Been using Facebook every day since 2007. Recently though I've noticed my visits to the site drop to maybe once or twice per day, whereas at its peak I was checking it multiple times per hour.
I think in their desire to work out what exactly makes them money, they've changed the way you're supposed to use the site. Where I used to see a news feed full of (mostly mundane but still interesting) status updates and photos from my friends, I'm increasingly bombarded with Shares, memes, comics, and pictures that would have been derided as old on 4chan back in 2006.
Now we're hearing about "fake users" - not the fault of the company themselves, I'm sure - and how FB is now just a place where tech marketing people see imagined riches. And in the process, they've ruined the site for the rest of us. The less pleasant the website experience, the less people will want to use it. Before long it'll just be dummy accounts and bots on the site.
Barring a major change of attitude and user experience, I would be surprised if I'm still using the site this time next year.
My massive decline in use is directly correlated to how annoying they've made it to use.
Eg: You can't have your feed always sort by "Most Recent", it keeps defaulting to "Top Stories", keeping old/stagnant stories at the top of my feed just because they got a few comments, while not showing me the new stuff.
Also, the sheer amount of crap they shove in your face now. "<friend name> Likes TOYOTA!" then a big post by Toyota shoved front and center of my feed, all because that friend Liked that page a few months back.
Also, the annoying way that you can't ignore just a certain type of post from friends (bar a few). You can set them to "Important Updates Only" but then you miss lots of posts you might find interesting. I want to ignore their Likes of memes/pictures but still get their posts of their own content, etc.
There's lots more reasons, but they've basically made the site a pain in the ass to use, so I find myself back to reading sites via RSS and chatting to people directly on Google Talk when I need some "social".
Their mobile iOS application is absolutely the worst application I have ever used on iOS.
It just doesn't work far too often (it took 2 months for notifications to randomly start working on my new iPhone 4S, but activating them can't load the new content half the time or just sits there loading forever; I have no network issues with any other iOS applications) and irritates me too much (e.g. I keep getting stories from pages I hid on the desktop site, you can't manage photos properly like on the desktop site, etc.).
I've reverted to using the desktop site under mobile Safari but I'm dying for somebody to replace Facebook simply with something of higher quality - I don't mind the ads or tracking and I genuinely find it a useful site, it's just of such poor quality it's annoying!
I already stopped using it a couple of months ago for a couple of reasons. Most notably privacy concerns upon realizing that nothing ever gets lost there. Yeah I know, as a tech person I should have known that from the start. Well, Facebook ended up with about a year and a half of my life, well documented online and stored deeply inside their database and their backups.
But as you pointed out, Facebook becomes less appealing to it's users for a variety of reasons that - I think - are all rooted in the fact that it doesn't really seem to care about what the user wants Facebook to do. That's never a good thing.
Somehow it gives the impression that FB is beginning to openly admit that users are not their customers but their product.
I've had a similar experience and similar thoughts. I'm a strong believer in free markets, etc, but sometimes I don't understand the unending need for growth (i.e. why is it considered a bad thing that Facebook is so large that it doesn't have much room for growth?) If you're large and profitable, what's wrong with that? It often seems like the relentless pursuit for growth leads to short-term decisions to increase profits that have long-term consequences of reduced customer satisfaction and thus lost profits.
There was also a statistic about the percentage of people who open facebook for their dogs. I wonder if dog and stalker accounts are in that fake count, or if they do count as active as they generate puppy treat ad revenue.
I wonder if Facebook actually analyses the uploaded content to determine its meaning. So if you did start to hide more and more comics whether it would be able to automatically do that irrespective of which friend uploaded it.
That said it is a bit strange that you would seek to blame Facebook when clearly it is a problem with your friends. I for example never receive any 4chan content.
Worth noting that not all these "fakes" are bad, or even inactive or less active.
For example, most performers on the Burlesque scene have accounts specifically for their Burlesque personas, with names like "Kitty Cupcake" or "Tabitha Taboo" and the like. These are obviously not their real names, but a consequence of the fact that Burlesque performers don't want the offline attention on their personal or professional lives outside the performing scene, and that it is standard on that scene to have an alternate identity, in the real world, who is the Burlesque artist.
The two identities are cleanly separated in real life as well as online, and they tend to use Facebook online to network with each other, get gigs, post photos, accrue fans, and so on. I know several such artists who can't be bothered to update their personal Facebook profile much, but are very active Facebook users under their Burlesque pseudonym, with many friends/fans/connections.
To consider these accounts "fake" seems, to me, like a mistake. These are very legitimate use of a social networking platform. It would be a mistake for Facebook to target such accounts and close them down. They would generate immense bad will amongst an increasingly influential community of artists.
>"These are very legitimate use of a social networking platform."
I have many friends (not strippers, unfortunately) who are active on the site with completely fraudulent personal information.
The problem isn't that the accounts are inactive. The problem is that businesses are buying ad-space based on the data produced by these "fake" accounts. When my 30 year-old female friends from Canada are generating data as 65 year old, married men from Wisconsin, someone trying to advertise to those men is going to get a raw deal.
>"It would be a mistake for Facebook to target such accounts and close them down."
Facebook won't close them down, both for the reasons you mention (these are real, active users) as well the fact that it's important for them to be able to boast about user figures. If the published number is 83MM, my bet is the reality is higher.
My ex-girlfriend used a second Facebook profile to earn rewards in the *ville games (or something, I have no idea how those games work). Truly fake secondary accounts like that are probably quite common given the popularity of those games. All of this just demonstrates that using "monthly active users" as a metric is meaningless and Facebook need better and more well thought out metrics.
Good point. I also know for a fact that a lot of underground (and not-so-underground) musicians use a standard Profile for their Facebook presence instead of a Page, as well as a Profile for their real identity.
Is this using the system wrong? Yes. Are they getting the full benefits of Facebook when managing their online fanbase? No. Do they care? Nope.
Also worth noting that this phenomenon exists everywhere.
For example, the standards for Nielsen ratings used for (much more expensive) TV advertising are pretty lame. If you're in the same room as a powered-on television, you're considered a member of the audience.
My other question would be... does it matter? Wouldn't the ability to target burlesque folks (who are real people, just not real names in this example) with laser-like precision be more valuable than trolling for real burlesque aficionados amongst the general population?
"an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account."
The problem there is that a person trying hard to keep personas separate can do so without Facebook being able to track (I assume they have to be more specific than just matching by IP address).
After being a full time-500+friend user of Facebook since the days when you required your university account to sign up, I finally got around to deleting my account on Facebook. Moved my close family, including my five year old niece, and my six "actual" friends over to Path (well, five of six. #6 doesn't have a smart phone, ironic that my five year old niece does (her father's old 3GS))
I realized one of the nice things about Path is - not sticky at all. No extended timelines, or history that you typically see. 99% of the time you are interested in the last five or six updates only. What this means, is that moving off of Path will be trivial once the eventual commercialization pollutes what is currently a great user experience. (No Ads, No Distractions)
Great for us, not so great for Path, I guess.
Oh, and the fact that I spend a grand total of 5 minutes a day on Path (Less time than I've spent writing this post) - is also appreciated.
I can account for atleast 100 of those. Any company who relies heavily on Facebook for registration and auth likely creates many on a regular basis for testing.
I, too, have several accounts that either predate test users or predate my knowledge of them. Still easier to use them than the test accounts occasionally.
I am in a complicated relationship on FB with my fish. Who has a lot more fish and human friends than me (~800 against 99). Never understood how he gets new friend requests everyday.
I did an experiment a few years ago where I set up a profile for someone who supposedly went to my university. His pictures were pulled from the profile of a male model, the rest was all made up. I went through every profile I could get and sent friend requests. I actually hit the 5000 friends limit. Usually I would send a message saying "hey we met at X party last night!" if I could find that information on their public profile. Many of the people "remembered" that. The account still gets people wishing him happy birthday.
I think calling them "fake" users is incorrect and misleading. The majority, as the article states, are real people with two or more accounts.
Two accounts represents an easy way to separate your personal and professional lives. Instead of fretting over the privacy settings of each picture, setting up lists, using the complicated and changing processes for managing privacy on FB, the "easy" way is to create two separate personas. And there is nothing wrong with this.
Performers needed to do this, since Facebook "Pages" and "subscribing without friending" are relatively new. And plenty of people who feel the need to be Facebook friends with people from work who don't want them seeing their personal lives and high school photos. And people hiding from ex-husbands and stalkers and other privacy-aware people who want to be on FB, publically findable, but keep a lot of stuff truly hidden.
There are a lot of people who value their privacy and doesn't provide real birthdays (Jan 1 1900), real pictures, real interests and likes, announce who their relatives are, and relationship statuses... are they fake?
The system has to account for people who need two accounts or incomplete accounts. I don't see how this harms Facebook in any way, or why the BBC needs to portray this as if there's a massive problem.
Spam accounts and bots... that's another thing entirely.
When an advertiser buys a Facebook ad, he is able to narrow down the target audience based on demographic information. Facebook then tells the advertiser the "reach" of that ad. So, if I want to advertise to Males between the ages of 18 and 24, from the UK, who like Ford, Facebook will tell me how many people my ad can reach. That's what you pay for. As an advertiser I will have historical advertising figures to calculate the ROI on this ad.
But what happens when many of the accounts I'm "reaching" aren't really male, aren't really between the ages of 18 and 24, aren't really from the UK and are owned by people who don't really like Ford? My ROI is skewed. I'm wasting money.
It bears repeating: as a Facebook user, you are not the customer. The advertiser is the customer. Users are not harmed by fake accounts, but advertisers are. If your cat Fluffy has an account, and is listed as a male, someone, somewhere is paying to advertise to him. Same goes for Bobone, Bobtwo, Bobthree and all the other accounts you've created to "add friends" in Farmville.
There are a lot of people offering 1000 Facebook page likes for just $5 on websites like Fiverr. I've seen profiles that have had no status updates but has 5k pages liked. There is a LOT of social media spam on Facebook
From the submitted article: "User-misclassified accounts amounted to 2.4% - including personal profiles for businesses or pets"
The dog owned by my niece in Taiwan has been on Facebook for more than a year. (I haven't bothered to friend the dog, but I keep up with my niece's news via Facebook.)
"Duplicate profiles - belonging to already registered users - made up 4.8% of its membership figure."
I have plenty of American friends (mostly married women with children) who use pseudonyms, and plenty of those have more than one Facebook account to distinguish personal friends from work colleagues.
"Last month, the BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones set up a fake company called VirtualBagel to investigate allegations of fake 'likes'."
The BBC investigation confirms what most of us regular Facebook users know from personal experience. A lot of what looks like user engagement on Facebook is just faking or fooling around, not something on which to build an estimate of future monetization of Facebook. I'm still not seeing how Facebook can do any better than AOL did at increasing monetization without driving down the satisfaction of users.
I wonder how many of these fake accounts are "test" accounts from before the time that Facebook introduced official test accounts? Or even from developers unaware of the proper test accounts that can be used.
I think I had three or four accounts set up years ago to test various bits of functionality, such as sending invites and status updates. The introduction of proper test accounts was a godsend!
Same here. I needed to work with their API, so I made a fake account to make some test and to access the documentation.
I have no intention of having my own facebook account, much less to have it full of debuging messages. If I created a real account, it would only annoy my real friend with messages such as "Test 1" and "sadsadasd".
I'll say this, facebook is dying. But the new king is not G+, no. Demographically speaking, FB users like gossip, while G+ users like quality. Mom will never go to G+ and I will never go to FB.
So, there is a need for a new facebook and G+ is not the answer. I dare to say something like pinterest, with a river of short messages and pictures, but highly visual, will replace FB.
No ads, no apps, no likes, no stupidity in the name of profits, no privacy whoring.
Whist we're at it I'd love to see the stats for twitter. How many of their users are actually active? Or those active users how many are real people an not bots?
I have not used my Twitter account for over two years, yet it gathers about 3-4 new followers a week so there's a significant amount of pointless activity created by automated processes that just follow people based on keywords - or maybe there's a lot of people who like my extended period of thoughful silence.
Facebook have to admit they have fake accounts because it would defy credulity to suggest otherwise. They also have to vastly understate the number otherwise their advertisers would sue or flee in droves.
So the only question is to what degree they are lying. I would suggest that from an advertiser's perspective the real number of fake accounts is at least 25%, probably much higher.
I think some of these can be explained as hacked accounts. I've had more than one friend who got their accounts hacked and FB wouldn't do anything to reset their password or give them back control. They just simply created another account and just forgot about the old account.
Facebook wishes it "only" has 83 million "fake" users. I used to run a very popular forum and more than 80% of the registered accounts were nothing more than spam or troll accounts. Let's give FB the benefit of the doubt and say that they only have 15%.
[+] [-] jgroome|13 years ago|reply
I think in their desire to work out what exactly makes them money, they've changed the way you're supposed to use the site. Where I used to see a news feed full of (mostly mundane but still interesting) status updates and photos from my friends, I'm increasingly bombarded with Shares, memes, comics, and pictures that would have been derided as old on 4chan back in 2006.
Now we're hearing about "fake users" - not the fault of the company themselves, I'm sure - and how FB is now just a place where tech marketing people see imagined riches. And in the process, they've ruined the site for the rest of us. The less pleasant the website experience, the less people will want to use it. Before long it'll just be dummy accounts and bots on the site.
Barring a major change of attitude and user experience, I would be surprised if I'm still using the site this time next year.
[+] [-] Andrenid|13 years ago|reply
Eg: You can't have your feed always sort by "Most Recent", it keeps defaulting to "Top Stories", keeping old/stagnant stories at the top of my feed just because they got a few comments, while not showing me the new stuff.
Also, the sheer amount of crap they shove in your face now. "<friend name> Likes TOYOTA!" then a big post by Toyota shoved front and center of my feed, all because that friend Liked that page a few months back.
Also, the annoying way that you can't ignore just a certain type of post from friends (bar a few). You can set them to "Important Updates Only" but then you miss lots of posts you might find interesting. I want to ignore their Likes of memes/pictures but still get their posts of their own content, etc.
There's lots more reasons, but they've basically made the site a pain in the ass to use, so I find myself back to reading sites via RSS and chatting to people directly on Google Talk when I need some "social".
[+] [-] lusr|13 years ago|reply
It just doesn't work far too often (it took 2 months for notifications to randomly start working on my new iPhone 4S, but activating them can't load the new content half the time or just sits there loading forever; I have no network issues with any other iOS applications) and irritates me too much (e.g. I keep getting stories from pages I hid on the desktop site, you can't manage photos properly like on the desktop site, etc.).
I've reverted to using the desktop site under mobile Safari but I'm dying for somebody to replace Facebook simply with something of higher quality - I don't mind the ads or tracking and I genuinely find it a useful site, it's just of such poor quality it's annoying!
[+] [-] tsahyt|13 years ago|reply
But as you pointed out, Facebook becomes less appealing to it's users for a variety of reasons that - I think - are all rooted in the fact that it doesn't really seem to care about what the user wants Facebook to do. That's never a good thing.
Somehow it gives the impression that FB is beginning to openly admit that users are not their customers but their product.
[+] [-] joshuahedlund|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] checoivan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taligent|13 years ago|reply
That said it is a bit strange that you would seek to blame Facebook when clearly it is a problem with your friends. I for example never receive any 4chan content.
[+] [-] swombat|13 years ago|reply
For example, most performers on the Burlesque scene have accounts specifically for their Burlesque personas, with names like "Kitty Cupcake" or "Tabitha Taboo" and the like. These are obviously not their real names, but a consequence of the fact that Burlesque performers don't want the offline attention on their personal or professional lives outside the performing scene, and that it is standard on that scene to have an alternate identity, in the real world, who is the Burlesque artist.
The two identities are cleanly separated in real life as well as online, and they tend to use Facebook online to network with each other, get gigs, post photos, accrue fans, and so on. I know several such artists who can't be bothered to update their personal Facebook profile much, but are very active Facebook users under their Burlesque pseudonym, with many friends/fans/connections.
To consider these accounts "fake" seems, to me, like a mistake. These are very legitimate use of a social networking platform. It would be a mistake for Facebook to target such accounts and close them down. They would generate immense bad will amongst an increasingly influential community of artists.
[+] [-] tatsuke95|13 years ago|reply
I have many friends (not strippers, unfortunately) who are active on the site with completely fraudulent personal information.
The problem isn't that the accounts are inactive. The problem is that businesses are buying ad-space based on the data produced by these "fake" accounts. When my 30 year-old female friends from Canada are generating data as 65 year old, married men from Wisconsin, someone trying to advertise to those men is going to get a raw deal.
>"It would be a mistake for Facebook to target such accounts and close them down."
Facebook won't close them down, both for the reasons you mention (these are real, active users) as well the fact that it's important for them to be able to boast about user figures. If the published number is 83MM, my bet is the reality is higher.
[+] [-] lusr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgroome|13 years ago|reply
Is this using the system wrong? Yes. Are they getting the full benefits of Facebook when managing their online fanbase? No. Do they care? Nope.
[+] [-] dasil003|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|13 years ago|reply
For example, the standards for Nielsen ratings used for (much more expensive) TV advertising are pretty lame. If you're in the same room as a powered-on television, you're considered a member of the audience.
My other question would be... does it matter? Wouldn't the ability to target burlesque folks (who are real people, just not real names in this example) with laser-like precision be more valuable than trolling for real burlesque aficionados amongst the general population?
[+] [-] veyron|13 years ago|reply
The problem there is that a person trying hard to keep personas separate can do so without Facebook being able to track (I assume they have to be more specific than just matching by IP address).
[+] [-] darkarmani|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmc|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmphosis|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wpietri|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghshephard|13 years ago|reply
I realized one of the nice things about Path is - not sticky at all. No extended timelines, or history that you typically see. 99% of the time you are interested in the last five or six updates only. What this means, is that moving off of Path will be trivial once the eventual commercialization pollutes what is currently a great user experience. (No Ads, No Distractions)
Great for us, not so great for Path, I guess.
Oh, and the fact that I spend a grand total of 5 minutes a day on Path (Less time than I've spent writing this post) - is also appreciated.
[+] [-] petitmiam|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaredstenquist|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bretkoppel|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conradfr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freehunter|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bmunro|13 years ago|reply
It's used purely for logging into Spotify, as there is no other way to get a Spotify account.
[+] [-] ServerGeek|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unreal37|13 years ago|reply
Two accounts represents an easy way to separate your personal and professional lives. Instead of fretting over the privacy settings of each picture, setting up lists, using the complicated and changing processes for managing privacy on FB, the "easy" way is to create two separate personas. And there is nothing wrong with this.
Performers needed to do this, since Facebook "Pages" and "subscribing without friending" are relatively new. And plenty of people who feel the need to be Facebook friends with people from work who don't want them seeing their personal lives and high school photos. And people hiding from ex-husbands and stalkers and other privacy-aware people who want to be on FB, publically findable, but keep a lot of stuff truly hidden.
There are a lot of people who value their privacy and doesn't provide real birthdays (Jan 1 1900), real pictures, real interests and likes, announce who their relatives are, and relationship statuses... are they fake?
The system has to account for people who need two accounts or incomplete accounts. I don't see how this harms Facebook in any way, or why the BBC needs to portray this as if there's a massive problem.
Spam accounts and bots... that's another thing entirely.
[+] [-] tatsuke95|13 years ago|reply
When an advertiser buys a Facebook ad, he is able to narrow down the target audience based on demographic information. Facebook then tells the advertiser the "reach" of that ad. So, if I want to advertise to Males between the ages of 18 and 24, from the UK, who like Ford, Facebook will tell me how many people my ad can reach. That's what you pay for. As an advertiser I will have historical advertising figures to calculate the ROI on this ad.
But what happens when many of the accounts I'm "reaching" aren't really male, aren't really between the ages of 18 and 24, aren't really from the UK and are owned by people who don't really like Ford? My ROI is skewed. I'm wasting money.
It bears repeating: as a Facebook user, you are not the customer. The advertiser is the customer. Users are not harmed by fake accounts, but advertisers are. If your cat Fluffy has an account, and is listed as a male, someone, somewhere is paying to advertise to him. Same goes for Bobone, Bobtwo, Bobthree and all the other accounts you've created to "add friends" in Farmville.
That's how Facebook is harmed by this.
[+] [-] xSwag|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unreal37|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] human_error|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] veyron|13 years ago|reply
http://seekingalpha.com/article/773061-facebook-cannot-survi...
[+] [-] tokenadult|13 years ago|reply
The dog owned by my niece in Taiwan has been on Facebook for more than a year. (I haven't bothered to friend the dog, but I keep up with my niece's news via Facebook.)
"Duplicate profiles - belonging to already registered users - made up 4.8% of its membership figure."
I have plenty of American friends (mostly married women with children) who use pseudonyms, and plenty of those have more than one Facebook account to distinguish personal friends from work colleagues.
"Last month, the BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones set up a fake company called VirtualBagel to investigate allegations of fake 'likes'."
The BBC investigation confirms what most of us regular Facebook users know from personal experience. A lot of what looks like user engagement on Facebook is just faking or fooling around, not something on which to build an estimate of future monetization of Facebook. I'm still not seeing how Facebook can do any better than AOL did at increasing monetization without driving down the satisfaction of users.
[+] [-] mootothemax|13 years ago|reply
I think I had three or four accounts set up years ago to test various bits of functionality, such as sending invites and status updates. The introduction of proper test accounts was a godsend!
[+] [-] Jgrubb|13 years ago|reply
I recently opened up an account for the sole purpose of being able to get into their API docs and haven't been back since. Am I a fake user?
[+] [-] JD557|13 years ago|reply
I have no intention of having my own facebook account, much less to have it full of debuging messages. If I created a real account, it would only annoy my real friend with messages such as "Test 1" and "sadsadasd".
[+] [-] janlukacs|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kilimanjaro|13 years ago|reply
So, there is a need for a new facebook and G+ is not the answer. I dare to say something like pinterest, with a river of short messages and pictures, but highly visual, will replace FB.
No ads, no apps, no likes, no stupidity in the name of profits, no privacy whoring.
That's the new facebook.
[+] [-] tomjakubowski|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zizee|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linker3000|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epo|13 years ago|reply
So the only question is to what degree they are lying. I would suggest that from an advertiser's perspective the real number of fake accounts is at least 25%, probably much higher.
[+] [-] at-fates-hands|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moreorless|13 years ago|reply