Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Users Are Sharing Less and It's a Big Problem (fortune.com)
Reader Colin Castro writes: Facebook is starting to see decline in original posts and people sharing their thoughts. "Facebook's decline in personal updates reflects a common growing pain for online communities. What starts out as a special and intimate place to share things grows into a big, impersonal, and professional platform ." The author points out one of the reasons why: "They know that, unlike in Facebook's earlier days, their status updates can now be seen by distant relatives, high school classmates, and co-workers -- so they don't share anything too personal."
IF they want my original content I should be paid. They are making money off of my hard work taking that stupid picture.
People realized sharing everything about themselves to everyone they vaguely know isn't generally the best social strategy? No way.
Google+ created circles to allow you to control who you share things with, which would prevent this problem.
The thing is, people are posting less and less even of pictures. My feed is all idiotic "shares". This is why I use FB less and less with every passing month.
I wish there was a way to block ALL shares, and ONLY see original content created by someone I know. Of course, that doesn't help Zuckerberg's marketing analytics or Facebook's "you are the product" business model.
The author is... more than a little off base. To take the services I'm aware of; Flickr didn't crumble because it reached the mainstream, because it never really reached the mainstream. Flickr* crumbled because of a number of ill advised changes to the UI at the same time Facebook and a number of other photo sharing services were on the rise. In the same way, LiveJournal was quite healthy, even in the mainstream, but the rise of Facebook combined with a number of ill advised changes, and numerous outages due to DDOS attacks pushed people away. Orkut never was mainstream.
He also misses one huge change to Facebook itself - the shift to mobile devices. As slashdotters have long noted, it's hard to produce original content, even text, on tablets, phablets, and phones.
* Yes, Flickr could be considered a social media site even though it's ostensibly a photosharing service. It had extensive groups (forums) dedicated to almost every topic under the sun. People used the text blocks (intended for descriptions) accompanying the photographs for blogging. Etc... etc...
As a right-conservative leaning person, I'd have to disagree. I just don't see this as a political issue, left or right.
This is simply people realizing what Facebook is about and what the implications of sharing all the intimate details of your life really means. It means your boss can see what you do in your spare time and who you hang out with. It means people you don't really want to associate you can track your every move. It means you lose your privacy in unexpected and unwelcome ways. It means your kids get into arguments with you because you're posting details of their lives without their consent.
In other words, people are simply learning about the downsides of Facebook. And it's about fucking time.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
You are overthinking it. People are just bored with facebook and aren't interested in it any more.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Also, it's a consequence of FBs business model.
Some people are now aware that they're being tracked, in detail, and don't want it anymore.
They'll still use FB to see what friends are doing & share a few funny things, but that's it anymore.
More & more people aware that *they're* the product, and stop using it.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
. A lot of my friends enjoy my daily news update, but I stopped putting things about me and my daily life except the random tidbit about a terrible driver or traffic.
No, no one cares.
Ultimately for me facebook has become a lot less useful as more people are on it. It used to be mostly my siblings, a few immediate friends and some of the more tech minded people i knew from work. That was great, I could ask a technical question there and have a discussion about it. Now if i post something like that the first response is usually "lulz i have no idea what you talking 'bout", so I don't bother with stuff like that. I use dropbox to share family photos with my immediate family since I don't want them to have distribution as wide as facebook. I know I *could* set up privacy rules to maintain that stuff better but I can't be bothered.
This is all true. The funny thing is that Facebook could have made it easier to do all of this. They could have made it easier for people to have online pseudonyms or multiple "personalities" (or whatever you want to call them) that allow you to easily group friends into various categories.
And they sort of do that now, but it's not intuitive. And there's no way to completely separate account details unless you violate Facebook's principle that you're only supposed to have one account per real person. (Otherwise, so Zuckerberg has argued, you're being deceptive or something... despite the fact that in real life we behave as "different people" depending on our audience.)
And you couple that with the various trends over the years where Facebook tried to deliberate undermine privacy settings you may have already made by progressively setting things to be more and more open.
I understand why Facebook did this: they thought the more content was shared with the widest audience, the more "data points" they could get to profile you, which is what they're really trying to get to sell to other businesses to make money. The more "likes" among random friends, the more data points. But if you're only sharing most of your posts with 5 close friends, that's much less new information for Facebook.
The problem is that people are realizing what this does -- it makes Facebook much less useful for the kind of socialization people want to do. They want to have clusters of friends -- the coworkers, the people you drink with after work, the people at church or the club or whatever. And they do NOT want that data to go between those groups. That's what most people do in real life.
And so Facebook is starting to lose. It's main market now is for teenagers who haven't yet figured out how stupid it is to post something online that will potentially follow you for your entire life. As the rest of the adult public realizes this, they will post less and less... and a medium that allows more personalized groups and doesn't insist on a "one profile with a real name for one person that's shared with everyone" policy will ultimately be more desirable.