7 ms·

What % of people do you think will actually delete their profiles? How many will deactivate? Use FB less? I think about this a lot.

by rblion 9y ago

WhiteSource1 9y ago
Very few. "Network effects." This won't hurt them. Gen Z not joining FB will.
- katzgrau 9y ago
  I agree, but the full effect of Gen Z won't be felt for 5 or 10 years. And they're definitely on Instagram, which still provides much more targeting ability to an advertiser than every other social site in the world apart from LinkedIn. Twitter doesn't even register.
  - exelius 9y ago
    Less Instagram and more snap for the younger kids. In general, I find each generation has its own preferred social platform — Facebook for generation X, Instagram for millennials, and Snap for whatever we’re calling whoever comes after. Each of these platforms seems to reflect the collective concerns of each generation.
    - katzgrau 9y ago
      I think FB has scooped up the older half of millennials. FB was the hot thing as they were just getting to college, when it was still limited to college kids. We can't discount outside of US/Europe though — they're big over there too. As for Snap, they definitely have Gen Z or whatever it's called, but I don't think the data on Snap is as strong. And Instagram has a strong hold on them too. Most teenagers I know keep Snap/Insta, and if they had to pick between the two, it'd be Insta.
  - Lionsion 9y ago
    > And they're definitely on Instagram, which still provides much more targeting ability to an advertiser than every other social site in the world apart from LinkedIn. Can you explain this? I've put far less info into my Instagram profile than I have any other social network. They definitely slurped up my FB profile, but they wouldn't have that advantage for someone who skipped it. I'm a very light user of Instagram, so I think I'm missing something.
- pjc50 9y ago
  Yes, I think there's a natural "churn" with these things. A lifecycle was first identified for MUD users decades ago, and there are already ""dead"" social networks to show that it can happen: Bebo, Orkut, Myspace, and so on.
- simias 9y ago
  If Gen Z joins other Facebook-owned social networks in stead it won't hurt them in the least. Facebook might not be hype anymore but Instagram and WhatsApp seem to do just fine with the young ones, at least as far as I can tell as someone in his 30s.
  - svantana 9y ago
    Well arguably facebook the product has been the problem, not facebook the coorporation. Those other products you mention don't have the same "put all information about yourself on here" design, and nowhere near the amount of news/politics on them.
    - BaconJuice 9y ago
      The other products Facebook own literally are "put all information about yourself on here" applications? I notice that if I talk about something on whatsapp I see some sort of ad on instagram around it etc.
    - simias 9y ago
      Supposing that the focus switches from Facebook to these other platforms how long until you see exactly the same patterns in these applications? We're talking about Facebook's core monetization strategy here, if they feel it's threatened I'm sure they'll do everything they can to "correct" that.
- CSMastermind 9y ago
  Except they're all joining Instagram
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> What % of people do you think will actually delete their profiles? What fraction of oil buyers stopped buying from Standard Oil? Or phone users disconnected their AT&T lines? The fraction was negligible because monopolies (and firms wielding monopoly powers) are a known mode of market failure. (Instead of suppliers and consumers we have users and advertisers.) The solution must be public, not private.
- hdyr 9y ago
  It's hard to imagine such a luxury as being the same sort of monopoly as the other two things. The other two are basically necessary in order to find and go to work.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  The solution must be public, not private. Which has it's own set of problems, I think I'd prefer a heavily regulated private provider rather than handing all this to data to any government.
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > I'd prefer a heavily regulated private provider rather than handing all this to data to any government Agreed. By "public" I meant the government has to step in, not that they need to take over. The solution involves: 1. Breaking up Facebook; and 2. Implementing an American analog to Europe's GDPR.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Bad news: you already have an unregulated private provider who's handing all this data to any government that will pay for it (and some that haven't). https://theintercept.com/2018/03/26/facebook-data-ice-immigration/ https://theintercept.com/2018/03/26/facebook-data-ice-immigr... (caution on source reliability, but the essential fact that any intelligence agency could have done the same thing as CA, or bought their data, or stolen it, remains.)
Dowwie 9y ago
.00001% will delete their profiles
- jobigoud 9y ago
  Overly pessimistic, this represents less than one user.
  - jk563 9y ago
    If you're going to be pedantic, at least run the numbers properly. Off of 2.2B active users[0], 0.00001% comes to about 220 users. Overly pessimistic, yes; less than one user, no! https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
    - Dowwie 9y ago
      thank you, my savior
    - jobigoud 9y ago
      Oops, mixed up millions and billions…
IAmEveryone 9y ago
I won’t delete my account, because a lot of my social life depends on it. Which is why I hope for serious regulatory action. It’s not unlike leaded gasoline: people would definitely prefer unleaded. But absent a choice, they would continue to use the toxic version because forgoing the benefits of a car would be inconvenient.
- OrganicMSG 9y ago
  >I won’t delete my account, because a lot of my social life depends on it. Sounds like you are in a tautological version of the sunk cost fallacy.
qubex 9y ago
Not many will relinquish it, I expect. The perceived penalty ’feels’ too great for most people. In much of the world, and in most demographics, concern seems to be absolutely nonexistent.
sdiepend 9y ago
Vero is apparently all the hype now. But from what I understood it's just as bad privacy wise.
robryan 9y ago
Using Facebook in limited ways can hurt them nearly as much as deleting. Monthly actives might not go down much but revenue per user will.
exelius 9y ago
% of overall profiles is probably low; there are a lot of bots on these social networks. But real, active users? Once that starts to decline, Facebook is dead; and I’m not sure they can tell bots from humans very well. Facebook has a lot of data; but it turns out every company that advertised with them turned around and used that data to essentially build their own customer targeting databases. Facebook’s data policies were very naive, and it’s coming back to bite them now that user expectations have come around.
stareatgoats 9y ago
Looks like traffic is down approx 6% so far. My guess is maybe 5% will drop off, and maybe 25% will use it less over a period of time. And this will show a slight bump on the upward trajectory which might reach apex in maybe 10 years as the rest of the developing world comes on board. In the meantime, there will some general adaption both to and by social media towards more sensible and responsible usage: better privacy protection and safeguards against mass-scooping of data, and for users; turn off notifications, log in maybe once a day, banning phones in schools etc. which will calm the novelty mania that has been the case in these early days.
jerf 9y ago
Remember, like a lot of the other big Silicon Valley names, Facebook stock is not priced for their current size, it is priced for the idea that they are expected to grow massively in the future. They already reported a user loss last quarter, seeming to have basically weathered that, but if they go into this quarter report (which is still a ways off) with a report that even just another 2 or 3% left, they can see a massive drop off in their stock price. Yes, even a drop that will make the current drop off seem like merely an opening overture. From there, you get recruiting and retention problems. From there you get long-term slow decline that even though nominally everything should be coming up Facebook, internally they just don't have the engineering talent to execute on it. And so on. As I was saying a few days ago, Silicon Valley's massive wealth and valuations are a great deal more fragile than most of you probably think. That's why all these news articles about Silicon Valley swaggering around and swinging their weight around by deciding who sees and who says what represent more danger than you realize. In something like the car industry, their wealth and power is mostly realized gains, the ability today to build millions of cars and sell them, etc. A lot of SV's power and wealth is tied up in future promises of power, and future wealth and prosperity can vanish in the wink of an eye. (Yes, there is a lot of real wealth today too, but that's not where the valuations are coming from.) I'll also tack on the end of this that contra a lot of people's claims that the only way that Facebook can fail is if a competitor arises that everybody jumps too, I'm seeing a lot of the "normies" in my life either simply limit Facebook or even straight-up drop Facebook, for no competitor at all. Will it stick? I dunno. But the "Facebook competitor" that may beat Facebook is just "no social media at all". And people are really thinking about Twitter and such as well in the same boat. (And I don't live in SV. The "normies" in my life are pretty representative of the bulk of Facebook's customers. If a Facebook exec overheard my family's discussions from this last Sunday, they'd probably be terrified. I didn't even participate, because I like to just observe these things sometimes to make sure I'm not unduly steering the conversation, so it's not my opinion being reflected back, either.) What if social media is fundamentally a bad idea, and will be looked back on in 20 years in much the same way we look back on pets.com or CueCat? I'm not ready to say that's the case for sure, but the pathologies seem to be getting worse, and the people running the social media sites are so ideologically uniform that they don't strike me as being capable of fully understanding the problem, only their corner of the problem, so the solutions keep making the problem worse overall. The bad scenario I describe above isn't guaranteed by any means, but at the moment I believe the course is currently set for that disaster, and I have no confidence in the current personnel to figure out how to successfully avoid it.

What % of people do you think will actually delete their profiles? How many will deactivate? Use FB less? I think about this a lot.

by rblion 9y ago

What % of people do you think will actually delete their profiles? How many will deactivate? Use FB less? I think about this a lot.

WhiteSource1 9y ago

Very few. "Network effects." This won't hurt them. Gen Z not joining FB will.

katzgrau 9y ago
I agree, but the full effect of Gen Z won't be felt for 5 or 10 years. And they're definitely on Instagram, which still provides much more targeting ability to an advertiser than every other social site in the world apart from LinkedIn. Twitter doesn't even register.
- exelius 9y ago
  Less Instagram and more snap for the younger kids. In general, I find each generation has its own preferred social platform — Facebook for generation X, Instagram for millennials, and Snap for whatever we’re calling whoever comes after. Each of these platforms seems to reflect the collective concerns of each generation.
  - katzgrau 9y ago
    I think FB has scooped up the older half of millennials. FB was the hot thing as they were just getting to college, when it was still limited to college kids. We can't discount outside of US/Europe though — they're big over there too. As for Snap, they definitely have Gen Z or whatever it's called, but I don't think the data on Snap is as strong. And Instagram has a strong hold on them too. Most teenagers I know keep Snap/Insta, and if they had to pick between the two, it'd be Insta.
- Lionsion 9y ago
  > And they're definitely on Instagram, which still provides much more targeting ability to an advertiser than every other social site in the world apart from LinkedIn. Can you explain this? I've put far less info into my Instagram profile than I have any other social network. They definitely slurped up my FB profile, but they wouldn't have that advantage for someone who skipped it. I'm a very light user of Instagram, so I think I'm missing something.
pjc50 9y ago
Yes, I think there's a natural "churn" with these things. A lifecycle was first identified for MUD users decades ago, and there are already ""dead"" social networks to show that it can happen: Bebo, Orkut, Myspace, and so on.
simias 9y ago
If Gen Z joins other Facebook-owned social networks in stead it won't hurt them in the least. Facebook might not be hype anymore but Instagram and WhatsApp seem to do just fine with the young ones, at least as far as I can tell as someone in his 30s.
- svantana 9y ago
  Well arguably facebook the product has been the problem, not facebook the coorporation. Those other products you mention don't have the same "put all information about yourself on here" design, and nowhere near the amount of news/politics on them.
  - BaconJuice 9y ago
    The other products Facebook own literally are "put all information about yourself on here" applications? I notice that if I talk about something on whatsapp I see some sort of ad on instagram around it etc.
  - simias 9y ago
    Supposing that the focus switches from Facebook to these other platforms how long until you see exactly the same patterns in these applications? We're talking about Facebook's core monetization strategy here, if they feel it's threatened I'm sure they'll do everything they can to "correct" that.
CSMastermind 9y ago
Except they're all joining Instagram

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

> What % of people do you think will actually delete their profiles? What fraction of oil buyers stopped buying from Standard Oil? Or phone users disconnected their AT&T lines? The fraction was negligible because monopolies (and firms wielding monopoly powers) are a known mode of market failure. (Instead of suppliers and consumers we have users and advertisers.) The solution must be public, not private.

hdyr 9y ago
It's hard to imagine such a luxury as being the same sort of monopoly as the other two things. The other two are basically necessary in order to find and go to work.
tonyedgecombe 9y ago
The solution must be public, not private. Which has it's own set of problems, I think I'd prefer a heavily regulated private provider rather than handing all this to data to any government.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > I'd prefer a heavily regulated private provider rather than handing all this to data to any government Agreed. By "public" I meant the government has to step in, not that they need to take over. The solution involves: 1. Breaking up Facebook; and 2. Implementing an American analog to Europe's GDPR.
- pjc50 9y ago
  Bad news: you already have an unregulated private provider who's handing all this data to any government that will pay for it (and some that haven't). https://theintercept.com/2018/03/26/facebook-data-ice-immigration/ https://theintercept.com/2018/03/26/facebook-data-ice-immigr... (caution on source reliability, but the essential fact that any intelligence agency could have done the same thing as CA, or bought their data, or stolen it, remains.)

Dowwie 9y ago

.00001% will delete their profiles

jobigoud 9y ago
Overly pessimistic, this represents less than one user.
- jk563 9y ago
  If you're going to be pedantic, at least run the numbers properly. Off of 2.2B active users[0], 0.00001% comes to about 220 users. Overly pessimistic, yes; less than one user, no! https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
  - Dowwie 9y ago
    thank you, my savior
  - jobigoud 9y ago
    Oops, mixed up millions and billions…

IAmEveryone 9y ago

I won’t delete my account, because a lot of my social life depends on it. Which is why I hope for serious regulatory action. It’s not unlike leaded gasoline: people would definitely prefer unleaded. But absent a choice, they would continue to use the toxic version because forgoing the benefits of a car would be inconvenient.

OrganicMSG 9y ago
>I won’t delete my account, because a lot of my social life depends on it. Sounds like you are in a tautological version of the sunk cost fallacy.

qubex 9y ago

Not many will relinquish it, I expect. The perceived penalty ’feels’ too great for most people. In much of the world, and in most demographics, concern seems to be absolutely nonexistent.

sdiepend 9y ago

Vero is apparently all the hype now. But from what I understood it's just as bad privacy wise.

robryan 9y ago

Using Facebook in limited ways can hurt them nearly as much as deleting. Monthly actives might not go down much but revenue per user will.

exelius 9y ago

% of overall profiles is probably low; there are a lot of bots on these social networks. But real, active users? Once that starts to decline, Facebook is dead; and I’m not sure they can tell bots from humans very well. Facebook has a lot of data; but it turns out every company that advertised with them turned around and used that data to essentially build their own customer targeting databases. Facebook’s data policies were very naive, and it’s coming back to bite them now that user expectations have come around.

stareatgoats 9y ago

Looks like traffic is down approx 6% so far. My guess is maybe 5% will drop off, and maybe 25% will use it less over a period of time. And this will show a slight bump on the upward trajectory which might reach apex in maybe 10 years as the rest of the developing world comes on board. In the meantime, there will some general adaption both to and by social media towards more sensible and responsible usage: better privacy protection and safeguards against mass-scooping of data, and for users; turn off notifications, log in maybe once a day, banning phones in schools etc. which will calm the novelty mania that has been the case in these early days.

jerf 9y ago

Remember, like a lot of the other big Silicon Valley names, Facebook stock is not priced for their current size, it is priced for the idea that they are expected to grow massively in the future. They already reported a user loss last quarter, seeming to have basically weathered that, but if they go into this quarter report (which is still a ways off) with a report that even just another 2 or 3% left, they can see a massive drop off in their stock price. Yes, even a drop that will make the current drop off seem like merely an opening overture. From there, you get recruiting and retention problems. From there you get long-term slow decline that even though nominally everything should be coming up Facebook, internally they just don't have the engineering talent to execute on it. And so on. As I was saying a few days ago, Silicon Valley's massive wealth and valuations are a great deal more fragile than most of you probably think. That's why all these news articles about Silicon Valley swaggering around and swinging their weight around by deciding who sees and who says what represent more danger than you realize. In something like the car industry, their wealth and power is mostly realized gains, the ability today to build millions of cars and sell them, etc. A lot of SV's power and wealth is tied up in future promises of power, and future wealth and prosperity can vanish in the wink of an eye. (Yes, there is a lot of real wealth today too, but that's not where the valuations are coming from.) I'll also tack on the end of this that contra a lot of people's claims that the only way that Facebook can fail is if a competitor arises that everybody jumps too, I'm seeing a lot of the "normies" in my life either simply limit Facebook or even straight-up drop Facebook, for no competitor at all. Will it stick? I dunno. But the "Facebook competitor" that may beat Facebook is just "no social media at all". And people are really thinking about Twitter and such as well in the same boat. (And I don't live in SV. The "normies" in my life are pretty representative of the bulk of Facebook's customers. If a Facebook exec overheard my family's discussions from this last Sunday, they'd probably be terrified. I didn't even participate, because I like to just observe these things sometimes to make sure I'm not unduly steering the conversation, so it's not my opinion being reflected back, either.) What if social media is fundamentally a bad idea, and will be looked back on in 20 years in much the same way we look back on pets.com or CueCat? I'm not ready to say that's the case for sure, but the pathologies seem to be getting worse, and the people running the social media sites are so ideologically uniform that they don't strike me as being capable of fully understanding the problem, only their corner of the problem, so the solutions keep making the problem worse overall. The bad scenario I describe above isn't guaranteed by any means, but at the moment I believe the course is currently set for that disaster, and I have no confidence in the current personnel to figure out how to successfully avoid it.