Which is a big problem for German (and potentially European) publishers due to privacy laws. One major German IT publisher therefore developed an open source privacy preserving tool that strikes a balance: https://github.com/heiseonline/shariff
It shows a bunch of buttons but only loads the 3rdparty Javascript when you press them once (ie. show intent to use them) and asks you to press once again (then the native 3rdparty button).
You can also apply Richard Gott's estimator:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/10/06/we-ha...
At the 50% confidence interval, it predicts that Facebook has between 5 and 42 years left in it. Maybe the Cambridge Analytica scandal is serious enough to be the death knell, and in five years it will be defunct. Five years is a long time on the web. I could easily see us looking back on this as the scandal that led to Facebook's complete downfall.
Another question I don't have the answer to is how dependent is Facebook on advertising. If their brand becomes toxic and all the advertisers pull out, how much runway do they have? Enough to build a completely new revenue model before going out of business?
Day to day big things are rare, but over longer time intervals large companies do die, and for more frivolous reasons than this.
There are plenty of companies that will still advertise there. As long as the users remain - and that appears to not be a question, at least right now - there will be advertisers chasing after them. I am in charge of a relatively large Facebook advertising budget, and I can tell you that I would love it if, for example, half of the advertisers left. Facebook ad pricing is largely based on an auction model, and that would mean less competition and lower priced clicks. But I'd be stunned if even 0.5% of the advertisers left over this.
Mozilla is in a unique situation, in that the political views of its workforce seem to dictate many of its business decisions. That is not the case at most companies.
"When building sand castles on the beach, we can ignore the waves but should watch the tide." -- Dijkstra
What will Facebook's successor look like, and what makes you think it'll be any more human-friendly?
Honestly, I think it's going to be "mobile messaging and X" where X is different for every subset of people. The mobile messaging allows you to keep contact details for people and keep in touch in a non-1-to-1 way through group chats, while the choice of X allows people to make a statement about what sort of person they are.
https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/23/facebook-losing-users-prin...!
I'm sure that it wasn't intentional. Most CMSs have this functionality built in.
Facebook has its claws in deep. De-Facebooking the Web isn't going to be a simple task.
Do you think anyone will try? This is a PR storm, but it will be drowned out in a few weeks or less with whatever headlines get clicks for news sites at that point. Click-hungry web publishers are not going to remove these sharing tools, and many smaller sites depending on tools like Wordpress probably don't even know how even if they wanted to.
If Facebook lost half of its users tomorrow (which won't happen), there would still be over a billion people using it, not to mention its other tools like Instagram. Love them or hate them, Facebook isn't going anywhere for the foreseeable future.