spiral. The only thing that makes Facebook interesting is the people it can connect you to. If a few of them leave, the place becomes a little more boring than it used to be... which leads a few more of them to get bored and leave, which makes the place a little more boring... which leads more people to get bored and l…

this happens to MMO servers too, I used to play the game DOFUS years ago and it was one of my favorite places on the internet when first started but then people left the game as they grew up and it was gradually taken over by bots and scammers until it got merged with another server

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

#472

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…

WhatsApp isn't at all free from controversy - it's had its share of "terror attack orchestrated by WhatsApp [and therefore it's some how to blame]" stories.

What's saved it, IMO, is the similar deluge of stories about political in-fighting taking place in WhatsApp groups.

The available conclusions to the reader of the two angles on it are: 1) politicians are organising terror attacks; 2) there is no causal relationship between WhatsApp and terror attacks

... one of which seems eminently more reasonable than the other; so thankfully that's where we are.

Amusingly it also came under fire from politicians in the opposite direction in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal: far from wanting to peek at end-to-end encrypted data (as called for whenever it's used by terror groups) they then wanted assurances that the data hadn't been snooped on or passed to third-parties!

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

#473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if they even do their A/B testing right. In my experience (none at facebook) accidental p-hacking is rampant in the tech industry, with trials being cut short or prolonged by the tester who's staring at a graph of the results in real time.

If you have a change that improves your metric initially but damages it in the longer term, and your A/B test only detects the short initial effect, you can execute your A/B test perfectly and still get the wrong result.

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

#474

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…

Yeah, I'm a very passive FB user and have removed all the FB battery draining crap from my phone, so I don't get meaningful notifications very often, but I'm checking it out at least every few days out of habit. It's always showing me a bunch of notifications for completely random things, like some new random post in marketplace group I'm participating, but no notification for the 50 other new posts in there or other groups. Or somebody I haven't spoken to in years is going to some event I never heard about. At this point I don't even see them as notifications, just a list of random things that happen and don't affect me.

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

#475
I quit facebook a while ago but then I went back. Not for the posts or updates but because of the market place and seeling groups. It's, by far, the easiest way to sell stuff in Brazil.

I thought about having a 'fake' account, but having a 'real' one with photos and friend list helps a lot to earn trust from buyers.

Then, when I have nothing to sell, I disable my account again.

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

#476
post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know about mbasic and chat working. Thanks. I'm also deleting as many apps as possible. Even Instagram works quite well without the app. Less uncontrollable spying, less battery usage, no annoying notifications, more free memory, more blocked ads and trackers.

But no replying on the comments to your posts, it seems, which is quite annoying.

I use mbasic and can reply to comments on posts.

I just checked the details and (for example) I click under the post: "2 scratches 'pon wood" (sorry I have language set to Pirate but it's the equivalent of "2 comments").

This takes me to a page showing the post, comments beneath, and a text field for me to reply into.

So it's there, just check the various links under each post to see what's available. Actually I've yet to find anything that I can't do on mbasic. I've thought something was missing several times (turning off notifications for specific groups springs to mind) but always found a way to do it eventually. It's often a hideous UX but I like how ugly mbasic is, it's FB without the sugar so you can taste how bitter it really is :) (for anybody wanting to say something like "if it's so horrible why do you still use it", it's something I do reluctantly because I have a few geographically distant friends who I like to keep in contact with and who always message me through FB)

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

#477
My biggest disappointment with Facebook is that it - at least my feed - became toxic. There's only post complaining about politics, calling right/left people dumm, and fake news, a lot of fake news.

And now they are engaging in this fake notification scheme (same with twitter and LinkedIn)...

As i explained in another post, facebook is only useful for me because of the marketplace...

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

#479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more annoying is the same thing that they do with email notifications. They seem to keep inventing new "categories" of notifications all the time that I haven't yet opted out of - basically because I seem to be only able to opt out of just that specific category that they just sent me an email about, when I click on the "don't want to receive any more of these mails" link below the message. And every time, they…

I opted out of all emails altogether - I only check my notifications once in a while. I've never missed anything of value.

> I've never missed anything of value.

How can you be sure of that if you didn't see it?

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

#480

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…

If on Android I recommend the Facebook Lite app. Its not as obnoxious and on Android you can tell the OS to ignore all notifications from an app. The lite version of Facebook is probably the only worthy version, I just wish it could be firewalled so you know when it tries to use network access and lock it down to just when you open the app. I assume Lite Android apps arent allowed to use much data but I could be maki…

The full fat messenger is the most annoying app I have ever used. It's like a small child constantly trying to get your attention when you are busy with other tasks.
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