Banner adds since I switched to Android this year were interesting as I used to use my gmail account for FB. First, a week of banner ads saying "come back to Facebook"; Very Uber-creepy. Then a week of sign up for Instagram! Followed by a week of "Facebook messenger doesn't require a facebook account!" which I don't understand.

At that point, I created a new Google account and deleted my old one. Now I see ads for foot fungus!

You can actually sign up for a Messenger account independently of a Facebook account. However, this doesn't seem to be well supported. There is no way that I can tell to delete a Messenger-only account, or to remove contacts that were automatically uploaded from your phone.

I could trigger Messenger to log in to your shadow Facebook account. It will work mostly like a regular account with the exception you (mostly) can't interact with your friends. I reported it as a security bug last year. Somehow after I reported it, the app doesn't do it anymore. Fb security took another 6 months to discard it as a security bug.

I was too disappointed by how much they cared, so I don't even bother to make a blog post about that. I trust both Facebook and Facebook security less after working with them. I don't have a Messenger only account anymore (but then, my Messenger-only account was never deleted). But do they care? Probably not. Do I care? Maybe - but what can I do about it?

Here is the draft that I wrote up but didn't publish about the experience: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSa-LjM5IzyTWJuD...

Obtain a visa to an EU country and/or sell your account to an EU citizen after May 25, so that they can either file a "right to be forgotten" request under the GDPR, or, generally, engage their "right of a Data Subject to withdraw consent" for personal data to be held against the account.

Either way this is by far one of the most exciting reasons I've encountered to still have my original citizenship!

Now, the downside is that small, local companies probably won't care about the GDPR. However, you buy soap (and everything else) from multinationals with European operations -- and crucially, bank accounts.

have searched online and cant find anything which leads me to believe that no one really does this.

I noted that, too. Advertisers have become really good at tracking health-related issues. For example, some ten years ago, I bought some device on Amazon for coping with some sensory disability issue. I am still regularly getting ads for the same issue, even if I use the net in a mostly pseudonymous way.

Where were these banner ads exactly? FB uses Google's ad network to target people who recently quit FB? Is that correct?

The stench of treacherous, defecting feet walking away.

This is a very dangerous game, with a lot to lose. It was the same with any other, now dead, giant on the web. Only because people are still using Facebook now, does not mean, that as soon as a worthy competitor will appear, people will move et masse. Facebook is a necessity now, but it might be not, for example, tomorrow.

Kind of. But it shouldn't be a mental model where something like Facebook, but better, comes along. Rather, you should expect something that fulfills the same emotional, practical need or occupies time that makes people use Facebook less, but fulfills a need that better clicks with what people want.

As an analogy, consider how Apple and Microsoft flipped places. It's not that Mac OS was like Windows but better and supplanted them. Rather, smartphones changed the game in such a way that Microsoft's core strengths didn't seem so strong anymore. Apple was able to innovate in such a way because of their DNA as a design focused product company, but those strengths didn't get to shine until the paradigm shifted to favor cohesive product experiences rather than versatile software platforms.

So the thing that supplants Facebook won't look like Facebook, it'll be some better way to keep in touch with people from previous walks of life, get in arguments with your distant family members, and share photos. And it won't happen all at once either. It'll probably sit as some obscure niche for a while as it slowly refines itself and evolves.

That was a dependency game.

Windows had created an incredibly strong lock-in effect, leading it to become like an invincible bastion. But at the same time, the bastion's walls make it difficult to connect any device from the outside to it. The same stones the walls were build with are what is dragging the Microsoft ship down.

What we need to realize is that FB is creating and exploiting dependencies, too. I could imagine that a new wave of communication tools would be just much more economical with our time and attention, and would match both to the real importance the people we communicate with have for us.

Yet similar services like AOL, Friendster, and Myspace were once big and are no longer what they were. I have no idea what will possibly supersede Facebook but I bet it will be something out of left field.

I think we are entering much more violent times, where huge corporations will see a crashing end.

If there will be great, easy to use, easy for user alternative to Facebook, that will be able to fill all the blanks quickly, would Facebook's value, stock and revenue withstand for example 250 Million user drop? Those would be the users that are unlikely to come back, and this would initiate huge migration.

There is a time when a company screws one time too many, disruptor shows up at the right time with the right cards in its hand and literally syphon the value out of the big company. This happened many times before. See how Google showed up with better solution, very adaptive strategy and no annoying noise and rip apart the whole search engine niche.

Not that I am disagreeing, but I once read an essay by a famous economist who pointed out that criminals are not as stupid as people think they are because their behavior makes a lot of economic sense if they can lower their risk of getting caught. Combine that with the "1% of turnover" fine that FB copped from the EU, and you can see how they can get away with this kind of stuff.

When you think about it, FB is doing a sort of "micro-doxing" of its user base on a regular basis. But since it happens invisibly, and over a long time frame, they are generally getting away scot free. One day it will catch up to them, and you will start to see folks who worked at FB trying to hide that fact from their resume.

My personal facebook has been disabled for 9 months and I had to recently reactivate it because you can't have an app (for using their auth) without a personal account.

So yeah until the network effect they have changes (the majority leave), people are "trapped" using it.

"My cog in the machine is not hurting anyone, why should I care" is how things get very, very bad.

making the hard choice is easy when you have nothing to lose, and it's even easier when you're so rich that the losses don't matter. the folks in the middle have just enough that it would really hurt to lose it. I can't say I blame them for guarding that jealously.

While I totally agree with this, I'm wondering where that tipping point would be with them.

They have (depending on who you believe) somewhere north of 200 million users with some estimates in the 500 million range. Does losing 100 million users impact them at all or their bottom line?

At what point do you think they would actually start changing? How much revenue would they have to lose before they started to make noticeable reforms?

Moreover, I noticed that my comments with links to laws and court decisions on government sites were silently marked as spam and hidden by FB. Moderators are helped me once to fix that, then it happens again and again, and FB refuses to fix that.

I made backup accounts on G+ and local social networks just in case I will be banned again by FB for posting well known poems or links to laws. I see also that traffic is increased a bit on these sites.

I also looking for way to setup my own node of a federated social network, such as Mastodon or PeerTube, but they are too heavyweight.

whats frustrating is blogs and comments that carry an air that facebook can change in the user's favor, much less that it ever will. i have read quite a few complaints myself that backtrack once it gets to presenting a positive, constructive solution to the problem (i.e. deleting your facebook) and suggest that facebook can be used by users for their benefit if users change their behavior. this puts an insurmountable burden on users to change a product that they are not in any way shape or form in control of. truly the only thing users have in their control regarding facebook is whether or not they have and/or use an account. deleting facebook is exhibiting control, and i believe everyone should do so.

"Many people vote with their time and attention." .

Of course. We could argue that you have voted with your comment. The "statistically invisible" commenter got your time and attention (=vote).

"Facebook measures how people behave, not what pundits say."

There is a saying that goes something like, "What you measure you can control." It follows that what the "pundits" posit outside of Facebook is not something Facebook can control.

Its simple. Users and non-users will stop publishing comments about Facebook when Facebook loses popularity.

Sort of like non-smokers in the fifties, but times change. More predictable and depressing than people who don’t use FB chiming in are the people who have endless rationalizations for why they need it. Often the reasons boil down to “network effects” which fits with the tendency of some here to cite Tragedy of The Commoms whenever a hard problem crops up.

Willing to admit I’m wrong though. I just don’t think FB is as necessary as you think it is. How did you all manage to have social lives before FB existed?

Social interaction mechanisms are pretty much the poster child for network effects, where using what other people are using matters a lot to utility.

To the network of people using a compatible encrypted messenger, not to people using "the internet" in some generic sense. Network effects definitely apply to each of the options at the level that they have their own network (e.g., "email" is a network, to the extent that it is interoperable; "Facebook" and any particular encrypted messaging system are each their own networks. The utility of each is determined largely by how many and which other people are using them and what those other people are using them for.)

I pull my FB list of upcoming events via CalDAV to my local calendar, for local handling of reminders. So yes, I could invite people manually, but it would be a bit of a mess.

FB has all the artists and all the venues in one place. The convenience should not be underestimated.

I have absolutely nothing on Facebook that isn't related to either bands or musical venues.