Those people make Facebook money, and the changes aren't making them leave or complain.
Do a search for a few terms like "We want the old facebook back!" "Facebooked changed now it sucks!", and "Facebook charging $" and similar terms, and you will see how wrong you are about the second point.
Though, to be fair, if every person who said they're going to leave facebook if they don't change it back on every interface update actually did leave, you'd have hardly anyone left. Seriously, people love to whine about it, but give up their precious, precious little page where they think people are basking in the glow of their stunning life? Yeah, not so much.
Do a search for a few terms like "We want the old facebook back!" "Facebooked changed now it sucks!", and "Facebook charging $" and similar terms, and you will see how wrong you are about the second point.
Vocal minority. It's the same with anime and manga. If you look at anime and manga blogs and forums you would think shows like X, Y and Z are super popular. Meanwhile you look at actual sales, and they don't match up at all.
Look at blogs and such, you're always going to find the vocal negative minority. The positive or indifferent majority isn't writing any blog posts at all. Nobody writes a blog post for "I love these changes," so they don't register on a Google search.
Let me get this straight - you're saying that out of a group of a few hundred million people, who are on the internet and using this service, the majority are NOT idiots? Bullshit, Scott, and you know it. Facebook is one of the most popular sites in the world. Even people who can barely perform a google search are on facebook in surprisingly large numbers. You know as well as I do that the vast majority of people on facebook are almost certainly that stupid, and I'm surprised, considering your normal attitude towards the general public, that you'd imply otherwise.
Let me get this straight - you're saying that out of a group of a few hundred million people, who are on the internet and using this service, the majority are NOT idiots? Bullshit, Scott, and you know it. Facebook is one of the most popular sites in the world. Even people who can barely perform a google search are on facebook in surprisingly large numbers. You know as well as I do that the vast majority of people on facebook are almost certainly that stupid, and I'm surprised, considering your normal attitude towards the general public, that you'd imply otherwise.
Oh, they are definitely stupid. So stupid in fact that they don't even know about any privacy issues, let alone care about them one way or the other.
So stupid in fact that they don't even know about any privacy issues, let alone care about them one way or the other.
Now you're getting accurate. I was simply protesting the point that they're too stupid to complain or leave. They'll complain alright, en masse, endlessly and loudly, and leave on occasion, but over the completely wrong thing, because they don't see the point of privacy on facebook, or why you shouldn't just add everyone you've ever heard of, so on, so fourth. They'll share their pictures with everyone, and have every setting set to absolutely open, so they can show off how good they look in their pictures, or how drunk they got last friday, and then complain when people they don't know comment on them. They'll join every single "Click this link to see the picture!" group, and play every facebook game, and do every facebook quiz.
They don't give a shit about privacy not because they're stupid, but mostly because they're vain, arrogant, and wilfully ignorant.
Nope. Just giving you shit for the hell of it. I wasn't entirely serious, either, though admittedly, that's not exactly(or really, at all) clear - I need to be more clear about these things, rather than just typing like I talk, since it tends to get confusing when it's lacking context and tone.
But anyway, They will complain, and they will leave, that's obvious, it already happens over stupider(and often, non-existent) issues all the time. I suspect that if you actually told them what the game was, they'd probably even complain and leave for the right reasons. The problem is, I think, that most of the people who do complain loudly on facebook don't travel in the circles where that's a spoken about issue. They might have some vague knowledge that some people are worried about it, but they don't actually know shit about what's going on, for the most part.
Do not doubt the the indignant masses. Starbucks failed in Australia, because people got indignant about how they were squeezing out smaller shops. They were enormously popular before that, but afterwards, they ended up having to close the majority of their stores - mostly, only the stores in touristy city locations like the gold coast remain open.
Starbucks failed in Australia, because people got indignant about how they were squeezing out smaller shops.
I doubt that's the sole reason this happened. Similar sentiment existed in America, and later closings were due solely to correct a previous overexpansion of stores: not to any customer fatigue or anger.
Do not doubt the the indignant masses.
The Internet is full of sound and fury every day. No one follows through on their threats. How many people said that they'd stop playing WoW if X happened, X happened, and they continued playing? How many people said that they'd bail on Otakon's AA, but tried to get a table anyway? This privacy issue isn't even on the radar of the majority of Facebook users beyond the soundbites they hear see in their RSS aggregators.. The loud people are in the aged 20-30 demographic most likely: younger people already don't care about privacy (through their parents are increasingly paranoid about it), and older people typically don't understand the issue. Furthermore, even within this demographic, most people probably don't care, or care only insofar as they heard it was an issue, and rabbled about it a little to be hip.
I fully expect no actual permanent exodus of users of any magnitude.
It's true; most of the users aren't even aware of what each of Facebook's updates does. They just hear "ohnoes, your privacy is at risk!" and go batshit for 2 days at the most.
As for me, the issue is that there's no comparable service to switch to. It's like when your choice is cable provider A for internet or dial-up. Dial-up is not an acceptible choice for internet access anymore, so no matter how much cable provider A fucks you, you don't have another choice short of giving up your internet access. Facebook is a network where I actively keep up with many people. There is no comparable network for me to switch to, so until the problems become so egregious that I cannot mitigate them with vigilance, I am unlikely to close my account.
If you rarely use your account or you use it only casually, then it is much easier to leave. For me, leaving Facebook would present a significant social impediment. I have a large group of friends that I cannot immediately associate with back in the South. Regularly calling each of them is not something I have the time for, and I rarely get to see them. Facebook provides a way to keep up with them at some level that is not hugely time-consuming. Whether to continue to use the service is solely a C/B analysis, and until the costs become greater than the benefits, we will bitch about the things we don't like, mitigate the negative consequences, and continue to use the service.
For me, leaving Facebook would present a significant social impediment.
That is the sole reason why I have refused to ever tie myself to Facebook or services like it. In refusing initially to use it, no one I know has been able to become dependent on it for interaction with me, and I am free to continue to ignore it.
That is the sole reason why I have refused to ever tie myself to Facebook or services like it. In refusing initially to use it, no one I know has been able to become dependent on it for interaction with me, and I am free to continue to ignore it.
That's because you don't interact with anyone beyond a close group of friends, you have a forum where almost all of them reside and any fans will contact you directly :-p
That's because you don't interact with anyone beyond a close group of friends, you have a forum where almost all of them reside and any fans will contact you directly :-p
Exactly. And when I need to incorporate a new person into my circles, I give them access to these means. If they can not or will not use them, I likely have no business with them in the first place. Note that I also use several other forums for similar things with other contacts (such as NerdNYC).
It's much like how I basically stopped using AIM and forced everyone who really needed to contact me to use gtalk. I have AIM still signed in since it exists in gmail, but if that ever fails to work, I'll never try to fix it.
How many people said that they'd stop playing WoW if X happened, X happened, and they continued playing?
My favorite example of this is a screen shot I saw of a Steam group that was titled something along the lines of: "Boycotting MW2 PC Game". On the day of the MW2 release, someone went and looked at the membership of the group, and more than half had "playing MW2" as their status. The internet is full of hot air. That's not to say it cannot spur real action, but such action is the exception, not the rule. Therefore, don't bet your money on a Facebook exodus.
My favorite example of this is a screen shot I saw of a Steam group that was titled something along the lines of: "Boycotting MW2 PC Game". On the day of the MW2 release, someone went and looked at the membership of the group, and more than half had "playing MW2" as their status. The internet is full of hot air. That's not to say itcannotspur real action, but such action is the exception, not the rule. Therefore, don't bet your money on a Facebook exodus.
That's exactly right. Anyone who vociferously complains about (insert Facebook/video game/etc. here) is someone who is a huge fan of whatever that thing is. They have a large emotional investment in the thing, and that's why they are complaining. Despite their whining, they're still in love. They're not going to break up over something small like forgetting to take out the trash.
That is the sole reason why I have refused to ever tie myself to Facebook or services like it. In refusing initially to use it, no one I know has been able to become dependent on it for interaction with me, and I am free to continue to ignore it.
That's because you don't interact with anyone beyond a close group of friends, you have a forum where almost all of them reside and any fans will contact you directly :-p
Yeah, and you also haven't developed an extensive social network and then left to move far away. It would be stupid to expect every person I was close to back home to join your forum just to keep up with me, especially when it's just for me and not a general-use network. For me, it is either let those people fall away, put extensive time and effort that frankly, neither of us has, into keeping up with each of them individually, or use Facebook. That's why I only started using it after I moved. Facebook did not create the problem. That was caused by me moving away from a bunch of my friends. It is simply the least inconvenient mechanism for keeping up with them, so I use it. When a better alternative comes up, we will use it.
Rym's method, while it sounds great in theory, led to him not talking to me for a year at a time for several years because he never answered his goddamn phone and calling to catch up was so freaking time consuming. It is not a good way to keep up with a decent-sized group of friends that span various interests. Basically, Rym is saying "if all my friends don't fit into this one niche, I will simply cull my friends until I am left only with the ones that do."
Yeah, and you also haven't developed an extensive social network and then left to move far away
That is a luxury I have: that I have never put down roots tied to a physical place. RIT was guaranteed dispersion, as nearly everyone I knew there was in Rochester for a temporary span. I had no roots in the Mid-Hudson Valley except for the crew who moved out that way after me (and the Mid-Hudson Valley is, usefully enough, entirely within the orbit of New York). I cultivated very few of the relationships I had in high school after moving out of Michigan to no great loss. And now, living in New York City, I'm basically permanently at the center of most social circles I will ever encounter, the rest happily maintained online.
Leo Laporte is talking on his radio show about how Facebook is deleting wall posts that reference deleting their Facebook because of privacy issues.
Time to try science.
Edit: By the way, do you have any sources on this other than Leo's radio show? If Facebook is actually doing this, that makes me want to switch to something else even more.
Edit: By the way, do you have any sources on this other than Leo's radio show? If Facebook is actually doing this, that makes me want to switch to something else even more.
I posted one claim on your status, but it's mostly just Leo. He told his listeners to try making posts with the link to the WikiHow page on permanently deleting your Facebook and to email him or post in his chatroom about if it gets deleting. He was reporting something like 10%-20% of the people trying it getting their post deleted, but I'm still a bit skeptical. He was pretty pissed, so I'm still waiting for some other confirmation before I modify my Facebook usage.
You know, this made me think of something. If you look at mainstream news, it's the sensationalized cable news and the tabloid rag newspapers that get the big sales and ratings. You look at the tech news, and Le Laporte is pretty much king of ratings. And if you really think about it, This Week in Tech is pretty much the very definition of sensationalized tabloid tech news.
Perhaps the reason that GeekNights can't compete on ratings is because we're so the exact opposite. Deleting wall posts, even if it's true, gets a "big whoop" from me. Also, knowing what I know about technology, it's probably just a technological misunderstanding. The way that databases for high volume web sites like Facebook are setup, with all kinds of caching, it's very likely that you will post something and it actually won't appear everywhere it is supposed to right away. It will appear when the database is "eventually" consistent, and when the caches have expired and refreshed. Granted, that's not necessarily the case in this particular instance. It could be they just are deleting some wall posts. However, it's just one example of a possible alternative explanation. At the very least they should all make wall posts that say simple things like, "hello, my friend" as a control. I bet they'll see the same percentage "missing".
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Though, to be fair, if every person who said they're going to leave facebook if they don't change it back on every interface update actually did leave, you'd have hardly anyone left. Seriously, people love to whine about it, but give up their precious, precious little page where they think people are basking in the glow of their stunning life? Yeah, not so much.
Look at blogs and such, you're always going to find the vocal negative minority. The positive or indifferent majority isn't writing any blog posts at all. Nobody writes a blog post for "I love these changes," so they don't register on a Google search.
They don't give a shit about privacy not because they're stupid, but mostly because they're vain, arrogant, and wilfully ignorant.
But anyway, They will complain, and they will leave, that's obvious, it already happens over stupider(and often, non-existent) issues all the time. I suspect that if you actually told them what the game was, they'd probably even complain and leave for the right reasons. The problem is, I think, that most of the people who do complain loudly on facebook don't travel in the circles where that's a spoken about issue. They might have some vague knowledge that some people are worried about it, but they don't actually know shit about what's going on, for the most part.
I fully expect no actual permanent exodus of users of any magnitude.
As for me, the issue is that there's no comparable service to switch to. It's like when your choice is cable provider A for internet or dial-up. Dial-up is not an acceptible choice for internet access anymore, so no matter how much cable provider A fucks you, you don't have another choice short of giving up your internet access. Facebook is a network where I actively keep up with many people. There is no comparable network for me to switch to, so until the problems become so egregious that I cannot mitigate them with vigilance, I am unlikely to close my account.
If you rarely use your account or you use it only casually, then it is much easier to leave. For me, leaving Facebook would present a significant social impediment. I have a large group of friends that I cannot immediately associate with back in the South. Regularly calling each of them is not something I have the time for, and I rarely get to see them. Facebook provides a way to keep up with them at some level that is not hugely time-consuming. Whether to continue to use the service is solely a C/B analysis, and until the costs become greater than the benefits, we will bitch about the things we don't like, mitigate the negative consequences, and continue to use the service.
It's much like how I basically stopped using AIM and forced everyone who really needed to contact me to use gtalk. I have AIM still signed in since it exists in gmail, but if that ever fails to work, I'll never try to fix it.
Rym's method, while it sounds great in theory, led to him not talking to me for a year at a time for several years because he never answered his goddamn phone and calling to catch up was so freaking time consuming. It is not a good way to keep up with a decent-sized group of friends that span various interests. Basically, Rym is saying "if all my friends don't fit into this one niche, I will simply cull my friends until I am left only with the ones that do."
Edit: By the way, do you have any sources on this other than Leo's radio show? If Facebook is actually doing this, that makes me want to switch to something else even more.
Perhaps the reason that GeekNights can't compete on ratings is because we're so the exact opposite. Deleting wall posts, even if it's true, gets a "big whoop" from me. Also, knowing what I know about technology, it's probably just a technological misunderstanding. The way that databases for high volume web sites like Facebook are setup, with all kinds of caching, it's very likely that you will post something and it actually won't appear everywhere it is supposed to right away. It will appear when the database is "eventually" consistent, and when the caches have expired and refreshed. Granted, that's not necessarily the case in this particular instance. It could be they just are deleting some wall posts. However, it's just one example of a possible alternative explanation. At the very least they should all make wall posts that say simple things like, "hello, my friend" as a control. I bet they'll see the same percentage "missing".