Facebook Users Are Sharing Less and It's a Big Problem (fortune.com) 326
Reader Colin Castro writes: Facebook is starting to see decline in original posts and people sharing their thoughts. "Facebook's decline in personal updates reflects a common growing pain for online communities. What starts out as a special and intimate place to share things grows into a big, impersonal, and professional platform ." The author points out one of the reasons why: "They know that, unlike in Facebook's earlier days, their status updates can now be seen by distant relatives, high school classmates, and co-workers -- so they don't share anything too personal."
They should pay me if they want original content. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They should pay me if they want original conten (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is, people are posting less and less even of pictures. My feed is all idiotic "shares". This is why I use FB less and less with every passing month.
I wish there was a way to block ALL shares, and ONLY see original content created by someone I know. Of course, that doesn't help Zuckerberg's marketing analytics or Facebook's "you are the product" business model.
Re:They should pay me if they want original conten (Score:5, Informative)
If they can't be trusted with sharing then unfriendly them.
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If they can't be trusted with sharing then unfriendly them.
Or, unfollow them and never see their trash in your feed again--while still leaving line of communication open.
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Re:They should pay me if they want original conten (Score:5, Insightful)
. A lot of my friends enjoy my daily news update, but I stopped putting things about me and my daily life except the random tidbit about a terrible driver or traffic.
No, no one cares.
Re:They should pay me if they want original conten (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, it's a consequence of FBs business model.
Some people are now aware that they're being tracked, in detail, and don't want it anymore.
They'll still use FB to see what friends are doing & share a few funny things, but that's it anymore.
More & more people aware that *they're* the product, and stop using it.
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Well, it's kind of the same thing - just from 2 different entities. One without guns, one with.
Re:They should pay me if they want original conten (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not necessarily sure if it's because there are more shares or just because there isn't as much original content.
Ultimately for me facebook has become a lot less useful as more people are on it. It used to be mostly my siblings, a few immediate friends and some of the more tech minded people i knew from work. That was great, I could ask a technical question there and have a discussion about it. Now if i post something like that the first response is usually "lulz i have no idea what you talking 'bout", so I don't bother with stuff like that. I use dropbox to share family photos with my immediate family since I don't want them to have distribution as wide as facebook. I know I *could* set up privacy rules to maintain that stuff better but I can't be bothered.
I strongly believe they are in a downward spiral and think it'll be hard to claw back from that. As the utility it provides to me drops, there's less incentive for me to provide value to them.
Re:They should pay me if they want original conten (Score:5, Insightful)
Ultimately for me facebook has become a lot less useful as more people are on it. It used to be mostly my siblings, a few immediate friends and some of the more tech minded people i knew from work. That was great, I could ask a technical question there and have a discussion about it. Now if i post something like that the first response is usually "lulz i have no idea what you talking 'bout", so I don't bother with stuff like that. I use dropbox to share family photos with my immediate family since I don't want them to have distribution as wide as facebook. I know I *could* set up privacy rules to maintain that stuff better but I can't be bothered.
This is all true. The funny thing is that Facebook could have made it easier to do all of this. They could have made it easier for people to have online pseudonyms or multiple "personalities" (or whatever you want to call them) that allow you to easily group friends into various categories.
And they sort of do that now, but it's not intuitive. And there's no way to completely separate account details unless you violate Facebook's principle that you're only supposed to have one account per real person. (Otherwise, so Zuckerberg has argued, you're being deceptive or something... despite the fact that in real life we behave as "different people" depending on our audience.)
And you couple that with the various trends over the years where Facebook tried to deliberate undermine privacy settings you may have already made by progressively setting things to be more and more open.
I understand why Facebook did this: they thought the more content was shared with the widest audience, the more "data points" they could get to profile you, which is what they're really trying to get to sell to other businesses to make money. The more "likes" among random friends, the more data points. But if you're only sharing most of your posts with 5 close friends, that's much less new information for Facebook.
The problem is that people are realizing what this does -- it makes Facebook much less useful for the kind of socialization people want to do. They want to have clusters of friends -- the coworkers, the people you drink with after work, the people at church or the club or whatever. And they do NOT want that data to go between those groups. That's what most people do in real life.
And so Facebook is starting to lose. It's main market now is for teenagers who haven't yet figured out how stupid it is to post something online that will potentially follow you for your entire life. As the rest of the adult public realizes this, they will post less and less... and a medium that allows more personalized groups and doesn't insist on a "one profile with a real name for one person that's shared with everyone" policy will ultimately be more desirable.
G+ circles (Score:4, Informative)
a medium that allows more personalized groups and doesn't insist on a "one profile with a real name for one person that's shared with everyone" policy will ultimately be more desirable.
The "circles" feature of Google+ was designed specifically around this concept. Though it uses a real name, posts can be shared only with a specific circle of other users. Why didn't it take off?
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Inertia. Everyone was already on Facebook. If everything of yours is on Facebook and most everyone you know is on Facebook, then why would you use something else? While the circles feature was awesome, how many features did Google+ not have that Facebook had for some time? It's not a compelling enough reason to leave.
It was invite only. Social networks need people. That's the whole point. Easily kills any hype momentum. Sure you don't want to bum rush a service and kill it out of the gate but Facebook was t
Re:They should pay me if they want original conten (Score:5, Insightful)
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Is that you hon?
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Of course, that doesn't help Zuckerberg's marketing analytics or Facebook's "you are the product" business model.
People gripe about this, but what do you expect? Even Slashdot has to pay the bills. Facebook isn't some altruistic touchy-feely social experiment, it's a business. An you are not obligated to participate.
Re:They should pay me if they want original conten (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, that doesn't help Zuckerberg's marketing analytics or Facebook's "you are the product" business model.
People gripe about this, but what do you expect? Even Slashdot has to pay the bills. Facebook isn't some altruistic touchy-feely social experiment, it's a business. An you are not obligated to participate.
The problem is that Facebook is a business masquerading as some altruistic touchy-feely social experiment. When its facade wears thin and people see how it treats them and their touchy-feely social things, they tend to pick up and take their business elsewhere. Basically, Facebook could have a production problem. Its product doesn't especially want to get sold and the more FB tries to sell the more the product pushes back.
The solution is for Facebook to tone down the salesmanship a bit and get back in touch with the touchy-feely social end of things, but that's not going to happen. When a business is threatened it doesn't lighten up on its core practices, it doubles down.
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The problem is that Facebook is a business masquerading as some altruistic touchy-feely social experiment. When its facade wears thin and people see how it treats them and their touchy-feely social things, they tend to pick up and take their business elsewhere.
While I'd LIKE to think that's true, I don't think it really is for most people. Most Facebook users seem not to give a crap about how terrible Facebook treats them, their data, their privacy, serving up ads, whatever. Slashdot users tend to be more sensitive to these sorts of things, but I really doubt that means much to the average person on Facebook. Sure, the Facebook "user experience" (such as it is) has degraded a bit, but I don't think it's bad enough to drive more than a small percentage away.
I
Re:They should pay me if they want original conten (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing is, people are posting less and less even of pictures. My feed is all idiotic "shares". This is why I use FB less and less with every passing month.
I wish there was a way to block ALL shares, and ONLY see original content created by someone I know. Of course, that doesn't help Zuckerberg's marketing analytics or Facebook's "you are the product" business model.
I think this is a natural result of Zuckerberg's "users are dumbfucks" attitude [1], spelled out by a lack of ethics and consequently trust from the users. I know very few people in my network of recent parents that share their family photos on FB, for the simple fact that FB doesn't have a "privacy first" capability (or if that exists, that they trust FB to deliver).
Most of these folks are sharing on Apple Photostream, or Google Photos.
My surprise is that it took so long for this to happen.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com... [businessinsider.com]
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Re:They should pay me if they want original conten (Score:5, Insightful)
What I wish Facebook would release is a "no politics" filter. It's become really tedious to have half my feed consist of "Trump is Hitler" and "Hillary is Satan". I've been trying to train FB by hiding all of those and marking them as spam when it gives me the option. But it just doesn't seem to get the hint.
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Re:They should pay me if they want original conten (Score:4, Insightful)
Vote Cthuhlu 2016 - Why Settle for the Lesser Evil?
The trouble is, this year, Cthulhu is the Lesser Evil. (Which really ticks him off...)
Re:They should pay me if they want original conten (Score:5, Interesting)
IF they want my original content I should be paid.
Turning this around, it appears that the only people who reliably post (at least in my circles) are people who want to use the site as a foundation for their business. They spend a lot of time with phony posts and what not designed to pump up their views. The number of posts I even SEE from people who I care about (i.e. not people's business) have dropped. I can go look at walls to see that they are happening from time to time, but they never show up on my timeline anymore, just the paid stuff.
So kind of Facebook has ruined itself.
Derp (Score:5, Insightful)
People realized sharing everything about themselves to everyone they vaguely know isn't generally the best social strategy? No way.
Opportunity Knocking (Score:5, Interesting)
Make a new Facebook without all the Asshat, "features".
Design it for close knit groups only...Family, a few friends. All content hidden by default, invitations only to grant access (not even solicitations to be granted access), etc.
The premise of an on-line place to share things with people you want to share them with was a good idea. But like all internet things, Good Ideas are quickly perverted into blatant, clumsy, and in your face money grabs.
Re:Opportunity Knocking (Score:5, Informative)
blatant, clumsy, and in your face money grabs.
Facebook didn't become that, it started out that way. It was NEVER a good idea.
Re:Opportunity Knocking (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Opportunity Knocking (Score:5, Insightful)
blatant, clumsy, and in your face money grabs.
Facebook didn't become that, it started out that way. It was NEVER a good idea.
Indeed. Zuckerberg just stole a dumb idea, claimed it as his own, made a fortune from this stolen idea and now everyone else is starting to realise what a dumb idea it was in the first place. Hopefully everyone will think it was actually Zuckerbergs dumb idea in the first place.
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it was a close system for alumns
Which Zuckerberg uploaded himself without permission to get started. Even it's 'origin story' is just a tale of what a piece of shit Zuckerberg is.
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So like G+? ...
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Ah, Yes, Google+ ! Every feature you could dream of or desire, except other users you know...
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Things that are intimate can be difficult to finance over time. Perhaps more to the point, they're that much harder to get suddenly and obscenely rich off of. So unless you can find someone willing to run a first rate company who isn't going to want to get rich off of it when it becomes popular and they see dollar signs, you're going to always see this sort of things happen. Google, for instance, is still a big, popular company that is doing lots of things, but "Don't be evil" is firmly in the past with
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How are you going to pay for the servers?
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Design it for close knit groups only...Family, a few friends. All content hidden by default, invitations only to grant access (not even solicitations to be granted access), etc.
I miss dialup BBSes too.
--
BMO
Re:Derp (Score:5, Interesting)
It's more than just "I don't want grammy to see" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's more than just "I don't want grammy to see (Score:4, Interesting)
That is interesting. It would be worth making a study of just how much Zuckerburg's own PC thought police don't share anything that might offend someone policies are contributing.
The counter point would be twitter, which up until very recently, and now with limited success has not really tied to police content other than strait up porn. Arguably twitter is mostly a cesspool of people flaming each other for this an that and advertisements.
Re: It's more than just "I don't want grammy to se (Score:2, Funny)
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Please stop labeling or inserting political bias into any discussion. A discussion should NOT BE pulled to involve politic.
I actually think why should people post personal things on the public Internet anyway? If they want anyone to see their personal thought, then accept consequences because it is no longer "personal" but rather becomes public. Also, why do they think that Facebook is that PERSONAL in the first place?
Re:It's more than just "I don't want grammy to see (Score:5, Interesting)
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No, it isn't. It is merely being intellectually lazy to consider everything through political lenses. This is what gave us the current cesspool of people always on the lookout for "micro-slights" so they can submit to the temptation to get angry and then turn that anger into obscene outbursts in an adolescent bid for attention.
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Please stop labeling or inserting political bias into any discussion. A discussion should NOT BE pulled to involve politic.
This is what's really wrong with Facebook.
Re:It's more than just "I don't want grammy to see (Score:5, Insightful)
As a right-conservative leaning person, I'd have to disagree. I just don't see this as a political issue, left or right.
This is simply people realizing what Facebook is about and what the implications of sharing all the intimate details of your life really means. It means your boss can see what you do in your spare time and who you hang out with. It means people you don't really want to associate you can track your every move. It means you lose your privacy in unexpected and unwelcome ways. It means your kids get into arguments with you because you're posting details of their lives without their consent.
In other words, people are simply learning about the downsides of Facebook. And it's about fucking time.
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I have seen people post things that then were commented on by someone else, and the person who commented said something that they didn't "intend" to cause harm, but they weren't thinking "clearly" and the repercussions were bad.
I've seen people who IRL were on go
Re:It's more than just "I don't want grammy to see (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree.
I'm really just speaking for myself here. I can only speculate that others might have had similar experiences to me, but I definitely don't know what people are doing on Facebook or why.
Essentially, I signed up for Facebook because it was a good way of keeping in touch with peers-- old college friends and current friends. Relatively close friends. I posted whatever I wanted, and didn't think much about it. Then I friended some people who weren't really friends, but more like acquaintances. It didn't change things much. Some of my cousins friended me, but only ones that were roughly my age, so that was fine. Then-- I remember this one event pretty clearly-- one of my aunts friended me. I was really torn. On the one hand, I did not want her to invade the my Facebook social circle. I would have to watch what I said to a much larger degree. Still, I wanted to keep in touch with her, and I couldn't think of a polite way to say "no", so I accepted her friend request.
After that, my parents friended me. Then coworkers. Then bosses-- and by that time, I was careful enough about what I posted that I just accepted without thinking too much about it. I was already careful not to post anything too controversial or inappropriate, so I wasn't too afraid of my boss seeing it. And I was kind of friendly with my boss, so... whatever.
Still, I posted things on Facebook. Nothing very personal. I posted photos that I would be ok with being public. I posted pretty inoffensive thoughts that I thought might be interesting or funny. But then something else started to happen. I don't know if it was because of a cultural shift or just that my network his some sort of critical mass of different viewpoints, but I couldn't post anything without someone getting butthurt. I'd post a comment about Net Neutrality, and one of my conservative uncles would start spamming me with comments about how Net Neutrality was a communist plot to destroy businesses. I'd post something about a video game, and I'd get responses relating to GamerGate. I'd mention that I'd gotten a new iPad and one person bring up the problems in Apple's Chinese factories, and another person would comment, "Apple is for fags. Android 4ever."
I'm exaggerating a little, but not that much. Even innocuous comments had random people coming out of the woodwork to make nasty comments. It wasn't just liberal people or conservative people, Democrats or Republicans, friends from the city or redneck friends. There wasn't really a common thread. Everyone had just gotten much more serious, much less unwilling to read comments in a way that gave you the benefit of the doubt, and much more hostile. Sometimes they were my friends, sometimes friends of friends, and sometimes people I didn't know at all (e.g. commenting on one of my friend's posts, someone I didn't know would yell at me for something or other). The whole thing became so unpleasant that I just stopped. I didn't see the value in posting.
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I can't tell you the number of times I've started writing posts or thought to reply to something when I hit shift A and press delete and close the comment. Too many eyes make it not worth it to say anything. Too many people fired or upset or eyes on.
For me it is a bit paralyzing, I have always kept too myself what I like or dislike. When I was younger the internet was a savior, I could finally say what I wanted without fear of mockery IRL, not that i'm controversial at all, just, it was hard to let it out.
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but I couldn't post anything without someone getting butthurt.
Bingo. That really is the crux of the problem.
And what is really interesting, is there is sort of a "thinning of the skin" so to speak regarding how easy people get "butt-hurt" now, since the advent of social networking. IMHO people are way more sensitive about everything, whether it is climate change, the war in Iraq, transgender politics, the budget deficit, etc, etc.
In a way, social networking has engendered the exact human behavioral reaction they don't want.
Also, the recent MS chatbot incident
Re:It's more than just "I don't want grammy to see (Score:4, Interesting)
This isn't a change. It's always been the case that if you share pictures of yourself drunk, mostly naked, and swinging from the chandelier at the strip club with your coworkers, you'd likely get fired.
The internet is a public place. Share something, and it's shared. Get over it.
The only notable aspect to this is that people are now whining about people doing what people whined they should do:
"You shouldn't share personal information on Facebook! That's a bad idea!"
"OK, I'll stop."
"OH MY GOD!!! YOU'RE NOT SHARING PERSONAL INFORMATION ON FACEBOOK!!! IT'S THE END OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION!!! DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER!!!"
Yawn.
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Nonsense. Free speech doesn't mean the absence of prior restraint (i.e. censorship imposed before you've said anything). Having Free Speech means freedom from consequences. If you know that you'll face retribution(other than ridicule or counter-argument) for expressing *wrong* opinions, then you don't really have Free Speech.
Facebook is 99.99% reposts for me (Score:5, Informative)
I see very little content that's actually from the people I follow. 99% of what I see is just stuff reshared from other places. I hardly ever use Facebook anymore because most of that reshared content doesn't interest me anyway.
Re:Facebook is 99.99% reposts for me (Score:4, Interesting)
FB has its place. It is extremely good at getting your message out to everyone you care about.
I rarely post anything on FB anymore, but I do keep it around and monitor it from time-to-time. I also keep Trillian signed in to FB messenger.
It keeps me vaguely in the loop of events and makes me available for my friends and family to contact me. But I keep my privacy options up-to-date and don't use FB as authentication for anything else. Nor do I use many FB apps or games.
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Except this isn't true any more.... with all the junk that gets posted and people not posting/reading as often it is losing this advantage.
Google+ (Score:5, Insightful)
Google+ created circles to allow you to control who you share things with, which would prevent this problem.
Re:Google+ (Score:5, Insightful)
And if Google didn't try to shove + down people's throats, they might not have instantly loathed it.
Re:Google+ (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, that was a huge miss. Which is weird because they usually put out all these beta products to sink or swim on their relative merits, but for Google+ they absolutely rammed it down your throat. Perhaps they thought they were under-supporting their products and just went a little too far in the opposite direction that time.
Re:Google+ (Score:5, Insightful)
And why didn't that take off? Because it was too complicated. You had to set up the circles and maintain them. Every time you posted you needed to spend time thinking about which circle got to see it, and making sure you didn't make an embarrassing error by sharing with the wrong people. No one could be bothered with that.
People needed it to be as easy as chatting in the staff room, or at a social gathering, by just glancing around the room to see who is in earshot. It wasn't.
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>And why didn't that take off? Because it was too complicated.
Nah. Two reasons
1) FB already existed. Why change? None of your friends use G+ after all. Just one more annoying PoS to deal with.
2) The overly aggressive, intrusive, and *deceptive* way Google went about signing people up for it. It's as bad as Windows 10 installs. You go to YouTube and get presented a message asking you what name you want to use. If you select either option, it signs you up for Google+! If you then disable that, well fuck yo
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Google+ didn't take off because everybody was already on Facebook. That's the one and only reason for its failure.
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Pro tip: One-to-one and one-to-many are categorically different relations.
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Narcissism is why people stop posting (Score:3, Interesting)
People realize they are becoming narcissistic. So they stop posting.
Then the people that are super narcissistic keep posting. And those that stopped get sick of the daily posts telling everyone what they ate for lunch.
And everyone leaves the site that has become a cluttered mess of posts no one cares about and advertisements.
Data harvesting (Score:4, Interesting)
...What starts out as a special and intimate place to share things grows into a big, impersonal, and professional platform ."...
The problem is that facebook participants slowly began to realize that anything and everything they post is harvested by the advertisers to build a profile of you.
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At some point, perhaps users learned how to update their privacy settings too.
So maybe less content is publicly visible.
Re:Data harvesting (Score:5, Insightful)
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You are overthinking it....
If you call asking my friends why they have stopped posting on facebook as much as they used to, and they tell me it was the data harvesting, then, yes, I was over thinking it.
.
I agree boredom may play a part, but the main reason I hear is the data harvesting. It could be because my friends are more technical than most, though.
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And by the government. Though maybe Uncle Sam is who they meant by "distant relatives" in the summary...
Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)
Why bother when nobody sees it (Score:5, Interesting)
The masterful (/s) algorithm for post visibility is skewed against personal updates. Based on the shit that's on my feed it's the stupid-ass memes that people post which seem to get play, and personal updates show up rarely, or several hours/days late. They should be running all those images through TinEye and if there's a hit, that post gets pushed to the background. If they constantly reward worthless content, they're going to get more and more of it. I wish there was a manual +/- on your friends so that if, by chance, you intentionally (or unintentionally) clicked on one story posted by that obscure guy you met at some conference, you wouldn't automatically be bombarded with his next 100 useless memes and radical political posts.
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I am not talking about "friends group" alà google circle that are hard to manage in FB, but "interest group".
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I'm afraid that you have to curate manually if you want to filter out the shit. Every post has a little dropdown menu which usually has a "Hide all from..." option. As a general rule, anything with "meme", "viral", "funny", "adult", or especially anything that looks like a TV or radio call sign should be blocked as you encounter it. My feed th
I don't think so. (Score:5, Insightful)
The author is... more than a little off base. To take the services I'm aware of; Flickr didn't crumble because it reached the mainstream, because it never really reached the mainstream. Flickr* crumbled because of a number of ill advised changes to the UI at the same time Facebook and a number of other photo sharing services were on the rise. In the same way, LiveJournal was quite healthy, even in the mainstream, but the rise of Facebook combined with a number of ill advised changes, and numerous outages due to DDOS attacks pushed people away. Orkut never was mainstream.
He also misses one huge change to Facebook itself - the shift to mobile devices. As slashdotters have long noted, it's hard to produce original content, even text, on tablets, phablets, and phones.
* Yes, Flickr could be considered a social media site even though it's ostensibly a photosharing service. It had extensive groups (forums) dedicated to almost every topic under the sun. People used the text blocks (intended for descriptions) accompanying the photographs for blogging. Etc... etc...
Because no one is interested (Score:3)
Facebook users are just starting to realise that no one is actually interested in their 'updates' about what they had for breakfast or reading their 'stream of consciousness'.
Its just starting to dawn on them that this is utterly boring and useless.
Noise in Facebook feed (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no simple factor that can explain this; I'm sure it's a confluence of a variety or reasons.
One that I've noticed is that my feed is just noisier now with Ads, other "of interest" stories that FB feels like shoving in there. The nice friends and family updates I want to see are still there, but I have to scroll through a lot of noise to see them.
Eventually I get tired of scrolling and stop. Then I visit less often, then I post less often, and the cycle perpetuates itself.
FB made changes to their feed sometime back, a year or two ago, and it's definitely affected things.
And then there are all the other issues people mention. Many of the people and their updates which prompted me to join FB are now on WhatsApp and other platforms.
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One of my issues is that AFAICT without digging, I can't just see the newest crap first. FB shows what it thinks I want to see, which I usually don't. So, I seldom bother with it.
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This exactly. It's too much work hiding the junk to get to what I used to see immediately. I'll upload some pictures occasionally, and do a random Like if i see something front and center, but I don't have the energy to wade through the junk anymore.
Other reasons FB is declining (Score:2)
"Big problem" (Score:2)
Oh yes, Facebook users are not sharing enough of their petty social drama and that's a "big problem", (for very small values of 'problem').
Never mind all the wars and starvation and the Panama Papers and other shit going on in the world, pay attention because Facebook users aren't sharing enough! OMG whatever will we do???
Make Privacy Prominent (Score:3)
If they just made the privacy settings more prominent when creating a post, it will be easier to designate a post's visibility to different groups (and creating those groups).
They tried so hard to hide privacy settings, and this is the result.
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If they just made the privacy settings more prominent when creating a post, it will be easier to designate a post's visibility to different groups (and creating those groups).
What are you talking about? The privacy controls are literally right next to the "Post" button on Facebook, unless you're using the mobile client, then they're right next to your name. In either case they're pretty freaking prominent and you can use them to have a pretty fine-grained control over who sees what you post.
Of course, I doubt most people bother with that control. I have it set to "friends only" and just leave it at that. If I don't want some subset of people to see something on Facebook, I just
And why would I share? (Score:3, Interesting)
Last night, someone posted a manufactured controversy. So I called them on it. Their response? Cyber-stalking across all my social media accounts and threats to call my boss to get me fired.
Why would I be interested in posting anything at all?
Uncool (Score:5, Funny)
Exactly what I noticed in my feed (Score:2)
What's the problem? (Score:2)
What is really the problem with people not sharing their info? Maybe they have started to realize that they are the product.
typo in the op (Score:3)
"What starts out as a special and intimate place to share things grows into a big, impersonal, and professional platform"
s/b
"What PEOPLE IGNORANTLY BELIEVE IS a special and intimate place to share things IS FINALLY RECOGNIZED AS a big, impersonal, and professional platform"
Thanks for the correction.
Why geeks hate facebook (Score:3, Informative)
Facebook keeps reverting your newsfeed to "top stories" (from "latest stories"), so most people are only seeing the most popular posts. And how often are a geek's posts popular? You post, nobody reacts, you hate the platform.
When you post, Facebook shares is with just a couple of the people who have reacted to your posts (like, share, comment) before. If they don't react, your post isn't shared with anyone else. If they do react, Facebook shares it with a few more people. They react? More people see it.
Like most geeks, who aren't sharing pictures of friends and food and generally displaying a charmed life, my posts are about things and projects and happenstance and other boring stuff nobody cares about. I post it, Facebook shares it with a couple people who don't respond, and Facebook kills it. Nobody sees it, I don't bother posting it anymore.
Admit it, this is how your facebook experience goes, too. So you post to slashdot how useless and intrusive Facebook is.
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Sorry, I'm a geek and share all kinds of geeky things... some people respond to, some they don't. And I don't give a rat fuck either way. It's my feed, I'll post what I want. I don't particularly need anyone else's approval or attention.
Your problem, like with so many other people here on Slashdot, isn't with Facebook - it's that you have a shit group of friends.
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Because I don't know whether or not they'll be seen beforehand, and because I don't know what my friends will react to or not. But those nobody responds to, no big deal. I don't need that kind of social validation.
None too soon. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have always operated on Facebook as a pseudonym, and recently they blocked my account for not having any way to uniquely legally identify me. I have to admit that I am happy with that outcome, and the fact that they won't permit me onto their service without being able to identify me certainly cements my resolve to remain that way.
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I agree. Facebook has the ability to create and manage groups, but it's always been a pain to maintain. The metaphor and controls Google+ created make so much more sense. The problem that Google+ has always faced is that they started too late.....Facebook already had all of the people, and it was really hard to convince people to leave it because "that's where all of my friends already are"
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Re:Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a big problem for Facebook because the more impersonal the posts become, the less people are going to bother visiting to read them. There goes their advertising revenue.
It's a definite trend. The majority of stuff I now see on my time line now is re-shares of crappy viral content. Fewer and fewer friends put anything about themselves or their day, the kind of stuff I might actually care or be interested in. And I understand that. 99% of what little I put is trivial or generic observations. Almost never anything personal.
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Odd. I get why no one would want to go to Tumblr unless they had to, but Twitter is usually considered part of the whole social media A-team. What better place to find salacious things to hate you for than abbreviated half-thoughts with perhaps a picture attached? Is it really not actually looked at by HR teams, or is it perhaps a little harder to link an actual individual to a Twitter account unless it is provided?