A great many people that I communicate with stopped using email regularly ages ago. For younger folks the means of communication are messenger apps and social platforms.
Marketing it is. I actually thought about this idea for a long time, and did a design based off of the phonebook in iOS 11.
But marketing this application is nearly impossible, because it doesn't have any extra features. It just has phone numbers [contact details], and that doesn't excite users to spend time getting it set up.
So I concluded that this is something that has to be done from the OS vendor side. We need an extension to the CardDAV protocol, and we need vendors to implement it.
Twitter is quite frankly worse. And I don't know if I am personally acquainted with even a single person who actively uses LinkedIn. I wonder if the latter is an SV thing?
I don't think LinkedIn use is limited to SV, but the qualifier "actively" makes it unclear what you are trying to say. What is "active" in this context?
Ads manager targeting is a funny beast. Even FB doesn't really know the available targeting buckets. A lot of the time, the algorithms just create the targeting buckets.
I think the fact that these search options used to be available to everyone means that nobody would care. I remember how freaking creepy that was being able to search for people of a specific sexual orientation between certain ages and single in my network. And I still used Facebook.
Facebook did report the first decline in monthly active users (MAU), is this the turning point [1]? Ive always wondered if facebook would die a quick death or a slow crawl. Wonder who gains from this ? twitter resurgance ? dont think so, snap ? not so sure, time for google to give another go to push google+?
Twitter resurgence? Is there one? I am basically turned off Twitter far more than I am Facebook at the moment. The signal to noise ratio there has tilted FAR into the red zone of late. The proliferation of bots, and the ability for anyone with a pulse and a stupid meme graphic to plaster them into any conversation has just killed the conversational or learning capacity of that platform for me.
I'd love to get off both Twitter and Facebook, but that network effect...
I went and had a look at Vero, but it doesn't allow posting text, only associated with an image, movie, link or book. I checked how Diaspora was going, but the most popular pods have 2K users, and there are no pods in NZ or even Australia.
I guess I should get off my chuff and set up a New Zealand pod, but life is full enough already without taking that on.
ah the network effect. Same reason im still on fb. Diaspora is brilliant but I feel its never going to capture the imagination of the general public.
Maybe we should all go back to blogging. - if only, sigh
I get more and more depressed browsing my fb newsfeed (which I mostly do when I am taking a shit and run out of things to read)
I think it's worth stating: if you're not deleting your friend connections, you're not leaving.
I say that because your friends retain their friend count, and that's a big part of FB-identity. Also, you can always pick it back up when "they" fix the problem (which isn't fixable).
I made my act public, left a message with contact info as my last message, and then deleted all my "friends" (which was, honestly, a pretty nice reminder of folks I hadn't spoken with in a while). Finally, I bcc'd them on an email so I could stay in touch. I can always reply-all that email if I need to spam them with news/info/etc...
it's not a perfect solution, but it's the best I could come up with on my own, and I'm advising my friends to do the same.
Yeah, absolutely I sent an email to the weak connections I wanted to retain, though it didn't include all of them. To be fair, i'd been pruning for years. The CA thing wasn't such a surprise (though it's impacts certainly were) because I've been a paranoid shit for most of my recent life.
I had been using a false name on my primary FB since I started the account in ~2008... funny anecdote, I once got a popup on my real account with a question about my "fake" profile: "Is this a real person?" Yes, of course... and now I'm going to make a post on my wall asking my friends to please say "yes" if they got the same question.
I have an account which I use just to talk or argue with anybody on the facebook, mostly in news comment sections. No photo, no apps, no friends. Just a profile name. I wonder if anything can still get attached to me.
The question is - will this be just a minor blip to Facebook and then normal services will resume after the indignation wears off? Or will it the beginning of the end of the social media dominance of the platform?
For me personally, I use FB primarily to keep in touch with friends, family and old colleagues who are spread all over the world. It is purely a contact tool, and not really used to market products of services etc., so my attachment is purely an emotional one.
However, I must admit that this latest episode has really hammered my trust in the platform FAR more than any other previous ones (and there have been many). Yesterday, for the first time ever, I went through my FB settings and removed a lot of personal information as well as stagnant apps that I had approved YEARS ago from my permitted apps list.
I am also seriously reconsidering what I do post on there from now on, as well as drastically reducing the number of times I post. I've also turned off location tracking for the FB app on my phone, and am considering deleting it altogether and just sticking to the web platform.
Will I change my mind in a months time? It's unlikely, but who knows? I like being able to talk to family that are literally on the other side of the world, and it is too hard for me to get them all to adopt Telegram or any other communication tool outside of FB Messenger, so I may find myself drawn back in.
I had deactivated my account a year or two ago, and turned it back on to "permanently delete" my account. The most prominent UX option about deleting your account on their privacy page is is an opt-in for deleting your account after you die (...)
A year or so ago I noticed I would wake up and the first thing I did was load up Facebook in my phone. I deleted the app, and what do I do? i still open it on my phone's browser. So I changed my password to 32 characters generated by Keepass, and make sure I logged out of it on my phone. I'm still logged in on the desktop, but nowadays it's pretty quiet anyway. Thr last few days I've been using a Chrome extension (1) to delete stuff from my wall, reasoning that just like real life interactions, it's okay to forget things (well I did download my archive/went through my activity logs and saved them as HTML files).
There's only 1 person I wish to stay in touch that I talk to exclusively on Messenger. I think I will have to persuade them to install another app. Admittedly it will be WhatsApp, which is also Zuckerberg's tool for "dumb fucks".
Similar story here: a while back I installed a browser extension to delay the loading of unproductive sites that I was habitually visiting just to distract myself from tasks, imposing a 30 second wait barrier. What it's revealed is that there are some sites that I'm very willing to wait 30 seconds to visit (e.g. if there's a certain song on YouTube that I want to play in the background), but not once have I ever bothered to wait 30 seconds for Facebook to load. My fingers instinctively type the domain, the delay page appears, and then I close the tab. Makes it easy to realize how little value Facebook was providing me.
Similarly, I moved all my reddit subs to multis, so my homepage there is empty. In the last months the time I spent there has dropped to less than single-digit percentages of how much I spent in the past.
you probably need to down regulate your dopamine response in general for all aspects of your life. try reading a book, concentrating for periods of time, not concentrating for periods of time, a long walk, or meditation. over time you can overcome automatic behavior, its probably healthier for you anyway
if you have to convince. Try signal. As good as whatsapp, in most ways, better in others. Signal did whatsapp's encryption.
I use both - if a contact is on both signal and whatsapp I use signal.
I think signal is the best of these with whatsapp second. Everything else is equal last. This ranking will no doubt change in the coming years with upstart competition doing communication with proper encryption. I look forward to it.
For me it had entered muscle memory, whenever I was slightly bored and craving that dopamine hit my fingers would do “splat-t fa return” without even really thinking about it. Took a few weeks to fully unlearn that!
I had a similar behaviour years ago. I deleted the app from my phone, but then after a short while logged in via my phone's browser. A short while after that I chose to 'delete' my account (after backing up the archive of course).
Since it gives you 30 days to reconsider your decision, I thought if I really missed facebook that much I'd log in within the 30 days. It's been years since and I haven't had the slightest desire to be apart of facebook.
In recent times my attention has been drawn to the amount of time wasted on random Youtube videos. Youtube is more difficult since the service actually has value to me. Somehow restricting my access to only videos from my subscriptions could be a possible solution.
It will be a minor blip. Most users are utterly addicted and don't value their privacy over their convenience despite what they say.
I deleted my account in 2010 and there was absolutely no change in my daily behavior, but then I wasn't a chronic addict either. Honestly, if users haven't figure out by now that their privacy is utterly void when they use Facebook they absolutely don't care.
No, that's for talking with a person. Facebook is for "keeping in touch", which is a bit like the Unix command touch. It doesn't read or modify the file, it just increments the date.
TBH my observation is that for many it's just engaging in stupid circlejerks and flamewars with strangers and post glorified "good morning" messages and celebrations and congratulations.
I hope I'm wrong but I think this in no way bringing facebook down.
Keeping in touch with friends & family is too important to ditch entirely, and having everyone switch to a different platform is very hard. That said, my whole extended family uses whats app nowadays...
The reason I still invest in Facebook as a company is because of their ownership in these other platforms.
I think the classic site’s days are numbered but it will be a while before it does a complete shutdown, if ever. At that point Facebook might decide to just completely redesign it into something different and recapture the lost audience.
I'd argue a lot if not probably the majority of users of Facebook are read only. What matters is really whether the minority of users who actively post are leaving or not. These are the most affected by privacy concerns. Once enough of them do, the platform dries out and its end will accelerate.
In my case, most of my friends have no FB account or they have deactivated the account long ago. Few other have accounts but they practically never posted anything.
Some of my cousins/colleagues used to be active but now they have got fed up of FB.
Amusingly, none of them ditched FB because 'Oh FB is evil mass surveillance system'. What I sense is people are getting fed up with FB.
Sadly, it is Whatsapp which has taken the place of FB.
That’s a good point. Are you just assuming the majority of users are read-only or is that informed by some other source? I would probably assume something similar as far as posts and less for comments, but as far as just liking things, I would assume almost everybody who logs in does that on a regular basis. They probably do it a lot less but logging in and browsing but not liking anything seems a little uncanny to me. I mean it makes sense if you just don’t see anything you like but that doesn’t seem like a likely habit to sustain itself.
My own personal experience of seeing the majority of the posts in my feed coming from a minority of my contacts. And a lot of people use facebook just to keep track of what distant relatives and acquaintances have become, not because they feel like sharing everything in their life with the world.
>What matters is really whether the minority of users who actively post are leaving or not.
I see it differently. Looking at it from a stats perspective, people who just login and don't scroll are also pretty valuable for Facebook since they're still come under the DAU and MAU numbers. They're counted for the ad impressions, and subsequently ad revenue.
Even though Facebook has prioritized friends' posts, bulk of the content (even though it can be not the most important) I think for most people is by pages and companies. Who I don't think are going to change in any way after this event.
Obviously passive users are important for FB's bottom line, but I think what GP is saying is that if all the active users leave (even if media companies/pages don't, just the friends who post), it will cause an exodus of passive users.
Sure, if all will. But most won't, and that won't change things. The 'enough' in GP's comment should pretty much be 80%+, which we all know won't happen.
It's still a great communication tool without the users who post though.
None of those are essential either. Where you have a choice you have responsibility. If people prefer supposed convenience, let them state it as such, but let nobody claim they have no choice.
I miss the movies sometimes (just wish they were a bit cheaper) and binge watching is horrible for your health (not just physically but mentally as well -- teaches you how to be an addict).
Amazon, while convenient, has destroyed an entire economic subsystem in it's wake and destroyed a way of life that was more communal and social to one that is more isolated and reclusive.
Finally, people more and more these days are trying to find ways to detach from their smartphones (I think your comment wrongly assumes Apple "created" the smartphone -- they did not)
You comment is ambiguous to the point of being meaningless.
As such I would say your own comment says nothing.
The three things you listed are pure technology. Staying in touch with people you care about and making time to do so is not an inherently technological undertaking.
Where i think Facebook fills a gap is that it creates the feeling that you are in touch with someone without having to go to the effort of phoning/emailing 1:1/physically meeting, in some ways I think there is a guilt mitigation built in there somewhere. When I compare how may parents keep in touch with friends & family through regular calls and meeting I think we have definitely lost something personally and as a society. How much more personal is a one on one conversation can be compared to a facebook post. I always thought there was room for a network that would require a physical meeting occasionally.
I mean, I just went and installed signal on my whole families phones one druken evening (I have 7 sets of aunt's and uncle's, no small feat). Now we communicate all through signal and they didn't even realize it helped them lol
Then all the sudden a week or so ago they freaked out and I was like - no worries, remember that one time I switched your text messages?
My family primarily communicates in texts, phone calls, and in person. So this was relatively easy, myself and the other half the family either stopped using Facebook years ago, or never used it in the first place.
This is the only real demise of fb or any other large player. Another service catches on that is not directly competitive, and then adds features to gradually replace the incumbent.
also just FB Messenger. I use Messenger almost exclusively to talk to friends in my area. We have other IM options in theory, but end up reaching for Messenger because of how well it works.
> Keeping in touch with friends & family is too important to ditch entirely, and having everyone switch to a different platform is very hard.
I have good friends who would rather drop contact entirely than having to have an account on website that is not at least deeply privacy-conscious.
In this sense I would rather claim that whether this statement holds or not strongly depends on the kinds of persons that your social circle contains.
I highly recommend deleting the fb app from your device to prevent it listening on you, tracking location, draining your battery and bombarding you with notifications.
> The question is - will this be just a minor blip to Facebook and then normal services will resume after the indignation wears off? Or will it the beginning of the end of the social media dominance of the platform?
I'd bet my house it is the former.
I think on HN we understandably make assumptions about the general population due to the bubble we live in. The reactions to other privacy scandals e.g. wikileaks or Snowden was actually pretty muted. John Oliver did a great piece when he met Snowden for example: literally pointing out that almost everyone he asked on the streets of New York had no idea who he was (https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/4x3pvm/john-olive...). So the idea of a mass exodus from Facebook is extremely unlikely.
I suppose it all depends on how much user attrition you would say constitutes a "mass exodus." How many millions of former users would that be? Or what percentage from what high-point? By these following reports, there's been a mass exodus in terms of usage among the much-sought-after teenage demographic, and that's been happening from Facebook to Snapchat for at least two years now:
Oct 2016: Snapchat Beats Instagram and Facebook as the Top Social Platform for Teens
May 2017: AppAnnie report: "On any given day in the US, 35% of Snapchat’s daily users cannot be reached by Facebook, 46% can't be reached by Instagram and 58% can’t be reached by Messenger" the report says.
Sure, I agree that "mass exodus" is ill-defined. I have nothing to back this up, but I think we can both agree that it is extremely unlikely Cambridge Analytica really has anything to do with the teenagers preferring Snapchat to Facebook.
From what I've been able to gather, teens prefer creating "ephemeral" less-curated content in favour of throwing up "permanent" posts to Facebook (for all/too many to see) until it's past its use by date. So in a sense, they may or may not be more conscious of being seen by their parents who are mostly tech-savvy (compared to past generations anyway).
So if what I just wrote is somewhat true, the commonality between Cambridge Analytica and teens preferring Snapchat to Facebook is actually privacy or lack thereof (perceived or otherwise).
As for mass exodus - Hotmail, MySpace, Flickr, Yahoo... Where does one draw the line - is Facebook invincible?
I believe that more people care about privacy than they themselves realise. It's only a question of how much it'll take for patience to be tested. Keep in mind that easy-technology (the iPhone) has only been around for hardly more than 10 years; a lot of "non-geeky" people are still learning the ropes of how to balance their digital and physical lives.
Also don't forget that this is only one piece of bad news that Facebook has had of late. We're still wondering how useful online advertising really is, and how often it's gamed by ad click-fraud, etc. Aside from that, I can't comment on where FB's share price might be at any future point from now; not that I should even care.
Edit: With reference to big companies and which ones can eventually fail, I recommend reading Benjamin Graham's "The Intelligent Investor".
By bets are on minor blip. Every large company is going through a shitstorm every once in a while. Now it's FB's turn. The media loves this and pushes the matter as much as possible as it translates directly into clicks (and therefore revenue).
Remember the outrage about Apple slowing down iPhones and iPads? Or the outrage about Apple's and Google's tax avoidance schemes?
My bet is nobody's going to talk about this incident 6 months from now and FB's stock price will have more than recovered.
Minor blip for sure. There's a media frenzy, but I only personally know two people who are even talking about it, and even they're not totally sold on jumping ship just yet. They've also known better than to post personal information on there (and I've posted bogus personal information just to mess with FB, which I heartily recommend to everyone. False information is better for your privacy than no information).
> The hashtag #DeleteFacebook appeared more than 10,000 times on Twitter within a two-hour period on Wednesday, according to the analytics service ExportTweet. On Tuesday, it was mentioned 40,398 times, according to the analytics service Digimind.
The media have been pumping out a lot of articles, but 40,000 tweets is really nothing.
Facebook has 2.2 billion monthly active users - that's 75% of all humans who have internet access. I think Facebook will probably exist for the rest of human history. They'll be a multiplanetary social network, and they'll probably still be running when the sun becomes a red giant.
I mean do we really think Facebook is the only company with data problems? Is switching to something different really going to make a difference? Deleting your Facebook won't get rid of your data. Google, Microsoft, Twitter, your ISP, your cell carrier all have so much data on you. At this point you are out there in someone's database somewhere. Unless you haven't been on the grid at all which clearly anyone on HN is on the grid. So not sure what we think #DeleteFacebook will really do?
It annoys me that you're getting downvoted with no replies. I completely agree with you. The only way to stop your data from being spread across the web is to never put it there in the first place. I feel like federated systems (Mastodon, Diaspora*, et al) will only make it more difficult to remove your data, because now it's spread across 100 individual servers in 100 individual countries with 100 individuals doing their own thing. It ends up being even MORE permanent in the end, IMO.
Absolutely. You got to think: "what am I getting out of this; is it really worth it?". Maybe you'll then realize that it's best to keep your data out of somebody else's computer.
There is no end. I suspect multi generational data to be endlessly more nasty.
We do have other approaches. That I can obtain your employment contract, take your picture as you walk in and out of buildings and when you visit the beach, figure out your birth day and who you hang out with...
...doesn't mean I'm allowed to or freely share/sell every detail of your life.
We could for example create a license or permit for gathering a type of data. Like: If you are a dating agency you can ask for peoples sex. If you are a head hunter you may gather data on employment history. If you have a taxi service you can ask for peoples address.
We could also adopt a government issued key for things like signing petitions.
Where the data is stored could also be subject to regulation. Its possible to keep access logs with specific justification for each bit of sensitive information accessed.
One thing I respect about Twitter, is that they spell this out fairly clearly in their privacy policy:
Twitter is primarily designed to help you share information with the world. Most of the information you provide us through Twitter is information you are asking us to make public. ... Twitter broadly and instantly disseminates your public information to a wide range of users, customers, and services, including search engines, developers, and publishers that integrate Twitter content into their services, and organizations such as universities, public health agencies, and market research firms that analyze the information for trends and insights. When you share information or content like photos, videos, and links via the Services, you should think carefully about what you are making public.
I could swear an earlier version even pointed out that tweets you delete are not gone, because, by the time you delete it, it's already been permanently archived by a zillion third parties. I can't find anything about that in the current version, though.
I suppose Twitter's in an easier spot here, though. Like they say, Twitter's for talking to the whole world. Whereas, when people use Facebook, they typically use it to communicate with a more intimate circle.
The point, I think, is to send a message. Yes, the damage is done. But public pressure to #DeleteFacebook might force Facebook to be a little less cavalier with billions of people's personal data, respect previous agreements with the FTC [0], etc. in the future.
I think it's better for 10 different companies to each have 1/10th of your data rather than one company having all of it. Facebook has grown to the point where they're just too big. They have pretty much every person I've ever known as a user. Those users have the app (or multiple apps) installed on their phones, upload all their photos, do much of their messaging, plan their events, etc. within Facebook. Plus Facebook owns a bunch of other properties with huge user bases.
The potential for abuse is smaller if we use independent services for all of those different things, even if those services aren't any more trustworthy than Facebook.
No major tech company has shown such disdain for the privacy for its users and
No tech company (at least no customer facing tech company) has driven the handling of user privacy this badly into the gutter.
So much went wrong over the years with Facebook and user privacy (normally followed by a mealy mouthed bullshit apology, same as you see now) that they do not deserve any more benefit of a doubt.
Threatenting to sue the publications uncovering this tragedy is just about the icing on the cake.
1. Agreed, private action is not enough, public (political) action (as happened in the EU) is needed in addition.
2. Having said that, spreading the awareness of this problem (as people are doing with this hashtag/campaign) is a good thing.
3. Maybe you can't avoid being in some database, but you can be in fewer databases with less information, and make it harder to aggregate all the information about you.
4. What do you suggest, resigned fatalism? Of course, you can do something. Avoid Google products, avoid Facebook, use a VPN, avoid tracking cookies, etc. - there's a ton you can do. Use different emails for different purposes, for example.
5. If enough people start caring about this, then companies will (have to) take note.
I think it will be a minor blip. There's been such a drum beat about FB being bad for privacy over the years that most users probably don't care. I know it's just one data point, but none of my friends have mentioned this latest episode.
Additionally, re-building a social presence on another network would be a lot of work for many users. There's a certain dopamine rush to making a post and getting a ton of likes. In the short term, users are not going to get that kind of engagement if they move shop to another platform.
I asked a friend if they would pay $1/mo for a facebook alternative, and they said no -- they would just start using instagram. When I explained facebook owned instagram, they still didn't think $1/mo would be worth it, citing:
"It's just another thing I have to pay per month: Netflix, Spotify, etc."
People have mental budgets, and maybe their psychological good will in balancing those budgets get drained over time for things like recurring payments that aren't on a bigger scale ($100+) and aren't 100% necessary like internet.
this is already a grey comment for me, but I think your message is relevant.
People need "friends" and they get them where they can. As a society, we deserve and owe our selves better than this. There are FOSS alternatives which are nearly as good. This is as fine a time as any to turn up the pressure on our friends, and to work for solutions that don't/can't sell us out (intentionally, or accidentally).
There are also gnu social, hubzilla, friendica, movim, pleroma, postactiv, etc. And, oh by the way, before you think these different alternatives don't interact...well, they do actually can and do interact with each other...some of the interactions are not 100%. As an example, gnu social, pleroma, postactiv all interact seamlessly 100% with one another...and they all interact a bunch with mastodon, though a little less than 100%. But still there is interactivity, just like emails that can easily cross different systems. And, you can join a server for any of the above for free! The only exception would be if YOU choose to manage your own server - which entails server monthly fees, and your administration time...Otherwise, if you only wish to be a user on someone else's server, that's free. So, you see, you really don't need facebook (or twitter or instagram or snapchat, etc.).
I see where you are going and don't disagree. However, let me throw two things out there:
1) No good sales pitch starts with the price. What benefits you offering that will entice them?
2) You don't need to do everything a larger competitor does to disrupt. You just need to do one area better and have a slice of the audience cares a lot about that thing. What's the thing?
"The hashtag #DeleteFacebook appeared more than 10,000 times on Twitter within a two-hour period on Wednesday, according to the analytics service ExportTweet. On Tuesday, it was mentioned 40,398 times, according to the analytics service Digimind."
Is this really such a big deal for Facebook?
Suppose 50000 persons delete their Facebook everyday, then it will just lose 1,825,0000 users one year, not counting new users joining Facebook every year. And Facebook has 2 billion users.
Edit: The number lost in one year is 1,825,0000, not 1,825,000.
Well, GP did, but this shouldn't be that hard to comprehend. If for an entire year 50K users leave Facebook forever every day, the result would be FB's daily actives shrinking by eight and a half tenths of a percent … if one assumes that each of deactivating used Facebook daily.
But, how many of those people are active to any meaningful extent?
Also, Facebook relies on a critical mass of users; if 75% of my friends leave, I'll probably leave, then large swaths of the social networks begins unthreading?
If even 10% of my friends weren't there, I couldn't be planning events there for example. If you have to call or email a subset of people you might as well choose a different way of planning (e.g. invite people via email to a dedicated planning service).
So to me the value is that everyone I know is there. Not just 95% but 99%. So if even a fraction left, I could much easier just leave. My "social circle" on facebook could quickly just disappear, and I suspect this goes for lots of other people. Because the strength of facebook is that every social group is connected - but that will be how the cancer spreads too.
But "2 billion" is the number they have to brag/do a sales pitch with. Heck, I have 3 accounts, one I rarely use and one I don't even remember the credentials any more.
Come to think of it, I have a 4th account. And how many do the botfarms have?
I would say most people on Facebook aren't on Twitter, so this isn't a great sample and thus it is hard to know yet. The thing that could go against FB is exactly what made it grow fast - the network effect.
FB loses appeal, people deleting their account is their smallest problem, it's the number of people who just stop using their FB account because it's not cool and cool people are not there.
If this catches on, FB can turn into Myspace in few years. It will still have billion or so active users, but FB's stock valuation will crash until it's P/E ratio will be something like 4-5.
Wonder how many of those 40000+ mentions were bots? If Facebook is manipulated to shift elections, why wouldn't we expect Twitter be manipulated to shift social media platforms?
Also, I suspect many millions have already abandoned facebook and were using other platforms, they just left their account around just in case. Now, they have a wee bit of signaling, for practically no cost, so they go delete their account, and can happily pronounce on whatever currently-popular- social media platform, how they "dont even have" a facebook account triumphantly (no doubt missing the irony).
A good number of those two billion user accounts are not real people. They are either additional alternate identities a person had created, or out-and-out fiction.
Yeah, I'm surprised every time I see that number that it doesn't seem to get much scrutiny. Furthermore, the claim is that they are monthly active users.
Only 1/2 of the planet is even on the Internet. Yet they have 2B MAU?
WeChat has a billion monthly active users, and they managed to do that mostly just in China and a few parts of Asia.
WhatsApp has 1.5 billion monthly actives.
It makes perfect sense that a global social network that dominates in most countries not named China, could get to two billion users.
I must have seen hundreds of skeptical statements on HN over the years about how Facebook can't have X number of users. I've never once seen any supporting evidence against their general scale. Not once, not ever. And again in this thread, skeptics and zero supporting evidence against Facebook having two billion users.
In their favor is extreme data: dozens of large and persistent research efforts put into studying use, by external parties. That spans everything from traditional media usage polling agencies, to large media ratings firms, to ad companies, to competitors, to services that see wide-spread use of Facebook-login, to Web traffic tracking services that indicate massive adoption. It also includes the massive usage that is seen on the iOS and Android app stores. The sole rebuttal possible, is to say: it's all fake! without any equally massive supporting evidence.
Companies like Google would have a very large interest in destroying Facebook by pointing it out, and Google would know as well as anyone if Facebook were lying to such an extreme degree.
I have a feeling this will be a blip, but I also have a feeling this saga will lead to a qualitative change in the air. The level of trust FB has with the general public will fall. People will become more suspicious of it over time. It will make them vulnerable to being "disrupted" by some other service, technology, or philosophy.
What's interesting is that of the 5 people the article profiled, only 1 seems likely to have voted for Trump. Based on location and occupation, I would guess the others were not Trump voters.
My impression of this whole scandal, is that where you are on the political spectrum affects how you see it. I think a lot of the anger at Facebook is not because of what they did, but what they people see as the consequence from it, mainly the election of Donald Trump.
Facebook cannot afford to alienate both halves of the partisan divide at the same time. There is a substantial portion of the Left that at least partially blames Facebook for Donald Trump's election. Given that, I wonder if in the near future they will try to position themselves as a more conservative friendly company than the other Silicon Valley tech players.
Consequences matter. I'm generally okay with animal testing that is focused on finding disease cures and generally not okay with animal testing that supports bio-weapons programs.
I suspect the friends API feature was actually created for the Obama 2012 campaign. I know they used it very heavily in their phone banking app online in 2012. They were also collecting this data.
I have a bad feeling that like the Snowden revelations and Occupy Wall Street these findings will actually embolden companies like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica the same way the NSA and Wall Street banks were likely emboldened because it will once again prove that after a short outburst of moral outrage people will go back to being complacent without substantive change being enacted. They will get away with it and double down on the activity because they know that nothing will be done.
In and of itself that's a signal that for some reason things like this don't seem to make the general public change their behavior en masse?
I'd love to see some kind of reporting/study on why on average the general public does not respond to events you mention like Snowden/Manning/OWS/Bank Bailout and others. I mean at one point in time social movements in the US got things done like Temperance Movement, Womens Voting Rights, Civil Rights Movement etc...
Maybe there is a larger narrative here that I'm missing, like each of these things are part of the anti-corporate movement or something.
The Snowden revelations had a huge response, just not how you'd hope. There was a dropoff in government criticism and traffic to websites related to certain keywords. Was certainly a win for Eve.
Because people are too busy trying to survive until their next paycheck. Nobody has time to waste thinking about some vague overreach by a government agency.
While I agree in general, I don't buy this argument with regard to Facebook.
People aren't "too busy" to waste a lot of time on Facebook. If anything, tight time constraints would make people not use Facebook in the first place.
> the same way the NSA and Wall Street banks were likely emboldened because it will once again prove that after a short outburst of moral outrage people will go back to being complacent without substantive change being enacted
Stopping the NSA or changing Wall Street requires significant political power and cooperation, stopping Facebook from snooping on you requires individuals to stop using a website and maybe install a browser extension.
It seems to me that zuckerburg cares about ad revenue, which means he needs eyeballs and needs to keep them for as long as possible. And, he has proven to care very little about privacy. Therefore, for those who can't shake the habit 100%, cutting back to one day a week is a good way to get the connections you need while slicing into the attention getting ad revenue.
I've had a dormant FB account for years. I don't like the site and I never add content. I believe that social media has become a net detractor to quality-of-life for many (most?) humans who use it. I think Mark Zuckerberg is either incredibly naive, or a sleaze bag, but in either case should suffer some consequences from this.
That said, I probably won't delete my account. It remains the only way many of my friends plan events. It exists, for me, solely so I can be invited to things. I imagine there are many others like me. Like it or not, I suspect this is a blip for FB.
I am sure that MZ is the latter. F*book is a farce. You are the problem. Be the change you want to see. Reach out to people other ways for events. FFS, you are connected 24x7 to the internet, not facebook exclusively, never in the history of humanity have we had this level of instantaneous hyperconnection, that excuse is a lie.
Surely the reason he is being invited is not because he has an account on an online platform. We are in a hyperconnected world where an infinite number of ways to communicate exist.
You don't need to rely on a single closed-garden platform for communication. F*book sole purpose as a corporation is built around harvesting as much personal data about you as possible and selling it to the highest and most nefarious bidder.
As someone who never had an FB account, I can assure you I've missed multiple events over the years over this. People simply forget that I don't have an account.
As a long-time human, who's worked with a lot of humans, I'd advise you not to underestimate the power of trivial inconveniences.
Rational, perfectly selfish agents in an environment of frictionless transactions might still invite me to events if I were off their social media platform. Humans will not.
It surprises me how many people assume that Zuckerberg is evil. I've never seen any convincing evidence of him being anything other than a relatively regular guy in an extremely unique circumstance.
At this point, I think it is unproductive to comment on Zuckerberg as an individual (ad-hominem attacks?) because this leads to assuming that any alternative CEO would be better. I don't think we've had any solid evidence so far that he's naïve or a "sleazebag". However, what might be more frightening is the fact that he appears to be very normal and that many of us might share more traits with him than we'd be comfortable with admitting. Or perhaps that isn't frightening for many, and he is who some still aspire to (just like how many admire the management style of Torvalds or Jobs).
Facebook's business model doesn't depend on Mark Zuckerberg's "magic". It will continue to grow or break regardless of whether he's at the helm or not. Users, advertisers, competitors and governments will have to be the ones to decide.
I remember being 20 years old and no, I haven't been calling people "dumb fucks" in private conversations; to the contrary, I ran a small website on geocites in 1995 (if you don't know them, google it) and was super-happy when I had people commenting on it. Last thing my 20-year old would call them was "dumb fucks" for merely entertaining with my site.
Same here. I probably gave FB way too much information over the early years, but I can't see what difference a dormant FB account with occasional event planning activity does over deleting it outright. It's not like you can ever "delete" your FB account anyway.
As we say around these parts, "perfect is the enemy of good".
I've used Facebook a fair bit over the past decade and only deactivated it two months ago, after Zuckerberg signalled his intentions for 2018. I see a deactivated account as being a precursor to finding a way to test, properly obfuscate and then really delete.
So compared to doing nothing, I am in the process of deleting as much as possible. I don't want to participate with events, groups or with people who might be encouraged by me staying (this assumes that they care, of which some do; so it is my responsibility to help pull them away).
I agree there are tons of share praxtices here - but there is always the “alternative cost” to consider. For example - would the alternative be just switching to a different social network for “social graph management”? If so - which one?
And for Facebook’s many services (calebdar, photo albums, chat) there are numerous alternatives to each - but would the privacy issues of using all those competitors together be worse or better than just staying on Facebook?
There is also the issue of damage done. Facebook knows a lot about me, too much, but the competing service might not. Switching to other services means giving them a lot of the information I already regret I gave Facebook.
So in the end - unless one convinces both one self and all contacts to switch to “traditional” social networking such as a phonebook, a list of email addresses, blogs for photos, secure chat apps - one must consider what the alternative “integrity cost” to Facebook is.
People have to be pulled not just from Facebook but to something else (unless they agree to the phonebook style social network - which nearly no one will). But what?
They're good questions and would likely depend on how already invested one is into Facebook. You completely leaving it (for example) would probably not have as great an effect as me leaving, guessing on the fact that I've used it quite a lot over the past x years.
For those who are light users - my best guess is that they'll either not see the problem and continue, or switch to a more addictive platform (Twitter). You might choose to hand out a not-Facebook contact detail or alternative preferred method of events notification and this will probably contribute something to nudging another person toward a particular direction (if it's as simple as handing out a secure chat app and letting others know they exist, that could be a good thing)
For moderate and heavy users, they might deactivate and then delete Facebook and learn from that experience and then be wary of all social media from that point on and choose to go outside more to ride a bike in their local area, etc.
A point that is brought up occasionally, but probably not enough: Deleting Facebook really isn't possible for a nontrivial percentage of the world population, since Facebook is the internet in some places. Their monopoly over internet infrastructure in some developing countries is such that people can't afford non-Facebook internet packages, and seems to disincentivize actual low-cost internet infrastructure from being built out.
> I'm not in favour of nationalization as a rule.
> we must control our own critically important infrastructure! (cheers)
You're conflating two things. If the US somehow lost all steel foundries without being able to spin things up in a reasonable amount of time, we're screwed in a war. You must indeed make sure that you're self-sufficient in things that are essential for living in case you're cut off due to circumstances.
Absolutely correct. I've met people in Asia (Myanmar and Nepal) who have just accessed the internet for the first time in the past 12-24 months (through their Android smartphones). But they don't know the true internet - they only know the internet through the Facebook app. They use it like we use Google and web browsers.
To them, Facebook is the internet. They don't have email accounts. They don't use the browser. They don't search the web. I met someone in a small town who never even used the maps feature. I tried to think of what value the true internet might bring them, but when I suggested that "you can search for news and read other things", the response was that they already did that with the Facebook App.
One guy handed me his phone, so I could add myself as a friend on his Facebook. While I started typing my name, I noticed his search history... and to him, Facebook was even a substitute for what people in the USA might use Incognito mode for!
I would call Facebook their internet portal, but it's not really a portal to anything - Facebook is just the entire internet to them.
“Nobody asks, they don’t care about the email,” he said, explaining that most don’t know that creating an email address is free, and easy. “No one is using that. They have Facebook.”
Since you are as surprised as I was a month back, I've looked further and concluded that buzz feed actually funds very high quality journalism (yes yes shocking I know) and presents facts from both sides. They do it using the money generated from click baits. I'd even make what will sound like a hyperbole , if you are the sort that wants truth on both sides of political spectrum and not just an echo chamber , go to buzz feed, and not NY TIMES or wapo.
All of h3h3's videos are silly. That's his style of comedy.
You can't see that a video shaped entirely by left-wing identity politics that blames all men for the crimes of a few, that ignores practical realities contributing to the issue, has a left-wing bias? Are you serious?
Many, many people don't realise there is an entirely separate section of BuzzFeed called BuzzFeed News. BuzzFeed News are the ones who first published the "Steele dossier" to the public (as far as I recall; if there was another organisation in partnership, I only remember BuzzFeed News).
I recall at the time that people kept nitpicking over the misspelling of a bank (in a way that suggested people of a certain expertise never make spelling errors, which is simply untrue). It was a sensational story at the time, but all one needs to do now is to look back and compare it to what we know now.
>" I've met people in Asia (Myanmar and Nepal) who have just accessed the internet for the first time in the past 12-24 months (through their Android smartphones). But they don't know the true internet"
Yes and at one time AOL occupied a similar role. And everyone moved out of the walled garden and onto the real internet just fine.
This is the model for internet/Facebook access in several sub-saharan African countries and others:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Basics#Participants
They've partnered up with large telecom operators in these regions to offer zero-rated Facebook access.
The Guardian has a couple of decent writeups about it too:
Facebook has been actively targeting developing countries that lack Internet infrastructure. They offer a walled garden consisting of Facebook and a few other sites for free. They initially called it Internet.org, but it’s since been renamed Free Basics.
I guess the concern is that people will confuse Facebook for the Internet, and they’ll think they’re getting the Internet for free. It then becomes very difficult for a real ISP offering full Internet access to enter the market.
I am getting a bit annoyed by how shocked people on here are about this. The friends end point in the graph API was hardly a secret. It is an open API. There was no way for Facebook to enforce that data collected from authorized apps wasn't being saved. It's part of the reason the friends API was put under tighter restrictions a few years ago.
> I am getting a bit annoyed by how shocked people on here are about this.
Exactly. Didn't people know all the proprietary social networks are spyware+adware? That's the way they earn money. BTW Ghostery says it knows 92 trackers in the social media category.
I tried Ghostery twice and didn't understand it - sites seemed to keep breaking so I go with an alternative method (uBlock Origin + DuckDuckGo extension, and Brave on mobile). Based on this experience, Ghostery is not something I would simply throw on "most people's" computer. I would not for a single moment think that most people (as you implied) understand social networks.
I think we become a part of the problem if we simply assume all users are just like us and know all about the negatives of tech. Facebook evidently didn't anticipate/address it early enough despite all that talent - did they really want this Cambridge Analytica situation to happen? What are we doing to fix this?
Ah fair enough; I think DuckDuckGo's extension does a similar thing with regards to trackers and appears to be easier to use (for me). As for a social network that doesn't spy like the current big ones? I'd go with IRC.
I know people have proposed alternatives like Mastodon or Diaspora*, but I don't think they're good alternatives either compared to gradually giving them up to learn old offline alternatives: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/jobs/quit-social-media...
As for Steemit, I think this "feature" is most absurd. I hope it never takes off:
But you're well-versed in this area already, right? The reason that more people are only shocked now is because no one before reported in a way that was accessible enough to the general public. Journalists on the whole are still better at one thing that techies continue to struggle with - investigative journalism & communication.
If you want this to happen, users need an alternative. I'm not sure it matters to them if the alternative truly protects their confidentiality or if they will understand whether it does or not. I know there are alternatives out there, is there one that is user-friendly, confidential, and secure, and that users can switch to right now?
It reminds me to remind myself: A project that seemed quixotic a month ago suddenly has potential and value. You need to start developing such things when the market is in the 'quixotic' stage in order to have them ready when the world suddenly understands. Congratulations to those who started months or years ago.
I already deleted my FB account once, maybe 6-7 years ago (not suspended, deleted). It was a mistake. I lost contact with a lot of people, including my relatives in Europe and old friends from grad school. Once I rejoined FB, it took a long time to re-build my friends list. FB has a lot of flaws and I don't use very much or share very much on it, but for staying in contact with people... I can't think of anything better, unfortunately.
And then FB bans you and your friends for 30 days in random order.
Users started to post reports about who is banned today, for how long, and where to find their backup account (usually, on Telegram).
This is fake news. That article is a sob story opinion piece with 5 peoples views. I deleted facebook 3 years ago, don't use whatsApp or insta and despise them but at least give some statistics
You are still forcing others to use it through network effects. Either let it go completely, or don't pretend you're fighting it. We need more people to draw a line in the sand and ditch this oppressive system completely. Facebook wants you to be afraid of living without it.
I hope many many ditch Facebook, a message must be sent. I personally made my last facebook comment "Das vidanya facebook" and disabled my account and deleted facebook & messenger apps.
Yes, I know they make money other ways. But if no one uses the news feed, their ad revenue will take a noticeable hit. Most of the negatives come with the endless feed/scroll in the first place. I still spend time on Facebook, but only when I want to. No endless scroll, and I don't miss a thing when it comes to groups/events/messaging.
But you're forgetting the tracking pixel and cookies used in many many sites...
Plus then privacy loss is not just for you but the shadows you cast (shadow profiles for those who never logged in based on relationships and inferences from live users)
It was nice to "see" Zuckerberg on CNN today, given he was at his office reading from the script (you can see the eye movement) and interviewer was somewhere else in a greenbox room.
Unless CNN went SO amateurish that you only show a back head of interviewer and you never show him with the journalist together!
351 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 300 ms ] threadThat said, I've never clicked an add nor engaged with some silly quiz.
But marketing this application is nearly impossible, because it doesn't have any extra features. It just has phone numbers [contact details], and that doesn't excite users to spend time getting it set up.
So I concluded that this is something that has to be done from the OS vendor side. We need an extension to the CardDAV protocol, and we need vendors to implement it.
Wait until people find out about the Facebook pixel.
https://assets.propublica.org/images/articles/_threeTwo2000w...
via:
https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-enabled-advertis...
https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-disc...
and many more.
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-north-america-daus-...
I went and had a look at Vero, but it doesn't allow posting text, only associated with an image, movie, link or book. I checked how Diaspora was going, but the most popular pods have 2K users, and there are no pods in NZ or even Australia.
I guess I should get off my chuff and set up a New Zealand pod, but life is full enough already without taking that on.
Maybe we should all go back to blogging.
It's following the same model as WhatsApp of it being free to join for anyone up until a certain point and then they'll charge money.
And yes, I do love the thought of Vero being bought by Facebook at some point in the future, too.
I say that because your friends retain their friend count, and that's a big part of FB-identity. Also, you can always pick it back up when "they" fix the problem (which isn't fixable).
I made my act public, left a message with contact info as my last message, and then deleted all my "friends" (which was, honestly, a pretty nice reminder of folks I hadn't spoken with in a while). Finally, I bcc'd them on an email so I could stay in touch. I can always reply-all that email if I need to spam them with news/info/etc...
it's not a perfect solution, but it's the best I could come up with on my own, and I'm advising my friends to do the same.
I had been using a false name on my primary FB since I started the account in ~2008... funny anecdote, I once got a popup on my real account with a question about my "fake" profile: "Is this a real person?" Yes, of course... and now I'm going to make a post on my wall asking my friends to please say "yes" if they got the same question.
For me personally, I use FB primarily to keep in touch with friends, family and old colleagues who are spread all over the world. It is purely a contact tool, and not really used to market products of services etc., so my attachment is purely an emotional one.
However, I must admit that this latest episode has really hammered my trust in the platform FAR more than any other previous ones (and there have been many). Yesterday, for the first time ever, I went through my FB settings and removed a lot of personal information as well as stagnant apps that I had approved YEARS ago from my permitted apps list.
I am also seriously reconsidering what I do post on there from now on, as well as drastically reducing the number of times I post. I've also turned off location tracking for the FB app on my phone, and am considering deleting it altogether and just sticking to the web platform.
Will I change my mind in a months time? It's unlikely, but who knows? I like being able to talk to family that are literally on the other side of the world, and it is too hard for me to get them all to adopt Telegram or any other communication tool outside of FB Messenger, so I may find myself drawn back in.
There's only 1 person I wish to stay in touch that I talk to exclusively on Messenger. I think I will have to persuade them to install another app. Admittedly it will be WhatsApp, which is also Zuckerberg's tool for "dumb fucks".
(1) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-m...
I use both - if a contact is on both signal and whatsapp I use signal.
I think signal is the best of these with whatsapp second. Everything else is equal last. This ranking will no doubt change in the coming years with upstart competition doing communication with proper encryption. I look forward to it.
In recent times my attention has been drawn to the amount of time wasted on random Youtube videos. Youtube is more difficult since the service actually has value to me. Somehow restricting my access to only videos from my subscriptions could be a possible solution.
I deleted my account in 2010 and there was absolutely no change in my daily behavior, but then I wasn't a chronic addict either. Honestly, if users haven't figure out by now that their privacy is utterly void when they use Facebook they absolutely don't care.
For lots of people, it's "don't value their privacy over being able to keep in touch with friends and family", not merely convenience.
Keeping in touch with friends & family is too important to ditch entirely, and having everyone switch to a different platform is very hard. That said, my whole extended family uses whats app nowadays...
I think the classic site’s days are numbered but it will be a while before it does a complete shutdown, if ever. At that point Facebook might decide to just completely redesign it into something different and recapture the lost audience.
Some of my cousins/colleagues used to be active but now they have got fed up of FB.
Amusingly, none of them ditched FB because 'Oh FB is evil mass surveillance system'. What I sense is people are getting fed up with FB.
Sadly, it is Whatsapp which has taken the place of FB.
I see it differently. Looking at it from a stats perspective, people who just login and don't scroll are also pretty valuable for Facebook since they're still come under the DAU and MAU numbers. They're counted for the ad impressions, and subsequently ad revenue.
Even though Facebook has prioritized friends' posts, bulk of the content (even though it can be not the most important) I think for most people is by pages and companies. Who I don't think are going to change in any way after this event.
It's still a great communication tool without the users who post though.
And people who don't use it now also manage to keep in touch with people they care about just fine.
I miss the movies sometimes (just wish they were a bit cheaper) and binge watching is horrible for your health (not just physically but mentally as well -- teaches you how to be an addict).
Amazon, while convenient, has destroyed an entire economic subsystem in it's wake and destroyed a way of life that was more communal and social to one that is more isolated and reclusive.
Finally, people more and more these days are trying to find ways to detach from their smartphones (I think your comment wrongly assumes Apple "created" the smartphone -- they did not)
The three things you listed are pure technology. Staying in touch with people you care about and making time to do so is not an inherently technological undertaking.
Then all the sudden a week or so ago they freaked out and I was like - no worries, remember that one time I switched your text messages?
My family primarily communicates in texts, phone calls, and in person. So this was relatively easy, myself and the other half the family either stopped using Facebook years ago, or never used it in the first place.
Easy really, and not necessary
It's like they are going out of their way to be creepy at this point.
I have good friends who would rather drop contact entirely than having to have an account on website that is not at least deeply privacy-conscious. In this sense I would rather claim that whether this statement holds or not strongly depends on the kinds of persons that your social circle contains.
If you must use messenger in mobile,
https://mbasic.facebook.com/
works
I'd bet my house it is the former.
I think on HN we understandably make assumptions about the general population due to the bubble we live in. The reactions to other privacy scandals e.g. wikileaks or Snowden was actually pretty muted. John Oliver did a great piece when he met Snowden for example: literally pointing out that almost everyone he asked on the streets of New York had no idea who he was (https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/4x3pvm/john-olive...). So the idea of a mass exodus from Facebook is extremely unlikely.
Oct 2016: Snapchat Beats Instagram and Facebook as the Top Social Platform for Teens
http://www.adweek.com/digital/snapchat-beats-instagram-and-f...
May 2017: AppAnnie report: "On any given day in the US, 35% of Snapchat’s daily users cannot be reached by Facebook, 46% can't be reached by Instagram and 58% can’t be reached by Messenger" the report says.
https://mashable.com/2017/05/03/snapchat-users-facebook/#2Pm...
Oct 2017: Snapchat Furthers Its Lead As Teens’ Favorite Social Platform, BUT [Instagram is Reportedly "a Better Bet" for Marketers]
https://www.marketingcharts.com/digital/social-media-80744
So if what I just wrote is somewhat true, the commonality between Cambridge Analytica and teens preferring Snapchat to Facebook is actually privacy or lack thereof (perceived or otherwise).
As for mass exodus - Hotmail, MySpace, Flickr, Yahoo... Where does one draw the line - is Facebook invincible?
I believe that more people care about privacy than they themselves realise. It's only a question of how much it'll take for patience to be tested. Keep in mind that easy-technology (the iPhone) has only been around for hardly more than 10 years; a lot of "non-geeky" people are still learning the ropes of how to balance their digital and physical lives.
Also don't forget that this is only one piece of bad news that Facebook has had of late. We're still wondering how useful online advertising really is, and how often it's gamed by ad click-fraud, etc. Aside from that, I can't comment on where FB's share price might be at any future point from now; not that I should even care.
Edit: With reference to big companies and which ones can eventually fail, I recommend reading Benjamin Graham's "The Intelligent Investor".
Remember the outrage about Apple slowing down iPhones and iPads? Or the outrage about Apple's and Google's tax avoidance schemes?
My bet is nobody's going to talk about this incident 6 months from now and FB's stock price will have more than recovered.
The media have been pumping out a lot of articles, but 40,000 tweets is really nothing.
Facebook has 2.2 billion monthly active users - that's 75% of all humans who have internet access. I think Facebook will probably exist for the rest of human history. They'll be a multiplanetary social network, and they'll probably still be running when the sun becomes a red giant.
We do have other approaches. That I can obtain your employment contract, take your picture as you walk in and out of buildings and when you visit the beach, figure out your birth day and who you hang out with...
...doesn't mean I'm allowed to or freely share/sell every detail of your life.
We could for example create a license or permit for gathering a type of data. Like: If you are a dating agency you can ask for peoples sex. If you are a head hunter you may gather data on employment history. If you have a taxi service you can ask for peoples address.
We could also adopt a government issued key for things like signing petitions.
Where the data is stored could also be subject to regulation. Its possible to keep access logs with specific justification for each bit of sensitive information accessed.
Twitter is primarily designed to help you share information with the world. Most of the information you provide us through Twitter is information you are asking us to make public. ... Twitter broadly and instantly disseminates your public information to a wide range of users, customers, and services, including search engines, developers, and publishers that integrate Twitter content into their services, and organizations such as universities, public health agencies, and market research firms that analyze the information for trends and insights. When you share information or content like photos, videos, and links via the Services, you should think carefully about what you are making public.
I could swear an earlier version even pointed out that tweets you delete are not gone, because, by the time you delete it, it's already been permanently archived by a zillion third parties. I can't find anything about that in the current version, though.
I suppose Twitter's in an easier spot here, though. Like they say, Twitter's for talking to the whole world. Whereas, when people use Facebook, they typically use it to communicate with a more intimate circle.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2011/11/faceb...
The potential for abuse is smaller if we use independent services for all of those different things, even if those services aren't any more trustworthy than Facebook.
No major tech company has shown such disdain for the privacy for its users and
No tech company (at least no customer facing tech company) has driven the handling of user privacy this badly into the gutter.
So much went wrong over the years with Facebook and user privacy (normally followed by a mealy mouthed bullshit apology, same as you see now) that they do not deserve any more benefit of a doubt.
Threatenting to sue the publications uncovering this tragedy is just about the icing on the cake.
And yes, I "deleted" my account some 4 years ago.
2. Having said that, spreading the awareness of this problem (as people are doing with this hashtag/campaign) is a good thing.
3. Maybe you can't avoid being in some database, but you can be in fewer databases with less information, and make it harder to aggregate all the information about you.
4. What do you suggest, resigned fatalism? Of course, you can do something. Avoid Google products, avoid Facebook, use a VPN, avoid tracking cookies, etc. - there's a ton you can do. Use different emails for different purposes, for example.
5. If enough people start caring about this, then companies will (have to) take note.
Additionally, re-building a social presence on another network would be a lot of work for many users. There's a certain dopamine rush to making a post and getting a ton of likes. In the short term, users are not going to get that kind of engagement if they move shop to another platform.
I just use web.messenger.com to contact them. That is the only value for me.
"It's just another thing I have to pay per month: Netflix, Spotify, etc."
People have mental budgets, and maybe their psychological good will in balancing those budgets get drained over time for things like recurring payments that aren't on a bigger scale ($100+) and aren't 100% necessary like internet.
People need "friends" and they get them where they can. As a society, we deserve and owe our selves better than this. There are FOSS alternatives which are nearly as good. This is as fine a time as any to turn up the pressure on our friends, and to work for solutions that don't/can't sell us out (intentionally, or accidentally).
1) No good sales pitch starts with the price. What benefits you offering that will entice them?
2) You don't need to do everything a larger competitor does to disrupt. You just need to do one area better and have a slice of the audience cares a lot about that thing. What's the thing?
Is this really such a big deal for Facebook?
Suppose 50000 persons delete their Facebook everyday, then it will just lose 1,825,0000 users one year, not counting new users joining Facebook every year. And Facebook has 2 billion users.
Edit: The number lost in one year is 1,825,0000, not 1,825,000.
But that's still only .00857 of 2.13 billion daily actives.
Also, Facebook relies on a critical mass of users; if 75% of my friends leave, I'll probably leave, then large swaths of the social networks begins unthreading?
jk I've never Facebooked.
So to me the value is that everyone I know is there. Not just 95% but 99%. So if even a fraction left, I could much easier just leave. My "social circle" on facebook could quickly just disappear, and I suspect this goes for lots of other people. Because the strength of facebook is that every social group is connected - but that will be how the cancer spreads too.
Come to think of it, I have a 4th account. And how many do the botfarms have?
If this catches on, FB can turn into Myspace in few years. It will still have billion or so active users, but FB's stock valuation will crash until it's P/E ratio will be something like 4-5.
Also, I suspect many millions have already abandoned facebook and were using other platforms, they just left their account around just in case. Now, they have a wee bit of signaling, for practically no cost, so they go delete their account, and can happily pronounce on whatever currently-popular- social media platform, how they "dont even have" a facebook account triumphantly (no doubt missing the irony).
I simply do not believe 1/3 of the planet is on Facebook.
I am not. Half of the planet does not have access to clean drinking water, I do not believe they are on Facebook either.
What % of American voters users Facebook? I would be surprised to see over 80%. Nothing has adoption rates that high.
It's a lot easier to ship a phone somewhere than to ship clean drinking water.
(There are a lot of people who do not have access to clean water but have a cell phone.)
Only 1/2 of the planet is even on the Internet. Yet they have 2B MAU?
WhatsApp has 1.5 billion monthly actives.
It makes perfect sense that a global social network that dominates in most countries not named China, could get to two billion users.
I must have seen hundreds of skeptical statements on HN over the years about how Facebook can't have X number of users. I've never once seen any supporting evidence against their general scale. Not once, not ever. And again in this thread, skeptics and zero supporting evidence against Facebook having two billion users.
In their favor is extreme data: dozens of large and persistent research efforts put into studying use, by external parties. That spans everything from traditional media usage polling agencies, to large media ratings firms, to ad companies, to competitors, to services that see wide-spread use of Facebook-login, to Web traffic tracking services that indicate massive adoption. It also includes the massive usage that is seen on the iOS and Android app stores. The sole rebuttal possible, is to say: it's all fake! without any equally massive supporting evidence.
Companies like Google would have a very large interest in destroying Facebook by pointing it out, and Google would know as well as anyone if Facebook were lying to such an extreme degree.
My impression of this whole scandal, is that where you are on the political spectrum affects how you see it. I think a lot of the anger at Facebook is not because of what they did, but what they people see as the consequence from it, mainly the election of Donald Trump.
Facebook cannot afford to alienate both halves of the partisan divide at the same time. There is a substantial portion of the Left that at least partially blames Facebook for Donald Trump's election. Given that, I wonder if in the near future they will try to position themselves as a more conservative friendly company than the other Silicon Valley tech players.
And what's the proportion who would still vote for Trump today?
But this time it's not just people, it's political parties and whole countries that are being affected.
I'd love to see some kind of reporting/study on why on average the general public does not respond to events you mention like Snowden/Manning/OWS/Bank Bailout and others. I mean at one point in time social movements in the US got things done like Temperance Movement, Womens Voting Rights, Civil Rights Movement etc...
Maybe there is a larger narrative here that I'm missing, like each of these things are part of the anti-corporate movement or something.
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/277843-snowden-revel...
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2769645
People aren't "too busy" to waste a lot of time on Facebook. If anything, tight time constraints would make people not use Facebook in the first place.
Stopping the NSA or changing Wall Street requires significant political power and cooperation, stopping Facebook from snooping on you requires individuals to stop using a website and maybe install a browser extension.
They're not comparable at all.
edit to add... this is like some sort of Russian roulette. ignoring the Russian connection pun, that's still a funny joke.
It seems to me that zuckerburg cares about ad revenue, which means he needs eyeballs and needs to keep them for as long as possible. And, he has proven to care very little about privacy. Therefore, for those who can't shake the habit 100%, cutting back to one day a week is a good way to get the connections you need while slicing into the attention getting ad revenue.
That said, I probably won't delete my account. It remains the only way many of my friends plan events. It exists, for me, solely so I can be invited to things. I imagine there are many others like me. Like it or not, I suspect this is a blip for FB.
It's the other way around, he's being reached by other people through FB. What good would it do to make an account where his friends are not?
You don't need to rely on a single closed-garden platform for communication. F*book sole purpose as a corporation is built around harvesting as much personal data about you as possible and selling it to the highest and most nefarious bidder.
Rational, perfectly selfish agents in an environment of frictionless transactions might still invite me to events if I were off their social media platform. Humans will not.
What makes you so sure he's a sleazebag?
Hmm typically when someone says that people are "dumb fucks" it usually means they are simply incredibly naive /s
Facebook's business model doesn't depend on Mark Zuckerberg's "magic". It will continue to grow or break regardless of whether he's at the helm or not. Users, advertisers, competitors and governments will have to be the ones to decide.
Saying that Zuckerberg is a sleazebag based on a snippet of a private conversation he had 15 years ago when he was a college student is a stretch.
It's entirely possible that you're a much better person than Mark Zuckerberg. That doesn't make him a bad person.
I also remember being 20 and I said much worse things than calling a bunch of people dumb fucks in private conversation.
I've used Facebook a fair bit over the past decade and only deactivated it two months ago, after Zuckerberg signalled his intentions for 2018. I see a deactivated account as being a precursor to finding a way to test, properly obfuscate and then really delete.
So compared to doing nothing, I am in the process of deleting as much as possible. I don't want to participate with events, groups or with people who might be encouraged by me staying (this assumes that they care, of which some do; so it is my responsibility to help pull them away).
Read this: http://www.salimvirani.com/facebook/
There is also the issue of damage done. Facebook knows a lot about me, too much, but the competing service might not. Switching to other services means giving them a lot of the information I already regret I gave Facebook.
So in the end - unless one convinces both one self and all contacts to switch to “traditional” social networking such as a phonebook, a list of email addresses, blogs for photos, secure chat apps - one must consider what the alternative “integrity cost” to Facebook is.
People have to be pulled not just from Facebook but to something else (unless they agree to the phonebook style social network - which nearly no one will). But what?
For those who are light users - my best guess is that they'll either not see the problem and continue, or switch to a more addictive platform (Twitter). You might choose to hand out a not-Facebook contact detail or alternative preferred method of events notification and this will probably contribute something to nudging another person toward a particular direction (if it's as simple as handing out a secure chat app and letting others know they exist, that could be a good thing)
For moderate and heavy users, they might deactivate and then delete Facebook and learn from that experience and then be wary of all social media from that point on and choose to go outside more to ride a bike in their local area, etc.
It's all worth considering.
Facebook are the agent of foreign states, we must control our own critically important infrastructure! (cheers) Free internet for all! (more cheers)
Populism is so hot right now.
You're conflating two things. If the US somehow lost all steel foundries without being able to spin things up in a reasonable amount of time, we're screwed in a war. You must indeed make sure that you're self-sufficient in things that are essential for living in case you're cut off due to circumstances.
I'm not quite sure what your point is.
To them, Facebook is the internet. They don't have email accounts. They don't use the browser. They don't search the web. I met someone in a small town who never even used the maps feature. I tried to think of what value the true internet might bring them, but when I suggested that "you can search for news and read other things", the response was that they already did that with the Facebook App.
One guy handed me his phone, so I could add myself as a friend on his Facebook. While I started typing my name, I noticed his search history... and to him, Facebook was even a substitute for what people in the USA might use Incognito mode for!
I would call Facebook their internet portal, but it's not really a portal to anything - Facebook is just the entire internet to them.
Buzzfeed (yes, Buzzfeed) did an excellent writeup of Myanmar, that mirrors what I saw there: https://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/fake-news-spreads-tru....
“Nobody asks, they don’t care about the email,” he said, explaining that most don’t know that creating an email address is free, and easy. “No one is using that. They have Facebook.”
Since you are as surprised as I was a month back, I've looked further and concluded that buzz feed actually funds very high quality journalism (yes yes shocking I know) and presents facts from both sides. They do it using the money generated from click baits. I'd even make what will sound like a hyperbole , if you are the sort that wants truth on both sides of political spectrum and not just an echo chamber , go to buzz feed, and not NY TIMES or wapo.
There are more than 2 sides to a story.
They’re not just click bait, they do create incredibly biased content.
Would you really say that Buzzfeed's bias strains your credulity, or is it more likely that you simply disagree with them?
You can't see that a video shaped entirely by left-wing identity politics that blames all men for the crimes of a few, that ignores practical realities contributing to the issue, has a left-wing bias? Are you serious?
I recall at the time that people kept nitpicking over the misspelling of a bank (in a way that suggested people of a certain expertise never make spelling errors, which is simply untrue). It was a sensational story at the time, but all one needs to do now is to look back and compare it to what we know now.
Yes and at one time AOL occupied a similar role. And everyone moved out of the walled garden and onto the real internet just fine.
This time they have algorithms that can prevent you from wanting to leave.
I doubt it's the same thing.
In which developing countries does Facebook have a "monopoly" over internet infrastructure?
The Guardian has a couple of decent writeups about it too:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/01/facebook-free-...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/27/facebook-...
I guess the concern is that people will confuse Facebook for the Internet, and they’ll think they’re getting the Internet for free. It then becomes very difficult for a real ISP offering full Internet access to enter the market.
I don’t know if they have “monopolies”, as OP claimed, but these are the countries where they operate:
https://info.internet.org/en/story/where-weve-launched/
Exactly. Didn't people know all the proprietary social networks are spyware+adware? That's the way they earn money. BTW Ghostery says it knows 92 trackers in the social media category.
I think we become a part of the problem if we simply assume all users are just like us and know all about the negatives of tech. Facebook evidently didn't anticipate/address it early enough despite all that talent - did they really want this Cambridge Analytica situation to happen? What are we doing to fix this?
I know people have proposed alternatives like Mastodon or Diaspora*, but I don't think they're good alternatives either compared to gradually giving them up to learn old offline alternatives: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/jobs/quit-social-media...
As for Steemit, I think this "feature" is most absurd. I hope it never takes off:
https://steemit.com/faq.html#Can_I_delete_or_deactivate_my_a...
> "Can I delete or deactivate my account?"
> "Accounts can not be deactivated or deleted. The account along with all of its activity is permanently stored in the blockchain."
It reminds me to remind myself: A project that seemed quixotic a month ago suddenly has potential and value. You need to start developing such things when the market is in the 'quixotic' stage in order to have them ready when the world suddenly understands. Congratulations to those who started months or years ago.
But I will stop posting, liking, and commenting. Let’s slowly starve the monster.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
Yes, I know they make money other ways. But if no one uses the news feed, their ad revenue will take a noticeable hit. Most of the negatives come with the endless feed/scroll in the first place. I still spend time on Facebook, but only when I want to. No endless scroll, and I don't miss a thing when it comes to groups/events/messaging.
Plus then privacy loss is not just for you but the shadows you cast (shadow profiles for those who never logged in based on relationships and inferences from live users)
Unless CNN went SO amateurish that you only show a back head of interviewer and you never show him with the journalist together!