U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says • Hacker News Board

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

#591

Post by JorgeGT » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 7:25 PM UTC

Yhippa wrote: post #504

arethuza wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't A/B testing pretty much going to behave like a steepest ascent hill climbing? At each micro decision point you take what looks like the 'best' option but that means you can get stuck in local maxima?

This is interesting but I don't think I fully understand. Do you mind dumbing it down for me?

Typical example: you arrive at a crossroads A where both ways work for you, so you choose the one with less traffic. Then at crossroad B you do the same, and then at C, and finally you arrive at destination D.

However, it turns out the heavy traffic at the other A branch was just for a few miles and then it was actually empty after that --- you took optimum local decisions at each step but since you weren't able to look at the big picture, you didn't actually choose the globally optimal route.

As others have pointed, this is related to the mathematical concepts of local and global maxima: sometimes your optimization algorithm happily stops when it finds a local maximum, ignoring the much better global maximum because it didn't actually traversed the whole search domain.

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

#592

Post by beepboopbeep » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 7:34 PM UTC

Being on facebook is like sticking your pant leg in a briarbush. It's random bits of window and content that just tries to cling to you. Nothing about it is fun or engaging. Instagram is quickly going that path as well.

That said, any bets that FB's user count will magically continue to increase quarter over quarter?

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

#593

Post by elamje » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 7:39 PM UTC

fwn wrote: post #374

elamje wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Oh no. I see

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

#594

Post by liberte82 » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 8:28 PM UTC

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…

Totally agree! Ever since they added story updates into the notifications screen, it has totally lost meaning. That and friends attending random events, etc. It used to actually mean something.

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

#595

Post by liberte82 » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 8:35 PM UTC

nkrisc wrote: post #533

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…

My breaking point was when they fucking texted me that I had "notifications" when I hadn't logged in for a while. No doubt those notifications were that someone is going to an event I don't care about somewhere within a 100 miles of me.

I never did give Facebook my phone number, thank god

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

#596

Post by diminoten » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 8:38 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #186

diminoten wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah definitely, it's got nothing to do with privacy, it's just not a platform geared towards younger people, because it's a platform that caters to older people. Kids these days don't give a shit about privacy. Why would they?

> Kids these days don't give a shit about privacy. I'm not so sure that's true. At least, it's not true among the kids that I personally know. What is true is that they have a more pragmatic view of the issue than us oldsters -- they view it as more like a monetary exchange: they understand and care about privacy, but they're willing to pay for a service by giving some of it up if they think the value they're receivi…

The kids I know (my teenage siblings) genuinely don't give a shit, and neither do their friends, or their friends' friends.

Nor do the many many kids on YouTube or Twitch.

Not a single one of the children I just mentioned understand, care about, or are willing to pay to keep their privacy, in any form.

And they're right. It doesn't matter, because nothing happens when you lose your privacy on the Internet, not even remotely approaching the risks we take and accept in our daily lives (driving, swimming, walking outside, etc.).

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

#597

Post by pndy » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 8:45 PM UTC

sizzle wrote: post #580

pndy wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I joined 10 years ago after the local equivalent of classmates become utterly useless which mean creators had to seek for revenues and that included but wasn't limited to sponsored profiles of local brands and famous people, virtual currency (you could spend on ridiculous pictures that were meant to enrich your profile and interaction with people), games, annoying promotion of their twitter-alike microblog nobody had…

Do you think there is enough abandonment of the core userbase that Facebook can be dethroned?

I really doubt it; they may lost users in long term but not because of new player - they have seem to reached already over-complexity stage with features and thus service will simply become unappealing to existing and new users but that will take time. If they start changing messenger into more discord-slax alike service then they may keep users as this form of communication seems to be getting more popular

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

#598

Post by Matheus28 » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 8:48 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #445

Matheus28 wrote: post #338

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.

Isn't A/B testing pretty much going to behave like a steepest ascent hill climbing? At each micro decision point you take what looks like the 'best' option but that means you can get stuck in local maxima?

Yes, but it gets more complicated because there's a time factor too.

If you're A/B testing each change for 2 weeks, but the negative impacts of it only happen after a few months (like what the parent post mentioned [1]), then while you're in a local maxima right now, it'll slowly sink, along with all your neighborhood of choices.

You can think of it as a function that returns the current value and another function that you have to use for the next time step. Sorta like f(a, b, c, ...) = (y, \a_2 b_2 c_2 ... -> ...). Steepest ascent hill climbing doesn't work well for finding good long term local maxima, since you don't know how long it takes until it stabilizes (or if it ever does). The best you can do is guess it'll stabilize in X amount of time, but if X is too small, you might end up stuck in a really bad local maxima.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19325816

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

#599

Post by thstart » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 8:53 PM UTC

ykevinator wrote: post #76

What's that in percentage?

Define 'Lifelog' [DARPA]. "an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person's experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities". The objective of the LifeLog concept was "to be able to trace the 'threads' of an individual's life in terms of events, states, and relationships", and it has the ability to "take in all of a subject's experience, from phone numbers dialed and e-mail messages viewed to every breath taken, step made and place gone". Define 'FB'. The Facebook service can be accessed from devices with Internet connectivity, such as personal computers, tablets and smartphones. After registering, users can create a customized profile revealing information about themselves. Users can post text, photos and multimedia of their own devising and share it with other users as "friends". Users can use various embedded apps, and receive notifications of their friends' activities. Users may join common-interest groups. Compare & Contrast. DARPA senior employees > FB? DARPA TERMINATES PROGRAM FEB 4, 2004. FB FOUNDED FEB 4, 2004. DARPA = FB

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

#600

Post by standardUser » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 9:00 PM UTC

justaguyhere wrote: post #279

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 curiosit…

I've gotten back in touch with various people over the years. I can't predict which of the couple hundred people I will have a reason to reach out to in the future. But I know I'll inevitably be happy to be connected to this or that person on Facebook when I pick up a similar hobby or visit a certain place or go looking for some new type of job, etc.

And no, obviously not ever person I know is worth emailing or calling on the phone on some regular basis. That doesn't mean I don't want to know them.