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.
This is the result of the left-liberals financial crusade for PC. Free speech has been stifled because your "free" speech might just cost you your income/career if you don't toe the line.
I see very little content that's actually from the people I follow. 99% of what I see is just stuff reshared from other places. I hardly ever use Facebook anymore because most of that reshared content doesn't interest me anyway.
Google+ created circles to allow you to control who you share things with, which would prevent this problem.
That is interesting. It would be worth making a study of just how much Zuckerburg's own PC thought police don't share anything that might offend someone policies are contributing.
The counter point would be twitter, which up until very recently, and now with limited success has not really tied to police content other than strait up porn. Arguably twitter is mostly a cesspool of people flaming each other for this an that and advertisements.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
People realize they are becoming narcissistic. So they stop posting.
Then the people that are super narcissistic keep posting. And those that stopped get sick of the daily posts telling everyone what they ate for lunch.
And everyone leaves the site that has become a cluttered mess of posts no one cares about and advertisements.
Wow. Your Jimmies are really rustled on this topic. Tell us more about your political philosophies!
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.
Please stop labeling or inserting political bias into any discussion. A discussion should NOT BE pulled to involve politic.
I actually think why should people post personal things on the public Internet anyway? If they want anyone to see their personal thought, then accept consequences because it is no longer "personal" but rather becomes public. Also, why do they think that Facebook is that PERSONAL in the first place?
...What starts out as a special and intimate place to share things grows into a big, impersonal, and professional platform ."...
The problem is that facebook participants slowly began to realize that anything and everything they post is harvested by the advertisers to build a profile of you.
Make a new Facebook without all the Asshat, "features".
Design it for close knit groups only...Family, a few friends. All content hidden by default, invitations only to grant access (not even solicitations to be granted access), etc.
The premise of an on-line place to share things with people you want to share them with was a good idea. But like all internet things, Good Ideas are quickly perverted into blatant, clumsy, and in your face money grabs.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Wish I had a Facebook account to share this post...
The masterful (/s) algorithm for post visibility is skewed against personal updates. Based on the shit that's on my feed it's the stupid-ass memes that people post which seem to get play, and personal updates show up rarely, or several hours/days late. They should be running all those images through TinEye and if there's a hit, that post gets pushed to the background. If they constantly reward worthless content, they're going to get more and more of it. I wish there was a manual +/- on your friends so that if, by chance, you intentionally (or unintentionally) clicked on one story posted by that obscure guy you met at some conference, you wouldn't automatically be bombarded with his next 100 useless memes and radical political posts.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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...
If they can't be trusted with sharing then unfriendly them.
Seriously, what is wrong with ether?
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.
It's a big problem for Facebook because the more impersonal the posts become, the less people are going to bother visiting to read them. There goes their advertising revenue.
It's a definite trend. The majority of stuff I now see on my time line now is re-shares of crappy viral content. Fewer and fewer friends put anything about themselves or their day, the kind of stuff I might actually care or be interested in. And I understand that. 99% of what little I put is trivial or generic observations. Almost never anything personal.
Facebook users are just starting to realise that no one is actually interested in their 'updates' about what they had for breakfast or reading their 'stream of consciousness'.
Its just starting to dawn on them that this is utterly boring and useless.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
There is no simple factor that can explain this; I'm sure it's a confluence of a variety or reasons.
One that I've noticed is that my feed is just noisier now with Ads, other "of interest" stories that FB feels like shoving in there. The nice friends and family updates I want to see are still there, but I have to scroll through a lot of noise to see them.
Eventually I get tired of scrolling and stop. Then I visit less often, then I post less often, and the cycle perpetuates itself.
FB made changes to their feed sometime back, a year or two ago, and it's definitely affected things.
And then there are all the other issues people mention. Many of the people and their updates which prompted me to join FB are now on WhatsApp and other platforms.
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
If they just made the privacy settings more prominent when creating a post, it will be easier to designate a post's visibility to different groups (and creating those groups).
They tried so hard to hide privacy settings, and this is the result.
At some point EVERYTHING is political, just like it's personal, despite protestations to the contrary.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Last night, someone posted a manufactured controversy. So I called them on it. Their response? Cyber-stalking across all my social media accounts and threats to call my boss to get me fired.
Why would I be interested in posting anything at all?
Please stop labeling or inserting political bias into any discussion. A discussion should NOT BE pulled to involve politic.
This is what's really wrong with Facebook.
Your mom and General Motors are on Facebook.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
IF they want my original content I should be paid.
Turning this around, it appears that the only people who reliably post (at least in my circles) are people who want to use the site as a foundation for their business. They spend a lot of time with phony posts and what not designed to pump up their views. The number of posts I even SEE from people who I care about (i.e. not people's business) have dropped. I can go look at walls to see that they are happening from time to time, but they never show up on my timeline anymore, just the paid stuff.
So kind of Facebook has ruined itself.
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
I'm not necessarily sure if it's because there are more shares or just because there isn't as much original content.
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.
I strongly believe they are in a downward spiral and think it'll be hard to claw back from that. As the utility it provides to me drops, there's less incentive for me to provide value to them.
If they can't be trusted with sharing then unfriendly them.
Or, unfollow them and never see their trash in your feed again--while still leaving line of communication open.
"What starts out as a special and intimate place to share things grows into a big, impersonal, and professional platform"
s/b
"What PEOPLE IGNORANTLY BELIEVE IS a special and intimate place to share things IS FINALLY RECOGNIZED AS a big, impersonal, and professional platform"
Thanks for the correction.
-Styopa
I look over my wife's shoulder sometimes when she uses Facebook and it just seems to be an endless stream of chain 'hey look at this funny/thought provoking/sad thing' emails. The kind I never really wanted to get, but people sent me. Not sure why anyone would want to read that.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
I think this is a natural result of Zuckerberg's "users are dumbfucks" attitude [1], spelled out by a lack of ethics and consequently trust from the users. I know very few people in my network of recent parents that share their family photos on FB, for the simple fact that FB doesn't have a "privacy first" capability (or if that exists, that they trust FB to deliver).
Most of these folks are sharing on Apple Photostream, or Google Photos.
My surprise is that it took so long for this to happen.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com...
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
It does help Facebook's model. The problem right now is that, due to the lack of original content, people aren't paying attention to their news feeds and that means Facebook has less product to sell. I used to love FB because it enriched relationships. Now it's just a bunch of worthless auto-play videos. If there were more original content on FB, they would be able to get a much better price advertising to their users. That's the point of the article.
This isn't a change. It's always been the case that if you share pictures of yourself drunk, mostly naked, and swinging from the chandelier at the strip club with your coworkers, you'd likely get fired.
The internet is a public place. Share something, and it's shared. Get over it.
The only notable aspect to this is that people are now whining about people doing what people whined they should do:
"You shouldn't share personal information on Facebook! That's a bad idea!"
"OK, I'll stop."
"OH MY GOD!!! YOU'RE NOT SHARING PERSONAL INFORMATION ON FACEBOOK!!! IT'S THE END OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION!!! DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER!!!"
Yawn.
. 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.
What I wish Facebook would release is a "no politics" filter. It's become really tedious to have half my feed consist of "Trump is Hitler" and "Hillary is Satan". I've been trying to train FB by hiding all of those and marking them as spam when it gives me the option. But it just doesn't seem to get the hint.
Imagine all the people...
Is that you hon?
One of the reasons(and there are many...) that I didn't create a FB account is that I have personally seen people who were at one time "real" friends get into personal/cultural/political disagreements on FB and have it turn into a huge blowup.
I have seen people post things that then were commented on by someone else, and the person who commented said something that they didn't "intend" to cause harm, but they weren't thinking "clearly" and the repercussions were bad.
I've seen people who IRL were on good, friendly terms then turn into enemies because of political posts and eventual flame wars
I've seen, in effect, that when people post as themselves, and not anon that is when the problems start.
People will say and post things on FB that they would never say IRL to someone.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Of course, that doesn't help Zuckerberg's marketing analytics or Facebook's "you are the product" business model.
People gripe about this, but what do you expect? Even Slashdot has to pay the bills. Facebook isn't some altruistic touchy-feely social experiment, it's a business. An you are not obligated to participate.
The problem is that Facebook is a business masquerading as some altruistic touchy-feely social experiment. When its facade wears thin and people see how it treats them and their touchy-feely social things, they tend to pick up and take their business elsewhere. Basically, Facebook could have a production problem. Its product doesn't especially want to get sold and the more FB tries to sell the more the product pushes back.
The solution is for Facebook to tone down the salesmanship a bit and get back in touch with the touchy-feely social end of things, but that's not going to happen. When a business is threatened it doesn't lighten up on its core practices, it doubles down.
I agree.
I'm really just speaking for myself here. I can only speculate that others might have had similar experiences to me, but I definitely don't know what people are doing on Facebook or why.
Essentially, I signed up for Facebook because it was a good way of keeping in touch with peers-- old college friends and current friends. Relatively close friends. I posted whatever I wanted, and didn't think much about it. Then I friended some people who weren't really friends, but more like acquaintances. It didn't change things much. Some of my cousins friended me, but only ones that were roughly my age, so that was fine. Then-- I remember this one event pretty clearly-- one of my aunts friended me. I was really torn. On the one hand, I did not want her to invade the my Facebook social circle. I would have to watch what I said to a much larger degree. Still, I wanted to keep in touch with her, and I couldn't think of a polite way to say "no", so I accepted her friend request.
After that, my parents friended me. Then coworkers. Then bosses-- and by that time, I was careful enough about what I posted that I just accepted without thinking too much about it. I was already careful not to post anything too controversial or inappropriate, so I wasn't too afraid of my boss seeing it. And I was kind of friendly with my boss, so... whatever.
Still, I posted things on Facebook. Nothing very personal. I posted photos that I would be ok with being public. I posted pretty inoffensive thoughts that I thought might be interesting or funny. But then something else started to happen. I don't know if it was because of a cultural shift or just that my network his some sort of critical mass of different viewpoints, but I couldn't post anything without someone getting butthurt. I'd post a comment about Net Neutrality, and one of my conservative uncles would start spamming me with comments about how Net Neutrality was a communist plot to destroy businesses. I'd post something about a video game, and I'd get responses relating to GamerGate. I'd mention that I'd gotten a new iPad and one person bring up the problems in Apple's Chinese factories, and another person would comment, "Apple is for fags. Android 4ever."
I'm exaggerating a little, but not that much. Even innocuous comments had random people coming out of the woodwork to make nasty comments. It wasn't just liberal people or conservative people, Democrats or Republicans, friends from the city or redneck friends. There wasn't really a common thread. Everyone had just gotten much more serious, much less unwilling to read comments in a way that gave you the benefit of the doubt, and much more hostile. Sometimes they were my friends, sometimes friends of friends, and sometimes people I didn't know at all (e.g. commenting on one of my friend's posts, someone I didn't know would yell at me for something or other). The whole thing became so unpleasant that I just stopped. I didn't see the value in posting.
Facebook keeps reverting your newsfeed to "top stories" (from "latest stories"), so most people are only seeing the most popular posts. And how often are a geek's posts popular? You post, nobody reacts, you hate the platform.
When you post, Facebook shares is with just a couple of the people who have reacted to your posts (like, share, comment) before. If they don't react, your post isn't shared with anyone else. If they do react, Facebook shares it with a few more people. They react? More people see it.
Like most geeks, who aren't sharing pictures of friends and food and generally displaying a charmed life, my posts are about things and projects and happenstance and other boring stuff nobody cares about. I post it, Facebook shares it with a couple people who don't respond, and Facebook kills it. Nobody sees it, I don't bother posting it anymore.
Admit it, this is how your facebook experience goes, too. So you post to slashdot how useless and intrusive Facebook is.
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.
He didn't say it wasn't true; it's just tedious to hear everybody keep repeating it over and over.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Vote Cthuhlu 2016 - Why Settle for the Lesser Evil?
The trouble is, this year, Cthulhu is the Lesser Evil. (Which really ticks him off...)
We are a nation of Tut Tut'rs who do nothing but point out what others are doing wrong, and scream from the mountain tops that the person should be publicly vilified.
If I DARE say something that is a slightest bit non-PC I will have strangers looking up my place of employment, and asking that I be fired. Or held against me for any future employment.
Fuck that, and fuck facebook and any other social media site.
Oh yeah, fuck Political Correctness!!
I have always operated on Facebook as a pseudonym, and recently they blocked my account for not having any way to uniquely legally identify me. I have to admit that I am happy with that outcome, and the fact that they won't permit me onto their service without being able to identify me certainly cements my resolve to remain that way.
"No good deed goes unpunished"
I can't tell you the number of times I've started writing posts or thought to reply to something when I hit shift A and press delete and close the comment. Too many eyes make it not worth it to say anything. Too many people fired or upset or eyes on.
For me it is a bit paralyzing, I have always kept too myself what I like or dislike. When I was younger the internet was a savior, I could finally say what I wanted without fear of mockery IRL, not that i'm controversial at all, just, it was hard to let it out. With the general population being online and the datamining abilities of companies to string things together, posting anything online has become much more dangerous than speaking aloud.
I keep trying to push through it sometimes, but it's hard. Even now I just shift A'ed this post and almost deleted. I'll put it out there this time though.
but I couldn't post anything without someone getting butthurt.
Bingo. That really is the crux of the problem.
And what is really interesting, is there is sort of a "thinning of the skin" so to speak regarding how easy people get "butt-hurt" now, since the advent of social networking. IMHO people are way more sensitive about everything, whether it is climate change, the war in Iraq, transgender politics, the budget deficit, etc, etc.
In a way, social networking has engendered the exact human behavioral reaction they don't want.
Also, the recent MS chatbot incident is symptomatic of this "dumbing down" or de-civilizing of discourse via the web.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
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.
The "circles" feature of Google+ was designed specifically around this concept. Though it uses a real name, posts can be shared only with a specific circle of other users. Why didn't it take off?
Nonsense. Free speech doesn't mean the absence of prior restraint (i.e. censorship imposed before you've said anything). Having Free Speech means freedom from consequences. If you know that you'll face retribution(other than ridicule or counter-argument) for expressing *wrong* opinions, then you don't really have Free Speech.
The problem is that Facebook is a business masquerading as some altruistic touchy-feely social experiment. When its facade wears thin and people see how it treats them and their touchy-feely social things, they tend to pick up and take their business elsewhere.
While I'd LIKE to think that's true, I don't think it really is for most people. Most Facebook users seem not to give a crap about how terrible Facebook treats them, their data, their privacy, serving up ads, whatever. Slashdot users tend to be more sensitive to these sorts of things, but I really doubt that means much to the average person on Facebook. Sure, the Facebook "user experience" (such as it is) has degraded a bit, but I don't think it's bad enough to drive more than a small percentage away.
Instead, the current trend discussed in TFA is about Facebook becoming too FULL of people. What used to be a hangout for students and peers has now become a place for your grandparents and your boss.
For most people, socializing with your grandparents or with your boss is a very different thing from socializing with your close friends. But Facebook tries to smear it all together... and that's not working well as a "touchy-feely social experiment."