Facebook has become almost completely useless to me yet I waste so much time on it every day. No one posts anything on it except like 3 guys who post 10 times a day that I barely know yet find their extremist political posts mind numbingly amusing. The news on there is trash, I much prefer the WSJ and if I want sensationalist things I'll go to Reddit and my tastes are more niche now so I have some forums I visit occasionally for better discussion.
I have never in 10 years clicked on a single ad and I've removed the apps so I don't get autoplaying videos so I'm not bothered by the future ads on there. Messenger is important to me and the Birthday list is too. Without those I wouldn't deCtivate since you need it as social proof for Tinder, but I'd never go back on.
Honestly, I was busy for just 3 days and didn't log on and the "addiction" completely vanished. We need to have a no shave novemebr for Facebook, maybe a no Facebook February and I guarantee millions would get off the addiction and vastly limit daily social media use.
The greatest thing I did was delete Facebook off my phone. Here are the benefits I discovered:
- I didn't miss anything. Turns out there wasn't any real quality content on there anyway.
- My battery lasts 2x longer.
- I seem to be happier. No joke. With all the rage articles and click bait headlines gone, I am far more happier.
- I am way more informed now. I visit allsides.com and get the news there. I quickly get up to speed and find well written articles that inform me about what is really going on.
- I am more productive. Without all the garbage Facebook puts out, I have more time to get actual work done.
- I feel accomplished. I go home feeling more accomplished. I am happier, more productive, and more informed. It is a win-win-win all around.
Delete it off your phone, ASAP. There is literally nothing to gain from having the Facebook app on your phone. The app doesn't positively help you with the one thing Facebook is really useful for - event planning.
Every once in a while i like to see what events my friends have invited me to, so I log on to facebook on my browser, check my notifications, and leave. How do I prevent myself from getting sucked in by the news feed? I block it, with News Feed Eradicator, a Chrome extension.
If someone posted a picture of you or tagged you in some way, you know, the things that in your news feed that are actually useful/concern you, you get a notification without any clutter to block it up.
It's lowered my stress level and I still get to stay in touch with the things I care about.
Don't see how this is a reason for others to delete the app from their phones, it only show that for you it was the right thing to do.
To come with another data-point, I have the app on my phone, but don't open it every week. I have turned off most notifications, so if I get a notification on the phone I know it is worth it to use 30 sec to check what it is. Instead I check FB a couple of times a day on a PC where I can set the feed to show most recent post first and in a minute or two go through the list of new post from peoples I keep in the feed. Some times it is something interesting there, some times not. For me it is strange how others manage to use hours at a time on FB (except messenger which I use to keep in touch with friends and family).
My point is that you cannot only blame FB for getting addicted, you is the only one that is responsible for how you spend your time. It is getting so "normal" to blame external forces for own behavior
There is a damn good incentive to uninstall the app. By going to mbasic.facebook.com in your browser instead, you use much less bandwidth and you get to use an adblocker (in Firefox, at least), to help weed out most of the nonsense FB throws at you.
I don't see how the 2MB of mobile data the FB app have used so far this month would be any less if I had used the mobile page instead. Going to the web-page is a much worse user experience when you mostly use the app to get notifications you have filtered out to actually get instead of using it to look at stuff you are not interested in.
You don't see all the stuff you don't want to see if you don't keep opening the app all the time. So back to it is how you use the application that is the problem, not the application.
By going there in a browser (and specifically to the mbasic version), you weed out the javascript tracking and bloat, and your adblocker gets to weed out the ads and sponsored content nonsense. As a bonus, there are no auto-playing videos or any of that other junk. That is the problem with using the app (and apps in general): They try very hard to prevent you from blocking ads and sponsored content.
That frees you up to use Facebook for its actual useful function: Handling events and possibly the most genuinely important updates from your friends, without the bloat.
The pared-down user experience in the mbasic version is the entire point. I already filter out everything I don't consider important, and using the mbasic version is another step in the direction of reducing distractions. It also doesn't do the weird re-arranging of discussions and broken infinite scroll that the app does.
It's simply a much easier and less annoying experience.
I as well deleted it off my phone. There is just nothing personal on it anymore. They are also ruining instagram. Too many ads, suggested posts etc. They are morphing it in facebook light. Everything is just bad auto roll food videos, UNILAD shit, and identity politics clickbait sob stories.
The only reason I still have facebook is for group chat messenger during the day, and to keep track of underground parties. One of those chats is moving to discord, and other kind of moved to iMessage. Messenger now has intrusive ads on it as well, I would leave it if I could.
Actually, you can even have the Messenger app with no Facebook account. Just sign in with your phone number, and it'll pick up acquaintances from your contact book (much like WhatsApp). You can still search for other people, but don't need an FB account.
Signing up with phone number doesn't work for lots of young people I suspect. We don't have phone numbers of friends anymore, for example I have no phone numbers of even my closest friends, we have been communicating via internet since we have been teenagers (started with ICQ, then moved to emails then FB then whatsapp, never really needed to share our phone numbers as we don't ever call anybody nor send SMS).
This might be just specific to very international people like me who travel and work in many different countries so our phone numbers change often and keeping track of that is almost impossible.
I guess this also varies tremendously by region. WhatsApp completely dominates non-work communication in Argentina; we don't use SMS, nor phone calls, and FB is pretty much is second place.
AFAIK, in the US people actually use SMS a lot, and I'm sure it's a bit different everywhere else.
More on topic though; you can use Messenger without an FB account and still find people by username.
How did you sign up in WhatsApp without a phone number? Also, when you want to exchange contacts in WhatsApp, what you do it to pass the phone number registered in the service.
It seems that you have phone number that is in some way associated with you.
same here. work is the biggest reason that I still have Facebook on my phone. We have work related stuff going on. i work with very non-technical users, and Facebook is about as complicated as things can get. They have a variety of devices, and Facebook + Messenger has worked on everything. Getting them to switch would be hard. :/
Jokes aside, I did the same. Its a healthy move, I also forgot my FB password on my main computer and have not gone through the trouble of using chrome to look it up.
Ive found on my 16GB phone I can either have the facebook app or every other app that I want but not both at the same time . It takes up an insane amount of space for a mobile app and they for some reason need to update it once a week. Needless to say I use the browser now to check fb.
Nothing wrong with updating an app often IMO. There are dozens of teams working on the app concurrently (didn't they compain about the 65,535 class limit in objc due to their iPhone app?) so no surprise they have a regular release cadence.
I think life is a bit better not having facebook -- considered everything is already alright.
I think, however, if someone is depressed, being on Facebook is a huge problem. Which is ironically what I resorted to when I was depressed. It was like living in hell.
http://www.theweek.co.uk/ is the closest I know of, though you need to know the political leanings of each publication mentioned, whereas allsides.com really spells it out.
I have been leaving the FB app off my phone (Android) for 2-3 years now, and I don't miss it one bit. I was running Messenger, but that's also a resource hog.
I am now using Messenger Lite, as I am in some personal friend groups (muted) that I sometimes catch up on, and I will say that it hardly uses any resources at all. Would highly recommend it for anyone who still wants Messenger but without the bloat and battery loss.
I share your experience. At the time I did a simple cost-benefit analysis.
It was costing me >0 resources (i.e. my time) and was having a net negative effect on me. I was just so irritated by the mind numbingly dumb things that I'd consume while browsing the news feed. Which unfortunately over time became close to 100% of the content on my feed.
Agreed. I have deleted Facebook app from my phone and it has been great since then. I feel like I waste less time scrolling through meaningless feed of pictures, posts and ads algorithmically crafted to be as addictive as possible.
I have also stopped using the main FB website. I only use messenger.com to talk to my friends but no need to go to the main website anymore.
The only reason why I haven't deleted my FB account completely yet is because I got a lot of pictures on FB and haven't found a convenient way to export them yet. So I might keep my FB account just as free cloud storage for my pictures, that's all.
> haven't found a convenient way to export them yet
Click the triangle on the right in the menu bar, and go to Settings. Under "General - General Account Settings" there's a light-grey link that takes you to "Download a copy of your Facebook data". From there you can request an archive of your profile.
It doesn't include all the 'shadow profile' info they keep of you, but it gives you and easy way to download all of your photos at once, easy to import in your photo management app.
EDIT: I've just done a fresh export of my profile, and it seems that sadly the photos don't get exported at full resolution, so this might not be the best option if FB is your primary photo storage at the moment.
I see. Not sure what I would use as alternative way of managing my photos though. I don't like using the Photos app on my MacBook as it is too clunky. I'd like to have a single website which is just like the photo albums part of FB minus the whole social network. That would be ideal.
I was off Facebook for years, but a few years ago I got back on it. It's just junk food for the brain.
Before I deleted the app on my phone recently, I scrolled through my feed for about 5-10 minutes with a simple test: if I encountered something that genuinely improved my life, I'd keep it installed. I didn't. I can (and do) get my news and politics elsewhere, the comic strips I follow I'll figure out another solution for, and if I want to see photos I can log in through the website whenever the urge hits me.
Anyone know how to block a particular website like FB on Android without being rooted or signing up for a subscription to some security or parental-control app? A google search just turns up a million people recommending editing the host file with ES File Explorer (which doesn't work unless you're rooted) or using the TrendMicro Mobile Security app (which requires a subscription).
NetGuard, it's from the same developer who created Xprivacy
install it from the Github repo and you can use it load a custom host file (the playstore version doesn't allow this) it functions as a VPN. Free service that also lets you block trackers and individual app analytics
There are some site-blocking hosted-on-the-device VPNs on Android. I haven't found any I'd be comfortable recommending though - gotta find an open source one I can reasonably audit and isn't terrible :|
If you have a Samsung phone you can use some apps that run as part of the Knox framework and block ads or arbitrary websites system-wide without rooting.
Same experience here with Facebook. This is a little off-topic, but, given the common ground, I visited Allsides.com and it was an interesting experience. I expected to like it, but it felt more like being a 3rd wheel watching a couple argue while both of them made the problem worse. Sigh.
Agree, you are kind of watching from the outside inside. I end up mostly focusing on center stories. But being on the site, it really hits you just how bad the media has become. No one, it seems, listed to John Stewart when he appeared on Crossfire. Instead, the morphed the whole network into Crossfire. [1]
Leaving Facebook has honestly made me a happier guy. (I left my account active, but I've removed the apps from my phone and I only visit the site about once every three months to message someone my phone number.)
Browsing the site always made me a bit angry (at the politics) and a bit sad (because someone else always seems to be on some impressive vacation). Then I'd close the browser be angry at myself for wasting time I could have invested in learning something or creating something.
My #1 fear was that I'd feel out of the loop, but I honestly don't. I've yet to have anyone mention something with a "didn't you see that on Facebook?" A friend of mine tried the same experiment and says he's also happier. If you catch yourself left with a bit of pensive sadness after using the site, try taking a hiatus and see how it feels.
Anecdotal, but the only time I've ever hear that phrase in the past 3 years is for my college meme group (one of the few reasons I am still on Facebook). As far as I know, nothing happens on Facebook for anyone under 25. As you get older, life event announcements are about the only thing I can imagine would be useful.
Maybe it's just my friend group, but absolutely everything is scheduled and planned through Facebook events. I basically don't visit, I use Social Fixer to trim down the news feed when I do, but Events is invaluable.
Yeah, I think it's just a matter of social circles. For me, events exist on Facebook, but plenty of people get invited off of Facebook, and the events are private so there's no discovery aspect you'd get in your news feed. I get told in person about most parties or events before seeing an invite on Facebook.
I do like and use events on Facebook, but I wish it was any other service at this point. It's all about the network effect though, it doesn't matter how many better options there are if no one has an account there.
It's used a surprising amount for academic discussion in my field, especially more informal stuff like which conferences to submit to or follow-ups to recent controversies. Basically the discussions that 10 years ago would've happened on a mailing list, or in the comments on a prominent person's blog. Some of that also happens on Twitter, but a somewhat different subset of discussions go there.
Does it matter? If he's still keeping in touch with the friends & family that he truly cares about, then anything he "misses" probably wasn't important enough for those people to mention to him in person / text / chat / on the phone / whatever.
And if it wasn't important enough to mention, why care about it?
I never read status updates as I only use messenger/messenger.com. I'd like to ditch that too, but I have a lot of friends who I only have in messenger and who literally live on the other side of the planet. I suppose I should just make international txts instead.
1. Events. For discovering events, there really is no good substitute to seeing where other people are going. I often get good event suggestions from Facebook through distant friends who would never invite me in real life.
2. Groups. For discussing stuff related to hobbies, people often use Facebook groups. E.g. a painting class, where people post their work, and post things like "let's visit this gallery tomorrow morning" or "there's a masterclass this weekend, who joins?".
Facebook has lost ground for genuine social interaction.
Facebook is more serious stuff such as life announcements for new job, grad/college acceptance, engagement to their significant other, uploading a vacation photo as their profile pic in Grand Canyon as a DSLR, etc.. Everything feels so "official" and "serious"
Snapchat is low-stakes and more playful for throw-away stuff in people's day-to-day life.
None of my extended friends around the world (late twenties so we are not that old) nor my family use Snapchat. So in my opinion Snapchat is so niche and has such narrow group of users it will never replace what Facebook used to be.
People grow in age. The audience that is using Snapchat now (I talk to a dozen friends on Snapchat) are going to keep using Snapchat (I haven’t seen any age based dropoff), and younger people start using Snapchat.
I don’t even have some fairly close friends on FB!
Sure but I doubt it. For example after initial students on college campuses who started using Facebook, it has spread to older generations and people in 30s, 40s even 50s now use Facebook.
With Snapchat I don't see such trend. It has no website, only a confusing mobile app with horrid UX that most people can't figure out and is mostly used for adding pig noses and cat ears to pictures by teenagers.
if Snapchat had a website, then users could screenshot photos/conversations without notifying the other person. That's exactly why they don't have one.
i don't think its a bad thing that Snapchat will replace Facebook. People don't want an imitator.
The whole point of Facebook is to "record personal history".
The whole point of Snapchat is to maintain "privacy". It fills a void that Facebook was never meant to do nor intends.
Before someone says "you can still screenshot" on Snapchat. While that is true, the platform strongly discourages it and millions of users do not screenshot for every single photo. Whereas FB, is default "save"
The way a platform facilitates interaction is very important.
I think people want to keep personal history in most cases. Like all normal conversations with friends or family, you would want to keep history of it so you can go look up things in the future.
Sending pictures that disappear and are not recorded is a valid use case but it's a very narrow one in my opinion. It might be useful for dating or "flirting" conversations so maybe 10% of human interaction.
Therefor I think the way Snapchat works it will never become mainstream like Facebook did because it doesn't work well for normal interaction between friends & family which is 90% of most peoples' social interaction.
>Snapchat works it will never become mainstream like Facebook
Snapchat is already mainstream, it has 178 million daily active users. Tons of celebrities use it too. It's not some unknown app. Facebook is still more popular by a large margin. However, that doesn't deny Snapchat being labeled "mainstream".
>I think people want to keep personal history in most cases. Like all normal conversations with friends or family, you would want to keep history of it so you can go look up things in the future.
Again, Facebook and Snapchat are two different apps. Snapchat was never meant to become a Facebook copy-cat. They both fulfill two different purposes.
Your comment is similar to watching a horror film and complaining that it wasn't a comedy film and explaining how horror films do poorly compared to comedies. They are not mutually exclusive.
Ironically, the best way to promote this would be with a viral Facebook status that says “this will be my last post until March, let’s see if I can make it! I challenge Mark, Sarah, Sam to do the same” etc.
I’m amazed at how easily people obey the challenge memes. I’m guessing a lot of them are instigated by Facebook to increase engagement.
Private groups. My user experience was similar to yours and I was close to deactivating my account before I got invited into a private group. Topics and discussions get much more interesting when people know coworkers and family members can't see it.
I second this. I live in in a foreign country and there's a Facebook group with people from my home country who also live here. It's a small group with (50 people or so) and I really enjoy the friendly discussions and the fact that people try to help each other out. I keep my account for groups like those.
Ever since deleting facebook I've felt so much ___. It's only once I quit the site I was able to take a long hard look at my perception of ____ and realized that everyone else does ____ while I should do _____. I realized that I'm actually ____, not ____. I started handling my _____ relationships in a healthier, more ____ manner.
* Do not install it on my phone. My long, complex password isn't even stored there, so I couldn't log in if I wanted.
* Open https://mbasic.facebook.com/ in a private tab on my computer when I want to post something or check in, then close it when I'm done. This greatly reduces tracking surface (no JS), and provides just enough friction to eliminate compulsive checking or interaction.
It's like not buying a giant bag of potato chips every time you go to the store.
What do you _do_ on facebook, thought? All I see on it are people saying what they just did or how they feel, that's something that has zero importance in living your daily life and trivially deferred to "check it maybe once a day".
I'm not sure if I understood correctly but; you can keep using messenger (and maybe Tinder, I haven't tested) even after you deactivate your fb account. Just leave the last checkbox unchecked on the account deactivation page.
I recommend deleting your account. Facebook wants people to think that everything happens on Facebook, but really almost nothing happens on Facebook. It's basically a useless recreational drug that is wasting the lives of many people (and severely damaging human civilization with its reality distortion -- time will tell us the full effects).
I’ve said this before on here, but bears repeating as I don’t know that everyone realises you can do it - a great way to wean yourself off the Facebook checking addiction is to unfollow all your contacts and pages. Once you do this, your homepage is basically blank (no news feed), but you still retain the ability to use the messenger, which unfortunately is still socially quite useful from time to time despite having a horrible UX. You also maintain the ability to access pages as usual (FB aggressively tries to push you to register if you view them logged out) and get notifications if people tag you.
I’d really recommend trying it if you have the same feeling of wasting time as the OP - it’s a bit less drastic than removing your account, but it does the job. I thought I might refollow certain people after a while but six months later I haven’t bothered and I now only check the site once a day for messages usually.
You can either do the process of unfollowing manually, or using JavaScript - there is a settings page where you can list all your contacts (by pressing load more a lot) then automate clicking “unfollow”. I can try to find the script I used if you are interested. Sounds like another option is to use a browser extension.
Another piece of advice that others have mentioned is to delete the app - if you want access messages, you can use mbasic.facebook.com. It really sucks that they removed messaging from the mobile site to push users to their sucky apps.
I’ve got respect for people just deleting their account but for me messenger still has enough social use that this is a perfect compromise for now!
I was off Facebook for awhile but rejoined this past year. I primarily use it to follow some organizations that post updates I'm interested in.
If a "friend" posts something political or something that annoys me, I just Unfollow them. That means I've unfollowed most of my friends, but I have no interest in partaking in the outrage.
How often do you use Instagram, Snap, iMessage/SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, or other social apps? Curious whether you get that "fix" elsewhere or if it yes/no for just FB.
Thinking about it more, all media should be in the running, from HN to Netflix, because it's really about time spent.
I've been seeing the same thing, almost everything is links, clickbait or "tests" that everyone just re-shares. Very few people are posting any original content any more.
Currently I think Messenger is what's keeping people from abandoning Facebook.
>The company also wants professional creators to post more videos to the site and make the platform a content hub on par with YouTube, a unit of Alphabet Inc.’s Google.
That's interesting, because I've never been able to find a second time a video that popped up in my feed. For my experience, videos on Facebook might as well be ephemeral. forever vanishing the moment my feed refreshes itself automatically.
This. Facebook is going to have to make efforts to present a better UI/UX if it wants to be a content portal for videos.
Their entire UX is based around the algorithmic feed, which obfuscates the true quantity of actual content on the user's timeline, thereby allowing a higher density of ads and other sponsored content without the user necessarily being able to tell or prove [1]. But the sliding window of the feed still moves forward in time, so content that you don't interact with enough to be recorded in the activity log just falls off, never to be seen again.
In 2014, Facebook Paper was an effort to reimagine how Facebook surfaces content [2][3], but despite rave reviews it fizzled and was killed in 2016. It was part of a wider effort to pivot into being a publisher of original content and not merely a social aggregator, and although Paper was discontinued prematurely, the effort faced several hindrances, including news publishers' pushback against Facebook's content framing [4] and Facebook's role in the dissemination of fictitious clickbait.
Facebook is so multifaceted that its current way of presenting content is woefully inadequate, and doesn't fit their ambitions.
I experience the same thing and it's really frustrating. I refuse to install Facebook applications on my phone, and they've needlessly crippled their mobile site (disabling messages except mbasic.facebook.com among many other things). If I so much as check a notification then go back to the newsfeed, it's different content and hit/miss as to whether I can find the top post again.
I had to wonder for a second whether I was looking at a post of mine!
A year or two ago they made the change to disallow access to messages from m.facebook.com, so I started using mbasic.facebook.com for messages. Recently they blocked the mbasic.facebook.com entirely for iPhones. It's clear that there reason is to force mobile users to install messenger, because messages are still available on m.facebook.com and mbasic if you visit in a desktop browser.
I already have a FB app on my phone, Instagram, which is more useful for messaging in my circle and less annoying. I refuse to be forced to install their app, so the only response to this is to stop using messenger. Already my messages are going unchecked and will stay that way until I get to a desktop.
The vagaries of finding content you saw minutes before, and the almost entirely random way posts and everything is organized, is frustrating too.
Oh, interesting. Thanks for letting me know. I haven't tried in a week or two, and it's back! I was definitely getting redirected to m.facebook.com for a week or two, but apparently see they have restored access, for whatever reason.
Edit: does anyone know of somewhere I can be informed of changes about this by Facebook?
Searching for previous discussions about this on a Hacker News, I see other people say that the mbasic Does or doesn’t work for them at various times.
People have been saying that Facebook has removed messaging from their mobile site for quite a while now, and all that time I've been fearing the moment that would happen for me. But it hasn't yet - I wonder why? The main difference I can think of is never having had the app installed, and using Firefox for Android with an ad blocker. You might give that a try and see if it comes back for you.
after them crippling their mobile site I deleted facebook, it was not needed... though I just replaced it with whatsapp or hangouts (really hard to get my friends on anything else)
Their site would literally work just fine as mobile site. It wouldn't give them as much data.
Years ago I had the app installed. The fact that they wanted not one, but two hugely bloated apps on my phone is the reason they haven't been on my phone in many years.
That should not be far off with the current viral video market though.
I follow CGPGrey who does 3~7 min videos, and the main use case is a user looking at it when it pops up, and let it fade into the void after that.
Do that for 3M people in roughly 24h, and it’s done. The rest of the life of the video will have minimal financial returns from that point, and the creator can focus on the next viral topic.
That makes sense, considering YouTube videos probably follow a similar pattern even though it's pretty easy to search for them at any time.
Though maybe it's just me but I don't go to Facebook looking for video content because I can't actively seek anything I'm interested in or find that cool video my friend told me about. If someone says they saw a cool video in Facebook I go look for it on YouTube first.
It's a challenge to share anything inside of Facebook! Look at any popular video and all the comments are nothing but people tagging a friend, no actual discussion. It's impossible (or I haven't figured out how) to share something I come across with an individual friend. My wife and I just text each other screenshots of our Facebook feed when we want to share an image or post with each other.
Given so much of the video content (at least high 80s percent wise) on Facebook is simply pirated from YouTube and other creators, it seems more than a little unethical for them to start emblazoning them with ads. But, they'll happily sit behind the DMCA Safe Harbor, slowly taking down videos and reaping the ad revenue in the meanwhile without giving any of it back to creators...
For others who may think this is not a big deal I recommend searching about Facebook videos and monetization issues on YouTube. It's like a widespread money disease making creators lives miserable trying to stop it.
A little OT, but I think public perception really muddies this a lot.
To expand on the siblings' example of Uber, the public seems to mostly think Uber=unethical & Lyft=ethical, but really, they engage in many of the same business practices. Uber has a worse reputation because of their sexual harassment scandals and outspoken douchebag former CEO. Lyft tries to brand themselves as the hippie-dippy summer-of-love sharing company, and has done pretty well at maintaining that image. I don't doubt that Lyft is a much better place to work (for employees, not drivers), and I just had to look up their CEO's name because he isn't the raging asshole that Kalanick seems to be and isn't in the news all the time... but that doesn't maybe Lyft the innocent darling many people think they are, especially when it's so easy to compare them favorably against Uber.
So it's easy to demonize Facebook for being "the most unethical", because they're often front-and-center not just in the news, but also in people's daily lives. But consider other companies, like Uber (and Lyft!), Palantir (fuels the surveillance state), Theranos (fraudulent claims about the efficacy of "new" medical lab test procedures), Hampton Creek (had its employees buy their product from stores to pump up sales numbers), and Zenefits (built software that allowed employees to dodge state licensing requirements).
As much as I love Silicon Valley and couldn't imagine working anywhere else, there's also a lot of corruption and unethical behavior here.
Well what a coincidence to see your post identical to mine. I haven't refreshed the page within the time span of you posting so I thought I was the first haha.
While I agree that Uber has established itself as "the most unethical tech-company of our time", the difference is that Facebook's business model is kind of unethical - hoarding of personal data on its users to sell to advertisers.
While Uber's business model is merely providing people with utility.
They're dying, it may be a very slow death but the process has begun. They will become like Yahoo, Myspace, Aol, etc. They are not a Google that can pivot and do a number of different things. Also I've come to realize that Google has a much different relationship with it's users, Google doesn't try to suck up all your time it just tries to give you what you want when you want it, Facebook tries to gamify everything so that you're constantly checking it's useless drivel.
I formed the opinion that Facebook (the service) was in trouble back in 2014-2015 when I noticed the site appeared to becoming more about interaction with content posted by 'meme pages' and such rather than content produced by friends.
Facebook as a company will probably be fine as it has its tentacles in all sorts of places now.
I think a lot of that has to do with the popularization of the meme (image macro) as a form of internet creativity. Facebook certainly was an outlet for that and they didn't impose much if anything to slow it down, but so was everywhere else you can post an image.
They've maintained their positions through acquisitions. Facebook itself could be on a slow decline, but if Instagram and Whatsapp do well are they really dying?
What I would be worried about is that the same practices of monetization that killed Facebook are seeping into Instagram. At what point are they just a poison that slowly kills anything it touches? I think they already are but the deaths are slow.
I think they realize this though. Just milking the cow now. Anyone smart enough realizes social media itself is relatively new and volatile. They have to be fluid / versatile in their investments and services other wise people just simply move to the latest and greatest platform. That's what happened in the early days with Myspace / Facebook. A business built upon this kind of product is a business built upon sand. It moves and shifts. There is no one size fits all. At least I don't think so anyways.
This makes me really sad that this is the goal of Facebook, who will then serve only the goal of capitalizing on the latest and greatest type of platform format (by acquisition or copying) for social media while systematically and methodically milking the patience of their users with ads.
This isn't a precise way of thinking about things, but I really think the most important part of maintaining the success of a social network is being "cool", or rather, being the social network that cool people use.
I don't know the data, but my assumption is that facebook's user count isn't really continuing to grow among young people in developed countries. Like it or not, this demographic is usually what defines what it means to be cool. Would people in Indonesia and India join Facebook if it were mostly old people and people from their own countries? I doubt it - they would know what young people in other countries truly prefer, plus they would likely be better served by a local alternative. Would old people join Facebook if their children and younger relatives used something else? I doubt that too.
Facebook wanted to grab Snap, and did grab Instagram, so that it could maintain its monopoly on the social media that "cool" people use. All we need is more companies like Snap not willing to be bought out for Facebook to see a big hit in this market segment. I think that's the long term threat to Facebook
> Would people in Indonesia and India join Facebook if it were mostly old people and people from their own countries
Shockingly, people join networks that are used by people they know and their circle of friends is in their own country, for most part. If you think young Indian people are desperately trying to copy what's cool in America you'd have to explain why Whatsapp has been (and continues to be) the dominant network in India, despite being a minor player in America.
> I really think the most important part of maintaining the success of a social network is being "cool", or rather, being the social network that cool people use.
Facebook hasn't been "cool" in almost 10 years. Their IPO was in 2012, and like pretty much any other teenager would've at the time, I thought it was about to die off because our moms were starting to use it.
Trust me that if they lose a lot of users in the US but gain users in some place like India or China they will be much worse off. It takes a lot of users from those places to equal one US user due to massive income differences so ads shown to them are much less valuable
Every SV think piece I read has Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon as the unassailable leaders of the industry.
HN comments would have one believe that everybody hates Facebook when the reality is that most regular people find it very useful.
And on top of that, there is a certain amount of hypocrisy here. How many HN commenters who hate Facebook, still work for startups that have (and profit off of) a Facebook presence?
I'm not sure you are aware, but you are not the startup you work for. (or at least most people are not)
And in reality maybe Facebook is useful, it is still designed and built for one purpose (as every company in world), to maximize profit. And they are doing it by turning their users into dopamine addicts. So it does not matter if it has useful functions when it turns you into an addict.
If you look at the Facebook chart you see a classic runaway gap in July 2013. Historically those gaps always get closed. This means it will eventually fall back to 20/30 USD (currently 175 USD). The question is just when.
Seriously tho, I know at least 40 persons from my inner circle that left FB in last two years. To be honest, I feel stupid by ever registering but what now. Guess it's times for other, Facebook does not add any life-social values at all.
Honestly, I have recently been trying not to use anything from google or facebook. I try to use stuff from Microsoft and apple. These are straightforward businesses that I pay to use. No bullshit ads or other hidden shit. A big impediment has been the utterly low quality of the apple music app on android.
Google has built ad products on data about what you want, and Facebook has built ad products on data about who you are, which are both natural extensions of the data they receive in order to deliver you their core service. Which constitutes more data or a creepier amount, unsure. But I’m more wary of services that are mashing that data together to get a fuller picture of you.
I got rid of my TV in 2003, I'd just lost my job and thought it'd be a good idea to lose a distraction. It worked and was not particularly hard.
Now I did unleash an enormous amount of smugness towards everyone about how good it was to not have a TV. Being snobbish about the choice I made with a side of judgement to other people not having the same preference.
I think a lot of people here do something similar as soon facebook is discussed. And I feel we are missing out on having a conversation about how something as transformative as a personalised mediafeed impacts society because signalling not being part of it gives more cred.
We all know that software companies in a very short time has amassed power never seen before. It doesn't matter if you don't take part because at the end of the day it will affect you anyway.
If I was Facebook, I'd start to think about how to add more value to people's lives. Their monetisation strategy is becoming increasingly annoying and their service is not adding enough value to counter that. People will eventually leave if you irritate them enough (see also comments on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15922022)
This was the plan from the start though. Zuck took all that money in 2005 from VCs and the like specifically to corner the market on Social Media (or at least be #2 in the space). The entire idea with these start-ups is to become a monopoly by being really good at it, and then when the competition is dead, crank up the money making portion of the service to the point at which people will just not use it. These are 'Unicorn' investments, they are there to make a billion dollars so that the VC is still solvent (1 unicorn covers the 99 other investments). Becoming a monopoly and then 'boiling the frogs' was the entire idea.
This is really sad. Makes me want to start a lean, open source social network that keeps the good stuff and does away with the bloat. I bet it could be popular with intelligent people! Anyone interested, email me (see profile) :p
That's the point; it'd be nice to have something similar to Facebook without all of the addictive trash. In my opinion, the concept of a social network in itself isn't bad - it's just the monetisation bit that they've got terribly wrong, along with the use of addictive media to bolster ad revenues.
The issue is the cost of the service. You have to pay for those servers somehow and for updating the site to the latest versions of iOS or Windows or whatever.
There have been MANY attempts at implementing a 'paid FB' or just a straight attempt to tackle FB outright (Ello comes to mind). None have thus far worked. Not saying you can't try, but talk to the other creators out there first to learn from their mistakes.
Again, the issue is that servers cost money and you have to find the funding somehow. Ads are good at that. Subscription services aren't thus far, but Patreon may be changing things.
Still, with NN out the window now, I'd chill and wait to see how the dust settles.
You're right, but I'm tempted to do it anyway! Who's with me? Anyone? Guess it's just me!
Seriously though, I know monetisation is tricky, but there must be a better alternative to ads. I'm thinking something which can perhaps enrich the quality of a user's experience for a fee, rather than earning via ads while annoying the user.
In some ways I think Americans are cheap. I'm imagining a paid FB-like service in the range of $5-10/mo, considering ISP packages can easily run up to $80/mo, and a FB-like site should ideally only consume a portion of that.
But I think you really need to re-think the core concept of a social platform. Can't find the comment on HN, but someone a few days ago mentioned: social platform vs. social technology. A social platform is likely to be closed; Facebook only wants you to communicate via Facebook, same with Twitter, G+, etc. If you decide to email your friends instead of using FB, they lose out. A social technology, however, doesn't care about other providers as much. Think about a telephone company. They obviously want you to use their service, but they don't care if you call someone who has a different carrier. Likewise, they won't listen in to the content of your calls to tailor their service to you, because them providing you phone data and the contents of your calls are completely orthogonal.
Try thinking along the lines of a social technology, rather than a social platform. E.g. my friends want to put together a movie/pizza night so they go to Facebook to create a poll to decide on a movie and pizza toppings. Why can't that be part of an SMS standard?
It seems to me like SMS has a lot of potential for future iterations. Right now you can send texts and images to one or more people. Why not bake in other features like polls, appointments, etc. It truly has frustrated me that my friends will use Facebook to organize something that could easily be done over SMS if it just had a few extra features.
Interesting points. I'm not sure if SMS is rich enough to support a full fledged social tech, but I kind the idea of keeping the technology open. I will definitely keep thinking about this!
Right, SMS probably wouldn't be able to bear that full weight of a whole social tech, but I believe with just a few additional features added to its spec (or a fork), the effort-to-payoff ratio would be large, if your goal is to help ween people off of sites like Facebook. There's no reason why I shouldn't just be able to use my phone to invite a bunch of friends to some event, and have them indicate with a checkmark or red X whether they will be going or not.
I have some other ideas that I was going to formally write up and thinking of submitting it to Mozilla. Feel free to email me (email in my profile) to discuss more if interested.
If I was Facebook, I'd start downsizing my company to a slim and trim archival service, maybe even start charging a fee for executive functionality (like what? I dunno) to help support server costs. Maybe even go distributed content where everyone hosts (encrypted) content and shares bandwidth.
IMHO online social networks have a 5-7 year half life, after that they stagnate and die because the company tries to chase ad dollars (the easiest dollars to get) and step by step degrades their usefulness.
For some reason we don't model business on natural systems (birth -> growth -> reproduction -> death). Seems to me that'd be a good idea if we want to be around in a million years.
I think Google realized this a long time ago and it's also part of why they failed with Google plus. They just weren't willing to go down into the gutter the way Facebook is and try to suck up people's time to a ridiculous extent. They have remained too concerned, if you will, with providing actual value and Facebook, from day one, has never had that as a concern as their only concern is getting you to use the app as much as humanly possible.
One factor that turned me away from Google+ when they were hyping it was their usage model. Having context-sensitive associations "circles" was nice, but they ruined it by not also having context-sensitive identity. Instead there was all that stuff about requiring real names everywhere.
In the real world we traditionally rely on other factors to keep out identities separate. A dirty joke told to some friends doesn't get archived and indexed and re-shared with metadata back to your boss. It gets forgotten or attributed to "a guy I know." So it's relatively safe to give your real name in both contexts, and maintain the separation between studious-worker in one context and bawdy-clown in another.
But online, maintaining that "freedom to be a different kind of person" isn't reliably safe when both things come from the same user-ID.
I've noticed that FB started inserting ads about 10 seconds into playing a video. Now when I see the "about to start ad" I just go to the next video and skip it.
Ads before videos just means I won't be watching videos on Facebook.
I'm in the same boat for the first part. I'll be thumbing through my feed and see some quasi-interesting video but no matter how great it is, when I see that "about to start ad" text, I just scroll on. Like on YouTube, I could watch a pre-roll if I really, really want to watch it.
For anyone using Facebook as a messaging/group/event service, I cannot recommend the Facebook News Feed Eridactor more. It literally just blocks it all. Not perfect for all users, but it has really helped me spend less time wasting away scrolling out of habit.
You can just unfollow your entire friends list except for the few people you actually want to see content from and your feed is basically not changing at all except for those VERY few updates from your select friends.
It's doomed to fail. YouTube allows creators to profit and build businesses for themselves. Facebook shares none of it's revenue with creators and this is not a sustainable model in the long term.
Even if they are sharing with uploaders, they're less creators and more freeloaders pirating other people's YouTube content in most cases so this is pretty irrelevant at best.
Because they haven't done enough to piss off the RIAA/MPAA and get a billion dollar lawsuit yet. They're only abusing smaller creators who can't afford to do anything serious about it.
I for one cannot wait for the American Facebook user to actually sit down and consider whether they pay their ISP $10 a month to be force fed ads in their time line now throughout all videos and the finally put down the 'free' drug that Facebook has become.
Edit: Not just Facebook but social media as a whole.
The problem is though: Facebook is so big, they will pay every ISP in the country to be apart of the "free basics" package. The've even already done this in India and other developing nations around the world with https://internet.org. This will be free, or the lowest cost internet plan. So with net neutrality gone, Facebook has it easier, not harder.
I am confused by this comment. You pay ISPs for connection to content providers (assuming net neutrality). It is normal to expect people to pay the content providers for the content itself either directly or through watching ads. You can argue (and I would agree) that some content is not worth it, but this is not ISP related (again assuming net neutrality).
The comment is that you can no longer assume net neutrality. Under the assumption that your ISP does the equivalent of bundling television channels, you'd have end users look at their "package options" and go "no, of course I won't pay you an extra 10$/mo for Facebook with ads". GP is looking forward to the Schadenfreude.
Same. Ad starts playing? Skip to whatever is next in the feed. Ad at the start of a video, not even going to wait. As it is, after turning off all notifications from FB I maybe open the app once a week.
Facebook is just a feed of only fake promoted posts now. It's become like producthunt but promoting everything indirectly. I can't even see posts of pages I like anymore. Couple of times I found that Facebook automatically unliked pages that I had liked and haven't seen their posts in a year or something.
My wife make crochset things as a hobby, and she has decided to create a facebook page to share the passion and show what she made. Most of the fans are our mutual friends, but it has become sort of a side-income for her (friends like to order some of the stuff she makes). Last year she had lots of likes and orders for Christmas-themed stuff in Nov/Dec. This year all Facebook gave us was nagging to "boost" posts for money, and pay to promote to reach X more people etc. The content doesn't even reach our friends who are actively waiting to see new stuff unless we share it using our personal accounts (and even then it's nothing compared to last year). It's pay or fade away. That's why the feed becomes all sponsored stuff.
> Videos must now last at least three minutes to be eligible for an “ad break” up from the previous threshold of 90 seconds. Facebook expects users will be more likely to watch ads in the middle of longer videos.
Why would anyone be okay with watching a 3 minute video with an ad at the start and in the middle?
I will never understand why people insist on using Facebook. What is the appeal? If you’re worth talking to, I will give you my phone number and we can text. For longer messages, I will send you an email. I can keep track of my contacts inside the Address book of my phone. What need exactly is Facebook filling?
For me Facebook fills the need of a centralized place to communicate with my close friends via Messenger, a place to keep track of niche interests via groups, and a place to get invites to events by friends that I don't see or talk to as often. I also use it to keep track of a few news sources.
I get it that some people don't want to use Facebook, but you really can't understand why other people make a different decision?
I'm already blowing over my data allowance each month thanks to things like facebook, I don't see this helping me. I'd say "well, it's time to get off Facebook then!" like so many people say, except the actual execution of that plan is what seems to fail me.
Of course.. this is the pressure that all public companies face; the pressure to forever increase shareholder value @ whatever cost :-/.. Sad. I wonder if FB is "too big to fail" or if there's a chance that more moves like this might actually hurt the platform?
I have been instantly closing the Facebook app or Facebook page as soon as I get any type of video ad. I feel like some ML algo will learn that I will not watch video advertisements so eventually it may stop trying. This will make it so I will not watch videos at all on Facebook anymore.
Or it will ply you with them more frequently. Eventually it may be an ad when you first launch the site/app, but don't worry, you can buy coins to skip it!
I use Messenger to get in touch with my friends from college and I'm a member of a private group about AI. I actually don't use the birthday list because, be honest, do you know if all your close friends and relatives on Facebook did send you a birthday greeting? I have other notifications for my immediate family's birthdays, I send them a text or call them at their birthday instead.
Deleting the Facebook app has been liberating. I spend more time learning new stuff, consuming entertainment I actually enjoy, and building stuff than I did before. Facebook was really unhealthy for me, and it could be that I'm approaching my 30s but it just gives me no lasting enjoyment anymore.
I see some of the typical facebook hate posts but I personally don't mind it at all. I removed the app from my phone and check the website maybe once or twice a day. I get reminded about people that I would have forgotten otherwise and sparks interest again. I also get a dose of updates what's happening in terms of events and groups around me.
I also use it very successfully to sell things through free market groups when things like craigslist got me close to new results besides a few scammers.
And messenger I use for normal staying-in-contact.
I don't see the need to delete my account, or to do a 'facebook cleanse month'. It's a useful tool and I see it as that
Presumably they didn't do it cause they wanted to build a userbase though. It was always gonna be monetized they just preferred growth to money initially.
Just in case someone out there isn't aware, there's an app called Facebook Local (formerly Facebook Events), which is focused on the events aspect of Facebook. Great for continued participation in friends' events without all the other stuff.
Surprisingly, it also seems to be good for finding local events if you're looking for something to do.
Don't people here use the 'block newsfeed' extensions?
I think that's a nice middle ground to be on. I can still participate in groups that I'm a member of, can still chat with friends, while not have the awfulness that is the newsfeed shoved down my mind.
Will it be resource heavy for facebook to make the ads unblockable?
I remember when ublock stopped preventing spotify ads. It was when I stopped using the service for about 2 weeks, until the blocking functionality was reinstated.
Worse is their current policy. I've seen my wife watch Facebook videos and an ad will INTERRUPT THE VIDEO with a video of its own. That's completely unacceptable, to me.
This might be what gets me to finally abandon my Facebook account for good. They couldn't find a more aggravating way to squeeze the last drop of blood from this stone.
so..i'll be scrolling through my feed and ill see my friend post what appears to be a video ad. I'm smart enough to know its just a facebook ad, but alot of people will be tricked and actually think their friend is endorsing a product.
But if you knew that a majority of the population was simply watching advertisements, wouldn't it annoy you? Facebook has commoditized the social nature of humanity and now they are selling it. I highly doubt Mark would let his daughter freely roam FB.
I used to like Facebook a lot. I would argue about politics there like a lot of people did in 2016. Facebook wss where I got my news for a while. Nah, I have unfollowed those toxic pages (e.g “Now This”)
I was bothered by my mental illness this year and I live streamed my suicide attempt twice and it was not pretty to watch. Friends all freaked out and tried to get someone to help me. I guess I did that because “that’s where people get to see me”.
A few months ago I deactivated my facebook for about a month and I maintained my relationship strictly over WhatsApp. It worked great. There was no pressure. I eventually reactivated it so I can spend some more time with a really good friend.
Now, like my Instagram, most of the pages I follow now are about cats, some cultural stuff, and a number of youtubers.
I still get to see what my friends are doing and that’s great. I still share pictures and updates with my friends. But I am not so attached to it anymore (and the stupid iOS app has been crashing every 30 seconds for no freakin’ reason) - Facebook team please fix it.
You don’t have to deactivate the account, but please clean up your newsfeed first. Unfollow pages you don’t want and clean up friend list.
Use the good part of Facebook and you will be fine.
I have never in 10 years clicked on a single ad and I've removed the apps so I don't get autoplaying videos so I'm not bothered by the future ads on there. Messenger is important to me and the Birthday list is too. Without those I wouldn't deCtivate since you need it as social proof for Tinder, but I'd never go back on.
Honestly, I was busy for just 3 days and didn't log on and the "addiction" completely vanished. We need to have a no shave novemebr for Facebook, maybe a no Facebook February and I guarantee millions would get off the addiction and vastly limit daily social media use.