
Facebook exodus: Nearly half of young users have deleted the app - octosphere
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/05/facebook-exodus-44-percent-of-americans-age-18-29-have-deleted-app.html
======
jwally
Note I wrote my father in law when he had gone too far down the rabbit hole
and legitimately worried about the poison it spreads around his demographic:

I left Facebook when I read some press release about it being designed from
the outset to make you feel bad because it keeps you engaged; hoping someone
agrees with something you liked or shared and the dopamine hit it releases. I
don’t like feeling manipulated and manipulation is facebooks modus operandi.
All to track everything I do around the internet to sell me ads for
$12/person/year in revenue.

I left Twitter for basically the same reason and when I’d stick on the site
refreshing it all day hoping someone noticed the well thought out point I
spent 3 hours putting together only to realize no one cares. Leaving both
after about a week feels like when I have taken breaks from caffeine. It sucks
at first but after a week, you feel refreshed and clean. I’m sure drug
abstinence feels similar.

My father went down the rabbit hole of Facebook and shares political crap
constantly, flooding peoples news feeds. There’s a feature on Facebook that
lets you silently unfollow people so they’re on mute. Everyone of my family
members who are Facebook friends with my dad have done this to him and don’t
see anything he posts. He’s shouting into a black hole thinking the whole
world is paying attention while in reality no one is.

He has said things that the man I grew up with would never have said and
Facebook/ talk radio is to blame. We’re all vulnerable to it, which is why I
try and stay away from it.

[https://www.wired.com/2017/02/dont-believe-lies-just-
people-...](https://www.wired.com/2017/02/dont-believe-lies-just-people-
repeat/)

~~~
duxup
I don't even know what Twitter is for except mutual high fives over the most
superficial "look at me" memeish stuff.

It's worse than facebook as far as the "get attention" vibe.

Granted all social media is about getting attention, and I don't think there
is anything wrong with it necessarily. Attention is nice, there is good reason
for it, but when the message is so tailored to just that and there isn't
anything else, I don't know what the point is.

I recently switched careers from a long networking career to web development
and thought I'd take another spin on Twitter, but rather I just get sites that
paste a link to their website, and hordes of people posting programming
truisms or career / resume / coding lifestyle fodder .... so little feels like
that person wrote it, so much feels like what those people thing "a commercial
about me" should be.

\---

As for your other notes about the impact on people. It is horrifying. I see
some relatives posting terrible things and I wish saying "but you've never met
any of those people" had the impact that it should... but it doesn't.

~~~
erickhill
It took me about _10 years_ to finally "get Twitter". I used to use it for
professional reasons, posting what I considered relevant content. For the most
part no one really cared. The engagement was almost always nil. Sort of like
saying something intelligent, out of the blue, to a crowded stadium of people
doing the same thing.

Then, 2 years ago I created a new account that ONLY focused on a personal
hobby of mine: retro-computing. I posted photos, links to cool articles,
experiences from my workbench, etc. To my surprise, I began to get a lot of
engagement. Like, 25-50X more than what I used to ever get on my professional
persona's account.

I made a point to only follow back people who posted similarly to my own
laser-beam focus. This takes a lot of time, but I have cultivated a stream of
content I very much enjoy reading and scanning in my off-hours or lunch
breaks. If you post about politics, or food, or cats, or simply whine or are
acidic by nature, I don't follow those accounts back. I'm looking for good
vibrations for a pastime hobby - that's it. And to my surprise (and those that
know me personally and professionally that I've explained this to) it has
worked beautifully for that. No one is a jerk and no one is trolling, none of
that.

I've actually made several online friends around the country and the world as
a result of the past 2+ years on Twitter.

Now, is my experience normal? No. If I were to guess it's probably in the top
2% in terms of the joy it brings me (vs. the rest of the user population who
just hates to even look at Twitter anymore). And I totally get that.

I hope the service keeps going for my own greedy self-interests. But I also
recognize that Mastadon may be the future, too. Or something else.

It's sort of how I changed my usage with Facebook. I deleted my personal
account and created an anonymous account on FB that _only_ is used for FB
Groups (in, yes, the same hobby). These are closed groups that are moderated.

And holy smokes. It works.

Go figure.

Remove the YOU from social media, and use it to have fun about whatever it is
you do to have fun, and it can actually be ... fun.

~~~
Falkon1313
Sounds a lot like going back to the anonymous/pseudonymous usenet groups and
forums that we had before 'social networking' became a buzzword.

Why use Twitter for such things, given its limitations? Why not use a blog,
personal site, or forum where instead of just posting a link you can also
write your thoughts about it, etc.? I get not wanting to bother with running a
personal site or maintain a blog, but there are tons of hobby forums.

Personally, I never got the appeal of Twitter, and while I did enjoy early
Facebook, since it jumped the shark I use it primarily as a long-term contact
list for people that I don't talk to very often so that we'll still have a way
to connect if one of us changes email addresses/phone numbers before the next
time we talk.

~~~
salvar
> Why use Twitter for such things, given its limitations?

It has limitations, but it also has a lot of reach. A blog might not reach the
people you are trying to share things with.

------
brobdingnagians
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.

~~~
mrweasel
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.

~~~
deminature
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.

~~~
clarry
It is frightening how the internet outrage culture is getting people fired and
destroying their lives over some stupid tweet.

~~~
deminature
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.

~~~
goldfeld
Or society is just showing how barbaric it's ever been. See the elections in
Brazil yesterday.

------
samfisher83
They are just going from FB to Instagram:

[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/22/teens-abandoning-facebook-
st...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/22/teens-abandoning-facebook-still-
flocking-to-instagram.html?recirc=taboolainternal)

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.

~~~
lostgame
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".

~~~
cududa
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

~~~
samstave
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.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
If you're not interested in posting why not just use instagram.com?

~~~
samstave
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.

------
irrational
I have teenagers and college-age kids and I'm not surprised in the least. They
openly consider Facebook to be a platform for old people.

They seem to have moved to more of a distributed social media system. That is,
they don't seem to have a central place where they communicate with friends.
They seem to move between texts, facetime, tumblr, instagram, phone calls (!),
etc. in a fluid manner. Anything except for Facebook (which has a negative
stigma these days). They don't seem to be tied down to any one platform
anymore.

~~~
derefr
I don't think there's any sort of "stigma." There's just the fact that, since
"old people" _are_ on Facebook—and that likely includes your parents and other
relatives—they all expect you to add them as a Facebook friend. At which point
you won't be able to be yourself on Facebook any more, because they can
observe any of your "broadcast" activity.

The nice thing about the other platforms isn't that they don't have "old
people" on them. It's specifically that your parents and relatives won't even
_think_ to add you on, say, Snapchat.

Also note that the apps that teens mostly _do_ interact with parents through
now, consist mostly of group-chat apps like Messenger or WeChat, where there
is an explicit separation of social contexts (the groups you're chatting
with), such that you don't need to worry about your relatives seeing anything
as long as you don't put it in your family group.

~~~
irrational
I don't know. Recently I was at an event where an older teen was giving a
speech where he mentioned some social media platform and then explained,
"That's like Facebook for you old people". That got quite a laugh, but in my
experience there really is a stigma among young people that Facebook is only
for old people.

~~~
fjsolwmv
Right, but there is no stigma against Facebook, the stigma is against "old
people" and wherever they happen to be.

~~~
irrational
That isn't what I'm saying. When I hear teens and college students talking bad
about Facebook, they aren't mentioning old people (though that probably is the
root cause), they are saying Facebook by name. They are saying "Facebook
sucks" not "Old people suck, old people use Facebook, ergo I am declining from
using Facebook for now until I too am an old person".

~~~
Double_a_92
It sucks because you can't freely post anything there, without people (family
/ coworkers) judging you. I don't want to broadcast to that group of people.
If I need to talk to them it's personal or in small groups, so that's done in
instant messengers.

The only people I would like to broadcast to are close friends or strangers on
the internet.

I don't have that many close friends, so a bigger IM group is enough for that.
(I guess Instagram might work if you have lots of "close" friends.)

That leaves only my need to anonymously talk to the internet. So Twitter,
reddit, personal blogs?

------
Nikaoto
There's just no way I could keep myself up to date with local events without
Facebook. I live in a post-soviet country so Snapchat and Instagram are
considered pretty niche here so every social event is always documented on
Facebook.

I also hold a monthly gamedev meetup, which would be utterly impossible
without Facebook. The attendance has grown from 5 to 30 people in a few months
and is now helping jump start the game development scene in the country (not
because of my meetup).

Despite this, I have a deep hatred towards the platform and can't stand how
people around me get locked into feedback loops of endless scrolling. I
uninstalled the app on my phone a year ago, kept messenger. Also, I haven't
seen the news feed in more than 2 years, after installing a plugin that blocks
it. The productivity gains were and still are immeasurable.

I see the platform as a versatile and useful tool to help connect with others
and I hope that Facebook will try to improve it and remove some of its
ethically questionable features, but it's still evil.

It's a necessary evil.

~~~
Zelphyr
It is evil but it's really not as necessary as you think. I'm known to ALL of
my friends and ALL of my family as someone who will not ever be on Facebook.
You know what they do? They call me. Or text me. Or email me. And I never miss
out on events. Even people I rarely interact with know how to, and do reach me
outside of Facebook.

People make such a big deal out of how impossible their social lives would be
without Facebook but never actually try it. I honestly don't get it.

~~~
Aelius
Same, however in my experience people like us will be left out of the loop
when there are last minute changes to the event. Just last week I nearly
missed a weekly public activity: the venue changed last minute and they only
posted about that on Facebook. If a friend hadn't told me, I'd have gone to
the usual place.

I have an amusing anecdote about being the one friend without Facebook.

Someone told me about a birthday party- they told me where it was and what
time to be there. They did not tell me that our group was not actually invited
and our arrival would be a surprise.

The rest of the group was half an hour late. I was not. They all wanted to
arrive together and were delayed, but no one filled me in on the new time.

And that's the story about how I awkwardly attended a party for 30min where I
knew no one but the birthday woman and it was obvious to _everyone_ that I was
not actually invited.

All was well once my friends arrived. Still, what a nightmare that was.

~~~
Zelphyr
I haven't had Facebook in going on seven years. Not once has someone said
anything like, "I only sent the invite out on Facebook. I forgot to invite
you!"

------
JumpCrisscross
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?"

~~~
scarecrowbob
I wrote a script:

    
    
      #  ~/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.

~~~
jayalpha
How does this work? I get an error?

sed: can't read s/^127.0.0.1 f....

~~~
glass_of_water
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.

~~~
jayalpha
No, I use ubuntu

sed: can't read s/^127.0.0.1 facebook.com/#127.0.0.1 facebook.com/: No such
file or directory

~~~
scarecrowbob
If it's helpful, I have to run this as su on macOS. I got no idea if it works
for anyone else.

------
Animats
Wow, that's tough for Facebook.

But Facebook did it to themselves. I just opened up Facebook on desktop. Above
the fold, I have "People you may know" whom I've never heard of. Nothing above
the fold is very relevant. Some of my horse-owning friends have posted some
things, but I have to dig to find them.

Two years ago, I was shown what my friends were doing. Now Facebook puts all
the crap up top. Facebook's ideas of what to show me are strange. Burning Man
infrastructure groups? A double-wide house trailer in Fremont? Huh? No wonder
people are fed up.

They're down at Myspace level now.

~~~
jboles
By putting the crap up top they're inducing you to start that downward
scroll...

------
MadcapJake
I deleted the app because I was sick of getting notifications somewhere along
the lines of “your friend just commented on a photo” or “your friend recently
liked a post”. I tried turning off all notifications that weren’t directly
related to my content and Facebook still sent me these types of notifications.
So I said that I would just use the website instead of getting these
notifications (at least 2 a day). I want an app that provides a means to
connect with old friends rather than gossip about their comments/likes. I feel
like they are doubling down on being a gossip machine.

~~~
swozey
This was the straw that finally made me delete everything. For a few days/week
I was getting text messages for notifications even though I had them disabled
and had even deleted the app (deleted app out of the frustration you
mentioned). I couldn't escape it.

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/16/17022162/facebook-two-
fac...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/16/17022162/facebook-two-factor-
authentication-sms-notifications-security-bug)

~~~
NeoBasilisk
Oh, so it was a bug, huh? I found it so irritating that I just removed my
phone number from my facebook account altogether, because I couldn't find any
setting that would make them stop texting me.

------
Rotdhizon
Facebook really has no draw to it anymore other than the convenience of
messaging people that you don't have other lines of communication with. Going
through my feed, it's 95% spam consisting of friends sharing stock pictures
with spiritual quotes, self motivational quotes, etc. It's difficult to filter
through that for some people you want to keep tabs on because they share
annoying junk from 50 different sources, requiring me to manually block every
single one to keep them off my feed. I didn't use it for several years and it
had very few negatives. The only thing I missed out on was not reconnecting
with old friends. FB is for the older crowds now, it's lost all appeal to the
younger generations. Hell, I'd rather see myspace revived than have FB be
popular again. At least myspace let you get creative.

~~~
RandallBrown
My facebook feed is 95% pictures of my friends in their halloween costumes.

------
kozak
"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.

~~~
rchaud
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.

~~~
thelasthuman
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.

------
abalone
I think Facebook is juicing their DAU metrics by gaming people with "friend
suggestion" notifications.

My usage is way down and I barely check it, maybe once in a couple weeks, but
after I check it I get a sudden uptick in notifications. Mostly "friend
suggestions". There's nothing new about them. In many cases they've suggested
them before. But it seems like they just want to slide into my notifications
and keep that red badge lit up and just trigger me to open up the app. But not
too much.. after I ignore it for awhile they die down, probably so I don't
uninstall entirely. Then the cycle repeats a couple weeks later.

And I could be wrong but it looks like they _removed_ the ability to turn off
friend suggestion notifications. You can turn just about everything else off
but not that one. Hmmmm...

~~~
Yhippa
There's no better feeling than getting friend suggestions from people who've
flat out unfriended me.

------
samstave
The biggest failure in FB afaiac, is the complete package of utility to truly
connect people with tools.

For example, they could have created workspaces for people to create teams and
collaborate and build things, manage communities and projects have real
facility to build create and run organizations with Facebook being the profile
glue and communications channel.

They have had less-than-mediocre efforts on all of these. And their system
stinks of every kind of digital fraud you can imagine from inflated and fake
metrics across the board, to data breaches and leaks, a UX that is labrynthian
etc.

With the money And resources they have, why don't we see the fruits of Vision
that could be available to them.

Their cell phone was a flop, their engagements feel cancerous and they are
basically a new-money-elite building moats around old-boy-exclusionist
thinking.

~~~
abvdasker
To my mind one of the major mistakes Facebook made was that they never made
any effort to implement identity segmentation. I don't want a picture of me
from college with a solo cup in each hand visible to any prospective employer
and therefore would never want my Facebook profile to take the place of the
one I have created for myself on LinkedIn.

If I could have multiple views of my identity depending on the context that
would be pretty neat and more analogous to the way people present themselves
in the real world. Huge missed opportunity on Facebook's part and now it's way
too late.

My other hot take is that the interaction design of Facebook is just much too
heavy when compared to Instagram or Tinder. If I go on Facebook it's
guaranteed 15 minutes of time just to kind-of get into the flow and see a
bunch of friends' statuses and maybe click on their profiles. Instagram on the
other hand you can just pick up and scroll through pictures for a few minutes
and then put down — the interaction feels lighter weight and less burdensome.

------
wgerard
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.

~~~
rigged-system
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.

~~~
rigged-system
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.

~~~
mulmen
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.

~~~
cknoxrun
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.

~~~
therealx
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.

------
izzydata
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.

~~~
stephengillie
This isn't about deleting your account. It's about uninstalling the app.

~~~
ddebernardy
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.

~~~
enjo
There are definitely some set of users that have dropped the app for technical
reasons, but are still active Facebook users.

I've uninstalled the app, but that's because it was a huge battery drain.

------
dalbasal
I'm always suspicious of stats like this. Is it cherry-picked? Does it mean
what it sounds like it means? Do young users just delete-n-reinstall apps more
often than older users? Is 44% higher than last year...?

All that said, I expect FB (the social media network, not the company) to peak
and shrink, at some point. It just seems more like something that exists for a
certain period of time.

Imagine a movie set in 2034. Do FB notifications ping the characters' AR
lenses?

If you think of long-lived tech companies, they tend to have a very deep moat
(oracle, msft, intel) and/or terrific execution ability (amazon, google,
foxconn, apple). Facebook hasn't shown execution ability like that yet. Their
moat isn't that deep.

~~~
liftbigweights
> All that said, I expect FB (the social media network, not the company) to
> peak and shrink, at some point. It just seems more like something that
> exists for a certain period of time.

Probably true in the US. But FB is still growing overseas.

> Facebook hasn't shown execution ability like that yet. Their moat isn't that
> deep.

Their moat is pretty deep. They own 4 out of the top 6 social media platforms.

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-
net...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-
ranked-by-number-of-users/)

All their properties are growing worldwide (even FB). And the fastest growing
platform in the US for young adults is instagram. Guess who owns instagram?

------
buboard
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.

~~~
lostgame
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?) :/

~~~
yesenadam
_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.

------
cm2012
That's why Facebook's quarterly number of daily users has dropped
precipitously from 181 million daily users to ... 181 million daily users.

Facebook's daily user numbers havn't dropped at all. So either they're moving
to IG, or people say a lot of things in surveys.

EDIT: Meant to specify, the numbers in this comment are US only.

~~~
rtkwe
Note this is among American users. With Facebook moving into other markets
(see East Asia where their introduction and use might have helped kick off the
crisis in Myanmar) drops in the US could easily be covered up by increase
elsewhere.

~~~
cm2012
The numbers I posted are US only, FB is still growing 30%+ in daily
international users YoY.

------
alex_duf
Deleted the app last year, then last September asked for all my data, then
closed my account.

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.

~~~
bracobama
Wait what... Instagram's feed isn't chronological?

~~~
oe
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.

~~~
markmark
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.

~~~
oe
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](https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/NewStravaFeed)

------
IronWolve
I stopped playing facebook games when they tried to get me to log in every
hour, to water or take care of someone's farm. Sorry, I dont need another
Job...

Then the client started spying on me, so I switched to the web mobile version.
Then they removed chat from that. Oh well, I can text people instead.

I'm not playing their game, behaving like they want me too, they want mindless
drones, f' them.

I'm very close to deleting my account, but my daughter posts the grandkids
pics, so I'm stuck for now.

They want a race to the bottom, they are doing a good job with their damn
authoritarian forceful methods. Already filtering what I view, its really
worthless now.

~~~
stokednz
I use the DuckDuckGo browser for Facebook messaging on the mobile site.

------
tempestn
For a while I couldn't understand this "delete facebook" trend. I've had a
Facebook account forever, but have never felt the desire to waste my life
endlessly reading garbage on there. I set it up to give me notifications in
three cases: when someone contacts my business page, and when my wife or my
mom posts something (the latter being very infrequent, usually pictures of my
kids!) Otherwise I use it for a few local groups I care about (motorsports
mostly) and to look up an old friend occasionally. Occasionally I'll glance
through my feed when doing one of those other things—maybe once a month or so?

But now that I think about it, it's obviously like any addiction. An alcoholic
can't just have a beer every once in a while, and I'm sure it's just as
unhealthy for a lot of people to have Facebook on their phones. So, this
sounds like a healthy trend.

------
sgtAtom
I feel like Facebook has been squeezing their users for revenue more and more
over the past couple years, and the result is a terrible user experience. At
this point, I'm lucky if 10% of the content I see on Facebook is content I
actually care about. Young users have a lot less time and history invested in
Facebook, so it's no surprise to me that they're leaving.

------
arooni
In life you are either a consumer or a producer. Consumption is the silent
killer that's killed more dreams than any other force in history.

Relavent: [https://www.davidparkinson.com/beware-consumption-the-
silent...](https://www.davidparkinson.com/beware-consumption-the-silent-
killer/)

Also relavent: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-
eradicat...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicator-
for/fjcldmjmjhkklehbacihaiopjklihlgg) [I use this and swear by it... destroys
your news feed when you do login to facebook]

------
manigandham
I'm extremely glad that I was of the generation that only saw iPhones after
college. The instant connectivity of social media is nice in some aspects, but
I can't imagine growing up in this environment.

People just aren't designed for this kind of supersaturated communication, the
overwhelming need to share and show-off against the whole world, the complete
lack of privacy, and the fact that nothing is ever forgotten. It's definitely
not healthy, and I think the worst is still to come.

------
sct202
I still use Facebook regularly but I deleted the app and the regular Messenger
app because they were using too much RAM on my phone.

~~~
epx
Same here, but s/RAM/battery/ for me

~~~
CydeWeys
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).

------
cma
They don't give any real control of notifications (you can do some broad
stuff, but they try to spam you with irrelevant notifications at every
opportunity), and they burn up battery. I switched to just checking it via the
browser for those reasons.

------
mockingbirdy
I'm using Facebook every day to search for affiliate marketing websites and
niche sites that I can buy.

There are a ton of groups with website exchanges. It's also great to find
virtual assistants and content writers. We also have a group for our city
where things like cars, couches and other stuff gets posted. The same for
jobs, models and other topics. I can hire a bunch of people, buy websites and
trade stuff just using Facebook.

I'm 20y/o, so I guess I'm part of the relevant user group. All I can say is
that it's still very useful. I never comment or like anything, though. I'm
basically using it for business.

I don't think that I would use Instagram or Snapchat in the same way. I
recently bought an Instagram account with 10k followers to get into this
stuff, but I don't see the value of it (yet). It feels shallower than Facebook
(which is pretty hard).

edit: When I think about it - Facebook gives me easy access to a lot of people
and services. Does somebody know any alternatives (hiring people, trading
stuff and websites, local groups) when Facebook's user base leaves the
platform?

edit2: Reading through the comments - am I the only one who uses Facebook as a
means to do business? I thought that more people on HN would use it for that.

------
reilly3000
So HN, many of us have worked on User Experiences, Analytics Pipelines, User
Graphs and other such technologies. Many of us have seen, participated in or
personally built systems that, upon reflection and among new laws and news
about privacy travesties, may be a source of regret. Besides the excellent
work at darkpatterns.org, I'm not aware of any real 'rules of the road'
outside of privacy laws, nor if I had a serious concern how to properly report
it.

What is the brass tacks right way forward for us to create or embrace a system
to define ethical behavior on the web, and to expose unethical behavior. What
about enforcement? How can this be done in a way that ensures freedom? Or is
it impossible to police the web?

I see a few ways forward:

\- Status quo, private companies making individual actions internally, driven
with a fiduciary responsibility for profit.

\- A benefit corp offering some auditing, credibility, and feedback layer on
the web as a paid/freely available service.

\- Public firewall-as-a-service sort of wiki + LD API that gives users the
ability to control their own subscriptions to information filters, flags, and
warnings.

\- Global internet police authority.

Full Disclosure: that last one was bait.

------
sparkzilla
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.

------
quadcore
_A new survey of more than 3,400 U.S. Facebook users finds that 44 percent of
users ages 18 to 29 have deleted the app from their phones in the past year.

Overall, 26 percent have deleted the app, while 42 percent have taken a break
of several weeks or more._

Something's off. I don't know. How many people are we talking about? 80
millions? In the US alone? Really? We need more source here.

~~~
dlivingston
This also, by no means, spells 'the end' of FB. They allude to as much in the
article, but personally I've deleted / reinstalled FB multiple times this year
(along with Snap and Insta), as an effort to decouple myself from the digital
dopamine IVF.

'A new survey finds XX% of users aged _ to _ have rode their bike to work
instead of driving this past year' does not mean that people are giving up
their car.

------
lostgame
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?

~~~
lambda_lover
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.

~~~
petepete
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.

~~~
bradlys
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).

It's a clumsy experience but it works.

------
dawhizkid
Not that these things aren't replaceable/fixable, but the only two features
keeping me on Facebook is 1) I have 2 active FB groups I would like to
continue participating in and 2) I get most event invites from friends through
FB events and would not want to be excluded/forgotten because I decided to
delete my account.

------
ackidacki
I never wanted to disable the app, only disable notifications. The app
however, made this impossible. It kept having popups and kept redirect to
settings to re-enable them. The popups were so bad it made using the app
without push notifications impossible. So I just deleted it instead.

------
jganz
I am 32 years old and had been a facebook user since I was in college (2004).
I completely deleted all of my post history and shut down my account about 6
months ago and can say I feel really good about the decision. I realize now
that I thought I was staying more connected with my friends, though I was just
using it to keep an eye on what is going on in there lives. Whereas now, I
find that I actually take the time to meet up with more friends and connect
with them in person. It has obviously dramatically decreased the number of
people that 'connect with' (watch through my news feed), but maximized the
quality and depth of relationships with people I actually care about.

------
patrickaljord
Most of them are on instagram and whatsapp anyway. Besides, teens stopped
using email too, doesn't mean they don't start using it once they turn into
adults on the workforce.

------
JohnJamesRambo
My Mom and her generation are the only ones I know around me still using
Facebook. They eat it up, they can't get enough of it like crack, since it is
many of their first exposure to social media in their lifetime.

I don't think that bodes well for Facebook, that's not the demographic anyone
wants as far as I know. Like Snapchat after Kylie Jenner's tweet, this survey
is the canary in the coal mine telling investors to get out.

~~~
Mahn
> that's not the demographic anyone wants as far as I know

On the contrary, that's the demographic everyone wants, older people have more
money to spend. Of course, having _only_ this demographic is not great long
term, since the younger generations lead the way to adoption. But short term
they'll continue to make money.

------
secabeen
I refrained from installing FB on my phone at the last refresh. I don't mind
FB, I even like it pretty well, but the app feels like it's constantly
gathering data about myself, my friends, where I go, how long I'm there, etc.,
etc. The value proposition just isn't there for what I get from FB in exchange
for the data they're getting. I still use the web FB, and that's fine.

------
pcurve
"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%.

~~~
icsllaf
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.

------
kendallpark
I use the "News Feed Eradicator" Chrome extension. Don't have the app on my
phone, nor Messenger. Life is more sane.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-
eradicat...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicator-
for/fjcldmjmjhkklehbacihaiopjklihlgg?hl=en)

------
ravenstine
This last Wednesday was the first day that I scrolled to the bottom of my feed
and it said something like "There are no more posts to show." I only check
once a day and never post or comment. The vast majority of posts are not from
friends, especially not those my age, but of pages I once "liked". Facebook is
a ghost town.

~~~
anticensor
Facebook needs a "reset feed" and "dislike".

------
jessaustin
I never used FB very much, but comments on some sites I frequent are FB-
hosted. As a result I don't comment, but in the last year whenever I look at
them these comment sections are inevitably chock-filled with spam. Why does
e.g. ESPN think they're getting something valuable out of that business
relationship?

------
qwerty456127
We certainly need a better Facebook. More customizable, more feature-rich yet
more lightweight, not corrupted to the core with surveilance and ads. Facebook
just had never been user-oriented. Even its Russian clone vk.com had always
been much much better than the original (sadly nowadays it's completely owned
by the russian Federal Security Bureau and is moving away from the great UX it
used to have too). There seem to be many efforts in the field of "federated"
social networks nowadays but I certainly don't want to host my social network
account myself (as this means hardware dependance and a chance to get hacked)
and the functionality they offer seems limited (i.e. I want first-class (not
twitter-style post-like) editable comments, markdown support in posts, media
embedding etc).

------
barbecue_sauce
I have reduced my usage of facebook considerably. I keep the app on my phone,
but only check it once or so a day. I can't use it on my desktop, as I have
blocked all of its domains (including tracking domains) in my hosts file. As
soon as I blocked tracking and reduced my usage, I noticed that I started to
get push notifications about things that I wasn't directly related to, but
facebook thought I would be interested in (previously I only got notifications
about comments to my own posts and replies). This also corresponded with
around the timing of Zuckerberg's congressional testimony, so I'm not sure if
this more aggressive notification strategy has happened for everybody, or just
those of us that have actively disengaged from the platform.

------
kazinator
Where are these users going? If they are migrating to something owned by
Facebook, it's a moot point.

------
filmgirlcw
What will be interesting to observe is if this will correlate to usage.
Anecdotally, it seems like it will -- but it's also possible that mobile usage
of the proper app will simply yield to Messenger and that the desktop will be
used other ways.

I will say that for myself, I still have Facebook on my phone but I do
everything I can to use it as rarely as possible.

I should also add the caveat that because of the "public" nature of my former
job (and to a certain extent, my current job), I have been unable to use
Facebook like a normal person since late 2007 and so my investment in it as an
actual social network is far less than might be the case for others, who like
me, joined in college, and then saw it as a catalyst for lots of other things.

------
TACIXAT
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.

~~~
stephengillie
This is about uninstalling the app, not deleting your account.

------
wufufufu
When Facebook introduced a "News feed" and also allowed news and fake news
(i.e. non-personal updates) to advertise and proliferate, it really just
became "forwards from grandma" which has always been around. It's just much
more extreme now.

------
jvagner
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?

------
universenz
I deleted the app over a year ago as well. Best move ever.

I replaced it with a shortcut on the home screen to the mobile version of the
Facebook website in Safari. I use the AdGuard plugin on iOS to remove the
primary reason I was getting sick of the Facebook iOS app - the FORCED
"Stories" banner at the top of the news feed.

Not only is the newsfeed much lighter and cleaner on mobile.. but ads are
blocked, notifications are "opt-in" (the shortcut on the home screen doesn't
show notifications), analytics are probably less detailed, and I don't have to
deal with that shitty stories bar taking up the first quarter of my screen
every time I open the Newsfeed.

------
AOsborn
May have been mentioned elsewhere in the comments, but I haven't read through
all.

I think most commenters here missing the major point against Facebook for many
young users: being forced to use your real identity (and only one account).

As already mentioned, most young people have switched to Instagram and find
Facebook embarrassing.

That made sense.

What I was surprised to learn was that almost everyone has more than one
account - often three or more.

This is actually the killer hidden feature of Instagram - easy to manage
privacy.

So one has a main account, possibly public, that is OK for parents and
strangers to see.

Then they have a private account for friends.

Then possibly a third account for close friends. This is one that
nudes/sexual/illegal content is posted on.

------
casper345
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

------
londons_explore
A good part of this is that their app is huge and gobbles hundreds of
megabytes of space on my phone I'd far rather use for more photos or other
apps.

Make a minimalistic, lightweight, not gobbling RAM or storage app, and I'd
probably use it again.

------
dang
Turns out the survey this is based on already had a big discussion on HN,
though not as big as this one.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17919811](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17919811)

------
jonathankoren
The real question is what this really means for their bottom line. Young
people not joining / leaving Facebook was predicted a decade ago. (“Who wants
to join a social network with your mom?”, was the question.) But they also own
what appears to be the biggest alternative platform, Instagram. On top of
this, they’re still growing in APAC and other regions where they haven’t yet
reached saturation (ie NA and Europe)

Sure FB is morphing, but it’s not clear that Facebook Corp hasn’t set itself
up a tidy bulwark against the decline of Facebook.com in NA & Europe. They
might have. If they have, then they’ll continue to make money just fine.

------
egfx
I made a Social Media Facebook app [https://2fb.me](https://2fb.me) but Iv'e
never used Messenger, or Instagram outside of testing their functionality and
haven't posted a Facebook update in over a year. I _occasionally_ react to
posts. Yet as far as Social Media, Twitter, the most depressing site of all
still manages to suck in a lot of my time. Am I a weirdo? Man, does the
internet need to change. It's all the same. VR gamerooms? Non of this will
help Facebook. The network effect that made it popular is already working it's
way in reverse.

------
surfmike
I know the study didn't cover it but would be interesting to measure the
change in Instagram usage at same time. Anecdotally a lot of people I know
have become active on Instagram and stopped posting to FB.

------
ry_ry
Is an interesting one, assuming they struggle to get new users on the main
platform.

FB have a lot of hope riding on Marketplaces, but it's viability is entirely
down to FB being so ubiquitous.

Product suggestion (graph is still their core business, obviously), and being
able cross promote their products to a captive audience. They basically can't
pivot because everything they want to do relies on finding ways to leverage
the data they generate.

Can't figure out where they're heading in the longer term tbh. Would fully
expect IG Marketplaces to follow in the next couple of years.

------
Endy
I'm on an Android where the Facebook program came default. I've never logged
into the site using my device, and I never will. But thanks to the way
Alcatel, TracFone, and Facebook have it worked out, the best thing I can do is
"Force Stop" and "Disable" the program rather than uninstall it and remove it
from my device. It definitely makes me worried about logging into any website
- even in "Incognito Mode", because it says to me that someone wants to know
what I'm doing whether I like that or not.

------
pard68
I deleted my account. A comment on an HN article a few weeks ago prompted me
to see if, after six months, it was really deleted. Nope still there. Waiting
to see if it will delete properly this time.

------
alkonaut
I don’t use the various pages and feeds, I only use the calendar feature. Pics
of friends’ kids are better on Instagram and the feed is occupied by a tiny
fraction of my friends with their crusade of choice. I just don’t read it. I
suspect I’m not alone in this usage pattern - I have effectively stopped using
the “traditional” Facebook but I’m still a regular visitor because of a few
features such as the calendar.

It can’t be good for their bottom line that I don’t see many ads or any
sponsored pages.

------
akeck
To be "successful" (be visible) on "classical" social media (vs. something
like HN), it seems like you have to do certain things every day - that change
depending on the current algorithm ("engagement"). So classical social media
(for me, FB and IG) became sort of a job. In the end, doing the social media
job instead of my other "jobs" (work, family, art, etc.) isn't that
interesting anymore, so I've slowed down my active use.

------
TangoTrotFox
I have difficulty reconciling news like this against Facebook's stock price.
Yes, they're growing in the rest of the world still, but America has the
number one large scale source of highly monetizable advertising targets. The
survey was carried out on the 5th of September when Facebook was at $167, it's
now at $141 and that's with an avalanche of other recent issues to pile onto
this.

Was this already somehow priced in, or what?

------
anonytrary
I've always felt that average people want to be anonymous. The internet is a
place to remove your filters and be honest about what you think. You don't
have to worry about people judging you and treating you differently based on
your ideas. Facebook doesn't solve that problem at all, it exacerbates it.
Facebook is a place you go to be judged by everyone you know. People
fundamentally don't want that drama.

------
arbol
After 13 years I recently deleted my entire account. I have more time and I
have less admin. I will miss messages from old acquaintances but that's ok.

------
ilaksh
Plenty of people have reasons not to use Facebook but I believe it mainly just
became uncool. Mostly because parents started showing up everywhere. But when
something becomes unpopular then people stop using it without actually needing
a rationale. Human behavior is largely dictated by subconscious social effects
and the rational brain comes up with explanations after the fact.

So now younger people mainly use Instagram? Or what?

------
rednerrus
The same thing that makes holiday dinners a chore, having to endure all of
your friends and relatives uninformed opinions, is now making Facebook a
chore.

~~~
chronid
That was actually the reason I used it for example. There was a lot of
discussion about political topics, _even_ with uninformed people. I liked that
- it was sometimes wasted effort, but it was partly done for the audience, to
prevent people spreading bullshit everywhere.

Then Facebook stopped showing me those posts in the feed, and my "engagement"
went rapidly to 0. I suspect they found out that people seeing only opinions
similar to theirs spend more time in-app...

------
jonthepirate
I would like to wholesale get it off my phone but I find that other apps
require fb login and so I have to reinstall it... I really do not want it on
my phone and I also reject their recruiter inquiries every other month too.

Every once in a while I get an alert about a birthday for someone I met once
when I was in college 20 years ago... one day I'll figure out how to shut all
of that off it's really annoying.

------
reaperducer
_Published 12:18 PM ET Wed, 5 Sept 2018 Updated 2:45 PM ET Tue, 11 Sept 2018_

This story is almost two months old. And I believe it's been on HN before.

------
stewfortier
Facebook's woes with young people always remind me of this TechLoaf joke...
[https://www.techloaf.io/2018/07/25/mark-zuckerberg-offers-
si...](https://www.techloaf.io/2018/07/25/mark-zuckerberg-offers-six-pack-of-
natural-light-to-any-teenager-who-reactivates-facebook-account/)

------
sdan
I deleted Facebook because it was downright toxic. I don't need to know what
everyone else is doing, I need to focus on my own and my own goals and
passions.

After deleting Facebook, I have published a paper on Arxiv, Beat Georgia Tech
at a robotics competition, and improved my GPA.

Nowadays, I spend my time on Reddit, Twitter, and HN for ML Papers/Software
Updates and Launches and stuff like that.

------
Steeeve
That's a big misleading headline.

26% of 3400 respondents to a survey in May had deleted the app from their
phones at some point in the preceding year.

~~~
nothis
I don't think it is, read closer. They're referencing this survey:
[http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/05/americans-
ar...](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/05/americans-are-changing-
their-relationship-with-facebook/)

The 26% number is adults, total. The 44% number is people 18-29.

------
rcheu
> Members of the American Trends Panel were recruited from several large,
> national landline and cellphone RDD surveys conducted in English and
> Spanish. At the end of each survey, respondents were invited to join the
> panel.

Methodology is very shakey for a sample of young people. Results are also just
weird—I’m a young person (24) and very few people I know have deleted FB.

------
patja
I was on a bit of a Facebook diet and considering getting rid of it. Then I
got a 3D printer and joined a few Facebook groups focused on owners of that
printer, and it breathed new life into my Facebook experience. It can be a
great information exchange and community, once you just get rid of all the
friends and family stuff on it.

------
mark_l_watson
I will go against the grain, a bit, here: I do think there is some value in
FB: once a week I go on for 5 minutes (I time myself) and try to quickly look
at stuff family and friends have posted, at least what FB’s algorithms choose
to show me.

Also, If I release a new open source project or a new book, I like to use FB,
Twitter, and G+ to announce it.

------
tammer
How do folks find out about music/art/local events without Facebook? My
account would be in the garbage otherwise.

------
umvi
I deleted Facebook and got Messenger Lite, which gives me 99% of the
functionality with 0% of the distraction and bloat.

~~~
collyw
God, I forgot about the full fat messenger. The most annoying thing I have
ever had on my phone.

------
burtonator
What we need are VIABLE solutions to social platforms... While people are
deleting Facebook they're NOT deleting Instagram.

Additionally, we're still vulnerable to a lot of the same attacks that
impacted us in the 2016 election.

These networks still hold your private connection graph, know what you're
reading, can target you precisely with ads, etc.

I'm building an app named Polar which is an offline-first document management
system for people that read large numbers of PDFs and technical documentation.

[https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)

I want to integrate social support and while I will probably support posting
to Twitter + Facebook for people who want to I also want to work on building
out some sort of distributed IPFS and / or filecoin style storage and
collaboration.

Unfortunately, I think the space is still a big early for this. Another
approach could be to just build a security protocol using group encryption.
You could see your public data by others and anything that was shared socially
but NO ONE ELSE could see your social data.

Right now the problem is that Facebook can see ALL your private and semi-
private data and that's INSANELY dangerous.

~~~
gibsonf1
You could make your app Solid compliant - I would love a good social network
UI on top of Solid, especially if it could import all the FB data into your
Solid repository. [https://solid.mit.edu/](https://solid.mit.edu/)

~~~
celkam
I've been thinking about this a bit, and my main concern about SOLID powering
a social network is that it would thrash Pods from users with thousands of
friends requesting thousands of documents on the same pod every x seconds,
which might work for commercial servers but end up being a DDOS on smaller
Pods.

I guess I'm worried about the power need to do this at scale, and that we'll
end up with something analogous to bitcoin mining pools where there's few
practical options for the average user.

~~~
gibsonf1
It's a good point, simply solved by people with a bunch of friends needing a
reliable POD. I think the point of Solid is that you pay for service, even if
it's a small fee. So if you have huge social needs, you might have to pay a
bit more for a reliable POD.

------
negamax
I am only using it for messenger and events. There’s still a strong pull
towards Facebook if you have friends on it

------
derefr
I _want_ to delete the Facebook app, but apparently it's needed on iOS for
other apps to "Login with Facebook."

So instead, I just leave it installed but with all push-notifications,
location-usage, etc. disabled, and then kill it right after I'm done using it
to log into something.

~~~
juhq
"Login with Facebook" without the app will just use the browser on your device
and you can continue login into apps using your fb account without the app.

------
jason46
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.

------
tlow
Are social networks inherently evil?

Is it possible some sort of B-Corp or Foundation could run an ethical social
networking product that put respecting and serving its users as a first
principle?

Could an offering out-compete today's products and gain significant user-ship?

Is a post-Facebook world better?

~~~
kopo
All they have to do is hide the like count.

And humanity can return to normal human communication without a count
influencing every behaviour and thought.

They can still use the counts behind the scenes to surface popular content and
whatever else they do with it.

------
jozen
Too bad I can't remove Facebook from my Galaxy S7 edge originally; had to root
to remove some ads. Who the fuck decided it would be a good idea to prevent
the removal of bloatware on this shit? It's like a worse version of the
Superfish adware.

------
anderspitman
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.

~~~
kingnothing
You can easily do that at the OS level.

~~~
anderspitman
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.

------
logfromblammo
I log on via desktop browser once every six months and always post essentially
the same update: "I am still alive". Then I delete older updates and log out.
When my update stops getting likes, I know I can finally leave Facebook
forever.

------
qwerty456127
1\. They probably just don't realize Instagram is Facebook and even worse.

2\. Who needs the app anyway? Facebook apps had always been ridiculous -
outrageously heavyweight, coming with extra surveillance built-in and hardly
doing anything the website can't.

------
0xCMP
There are too many apps causing too many dopamine hits. How is anyone supposed
to do the meaningful work or gain the appropriate skills in the supposedly
AI/ML dominated future without doing deep work away from these things?
Everyone deletes these apps and turns their phones to gray scale so they can
focus.

Speaking of focus, one thing I want to focus less on is the continual
security/privacy nightmare of using Facebook to post content. Either I want to
know 100% it's public (Twitter/Instagram/Blogs) or it's essentially[0] 100%
private and hopefully short lived (private insta, snapchat).

[0]: Obviously not PGP private and etc. But from a practical perspective. On
Facebook you can do graph searches to identify someone based on a few pieces
of data. On snapchat you have to already know their username and be added to
see anything on their story or in messages to you. etc.

~~~
soared
What? Are saying the existence of apps makes it impossible to study/do work?
This makes no sense. You could make the same (flawed) claim about tv, books,
newspapers, sports, friends, etc.

~~~
0xCMP
If you can't concentrate because of these apps you can't do work. Yes, it
happens to me and I've seen it happen to others. The fact is that the internet
and other tech has likely made everyone, but particularly those who grew up
with technology, more susceptible to ADD/ADHD like symptoms.

The key with things like Facebook, which makes them different, is not that it
takes you away as much as they are designed to trigger dopamine levels in ways
TV, books, etc that you mentioned never could. Constantly and at a very high
rate. You can't be thanked 100x times by friends... unless you have a super
popular post with comments and reactions and now you can. You can't read 10-20
sensational articles back to back on a newspaper like you can on an endlessly
scrolling page or even watching videos on Facebook ( I have ended up losing
hours on this before). There are fundamental differences which let them do
what previous mediums or activities could do but in a way which our brains are
simply not equipped to deal with without intervention. It's similar to refined
sugar or highly refined anything works. By itself it isn't bad except it's
addictive and often leads you astray from your self-set goals.

So, in fact, it makes total sense that people would realize this and
increasingly control or remove it from their lives. And more importantly that
they'd focus on using only a few of them not every single app there is. Which
means two things: 1) people are wary of being sucked in like this and 2) they
are likely not willing to leave an app/network where they already spend their
time.

------
a3n
[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/technology/hate-on-
social...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/technology/hate-on-social-
media.html)

------
amoitnga
Having companies that worth 1 trln isn't ideal. I don't mind tech giants
breaking down into smaller, still huge though, companies. Facebook, Google,
Apple, Microsoft, Amazon... Why the hell do they need to do (own) everything?

Too much power.

------
sonnyblarney
The numbers may not show up very well as people still use FB as 'single sign
on' type thing. What we really need is more specificity in the data to know
what's going on.

Also - Instagram is exploding and they are tightly intertwined.

------
rb808
I still use the app but lots of people that used to post have stopped so isn't
as interesting any more. Its a bit sad as I have friends and relatives all
over the world I never see and FB was great to keep track of them all.

------
kerng
Tomorrow their earnings report is due... this should be reflected if indeed
true.

------
resters
These are the younger generation of Facebook's (former) users, and the main
reason they have deleted the app is because of Facebook's insistence on using
short-term revenue maximizing dark patterns.

------
kesor
The app itself is pretty shitty, takes a ton of space on the phone and
performance is meh. Also a good reason to delete the app, something which has
nothing to do with being or not being a user of Facebook.

------
sjg007
My extended family uses WhatsApp basically as a social feed.

All of the younger adults I know left FB for Snap and the left Snap for
instagram. Even many of my friends have limited FB now and mainly use
instagram.

------
Chazprime
I deactivated my account a little over a year ago and it was a great
decision...when I opened it the internet was a much friendlier place and full
of promise, but it doesn’t feel that way anymore.

------
peter_retief
I am neither young (57) or US based (Cape Town) and decided to delete my
facebook account mainly because it made people I know behave badly and myself
as well. I really dont miss it at all

------
mbo
Are there similar studies on non-US markets? As an Australian 20-something,
this seems like an absurdly high number. I'd like to see if this exodus is
mainly a US thing.

------
bbulkow
What's funny about this is people could defect to g+, with it's well thought
out 'group' structure to promote focus, but Google just killed it.

------
gmanontherocks
I rage quit facebook when i scrolled the the end of my news feed and it told
me i needed more friends. I dont need the computer telling me i need more
friends.

------
3rdAccount
Deleted it months ago and don't miss it even slightly.

------
senthilnayagam
I have 2 daughters one teen other pre-teen, both don't login into Facebook
anymore, though they are active in Instagram and WhatsApp to some extent.

------
Raphmedia
Deleted the app but still using the browser to view my feed. Nobody likes the
aggressive notifications and bad battery usage that comes with the app.

~~~
LeonM
This is the exact reason I deleted the app about 3 years ago, haven't looked
back since.

When they made their super aggressive push for the messenger app and disabled
message support on the regular FB app, there was no reason to keep the FB app
around. I never installed the FB messenger app though, it required access to
just about everything on my phone so I never dared installing it.

Then they disabled the messenger feature on the mobile version of their
website, and everybody stopped using FB messenger altogether. Problem solved.

------
ummonk
How does this compare to how many have installed the Instagram app? Is
Facebook as a company net positive or net negative with Americans aged 18-29?

------
bepotts
Another reason why all the talk of antitrust against Facebook is ridiculous.
Instagram will be in a similar position a couple years from now too.

~~~
anticensor
Facebook is half-open (Twitter and G+ are similar) aka fenced yard. Instagram
is fully walled garden. You cannot compete a fully closed network, because
each of them are incomparable. You could compare fenced yards by telescoping
them.

------
microcolonel
Turns out that few people actually wanted what Facebook has become, and they
just needed a small lull in the content pipeline to realize that.

------
lawrenceyan
Good thing everyone uses Instagram and WhatsApp now.

------
Yhippa
They should just rename Facebook to "Personal Data Collector 2K18". That'll
make you think twice about installing it.

------
chiefalchemist
> "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.

~~~
thomasfromcdnjs
This comment was hard to find... and also downvoted.

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...](http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-
content/uploads/sites/1/2018/09/FT_18.09.05_FacebookPrivacy_MethodologyTopline.pdf)

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://twitter.com/ajaxdavis/status/1057046359218388992)

~~~
chiefalchemist
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?

------
z3t4
Social network's are very risky to invest in. Sure they have crazy growth, but
users will leave just as easily.

------
holtalanm
i deleted the app months ago, and have only been actually _on_ facebook once
since.

I found that I didn't miss it in the least.

------
YPCrumble
Deleting Facebook for me was identical to Snapchat except the timer was set to
ten years rather than ten seconds.

------
ggm
Finally closed this year. Wish I'd never joined. 57 ftw, so this isn't only
"young" users.

------
k__
There is just nothing exciting happening on FB anymore.

6 years ago it was the place to be...now? I hang mostly on Twitter.

------
sigi45
Only using the chat

I tried to have discussions but no one wants to discuss there views.

People are agreeing or are extremely against it

------
robut_98765
I got rid of mine a couple months ago. It just felt like clutter that I do not
need in my life.

------
jjuhl
Good for them. The sooner Facebook goes the way of the Dodo the better.

------
casper345
I wonder what the next form of "social media" there will be

~~~
gagege
Something peer-to-peer hopefully.

~~~
arbol
Worth checking out what akasha are doing. Or mastodon.

------
inamberclad
It didn't have anything useful for me. Just a bunch of people I vaguely knew
complaining about things that diddn't affect me. Combined with the marketed
crap, spyware, and adblocker circumvention it was actively detrimental to go
there.

------
mmgutz
But they still own Instagram ... they're not the MySpace yet

------
zby
I would but I cannot delete it from my phone :(

I still use it on my desktop.

------
malloreon
Nothing will get better unless they delete instagram too.

------
coldtea
Polls exodus: I seriously don't believe those stats.

------
tapatio
All they did was switch to Instagram so who cares?

------
partiallypro
I use Facebook way less than I used to...but I use Instagram way way more than
I used to. So, I'm not sure it's all doom and gloom for Facebook as a company.

~~~
jamesrcole
You obviously didn't read the article. "The survey measures only the core
Facebook app, not Facebook-owned Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, all of
which remain popular and offer a lot of room for revenue growth."

~~~
partiallypro
I obviously was not commenting on the article's content directly but on the
doom and gloom scenario that others have, regarding the fall of Facebook (as a
company.) Hence I said "as a company" in my original post.

------
StreamBright
I never installed it at the first place.

------
qwerty456127
There is a funny poll on the page by the link: Which do you trust the most?
Google (49%), Facebook (4%), Twitter (12%), President Trump (35%). I
understand trusting the president is a political opinion and many people may
trust him but why the heck do so many people trust Google? Don't they realize
Google intentionally owns them even more than Facebook does?

~~~
ndnxhs
Google doesn't put you at war with your friends, family and the general public

~~~
qwerty456127
I see. Well. This is what I love about Google+ (the best social network ever
IMHO): it doesn't ask you who are your friends and who are not, just whose
posts seem interesting to you and who would you like to share what you post
with.

------
will123195
Good idea, uninstalling now!

------
village-idiot
I’ve given up on most social media; HN is the only place I comment now,
although I’ll read lobste.rs once a day for professional news.

Honestly, at some point I realized it was making me miserable. Why would I
want to keep doing something that makes me unhappy? So I stopped.

------
hardlianotion
This article seems like part of a self-reinforcingfeedback loop.

------
thinelvis
Never had Facebook, never will. Have fun, all.

~~~
izzydata
A man truly ahead of his time.

------
freen
Facebook: Graveyard of racist uncles.

------
vmarshall23
Good!

------
throwaway487548
Because of promoted spam. Teens hate to be spammed with irrelevant bullshit.

------
lanevorockz
Attack conservatives and you loose half of your audience. Paying for political
indoctrination

------
totalZero
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.

------
iooi
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.

~~~
stephengillie
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.

------
kposehn
> 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.

Yet the total user base in the US is something over 100mm - how would you
possibly consider 3,400 people be indicative of an entire demographic?

Edit: Yes, I'm aware of statistics and how they work ^_^ It is more that I'm
skeptical of the conclusion being based of a sample truly diverse enough to be
confident in

~~~
WoodenChair
Statistically 3,400 is a large (read statistically significant) sample size.
If the participants were appropriately sampled, it can be indicative of a
trend.

~~~
kposehn
Is that though for that large of a population? I guess I'm just skeptical of
the sampling in that small of a population to establish a pretty sweeping
conclusion.

------
euagrus
Good job States, I wonder if you will be smart enough to go with the google.
It is the sam sh*t but in a different camouflage. IT guys, do you dare (or you
are vendor locked in - the votes/downvotes will prove it)?

A reason I had: I will not support company that is having so much questionable
practices as google has.

Tasks, done in two years:

\- flashed android with Lineage + Microg (now it is much easyer -
[https://lineage.microg.org/](https://lineage.microg.org/) \- no more google
spyware on my phone

\- redirected all my web traffic (all devices) trough ssh tunnel to home
server where [http://www.squid-cache.org/](http://www.squid-cache.org/) is
cleaning my web traffic from trackers, including caching cdns forever

\- set up my own "cloud" ([https://nextcloud.com/](https://nextcloud.com/)) to
sync files, contacts and calendars

\- set up my own mail server (postfix, dovecot)

\- deleted my google account(s)

\- banned all known google domains using hosts files on all devices

\- removed google chrome from all devices

\- stopped using google, replaced by duckduckgo - I no longer get so many
results, but they are relevant instead of paid ads.

I am googless. And seeing sharp ;)

The hardest thing was to stop typing google into address bar. And stopped
using "I googled...".

Everything else was simple.

