Some more articles on how Facebook is having trouble with their business model…
This article (mentioned on HN in Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis is from September, but hints at significant loss of users in The West:
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And all the negative news and scandals had their effects on the moral of FB employees:
And the Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18450058
unless someone comes up with an alternative that everyone you know can get excited about, there will be no mass migration.
I’m not entirely sure that’s true. We may see a sagging, deflating of FB over time, lessening of social media throttleholds in general, and a fragmentation of available attention. People are getting sick of social media. They may not want to replace Facebook at all; they may want to reclaim their attention and their minds altogether.
This is beginning, with educated, well-off, and/or tech-savvy people leaving FB. It’ll likely trickle on down through the socioeconomic ranks. Right now, the biggest increase in smartphone market penetration here in the US is among lower-income users.
Here is an article from CNN that seems to imply Facebook has not much to worry about the fraction of users who give up on the app.
Finally it is starting to dawn on many people in the US that Facebook is up to no good, and worth to overcome the FOMO of quiting the platform.
Also read the large and insightful discussion on Hacker News (more than 500 comments already): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19322448
I’ve been off FB since late 2016 and could not be more satisfied with that decision. I can hardly believe people are still willing to go on the site, given everything we know. If any group I’m a part of insists on using FB I simply say I won’t be participating that way and I find another way to stay apprised of what’s happening. The idea that it’s not possible to leave these sites is propaganda and is frankly utter nonsense. I won’t trade my privacy and that of people I care about, and democracy, for the dubious benefits FB offers. BTW I don’t use any of the other social media sites either - I use Signal for messaging and protonmail for email.
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