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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

#511

Post by tha_nose »

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…

Everyone here is celebrating "people leaving facebook" as if it is a victory. People are simply moving from facebook to instragram as instragram is viewed as more "hip" and "young".

The title could be "Instragram gaining millions of users in the US" but I guess that doesn't sell as well.

Also, facebook may be losing users in the US, but it's gaining users overseas. So overall, facebook's overall user count is going to continue to climb for a while.

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

#513

Post by gnu8 »

Slartie wrote: post #388
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…

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’m not sure why this company is still allowed to send mail. Why can’t their mail servers be blacklisted?

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

#514

Post by kawfey »

My twenty-something friends and I used facebook extensively to run all aspects of our social lives, but now we exclusively use it for messaging and event planning. Nobody reads posts, comments, or notifications unless it has to do with an event.

A few of us have been dropping off and now we're starting to use chat programs (groupme, now Discord) to socialize.

I have to stay on to keep track of goings on in my amateur radio hobby, which as you'd expect is chock full of old men, a majority of which are on Facebook. I think the generational lag has finally caught up to them.

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

#515

Post by teleclimber »

michaelt wrote: post #473
darkpuma wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interestingly that's exactly how algorithms make things go viral. They pick up on things that get a quick reaction with complete disregard for what happens in the long term. Jaron Lanier explains this in his talks [0].

So features on social media are decided based on short term gains and posts on social media are promoted like that too. It's like an entire industry forgot their parents warnings about thinking about the future.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc_Jq42Og7Q

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

#516

Post by MR4D »

smacktoward wrote: post #317
MR4D wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought FB was integrating their messaging platforms? That seemed to make all the news rounds a month ago. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-insta... [1] https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-speaks-on-whats...

Integrating the backends of the messaging systems, not the frontends. There will still be separate apps called "Messenger," "Whatsapp," "Instagram," etc., but they'll just be different fixtures set on top of identical plumbing. This approach opens up exciting new opportunities for market segmentation via badge engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badge_engineering ... in much the same way that Ford (say) could…

I don’t disagree, but there seemed to be a lot of a publicity around a backend tech change, and to me, it is that publicity that undoes the whole idea of keeping businesses separated. As a side example, everyone knows that Coke makes Diet Coke, but many don’t know that they make Sprite. The Sprite model seems to be a better approach than FB’s new Diet Coke approach.

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

#517

Post by aedron »

arethuza wrote: post #443
simonh wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like facebook is engaged in a race to the bottom, against it’s own metrics. The easiest way to be engaged is to repost memes and fake news shock posts, so the most engaged users are meme posters and fake news trolls, so features that cater to meme posting and trolling get the most bang for buck, so they’re getting trapped in a cycle of circulating ever increasing torrents of drivel. My girls are 14 and 15 in…

UK here as well, I remember a couple of years back my teenage son saying "Facebook is for old people".

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=facebook

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

#518

Post by everdrive »

jd492 wrote: post #319
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…

I did not leave Facebook because of privacy concerns. That's your biggest mistaken assumption. I work on Big Data for a living and know how inept companies are at actually doing anything useful with personal data. The data being generated is massive and the vast amount of it is random and useless. My reason for reducing my social media presence is the Like count next to every thought expressed. By adding a publicly v…

The cyber criminals who penetrate these companies seem to be a bit better at doing useful things with the data.

Not as much of a concern here, but nefarious governments around the world are quite good at doing awful things with this data as well.

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

#519

Post by lcnmrn »

mihaifm wrote: post #439
Slartie wrote: post #388

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 tried setting up email filters based on subject and keywords, I currently have around 15-20 but it's a futile attempt, they keep changing everything, they've even changed the language. It really feels like I'm harassed by a beggar at this point.

I filter messages that contain the Unsubscribe word.

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

#520

Post by iak8god »

> The biggest drop is in the very desirable 12- to 34-year-old group.

12-34 is a very wide range. While I do know a few people toward the high end of that age range who did have FB accounts and deleted them, I wonder how much of the drop in this bracket is because younger people are simply never signing up for FB accounts.

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