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By far the biggest factor that had me stopping checking Facebook, and indeed LinkedIn, is number of utterly fictitious notifications they generate. There was a

By far the biggest factor that had me stopping checking Facebook, and indeed LinkedIn, is number of utterly fictitious notifications they generate. There was a time a few years back when that red dot made me drop everything to check FB, but these days it’ll be some completely bullshit message they’ve made a notification out of. Feels like they got greedy for my attention and killed the golden goose there. I check it about once a day now, and in the browser not the app. If the notifications were still meaningful I’d probably still have the app and all the metadata that sent them.

deanalevitt 8y ago
Exactly. I removed FB from my mobile devices for just this reason.
- HenryKissinger 8y ago
  (cries in Samsung)
  - propogandist 8y ago
    You can use adb to uninstall apps like FB and Chrome in a few minutes, with your phone connected to a computer https://www.xda-developers.com/uninstall-carrier-oem-bloatware-without-root-access/ https://www.xda-developers.com/uninstall-carrier-oem-bloatwa...
    - dbdjfjrjvebd 8y ago
      > This works because applications truly aren’t being fully uninstalled from the device, they are just being uninstalled for the current user
      - pjc50 8y ago
        If it's not running and doesn't send you notifications or demand updates, do you care all that much?
        dbdjfjrjvebd 8y ago
        In many ways no. NB the same can be achieved by disabling the App in settings? There is the principal of who owns the device... But that is a slightly different topic.
  - zamalek 8y ago
    Disable it in app settings, that effectively uninstalls it.
    - throwmeback 8y ago
      I used this method on my friends'/family phones where I can't just flash an AOSP-based ROM. That will change now that I found out about debloating through ADB.
    - JohnFen 8y ago
      Disabling is better than nothing, but it's no substitute for actually uninstalling.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
Matheus28 8y ago
It really feels like some companies like Facebook are flying blind by using A/B testing everywhere and ignoring the long term effects of the changes they do.
- edejong 8y ago
  Exactly this. Death by a thousand paper cuts, is another.
- Kiro 8y ago
  Or Hacker News is wrong.
  - TomAnthony 8y ago
    You are maybe being downvoted as you stated it so bluntly, but I'm not sure your point is without merit. The HN audience do not necessarily represent the mean/mode user, and Facebook are in a numbers game really. I agree with most of the sentiment above - I wish I could filter posts that are just attachments, 3rd party junk, and tune the algorithm to show me posts from a core set of friends, but I also recognise I don't use FB like a most people, I imagine.
- arethuza 8y ago
  Isn't A/B testing pretty much going to behave like a steepest ascent hill climbing? At each micro decision point you take what looks like the 'best' option but that means you can get stuck in local maxima?
  - qubex 8y ago
    Correct.
  - Yhippa 8y ago
    This is interesting but I don't think I fully understand. Do you mind dumbing it down for me?
    - 8y ago
zamalek 8y ago
They probably A/B tested it for a fortnight, found out that it worked, and never considered folks would catch on. It drove me away checking FB, too.
thatoneuser 8y ago
Dear God I installed LinkedIn a couple months back and their endless bs notifications made me realize that I don't need it. It doesn't give me anything. Why is it sending me 2-3 notifications a day when I have 5 friends who's profiles arent even actively used? If it did something useful, like find me clients for the work I do then sure - I'll give them my attention. He'll, I'll pay good money for that! But I don't give a flying fuck thaty friend just graduated or a colleague got some award. I don't give a fuck and I'm sure as fuck not gonna play this game where we all pretend theirs any value in these things that email didn't accomplish 10 years ago.
- whouweling 8y ago
  I also do not understand the Linked-in notifications at all. They send an e-mail like '5 job changes' which I actually find interesting to learn about. But when I click any of the links this information is nowhere to be found. So after a while I don't click on the links anymore and my engagement goes down. Seems like a lot of the decisions are focused based on quick-wins engagement instead of an long lasting useful experience for the user?
  - gpderetta 8y ago
    For me the worst part about LinkedIn is the aggressive redirect to appstore on mobile when clicking on mail links. This is borderline malware behaviour.
    - netsharc 8y ago
      For me this aggression is good, it makes me avoid that site, spending maybe a minute every 2 months on that wasteland of salarymen and networkers. I never installed the app but as your parent comment said, it's so spammy, I had that fear since they do a lot of mail spam. If they made their mobile website usable, they would've had more than a minute of my engagement...
  - piva00 8y ago
    It definitely looks like the effects of Goodhart's law [0] operating internally, somewhere their KPIs are measuring just the clicks, views or e-mails sent instead of the spirit of those actions (engaging users, turning passive users into active ones, etc.). LinkedIn turned into a place where I go to answer some messages that could be good opportunities in the future, and only when I don't feel overwhelmed by recruiters' contacts. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
oneeyedpigeon 8y ago
Twitter has started to do that too. Notifications went from focussing on significant interactions — such as someone liking or retweeting a tweet, or following you — to 'someone you follow just tweeted' — what's the point of that notification? It's happening all the time! Notifications get devalued as companies desperately try to promote their product.
- tumetab1 8y ago
  That has resulted in me disabling notifications and now I won't know if someone @me or responded to a tweet. Those useless notifications made the whole product useless for me.
  - Brakenshire 8y ago
    Yep, same for me. They want addicts not users.
    - swozey 8y ago
      I was never a twitter person until recently, as in the last month or so. I've had an account for years and never really used it. And wow. Going from reddit (was a huge addict) to twitter reminds me of when I went from forums to reddit/digg. I've barely used reddit in the last month. The deluge of posts at all hours is incredibly addicting. I may need to block it or scorch earth my followings. Or make two accounts and my main one only follow positive/uplifting/motivational accounts.
- josteink 8y ago
  Yeah. Notifications is useful, even great, when used sparingly, appropriately. But nobody does that, so I’ve stopped granting any app not email or IM notification rights. You reap what you saw: no “engagement” for you.
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    > I’ve stopped granting any app not email or IM notification rights. Yeah, I hit that point quite a while back. I no longer want any application or service to give me notifications or send me emails. Almost nobody seems to be able to use those things in an appropriate way.
j1elo 8y ago
I started like you, last year... then a couple days ago realized I hadn't checked it since mid January. And we're on March, that's a new record. I'm not in the "I'm leaving Facebook once and for all", actually I don't have that intention whatsoever, I am (was) a normal, active user. But it stopped being interesting. The kind of interaction Fb promotes is similar to twitter; in the first years I could see my friends showing off their breakfast or sharing their thoughts about something, now everything is 3rd-party articles, photos, videos, and complaining... LOTS of complaining (via sharing a relevant article they just read). Ironically I still write to share my thoughts on something, without photos or shocking videos, and it catcyes my friend's attention because of the "novelty" of writing something of my own instead of just sharing some link. Btw I've NEVER wanted to install Fb apps, especially since they forced everyone to have the Messenger app if you want to chat. Always used m.facebook.com for checking out, and mbasic. for chat (with the added benefit of the crappy UI pushing me out from using it...). Similarly, Twitter is another service I use, and never wanted their app installed, instead I use their website. The same reason frequent use of Reddit is out of the question for me.
- Tepix 8y ago
  I didn't know about mbasic and chat working. Thanks. I'm also deleting as many apps as possible. Even Instagram works quite well without the app. Less uncontrollable spying, less battery usage, no annoying notifications, more free memory, more blocked ads and trackers.
  - macleginn 8y ago
    But no replying on the comments to your posts, it seems, which is quite annoying.
    - firmgently 8y ago
      I use mbasic and can reply to comments on posts. I just checked the details and (for example) I click under the post: "2 scratches 'pon wood" (sorry I have language set to Pirate but it's the equivalent of "2 comments"). This takes me to a page showing the post, comments beneath, and a text field for me to reply into. So it's there, just check the various links under each post to see what's available. Actually I've yet to find anything that I can't do on mbasic. I've thought something was missing several times (turning off notifications for specific groups springs to mind) but always found a way to do it eventually. It's often a hideous UX but I like how ugly mbasic is, it's FB without the sugar so you can taste how bitter it really is :) (for anybody wanting to say something like "if it's so horrible why do you still use it", it's something I do reluctantly because I have a few geographically distant friends who I like to keep in contact with and who always message me through FB)
Emma_Goldman 8y ago
Totally agree. The three things which have driven me away are: 1) the proliferation of notifications 2) filling my feed with auto-play videos 3) the fact that fewer and fewer of my friends actively use it Just as rising membership creates a positive feedback loop through network effects, so declining membership does the opposite. The other main reason is that since buying a smart phone, I can access the one feature of FB that I use - messenger - while avoiding the rest. I now only log into my account to check my notifications every week or two, to see if I've been invited to anything.
- johnmaguire2013 8y ago
  Messenger.com on the computer.
Traubenfuchs 8y ago
They are making sure to give you red dots/numbers multiple times per day, if you login multiple times per day. It's usually stuff like "X posted something after a long while of not posting" or "Y will participate in an event near you". Utterly useless notifications about people I don't interact with. This is a mixture of bad UX and dark UX patterns. They are puppeteering a corpse here.
georgemcbay 8y ago
This is the same for me. I feel obligated to maintain an account and check it once in a while since I have a lot of family and friends who aren't local who do still use it (though most have transitioned from using it as a way to update people on their lives to using it as a place to effortlessly repost memes), but I'm incredibly put off by Facebook's increasingly irrelevant and desperate attempts to get my attention. Notifications used to be things I cared about, these days they are things like "This person knows a person who is the mother of a person on your friends list. Add Friend?" I just block the notifications now and log into Facebook every couple of days in a browser and quick scan the feed.
Slartie 8y ago
Even more annoying is the same thing that they do with email notifications. They seem to keep inventing new "categories" of notifications all the time that I haven't yet opted out of - basically because I seem to be only able to opt out of just that specific category that they just sent me an email about, when I click on the "don't want to receive any more of these mails" link below the message. And every time, they gladly acknowledge that I will not receive any more messages of that kind. "Okay, you won't get any more mails about new messages from friends. Okay, you won't get any more mails about stuff your friends liked. Okay, you won't get any more mails about stuff some other random people liked. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new stuff posted in groups you joined. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new stuff posted in groups you did not join, but we think you might be interested in. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new photos posted by your friends. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new photos of cats posted on Facebook. Okay, you won't get any more mails about news articles with dogs in the title. Okay, you won't get any more mails about postings your friends liked that complain about the weather and were written by women of age 35-40." Okay, admittedly the last three were exagerrated, but all the categories before have been actual "notification categories" that I successfully opted out of, before I put a generic Facebook email filter in my mailbox, because apparently nothing else is able to stop their overly-specific-category-generation-engine from spewing out new categories to keep me busy opting out of.
- martin_a 8y ago
  I have a seperate facebook@ mail address and I simply never check it. Did so before switching hosters last year and saw that about 8k mails had piled up since 2011. Crazy folks.
  - lostlogin 8y ago
    I wonder if you can still post to Facebook by email. Having this automatically loop would make me happy. I don’t have an account so can’t check and the instructions for doing it all seem dated.
    - martin_a 8y ago
simonh 8y ago
It looks like facebook is engaged in a race to the bottom, against it’s own metrics. The easiest way to be engaged is to repost memes and fake news shock posts, so the most engaged users are meme posters and fake news trolls, so features that cater to meme posting and trolling get the most bang for buck, so they’re getting trapped in a cycle of circulating ever increasing torrents of drivel. My girls are 14 and 15 in the UK. None of their friends use facebook, and that’s not just their social circle. Facebook is just not a thing for them. The only reason they use it at all is because there is one out of school club that posts their upcoming activities on a FB page, so they literally log in once a week to check that page and they’re done. They do heavily use Instagram and WhatsApp though, so they’re not entirely out of the FB sphere.
- arethuza 8y ago
  UK here as well, I remember a couple of years back my teenage son saying "Facebook is for old people".
  - aedron 8y ago
    https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=facebook https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=facebook
  - irrational 8y ago
    USA here - I was at a meeting where a teenager was speaking. He was mentioning some other social media platform and said, as an aside, "That's like Facebook for you old people."
    - arethuza 8y ago
      Yeah - I did understand there was an implied "like you" in his statement :-) Not that I've used Facebook much!
- JohnClark1337 8y ago
  It makes sense. Teenagers especially are searching for a place where they can have conversations with their friends without their parents around. I feel like this happens with social media a lot, the older people jump on so the kids leave because it's 'not fun' anymore.
nikkwong 8y ago
No kidding. With how smart they are and all the AI that goes on behind the scenes, I don't understand why I continue to get notifications when friend X 'adds to their story'. I have never once watched anyone's story. And I don't plan on starting. Aren't they smart enough to understand that this is just adding cognitive overhead and detracting from my immersion in a meaningful experience? Seriously, not rocket science. These UX people should get that.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  Most of their "AI" is just applied statistics. Train a statistical classifier to classify "events a user wants to see" then run it in prod and elevate the results to notifications. Run an A/B trial (quite possibly p-hacked) to determine if people actually like it. Ignore the false positive rate (e.g. the rate at which you're annoying people) if you think it's arbitrarily small enough. When people ask how you determine which events to turn into notifications tell them The Algorithm decides it and let their imaginations, seeded by pop culture science fiction, run wild about what sort of superhuman synthetic intelligence you have pent up in your computers when really all you've got is a glorified bayesian spam filter.
grecy 8y ago
Yup, it has become staggering. I frequently get notifications on my personal page to say my business page has a notification. That notification turns out be to "Your users have not heard from you in a while, write a post". I get this all the time, even when I have written a post within the last five hours. I would say on average I get 5 notifications per day that are utterly useless.
- nikkwong 8y ago
  This x100. Totally mirrors the sentiment in my sibling comment. Somewhere along the line they lost sight of creating an experience and each facebook product became focused on improving their metrics and notifications became the weapon of choice. They so obviously need to reign in all of these different teams, reduce clutter, and get back to basics - starting with a good user experience.
- chimprich 8y ago
  The page notifications are infuriating. I'm a co-owner of my mother's business page (barely a business really, almost more of a hobby). She can barely use Facebook and just uses the page for basic communication with a few dozen people but she/we are constantly bombarded by notifications about HOW MANY USERS we could reach AND WHY DON'T YOU BOOST THIS POST. Hey, your customers haven't heard from Facebook in 10 minutes! Why don't you give them another notification!?
  - grecy 8y ago
    haha, I know the feeling. Every single post I make "Performs better than 95% of posts on my page" ... "Click here to boost NOW!". Ugh.
- prolepunk 8y ago
  Yep, I got so annoyed I was compelled write blog post about it, documenting the ways facebook is being transparently manipulative. https://avolkov.github.io/fear-of-missing-out-as-a-business-model-for-facebook.html https://avolkov.github.io/fear-of-missing-out-as-a-business-...
- 8y ago
bvm 8y ago
Annoyingly, what's kept me on it is the fact that some super-niche private groups (that would otherwise be ideally suited to a forum or subreddit) have sprung up that have content that I simply can't get anywhere else.
daviddumon 8y ago
Exact same thing for me ! I uninstalled both twitter and facebook app when I realized they were faking notifications for me to open their apps, since I guess they need that for their DAU bs. Since then, I check twitter once a week in a browser mode, and facebook once a day with the firefox container.
giancarlostoro 8y ago
If on Android I recommend the Facebook Lite app. Its not as obnoxious and on Android you can tell the OS to ignore all notifications from an app. The lite version of Facebook is probably the only worthy version, I just wish it could be firewalled so you know when it tries to use network access and lock it down to just when you open the app. I assume Lite Android apps arent allowed to use much data but I could be making a bad assumption. It still saves on battery life at least. I agree though they would notify me of potential friends and they were never ever people I knew or wanted to be friends with (because I didnt know them!).
- collyw 8y ago
  The full fat messenger is the most annoying app I have ever used. It's like a small child constantly trying to get your attention when you are busy with other tasks.
  - giancarlostoro 8y ago
    Yeah, they have Messenger Lite, but I rather not have two apps for the same website. You can go on Messenger.com though if you want a web only experience.
corobo 8y ago
> Feels like they got greedy for my attention Bingo. Every time I check Facebook there's at least one "notification". It's always one of * A page I own has x new views * A friend or two is interested in an event (not even going to, interested in) * You have memories on this day Aside from Messenger for a few ongoing group convos my Facebooking time is mostly limited to interest groups at this point, and I'd happily jump ship with them if they moved to a self-hosted forum or mail list
mad182 8y ago
Yeah, I'm a very passive FB user and have removed all the FB battery draining crap from my phone, so I don't get meaningful notifications very often, but I'm checking it out at least every few days out of habit. It's always showing me a bunch of notifications for completely random things, like some new random post in marketplace group I'm participating, but no notification for the 50 other new posts in there or other groups. Or somebody I haven't spoken to in years is going to some event I never heard about. At this point I don't even see them as notifications, just a list of random things that happen and don't affect me.
edem 8y ago
There was a point when I got fed up and unsubscribed from all notifications from everything. Now I only operate in pull-mode. I check my things 1-2 times a day and I receive zero notifications. My life is much better now!
bsaul 8y ago
You can almost get a glimpse of the financial health of a company by the number of bullshit messages they send you. The trend is especially important. Just like you i’ve noticed facebook getting spammier and spammier, starting from the middle of last year. Which means things were probably starting to smell funky around that period
nkrisc 8y ago
My breaking point was when they fucking texted me that I had "notifications" when I hadn't logged in for a while. No doubt those notifications were that someone is going to an event I don't care about somewhere within a 100 miles of me.
- liberte82 8y ago
  I never did give Facebook my phone number, thank god
  - nkrisc 8y ago
    I don't recall ever explicitly doing so. I'm sure something I did gave them implicit permission to siphon it off my phone when I had the app installed.
asdffdsa 8y ago
Same thing with twitter; every tweet is a notification it seems *facepalm
jannes 8y ago
Once per day? That's a lot. I wouldn't call that "stop checking Facebook". You are still a MAU (monthly active user) in their statistics.
gdubs 8y ago
Anecdata, but this was a big factor for me as well. Having joined somewhat early, they had me with the red badge like Pavlov with his bell. It was effective because of the variable reward. I logged in to see if there was a red badge. Now there’s always a red badge.
reading-at-work 8y ago
I logged in for the first time in a few weeks recently. Out of 50+ notifications, literally only 1 was something I cared about seeing. I wish I were exaggerating.
genericone 8y ago
The boy who cries wolf <-> The app that notifies Do it too often and with too much urgency, and eventually you will be utterly ignored.
giarc 8y ago
Try having a business page on Facebook! Anytime you log in, they will create some new notification that you know is not true. "5 people have viewed X business, try posting again." Or "1 new person liked X business" then you check and the number of likes is the same. Which is pretty easy to check when the number of likes is in the 2-3 digit range.
- rahulchhabra07 8y ago
  Are you sure these are false? I am really skeptical of that. Could this be mixed w people unliking and hence the number doesn't change?
liberte82 8y ago
Totally agree! Ever since they added story updates into the notifications screen, it has totally lost meaning. That and friends attending random events, etc. It used to actually mean something.
subpixel 8y ago
I've posted this before but Instagram actually creates fictitious notifications when you stop using the app. That prompted me to delete it altogether.
noneeeed 8y ago
This is what lead me to switch to using their website on mobile, rather than the app. The same goes for LinkedIn, which I had the app for perhaps a week before I got fed up with its bullshit. I still have messenger for the tiny number of people who don't use WhatsApp or Signal. It's been good. I've taken to disabling notifications and uninstalling apps for most sites, I don't need them telling me when I should be looking at stuff, and mobile sites have improved a lot. It's all become much more intentional on my part. Ironically, the annoying anti-patterns that sites like LinkedIn use to encourage you to switch to their app instead of their mobile website just encourage me to use them less overall. LI is probably the worst, along with Reddit. I don't have an issue with most of the content of my FB feed itself, because most of the people I'm friends with don't post crap. I'm not friends with people I don't actually want to stay in touch with and I mute the small number that overdo the minion memes. My feed consists largely of stuff about my friends and reletives that I find, at worst, uninteresting and skippable. I don't seem to have all the "crazy people" problems that a lot of people seem to complain about (perhaps I'm just lucky that my family are pretty normal). I find twitter is much worse for things like political share-spam or vague-tweeting, but I'm pretty focused in who I follow there too, and turn retweets off for anyone who is a bit of a retweet spammer. I find it funny when people complain about Facebook because their feed is full of their MLM hawking aunt or the rantings of some odd "friend". I think there is a lot wrong with Facebook, but you can't blame them for your friends and family. That's like inviting a load of people to a pub for your birthday, then leaving a bad Yelp review because the company was bad.
jonwachob91 8y ago
They are starting to kill the attractiveness of instagram too. I get more notifications a day from spam accounts requesting to follow me or send me messages that my use of the app has declined substantially over the last year.

deanalevitt 8y ago

Exactly. I removed FB from my mobile devices for just this reason.

HenryKissinger 8y ago
(cries in Samsung)
- propogandist 8y ago
  You can use adb to uninstall apps like FB and Chrome in a few minutes, with your phone connected to a computer https://www.xda-developers.com/uninstall-carrier-oem-bloatware-without-root-access/ https://www.xda-developers.com/uninstall-carrier-oem-bloatwa...
  - dbdjfjrjvebd 8y ago
    > This works because applications truly aren’t being fully uninstalled from the device, they are just being uninstalled for the current user
    - pjc50 8y ago
      If it's not running and doesn't send you notifications or demand updates, do you care all that much?
      - dbdjfjrjvebd 8y ago
        In many ways no. NB the same can be achieved by disabling the App in settings? There is the principal of who owns the device... But that is a slightly different topic.
- zamalek 8y ago
  Disable it in app settings, that effectively uninstalls it.
  - throwmeback 8y ago
    I used this method on my friends'/family phones where I can't just flash an AOSP-based ROM. That will change now that I found out about debloating through ADB.
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    Disabling is better than nothing, but it's no substitute for actually uninstalling.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

Matheus28 8y ago

It really feels like some companies like Facebook are flying blind by using A/B testing everywhere and ignoring the long term effects of the changes they do.

edejong 8y ago
Exactly this. Death by a thousand paper cuts, is another.
Kiro 8y ago
Or Hacker News is wrong.
- TomAnthony 8y ago
  You are maybe being downvoted as you stated it so bluntly, but I'm not sure your point is without merit. The HN audience do not necessarily represent the mean/mode user, and Facebook are in a numbers game really. I agree with most of the sentiment above - I wish I could filter posts that are just attachments, 3rd party junk, and tune the algorithm to show me posts from a core set of friends, but I also recognise I don't use FB like a most people, I imagine.
arethuza 8y ago
Isn't A/B testing pretty much going to behave like a steepest ascent hill climbing? At each micro decision point you take what looks like the 'best' option but that means you can get stuck in local maxima?
- qubex 8y ago
  Correct.
- Yhippa 8y ago
  This is interesting but I don't think I fully understand. Do you mind dumbing it down for me?
  - 8y ago

zamalek 8y ago

They probably A/B tested it for a fortnight, found out that it worked, and never considered folks would catch on. It drove me away checking FB, too.

thatoneuser 8y ago

Dear God I installed LinkedIn a couple months back and their endless bs notifications made me realize that I don't need it. It doesn't give me anything. Why is it sending me 2-3 notifications a day when I have 5 friends who's profiles arent even actively used? If it did something useful, like find me clients for the work I do then sure - I'll give them my attention. He'll, I'll pay good money for that! But I don't give a flying fuck thaty friend just graduated or a colleague got some award. I don't give a fuck and I'm sure as fuck not gonna play this game where we all pretend theirs any value in these things that email didn't accomplish 10 years ago.

whouweling 8y ago
I also do not understand the Linked-in notifications at all. They send an e-mail like '5 job changes' which I actually find interesting to learn about. But when I click any of the links this information is nowhere to be found. So after a while I don't click on the links anymore and my engagement goes down. Seems like a lot of the decisions are focused based on quick-wins engagement instead of an long lasting useful experience for the user?
- gpderetta 8y ago
  For me the worst part about LinkedIn is the aggressive redirect to appstore on mobile when clicking on mail links. This is borderline malware behaviour.
  - netsharc 8y ago
    For me this aggression is good, it makes me avoid that site, spending maybe a minute every 2 months on that wasteland of salarymen and networkers. I never installed the app but as your parent comment said, it's so spammy, I had that fear since they do a lot of mail spam. If they made their mobile website usable, they would've had more than a minute of my engagement...
- piva00 8y ago
  It definitely looks like the effects of Goodhart's law [0] operating internally, somewhere their KPIs are measuring just the clicks, views or e-mails sent instead of the spirit of those actions (engaging users, turning passive users into active ones, etc.). LinkedIn turned into a place where I go to answer some messages that could be good opportunities in the future, and only when I don't feel overwhelmed by recruiters' contacts. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

oneeyedpigeon 8y ago

Twitter has started to do that too. Notifications went from focussing on significant interactions — such as someone liking or retweeting a tweet, or following you — to 'someone you follow just tweeted' — what's the point of that notification? It's happening all the time! Notifications get devalued as companies desperately try to promote their product.

tumetab1 8y ago
That has resulted in me disabling notifications and now I won't know if someone @me or responded to a tweet. Those useless notifications made the whole product useless for me.
- Brakenshire 8y ago
  Yep, same for me. They want addicts not users.
  - swozey 8y ago
    I was never a twitter person until recently, as in the last month or so. I've had an account for years and never really used it. And wow. Going from reddit (was a huge addict) to twitter reminds me of when I went from forums to reddit/digg. I've barely used reddit in the last month. The deluge of posts at all hours is incredibly addicting. I may need to block it or scorch earth my followings. Or make two accounts and my main one only follow positive/uplifting/motivational accounts.
josteink 8y ago
Yeah. Notifications is useful, even great, when used sparingly, appropriately. But nobody does that, so I’ve stopped granting any app not email or IM notification rights. You reap what you saw: no “engagement” for you.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > I’ve stopped granting any app not email or IM notification rights. Yeah, I hit that point quite a while back. I no longer want any application or service to give me notifications or send me emails. Almost nobody seems to be able to use those things in an appropriate way.

j1elo 8y ago

I started like you, last year... then a couple days ago realized I hadn't checked it since mid January. And we're on March, that's a new record. I'm not in the "I'm leaving Facebook once and for all", actually I don't have that intention whatsoever, I am (was) a normal, active user. But it stopped being interesting. The kind of interaction Fb promotes is similar to twitter; in the first years I could see my friends showing off their breakfast or sharing their thoughts about something, now everything is 3rd-party articles, photos, videos, and complaining... LOTS of complaining (via sharing a relevant article they just read). Ironically I still write to share my thoughts on something, without photos or shocking videos, and it catcyes my friend's attention because of the "novelty" of writing something of my own instead of just sharing some link. Btw I've NEVER wanted to install Fb apps, especially since they forced everyone to have the Messenger app if you want to chat. Always used m.facebook.com for checking out, and mbasic. for chat (with the added benefit of the crappy UI pushing me out from using it...). Similarly, Twitter is another service I use, and never wanted their app installed, instead I use their website. The same reason frequent use of Reddit is out of the question for me.

Tepix 8y ago
I didn't know about mbasic and chat working. Thanks. I'm also deleting as many apps as possible. Even Instagram works quite well without the app. Less uncontrollable spying, less battery usage, no annoying notifications, more free memory, more blocked ads and trackers.
- macleginn 8y ago
  But no replying on the comments to your posts, it seems, which is quite annoying.
  - firmgently 8y ago
    I use mbasic and can reply to comments on posts. I just checked the details and (for example) I click under the post: "2 scratches 'pon wood" (sorry I have language set to Pirate but it's the equivalent of "2 comments"). This takes me to a page showing the post, comments beneath, and a text field for me to reply into. So it's there, just check the various links under each post to see what's available. Actually I've yet to find anything that I can't do on mbasic. I've thought something was missing several times (turning off notifications for specific groups springs to mind) but always found a way to do it eventually. It's often a hideous UX but I like how ugly mbasic is, it's FB without the sugar so you can taste how bitter it really is :) (for anybody wanting to say something like "if it's so horrible why do you still use it", it's something I do reluctantly because I have a few geographically distant friends who I like to keep in contact with and who always message me through FB)

Emma_Goldman 8y ago

Totally agree. The three things which have driven me away are: 1) the proliferation of notifications 2) filling my feed with auto-play videos 3) the fact that fewer and fewer of my friends actively use it Just as rising membership creates a positive feedback loop through network effects, so declining membership does the opposite. The other main reason is that since buying a smart phone, I can access the one feature of FB that I use - messenger - while avoiding the rest. I now only log into my account to check my notifications every week or two, to see if I've been invited to anything.

johnmaguire2013 8y ago
Messenger.com on the computer.

Traubenfuchs 8y ago

They are making sure to give you red dots/numbers multiple times per day, if you login multiple times per day. It's usually stuff like "X posted something after a long while of not posting" or "Y will participate in an event near you". Utterly useless notifications about people I don't interact with. This is a mixture of bad UX and dark UX patterns. They are puppeteering a corpse here.

georgemcbay 8y ago

This is the same for me. I feel obligated to maintain an account and check it once in a while since I have a lot of family and friends who aren't local who do still use it (though most have transitioned from using it as a way to update people on their lives to using it as a place to effortlessly repost memes), but I'm incredibly put off by Facebook's increasingly irrelevant and desperate attempts to get my attention. Notifications used to be things I cared about, these days they are things like "This person knows a person who is the mother of a person on your friends list. Add Friend?" I just block the notifications now and log into Facebook every couple of days in a browser and quick scan the feed.

Slartie 8y ago

Even more annoying is the same thing that they do with email notifications. They seem to keep inventing new "categories" of notifications all the time that I haven't yet opted out of - basically because I seem to be only able to opt out of just that specific category that they just sent me an email about, when I click on the "don't want to receive any more of these mails" link below the message. And every time, they gladly acknowledge that I will not receive any more messages of that kind. "Okay, you won't get any more mails about new messages from friends. Okay, you won't get any more mails about stuff your friends liked. Okay, you won't get any more mails about stuff some other random people liked. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new stuff posted in groups you joined. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new stuff posted in groups you did not join, but we think you might be interested in. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new photos posted by your friends. Okay, you won't get any more mails about new photos of cats posted on Facebook. Okay, you won't get any more mails about news articles with dogs in the title. Okay, you won't get any more mails about postings your friends liked that complain about the weather and were written by women of age 35-40." Okay, admittedly the last three were exagerrated, but all the categories before have been actual "notification categories" that I successfully opted out of, before I put a generic Facebook email filter in my mailbox, because apparently nothing else is able to stop their overly-specific-category-generation-engine from spewing out new categories to keep me busy opting out of.

martin_a 8y ago
I have a seperate facebook@ mail address and I simply never check it. Did so before switching hosters last year and saw that about 8k mails had piled up since 2011. Crazy folks.
- lostlogin 8y ago
  I wonder if you can still post to Facebook by email. Having this automatically loop would make me happy. I don’t have an account so can’t check and the instructions for doing it all seem dated.
  - martin_a 8y ago

simonh 8y ago

It looks like facebook is engaged in a race to the bottom, against it’s own metrics. The easiest way to be engaged is to repost memes and fake news shock posts, so the most engaged users are meme posters and fake news trolls, so features that cater to meme posting and trolling get the most bang for buck, so they’re getting trapped in a cycle of circulating ever increasing torrents of drivel. My girls are 14 and 15 in the UK. None of their friends use facebook, and that’s not just their social circle. Facebook is just not a thing for them. The only reason they use it at all is because there is one out of school club that posts their upcoming activities on a FB page, so they literally log in once a week to check that page and they’re done. They do heavily use Instagram and WhatsApp though, so they’re not entirely out of the FB sphere.

arethuza 8y ago
UK here as well, I remember a couple of years back my teenage son saying "Facebook is for old people".
- aedron 8y ago
  https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=facebook https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=facebook
- irrational 8y ago
  USA here - I was at a meeting where a teenager was speaking. He was mentioning some other social media platform and said, as an aside, "That's like Facebook for you old people."
  - arethuza 8y ago
    Yeah - I did understand there was an implied "like you" in his statement :-) Not that I've used Facebook much!
JohnClark1337 8y ago
It makes sense. Teenagers especially are searching for a place where they can have conversations with their friends without their parents around. I feel like this happens with social media a lot, the older people jump on so the kids leave because it's 'not fun' anymore.

nikkwong 8y ago

No kidding. With how smart they are and all the AI that goes on behind the scenes, I don't understand why I continue to get notifications when friend X 'adds to their story'. I have never once watched anyone's story. And I don't plan on starting. Aren't they smart enough to understand that this is just adding cognitive overhead and detracting from my immersion in a meaningful experience? Seriously, not rocket science. These UX people should get that.

darkpuma 8y ago
Most of their "AI" is just applied statistics. Train a statistical classifier to classify "events a user wants to see" then run it in prod and elevate the results to notifications. Run an A/B trial (quite possibly p-hacked) to determine if people actually like it. Ignore the false positive rate (e.g. the rate at which you're annoying people) if you think it's arbitrarily small enough. When people ask how you determine which events to turn into notifications tell them The Algorithm decides it and let their imaginations, seeded by pop culture science fiction, run wild about what sort of superhuman synthetic intelligence you have pent up in your computers when really all you've got is a glorified bayesian spam filter.

grecy 8y ago

Yup, it has become staggering. I frequently get notifications on my personal page to say my business page has a notification. That notification turns out be to "Your users have not heard from you in a while, write a post". I get this all the time, even when I have written a post within the last five hours. I would say on average I get 5 notifications per day that are utterly useless.

nikkwong 8y ago
This x100. Totally mirrors the sentiment in my sibling comment. Somewhere along the line they lost sight of creating an experience and each facebook product became focused on improving their metrics and notifications became the weapon of choice. They so obviously need to reign in all of these different teams, reduce clutter, and get back to basics - starting with a good user experience.
chimprich 8y ago
The page notifications are infuriating. I'm a co-owner of my mother's business page (barely a business really, almost more of a hobby). She can barely use Facebook and just uses the page for basic communication with a few dozen people but she/we are constantly bombarded by notifications about HOW MANY USERS we could reach AND WHY DON'T YOU BOOST THIS POST. Hey, your customers haven't heard from Facebook in 10 minutes! Why don't you give them another notification!?
- grecy 8y ago
  haha, I know the feeling. Every single post I make "Performs better than 95% of posts on my page" ... "Click here to boost NOW!". Ugh.
prolepunk 8y ago
Yep, I got so annoyed I was compelled write blog post about it, documenting the ways facebook is being transparently manipulative. https://avolkov.github.io/fear-of-missing-out-as-a-business-model-for-facebook.html https://avolkov.github.io/fear-of-missing-out-as-a-business-...
8y ago

bvm 8y ago

Annoyingly, what's kept me on it is the fact that some super-niche private groups (that would otherwise be ideally suited to a forum or subreddit) have sprung up that have content that I simply can't get anywhere else.

daviddumon 8y ago

Exact same thing for me ! I uninstalled both twitter and facebook app when I realized they were faking notifications for me to open their apps, since I guess they need that for their DAU bs. Since then, I check twitter once a week in a browser mode, and facebook once a day with the firefox container.

giancarlostoro 8y ago

If on Android I recommend the Facebook Lite app. Its not as obnoxious and on Android you can tell the OS to ignore all notifications from an app. The lite version of Facebook is probably the only worthy version, I just wish it could be firewalled so you know when it tries to use network access and lock it down to just when you open the app. I assume Lite Android apps arent allowed to use much data but I could be making a bad assumption. It still saves on battery life at least. I agree though they would notify me of potential friends and they were never ever people I knew or wanted to be friends with (because I didnt know them!).

collyw 8y ago
The full fat messenger is the most annoying app I have ever used. It's like a small child constantly trying to get your attention when you are busy with other tasks.
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  Yeah, they have Messenger Lite, but I rather not have two apps for the same website. You can go on Messenger.com though if you want a web only experience.

corobo 8y ago

> Feels like they got greedy for my attention Bingo. Every time I check Facebook there's at least one "notification". It's always one of * A page I own has x new views * A friend or two is interested in an event (not even going to, interested in) * You have memories on this day Aside from Messenger for a few ongoing group convos my Facebooking time is mostly limited to interest groups at this point, and I'd happily jump ship with them if they moved to a self-hosted forum or mail list

mad182 8y ago

Yeah, I'm a very passive FB user and have removed all the FB battery draining crap from my phone, so I don't get meaningful notifications very often, but I'm checking it out at least every few days out of habit. It's always showing me a bunch of notifications for completely random things, like some new random post in marketplace group I'm participating, but no notification for the 50 other new posts in there or other groups. Or somebody I haven't spoken to in years is going to some event I never heard about. At this point I don't even see them as notifications, just a list of random things that happen and don't affect me.

edem 8y ago

There was a point when I got fed up and unsubscribed from all notifications from everything. Now I only operate in pull-mode. I check my things 1-2 times a day and I receive zero notifications. My life is much better now!

bsaul 8y ago

You can almost get a glimpse of the financial health of a company by the number of bullshit messages they send you. The trend is especially important. Just like you i’ve noticed facebook getting spammier and spammier, starting from the middle of last year. Which means things were probably starting to smell funky around that period

nkrisc 8y ago

My breaking point was when they fucking texted me that I had "notifications" when I hadn't logged in for a while. No doubt those notifications were that someone is going to an event I don't care about somewhere within a 100 miles of me.

liberte82 8y ago
I never did give Facebook my phone number, thank god
- nkrisc 8y ago
  I don't recall ever explicitly doing so. I'm sure something I did gave them implicit permission to siphon it off my phone when I had the app installed.

asdffdsa 8y ago

Same thing with twitter; every tweet is a notification it seems *facepalm

jannes 8y ago

Once per day? That's a lot. I wouldn't call that "stop checking Facebook". You are still a MAU (monthly active user) in their statistics.

gdubs 8y ago

Anecdata, but this was a big factor for me as well. Having joined somewhat early, they had me with the red badge like Pavlov with his bell. It was effective because of the variable reward. I logged in to see if there was a red badge. Now there’s always a red badge.

reading-at-work 8y ago

I logged in for the first time in a few weeks recently. Out of 50+ notifications, literally only 1 was something I cared about seeing. I wish I were exaggerating.

genericone 8y ago

The boy who cries wolf <-> The app that notifies Do it too often and with too much urgency, and eventually you will be utterly ignored.

giarc 8y ago

Try having a business page on Facebook! Anytime you log in, they will create some new notification that you know is not true. "5 people have viewed X business, try posting again." Or "1 new person liked X business" then you check and the number of likes is the same. Which is pretty easy to check when the number of likes is in the 2-3 digit range.

rahulchhabra07 8y ago
Are you sure these are false? I am really skeptical of that. Could this be mixed w people unliking and hence the number doesn't change?

liberte82 8y ago

Totally agree! Ever since they added story updates into the notifications screen, it has totally lost meaning. That and friends attending random events, etc. It used to actually mean something.

subpixel 8y ago

I've posted this before but Instagram actually creates fictitious notifications when you stop using the app. That prompted me to delete it altogether.

noneeeed 8y ago

This is what lead me to switch to using their website on mobile, rather than the app. The same goes for LinkedIn, which I had the app for perhaps a week before I got fed up with its bullshit. I still have messenger for the tiny number of people who don't use WhatsApp or Signal. It's been good. I've taken to disabling notifications and uninstalling apps for most sites, I don't need them telling me when I should be looking at stuff, and mobile sites have improved a lot. It's all become much more intentional on my part. Ironically, the annoying anti-patterns that sites like LinkedIn use to encourage you to switch to their app instead of their mobile website just encourage me to use them less overall. LI is probably the worst, along with Reddit. I don't have an issue with most of the content of my FB feed itself, because most of the people I'm friends with don't post crap. I'm not friends with people I don't actually want to stay in touch with and I mute the small number that overdo the minion memes. My feed consists largely of stuff about my friends and reletives that I find, at worst, uninteresting and skippable. I don't seem to have all the "crazy people" problems that a lot of people seem to complain about (perhaps I'm just lucky that my family are pretty normal). I find twitter is much worse for things like political share-spam or vague-tweeting, but I'm pretty focused in who I follow there too, and turn retweets off for anyone who is a bit of a retweet spammer. I find it funny when people complain about Facebook because their feed is full of their MLM hawking aunt or the rantings of some odd "friend". I think there is a lot wrong with Facebook, but you can't blame them for your friends and family. That's like inviting a load of people to a pub for your birthday, then leaving a bad Yelp review because the company was bad.

jonwachob91 8y ago

They are starting to kill the attractiveness of instagram too. I get more notifications a day from spam accounts requesting to follow me or send me messages that my use of the app has declined substantially over the last year.