"Deleted app" is not necessarily a good metric, considering that I prefer to use Facebook on my mobile phone as a web page instead of the app, simply because I like it that way. It's simply a more consistent and less intrusive experience IMO. Facebook is nagging me with Facebook Lite ads because it thinks that I don't have resources on the phone to run the app, but that's not the case at all.
"Deleted app within the past year", however, is probably about as good as you're going to get. And c'mon, you know as well as I do that the percentage of people who deleted the app (especially "within the last year") simply because they prefer the web version has to be single digit percentages at best. "Yeah, but, I've got special case that I'll generalize to the population..." is not a refutation.
I don't know. I've also deleted the app but continue to use the web version of Facebook. I think a lot of people just don't use Facebook in a way that's consistent with the mobile app experience.
I'm also suspicious on principle of statistics which suggest but don't actually show what they're trying to measure. If nearly half of young adults have really stopped using Facebook, surely there's a more direct statistic showing it.
Anecdotal but same here. I've deleted the app as I didn't like how it takes too much memory (200-500MB) and syncs with the phone's photo gallery. Most of the people I know in my age group (early 20s) have also deleted the app yet still continue to use messenger and the browser version.
I've done the same for a couple years now but it means I don't get those instant notifications, I'm not responding to anything right away. Maybe every day or two I check it for five minutes. That's not leaving the app but it's definitely not the kind of user they're looking for
I would say yours is the edge case. For US users, when they see an on-screen message saying "There's way more features in the app", they go ahead and download the app, and soon forget they ever even accessed it as a mobile website. FB has deliberately hobbled its mobile site in slow increments over the years to drive the maximum possible number of users to the app.
I stopped using Facebook because of their mobile site sabotage. Switched to the desktop version on my phone for a while, but at one point I stopped and thought "why am I fighting with Facebook to use it the way I want?" And just gave up.
Self-reporting measuring how socially popular respondents think an action is vs. their actual actions is likely a more significant issue (we know this from, e.g., comparisons of actual election results to pre- and post-retirement polls; immediately pre-existing polls tend to be very close to the actual results, post election polls of how people say they voted consistently show a much better result for the declared winner than the actual election results.)
Now, we don't know how big of an effect perceived popularity has on other self-reports of past actions, but we have plenty of reason to believe it plays a significant role.
People, the concept of "revealed preferences" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference) is highly relevant here. What people say in surveys is often garbage, for all kinds of reasons, social desirability bias among them. This article is useless compared to actual measurements of people's phone and time.
It is a relevant metric since it reduces notifications being sent to you and reduces the information Facebook can gather (no tracking of what else is going on on the hone etc.)
It also tells them that the App apparently dosn't give value to users and something has to change on their side (whatever "something" might be, might be reputation or features or overall experience or ...)
I use Facebook only for its login capabilities and to occasionally send messages to people whose phone numbers I don't have. I have the app currently, but usually I delete it because its notifications are irritating. I fall into the older end of that age range.
Anecdotal obviously, but I'm surprised at how pervasive the "Facebook listens to your conversations through the app" rumors are, even among the more technically literate.
I'm curious how much of an effect that rumor had on this finding.
no effect for me, personally. my reasons for deleting the app and halting usage of facebook was entirely based on the plethora of toxic/useless content that just made me want to punch most of my friends in the face.
The claim was not that they were listening to calls (which they also directly claim they don't do, according to your article), it was that Facebook listens to you through the app. They've also explicitly stated they don't do that, as well.
Your friend's friend says the Facebook app tracks conversations. Do you
a) Vaguely agree that Facebook is awful, and removing the app is a good idea,
b) Start explaining how a detailed log of every app user's location, time spent reading each story, typing speed, searches, lists of other apps used (or in use), full lists of contacts, calendar events, text messages, phone call history, photographs, nearby WiFi networks and battery statistics can be combined with website-based Facebook use and tracking cookies on other sites, allowing Facebook to create a detailed profile of each user, and that's why they showed the creepily-relevant advert.
I would usually choose (a), unless the discussion is specifically about data privacy. (b) is not literally listening, but it's close enough for a casual discussion.
While anything's possible, it would be pretty shocking if Facebook figured out how to, on iOS (I can't speak for Android):
* Record audio if the app's killed completely
* Record audio with microphone permission disabled
* etc.
All of which have been claimed.
The far more likely scenario is that we're much more predictable than we think. Remember the target controversy when they figured out a teenage girl was pregnant before she had told her parents [1]? That happened in 2012. Imagine how much more advanced things have become since then.
I don't know why this got downvoted, while the question "does FB listen in on you" may not have a definitive answer, the answer to the question "does FB messenger look at your conversation text" is "yes": http://time.com/money/5227844/facebook-reviews-private-messa...
Does it use your private messages for advertising? It seems like "no" for now, but nothing is stopping them.
This came up (albeit regarding Instagram ads) at a Seattle conference I was at a couple of weeks ago. It was during a talk about the future of video ads. An FB engineer was one of the panelists, so an audience member relayed a story of him having a conversation about a product with a friend, and then seeing an ad for that exact product in his Instagram timeline.
Whether or not they are actually listening to conversations, the effect is the same; ads that are way too personal.
I suspect they have much more information than what we tell them, and I mean raw data, not what's derived from collaborative filtering or other techniques. I wonder if our ISPs, streaming services, banks, visa, etc, share data. Maybe it's just the trackers all over the internet.
Getting ads for a specific product the day after discussing it in person could be luck... or not.
> I suspect they have much more information than what we tell them, and I mean raw data, not what's derived from collaborative filtering or other techniques. I wonder if our ISPs, streaming services, banks, visa, etc, share data. Maybe it's just the trackers all over the internet.
They absolutely do. You should download your FB data, if you have an account. It's basically a list of everywhere you've shopped/been/etc. 95% of it you likely didn't share intentionally. It's quite shocking.
I have seen this first hand. At one point, I think I had figured this out because I the Facebook app had access to "Siri results", and "Siri results" is just about anything you do on your phone. We turned off Siri results, but we would still be discussing something out loud like "maybe we should go to Bali some day" and lo and behold, my wife would see ads for Bali in her Facebook stream within 1-2 hours.
I want to add one more thing. The ads weren't just for a travel destination. It would be something totally out of character for us like "Let's build a tree house and rent in out on AirBnb" and there would be ads for renting out tree houses.
Sure but did you have any other interaction with the internet about these topics? Did you search Google for tree house building codes? Did you search Pinterest or Instagram for ideas?
I have heard this anecdote many times but I don't believe Facebook is actually recording everything we say. Mostly because I don't think our phones have that kind of battery life. I do think they have data on essentially everything you do online.
I wonder if it is also possible they associate you with searches your friends have done after being in the same location? So if you chat about going to Bali with your friends or co-workers, and one of them searches for Bali flights, they then display Bali ads to the entire group.
This is true, they are known to monitor location all the time and display ads like this. They will also suggest people to be friends if they find you guys hang out in person a lot.
They weren't analyzing voice, but what they are doing gets them just as much or more data.
- They watch how quickly you scroll through the news feed at what you pause on, even briefly.
- They have ad deals with many of the sites you probably visit so can determine many of your search terms and interests even if you didn't search those things through Facebook itself.
- They have your friend & family graph and Facebook messenger context. Even if you personally didn't say something, maybe you mentioned it to a friend at some point and they searched it or discussed it in a chat.
Did she type any related query into a search engine or browsed some related travel sites (that happened to have Facebook like buttons on them) in-between two events?
I've seen this firsthand as well. I don't know that it was Facebook, but that was the only thing that seemed plausible at the time. My wife had been saying that she'd been getting creepy ads that appeared to be based on things she said out loud. I dismissed it as, "Oh, but you were talking about that because you read about it earlier, and the app noticed you read that story." She wasn't convinced.
Then we watched a random TV show on Netflix. During the show, two characters discussed a very specific medical method of improving their chances of bearing a child. Literally minutes later, she was getting ads for this type of conception therapy. We are both past child bearing age and have not discussed it in probably 20 years. We had never even heard of the specific type of process. We had never looked it up or read anything about it. It definitely came from something listening to our household, but we don't know what. It was way too specific to have been random chance.
We don't fall into the demographics for such an ad in any way. We have Apple devices with Siri, but that seems unlikely given their privacy policies. We don't have any Amazon or Google home devices (or any other types of their devices). She's on FB, and I'm not, so we think it was probably either her laptop or phone listening. She's had mic access on her phone turned off for Facebook and no other apps were running, but these apps have a way of finding their way around such permissions.
Some "smart TV"'s can phone home with TV usage data. I wouldn't be too surprised if there was a shazzam like thing in some smart TV's that can detect certain advertisements.
When anyone technically inclined tries to explain the difference, laypeople just hear a lawyer saying: "Well, they don't do exactly that, but they do the entire list of other things you could ever brainstorm that are in the same class as that. And a dozen more gross things you are just learning exist as part of this clarification."
> Anecdotal obviously, but I'm surprised at how pervasive the "Facebook listens to your conversations through the app" rumors are, even among the more technically literate.
They were slurping up text massages and collecting call logs, IIRC. So the rumor isn't too far from the truth.
I’m curious as to whether it’s a rumour. I’m an iOS developer, and I know how difficult and seemingly implausible these rumours are, but the causal evidence to the contrary I’ve experienced is too ‘Black Mirror’ for my liking, or others.
I have troubles convincing myself it’s not true because it just happens on an almost bi-daily basis - it’s too accurate and it regularly involves things either my friends or I have definitively not typed but only spoken about.
While anything's possible, it would be pretty shocking and a big blow to Apple if Facebook figured out how to, on iOS (I can't speak for Android):
* Record audio if the app's killed completely
* Record audio with microphone permission disabled
* etc.
All of which have been claimed and seem unlikely.
The far more likely scenario is that we're much more predictable than we think. Remember the target controversy when they figured out a teenage girl was pregnant before she had told her parents [1]? That happened in 2012. Imagine how much more advanced things have become since then.
I understand these things. I explained that explicitly. I had already seen that post.
But I explained that I'm a developer. I used the term 'implausible', and, yes, given legal requirements and whatnot there would have to be some extremely shady activity going on, but what I'm trying to explain is that whatever is going on has nothing to do with text or anything except spoken voice and occurs on such a regular basis to not just myself but other friends of mine that even though I absolutely know from a scientific perspective it's almost technically impossible, I literally have troubles believing it's technical implausibility/impossibility over the fact that it is simply happening.
That's how messed up and creepy it is. And I'm certainly not the only one saying or experiencing this. Many of the incredibly intelligent and talented developers at the major bank I work at have also experienced this and have extreme troubles explaining it. Many of the brilliant minds here at HN are having to say similar things.
It's like something out of Scooby-Doo. I want to pull the mask off the bad guy, but it really feels like one of those one-offs where the monster is real.
I'm a developer too and I know it doesn't sound technically possible, but after FB's behavior it really wouldn't surprise me. Collecting copies of every SMS from Android phones via Messenger when it only advertised using Messenger to send/receive SMS alongside FB messages? Downright lies and abusive to privacy.
Most of us knew how poor Facebook's developer data policy was and no one cared until Cambridge Analytica. I'm just waiting for this voice scandal to happen in the next year or two.
Are you sure that your friends haven't searched for whatever FB suggested? Perhaps not even the exact thing but something similar or associated (e.g. searched for dog treats, sees ads for dog beds)? Have you visited a place that sells that thing with location services enabled? Do your friends express a lot of interest in the things advertised (posts, pictures, comments on any FB platform)? Do you spend a decent amount of time with these friends? What about other people that use the same home/work networks that you do?
Being able to accurately predict what you might be interested in, or at least interested enough to click on is how FB makes their money. That is where a bulk of their R&D spend goes. Couple that with the fact that humans are creatures of habit and relatively predictable, and you can end up with the notion that FB or Google must be listening in on everything you are saying.
> Are you sure that your friends haven't searched for whatever FB suggested?
Absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, in several instances. Too many, at this point.
>> Perhaps not even the exact thing but something similar or associated (e.g. searched for dog treats, sees ads for dog beds)?
Definitely not. These things are often obscure, and many times, said in jest, and never repeated via texts, and certainly never looked up in a serious context.
>> Have you visited a place that sells that thing with location services enabled?
I keep all of my location services disabled by default. I do enough development to know that's a poor idea.
>> Do your friends express a lot of interest in the things advertised (posts, pictures, comments on any FB platform)?
No, again, I think it's that these things are often said or suggested in a joking manner that really throws my friends and I off a lot of the time.
>> Do you spend a decent amount of time with these friends? What about other people that use the same home/work networks that you do?
For sure. I spend a lot of time with a lot of my friends, and again, these things are observed by co-workers as well, our security is extremely tight at my office, so the idea that could be exploited in any way by something like Facebook is disturbing at best.
Frankly, the fact that you have to ask me these things alone is evidence enough as-is that there is an insane amount of intrusiveness going on.
There are a lot of sources for error here. 1. You may pay more attention to ads you wouldn't have noticed. 2. Something prompted you to say what you said and Facebook may be aware of that cause. 3. Your behavior may change as a result of having said it and Facebook may pick up on that.
There is a solution to all this. A (repeated) double blind experiment.
Pick two phrases. Say one so the phone can hear and one so it can't. It's very important you don't know which is which. You could eg have a friend put the phone in one of two rooms.
Here's my anecdote. In March my brother and I were visiting my father on holidays. My brother jokes to him that even on vacation he brings a soldering iron (he makes an esp* open source webradio player as a retirement project), and that was the end of it.
Later on in the evening my brother had ads for soldering iron in the Facebook app.
My wife and I conduct experiments. The first was shouting “dog food” multiple times in earshot to our google home and phones. Sure enough a chewse.com pamphlet came in the mail a few days later with a discount for the website. We’ve mentioned some pretty eclectic things and found ads on Hulu correspond. I had heard some story or myth that Target could predict pregnancies based on customer’s purchase habits [1], and half believed it. Now I really do.
I thought it was just a rumor until I experienced it firsthand. I was walking down a long hallway at work with a coworker between meetings. At one end of the hallway my zipper broke on my backpack. We walked and talked about backpack zippers though the corridor while I held my phone in my hand walking. She and I were talking about if you could sew in a new zipper or you'd have to buy an entirely new backpack. And if you could hand-sew in the new zipper or if you'd need a sewing machine. When we got to our next meeting we were 10 minutes early so I logged into facebook. BOOM- ZIPPER ads and backpack ads. I'd search for nothing about zippers, hadn't googled zippers, and my backpack zipper had just broken at the previous meeting. Literally the only way it could have known about that to show me those ads had been that it was listening via my microphone.
Here is another anecdote. I was talking to a friend through a WhatsApp voice call. During the call he told me that he had just bought an air hockey table. Later that day when I logged in to Facebook, I see an ad for an air hockey table. Creeped the hell out of me.
It doesn't matter, those same users will use the mobile web version instead. More importantly, Instagram usage has gone way up in that cohort. The title is pure clickbait.
That's the sad truth - this is just reporting the method of use. Other posters in this thread reported uninstalling the app to save phone resources, and instead use Facebook from a browser on their phone.
Same. I deleted Facebook a couple years ago when it was revealed that it was reducing battery life by a double digit percentage even if you never launched the app -- its background processing was that greedy. Anecdotally my phone definitely lasted longer once I deleted it.
The mobile web version works for those rare occasions when I need to check it on the go. I'm definitely never installing their app again; I simply don't trust them to prioritize my needs over theirs (even in regards to mobile resources).
"Pew surveyed more than 3,400 U.S. Facebook users in May and June, and found that a whopping 44 percent of those ages 18 to 29 say they've deleted the app from their phone in the last year. Some of them may have reinstalled it later.
Overall, 26 percent of survey respondents say they deleted the app"
I think the second sentence is more accurate, but of course, it's not as provocative as 44%.
The second sentence is only referring to the whole population though right? 26% of all participants have deleted the app but 44% of those aged 18 to 26 have deleted it which is dangerous as that is the target demographic for Facebook.
I realized I was checking facebook a lot each day whenever I had a spare moment, but didn't have anything really interesting happening, and I wanted to engage more with those around me and have more time for down-time thinking. So I deleted the app, knowing that making the threshold higher for checking it would reduce my usage, now I might check facebook once a month on my desktop, and still nothing happening, so it is super brief. My life is better, I feel better, my relationships are better, and I don't miss it at all.
This is exactly how my leaving facebook started. After a few months without the app I logged out on desktop, and then it wasn't long until I deactivated my account.
I'd like to delete it entirely but at the moment too many people still use messenger to contact me.
Oh man that brings back fond memories of creating Trillian 0.73-0.74 skins! I was just thinking the other day that I should make an app for Mac that lets you skin it via XML in the same way. Away with the conformity of Aqua and Aqua Dark, let creativity reign free!
But you could use the Bitlbee FBMQTT Plugin [1] and WeeChat's scripting functionality to implement it for your personal account. Probably an afternoon's worth of work if you have a VPS or t1.micro lying around to run a daemon on for a few months :)
Yeah used to be it'd be the opposite. We'd try desperately try to migrate everyone to using something like Messenger (eg: AIM or ICQ) because we couldn't count on our number remaining the same.
I wonder how long that will continue. I get so many spam calls every day (about a dozen now) that I am looking towards a future where I don't have a POTS number.
I imagine a large part of it is the dramatic lower barrier thanks to services like twilio and competitors. They enable a lot of really cool tech but the programatic access to the phone network like that makes all that stuff significantly easier
So this is just my two-cents based on working for a VOIP company for a couple years, but I noticed a few patterns, specifically the industry-wide pressure to compete with Twilio, that seem to make it easier to spam text/calls.
1.) VOIP providers have low-barriers to sign-up (typically just a credit card fraud check + check to see if IP or address is from certain countries where fraud calls are common). The up-side to this is that it makes the user experience more friendly to real customers b/c they don't have to wait around, but the downside is that any spammer semi-familiar with the checks that get done can sign up and start sending spam calls for a day or two before most places get complaints and shut them down. The fact that many voip providers allow users to set their Display Id to anything too without any approval also is also really convenient for spammers (ie, there aren't usually ways to immediately detect when a user fraudently set their Caller Id to the name of a bank or something)
2.) APIs everywhere. Twilio got big in part b/c it made APIs available, but the smaller providers are catching up and also adding APIs for texting and calling services. Spammers can automate their spam and re-use the scripts between different accounts when they get banned, so it makes sending out spam texts easier too.
3.) VOIP companies actually are ok with some degree of spam, as long as the spammers pay their bills. So they don't have a motivation to actually stop all of it. Instead of blocking all spam-ish calls outright, some places will just make a deal so that some callers (identified by having a high rate of unanswered calls + very short length calls) pay a higher rate to compensate for potential reputation damage. This is meant for legal cold-calling I imagine, but in practice, they don't know what is actually being said on those phone calls.
Yep. It currently explicitly states this and does it by default when you get to the final deactivation step. Previously it was an option you had to notice and click.
I did this one time and my account ended up in a broken state where friends couldn't send me messages in long-running one-on-one Messenger chats (they got some mystery error like "This user is not accepting messages right now."). Group chats still worked and I could send messages to those same long-running Messenger conversations.
Re-activating the Facebook side of the account resolved the issue. Caveat deactivator.
Better yet I wish Events were integrated into messenger, but part of me thinks Facebook knows it that a substantial portion of users would probably stick to messenger and never visit the news feed ever again because that's the only thing many of us care about.
Slightly different scenario on my side -- I want to use it, but the timeline has gotten so limited it doesn't draw me in as much. (No, i'm not on blocked lists. But strange things happen, e.g., Facebook has decided that despite my brother and I being friends and being marked "close" and not blocking each other, we dont see many of each others' posts.)
I'll confess I actually like using Facebook because it allows me to keep engaged and in touch with family with much less effort than before -- but whatever timeline changes they keep doing, I now see the same stories on my scroll. If I log in five times during the day, i see the same set of stories each of the five times.
Result: I don't check it as much, dont want to check it as much. So much for ranking functions.
Honestly, I feel the same a bit. Like the company itself is cancerous - their complete lack of regard with the way they let hate spread on their platform is shameful. But...I've been on since the old days. I remember when it was actually a community platform and all your friends were there. That was pretty cool.
I've never been a huge Facebook app user but the company definitely has me hooked on Whatsapp. All my friends, family, business partners, seem to have gravitated to Whatsapp and WhatsApp groups. It feels like Facebook.app is dead, Long live Facebook (Inc)...
I've actually been seeing "No more posts" a lot recently. I scroll through two pageloads of content and then it tells me there's nothing more to display.
Facebook, I've been signed up since you first opened up to non-edu accounts.. you're telling me there's nothing at all more to display?
I want to check FB once a week or two to catch up on how my friends are doing, but the FB ranking also fails me. All I get is viral click-bait and none of the meaningful news of friends. One friend was sick, another launched an app... i found out about all this after. No reason to log in anymore.
While I'm sure FB's algos are somewhat to blame for this, it's hard to estimate just how much content has been driven away by the site since the halcyon days of 2007-2012. Most of the reason I left was because none of my friends posted photos or thoughts any more -- folks just started sharing links and regurgitating talking points without generating any original content, so I left because I have HN/Reddit for that (with better curation tools, at that). Facebook was a good place when all of my friends used it for messaging and sharing their lives, but at some point everyone I knew started to use instagram and snapchat for those things.
Snapchat has mostly been killed by monetization, but instagram is still on life support for now. Losing the chronological timeline was quite the blow, though. Is it really that hard to balance "pleasant place to share my life" and "shove ads into my face"?
I believe that is how Facebook dies. Not people deleting their account, they’ll just stop checking their feed, because it’s spam and stuff friends likes or share and no longer posts about their life.
That pretty much exactly describes me - I never did delete the app on my phone but I can't remember when I last opened it. I just have no interest in checking it anymore.
I stopped posting because of the whole thing about social media written in ink. I'm not posting something which may be held against me, or have me randomly shamed in the future because the nuance of my joke was lost in text. When I last posted in 2007, the internet seemed to be a much different, friendlier place.
Facebook in 2007 was also mostly about friends, and not selling me stuff that it couldn't possibly know I was interested in unless my movements over the entire internet were being tracked.
The risk/reward of posting humor on the internet nowadays is terrible. Reward is maybe a few of your friends find it funny, maybe it gets ignored. Risk is someone is offended, you lose your livelihood and become an internet pariah because someone organized an angry mob against you on some Discord. Maybe someone doxes you, finds your address and starts harassing you at your home. The internet in 2018 is kind of a terrible place.
> The risk/reward of posting humor on the internet nowadays is terrible.
Doing so under your own name, yes. That's why I think places like Reddit are better suited to these kinds of silly things, assuming you don't get doxxed, which can happen.
I think he means "written in ink" in the sense that something you post cannot be erased, much like how if you write something with a pen, vs with a pencil.
I am careful about what I let get out on the Internet. I’m more concerned about being embarrassed about some of the juvenile arguments I got in using my real name on Usenet back in the day than what I post on FaceBook.
Any company that wouldn’t want to hire me because they find my bleeding heart libertarian pro-capitalist views offensive is not a company I would want to work for. Hell they would probably be confused about where I stand on most things.
I honestly do like seeing pics of my friends and their many animals. I like knowing what events people are going to. Other than that, I don't care.
I can't post without feeling like an attention seeker; because that's how I see most people who do post. It's to the point where I stopped sharing things I think my friends might actually find interesting... I'm out here all by myself in the end.
I'd love to know what happened, because I'm honestly not sure what it was. I just remember posting fearlessly about all sorts of random stuff I'd ashamed to think I put on the internet nowadays.
I used to use it daily, but now basically do not interact with it at all. I left because a year ago I spent a week away from it, and when I logged back in it was insanely spammy and clingy with irrelevant "your friend liked this post" notifications that I literally couldn't turn off.
The unmutable spam in my inbox forced me to turn off all Facebook mail notifications, and the user-hostile behavior made me hate the platform and not want to come back to it, almost out of spite.
I'll bet these underhanded tactics performed great in A/B testing. But big picture, they should not be surprised that people are leaving in droves after deliberately degrading user experience.
Yes, that's how I see and use Facebook as well. It's there if someone not close enough to have my phone number wants to reach me, but other than that I simply don't open and use the app, let alone post content. It's just not worthwhile to me.
Checking Facebook became the digital equivalent of looking in the fridge. You already know what’s in there, but you look anyways. Eventually people get over this. I notice far fewer of my friends seem to be posting and using it.
I deleted my account and recently created a new one to try out selling a product through ads. We'll see if it can deliver commercial value to me. I know a lot of people find social value through chat on there, but it's really lacking in that department for me.
The majority of the feed was what looked like irrelevant spam, ads or political arguing. It has essentially no positive value anymore so I deleted my account.
I'm not the OP but methinks the two are related. There was a time back in the day when FB gave me updates on what my friends were doing. And then one day - somewhere between 2008, when I stopped using it, and 2013, when I tried it again for a few months, stopped, and only came back 3 or 4 times since - it became mostly memes, cat videos, feel good stuff, what have you.
I've yet to bring myself to delete the account, since I get occasional messages I care about and it's convenient to lookup someone's email you've lost. I would if that wasn't the case.
I feel like the Facebook timeline has just become a dumping ground for rehashed memes, vaguebooking, unchecked 'facts', unfounded opinions, and, worse, blatantly false information that causes people to lash out to their so-called 'friends' when they're presented a different perspective.
Not only that, but I've actually experienced first-hand, and witnessed many of my friends experiencing depression and anxiety from the constant scrolling. The 'desire to be seen or heard' factor really plays in to an overall sense of toxicity and negativity that there have actually been a number of psychology studies on.
Overall, I find, contrary to say, HN, which I still spend too much time on (but mostly when I'm bored at work, ha), there is no bar of quality on Facebook. It's a cesspool of humanity's worst sides, especially if you consider the privacy violations of the medium itself.
In fact, it's actually becoming a faster and faster race to the bottom. (Can we all remember this year of 2018 started with 'Tide Pods'?)
About a year ago i listed a car on facebook and craigslist at the same time, and it ended up selling on facebook. I check it a few times a day(does blogging about it count against that) and mostly use it to post pics to family, troll friends. I also started my account about a year ago.
They added a indicator "You’re All Caught Up" when you've seen all new posts on the feed. Of course there can be some posts below the indicator that you haven't seen.
Now also Strava is making their feed sorted by some magic with no option to make it chronological :(
I can't quite understand this trend.
It's a symptom of the way our industry works. Pick a metric and over optimise it.
Say you pick the "time to like a post" metric, then as an employee you're incentivised to put the most click-baitee article at the top.
Now if you pick the "number of ads displayed in feed without drop-out" you may have something similar too.
Rince and repeat and you end up with the mess we see.
Regarding Instagram, I noticed they started to retain posts from the timeline. So they encourage compulsive checking it the app.
Open it once : it shows 2 new posts, close it and open it again, 2 more posts, both old by at least a few hours.
They just rewarded your brain for checking the app compulsively. Once I noticed that I couldn't unsee it, and I closed my account.
I _think_ strava is just when a user actually posted to srava, it used to be when they did the ride, but you would miss friend's rides if they only update strava the next day. I slightly preferred the old way, but it isn't too bad so far.
I asked them about it and they told me the feed is sorted based on what they think is most interesting. They have a survey about it at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/NewStravaFeed
Between the God-awful performance of the Facebook web site itself (on my 2018 15" MacBook Pro i9/32GB RAM/512 GB SSD, it still manages to make the fans spin. Loud.), and the ludicrous file size of the Facebook app, any developer worth their salt would actually have to wonder if optimization is something Facebook actively ignores.
Ever since Facebook unnecessarily divided their application into two, (Facebook and Messenger), I've pretty much sworn off it. But there's one simple reason, beyond the constant privacy concerns, that no single person should consider putting this app on their iOS device.
Facebook's iOS app currently sits at a staggering, literally almost unbelievable 316.7MB! Yes, 316.7MB. Almost a third of a GB. What. The. Hell.
Messenger is 139.4MB! What on earth QA process do these guys have where they consider this to be even remotely okay on non-storage-expandable devices, especially in the days where we still had 8GB iPhones?
On an 8GB iPhone, (which I understand are not in a lot of use at the moment, but still), which ends up having closer to 6-7GB of space, that would mean that Facebook + Messenger alone would take up 1/10th-1/14th of your space.
I miss the days when there was a 50MB-100MB limit on applications being downloaded over 3G/LTE/cellular. This was fantastic. Every company I worked for demanded I was able to trim the application size down to under 100MB so that there was a fair chance for everyone to be able to download it.
Many of my friends are still on 16GB iPhones and the size alone is the first reason they remove the app.
The second reason being the functionality offered does not match the app size.
The third reason being the general public is starting to visibly see the lack of value Facebook adds in our lives, and even the toxicity of the addiction of constantly scrolling.
You can do almost everything you can do within the Facebook app simply by logging into Facebook on your browser.
Protip (source: I am an iOS developer of 8+ years): If you'd like people to use and keep your application on their device that usually has extremely limited storage capacity, or at least non-expandable storage, you'd better ensure the application actually offers a significant value over that of not having the application installed.
Messenger's video chat, et cetera, makes it worthwhile. But it's also three times as small as the Facebook app. So, while Facebook's application provides almost no value at more than 300MB, Messenger is able to pack infinitely more functionality into 1/3rd the size.
What the hell are these guys doing wrong? Where's QA?
Don't worry: they've been slowly hobbling the mobile site to make the application more and more attractive. iirc you can't even message on the normal (non-basic) mobile site any more: it just shows a splash screen requesting that you download messenger. And of course their site uses screen dimensions and user agents to decide to force you onto mobile even if you request desktop.
It's worse than that. Even if you check the "Desktop site" box on Chrome for Android, every time you type a word in the messenger box and press space, it's deleted.
You have to go a long way to make anything that bad, it can't be accidental.
You can still get to it via normal means. You don't have to use the desktop site. What you do is go to facebook.com, check the "desktop site" option in the browser... page refreshes, you're in "mobile view" still (m.facebook.com), click messages icon.... now you're able to message people just fine. Works fine for me. I use Brave (which is not much different than Chrome on Android).
Code size is a function of engineer and feature count, since each engineer makes x lines of code per day. For example, there is a craigslist app in fb, a city guide app, an events app and so on, things that could be separate apps and companies on their own.
No. Code size is based on a thing called optimization. If your application is too big, and it's because you think that there's too many engineers because there's too much code because the final application is three times as large as it has any right to be, then you have a problem of too many cooks in the kitchen.
If you're ignoring optimization in favour of hiring more people, you, as a software company, have your priorities so out of whack I'm not sure how to even offer a suggestion onto how to move forward.
I'll repeat: the application needs to have value. If I had Facebook installed, it would be by at least 100MB the largest application on my iPhone, next to GarageBand.
tl;dr: if optimization is not part of your development process, your development process is not good. This isn't something that can be argued.
You seem to be convinced that you've solved the application size problem that literally thousands of engineers have been working on for years. Or that you've got more insight into the engineering tradeoffs made at the company.
I can assure you that the facebook CLIENT application is not rocket science and not worth 350M of disk. Maybe those thousands of engineers are looking at it from the wrong angle, yes, absolutely posible. Maybe they are not focusing on it too, but in something else.
You seem to be convinced that there is any way in hell an application that is a client for an existing web service that is little more than a glorified RESTful client needs to be more than 300MB.
You’re either not aware how these kinds of applications are constructed, or you’re perhaps not familiar with just how simple putting an application together like this is. The other response to this comment says a very similar thing.
Yes. I can confidently say as an iOS developer of 8+ years if I was given a chance to manage this application I would certainly be doing the hell of a better job.
If you don’t think you could, that’s cool, but I’ve made my living developing these types of applications since the App Store’s beta, and similar to when I hear an absolutely shitty pop song with mysogonistic or materialistic lyrics funded by some multi-million-dollar artist I say ‘I can do better,’ because, frankly, most musicians worth their salt could.
It doesn’t matter how successful a company is, how much talent they have, if there are too many voices talking over each other nobody is heard. And poor decision making is affecting the app’s bottom line of usage at this point.
When I say I can do better, it’s not coming from arrogance, the Facebook app is actually just that poor that any other direction that it’s current one would be an improvement. The statistic that OP posted alone proves that.
If Facebook has even 25-30 people on their iPhone app, on the client side, they have way too many. We’re talking about pulling existing info from a server and re-displaying it. At what point, other than the tiny shell required to display that information, maybe about 100-150MB at most, is that extra 150-200MB coming from?
If Facebook’s API were open for third-party FB applications, I’m sure I’d not be the first to whip up a minimalistic, small-sized, easy-to-use, far more intuitive application in a month or two of casual dev time. I did a similar thing for Twitter. It’s not hard.
Is it so much more likely that whole extra let’s say 150MB needs to be there than it’s likely that there’s simply too many cooks in the kitchen and optimization is being completely ignored?
I would expect that the FB client app does a lot more than you would expect it does. There are probably features in there for gamers, businesses, marketers, sellers, etc.
Yes you could build out 90% of the app that most people use in a smaller download in a couple months, that's not really noteworthy though.
You obviously have the experience level to get a job at facebook. Go do that (or some other big tech co) and you will understand why their apps are so large.
Some other candidates: linked in, twitter, uber, lyft, youtube, snapchat, gmail. Binary size is a problem issue at all of them and they would appreciate an expert such as yourself to solve it. You could get a staff engineer position and make half a million a year!
First of all, the Facebook app is literally an entire operating system unto itself, among other things. Like someone pointed out, there's an entire Craigslist, an entire Snapchat, an entire Yelp, an entire YouTube, an entire web browser and so much more stuffed into a single app. On top of that, there are probably thousands of A/B tests and divergent code paths that are running simultaneously. Even if you have a feature, you probably have the code to switch between 10 different variants of that feature. There's also complex real time user instrumentation, media storage and backup features, tons of custom animation frameworks, networking frameworks, caching frameworks and on and on and on. The level of complexity and the millions of man-hours worth of code backing that app is insane.
At this point, it shouldn't be surprising in the slightest that the app is a cool ~300megs. Could it be better? Sure, and I'm sure they're working on it. After all, look at their developing country strategy and the stuff they do with "Facebook For Every Phone" to shave off every last byte from their apps: https://code.fb.com/android/how-we-built-facebook-lite-for-e...
If you look at the incentives, it's NOT in their best interests to make updates hard. That's not how they make money and in developing countries it actively costs them business. It's not that they're intentionally bloating the app just to mess with you....it's just that there's really that much going on in the app, along with it maybe being a little sloppy too.
Look, I have my beef with Facebook just like everyone else does to an extent....but this whole app size argument you seem to be spending a lot of energy on just has no legs if you truly understood the problem space.
I mean this is what you said: "We’re talking about pulling existing info from a server and re-displaying it". We _are not_ talking about that. The problem space is much much much larger than that (I mean they're running machine learning models on-device, doing real time facial recognition, leveraging AR in their custom cameras, streaming real-time data, among other things). I think you are severely overestimating your knowledge of the topic and I implore you to truly take a step back and re-evaluate what people are trying to tell you here.
The key word there is trade offs, and it’s clear, if the client is 300+ MB, that the engineers there are trading off smaller size for something (faster development, code reuse, etc.)
You and parent are probably both right. They obviously could make the client 30MB or even 3MB, but choose not to because they find other things more important.
I mean, you also work at Fb. Maybe you are biased? I have a middle line Moto-E phone and installing fb app or messenger app totally makes the phone unusable. Surely something went wrong along the way?
I feel that, idiotically, as phone sizes increased, app creators seem to think it's okay to double, triple, or quadruple the size of their original applications. Without adding anything significant on top of what was there to start.
This is ludicrous. We are not gaining anything by having extra storage space if everything we had installed on our devices suddenly doubles or triples in size, because, hell, it can.
I miss the days when there was a 50MB-100MB limit on applications being downloaded over 3G/LTE/cellular. This was fantastic. Every company I worked for demanded I was able to trim the application size down to under 100MB so that there was a fair chance for everyone to be able to download it.
I'm not sure if that statistic changed, but it must have, because now not only do people not give a damn, it's like they actively see how much space their stupid service can take up on our phone before we get sick of it and save that room for more music, movies, or photos.
It's basically the Jevons paradox - as cost of compute power decreases, it encourages increased use, and as the result, the gains can be more than offset by the increased demand.
Deleted my facebook but forgot how many of my other accounts I used facebook as signing up (another eye opener) So I reactivated my facebook to start migrating my accounts just to use my email as auth. Hopefully soon I can delete my facebook
The irony is that as Facebook tries to recapture young people by stuffing the app with Stories and other youth-oriented features, it puts off older users like me, who will never, ever use Stories, while still not being cool enough to attract the kids.
I think Facebook's decline is great. For too long it has sucked all the life out of the social networking space. Perhaps now we can see some real competition and innovation.
Why is HN so eager to document the downfall of facebook? First, realize that for a large part of its demographics, facebook is the internet, and when they quit they 'll leave the internet altogether (provided that there 's not another new platform that absorbs them). Second, other social media are having far bigger leakages (snapchat) but that doesn't seem to concern anyone.
Because Facebook has a particular history of just...being evil, for lack of a better word. I heard about the SnapChat leak, but I seem to hear about privacy invasions from Facebook on a weekly, if not bi-daily basis.
Also, it's not necessarily just Facebook HN likes to shit all over. From what I've seen it's Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple. They all kind of get their time in HN's 'hate spotlight'. (Oh, and it's not as big of a company, but Magic Leap is up there, too. :P )
There is, if anything, a bias towards favouring Apple products, but it's not nearly as fanboy/fangirl-ish as it is on the rest of the 'net. It seems at least HN'ers, even those who favour Apple, are, for the most part, also willing to admit it's bad practices.
And that's a pretty strong claim that Facebook is the internet for a lot of folks. What about YouTube? Google? Wikipedia? (Especially for students?) :/
that's a pretty strong claim that Facebook is the internet for a lot of folks
It's just reality. There's some deal people in a lot of less-wealthy countries get where they get free FB chat on their phones, but can't see FB pictures, don't have googling/internet etc. It's extremely common in many countries, I know about it because many of my friends around the world have that.
Most of the comments on this page seem similarly to ignore/not be aware of what's happening in most of the world. Young people not caring about FB? Is that just in the US or something? I don't know, but in most of the world (Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America at least) people young and old are posting pics of themselves and their friends, commenting on each others pics, chatting, just like they ever did.
For me its the general sense that Facebook + most mainstream social media has been having a negative effect on society, both in terms of socialization and unethical invasions of privacy. The fact that for a large part of the world that facebook is "the internet" is a rather negative thing in my mind - its a devil's bargain that the US and the west is grappling with, while the benefits are still outweighing the costs for developing areas.
I fear we set that up with the "outrage" culture to trigger clicks for ads. Nuance disappeared from most public conversation on online newspapers, and things started getting black and white.
I mostly don't read these articles, but some random observations:
Facebook never clicked for me. I deleted it, went back, still couldn't make it work, deleted it again, started a new account and was banned. Whatevs. It seems to not click for a lot of folks inclined to hang in spaces like HN. Some folks who never really got it and perhaps felt left out that "everyone else was on it" may take glee in watching it fall and may feel some sense of vindication or the like.
There are truly terrible things being fostered by Facebook in some parts of the world, such as some developing countries. If you care about human rights, it's not unreasonable to feel like Facebook is a pox upon humanity and deserves to die.
(Complete 180 from the last point:) Facebook is a seemingly trivial thing. Taking glee in watching it burn can be good distraction from worse things happening in the world.
Finding a "bad guy" to blame things on helps a lot of people feel better about their own life choices, whether that is reasonable or not.
Humans just aren't monoliths. There is no single uniform answer here. There are around 5 million visitors a month to HN and however many of them are happy to see FB go down, each will have myriad different reasons for feeling that way.
For the developing countries I know about (SE Asia in particular) it’s definitely still very much in the positive range - it’s adding real value. The downside has yet to hit I think.
> First, realize that for a large part of its demographics, facebook is the internet, and when they quit they 'll leave the internet altogether
Isn't that hyperbole?
Or rather, that might be a demographic they never lose. Might explain why they were big on "internet.org". Anyone with options seems to have found better places to hang out (shocking - even IRL).
Maybe the better prediction is quitting FB is like quitting the soi-dissant "social" network thing. Is that a bad thing?
I did this. In the following sequence, over a few years, and am now to step 5:
1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone;
2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone;
3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone;
4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally
5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.
It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account. But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?"
One extra step you can do (somewhere between 2 and 3) is change your profile pic and your cover photo to messages advertising your intent to disengage from Facebook. That serves two functions: 1) it lets people who want to reach you know they shouldn't use Facebook to do so, and 2) it makes the withdraw visible and social, which may encourage others to follow.
# ~/unfuckfacbook.sh
#!/bin/bash
sed -i '' s/'^127.0.0.1 facebook.com'/'#127.0.0.1 facebook.com'/ /etc/hosts
sed -i '' s/'^127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com'/'#127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com'/ /etc/hosts
sed -i '' s/'^127.0.0.1 m.facebook.com'/'#127.0.0.1 m.facebook.com'/ /etc/hosts
sleep 30
say "Hey asshole, get off Facebook"
sleep 30
~/fuckfacbook.sh
~/fuckfacbook.sh just undoes the hosts file work
It helpped for a while but at some point I had to just commit to not checking it. I have some legitimate business I have to do on there sometimes (I'm a musician and I need more side-guy gigs), so I post updates from insta (which is less addicting to me) or if I open it I commit to not scrolling and browsing but just checking alerts.
It's so fcking creepy though... I mean, I'm legitimately an alcoholic but I can (when I want to, which is usually all the time these days) at least not _start_ drinking... but if I stopped drinking for a couple of days and the bottle of scotch in my cabinet sent me an email trying to get me to drink, I'd have to pour it out.
If you're using macOS, you'll need to do sed -i "" ... (put an empty string argument after the -i flag). If the second to last argument on the command line is -i, I think on the version of sed that ships with most distros, sed assumes that the argument to -i is the empty string and that the last argument in the command is the pattern. The version that ships with macOS, on the other hand, always treats the argument after -i as the extension to use for the backup file.
Great, now you have one less company selling your data out of thousands. And remember that FB will still retain your profile forever and continue build on it via shadow profile - from everyone you know, and probably from bartering data with other companies you still use. From Google/Apple powering your OS, from Cell operator collecting info with baseband chip, thousands of them.
I'm not saying FB is good, I just say that this fight is already lost, delete FB account or not.
I'm on step 4. Already feeling liberated. On Twitter, I unfollowed any political accounts or accounts which were overly toxic. My mood is better and I feel far less distracted.
facebook owns whatsapp too. I already did all 5 of thsoe steps some time ago... but I have friends in certain parts of the world where whatsapp is the only app. Not sure how to curtail that one.
You could try and get them on Wire or Signal. But it's an uphill battle, unfortunately. Let's wait and see until Facebook fucks up WhatsApp, then try again.
I'm logged out on my phone. Logged in through desktop in Chrome but have the "News Feed Eradicator for Facebook" chrome extension installed and am only logged in from my specific "personal" container in firefox, and all of that is enough of an obstacle for me to not spend much time on it.
I don't have Facebook or Messenger on my phone... but it was pretty easy because the people I'm friends with on Facebook almost invariably never post. There's a really small group of people who "Like" my post, and sometimes I like theirs, but the actual discussions, or interactions about substantive matters, are almost dead in my crowd.
So, it's quiet, and almost unnecessary, and easy enough to live with by checking in periodically. Mostly people hiking and running on weekends, or posting a thing about their kid, get a bit of social love...
But really, among me and my 40somethings, almost no actual activity. And so, if the 20somethings don't use it a whole lot either, what's Facebooks future?
> "Pew surveyed more than 3,400 U.S. Facebook users in May and June, and found that a whopping 44 percent of those ages 18 to 29 say they've deleted the app from their phone in the last year."
That feels like a fairly small sample. Then from that to look at some subset (i.e., 18 to 29) feels even more suspect.
Also, best I can tell, this survey was self-reported.
This is worthy of at-the-bar discussion, but let's not take it too seriously otherwise; at least not until the data is better.
I see the same. Maybe because it's stating the obvious? That said, when you read the comments it's as if so often the obvious has been ignored. Such is the effects of confirmation bias?
It was the notifications that were the last straw for me. If I can't figure out how to 100% disable your notifications in 5 minutes, your app is gone. I'm sure it's possible but apparently as a software engineer I'm not smart enough.
I reiterate: if it's not obvious within 5 minutes of poking around the app settings, I'm uninstalling the app. If they cared about user autonomy they would have a note in the app settings explaining how to do what you suggest at the OS level.
I'm on Android. I have no doubt something like this is possible there as well, but again if the app doesn't explain to me how to do this then it's obvious they have no respect for my agency and I'm uninstalling their crap.
FB can shift its model to becoming like priceline. Just try to buy up all the social networks. For example most travel site you probably use are owned by priceline. The same way Facebook could maybe buy up other social networks.
at least can be halted by the disapproval of antitrust regulators.
That's the key though, they can continue to try until someone sits up and takes notice. Depending on the regulatory climate at any given time a company will have varying degrees of success with this before they are stopped outright before buying any more competition. Either that or they suddenly start abusing their positions such that people/other companies complain enough for regulators to take notice of them.
"Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony"
> WhatsApp and Instagram acquisitions needed approvals from EU before they could continue.
What would it mean for a US based company if they decided to acquire two other US based companies and US regulators approved it, but EU regulators didn't?
What would happen if the company went forward with the acquisition anyway?
Most likely, the company would be fined and ordered to either sell off the company or agree to some other set of penalties. If they refused to pay the fine or perform their penalties, they could be banned from operating in the EU. They'd be unable to advertise in the EU, make deals with EU companies, employ people and set up datacentres in the EU, etc etc.
Companies like Facebook aren't "US based" in any way that means anything except for where their CEO normally works and which stock exchange their shares are traded on - they have operations that are central to their business all over the world, and many of those can be disrupted.
They will have to satisfy regulators from all major regions where they want to operate. Non-compliance results financial, or criminal penalties or not being allowed to operate in EU.
In theory FB could just agree with EU that they will cease all operations in EU and leave in peace, but that would effectively kill FB over long term. Competitors would crush them. Imagine a mobile carrier who can't make calls to EU or email provider who can't sent or receive calls from EU. FB is in the same situation. It's a social network. Value for the users comes from connections.
Every international company negotiates some kind of deal if they want to stay international.
I bet the Facebook employees who pushed to buy Instagram are feeling pretty justified right about now. But still, I'm not sure if Instagram can be monetized to the same degree as Facebook was in the last decade, especially as they continue to wreck their brand with privacy abuses (note that I'm not a privacy hawk).
Instagram is better positioned for monetization because of:
A) Stories and TV like content to compete with Snap
B) Ads integrated into their proprietary browser (aka Instagram app)
C) Sponsored live events
They’ve essentially made a closed ecosystem without having to rely on a desktop browser and they’re more mobile centric than Facebook. Furthermore, Visual content is the basis for IG and it lends itself better for monetization.
If anything, IG works better for facebook and its users because it's more honest. It's a platform for photo and video sharing and loads of people just use it to voluntarily follow brands anyway. In some ways, instagram is facebook's distilled product - rather than a directory which became everything, it's just a feed of content, so the terms and user expectations are different.
You mean to ruin a secondary platform? I've all but stopped using Instagram for the same reason I've all but stopped using FB... there are just too many ads to scroll past to see what I'm actually there to see (the people I'm friends with/following). Every other post now seems to be an ad/sponsored post. Both platforms have gone overboard to the point that I only visit maybe once/week now instead of daily. I also don't have any FB related apps on my phone since they all share data with FB and want access to every possible damn permission. I just visit the sites in my desktop browser now (and sign out when done). So, they better be charging a LOT more for the ads they show as I don't think I'm in the minority here by visiting a lot less often due to the complete over-saturation of them.
I'm not arguing that they're doing good things with it; I'm not an Instagram user. I was only observing that Instagram's rise is conveniently (for Facebook) occurring during Facebook's fall.
I've been doing the same for months, and I still see ads. The only effect I see is that ads are worse & worse with every day passing. At some point I hope advertisers will understand that Facebook is wasting their money on people like me. They ought to demand to Facebook that users hostile to ads are not targeted anymore...
Priceline actually got renamed to Booking Holding earlier this year, to reflect the fact that Booking.com is by far the largest part of their turnover.
Expedia have hotels.com, the main competitor to booking. The plane business and the hotel business are of similar size from what I've seen. Both huge and shadowing everything else.
I just got back from a three week vacation, and the travel-specific site I used most was TripAdvisor. I also used a lot of sites not specific to travel (like google maps and reddit).
Does TripAdivsor not qualify as a "major website about travel"? I don't actually know what share of travel-related web traffic they get, and I realize that Expedia and Priceline both own lots of other sites in the space.
What percentage of TripAdvisor does Expedia still own? The stock looks to be mostly held by various mutual funds although I didn't look very closely and may be missing something.
That's just accounting. Doesn't matter. Businesses are not run independently, they share some employees and services.
When you join the company, they will explain you the portfolio of brands and how they link together. A user might leave a site and spend money somewhere else, but it's alright as long as it stays in the family.
They're independently owned. You could argue that it was just accounting if the two businesses had the same or similar ownership while being two separate entities, but they're two different publicly traded companies with substantially different ownership. They also don't share a single board member. Can you provide some sort of substantive indication that they're operating together (today, as compared to prior to the TripAdvisor spinoff)?
Does anyone else find it super-strange that, as what is consistently one of the top ten iOS applications in the App Store, and a massive company now purchased by an even more massive company, Instagram can not be bothered to produce a native iPad app?
It's been 8 years (the first iPad was released in 2010) and the platform has certainly proven itself not to be a fad.
Instagram looks like an actual joke on my iPad Pro 12".
I believe they have focused on their web app for this. Turning it into a home screen based web application has been far better. Not as great as a native app, but better than the iPhone one scaled up!
Is there some one-click way to "bottle" web apps like this on demand? I'm thinking of something that does some light crawling, fills its cache up, shims xmlhttprequests for static data, and sandwiches it in a shell. It wouldn't be perfect, but it could always fall back on the real site when its cache falls through..
They’ve tested it time and time again, most recently last year. There’s less posting of images and stories which they figured would lower engagement across the app in general if there was marginally less content (they see it as their high growth crown jewel). I suspect when growth plateaus we’ll see the iPad app
But that's a lame argument: I don't expect iPad to be the primary device for posting, but you should be able to have a fine consuming experience in it.
It feels like running a 640x480 app on a 4k capable screen.
It's a joke that they would ignore what a crappy experience it is.
I hate Instagram more than FB. Everybody become some sort of "influencer" there, everybody is selling something!!!??!! On top of that 1 out of 3 posts is an AD. I don't have it on my phone anymore.
There are far, far, too many ads. But the ads are at least more tasteful than on most platforms. If you keep your list of follows < 100 or so (and take care to cull any accounts that get too spammy -- limiting yourself to people you know personally is a good strategy for this), Instagram is a pretty pleasant platform to check once a day, especially if your friends use Stories.
That being said, it suffers from Facebook syndrome to the extent that you literally have to fight the platform to make it usable. I'm holding out for some kind of federated hybrid of instagram/facebook in the near future with a chronological timeline and a reasonable volume of ads (to keep the lights on)/subscription option.
It's easy to get cynical about this but what I like about Instagram as opposed to facebook is that it's superficial by design. That makes it way less of a "thing".
It doesn't pretend like it truly "manages your social life" like facebook does, it's just funny pictures your extroverted friend posts. Instagram stories are gone after 24 hours. They're temporal. I know people who post 10 or 20 things a day on stories and maybe a pic here and there every couple of weeks otherwise.
Similarly, WhatsApp is SMS. SMS running through facebook but it's not very organized, either. My friend deleted WhatsApp, now we text via SMS and I see no difference. A group I was part of decided to use Telegram, so I just made a Telegram account, no friction whatsoever, there's no reason to feel like you're leaving something behind. People in Europe use it because mobile internet is way cheaper than paying for SMS since a text message via mobile internet is like a couple of bytes of traffic. Same with images. Group chat is nice. But it's all not very... connected.
It doesn't really make a profile, old messages are basically just an archive that nobody bothers to look through. I'm aware that facebook probably runs every machine learning algorithm ever invented through that data but from a user's perspective, it's way less of a "world", it's just one tool to share messages/pictures. It's not your life. Social networks aren't "just facebook" anymore and they're way less centralized that way.
Honestly I'd imagine this is on purpose. Facebook wouldn't want their platforms to overlap too much anyway-- wouldn't that be putting all eggs in one basket, in terms of vision for the future of social interaction?
There's bets they're clearly taking across companies (like stories), and they definitely are trying to flow traffic between Instagram and Facebook, but to some degree they've kept each app their own and that has only worked in their favour so far.
Not just them. Almost everybody does that. Just a few weeks ago saw a documentary that explained that the same happens in dating apps/websites, for instance.
It's also logical. I mean, what can you do when you are the market leader already.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 392 ms ] threadI'm also suspicious on principle of statistics which suggest but don't actually show what they're trying to measure. If nearly half of young adults have really stopped using Facebook, surely there's a more direct statistic showing it.
Now, we don't know how big of an effect perceived popularity has on other self-reports of past actions, but we have plenty of reason to believe it plays a significant role.
People, the concept of "revealed preferences" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference) is highly relevant here. What people say in surveys is often garbage, for all kinds of reasons, social desirability bias among them. This article is useless compared to actual measurements of people's phone and time.
It also tells them that the App apparently dosn't give value to users and something has to change on their side (whatever "something" might be, might be reputation or features or overall experience or ...)
I'm curious how much of an effect that rumor had on this finding.
When you're alone on Facebook it's easier to be yourself, and for some it's not a pretty picture.
Facebook = Friends and family pissing me off
Reddit = Strangers amusing me
The app has enough permissions that when coupled with Facebook's data analytics it amounts to a similar invasion of privacy.
You might as well just admit to encouraging disinformation campaigns against things you don't personally like.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/faceb...
Not quite "listening to calls," but not too different either. It shows you where their heart is.
a) Vaguely agree that Facebook is awful, and removing the app is a good idea,
b) Start explaining how a detailed log of every app user's location, time spent reading each story, typing speed, searches, lists of other apps used (or in use), full lists of contacts, calendar events, text messages, phone call history, photographs, nearby WiFi networks and battery statistics can be combined with website-based Facebook use and tracking cookies on other sites, allowing Facebook to create a detailed profile of each user, and that's why they showed the creepily-relevant advert.
I would usually choose (a), unless the discussion is specifically about data privacy. (b) is not literally listening, but it's close enough for a casual discussion.
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/h/facebook-does-not-use-your-ph...
* Record audio if the app's killed completely
* Record audio with microphone permission disabled
* etc.
All of which have been claimed.
The far more likely scenario is that we're much more predictable than we think. Remember the target controversy when they figured out a teenage girl was pregnant before she had told her parents [1]? That happened in 2012. Imagine how much more advanced things have become since then.
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
Does it use your private messages for advertising? It seems like "no" for now, but nothing is stopping them.
According to that, they do not listen for ads.
The fact of the matter is, the company's modus operandi is to collect as much information from you as possible. Their business model is spyware.
Whether the application currently records conversations or not is almost immaterial. You know that if they could get away with it, they would.
I suspect they have much more information than what we tell them, and I mean raw data, not what's derived from collaborative filtering or other techniques. I wonder if our ISPs, streaming services, banks, visa, etc, share data. Maybe it's just the trackers all over the internet.
Getting ads for a specific product the day after discussing it in person could be luck... or not.
They absolutely do. You should download your FB data, if you have an account. It's basically a list of everywhere you've shopped/been/etc. 95% of it you likely didn't share intentionally. It's quite shocking.
That, and I don't allow the app to know my location, or have access to my photos.
That limits the damage to a significant degree.
I have heard this anecdote many times but I don't believe Facebook is actually recording everything we say. Mostly because I don't think our phones have that kind of battery life. I do think they have data on essentially everything you do online.
- They watch how quickly you scroll through the news feed at what you pause on, even briefly.
- They have ad deals with many of the sites you probably visit so can determine many of your search terms and interests even if you didn't search those things through Facebook itself.
- They have your friend & family graph and Facebook messenger context. Even if you personally didn't say something, maybe you mentioned it to a friend at some point and they searched it or discussed it in a chat.
Then we watched a random TV show on Netflix. During the show, two characters discussed a very specific medical method of improving their chances of bearing a child. Literally minutes later, she was getting ads for this type of conception therapy. We are both past child bearing age and have not discussed it in probably 20 years. We had never even heard of the specific type of process. We had never looked it up or read anything about it. It definitely came from something listening to our household, but we don't know what. It was way too specific to have been random chance.
We don't fall into the demographics for such an ad in any way. We have Apple devices with Siri, but that seems unlikely given their privacy policies. We don't have any Amazon or Google home devices (or any other types of their devices). She's on FB, and I'm not, so we think it was probably either her laptop or phone listening. She's had mic access on her phone turned off for Facebook and no other apps were running, but these apps have a way of finding their way around such permissions.
eg - https://www.cnet.com/how-to/disable-vizio-smart-tv-spying/
Once you match the public IP address of all your devices you can link up the identities and do fun advertising stuff.
They were slurping up text massages and collecting call logs, IIRC. So the rumor isn't too far from the truth.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/faceb...
I have troubles convincing myself it’s not true because it just happens on an almost bi-daily basis - it’s too accurate and it regularly involves things either my friends or I have definitively not typed but only spoken about.
It’s creepy as hell.
While anything's possible, it would be pretty shocking and a big blow to Apple if Facebook figured out how to, on iOS (I can't speak for Android):
* Record audio if the app's killed completely
* Record audio with microphone permission disabled
* etc.
All of which have been claimed and seem unlikely.
The far more likely scenario is that we're much more predictable than we think. Remember the target controversy when they figured out a teenage girl was pregnant before she had told her parents [1]? That happened in 2012. Imagine how much more advanced things have become since then.
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
But I explained that I'm a developer. I used the term 'implausible', and, yes, given legal requirements and whatnot there would have to be some extremely shady activity going on, but what I'm trying to explain is that whatever is going on has nothing to do with text or anything except spoken voice and occurs on such a regular basis to not just myself but other friends of mine that even though I absolutely know from a scientific perspective it's almost technically impossible, I literally have troubles believing it's technical implausibility/impossibility over the fact that it is simply happening.
That's how messed up and creepy it is. And I'm certainly not the only one saying or experiencing this. Many of the incredibly intelligent and talented developers at the major bank I work at have also experienced this and have extreme troubles explaining it. Many of the brilliant minds here at HN are having to say similar things.
It's like something out of Scooby-Doo. I want to pull the mask off the bad guy, but it really feels like one of those one-offs where the monster is real.
I'm a developer too and I know it doesn't sound technically possible, but after FB's behavior it really wouldn't surprise me. Collecting copies of every SMS from Android phones via Messenger when it only advertised using Messenger to send/receive SMS alongside FB messages? Downright lies and abusive to privacy.
Most of us knew how poor Facebook's developer data policy was and no one cared until Cambridge Analytica. I'm just waiting for this voice scandal to happen in the next year or two.
I'm such a skeptic by nature. But this messes with my head, and other developers at my office, too.
Being able to accurately predict what you might be interested in, or at least interested enough to click on is how FB makes their money. That is where a bulk of their R&D spend goes. Couple that with the fact that humans are creatures of habit and relatively predictable, and you can end up with the notion that FB or Google must be listening in on everything you are saying.
Absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, in several instances. Too many, at this point.
>> Perhaps not even the exact thing but something similar or associated (e.g. searched for dog treats, sees ads for dog beds)?
Definitely not. These things are often obscure, and many times, said in jest, and never repeated via texts, and certainly never looked up in a serious context.
>> Have you visited a place that sells that thing with location services enabled?
I keep all of my location services disabled by default. I do enough development to know that's a poor idea.
>> Do your friends express a lot of interest in the things advertised (posts, pictures, comments on any FB platform)?
No, again, I think it's that these things are often said or suggested in a joking manner that really throws my friends and I off a lot of the time.
>> Do you spend a decent amount of time with these friends? What about other people that use the same home/work networks that you do?
For sure. I spend a lot of time with a lot of my friends, and again, these things are observed by co-workers as well, our security is extremely tight at my office, so the idea that could be exploited in any way by something like Facebook is disturbing at best.
Frankly, the fact that you have to ask me these things alone is evidence enough as-is that there is an insane amount of intrusiveness going on.
There is a solution to all this. A (repeated) double blind experiment.
Pick two phrases. Say one so the phone can hear and one so it can't. It's very important you don't know which is which. You could eg have a friend put the phone in one of two rooms.
Later on in the evening my brother had ads for soldering iron in the Facebook app.
So it totally can be a coincidence, or not.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
Snooping on users like that would cost them everything.
I found that I didn't miss it in the least.
The mobile web version works for those rare occasions when I need to check it on the go. I'm definitely never installing their app again; I simply don't trust them to prioritize my needs over theirs (even in regards to mobile resources).
Overall, 26 percent of survey respondents say they deleted the app"
I think the second sentence is more accurate, but of course, it's not as provocative as 44%.
I'd like to delete it entirely but at the moment too many people still use messenger to contact me.
If only there was a Messenger API to setup an autoresponder with alternate contact info...
[1]: https://wiki.bitlbee.org/HowtoFacebookMQTT [2]: https://weechat.org/
1.) VOIP providers have low-barriers to sign-up (typically just a credit card fraud check + check to see if IP or address is from certain countries where fraud calls are common). The up-side to this is that it makes the user experience more friendly to real customers b/c they don't have to wait around, but the downside is that any spammer semi-familiar with the checks that get done can sign up and start sending spam calls for a day or two before most places get complaints and shut them down. The fact that many voip providers allow users to set their Display Id to anything too without any approval also is also really convenient for spammers (ie, there aren't usually ways to immediately detect when a user fraudently set their Caller Id to the name of a bank or something)
2.) APIs everywhere. Twilio got big in part b/c it made APIs available, but the smaller providers are catching up and also adding APIs for texting and calling services. Spammers can automate their spam and re-use the scripts between different accounts when they get banned, so it makes sending out spam texts easier too.
3.) VOIP companies actually are ok with some degree of spam, as long as the spammers pay their bills. So they don't have a motivation to actually stop all of it. Instead of blocking all spam-ish calls outright, some places will just make a deal so that some callers (identified by having a high rate of unanswered calls + very short length calls) pay a higher rate to compensate for potential reputation damage. This is meant for legal cold-calling I imagine, but in practice, they don't know what is actually being said on those phone calls.
Re-activating the Facebook side of the account resolved the issue. Caveat deactivator.
I kinda wish you could do that for events...
I'll confess I actually like using Facebook because it allows me to keep engaged and in touch with family with much less effort than before -- but whatever timeline changes they keep doing, I now see the same stories on my scroll. If I log in five times during the day, i see the same set of stories each of the five times.
Result: I don't check it as much, dont want to check it as much. So much for ranking functions.
Not sure where that's going to pop up next.
Facebook, I've been signed up since you first opened up to non-edu accounts.. you're telling me there's nothing at all more to display?
Snapchat has mostly been killed by monetization, but instagram is still on life support for now. Losing the chronological timeline was quite the blow, though. Is it really that hard to balance "pleasant place to share my life" and "shove ads into my face"?
Facebook in 2007 was also mostly about friends, and not selling me stuff that it couldn't possibly know I was interested in unless my movements over the entire internet were being tracked.
Doing so under your own name, yes. That's why I think places like Reddit are better suited to these kinds of silly things, assuming you don't get doxxed, which can happen.
What are you referring to here? Could you elaborate? Newspaper coverage of social media?
Remember that. We're being used here just as much as on the FAANG platforms.
We don't delete comments outright except when the author requests it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16698937#16728471
Any company that wouldn’t want to hire me because they find my bleeding heart libertarian pro-capitalist views offensive is not a company I would want to work for. Hell they would probably be confused about where I stand on most things.
I honestly do like seeing pics of my friends and their many animals. I like knowing what events people are going to. Other than that, I don't care.
I can't post without feeling like an attention seeker; because that's how I see most people who do post. It's to the point where I stopped sharing things I think my friends might actually find interesting... I'm out here all by myself in the end.
I'm just done with it.
But then something happened...
The unmutable spam in my inbox forced me to turn off all Facebook mail notifications, and the user-hostile behavior made me hate the platform and not want to come back to it, almost out of spite.
I'll bet these underhanded tactics performed great in A/B testing. But big picture, they should not be surprised that people are leaving in droves after deliberately degrading user experience.
FB can always promote Instagram or Whatsapp into their main money cow.
I've yet to bring myself to delete the account, since I get occasional messages I care about and it's convenient to lookup someone's email you've lost. I would if that wasn't the case.
I've uninstalled the app, but that's because it was a huge battery drain.
Not only that, but I've actually experienced first-hand, and witnessed many of my friends experiencing depression and anxiety from the constant scrolling. The 'desire to be seen or heard' factor really plays in to an overall sense of toxicity and negativity that there have actually been a number of psychology studies on.
Overall, I find, contrary to say, HN, which I still spend too much time on (but mostly when I'm bored at work, ha), there is no bar of quality on Facebook. It's a cesspool of humanity's worst sides, especially if you consider the privacy violations of the medium itself.
In fact, it's actually becoming a faster and faster race to the bottom. (Can we all remember this year of 2018 started with 'Tide Pods'?)
Even Reddit has some quality control.
Long gone was the interesting content in my feed, I only had indoctrinated contacts posting either poor quality content or misinformation.
I think facebook lost me when they stopped the chronological feed, which is also why I closed my Instagram account.
Now also Strava is making their feed sorted by some magic with no option to make it chronological :( I can't quite understand this trend.
Say you pick the "time to like a post" metric, then as an employee you're incentivised to put the most click-baitee article at the top. Now if you pick the "number of ads displayed in feed without drop-out" you may have something similar too.
Rince and repeat and you end up with the mess we see.
Regarding Instagram, I noticed they started to retain posts from the timeline. So they encourage compulsive checking it the app. Open it once : it shows 2 new posts, close it and open it again, 2 more posts, both old by at least a few hours.
They just rewarded your brain for checking the app compulsively. Once I noticed that I couldn't unsee it, and I closed my account.
Ever since Facebook unnecessarily divided their application into two, (Facebook and Messenger), I've pretty much sworn off it. But there's one simple reason, beyond the constant privacy concerns, that no single person should consider putting this app on their iOS device.
Facebook's iOS app currently sits at a staggering, literally almost unbelievable 316.7MB! Yes, 316.7MB. Almost a third of a GB. What. The. Hell.
Messenger is 139.4MB! What on earth QA process do these guys have where they consider this to be even remotely okay on non-storage-expandable devices, especially in the days where we still had 8GB iPhones?
On an 8GB iPhone, (which I understand are not in a lot of use at the moment, but still), which ends up having closer to 6-7GB of space, that would mean that Facebook + Messenger alone would take up 1/10th-1/14th of your space.
I miss the days when there was a 50MB-100MB limit on applications being downloaded over 3G/LTE/cellular. This was fantastic. Every company I worked for demanded I was able to trim the application size down to under 100MB so that there was a fair chance for everyone to be able to download it.
Many of my friends are still on 16GB iPhones and the size alone is the first reason they remove the app.
The second reason being the functionality offered does not match the app size.
The third reason being the general public is starting to visibly see the lack of value Facebook adds in our lives, and even the toxicity of the addiction of constantly scrolling.
You can do almost everything you can do within the Facebook app simply by logging into Facebook on your browser.
Protip (source: I am an iOS developer of 8+ years): If you'd like people to use and keep your application on their device that usually has extremely limited storage capacity, or at least non-expandable storage, you'd better ensure the application actually offers a significant value over that of not having the application installed.
Messenger's video chat, et cetera, makes it worthwhile. But it's also three times as small as the Facebook app. So, while Facebook's application provides almost no value at more than 300MB, Messenger is able to pack infinitely more functionality into 1/3rd the size.
What the hell are these guys doing wrong? Where's QA?
You have to go a long way to make anything that bad, it can't be accidental.
It's a clumsy experience but it works.
If you're ignoring optimization in favour of hiring more people, you, as a software company, have your priorities so out of whack I'm not sure how to even offer a suggestion onto how to move forward.
I'll repeat: the application needs to have value. If I had Facebook installed, it would be by at least 100MB the largest application on my iPhone, next to GarageBand.
tl;dr: if optimization is not part of your development process, your development process is not good. This isn't something that can be argued.
I can assure you that's not the case.
You’re either not aware how these kinds of applications are constructed, or you’re perhaps not familiar with just how simple putting an application together like this is. The other response to this comment says a very similar thing.
Yes. I can confidently say as an iOS developer of 8+ years if I was given a chance to manage this application I would certainly be doing the hell of a better job.
If you don’t think you could, that’s cool, but I’ve made my living developing these types of applications since the App Store’s beta, and similar to when I hear an absolutely shitty pop song with mysogonistic or materialistic lyrics funded by some multi-million-dollar artist I say ‘I can do better,’ because, frankly, most musicians worth their salt could.
It doesn’t matter how successful a company is, how much talent they have, if there are too many voices talking over each other nobody is heard. And poor decision making is affecting the app’s bottom line of usage at this point.
When I say I can do better, it’s not coming from arrogance, the Facebook app is actually just that poor that any other direction that it’s current one would be an improvement. The statistic that OP posted alone proves that.
If Facebook has even 25-30 people on their iPhone app, on the client side, they have way too many. We’re talking about pulling existing info from a server and re-displaying it. At what point, other than the tiny shell required to display that information, maybe about 100-150MB at most, is that extra 150-200MB coming from?
If Facebook’s API were open for third-party FB applications, I’m sure I’d not be the first to whip up a minimalistic, small-sized, easy-to-use, far more intuitive application in a month or two of casual dev time. I did a similar thing for Twitter. It’s not hard.
Is it so much more likely that whole extra let’s say 150MB needs to be there than it’s likely that there’s simply too many cooks in the kitchen and optimization is being completely ignored?
Yes you could build out 90% of the app that most people use in a smaller download in a couple months, that's not really noteworthy though.
Some other candidates: linked in, twitter, uber, lyft, youtube, snapchat, gmail. Binary size is a problem issue at all of them and they would appreciate an expert such as yourself to solve it. You could get a staff engineer position and make half a million a year!
At this point, it shouldn't be surprising in the slightest that the app is a cool ~300megs. Could it be better? Sure, and I'm sure they're working on it. After all, look at their developing country strategy and the stuff they do with "Facebook For Every Phone" to shave off every last byte from their apps: https://code.fb.com/android/how-we-built-facebook-lite-for-e...
If you look at the incentives, it's NOT in their best interests to make updates hard. That's not how they make money and in developing countries it actively costs them business. It's not that they're intentionally bloating the app just to mess with you....it's just that there's really that much going on in the app, along with it maybe being a little sloppy too.
Look, I have my beef with Facebook just like everyone else does to an extent....but this whole app size argument you seem to be spending a lot of energy on just has no legs if you truly understood the problem space.
I mean this is what you said: "We’re talking about pulling existing info from a server and re-displaying it". We _are not_ talking about that. The problem space is much much much larger than that (I mean they're running machine learning models on-device, doing real time facial recognition, leveraging AR in their custom cameras, streaming real-time data, among other things). I think you are severely overestimating your knowledge of the topic and I implore you to truly take a step back and re-evaluate what people are trying to tell you here.
You and parent are probably both right. They obviously could make the client 30MB or even 3MB, but choose not to because they find other things more important.
This is ludicrous. We are not gaining anything by having extra storage space if everything we had installed on our devices suddenly doubles or triples in size, because, hell, it can.
I miss the days when there was a 50MB-100MB limit on applications being downloaded over 3G/LTE/cellular. This was fantastic. Every company I worked for demanded I was able to trim the application size down to under 100MB so that there was a fair chance for everyone to be able to download it.
I'm not sure if that statistic changed, but it must have, because now not only do people not give a damn, it's like they actively see how much space their stupid service can take up on our phone before we get sick of it and save that room for more music, movies, or photos.
I think Facebook's decline is great. For too long it has sucked all the life out of the social networking space. Perhaps now we can see some real competition and innovation.
Also, it's not necessarily just Facebook HN likes to shit all over. From what I've seen it's Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple. They all kind of get their time in HN's 'hate spotlight'. (Oh, and it's not as big of a company, but Magic Leap is up there, too. :P )
There is, if anything, a bias towards favouring Apple products, but it's not nearly as fanboy/fangirl-ish as it is on the rest of the 'net. It seems at least HN'ers, even those who favour Apple, are, for the most part, also willing to admit it's bad practices.
And that's a pretty strong claim that Facebook is the internet for a lot of folks. What about YouTube? Google? Wikipedia? (Especially for students?) :/
It's just reality. There's some deal people in a lot of less-wealthy countries get where they get free FB chat on their phones, but can't see FB pictures, don't have googling/internet etc. It's extremely common in many countries, I know about it because many of my friends around the world have that.
Most of the comments on this page seem similarly to ignore/not be aware of what's happening in most of the world. Young people not caring about FB? Is that just in the US or something? I don't know, but in most of the world (Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America at least) people young and old are posting pics of themselves and their friends, commenting on each others pics, chatting, just like they ever did.
It was downhill from there.
Facebook never clicked for me. I deleted it, went back, still couldn't make it work, deleted it again, started a new account and was banned. Whatevs. It seems to not click for a lot of folks inclined to hang in spaces like HN. Some folks who never really got it and perhaps felt left out that "everyone else was on it" may take glee in watching it fall and may feel some sense of vindication or the like.
There are truly terrible things being fostered by Facebook in some parts of the world, such as some developing countries. If you care about human rights, it's not unreasonable to feel like Facebook is a pox upon humanity and deserves to die.
(Complete 180 from the last point:) Facebook is a seemingly trivial thing. Taking glee in watching it burn can be good distraction from worse things happening in the world.
Finding a "bad guy" to blame things on helps a lot of people feel better about their own life choices, whether that is reasonable or not.
Humans just aren't monoliths. There is no single uniform answer here. There are around 5 million visitors a month to HN and however many of them are happy to see FB go down, each will have myriad different reasons for feeling that way.
(A thing I say a lot: It's not news unless it's bad news. We just don't trumpet quiet positives the way we do the click-baity negative events.)
Isn't that hyperbole?
Or rather, that might be a demographic they never lose. Might explain why they were big on "internet.org". Anyone with options seems to have found better places to hang out (shocking - even IRL).
Maybe the better prediction is quitting FB is like quitting the soi-dissant "social" network thing. Is that a bad thing?
1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone;
2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone;
3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone;
4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally
5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.
It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account. But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?"
It helpped for a while but at some point I had to just commit to not checking it. I have some legitimate business I have to do on there sometimes (I'm a musician and I need more side-guy gigs), so I post updates from insta (which is less addicting to me) or if I open it I commit to not scrolling and browsing but just checking alerts.
It's so fcking creepy though... I mean, I'm legitimately an alcoholic but I can (when I want to, which is usually all the time these days) at least not _start_ drinking... but if I stopped drinking for a couple of days and the bottle of scotch in my cabinet sent me an email trying to get me to drink, I'd have to pour it out.
sed: can't read s/^127.0.0.1 f....
sed: can't read s/^127.0.0.1 facebook.com/#127.0.0.1 facebook.com/: No such file or directory
I'm not saying FB is good, I just say that this fight is already lost, delete FB account or not.
Step 5 is tricky to accomplish as I need facebook to login to a bunch of websites.
So, it's quiet, and almost unnecessary, and easy enough to live with by checking in periodically. Mostly people hiking and running on weekends, or posting a thing about their kid, get a bit of social love...
But really, among me and my 40somethings, almost no actual activity. And so, if the 20somethings don't use it a whole lot either, what's Facebooks future?
That feels like a fairly small sample. Then from that to look at some subset (i.e., 18 to 29) feels even more suspect.
Also, best I can tell, this survey was self-reported.
This is worthy of at-the-bar discussion, but let's not take it too seriously otherwise; at least not until the data is better.
It is a super small sample, they do not even allude to what percentage of those votes were in the 18 - 29 category.
The provided pdf from the original Pewresearch article seems pretty bare -> http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/1/201...
I see this happen quite regularly on Hacker News, a bit strange for a rational/fact based community to behave.
Tweeted the researched -> https://twitter.com/ajaxdavis/status/1057046359218388992
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/22/teens-abandoning-facebook-st...
FB can shift its model to becoming like priceline. Just try to buy up all the social networks. For example most travel site you probably use are owned by priceline. The same way Facebook could maybe buy up other social networks.
Pretty sure it's not in the US, or at least can be halted by the disapproval of antitrust regulators.
For example: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/staples-office-depot-merge...
That's the key though, they can continue to try until someone sits up and takes notice. Depending on the regulatory climate at any given time a company will have varying degrees of success with this before they are stopped outright before buying any more competition. Either that or they suddenly start abusing their positions such that people/other companies complain enough for regulators to take notice of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890
Facebook already needs a permissions from multiple regulators if it attempts to buy competitor – not just from US regulators.
WhatsApp and Instagram acquisitions needed approvals from EU before they could continue.
What would it mean for a US based company if they decided to acquire two other US based companies and US regulators approved it, but EU regulators didn't?
What would happen if the company went forward with the acquisition anyway?
Companies like Facebook aren't "US based" in any way that means anything except for where their CEO normally works and which stock exchange their shares are traded on - they have operations that are central to their business all over the world, and many of those can be disrupted.
In theory FB could just agree with EU that they will cease all operations in EU and leave in peace, but that would effectively kill FB over long term. Competitors would crush them. Imagine a mobile carrier who can't make calls to EU or email provider who can't sent or receive calls from EU. FB is in the same situation. It's a social network. Value for the users comes from connections.
Every international company negotiates some kind of deal if they want to stay international.
A) Stories and TV like content to compete with Snap B) Ads integrated into their proprietary browser (aka Instagram app) C) Sponsored live events
They’ve essentially made a closed ecosystem without having to rely on a desktop browser and they’re more mobile centric than Facebook. Furthermore, Visual content is the basis for IG and it lends itself better for monetization.
If anything, IG works better for facebook and its users because it's more honest. It's a platform for photo and video sharing and loads of people just use it to voluntarily follow brands anyway. In some ways, instagram is facebook's distilled product - rather than a directory which became everything, it's just a feed of content, so the terms and user expectations are different.
Actually, most travel sites you use are probably owned by Expedia, then priceline.
Together, they own every single major web sites about travel.
Does TripAdivsor not qualify as a "major website about travel"? I don't actually know what share of travel-related web traffic they get, and I realize that Expedia and Priceline both own lots of other sites in the space.
When you join the company, they will explain you the portfolio of brands and how they link together. A user might leave a site and spend money somewhere else, but it's alright as long as it stays in the family.
For context, here's where you can see the substantial differences in ownership: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TRIP/holders/ vs https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/EXPE/holders/ .
And here's where you can see that they share no board members: http://ir.tripadvisor.com/corporate-governance/board-of-dire... vs https://www.expediagroup.com/about/leadership/ .
It's been 8 years (the first iPad was released in 2010) and the platform has certainly proven itself not to be a fad.
Instagram looks like an actual joke on my iPad Pro 12".
It feels like running a 640x480 app on a 4k capable screen.
It's a joke that they would ignore what a crappy experience it is.
It's a joke that they would ignore what a crappy experience it is.
That being said, it suffers from Facebook syndrome to the extent that you literally have to fight the platform to make it usable. I'm holding out for some kind of federated hybrid of instagram/facebook in the near future with a chronological timeline and a reasonable volume of ads (to keep the lights on)/subscription option.
It’s all shit but this shit is shinier!
It's easy to get cynical about this but what I like about Instagram as opposed to facebook is that it's superficial by design. That makes it way less of a "thing".
It doesn't pretend like it truly "manages your social life" like facebook does, it's just funny pictures your extroverted friend posts. Instagram stories are gone after 24 hours. They're temporal. I know people who post 10 or 20 things a day on stories and maybe a pic here and there every couple of weeks otherwise.
Similarly, WhatsApp is SMS. SMS running through facebook but it's not very organized, either. My friend deleted WhatsApp, now we text via SMS and I see no difference. A group I was part of decided to use Telegram, so I just made a Telegram account, no friction whatsoever, there's no reason to feel like you're leaving something behind. People in Europe use it because mobile internet is way cheaper than paying for SMS since a text message via mobile internet is like a couple of bytes of traffic. Same with images. Group chat is nice. But it's all not very... connected.
It doesn't really make a profile, old messages are basically just an archive that nobody bothers to look through. I'm aware that facebook probably runs every machine learning algorithm ever invented through that data but from a user's perspective, it's way less of a "world", it's just one tool to share messages/pictures. It's not your life. Social networks aren't "just facebook" anymore and they're way less centralized that way.
There's bets they're clearly taking across companies (like stories), and they definitely are trying to flow traffic between Instagram and Facebook, but to some degree they've kept each app their own and that has only worked in their favour so far.
It's also logical. I mean, what can you do when you are the market leader already.