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Facebook Use Has Been Dropping Since the 2016 Election, According to SimilarWeb

370 points by Kroeler 8y ago

smt88 8y ago
This is only web traffic and doesn't tell us much. Facebook usage overall might be up, as far as we know.
maytc 8y ago
The author confuses mobile web for mobile app traffic which isn't accounted for. One is the traffic from users using facebook.com via a browser on their phone versus using the installed application. Maybe the drop is real or Facebook has successfully converted more users to the Facebook app, Messenger app, etc.
- lopmotr 8y ago
  Holy crap. Now it makes sense. I couldn't understand how Facebook usage could have been steadily dropping for over a year. So the entire article is pointless and wrong.
nkkollaw 8y ago
I wonder how many were just bots during the election. My experience from running Facebook ads is that Facebook is crawling with bots. We might never know the actual numbers.
- adventured 8y ago
  Facebook recently said they deleted 583 million fake accounts in just the first quarter of 2018. It's entirely plausible a lot of that supposed usage drop, is more aggressive bot elimination. https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-deleted-583-million-fake-accounts-in-the-first-three-months-of-2018/ https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-deleted-583-million-fake-...
  - nkkollaw 8y ago
    Yup, good point. We also have no idea how many more there are, certainly FB wasn't warning anyone that their numbers might have been incorrect because of bots any time before getting rid of them..?
    - adventured 8y ago
      From what I understand of the bot deletion in question, these were newer accounts and are not counted in the official monthly active user figures (the 2.2 billion number). That is, Facebook's monthly active count isn't going to suddenly show 1.7 billion now instead.
0x7f800000 8y ago
Good.
jchw 8y ago
While I do think it's silly to assume that #DeleteFacebook is responsible for any serious movement in numbers, I also don't necessarily agree with the interpretation that this is just a downturn from how active Facebook was during the election; it seems it probably would've already dropped off and stabilized if that were the only cause, since the election hasn't been hot news for quite a bit now. Speaking from personal experience, the scandals Facebook has been involved in are only a small part of why I deleted Facebook; more than anything, I just felt like it was not providing any value to me, just a pure time sink that I became less and less interested in. Maybe I'm not alone.
- joering2 8y ago
  Its also important to ask the “network effect” works both way; people sign up in en-masse hockey stick shape grow because of others. It is quite possible someone in your network is using Facebook less often today, knowing you are inactive/dont exist there anymore. Eventually once the real exhodus starts, it will be equally rapid and happy to watch, as inicial waves of signups.
  - r00fus 8y ago
    After a while the dark-pattern growth hacks stop affecting the populace, I guess. The "Jane is waiting for you to see her post on your timeline" stuff where FB impersonates your friend was when my wife started ignoring everything from FB (I had quit a long time ago).
- vanattab 8y ago
  >since the election hasn't been hot new for quite a bit now. Oh. How I wish that were true. You must not watch the news much because that's pretty much all I hear on virtually all the channels.
  - exelius 8y ago
    I cut my news consumption down significantly since the election. I don’t feel any less informed checking in once a week, but I get a lot less anxiety. My life is complicated enough. Facebook was a big part of that, so it’s gone too. I’m simply more deliberate about what I spend my attention on, and Facebook is junk food.
deleted 8y ago
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ggg9990 8y ago
I see it myself. I used to see people’s baby pictures and vacation pictures on Facebook. Now it’s mostly people breathlessly writing about the Mueller investigation or other pointless political shit. My visits have probably dropped 1/3 or more.
- russh 8y ago
  I stopped using it when I noticed most of the stuff showing up was pointless political shit and less and less about the people I know.
- code_duck 8y ago
  How many friends do you have on there? Facebook shows you a tiny percentage of the content added to your network, including repeating items way before they have run out. If the News Feed team is trying to show me what I actually want to see, and not what they think will get the most interaction, ad clicks or time out of me, they are doing a terrible job. I find that the items displayed do not give me an accurate view of what my connections are posting. Often when I check the pages of in-person friends, while Facebook has been showing inane political posts by people I barely know, I have not been presented with the actually relevant and interesting activity my (real) friends have posted during the same time, or more recently. I have unfollowed, blocked, and hidden so many stories about guns and politics, yet Facebook manages to find new friends I’ve never heard of with similar stories for my newsfeed. Ever since 2016, at least, I feel like politics is shoved in my face every time I go to Facebook, provoking me to interact with strangers regarding my opinions in one of the worst venues that one can do that. I think they may be chasing interaction, regardless whether it’s positive our negative. Another wild theory is that they want to gather information about members’ reaction to politics, as it is not as lucrative to record reactions to someone’s cousin’s baby photos. The other alternatives mean they are very bad at their jobs, so I’m not sure.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > If the News Feed team is trying to show me what I actually want to see, and not what they think will get the most interaction, ad clicks or time out of me, they are doing a terrible job. The News Feed believed that interaction reveals a preference for seeing something. Even though they added more icons so that you weren't thumbs-upping your friends personal tragedies to indicate that they matter to you, interactions all mean “like” in the sense of “I like Facebook relaying this content to me”.
jfindley 8y ago
I don't see any strong correlation here. To me it looks like it was dropping from about Aug'16, and this blog has merely drawn a line for the US election and called it a story. Based on a quick google search, the US is only number 2 in terms of total Facebook users[0] - maybe it might have been worth considering other factors outside of US politics that might account for this trend? 0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-based-on-number-of-facebook-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-... (No idea how accurate it is, but.)
- askafriend 8y ago
  Exactly, you have to tease out seasonality and the impact of special events like elections on user behavior. For example, is the percentage drop any greater than after previous elections? I think people underestimate the truly global scale of Facebook. Even then, the US is a fraction of FB's user-base.
shubidubi 8y ago
I don't have "data" to back it up but my personal experience is the same. My feed feels "empty". most of my posts don't get any likes/comments and most of my friends that used to post few times a day are doing it once a week now.
picacho 8y ago
Nice. that platform's just wasting primates' time.
hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
I didn't see any sort of methodology in how they get that data. While the article said it included both web and mobile app traffic, I'm skeptical unless they provide more data. Could be that usage is just moving more to the app than web and the counting is different.
marcell 8y ago
AFAICT, this is traffic for desktop web and mobile web. It doesn't include the mobile app. Who's to say people aren't just moving to mobile app?
- freyir 8y ago
  The article claims it includes app visits: "Since then, total monthly visits to Facebook in the US (both on the web and through the mobile app) have fallen [by 3 billion/month]."
  - AznHisoka 8y ago
    SimilarWeb has no fool-proof way of tracking app usage, nor even app downloads (don't trust anyone that says they can, unless they're Apple or Google). What they can track is the number of ratings - nothing else, but there's very little correlation between that and app usage.
deleted 8y ago
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AznHisoka 8y ago
This data is meaningless because: 1. There is no benchmark and we need one because SimilarWeb is based on a panel. The less people in that panel, the less total traffic to any website. 2. Most likely cause is more app usage and less desktop usage. Also can we please stop using SimilarWeb as some sort of authority reference? Their panel isnt humongous. Despite the fact they pay Chrome extension owners and later hijack the code to track everyone who installs it.
- seano314 8y ago
  Agreed. By chance do you have references on SimilarWeb paying "Chrome extension owners and later hijack the code to track everyone who installs it"? Curious to learn more about exactly what they're doing here.
  - AznHisoka 8y ago
    https://www.howtogeek.com/180175/warning-your-browser-extensions-are-spying-on-you/ https://www.howtogeek.com/180175/warning-your-browser-extens...
- bonniemuffin 8y ago
  I was also noticing this-- that the graph shows desktop+mobile WEB, but not native app use. If people are switching from mobile web to native app, this graph would decrease even if more people are using facebook every day, right?
- dx034 8y ago
  I agree that they can't track native app use but think their data might not be too far off. I just compared a few pages where I have access to traffic data and similarweb estimates aren't too far off, more exact than I had expected. But that could be different for very popular sites.
- jazoom 8y ago
  Similarweb's guess of my site's traffic has been absurdly wrong for years. It thinks the traffic has been wildly fluctuating but it's only ever gone up.
btilly 8y ago
By "Facebook" do they mean "Facebook" or "Facebook + Instagram + ..."?
- tgb29 8y ago
  That's my question too. It seems more Facebook users are migrating to Instagram. They did announce 150 million people now use stories. My experiences could be biased, but it amazes me how many Instagram users don't know it's a product of Facebook.
overgard 8y ago
I don't know if it's algorithmic, or if most of my close friends just hardly use facebook anymore, but it seems like I just rarely see anything anymore in my feed anymore that I care about. It also seems weird that what does appear is generally from people I'm very faint acquaintances with -- if I am curious about one of my actual friends I pretty much have to go straight to their profile. Besides that though, I think it just encourages behaviors I don't really enjoy seeing in my friends. I definitely know people who in real-life are totally cool, but their social media presence makes me question why I ever liked them in the first place. Mostly I see a lot of: 1) very overt attention seeking for pretty lame things (like, pretty girls posting selfies of themselves doing nothing interesting, or dudes with gym photos, that kind of thing) 2) Extremely broad and poorly thought out political rants 3) sharing really vapid motivational quotes 4) people being maybe a little too vulnerable to a very broad audience, to the point where it's awkward. 5) This one is the worst of all. People taking passive aggressive swipes at individuals by posting very vague status updates. I hate stuff like that. I don't think of myself as a super judgmental person, but whenever I get on facebook I spend half my time just thinking "really?" and then feeling kind of gross.
- flamedoge 8y ago
  you definitely don't sound like majority voice.
- 0x0 8y ago
  Facebook was a lot more fun when there was a chronological timeline of non-rich-text status updates and comments from friends. These days it's all semi-spam from pages and random week-old friend's FB activities being surfaced in a poorly targeted fashion. I know there are interesting posts by people on my friend list but they're simply being hidden. Maybe some fb developer was happy with increased engagement metrics merely caused by confused users forever scrolling up and down in desperate attempts to find out where all their friends whose posts used to show up have gone. And when actual friends' posts show up, 90% of the time it's a like or a share of some uninspiring web page's article with no comment. It's like it's become digg.com curated by your non-techie acquaintances, with a bonus ORDER BY RANDOM() thrown in for good measure.
tehsauce 8y ago
Doesn't this go against the numbers that facebook put out in its most recent quarterly report?
jsemrau 8y ago
Bot DAU's are a fraudulent metric. FB ( and other social media sites) have been using this for quite some time to inflate their performance.
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  Really? You think Facebook has an army of bots trying to inflate their metrics?
  - cycrutchfield 8y ago
    It wouldn’t be the least ethical thing that Zuck as ever done...
bmarquez 8y ago
Personal anecdote time: The line on that chart, the 2016 election, was exactly when I cut back on my Facebook use. I had former friends who posted stuff that night like "white people need to die" and "unfriend me if you voted for [insert candidate's name here]". Notwithstanding all the privacy issues, I remember the days when Facebook used to be fun. Back before timeline, back when it was limited to colleges, back when "Random Play" was listed as a desired relationship option. Now it's meme and clickbait article land.
Zaheer 8y ago
Interesting chart showing FB steady decline over last 5 yrs on Google Trends. May not be the strongest correlation but interesting nonetheless: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=Instagram,facebook https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
- downandout 8y ago
  That’s interesting because many people use Google as a locator - they don’t type in Facebook.com, they type Facebook into the omnibar and click on the first link that comes up in Google. So it does show declining intent to visit Facebook. I imagine that the URL autocomplete feature in major browsers has also played a role in the decline you’ve shown here though.
  - fullshark 8y ago
    Also the facebook app
- chrispeel 8y ago
  Larger time window with comparison to Google and Snapchat. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F02y1vz,%2Fm%2F045c7b,%2Fm%2F0mgkg,%2Fm%2F027lnzs https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0... Google is also dropping in Google Trends. Assuming there is a drop in usage of FB (not just a drop in searches for FB), I guess the 2016 election is only one contributing factor.
  - unfunco 8y ago
    It seems odd to me that iPhone wouldn't spike, especially so around 2007. Am I reading this wrong?
    - KenanSulayman 8y ago
      It did spike, being compared with Facebook et al. normalizes the spikes away though: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F027lnzs https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...
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shahocean 8y ago
I suspect Facebook is going to die "The Orkut Death"!
sdan 8y ago
Waiting for school to end. I rely on Facebook for quick messages and group classroom posts. Once Summer break starts, I can #DeleteFacebook until next year.
- droidist2 8y ago
  Will you start over again with a new account in the Fall?
  - sdan 8y ago
    Sorry for the late reply. I most probably will. I'm working on making a middleman website to remove FB tracking. If it works out, I'll rely on that instead.
JansjoFromIkea 8y ago
Facebook is two things for me right now: 1. A lazy way of registering to sites 2. New Urbanist Memes For Transit-Oriented Teens (my feed is exclusively this one right now) The notifications going a bit mad about 18 months ago or so when they introduced the market stuff and "your friends are interested in going to X" was what ran me off. I'd unsubscribe and unfollow and new worthless ones would take up their place. Now I don't even bother checking my notifications; I'll log in maybe twice a day to check if I received any messages, have a scroll through NUMTOTs, that's about it.
- thex10 8y ago
  Heh, me too! It was only in the past year that I've discovered NUMTOT and other fun groups, and my enjoyment of FB has increased a lot since I've joined them.
  - Silfen 8y ago
    NUMTOTS everywhere! (Is this peak transit?) In all seriousness, it's definitely more fun than vanilla facebook, although I'd have a hard time calling it a shelter from politics or praising its level of overall discourse.
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xster 8y ago
Ironically propagations of articles like this is actually more or less the reason I stopped using Facebook. No one reads primary sources anymore. All kinds of baiting conclusions and titles are drawn on absolutely minimal data with zero scientific rigor like this blog entry and my feed is just reshares of these McNews for shock value and social credits.
partiallypro 8y ago
I have been avoiding a lot of sites since the election, largely because they can't seem to let the 2016 election go. Reddit is the biggest, I used to use Reddit a lot, now I'll use it a bit but generally I avoid all but a few subreddits. The others are unbearable, /r/politics is a swamp itself. I am willing to bet a lot of people have dropped off because politics is virtually unavoidable on Facebook. Meanwhile on Instagram, there are very few political posts. Facebook also changed their algorithm and now I see all kinds of stuff I literally do not care about at all, I find myself muting people all the time. I follow GQ on Facebook and even things they post are so political it's unnerving. Everything has been politicized, people are burned out. I can't even watch a late night talk show anymore without political news being shoved down my throat; so why would I log into Facebook and see what my old classmate or uncle thinks? I am a very active Twitter user, but the crowd I follow sees politics and the media obsession with it as it is, largely a joke.
- BigChiefSmokem 8y ago
  That problem is not caused by technology, it's caused by actual politics.
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    The problem of people being incensed by the political situation (from either side) is caused by politics. The problem of everyone feeling that they have to shout their politics to everyone around them, all the time, is caused by something else. Loss of civility? An almost religious attachment to Team Red or Team Blue? It's something more than politics. It's a breakdown of some elements of social unity that used to exist.
    - deleted 8y ago
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- losteric 8y ago
  In a democracy, politics does deserve the front-page. What's shameful is how the masses and media cover current events...
thebradbain 8y ago
I actually love to browse Facebook, mainly because I've taken the time to curate groups / pages I enjoy getting updates from. In addition, all of my friends still actively use Facebook too (all college kids) for status updates, photo uploads, and a LOT of event postings (most college campus groups/clubs/activities have migrated to be exclusively on Facebook). Maybe it's one of those things that drops off after highschool / college / when everyone goes their separate ways ?
nevatiaritika 8y ago
I sometimes wonder if truly my friends have started posting less on Facebook or is it their algorithm messing up again? I see almost no original content posted by friends and only posts from pages with comments by my friends on them ("X and Y commented on Z page's photo")
- cycrutchfield 8y ago
  Stuff like that is a surefire sign that your friends are indeed posting less and they are just filling up the space with second degree content.
edpichler 8y ago
I miss the blog and personal websites era. These “too easy to share” years created a lot of noise and we still do not have a good alghoritm to filter it, and even if we had, we would blame it for filtering content and shaping our thoughts. Users like to be in control. I have seen the rss emerging again, specially here on HN discussions, and I believe that is the best solution to follow updates.
Proven 8y ago
If FB won’t let me, I will get my fake news elsewhere
always_good 8y ago
I have to wonder how many HN comment anecdotes are related to HNers just getting older. Yeah, I'm meeting fewer people than I did in uni. I use Facebook less than I did in uni. As I get older, it takes more and more effort to meet people. Easy for me to see downward trends in Facebook when I don't plot them against downward trends in novelty in my own social life. But then I moved abroad at 25, I'm almost 30 now, I'm meeting new people (immigrants and locals) every month, and Facebook has become useful again for growing acquaintances into friendships like it always was. HNers like to grandstand about how they rediscovered how to call people instead of messaging them, but that's still something you do with your closer circle, not acquaintances in 2018. And that's a personal issue if you had to quit Facebook just to relearn how to call mom or your best friends. I certainly don't relate to that. It's like people who condemn Facebook because they got addicted to scrolling the news feed. Seems like condemning Netflix because you can't stop binge-watching. At which point do you take responsibility for yourself? Aside, SimilarWeb, like Alexa, seems pretty useless for metrics. I remember gaining 100k+ Alexa ranking by installing the Alexa toolbar on my own machine and visiting my own websites as usual. Never looked at Alexa ratings since. I guess I'm getting anti-Facebook fatigue. Especially when the predictable HN comments are things like "I quit Facebook and now I go outside again. Everyone needs to try this!"
- ddtaylor 8y ago
  > I remember gaining 100k+ Alexa ranking by installing the Alexa toolbar on my own machine and visiting my own websites as usual. Never looked at Alexa ratings since. I'm ashamed to admit my first thought was "damn I need to install Alexa and start browsing our site" lol =(
- Karrot_Kream 8y ago
  More people are not ages 16-25 than are ages 16-25 in the world though.
- freddie_mercury 8y ago
  I would add that Americans are (possibly uniquely) politicised and can't seem to stop constant posting about news. My friends from other countries never do that and instead use Facebook to talk about their actual lives. I also have anti-Facebook fatigue and HN threads about Facebook are tiresome and predictable. It is like a never-ending line of newly converted going on about veganism or Crossfit or whatever...but in HackerNews' case it is about anti-Facebook and how you'll be smarter, sexier, sleep better, lose weight, and your children and dog will love you more once you give up Facebook.
elvirs 8y ago
I can say the same thing about my observation of how my friends use Facebook. Most of my friends have started to comment and post stuff lot less in the last year or two.
anovikov 8y ago
I gave up on Facebook about 10 months ago because of my friends there, most people who kept posting something were Commies/Putinists - which is a Russian equivalent of Trump supporters - those with liberal views just stopped posting. For me, it became a conservative outlet. I no longer saw anything of value for me there, and just deleted my account.
Nimsical 8y ago
This is just bad data journalism.
dontwaitesforme 8y ago
So bored of Facebook hate.
rbosinger 8y ago
I think I'm just getting bored of information. I even find myself unexcited to check Reddit, or major news sites, or even this site. My routine used to be to check Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, CBC and CNN, GitHub "explore" and HackerNews. Now I just tend to get up in the morning, eat a muffin and stare off and think about stuff. I'm tempted to look at these sites but know I won't see anything that tickles me. So I find myself actually just deciding not to look at all.
- been_done1234 8y ago
  I have a friend of a friend who has described the same feeling. They weren't sure what to make of it.
  - LeRoyVoss 8y ago
    I have the same feelings too. In my case it is because of information being overwhelming. I just check a couple of sites at maximum now, the digital wellbeing thing that Google presented at io this year really resonated with me
    - brain5ide 8y ago
      I have the same feeling but am still guided by the monkey in my head that has the habit of checking everything. Any good replacement ideas for that dopamine hit?
  - pertsix 8y ago
    this is most commonly diagnosed as depression
    - lolsal 8y ago
      Can you clarify what you mean? I doubt that deciding not to look at news sites on the internet is depression.
- deleted 8y ago
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tzury 8y ago
just so you'll know, similar web gets it data, mainly by spying on users via browser extensions. this is far from being legal. or at least a dark gray area. I have personally complained about that, once found private URLs I sent to clients, and were not published elsewhere ever, were listed in their stats under that specific sub domain, but never got a satisfying response, if at all.
gkanai 8y ago
I, for one, am actively trying to limit my FB usage. I started actively limiting my FB usage last summer, so way before the Cambridge Analytica news. I do use it still for some groups, and Messenger from time to time, but I try hard to stay away from the main FB service. I am also slowly but surely deleting content from my account. Deleting old content, deleting likes and whatnot.
- mayniac 8y ago
  >I am also slowly but surely deleting content from my account. Deleting old content, deleting likes and whatnot. I would have likely stayed on the platform if there was an easy way to do this. One of my biggest concerns wasn't just Facebook analysing my data, but allowing others to access it indiscriminately and I wanted a way to delete it. There's no API functionality to delete/untag/unlike anything. Timeline is a mess, there's no bulk delete option or option to even select multiple/all. No "delete after X days" feature. In the end I spent 3x12 hour shifts writing a python script using image processing to find delete buttons in timeline and go through the motions to delete everything. It took about 3 hours for me to write/debug/test 300 lines of spaghetti python and another 30 or so for it to go through everything and try to delete. All of which should have been doable in <30 lines, a single API call, or by just hitting ctrl+a and delete. I deleted my account afterwards mainly out of spite. Considering how politicians are already getting stung by things they posted to FB/Twitter in their teens here in the UK it is absolutely incomprehensible to me how Facebook doesn't have half decent delete functionality.
sandrobfc 8y ago
Facebook is alive and well, at least for everyone who uses it on a daily basis. The mass users of Facebook are not the least worried about the negative effect of social networks and those who actually left after recent events are not enough to affect those statistics. Probably what's hurting it the most is the new users count, as I think that nowadays new users pick other social networks to hang out with their friends, such as Snapchat or Instagram.
horseLOGIC 8y ago
I can see why people are desperate to "prove" that the supposed election meddling or the Cambridge Analytica scandal is causing Facebook to fail, but the data just doesn't show that at all. People make a big deal about privacy, but the actual users of social media usually post stuff because they want everyone to know about it. The people who really care about privacy are not on social media. There's already a general understanding that when using the internet, you're getting tracked by various actors and people (even begrudgingly) accept that. That same graph shows that Facebook usage has been dropping virtually every month before the election and after, totaling almost 50% loss. There's no exceptional change visible due to any particular event. There are some strong upticks in there as well, but the longterm trend is down. I believe the most reasonable explanation is simply that people are moving on, just like they moved on from MySpace and other previously popular platforms. Young people are leading the charge here, it's just not as comfortable when your grandmother and high school teacher can see you on Facebook. It's uncool.
- yorwba 8y ago
  > users of social media usually post stuff because they want everyone to know about it > it's just not as comfortable when your grandmother and high school teacher can see you on Facebook I think most posts on social media are targeted at people in the poster's peer group, and the only reason that everyone else can see them too is that broadcasting is the default way to contact multiple people without prior coordination (say, by joining a group chat).
  - horseLOGIC 8y ago
    I don't actually use Facebook, but I'm under the impression that you can post to just the people who are your friends or just a set of friends. There's certainly the possibility to at least not broadcast to the whole internet.
xstartup 8y ago
Correlation is not causation. SimilarWeb buys data from ISP DNS resolvers. During the same time, Cloudflare DNS resolver was released to the public and marketed heavily. Even my nontechy gf started using Cloudflare Resolver. She saw that on twitter was curious about the benefits and was not disappointed. So, yeah usage did decline a bit but not that much.
ulfw 8y ago
Facebook has lost it when it stopped being a social network where people follow their friends' lives. Once it became a 'I share random links or "news" stories off the internet' feed it lost all its value. There is nothing social about a Fox News or MSNBC story link. At all.
fringedgentian 8y ago
Ah yes, I remember The Great DeFriending of 2016.
blklifematters 8y ago
Facebook and google, way too big to fall. They have more and more followers. Developers follow react, designers Material.. oh, they keep it changing enought often. Haha
makecheck 8y ago
Facebook dependency can’t really drop significantly as long as people keep requiring it for things that don’t technically need Facebook. Don’t link to articles only viewable on Facebook. If somebody plans an event on Facebook, push back and request to be sent the details and say “I can’t log in to Facebook”, etc. Check in with your friends in non-Messenger ways, e.g. phone messaging or (gasp!) actually seeing them in person. Make walled-off sites unacceptable.

370 points by Kroeler 8y ago

This is only web traffic and doesn't tell us much. Facebook usage overall might be up, as far as we know.

The author confuses mobile web for mobile app traffic which isn't accounted for. One is the traffic from users using facebook.com via a browser on their phone versus using the installed application. Maybe the drop is real or Facebook has successfully converted more users to the Facebook app, Messenger app, etc.

lopmotr 8y ago
Holy crap. Now it makes sense. I couldn't understand how Facebook usage could have been steadily dropping for over a year. So the entire article is pointless and wrong.

nkkollaw 8y ago

I wonder how many were just bots during the election. My experience from running Facebook ads is that Facebook is crawling with bots. We might never know the actual numbers.

adventured 8y ago
Facebook recently said they deleted 583 million fake accounts in just the first quarter of 2018. It's entirely plausible a lot of that supposed usage drop, is more aggressive bot elimination. https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-deleted-583-million-fake-accounts-in-the-first-three-months-of-2018/ https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-deleted-583-million-fake-...
- nkkollaw 8y ago
  Yup, good point. We also have no idea how many more there are, certainly FB wasn't warning anyone that their numbers might have been incorrect because of bots any time before getting rid of them..?
  - adventured 8y ago
    From what I understand of the bot deletion in question, these were newer accounts and are not counted in the official monthly active user figures (the 2.2 billion number). That is, Facebook's monthly active count isn't going to suddenly show 1.7 billion now instead.

0x7f800000 8y ago

Good.

jchw 8y ago

While I do think it's silly to assume that #DeleteFacebook is responsible for any serious movement in numbers, I also don't necessarily agree with the interpretation that this is just a downturn from how active Facebook was during the election; it seems it probably would've already dropped off and stabilized if that were the only cause, since the election hasn't been hot news for quite a bit now. Speaking from personal experience, the scandals Facebook has been involved in are only a small part of why I deleted Facebook; more than anything, I just felt like it was not providing any value to me, just a pure time sink that I became less and less interested in. Maybe I'm not alone.

joering2 8y ago
Its also important to ask the “network effect” works both way; people sign up in en-masse hockey stick shape grow because of others. It is quite possible someone in your network is using Facebook less often today, knowing you are inactive/dont exist there anymore. Eventually once the real exhodus starts, it will be equally rapid and happy to watch, as inicial waves of signups.
- r00fus 8y ago
  After a while the dark-pattern growth hacks stop affecting the populace, I guess. The "Jane is waiting for you to see her post on your timeline" stuff where FB impersonates your friend was when my wife started ignoring everything from FB (I had quit a long time ago).
vanattab 8y ago
>since the election hasn't been hot new for quite a bit now. Oh. How I wish that were true. You must not watch the news much because that's pretty much all I hear on virtually all the channels.
- exelius 8y ago
  I cut my news consumption down significantly since the election. I don’t feel any less informed checking in once a week, but I get a lot less anxiety. My life is complicated enough. Facebook was a big part of that, so it’s gone too. I’m simply more deliberate about what I spend my attention on, and Facebook is junk food.

deleted 8y ago

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ggg9990 8y ago

I see it myself. I used to see people’s baby pictures and vacation pictures on Facebook. Now it’s mostly people breathlessly writing about the Mueller investigation or other pointless political shit. My visits have probably dropped 1/3 or more.

russh 8y ago
I stopped using it when I noticed most of the stuff showing up was pointless political shit and less and less about the people I know.
code_duck 8y ago
How many friends do you have on there? Facebook shows you a tiny percentage of the content added to your network, including repeating items way before they have run out. If the News Feed team is trying to show me what I actually want to see, and not what they think will get the most interaction, ad clicks or time out of me, they are doing a terrible job. I find that the items displayed do not give me an accurate view of what my connections are posting. Often when I check the pages of in-person friends, while Facebook has been showing inane political posts by people I barely know, I have not been presented with the actually relevant and interesting activity my (real) friends have posted during the same time, or more recently. I have unfollowed, blocked, and hidden so many stories about guns and politics, yet Facebook manages to find new friends I’ve never heard of with similar stories for my newsfeed. Ever since 2016, at least, I feel like politics is shoved in my face every time I go to Facebook, provoking me to interact with strangers regarding my opinions in one of the worst venues that one can do that. I think they may be chasing interaction, regardless whether it’s positive our negative. Another wild theory is that they want to gather information about members’ reaction to politics, as it is not as lucrative to record reactions to someone’s cousin’s baby photos. The other alternatives mean they are very bad at their jobs, so I’m not sure.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > If the News Feed team is trying to show me what I actually want to see, and not what they think will get the most interaction, ad clicks or time out of me, they are doing a terrible job. The News Feed believed that interaction reveals a preference for seeing something. Even though they added more icons so that you weren't thumbs-upping your friends personal tragedies to indicate that they matter to you, interactions all mean “like” in the sense of “I like Facebook relaying this content to me”.

jfindley 8y ago

I don't see any strong correlation here. To me it looks like it was dropping from about Aug'16, and this blog has merely drawn a line for the US election and called it a story. Based on a quick google search, the US is only number 2 in terms of total Facebook users[0] - maybe it might have been worth considering other factors outside of US politics that might account for this trend? 0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-based-on-number-of-facebook-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-... (No idea how accurate it is, but.)

askafriend 8y ago
Exactly, you have to tease out seasonality and the impact of special events like elections on user behavior. For example, is the percentage drop any greater than after previous elections? I think people underestimate the truly global scale of Facebook. Even then, the US is a fraction of FB's user-base.

shubidubi 8y ago

I don't have "data" to back it up but my personal experience is the same. My feed feels "empty". most of my posts don't get any likes/comments and most of my friends that used to post few times a day are doing it once a week now.

picacho 8y ago

Nice. that platform's just wasting primates' time.

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago

I didn't see any sort of methodology in how they get that data. While the article said it included both web and mobile app traffic, I'm skeptical unless they provide more data. Could be that usage is just moving more to the app than web and the counting is different.

marcell 8y ago

AFAICT, this is traffic for desktop web and mobile web. It doesn't include the mobile app. Who's to say people aren't just moving to mobile app?

freyir 8y ago
The article claims it includes app visits: "Since then, total monthly visits to Facebook in the US (both on the web and through the mobile app) have fallen [by 3 billion/month]."
- AznHisoka 8y ago
  SimilarWeb has no fool-proof way of tracking app usage, nor even app downloads (don't trust anyone that says they can, unless they're Apple or Google). What they can track is the number of ratings - nothing else, but there's very little correlation between that and app usage.

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AznHisoka 8y ago

This data is meaningless because: 1. There is no benchmark and we need one because SimilarWeb is based on a panel. The less people in that panel, the less total traffic to any website. 2. Most likely cause is more app usage and less desktop usage. Also can we please stop using SimilarWeb as some sort of authority reference? Their panel isnt humongous. Despite the fact they pay Chrome extension owners and later hijack the code to track everyone who installs it.

seano314 8y ago
Agreed. By chance do you have references on SimilarWeb paying "Chrome extension owners and later hijack the code to track everyone who installs it"? Curious to learn more about exactly what they're doing here.
- AznHisoka 8y ago
  https://www.howtogeek.com/180175/warning-your-browser-extensions-are-spying-on-you/ https://www.howtogeek.com/180175/warning-your-browser-extens...
bonniemuffin 8y ago
I was also noticing this-- that the graph shows desktop+mobile WEB, but not native app use. If people are switching from mobile web to native app, this graph would decrease even if more people are using facebook every day, right?
dx034 8y ago
I agree that they can't track native app use but think their data might not be too far off. I just compared a few pages where I have access to traffic data and similarweb estimates aren't too far off, more exact than I had expected. But that could be different for very popular sites.
jazoom 8y ago
Similarweb's guess of my site's traffic has been absurdly wrong for years. It thinks the traffic has been wildly fluctuating but it's only ever gone up.

btilly 8y ago

By "Facebook" do they mean "Facebook" or "Facebook + Instagram + ..."?

tgb29 8y ago
That's my question too. It seems more Facebook users are migrating to Instagram. They did announce 150 million people now use stories. My experiences could be biased, but it amazes me how many Instagram users don't know it's a product of Facebook.

overgard 8y ago

I don't know if it's algorithmic, or if most of my close friends just hardly use facebook anymore, but it seems like I just rarely see anything anymore in my feed anymore that I care about. It also seems weird that what does appear is generally from people I'm very faint acquaintances with -- if I am curious about one of my actual friends I pretty much have to go straight to their profile. Besides that though, I think it just encourages behaviors I don't really enjoy seeing in my friends. I definitely know people who in real-life are totally cool, but their social media presence makes me question why I ever liked them in the first place. Mostly I see a lot of: 1) very overt attention seeking for pretty lame things (like, pretty girls posting selfies of themselves doing nothing interesting, or dudes with gym photos, that kind of thing) 2) Extremely broad and poorly thought out political rants 3) sharing really vapid motivational quotes 4) people being maybe a little too vulnerable to a very broad audience, to the point where it's awkward. 5) This one is the worst of all. People taking passive aggressive swipes at individuals by posting very vague status updates. I hate stuff like that. I don't think of myself as a super judgmental person, but whenever I get on facebook I spend half my time just thinking "really?" and then feeling kind of gross.

flamedoge 8y ago
you definitely don't sound like majority voice.
0x0 8y ago
Facebook was a lot more fun when there was a chronological timeline of non-rich-text status updates and comments from friends. These days it's all semi-spam from pages and random week-old friend's FB activities being surfaced in a poorly targeted fashion. I know there are interesting posts by people on my friend list but they're simply being hidden. Maybe some fb developer was happy with increased engagement metrics merely caused by confused users forever scrolling up and down in desperate attempts to find out where all their friends whose posts used to show up have gone. And when actual friends' posts show up, 90% of the time it's a like or a share of some uninspiring web page's article with no comment. It's like it's become digg.com curated by your non-techie acquaintances, with a bonus ORDER BY RANDOM() thrown in for good measure.

tehsauce 8y ago

Doesn't this go against the numbers that facebook put out in its most recent quarterly report?

jsemrau 8y ago

Bot DAU's are a fraudulent metric. FB ( and other social media sites) have been using this for quite some time to inflate their performance.

spookthesunset 8y ago
Really? You think Facebook has an army of bots trying to inflate their metrics?
- cycrutchfield 8y ago
  It wouldn’t be the least ethical thing that Zuck as ever done...

bmarquez 8y ago

Personal anecdote time: The line on that chart, the 2016 election, was exactly when I cut back on my Facebook use. I had former friends who posted stuff that night like "white people need to die" and "unfriend me if you voted for [insert candidate's name here]". Notwithstanding all the privacy issues, I remember the days when Facebook used to be fun. Back before timeline, back when it was limited to colleges, back when "Random Play" was listed as a desired relationship option. Now it's meme and clickbait article land.

Zaheer 8y ago

Interesting chart showing FB steady decline over last 5 yrs on Google Trends. May not be the strongest correlation but interesting nonetheless: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=Instagram,facebook https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

downandout 8y ago
That’s interesting because many people use Google as a locator - they don’t type in Facebook.com, they type Facebook into the omnibar and click on the first link that comes up in Google. So it does show declining intent to visit Facebook. I imagine that the URL autocomplete feature in major browsers has also played a role in the decline you’ve shown here though.
- fullshark 8y ago
  Also the facebook app
chrispeel 8y ago
Larger time window with comparison to Google and Snapchat. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F02y1vz,%2Fm%2F045c7b,%2Fm%2F0mgkg,%2Fm%2F027lnzs https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0... Google is also dropping in Google Trends. Assuming there is a drop in usage of FB (not just a drop in searches for FB), I guess the 2016 election is only one contributing factor.
- unfunco 8y ago
  It seems odd to me that iPhone wouldn't spike, especially so around 2007. Am I reading this wrong?
  - KenanSulayman 8y ago
    It did spike, being compared with Facebook et al. normalizes the spikes away though: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F027lnzs https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...

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shahocean 8y ago

I suspect Facebook is going to die "The Orkut Death"!

sdan 8y ago

Waiting for school to end. I rely on Facebook for quick messages and group classroom posts. Once Summer break starts, I can #DeleteFacebook until next year.

droidist2 8y ago
Will you start over again with a new account in the Fall?
- sdan 8y ago
  Sorry for the late reply. I most probably will. I'm working on making a middleman website to remove FB tracking. If it works out, I'll rely on that instead.

JansjoFromIkea 8y ago

Facebook is two things for me right now: 1. A lazy way of registering to sites 2. New Urbanist Memes For Transit-Oriented Teens (my feed is exclusively this one right now) The notifications going a bit mad about 18 months ago or so when they introduced the market stuff and "your friends are interested in going to X" was what ran me off. I'd unsubscribe and unfollow and new worthless ones would take up their place. Now I don't even bother checking my notifications; I'll log in maybe twice a day to check if I received any messages, have a scroll through NUMTOTs, that's about it.

thex10 8y ago
Heh, me too! It was only in the past year that I've discovered NUMTOT and other fun groups, and my enjoyment of FB has increased a lot since I've joined them.
- Silfen 8y ago
  NUMTOTS everywhere! (Is this peak transit?) In all seriousness, it's definitely more fun than vanilla facebook, although I'd have a hard time calling it a shelter from politics or praising its level of overall discourse.

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xster 8y ago

Ironically propagations of articles like this is actually more or less the reason I stopped using Facebook. No one reads primary sources anymore. All kinds of baiting conclusions and titles are drawn on absolutely minimal data with zero scientific rigor like this blog entry and my feed is just reshares of these McNews for shock value and social credits.

partiallypro 8y ago

I have been avoiding a lot of sites since the election, largely because they can't seem to let the 2016 election go. Reddit is the biggest, I used to use Reddit a lot, now I'll use it a bit but generally I avoid all but a few subreddits. The others are unbearable, /r/politics is a swamp itself. I am willing to bet a lot of people have dropped off because politics is virtually unavoidable on Facebook. Meanwhile on Instagram, there are very few political posts. Facebook also changed their algorithm and now I see all kinds of stuff I literally do not care about at all, I find myself muting people all the time. I follow GQ on Facebook and even things they post are so political it's unnerving. Everything has been politicized, people are burned out. I can't even watch a late night talk show anymore without political news being shoved down my throat; so why would I log into Facebook and see what my old classmate or uncle thinks? I am a very active Twitter user, but the crowd I follow sees politics and the media obsession with it as it is, largely a joke.

BigChiefSmokem 8y ago
That problem is not caused by technology, it's caused by actual politics.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  The problem of people being incensed by the political situation (from either side) is caused by politics. The problem of everyone feeling that they have to shout their politics to everyone around them, all the time, is caused by something else. Loss of civility? An almost religious attachment to Team Red or Team Blue? It's something more than politics. It's a breakdown of some elements of social unity that used to exist.
  - deleted 8y ago
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losteric 8y ago
In a democracy, politics does deserve the front-page. What's shameful is how the masses and media cover current events...

thebradbain 8y ago

I actually love to browse Facebook, mainly because I've taken the time to curate groups / pages I enjoy getting updates from. In addition, all of my friends still actively use Facebook too (all college kids) for status updates, photo uploads, and a LOT of event postings (most college campus groups/clubs/activities have migrated to be exclusively on Facebook). Maybe it's one of those things that drops off after highschool / college / when everyone goes their separate ways ?

nevatiaritika 8y ago

I sometimes wonder if truly my friends have started posting less on Facebook or is it their algorithm messing up again? I see almost no original content posted by friends and only posts from pages with comments by my friends on them ("X and Y commented on Z page's photo")

cycrutchfield 8y ago
Stuff like that is a surefire sign that your friends are indeed posting less and they are just filling up the space with second degree content.

edpichler 8y ago

I miss the blog and personal websites era. These “too easy to share” years created a lot of noise and we still do not have a good alghoritm to filter it, and even if we had, we would blame it for filtering content and shaping our thoughts. Users like to be in control. I have seen the rss emerging again, specially here on HN discussions, and I believe that is the best solution to follow updates.

Proven 8y ago

If FB won’t let me, I will get my fake news elsewhere

always_good 8y ago

I have to wonder how many HN comment anecdotes are related to HNers just getting older. Yeah, I'm meeting fewer people than I did in uni. I use Facebook less than I did in uni. As I get older, it takes more and more effort to meet people. Easy for me to see downward trends in Facebook when I don't plot them against downward trends in novelty in my own social life. But then I moved abroad at 25, I'm almost 30 now, I'm meeting new people (immigrants and locals) every month, and Facebook has become useful again for growing acquaintances into friendships like it always was. HNers like to grandstand about how they rediscovered how to call people instead of messaging them, but that's still something you do with your closer circle, not acquaintances in 2018. And that's a personal issue if you had to quit Facebook just to relearn how to call mom or your best friends. I certainly don't relate to that. It's like people who condemn Facebook because they got addicted to scrolling the news feed. Seems like condemning Netflix because you can't stop binge-watching. At which point do you take responsibility for yourself? Aside, SimilarWeb, like Alexa, seems pretty useless for metrics. I remember gaining 100k+ Alexa ranking by installing the Alexa toolbar on my own machine and visiting my own websites as usual. Never looked at Alexa ratings since. I guess I'm getting anti-Facebook fatigue. Especially when the predictable HN comments are things like "I quit Facebook and now I go outside again. Everyone needs to try this!"

ddtaylor 8y ago
> I remember gaining 100k+ Alexa ranking by installing the Alexa toolbar on my own machine and visiting my own websites as usual. Never looked at Alexa ratings since. I'm ashamed to admit my first thought was "damn I need to install Alexa and start browsing our site" lol =(
Karrot_Kream 8y ago
More people are not ages 16-25 than are ages 16-25 in the world though.
freddie_mercury 8y ago
I would add that Americans are (possibly uniquely) politicised and can't seem to stop constant posting about news. My friends from other countries never do that and instead use Facebook to talk about their actual lives. I also have anti-Facebook fatigue and HN threads about Facebook are tiresome and predictable. It is like a never-ending line of newly converted going on about veganism or Crossfit or whatever...but in HackerNews' case it is about anti-Facebook and how you'll be smarter, sexier, sleep better, lose weight, and your children and dog will love you more once you give up Facebook.

elvirs 8y ago

I can say the same thing about my observation of how my friends use Facebook. Most of my friends have started to comment and post stuff lot less in the last year or two.

anovikov 8y ago

I gave up on Facebook about 10 months ago because of my friends there, most people who kept posting something were Commies/Putinists - which is a Russian equivalent of Trump supporters - those with liberal views just stopped posting. For me, it became a conservative outlet. I no longer saw anything of value for me there, and just deleted my account.

Nimsical 8y ago

This is just bad data journalism.

dontwaitesforme 8y ago

So bored of Facebook hate.

rbosinger 8y ago

I think I'm just getting bored of information. I even find myself unexcited to check Reddit, or major news sites, or even this site. My routine used to be to check Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, CBC and CNN, GitHub "explore" and HackerNews. Now I just tend to get up in the morning, eat a muffin and stare off and think about stuff. I'm tempted to look at these sites but know I won't see anything that tickles me. So I find myself actually just deciding not to look at all.

been_done1234 8y ago
I have a friend of a friend who has described the same feeling. They weren't sure what to make of it.
- LeRoyVoss 8y ago
  I have the same feelings too. In my case it is because of information being overwhelming. I just check a couple of sites at maximum now, the digital wellbeing thing that Google presented at io this year really resonated with me
  - brain5ide 8y ago
    I have the same feeling but am still guided by the monkey in my head that has the habit of checking everything. Any good replacement ideas for that dopamine hit?
- pertsix 8y ago
  this is most commonly diagnosed as depression
  - lolsal 8y ago
    Can you clarify what you mean? I doubt that deciding not to look at news sites on the internet is depression.
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tzury 8y ago

just so you'll know, similar web gets it data, mainly by spying on users via browser extensions. this is far from being legal. or at least a dark gray area. I have personally complained about that, once found private URLs I sent to clients, and were not published elsewhere ever, were listed in their stats under that specific sub domain, but never got a satisfying response, if at all.

gkanai 8y ago

I, for one, am actively trying to limit my FB usage. I started actively limiting my FB usage last summer, so way before the Cambridge Analytica news. I do use it still for some groups, and Messenger from time to time, but I try hard to stay away from the main FB service. I am also slowly but surely deleting content from my account. Deleting old content, deleting likes and whatnot.

mayniac 8y ago
>I am also slowly but surely deleting content from my account. Deleting old content, deleting likes and whatnot. I would have likely stayed on the platform if there was an easy way to do this. One of my biggest concerns wasn't just Facebook analysing my data, but allowing others to access it indiscriminately and I wanted a way to delete it. There's no API functionality to delete/untag/unlike anything. Timeline is a mess, there's no bulk delete option or option to even select multiple/all. No "delete after X days" feature. In the end I spent 3x12 hour shifts writing a python script using image processing to find delete buttons in timeline and go through the motions to delete everything. It took about 3 hours for me to write/debug/test 300 lines of spaghetti python and another 30 or so for it to go through everything and try to delete. All of which should have been doable in <30 lines, a single API call, or by just hitting ctrl+a and delete. I deleted my account afterwards mainly out of spite. Considering how politicians are already getting stung by things they posted to FB/Twitter in their teens here in the UK it is absolutely incomprehensible to me how Facebook doesn't have half decent delete functionality.

sandrobfc 8y ago

Facebook is alive and well, at least for everyone who uses it on a daily basis. The mass users of Facebook are not the least worried about the negative effect of social networks and those who actually left after recent events are not enough to affect those statistics. Probably what's hurting it the most is the new users count, as I think that nowadays new users pick other social networks to hang out with their friends, such as Snapchat or Instagram.

horseLOGIC 8y ago

I can see why people are desperate to "prove" that the supposed election meddling or the Cambridge Analytica scandal is causing Facebook to fail, but the data just doesn't show that at all. People make a big deal about privacy, but the actual users of social media usually post stuff because they want everyone to know about it. The people who really care about privacy are not on social media. There's already a general understanding that when using the internet, you're getting tracked by various actors and people (even begrudgingly) accept that. That same graph shows that Facebook usage has been dropping virtually every month before the election and after, totaling almost 50% loss. There's no exceptional change visible due to any particular event. There are some strong upticks in there as well, but the longterm trend is down. I believe the most reasonable explanation is simply that people are moving on, just like they moved on from MySpace and other previously popular platforms. Young people are leading the charge here, it's just not as comfortable when your grandmother and high school teacher can see you on Facebook. It's uncool.

yorwba 8y ago
> users of social media usually post stuff because they want everyone to know about it > it's just not as comfortable when your grandmother and high school teacher can see you on Facebook I think most posts on social media are targeted at people in the poster's peer group, and the only reason that everyone else can see them too is that broadcasting is the default way to contact multiple people without prior coordination (say, by joining a group chat).
- horseLOGIC 8y ago
  I don't actually use Facebook, but I'm under the impression that you can post to just the people who are your friends or just a set of friends. There's certainly the possibility to at least not broadcast to the whole internet.

xstartup 8y ago

Correlation is not causation. SimilarWeb buys data from ISP DNS resolvers. During the same time, Cloudflare DNS resolver was released to the public and marketed heavily. Even my nontechy gf started using Cloudflare Resolver. She saw that on twitter was curious about the benefits and was not disappointed. So, yeah usage did decline a bit but not that much.

ulfw 8y ago

Facebook has lost it when it stopped being a social network where people follow their friends' lives. Once it became a 'I share random links or "news" stories off the internet' feed it lost all its value. There is nothing social about a Fox News or MSNBC story link. At all.

fringedgentian 8y ago

Ah yes, I remember The Great DeFriending of 2016.

blklifematters 8y ago

Facebook and google, way too big to fall. They have more and more followers. Developers follow react, designers Material.. oh, they keep it changing enought often. Haha

makecheck 8y ago

Facebook dependency can’t really drop significantly as long as people keep requiring it for things that don’t technically need Facebook. Don’t link to articles only viewable on Facebook. If somebody plans an event on Facebook, push back and request to be sent the details and say “I can’t log in to Facebook”, etc. Check in with your friends in non-Messenger ways, e.g. phone messaging or (gasp!) actually seeing them in person. Make walled-off sites unacceptable.