While I do think it's silly to assume that #DeleteFacebook is responsible for any serious movement in numbers, I also don't necessarily agree with the interpretation that this is just a downturn from how active Facebook was during the election; it seems it probably would've already dropped off and stabilized if that were the only cause, since the election hasn't been hot news for quite a bit now.
Speaking from personal experience, the scandals Facebook has been involved in are only a small part of why I deleted Facebook; more than anything, I just felt like it was not providing any value to me, just a pure time sink that I became less and less interested in. Maybe I'm not alone.
Its also important to ask the “network effect” works both way; people sign up in en-masse hockey stick shape grow because of others. It is quite possible someone in your network is using Facebook less often today, knowing you are inactive/dont exist there anymore. Eventually once the real exhodus starts, it will be equally rapid and happy to watch, as inicial waves of signups.
After a while the dark-pattern growth hacks stop affecting the populace, I guess.
The "Jane is waiting for you to see her post on your timeline" stuff where FB impersonates your friend was when my wife started ignoring everything from FB (I had quit a long time ago).
I cut my news consumption down significantly since the election. I don’t feel any less informed checking in once a week, but I get a lot less anxiety. My life is complicated enough.
Facebook was a big part of that, so it’s gone too. I’m simply more deliberate about what I spend my attention on, and Facebook is junk food.
You are not alone; this was my sentiment exactly. #DeleteFacebook wasn't responsible for me deleting my account, but it made me pause and examine my experience. And I realized checking it several times a day felt more like a chore and I hadn't had a pleasant interaction with anyone in quite a while.
I've been surprised by the number of my wife's peers (mid-late 20s women) who no longer use Facebook, or only use it for messaging and to share photos.
I dont care about anything on the news feed. I officially quit in an overtly, long drawn out week of statuses, but prior to that I had barely used FB in over months.
What will eventually kill Facebook is going to be people just abandoning their account, not #DeleteFacebook or scandals. Most people simply don't have any long term memory allocated to Facebook behaviour. We may actually mean it when we say that we'll delete our account, but when time comes to do it we forget, and forget the scandals and bad behaviour.
Bases on what I see, and that of cause completely anecdotal, more and more people simply don't post anything and the few that does are mostly commenting on sponsored posts in hope of winning a prize.
End the end enough people will quietly start visiting Facebook less and less, because their friends aren't posting anything. In the end they will simply stop using Facebook because they forget about it. Just as Facebook became inevitable at some point, because so many used it, it will crash just a quickly when enough people stop posting.
The surprising part is that advertisers still view Facebook so positively as they seem to be doing. I would think that engagement is pretty low and the number of people you actually reach is pretty low at this point.
In the end Facebook will need to be able to monetise Messenger, luckily they have WhatsApp that already knew how to do exactly that before Facebook bought them.
Facebook recently said they deleted 583 million fake accounts in just the first quarter of 2018. It's entirely plausible a lot of that supposed usage drop, is more aggressive bot elimination.
We also have no idea how many more there are, certainly FB wasn't warning anyone that their numbers might have been incorrect because of bots any time before getting rid of them..?
From what I understand of the bot deletion in question, these were newer accounts and are not counted in the official monthly active user figures (the 2.2 billion number). That is, Facebook's monthly active count isn't going to suddenly show 1.7 billion now instead.
I see it myself. I used to see people’s baby pictures and vacation pictures on Facebook. Now it’s mostly people breathlessly writing about the Mueller investigation or other pointless political shit. My visits have probably dropped 1/3 or more.
How many friends do you have on there? Facebook shows you a tiny percentage of the content added to your network, including repeating items way before they have run out.
If the News Feed team is trying to show me what I actually want to see, and not what they think will get the most interaction, ad clicks or time out of me, they are doing a terrible job. I find that the items displayed do not give me an accurate view of what my connections are posting. Often when I check the pages of in-person friends, while Facebook has been showing inane political posts by people I barely know, I have not been presented with the actually relevant and interesting activity my (real) friends have posted during the same time, or more recently.
I have unfollowed, blocked, and hidden so many stories about guns and politics, yet Facebook manages to find new friends I’ve never heard of with similar stories for my newsfeed. Ever since 2016, at least, I feel like politics is shoved in my face every time I go to Facebook, provoking me to interact with strangers regarding my opinions in one of the worst venues that one can do that.
I think they may be chasing interaction, regardless whether it’s positive our negative. Another wild theory is that they want to gather information about members’ reaction to politics, as it is not as lucrative to record reactions to someone’s cousin’s baby photos. The other alternatives mean they are very bad at their jobs, so I’m not sure.
> If the News Feed team is trying to show me what I actually want to see, and not what they think will get the most interaction, ad clicks or time out of me, they are doing a terrible job.
The News Feed believed that interaction reveals a preference for seeing something. Even though they added more icons so that you weren't thumbs-upping your friends personal tragedies to indicate that they matter to you, interactions all mean “like” in the sense of “I like Facebook relaying this content to me”.
Sure, that’s what I mean by chasing interaction regardless of whether it’s negative or positive. If you comment on something, they show you more items like that, assuming you like to comment on those things. My impression was that Facebook’s user behaviors analysis is way more detailed than that, though.
There are the specific negative indicators you can give to them such as hiding stories, which even says it will make them show fewer stories like that one, and unfollowing people. When you unfollow someone, surely Facebook attempts to analyze why? Neither of these seem to have an impact on the type of items shown to me.
If FB categorized posts with some ML algorithm and allowed people to filter things out that they don't like (politics), it would be a far more pleasant platform, but then I doubt they'd want to give users that kind of power as it could interfere with addictiveness.
Facebook can and does distort your perception of what a friend posts by selecting only the shares of "pointless political shit" from everything they post. Because that's what gets the engagement metrics up, I believe.
Facebook is not the only place on the Internet that seems to be "poisoned by politics". A few of my hangouts that survived a few presidential elections are now just total wastelands with everyone who was intelligent or not a troll driven off.
I don't see any strong correlation here. To me it looks like it was dropping from about Aug'16, and this blog has merely drawn a line for the US election and called it a story. Based on a quick google search, the US is only number 2 in terms of total Facebook users[0] - maybe it might have been worth considering other factors outside of US politics that might account for this trend?
Exactly, you have to tease out seasonality and the impact of special events like elections on user behavior. For example, is the percentage drop any greater than after previous elections?
I think people underestimate the truly global scale of Facebook. Even then, the US is a fraction of FB's user-base.
I don't have "data" to back it up but my personal experience is the same. My feed feels "empty". most of my posts don't get any likes/comments and most of my friends that used to post few times a day are doing it once a week now.
I didn't see any sort of methodology in how they get that data. While the article said it included both web and mobile app traffic, I'm skeptical unless they provide more data. Could be that usage is just moving more to the app than web and the counting is different.
The article claims it includes app visits: "Since then, total monthly visits to Facebook in the US (both on the web and through the mobile app) have fallen [by 3 billion/month]."
SimilarWeb has no fool-proof way of tracking app usage, nor even app downloads (don't trust anyone that says they can, unless they're Apple or Google).
What they can track is the number of ratings - nothing else, but there's very little correlation between that and app usage.
1. There is no benchmark and we need one because SimilarWeb is based on a panel. The less people in that panel, the less total traffic to any website.
2. Most likely cause is more app usage and less desktop usage.
Also can we please stop using SimilarWeb as some sort of authority reference? Their panel isnt humongous. Despite the fact they pay Chrome extension owners and later hijack the code to track everyone who installs it.
I was also noticing this-- that the graph shows desktop+mobile WEB, but not native app use. If people are switching from mobile web to native app, this graph would decrease even if more people are using facebook every day, right?
By chance do you have references on SimilarWeb paying "Chrome extension owners and later hijack the code to track everyone who installs it"? Curious to learn more about exactly what they're doing here.
I agree that they can't track native app use but think their data might not be too far off. I just compared a few pages where I have access to traffic data and similarweb estimates aren't too far off, more exact than I had expected. But that could be different for very popular sites.
Similarweb's guess of my site's traffic has been absurdly wrong for years. It thinks the traffic has been wildly fluctuating but it's only ever gone up.
That's my question too. It seems more Facebook users are migrating to Instagram. They did announce 150 million people now use stories. My experiences could be biased, but it amazes me how many Instagram users don't know it's a product of Facebook.
I don't know if it's algorithmic, or if most of my close friends just hardly use facebook anymore, but it seems like I just rarely see anything anymore in my feed anymore that I care about. It also seems weird that what does appear is generally from people I'm very faint acquaintances with -- if I am curious about one of my actual friends I pretty much have to go straight to their profile.
Besides that though, I think it just encourages behaviors I don't really enjoy seeing in my friends. I definitely know people who in real-life are totally cool, but their social media presence makes me question why I ever liked them in the first place. Mostly I see a lot of:
1) very overt attention seeking for pretty lame things (like, pretty girls posting selfies of themselves doing nothing interesting, or dudes with gym photos, that kind of thing)
2) Extremely broad and poorly thought out political rants
3) sharing really vapid motivational quotes
4) people being maybe a little too vulnerable to a very broad audience, to the point where it's awkward.
5) This one is the worst of all. People taking passive aggressive swipes at individuals by posting very vague status updates. I hate stuff like that.
I don't think of myself as a super judgmental person, but whenever I get on facebook I spend half my time just thinking "really?" and then feeling kind of gross.
Facebook was a lot more fun when there was a chronological timeline of non-rich-text status updates and comments from friends. These days it's all semi-spam from pages and random week-old friend's FB activities being surfaced in a poorly targeted fashion. I know there are interesting posts by people on my friend list but they're simply being hidden. Maybe some fb developer was happy with increased engagement metrics merely caused by confused users forever scrolling up and down in desperate attempts to find out where all their friends whose posts used to show up have gone.
And when actual friends' posts show up, 90% of the time it's a like or a share of some uninspiring web page's article with no comment.
It's like it's become digg.com curated by your non-techie acquaintances, with a bonus ORDER BY RANDOM() thrown in for good measure.
As the saying goes, Twitter is where you connect with the people you wish you knew, and facebook is where you connect with the people you wish you didn't.
Also their stupid push to make each single-line shitpost bigger and flashier and more impactful has driven the information density way down.
It was bad enough when people started posting pictures of text instead of just posting the text. Now they're posting videos of static text. What's next, immersive VR full sensory presentation to convey "its weekend party yay lol :D :D:D:D:D" posts?
I think the idea was to let single line shitposts compete with all the other shitposts, but they went the wrong direction. Should've made the media shitposts sized down to the text posts.
I assume big media pieces are where the advertising money is.
It's like flashy banner ads from the 90s back again that people jumped to for grabbing attention. At that time it was ads, now it's people posting their thoughts in this fashion. Since Facebook provides these backgrounds only up to a certain message character length limit, many people curate their messages just so it would fit with these flashy backgrounds.
And because these posts with the backgrounds get larger font sizes compared to normal posts, to get attention in a voluminous group one must play the same dirty game. They're literally dragging people into the dirt pit.
Hope they don't introduce animation in these gaudy backgrounds!!!
Why not just give some font controls instead and remove all this background nonsense?! (Though this could also be argued to be terrible)
One day everyone will look back at these stunts and see them for the ugliness and abomination they are, just like we look back at banner ads with derision and hate.
I actually don't think that's necessarily fair on MySpace. With facebook it's so low effort to post or share some garish random crap to your timeline that everyone (or at least most people) are doing it all the time. With MySpace, like Geocities, at least you had to put in a bit more effort. The results weren't necessarily better but the volume of crap was simply lower due to most people being too lazy to post it.
Wasn't the main selling point of Facebook originally that you couldn't do flashing animated geocities crap? I remember that being the reason I signed up, most of my HS friends had no business doing web design. Once they opened it up beyond ivy-league, it didn't seem to have any particular status, having a Gmail account was arguably harder (I had to get lucky getting an invite off /.).
I remember, around 2007, when facebook had started to be made more generally available outside of colleges in the US, that it seemed like a cleaner, easier, less cluttered version of MySpace. Sadly that version of the site is long since dead.
MySpace was often an assault on the senses, and disorienting. Reddit can be like that these days, perhaps worse since the interface elements also love around and can disappear. In the early days of FB, users had even less ability to customize the visual presentation of their pages than they do now. It’s about like the simplicity of HN vs a 10 highly customized subs on reddit - on one hand, users like to express their personalities. On the other, inconsistency can make for a terrible user experience.
The English Football Association has used a 2-minute Twitter video in order to announce the list of 23 players who made it to the World Cup (https://twitter.com/England/status/996737073418784770). I personally hate this trend.
While I do understand your hate, and while I personally hate the problem of using video instead of text, I gotta say that this specific example you've mentioned can be blamed to the limitations of the platform (Twitter).
Their alternatives were:
1. Interrupt people's flow by getting them off of Twitter.
2. Try fitting them all in one tweet (impossible).
3. Try fitting them in multiple tweets, which would make the users retweet a specific tweet that contains whichever player they're interested in, and their followers wouldn't see the entire roster.
I can see the appeal of transmitting the info in a 2 minute video since it gives users one tweet they should retweet, and transfers the important message in a relatively short amount of time (albeit much longer than skimming through a block of text).
Snapchat has mostly replaced Facebook for my friends that like just sharing fun updates. I think it's a combination of the ease of sharing spur-of-the-moment updates, and the difficulty of using it for anything but that (e.g. political rants). I still use Facebook, but almost expressly to follow specific groups, friends who post typically about specific topics, or to ask/answer questions within my friend group.
I have zero idea how people are using snapchat. Even as a programmer, I find their UX extremely hard to understand, enjoy and use. It's the shittiest app that is on my phone and I have opened it only twice in a year.
you use it to signal that you’re paying attention to someone in a relatively passive/casual way via read receipts on one-to-many picture messages. it’s mostly useful for groups of friends, and (critically) interacting with someone you’re romantically or sexually interested in with plausible deniability.
> These days it's all semi-spam from pages and random week-old friend's FB activities being surfaced in a poorly targeted fashion
I think putting the spam on facebook on equal footing with its post targeting as to why people aren't using facebook is wrong. I have hundreds of friends and tens of pages on FB, which I'll admit by FB's standards isn't all that much, yet I still find it much harder to browse than other sites with many times the content. Most people simply don't post that often or not at all, and the pages I joined don't post often either.
Despite how little content there is I find the issue of managing it all completely intractable. When I'm on Feedly I go through hundreds of posts worth of content in a few minutes by mashing the j key until I find content I want to read later, save it and then spend maybe 2 hours a week going through content I care about. When I'm on Twitter I skim until I see familiar content and pick out the stuff I care about. When I'm on reddit, I know it takes about 48 hours for my feed to "refresh" so I'll spend some time every other day skimming from top to bottom.
I can't even begin to figure out a workflow for finding content on Facebook. The whole thing is laid out so quickly finding the things I care about is impossible. I can scroll past ten posts I've seen before something new pops up so I have no idea when to stop scrolling. There's no concept of a "read" post and unlike reddit the "hide" button, hidden behind a menu, acts like a downvote. I have no way of creating a single stream of just the things I care about, and if I did there's no way to update myself when things change. Unlike youtube, there's no RSS feeds so I can't just do my browsing from Feedly. Even just getting a feed of my events is impossible since FB has the audacity to suggest events from pages I've never interacted with, have no friends going and thinks those are more important to me than the events created by pages I actually follow. Push notifications are insanely coursely-grained (or at least they do a good job hiding the interface). Cambridge Analytica be damned, the reason I don't use FB is because I can't figure out how. My age, income level and computer-addicted brain should make me prime meat for advertisers, yet I change the oil more often than login to FB simply because the algorithms that generate my feeds are just that bad.
My experience is exactly the same. Looks like fb has failed it big time on mobile. Is there a method to their madness? I’d really like to know.
Twitter is not a replacement as it’s totally public but it’s much more fun right now exactly for the lack of that silly algorithmic selection of posts.
> These days it's all semi-spam from pages and random week-old friend's FB activities being surfaced in a poorly targeted fashion.
The last thing I care about is that my friend's aunt comment on a thread from October 2016, but for some reason Facebook thinks that needs the #2 slot on my feed.
I guess it reads as a little gross or awkward on the surface but those are all signs of people who are feeling lonely or powerless.
When you’re really turned off by a post (or posts), try flipping it the other way around and see if you can feel your honest concern. Don’t patronize the person and make a big deal of the post, but act constructively: reach out and say hi and share the things that you like about them.
And if you can’t feel moved to do that, that’s fine. You’re not obliged to do anything. But it just might make you leave less grossed out and it might do your friend some good.
I think I would do this for my friends, even without Facebook. The problem is when I have to spend emotional labor tending to people I haven't seen since high school.
It's not that I'm not empathetic, but the kind of Real Speak you're sort of proposing feels out of place in a relatively public setting. I'd rather have a coffee or beer with them if I know them well, and if I don't, it's not like I call them on it, but it does slowly make me want to interact with facebook less. (I know I can unfollow people, but at a certain point it strikes me less about people misusing facebook, and more that facebook incentivizes these kind of behaviors)
> feels out of place in a relatively public setting. I'd rather have a coffee or beer with them if I know them well
To follow up on gppong's comment, these are often people who don't know anyone well ("lonely or powerless"). So the fact that it's people you don't know well who post things like that is kind of obvious in hindsight.
My favorite social network is the one I have on Goodreads. I love to see what my friends (who are readers) are reading. I also have found a bunch of people whose book tastes are similar to mine. Everyone is interested in the same goal: finding and reading good books.
When someone overshares, or gets soapboxy, or just spammy, I just unfriend. I did this with my sister! That's something I'd never do on Facebook.
I've also enjoyed Goodreads. It's almost a mirror image of FB in a sense: in Facebook, your friends often appear dumber than in real life. In Goodreads, only their reading is visible and that might make them appear smarter than you thought :)
But how does one even overshare on Goodreads when all the updates are about book reads or picks to to-read? In the comments?
If somebody is reviewing books I have zero interest in (eg: super partisan politics, superhero comic books) then I'm likely to unfriend them on Goodreads.
One of my middle-aged male friends was really into Young Adult romances. Like two books a week. I had to let him go.
I'm probably one of the rare people who has avoided Facebook for many years and has been using it more recently, so I'm just discovering many things people complain about.
I figured out how to exclude people whose updates tend to be really judgmental or political from my feed without defriending them, but I am still really frustrated by there being no way to keep it chronological. Facebook wants me to read the "top" posts, over and over, apparently, regardless of whether I'm interested or have already read them. And yet, there are many updates that I miss if I don't go to the effort of looking for them.
Most of the value to me is in the messaging function, but there's really nothing special about it compared to all the others that have existed - it's only useful because it's on FB and connected to the people I know that are there.
I find it disturbing when people I don't know ask to be friends, if they don't have any friends in common with me. I can't really understand why FB even allows this as when would they not be bots or scammers?
Facebook is just the AOL of a younger generation...just global in scale and on a longer timeline.
People came in droves when it was new and shiny and the easiest route to 'whatever' online.
At some point folks are only staying around for the messaging platform.
In some glacially-long (for the internet) pace of time, Facebook will be sunsetted in favor of the new hotness.
I think AOL is a good model of where Facebook is headed. It's happened to MySpace, it's happened to Digg, it's going to happen to Reddit, wtf were they thinking? Strangely enough, the worst site of them all, Twitter, will be the only one left alive as it is.
Twitter needs to die just so I can... please, in the name of all that is good and holy... stop being fucking hounded on all other media at 26 second intervals by every Z-list celebrity, podcaster, radio clown, journalist and postal carrier begging me to follow them.
This has been the way people have been getting engagement since advertising started. Twitter is actually the most efficient form of it. It's not going away and it's better than the alternatives.
I find it disturbing when people I don't know ask to be friends, if they don't have any friends in common with me. I can't really understand why FB even allows this as when would they not be bots or scammers?
yep I can imagine an alternate reality where you move into a new town and are socially outcast online by a facebook policy where you must have at least one facebook friend in common.
imagine going out of state for college and then not being able to add the hundreds of people you’ve met to your facebook friends list because you’re not already connected on facebook with at least one person in common.
people would just spend more time on another social network, where they can connect.
No, it is still there. I use it because I am only on Facebook for one group. By having no "friends" I can look at the group without the clutter and no "friend requests".
And, since the group are moving to a WhatsApp group soon, I wont have to use Facebook at all.
I've definitely been guilty of #4 even recently (I'm not sure if they made anyone feel awkward, though; those that did probably just ignored it), but there are 2 reasons I don't mind it from the poster's point of view.
1. If it makes you feel awkward that I'm honest about who I am in writing, then yeah, our friendship is probably superficial at best, and in those cases, I'm not really concerned on your feelings about my feelings. Feel free to unfollow (I know I unfollow certain friends posts).
2. Blogs have been used for this sort of thing for a MUCH wider audience than a group of friends behind a gated digital community, and I've personally never had any kind of issue with reading people's personal struggles, even other devs, and in fact it makes them far more human to me.
Then again, the type of vulnerability you're thinking of may be different than mine, but either way, to each his own. :)
The rest of the behaviors you mentioned are pretty much why I generally don't use Instagram or Twitter more than once every few months. Those formats, even when following devs, seem to encourage the types of activity you're discussing at least in my feeds. But FB is probably the platform I curate the most, simply because most of the people I care about use it to share about their life, from milestones to quick takes, for the most part, without excessive narcissistic self aggrandizing posts (some do, but most are fairly harmless, otherwise after a while, I just choose not to follow).
But I've noticed that there are definitely preferences across the board, which is mainly why they all seem to stick around. I doubt there will be one social media platform to rule them all, the same way there's no one amusement park or one kind of gym. There are behemoths, but there's always a long tail, especially in socializing.
This. The feed algorithm appears to be designed by committee with the usual results. Fonzi stuck his landing a long time ago.
I used to post random thoughts that struck me as funny and I spent some time getting the wording just right. But I'm such an outlier that it stopped being fun. I just text them to a couple of people now.
On the few occasions I go on Facebook I have to resist the urge to post a tongue-in-cheek comment about how I check in so rarely because "you're all so goddamn boring."
And if I have to look at one more picture of somebody's $37 plate of paella I'm going to burn my eyes out with a fireplace poker.
> I'm going to burn my eyes out with a fireplace poker.
I hope you’re joking but if not, there is help available for you. Facebook is not reason enough for self-harm. It comes very, very, very close, but close is not close enough.
Honestly I left Facebook to get away from ppl like you who turn every post into a chance to judge me against some unwritten moral code. Who needs enemies when you have friends on Facebook?
Instagram and others like it killed my Facebook feed, but because it was Instagram and others, it meant that people spread, and as a result the other feeds died out fairly quickly as well. I don’t miss it much, but it made me realize I missed blogs and personal geeky pages with actual substance and that I had been using the shallow Facebook feed as a replacement for the “real” internet.
Facebook is still so useful for groups and events that it’s impossible to leave though. I mean, you can leave, but then you’re the guy/woman whom others need to go out of their way to schedule with.
I have noticed the same thing, my news feed is full of people that I don't even message at facebook. Later I realised that it's because I unconsciously spend more time on their posts because of their clickbaity nature (ex. politics, humorous posts, attractive people, controversial topics) than I do with my real friends. I tried creating a few accounts to test this hypothesis and found out that even if I don't like or comment on their posts, just the act of hovering over their posts for a few seconds longer than other friends is enough for the news feed algo to prioritise these posts on my feed.
Twitter got it right with a "customisable news feed", the list[0], where I could create several list timelines for my friends and organize them by those who post about tech, business, political rants, etc.
I hope you realize most people on facebook are not there to find intellectual content. These are the same set of people who have made shows like Judge Judy and Dr. Phil and Jerry Springer famous. Vast majority of population loves cat videos and would click on "Top 30 reasons to see royal wedding". They are the one who will stay on FB for hours and contribute towards FB's impression goals. One time I was researching replies in twitter feed of Trump and other conservatives like Ann Coulter. It's purely fascinating how many people are out there with nothing else to do, hanging out there for hours on, posting stupid meme after meme for insignificant posts. You, me and crowd in general at HN is different. FB is not optimized for us and I highly doubt they would care about how we want FB to be.
BTW, FB has this "See First" feature where you can mark your friends to show their posts first. That has improved FB's usability to me just to borderline. Unfortunately they don't let me chose more than 30 people. It's mind numbing what kind of morons FB has hired who makes these decisions. Why the fuck I don't want to see more than 30 friends post first? Even worse, why the fuck can't they figure this out from all the decade worth of data they have on me?
I find Facebook to be way more enjoyable after aggressively muting people whose posts I don't care for. Now it's really an RSS feed for friends and family, minus a lot of junk
Agree. It pretty much has the feeling of a sugar shock. You enjoy it first, get a bit of a rush, and then feel exhausted and gross afterwards. Better avoid it
Facebook and Youtube both seem to obviously be optimising for the wrong metrics. It's really unfortunate, their original versions were much more fun to use and probably easier to code, but they have sufficient network effects that any disruptors will have to be not just a little but a lot better to replace them, even as their quality drops.
I am fully sick of all the political, religious, and commercial posts on facebook. It used to be fun: it used to be about what my friends were doing, and organising events. Now it's just full of garbage, all of which is pushing some sort of agenda, and it feels extremely tired.
I’ve found that, much like reddit, it’s best experienced by tailoring your feed to what you actually want to see. In my case, I unfollowed all posts from anyone I don’t actually care about, and removed my interests section entirely (fan pages and such contributed at least 50% of the spam on my feed - random sports autoplay videos are not what I’m looking for when i go on facebook). Facebook is a tool for making sure I’m not out of the loop with my actual friends. I don’t need to keep up to date with some person from my calculus class halfway across the country - and if i do run into them again, i can simply ask.
Personal anecdote time: The line on that chart, the 2016 election, was exactly when I cut back on my Facebook use. I had former friends who posted stuff that night like "white people need to die" and "unfriend me if you voted for [insert candidate's name here]".
Notwithstanding all the privacy issues, I remember the days when Facebook used to be fun. Back before timeline, back when it was limited to colleges, back when "Random Play" was listed as a desired relationship option. Now it's meme and clickbait article land.
That’s interesting because many people use Google as a locator - they don’t type in Facebook.com, they type Facebook into the omnibar and click on the first link that comes up in Google. So it does show declining intent to visit Facebook. I imagine that the URL autocomplete feature in major browsers has also played a role in the decline you’ve shown here though.
Google is also dropping in Google Trends. Assuming there is a drop in usage of FB (not just a drop in searches for FB), I guess the 2016 election is only one contributing factor.
Waiting for school to end. I rely on Facebook for quick messages and group classroom posts. Once Summer break starts, I can #DeleteFacebook until next year.
Sorry for the late reply. I most probably will. I'm working on making a middleman website to remove FB tracking. If it works out, I'll rely on that instead.
Facebook is two things for me right now:
1. A lazy way of registering to sites
2. New Urbanist Memes For Transit-Oriented Teens (my feed is exclusively this one right now)
The notifications going a bit mad about 18 months ago or so when they introduced the market stuff and "your friends are interested in going to X" was what ran me off. I'd unsubscribe and unfollow and new worthless ones would take up their place.
Now I don't even bother checking my notifications; I'll log in maybe twice a day to check if I received any messages, have a scroll through NUMTOTs, that's about it.
Heh, me too! It was only in the past year that I've discovered NUMTOT and other fun groups, and my enjoyment of FB has increased a lot since I've joined them.
NUMTOTS everywhere! (Is this peak transit?) In all seriousness, it's definitely more fun than vanilla facebook, although I'd have a hard time calling it a shelter from politics or praising its level of overall discourse.
Ironically propagations of articles like this is actually more or less the reason I stopped using Facebook.
No one reads primary sources anymore. All kinds of baiting conclusions and titles are drawn on absolutely minimal data with zero scientific rigor like this blog entry and my feed is just reshares of these McNews for shock value and social credits.
199 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] threadSpeaking from personal experience, the scandals Facebook has been involved in are only a small part of why I deleted Facebook; more than anything, I just felt like it was not providing any value to me, just a pure time sink that I became less and less interested in. Maybe I'm not alone.
The "Jane is waiting for you to see her post on your timeline" stuff where FB impersonates your friend was when my wife started ignoring everything from FB (I had quit a long time ago).
Oh. How I wish that were true. You must not watch the news much because that's pretty much all I hear on virtually all the channels.
Facebook was a big part of that, so it’s gone too. I’m simply more deliberate about what I spend my attention on, and Facebook is junk food.
I dont care about anything on the news feed. I officially quit in an overtly, long drawn out week of statuses, but prior to that I had barely used FB in over months.
Bases on what I see, and that of cause completely anecdotal, more and more people simply don't post anything and the few that does are mostly commenting on sponsored posts in hope of winning a prize.
End the end enough people will quietly start visiting Facebook less and less, because their friends aren't posting anything. In the end they will simply stop using Facebook because they forget about it. Just as Facebook became inevitable at some point, because so many used it, it will crash just a quickly when enough people stop posting.
The surprising part is that advertisers still view Facebook so positively as they seem to be doing. I would think that engagement is pretty low and the number of people you actually reach is pretty low at this point.
In the end Facebook will need to be able to monetise Messenger, luckily they have WhatsApp that already knew how to do exactly that before Facebook bought them.
My experience from running Facebook ads is that Facebook is crawling with bots.
We might never know the actual numbers.
https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-deleted-583-million-fake-...
We also have no idea how many more there are, certainly FB wasn't warning anyone that their numbers might have been incorrect because of bots any time before getting rid of them..?
If the News Feed team is trying to show me what I actually want to see, and not what they think will get the most interaction, ad clicks or time out of me, they are doing a terrible job. I find that the items displayed do not give me an accurate view of what my connections are posting. Often when I check the pages of in-person friends, while Facebook has been showing inane political posts by people I barely know, I have not been presented with the actually relevant and interesting activity my (real) friends have posted during the same time, or more recently.
I have unfollowed, blocked, and hidden so many stories about guns and politics, yet Facebook manages to find new friends I’ve never heard of with similar stories for my newsfeed. Ever since 2016, at least, I feel like politics is shoved in my face every time I go to Facebook, provoking me to interact with strangers regarding my opinions in one of the worst venues that one can do that.
I think they may be chasing interaction, regardless whether it’s positive our negative. Another wild theory is that they want to gather information about members’ reaction to politics, as it is not as lucrative to record reactions to someone’s cousin’s baby photos. The other alternatives mean they are very bad at their jobs, so I’m not sure.
The News Feed believed that interaction reveals a preference for seeing something. Even though they added more icons so that you weren't thumbs-upping your friends personal tragedies to indicate that they matter to you, interactions all mean “like” in the sense of “I like Facebook relaying this content to me”.
There are the specific negative indicators you can give to them such as hiding stories, which even says it will make them show fewer stories like that one, and unfollowing people. When you unfollow someone, surely Facebook attempts to analyze why? Neither of these seem to have an impact on the type of items shown to me.
0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-... (No idea how accurate it is, but.)
I think people underestimate the truly global scale of Facebook. Even then, the US is a fraction of FB's user-base.
What they can track is the number of ratings - nothing else, but there's very little correlation between that and app usage.
1. There is no benchmark and we need one because SimilarWeb is based on a panel. The less people in that panel, the less total traffic to any website.
2. Most likely cause is more app usage and less desktop usage.
Also can we please stop using SimilarWeb as some sort of authority reference? Their panel isnt humongous. Despite the fact they pay Chrome extension owners and later hijack the code to track everyone who installs it.
By chance do you have references on SimilarWeb paying "Chrome extension owners and later hijack the code to track everyone who installs it"? Curious to learn more about exactly what they're doing here.
Besides that though, I think it just encourages behaviors I don't really enjoy seeing in my friends. I definitely know people who in real-life are totally cool, but their social media presence makes me question why I ever liked them in the first place. Mostly I see a lot of:
1) very overt attention seeking for pretty lame things (like, pretty girls posting selfies of themselves doing nothing interesting, or dudes with gym photos, that kind of thing) 2) Extremely broad and poorly thought out political rants 3) sharing really vapid motivational quotes 4) people being maybe a little too vulnerable to a very broad audience, to the point where it's awkward. 5) This one is the worst of all. People taking passive aggressive swipes at individuals by posting very vague status updates. I hate stuff like that.
I don't think of myself as a super judgmental person, but whenever I get on facebook I spend half my time just thinking "really?" and then feeling kind of gross.
And when actual friends' posts show up, 90% of the time it's a like or a share of some uninspiring web page's article with no comment.
It's like it's become digg.com curated by your non-techie acquaintances, with a bonus ORDER BY RANDOM() thrown in for good measure.
It was bad enough when people started posting pictures of text instead of just posting the text. Now they're posting videos of static text. What's next, immersive VR full sensory presentation to convey "its weekend party yay lol :D :D:D:D:D" posts?
I assume big media pieces are where the advertising money is.
You joke, but they bought Oculus for a reason.
And because these posts with the backgrounds get larger font sizes compared to normal posts, to get attention in a voluminous group one must play the same dirty game. They're literally dragging people into the dirt pit.
Hope they don't introduce animation in these gaudy backgrounds!!!
Why not just give some font controls instead and remove all this background nonsense?! (Though this could also be argued to be terrible)
One day everyone will look back at these stunts and see them for the ugliness and abomination they are, just like we look back at banner ads with derision and hate.
# ppl like flashy stuff # #################
The English Football Association has used a 2-minute Twitter video in order to announce the list of 23 players who made it to the World Cup (https://twitter.com/England/status/996737073418784770). I personally hate this trend.
Their alternatives were:
1. Interrupt people's flow by getting them off of Twitter. 2. Try fitting them all in one tweet (impossible). 3. Try fitting them in multiple tweets, which would make the users retweet a specific tweet that contains whichever player they're interested in, and their followers wouldn't see the entire roster.
I can see the appeal of transmitting the info in a 2 minute video since it gives users one tweet they should retweet, and transfers the important message in a relatively short amount of time (albeit much longer than skimming through a block of text).
Pickford Butland Pope
TAA Trippier Rose Maguire Jones Stones Walker Cahill
Henderson Dier Alli Lingard Young Delph RLC
Sterling Vardy Kane Rashford Welbeck
The moment you (meaning they) even combine these words you've missed the point of Twitter.
the ui i won’t bother to defend though.
I think putting the spam on facebook on equal footing with its post targeting as to why people aren't using facebook is wrong. I have hundreds of friends and tens of pages on FB, which I'll admit by FB's standards isn't all that much, yet I still find it much harder to browse than other sites with many times the content. Most people simply don't post that often or not at all, and the pages I joined don't post often either.
Despite how little content there is I find the issue of managing it all completely intractable. When I'm on Feedly I go through hundreds of posts worth of content in a few minutes by mashing the j key until I find content I want to read later, save it and then spend maybe 2 hours a week going through content I care about. When I'm on Twitter I skim until I see familiar content and pick out the stuff I care about. When I'm on reddit, I know it takes about 48 hours for my feed to "refresh" so I'll spend some time every other day skimming from top to bottom.
I can't even begin to figure out a workflow for finding content on Facebook. The whole thing is laid out so quickly finding the things I care about is impossible. I can scroll past ten posts I've seen before something new pops up so I have no idea when to stop scrolling. There's no concept of a "read" post and unlike reddit the "hide" button, hidden behind a menu, acts like a downvote. I have no way of creating a single stream of just the things I care about, and if I did there's no way to update myself when things change. Unlike youtube, there's no RSS feeds so I can't just do my browsing from Feedly. Even just getting a feed of my events is impossible since FB has the audacity to suggest events from pages I've never interacted with, have no friends going and thinks those are more important to me than the events created by pages I actually follow. Push notifications are insanely coursely-grained (or at least they do a good job hiding the interface). Cambridge Analytica be damned, the reason I don't use FB is because I can't figure out how. My age, income level and computer-addicted brain should make me prime meat for advertisers, yet I change the oil more often than login to FB simply because the algorithms that generate my feeds are just that bad.
I don't think I've read a more accurate description of anything in a long time... Thanks for putting my feelings on Facebook into words!
The last thing I care about is that my friend's aunt comment on a thread from October 2016, but for some reason Facebook thinks that needs the #2 slot on my feed.
That's Instagram.
What else should we expect?
When you’re really turned off by a post (or posts), try flipping it the other way around and see if you can feel your honest concern. Don’t patronize the person and make a big deal of the post, but act constructively: reach out and say hi and share the things that you like about them.
And if you can’t feel moved to do that, that’s fine. You’re not obliged to do anything. But it just might make you leave less grossed out and it might do your friend some good.
To follow up on gppong's comment, these are often people who don't know anyone well ("lonely or powerless"). So the fact that it's people you don't know well who post things like that is kind of obvious in hindsight.
When someone overshares, or gets soapboxy, or just spammy, I just unfriend. I did this with my sister! That's something I'd never do on Facebook.
But how does one even overshare on Goodreads when all the updates are about book reads or picks to to-read? In the comments?
If somebody is reviewing books I have zero interest in (eg: super partisan politics, superhero comic books) then I'm likely to unfriend them on Goodreads.
One of my middle-aged male friends was really into Young Adult romances. Like two books a week. I had to let him go.
I figured out how to exclude people whose updates tend to be really judgmental or political from my feed without defriending them, but I am still really frustrated by there being no way to keep it chronological. Facebook wants me to read the "top" posts, over and over, apparently, regardless of whether I'm interested or have already read them. And yet, there are many updates that I miss if I don't go to the effort of looking for them.
Most of the value to me is in the messaging function, but there's really nothing special about it compared to all the others that have existed - it's only useful because it's on FB and connected to the people I know that are there.
I find it disturbing when people I don't know ask to be friends, if they don't have any friends in common with me. I can't really understand why FB even allows this as when would they not be bots or scammers?
When it's someone you just recently met.
imagine going out of state for college and then not being able to add the hundreds of people you’ve met to your facebook friends list because you’re not already connected on facebook with at least one person in common.
people would just spend more time on another social network, where they can connect.
And, since the group are moving to a WhatsApp group soon, I wont have to use Facebook at all.
1. If it makes you feel awkward that I'm honest about who I am in writing, then yeah, our friendship is probably superficial at best, and in those cases, I'm not really concerned on your feelings about my feelings. Feel free to unfollow (I know I unfollow certain friends posts).
2. Blogs have been used for this sort of thing for a MUCH wider audience than a group of friends behind a gated digital community, and I've personally never had any kind of issue with reading people's personal struggles, even other devs, and in fact it makes them far more human to me.
Then again, the type of vulnerability you're thinking of may be different than mine, but either way, to each his own. :)
The rest of the behaviors you mentioned are pretty much why I generally don't use Instagram or Twitter more than once every few months. Those formats, even when following devs, seem to encourage the types of activity you're discussing at least in my feeds. But FB is probably the platform I curate the most, simply because most of the people I care about use it to share about their life, from milestones to quick takes, for the most part, without excessive narcissistic self aggrandizing posts (some do, but most are fairly harmless, otherwise after a while, I just choose not to follow).
But I've noticed that there are definitely preferences across the board, which is mainly why they all seem to stick around. I doubt there will be one social media platform to rule them all, the same way there's no one amusement park or one kind of gym. There are behemoths, but there's always a long tail, especially in socializing.
I used to post random thoughts that struck me as funny and I spent some time getting the wording just right. But I'm such an outlier that it stopped being fun. I just text them to a couple of people now.
On the few occasions I go on Facebook I have to resist the urge to post a tongue-in-cheek comment about how I check in so rarely because "you're all so goddamn boring."
And if I have to look at one more picture of somebody's $37 plate of paella I'm going to burn my eyes out with a fireplace poker.
I hope you’re joking but if not, there is help available for you. Facebook is not reason enough for self-harm. It comes very, very, very close, but close is not close enough.
So it seems the candle is burning from both ends.
There, your unwritten moral code is now written. Go forth and spread your seed.
Facebook is still so useful for groups and events that it’s impossible to leave though. I mean, you can leave, but then you’re the guy/woman whom others need to go out of their way to schedule with.
Twitter got it right with a "customisable news feed", the list[0], where I could create several list timelines for my friends and organize them by those who post about tech, business, political rants, etc.
[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-lists
I bet those people are shown what their friends post and are moaning on their own forums about the lack of memes and quizzes these days.
The point of the algorithm seems to be to keep you scrolling and scrolling to see what you actually want so I bet that noone is happy.
I moved on.
(and that status didnt even work)
I havent missed it. It was a bunch of people that arent my friends sharing things that drive me crazy(politics that I have no impact on).
Notwithstanding all the privacy issues, I remember the days when Facebook used to be fun. Back before timeline, back when it was limited to colleges, back when "Random Play" was listed as a desired relationship option. Now it's meme and clickbait article land.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...
Google is also dropping in Google Trends. Assuming there is a drop in usage of FB (not just a drop in searches for FB), I guess the 2016 election is only one contributing factor.
Unrelated, I recognise your name from GitHub, thanks for your work on the psychonaut wiki, I've used that resource many times.
The notifications going a bit mad about 18 months ago or so when they introduced the market stuff and "your friends are interested in going to X" was what ran me off. I'd unsubscribe and unfollow and new worthless ones would take up their place.
Now I don't even bother checking my notifications; I'll log in maybe twice a day to check if I received any messages, have a scroll through NUMTOTs, that's about it.
No one reads primary sources anymore. All kinds of baiting conclusions and titles are drawn on absolutely minimal data with zero scientific rigor like this blog entry and my feed is just reshares of these McNews for shock value and social credits.