Pew surveyed more than 3,400 U.S. Facebook users in May and June, and found that a whopping 44 percent of those ages 18 to 29 say they’ve deleted the app from their phone in the last year. Some of them may have reinstalled it later.
Overall, 26 percent of survey respondents say they deleted the app, while 42 percent have “taken a break” for several weeks or more, and 54 percent have adjusted their privacy settings.
Facebook is terrible in every possible way. The product in and of itself is bad – terrible website and applications – and what it does to people is also bad, worse even. Garbage chain mail-like posts, obviously fake news and stories, massive echo chamber, targeting for election manipulation, and god knows what else.
I don’t have the application anymore, the bookmark is gone from my browser, and I’m planning on deleting my account as well. Facebook is garbage, and nobody should use it.
Dude… Get out. Delete the account. Facebook is one big giant fuck of a turd. I reached my limits, back in 2014. It became too heavy. No unified design language. I used too much time finding the features, that I forgot why I was looking for those features. I had absolutely no control over nothing. And I had all people I wanted on the phonebook in my telephone anyway. And it is more personal to do an actual phonecall.
I think your priorities are wrong.
I guess that makes you better than the rest of us then …
Come on. It shouldn’t have taken until now to figure out what an unholy pile fb is really is. Everything bad about the internet is featured there.
Selling personal info, unwanted and over the top tracking not to mention security issues. Over and Over and Over and Over ……
People pay any price to feed their egos.
There’s actually a very simple flaw in their political algorithm which is born out of America’s simplistic understanding of politics and our idiotic 2 party system.
If you talk to anyone who knows anything about political framing and messaging, you know that different people have different views on a variety of issues. Someone can be both pro-gun, and pro-choice, or both anti-gay-marriage, and pro-healthcare reform. But Facebook’s (and probably most of silicon valley’s) algorithm only has a single dimension for all things political – left <-> right. Every post gets measured and put somewhere on that line, and then your posts get filtered based on where FB thinks you sit on that over simplified spectrum.
The effect of this is pretty easy to see in the increasing polarization and tribalism of societies that use these platforms. When you start to see a set of articles telling you a set of things, you start to believe it. So we now see less of the kinds of folks who believe some left things, and some right things – we are now seeing folks believes start to align with the others the algorithm says they are similar to.
This is terrifying for so many reasons.
Edit: I tried to fix the misspelling in the title, but it didn’t work
Edited 2018-10-30 06:11 UTC
In my East European country I see only growth, and growth, is the place where you have to be registered so people can find you. Yes, more and more people get on Instagram and WhatsApp, but they still keep their facebook.
As for myself, I find their app a dog in terms of resource usage and intrusiveness, so I use a 3-rd part app instead.
The irony in more people ditching Facebook for Whatsapp and Instagram is that both of them also belong to Facebook :/
Indeed. It looks like Zuckerberg was smart when he bought the competition.
Yes. As long as Facebook the company can ride that wave by continuously buying out the competition to the competition, then who on their board will care?
My guess is so long as people are leaving for Instagram and Whatsapp, they are supremely relaxed about the whole thing. Perhaps there is even a strategy to try to move people from the Facebook platform to the ‘internal competition’, before the ‘external competition’ gets them instead.
Good luck with that. I never had a facebook account. However, some idiots who can’t spell for their lives created – I assume benevolently that by mistake – accounts using 2 of my less used e-mail addresses over the years. I could never really delete those accounts. I could change their passwords to ridiculously strong ones then deactivate them (or how the hell they call that) but I think they still exist. But that was maybe a couple of years ago, might have better luck now.
I got rid of it well over a year ago now I think and the only time it enters my thoughts is when another story breaks about how people are leaving or what other crap has gone on. It was easy for me to quit, Possibly due to having aspergers and not really being very interested in the people on there coupled with me not being good at making the small talk.
My Mrs has a problem with it though, It interferes with her life too much, I keep trying to get her to quit but for some it seems it isn’t so easy.
I like forums better, They are more focused and the people often know more of what they are talking about.
Edited 2018-10-30 08:19 UTC
Same here. I’ve quit Facebook years ago, and never returned. My wife will swear that she can control her Facebook habit, but she is totally addicted to it. Constantly on her phone browsing whatever sh*t is on there. So yes, some seem to find it rather hard to kick the habit.
Same pretty much across the board, I quit using it over a year ago and my mental health has improved from it. My wife still uses it, mostly for keeping up with college friends and distant family, and for promoting her blog. I hope she comes around to deleting the app from her phone and just using the website there; it eats up the lion’s share of our data plan every month and she hardly uses it on the phone (apparently the app will pre-download videos even when it’s not open, and even when you tell it not to, and somehow it uses mobile data instead of Wi-Fi even with a good Wi-Fi connection and the phone itself set to Wi-Fi preferred).
Seeing all the news stories about severe privacy violations and bad behavior on the part of FB executives only serves to reinforce my position that the company needs to die and soon. Unfortunately I don’t see that happening in the near future, especially as they are propped up by their other services (Instagram and Whatsapp mainly).
Recently killed my twitter (I just got bored of bot vitriol) and haven’t used Facebook for years except to arrange an event.
I’m open to return if they can get a handle on the abuse that clearly takes place and the clearly fake news that is allowed (and encouraged) to proliferate
Certainly in the UK, party planning is still the dominion of Facebook, so although I don’t participate, I can’t kill it off. As we grow older, the parties become less common so moving away is getting easier!
P.s. Getting out of twitter And deleting your footprint is crazy difficult. Facebook seems almost impossible. But once I find a way, that might be it for me.
A lot of people just can’t (or won’t) get it that not everyone is on Facebook or WhatsApp or … and that only broadcasting an event on Social Media is just lazy and short sighted.
I’m missed several events because not only do I not have a FaceBook account but all of FB is blocked at my firewall.
If the organisers can’t be bothered to send out an email or call me than said event can’t be that important.
I deleted them ALL, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat all of them. Deleted the accounts I had for years and now all gone. I don’t miss them at all.
I have a FAKE Facebook account with totally fake name/data that lives in a different country etc that I use for a) sites that want you to use facebook to login, and b) to be able to read groups on facebook for local organizations.
I never read twitter or anything else anymore they are cesspools anyway.
I have gone back to much better communication methods, and to me dedicated topical online forums like EEVBlog and places like OSnews are massively more intelligent forms of communication and are interesting instead of degrading and depressing that I found all social media to be.
Facebook is content driven and the content is humanity. Facebook can’t do anything about that, other than censorship. I would rather Facebook, warty humans and all. A few of those even turn up here from time to time. Agreed on the UI. I like the groups and the single identity for log-ons. Suits GenXrs.
I like this post so much in fact, that I’m going to share it on Facebook 😉 No, I wholeheartedly agree, Facebook is nothing but a time-suck. I love how everyone tells you “you’ll be back. You can’t do anything these days without a Facebook account”. You know what, if I come across something that literally has no other options but to use Facebook authentication or I can’t look up a businesses hours because god forbid they have a real website and instead only use FB, then to hell with them, I’ll go elsewhere.
Who cares what the kids do? They do all kinds of dumb things like constantly take pictures of themselves. I use Fluff Buster Purity and make Facebook into exactly what I want. I never get ads, and I simply hide everything I don’t want – including having a whitelist of ALL and I mean ALL political posts. So, I still get to keep in contact with all my old (I’m 55) friends. I couldn’t care less what the selfie-entranced drama kiddies do.
Oh, and by this way. The claims in this “article” are plain stupid.
All I know is that when I’m old (touch wood), I won’t be wishing I had spent more time on Facebook. That says a lot about what I’m gaining from spending time on FB: absolutely nothing.