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Facebook will continue to harvest and sell people's data for as long as people are willing to give it to them. The conditions for Facebook's ultimate demise are

Facebook will continue to harvest and sell people's data for as long as people are willing to give it to them. The conditions for Facebook's ultimate demise are: 1. Non-technical people are educated about their data being sold to advertisers who are in turn selling them stuff that is destructive/unhealthy. e.g: getting them into debt to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like! 2. Willingness of these people to pay for storing their data in order to control their personal details and who can see them. 3. Availability and awareness of a low-friction-to-adoption alternative platform where people control their own data which has similar features to Fb's "core" products and biggest "child" products (Insta, WhatsApp). The "alternative" needs to be: distributed/decentralised, encrypted and mobile-first. I am bullish on all 3 of these things and feel that it's only a matter of time before the alternative is available. As others have said, Fb has a massive cash reserve and they won't go down without a fight. My only hope is that the EU will take Fb to the cleaners under GDPR and that will keep the Fb execs busy for long enough for the alternative social network to win!

jbob2000 8y ago
This is hilarious, no non-technical person gives a shit where their data lives. We can’t even get people to understand the cloud. The QA department at my work doesn’t even understand where my app ends and our vendor’s app begins, and that’s their job! My mother thinks any text box with a search button beside it is Google. Nobody outside of the tech ecosystem gives a crap about tracking (they already see ads all around them anyways). Nobody would even been aware of an alternative to Facebook, the same way people are barely aware Bing exists. Hell, people can barely get off their asses to vote and you think they’re going to care what the EU parliament does? The only way Facebook will go down is by a major outage. Grandma logs on one day and can’t chat to her grandson so she calls him up instead. Boyfriend opens messenger to chat to his girlfriend about their date tonight, but can’t because it’s down, so he texts her instead. Friends can’t upload pictures of their trip so they use email or google photos. It would take a sustained outage of a few days to break the habits Facebook has created in us. I don’t see any way for a competitor get past their moat, they have too many features and too many people on board.
- nelsonic 8y ago
  @jbob2000 agreed, the current reality is that 95-99% of people don't know or don't care where their personal data is stored, who has access to it and how it's being used to manipulate them. Just because something is the "status quo" doesn't mean that it won't be possible to change. History is full of examples of where once popular ideas/systems/regimes have crumbled in the face of something new. Again, I remain optimistic that the (unhealthy) "habits Facebook has created in us" can/will be broken. (and not replaced by something worse!) Just as Rome was not built in a day, it also did not "fall" in day either. i.e. I don't think a single outage will have much effect on Facebook's dominance. The first step in helping people "detox" from Facebook is creating an objectively healthier way to spend those "bored" or "lonely" minutes Zuckerberg is obsessed with owning.

jbob2000 8y ago

This is hilarious, no non-technical person gives a shit where their data lives. We can’t even get people to understand the cloud. The QA department at my work doesn’t even understand where my app ends and our vendor’s app begins, and that’s their job! My mother thinks any text box with a search button beside it is Google. Nobody outside of the tech ecosystem gives a crap about tracking (they already see ads all around them anyways). Nobody would even been aware of an alternative to Facebook, the same way people are barely aware Bing exists. Hell, people can barely get off their asses to vote and you think they’re going to care what the EU parliament does? The only way Facebook will go down is by a major outage. Grandma logs on one day and can’t chat to her grandson so she calls him up instead. Boyfriend opens messenger to chat to his girlfriend about their date tonight, but can’t because it’s down, so he texts her instead. Friends can’t upload pictures of their trip so they use email or google photos. It would take a sustained outage of a few days to break the habits Facebook has created in us. I don’t see any way for a competitor get past their moat, they have too many features and too many people on board.

nelsonic 8y ago
@jbob2000 agreed, the current reality is that 95-99% of people don't know or don't care where their personal data is stored, who has access to it and how it's being used to manipulate them. Just because something is the "status quo" doesn't mean that it won't be possible to change. History is full of examples of where once popular ideas/systems/regimes have crumbled in the face of something new. Again, I remain optimistic that the (unhealthy) "habits Facebook has created in us" can/will be broken. (and not replaced by something worse!) Just as Rome was not built in a day, it also did not "fall" in day either. i.e. I don't think a single outage will have much effect on Facebook's dominance. The first step in helping people "detox" from Facebook is creating an objectively healthier way to spend those "bored" or "lonely" minutes Zuckerberg is obsessed with owning.