For a few years now, alarms have been sounded in various quarters about Facebook's teen problem. In 2013, one author explored why teens are tiring of Facebook, and according to Time, more than 11 million young people have fled Facebook since 2011. But many of these articles theorized that teens were moving instead to Instagram (a Facebook-owned property) and other social media platforms. In other words, teen flight was a Facebook problem, not a social media problem.
Today, however, the newest data increasingly support the idea that young people are actually transitioning out of using what we might term broadcast social media – like Facebook and Twitter – and switching instead to using narrowcast tools – like Messenger or Snapchat. Instead of posting generic and sanitized updates for all to see, they are sharing their transient goofy selfies and blow-by-blow descriptions of class with only their closest friends. [...]
- As social media usage has spread beyond the young, social media have become less attractive to young people.
- Many of the students I've spoken with avoid posting on sites like Facebook because, to quote one student, "Those pics are there forever!" Having grown up with these platforms, college students are well aware that nothing posted on Facebook is ever truly forgotten, and they are increasingly wary of the implications.
- Increasingly, young people are being warned that future employers, college admissions departments and even banks will use their social media profiles to form assessments. In response, many of them seem to be using social media more strategically.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday February 08 2016, @11:58PM
Facebook is noise. Instagram is noise. They want people to actually see them. That's what social media is all about, putting yourself in a little limelight.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @12:09AM
Kinda like that post.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday February 09 2016, @12:39AM
To link that post back to an actual person, if possible without NSA powers, is, if Lordwhatever did it right, a shitload of work.
To link a face showing photo posted under a person's real name, that's about being in the limelight.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @12:46AM
> To link a face showing photo posted under a person's real name, that's about being in the limelight.
Because pseudonyms never want attention. Posting history has no influence on readers and karma, wtf is karma, I've never heard of that!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @12:04AM
they are going where their parents aren't.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by zugedneb on Tuesday February 09 2016, @12:56AM
They, as in teens, are going where people/society is not present...
Friend people for strategic reasons, not accepting friends, unfriending others has price.
Employers track you, school tracks you...
Well, you all know this already.
Facebook have become reality. And living in a "reality" has a price.
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 2, Interesting) by zugedneb on Tuesday February 09 2016, @01:02AM
By mistake I posted, before finishing...
The point would have been that one of the prices of reality is a loss of identity. The other of the prices is being associated with "the wrong" identity...
For many years now, just by reading about it, I thought that FaceBook is becoming a more than a bit like Japanese society.
The schools/employers only made it worse, it was sinking before that.
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gravis on Tuesday February 09 2016, @01:21AM
The point would have been that one of the prices of reality is a loss of identity.
no, it's a loss of virtual identity, your avatar. you still get to be you no matter what. people don't need a page that has lots of personal information about them which is what they are discovering by deleting their accounts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:52PM
Your identity is what people think you are. There is no "real me" and "virtual me", as if they're two entirely separate, unconnected entities, there's just "me". "Oh its just the internet, nothing on there counts, that's why its ok to make death threats and harass people until they kill themselves" is the road your thinking quickly goes to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:55PM
inb4 the inevitable "grow thicker skin"-style victim blaming and "its just words".
(Score: 3, Funny) by mhajicek on Tuesday February 09 2016, @04:21AM
You blocked me on Facebook, and now you're going to die.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @10:04AM
Facebook have become reality. And living in a "reality" has a price.
If you die on Facebook, you die in real life!!
(Score: 1) by CHK6 on Tuesday February 09 2016, @03:31PM
Well said and agreed.
(Score: 0, Troll) by zugedneb on Tuesday February 09 2016, @05:55PM
just whoring for karma u stupid fuck...
just by saying stupid shit and agreeing with stupid crowd I am always at max...
still, I have not sunken so low as to praise the Snowden...
bwahahahahah
shitfuk
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @01:05AM
...and roughly a generation ago the kids left MySpace...not surprising that the pattern repeats. Before that it might have been AOL(?) and before that the Internet wasn't "cool", so the kids hung out somewhere else. In the 50's it was hot rods and drive-ins -- James Dean and Rebel Without a Cause. I think this goes back to the ancient Greeks, doesn't it?
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday February 09 2016, @01:17AM
It all goes back to 'Yo Mama'
'Plutochrus... yo mama!'
'Caesar... yo mama!'
'Jesus... yo mama!'
'Nefertiti... yo mummy!'
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Tuesday February 09 2016, @02:13AM
they are going where their parents aren't.
True. But its not JUST the parents.
Facebook started out as pretty much a college aged meat market.
Now that your kid sister and your grandmother are on it, to say nothing every stalker and your Ex, about the wisest thing is to avoid it all together. Especially for the meat market aspect.
Doesn't mean these kids aren't still on the hunt. And the stuff that goes on in supposedly "private" channels is a whole lot more explicit than what was of facebook.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 09 2016, @04:57PM
Yes, agree and extend the meat market aspect to tindr and grindr will likewise be abandoned once 20-something's parents start showing up. Assuming they aren't already.
I can imagine the quotes already "Ewww, tinder tried to set me up with my own mom" "Weird Uncle, delete your grindr profile" and so on.
(Score: 2) by dbe on Tuesday February 09 2016, @12:35AM
So if you follow the trend to go away from big corp, to a small audience and temporary validity, does that mean the end-game app is a fully P2P network?
(and yes I know once the info is out, there is no way to delete it so the "temporary validity" is a myth, but at least it's not stored into the inter-cloud...)
-dbe
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Tuesday February 09 2016, @01:01AM
So if you follow the trend to go away from big corp, to a small audience and temporary validity, does that mean the end-game app is a fully P2P network?
what?! how that's going to protect anyone from vampires?!
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday February 09 2016, @02:22AM
There are actually some services that strive for temporary, allowing only a certain life for a message of any sort, and auto destruction after a certain period, sometimes mere seconds.
But anything you can see on your device can be screen-shot, so the whole effort is pretty much never going to work.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @02:37AM
Absolute guaranteed privacy is next to impossible. Not having your info vacuumed into a database by default for anyone to search is VERY possible. Instead of worrying about a nameless horde with financial and malicious motives, now you only need to worry about your immediate social circle (or whoever you're sharing with) which has been the case since always. I'll take the more private option please and thank you.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 09 2016, @01:28PM
auto destruction after a certain period
There's a reason they market that feature to gullible little kids; tell a wise old man like me that and I'll hurt myself laughing. Of course the NSA and future employers will for a modest fee have read access to an archive of everything that's ever been sent on that service.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:33PM
Seems unlikely to have been done right.
But it could have been.
Encrypt with receiver's public key, appended to, supplemented by, or wrapped with some time dependent encrypted part using minutes, seconds, date portions, etc. Both encryption and decryption would have to be done in the handset.
Since phones usually have very precise time, the message could live in the cloud, but be very hard to decrypt, and even your own app would not be able to show it unless you could guess the interval in which you have to fake the clock.
Not impossible, and would probably make brute force your only option. Tox is designed around this model.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @01:14AM
...when it gets hacked wide open, and everyone finds out that these services didn't actually delete everything. Or that agencies like the FBI and NSA were dragnetting them the whole time.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @01:57AM
Don't make the error of believing that something must be perfect or it is useless.
These services are ephemeral enough. Everybody knows that even with perfect DRM you can still take a picture of your phone. But that is enough of a hassle that most people don't do it and that's good enough most of the time.
It is kind of like how cars are not 100% safe. Something like 20,000 people die in car accidents every year in the US alone but we all still drive our cars anyway because they are safe enough.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday February 09 2016, @01:19AM
It's a good way to keep in touch with high school friends, as they seem unaware that Facebook and the Internet, while related, are two completely different things. I graduated high school in 1982.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dyingtolive on Tuesday February 09 2016, @01:22AM
I mean, given the shitfest that is social media nowadays, I wouldn't want to associate with those people if I were their age.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Tuesday February 09 2016, @02:40AM
So is social networking inherently a self-limiting process?
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 09 2016, @01:38PM
Yes, if its "real names policy" then the holiness signalling spirals start, and the SJW entryism begins, and that repels most of the population out until nobody is left but the online equivalent of the high school kids who bragged about joining the Amnesty International club and the occupy wall street crowd.
Don't get me wrong I like what A.I. very theoretically stands for on paper, its just the people who naturally clustered into the club were... ugh. I have observational data that the vast majority is that way, but I am curious if all A.I. clubs are like that or just 99% or its the lower bound around 3/4 or 4/5.
A site or system like the chans or SN or usenet or IRC will live in some form forever because the anonymous-ness can't start holiness spirals beyond campy Karma bragging. Thats an interesting idea for a site enhancement, neuter Karma by hiding it or making it an elaborate practical joke by expressing it in decibels or as a pH value or something.
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Tuesday February 09 2016, @04:17PM
I'm less interested in the particular faults of particular networks than I am interested in the scaling properties of any theoretical communications network.
Building a very broad network with a low cost of sharing information may be hitting a saturation point. The implications of a public face being a liability are becoming apparent once it reaches a certain threshold.
I can't remember the name of the phenomenon but there is a typical upper bound on the number of relationships people have. Does exceeding that limit have game theory implications that paralyze people's range of actions? Is this a human limit or a constraint on systems of multiple intelligent actors?
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 09 2016, @04:44PM
Google doesn't find anything at the intersection of social media and Shannon's Law from the world of telecommunications, but I wonder if we have enough pre-collapse pre-threshold data to try and fit Shannon's Law to various social network observations.
You could assume the amount of signal is constant. The recent train crash in Germany is a constant aside from koan commentary about trees falling in forests. But the number of people murmuring meaningless stuff about it is a noise component that increases with the size of your social media network. Therefore the SNR varies with network size. Now Shannon sets a physics based limit on how much "real information bits" can flow given a constant BW and varying SNR and varying bit error rate. I wonder if the observed limit is anywhere near the physics based limit, or if there's a shadow of the physics based limit. Anyway lowering SNR by 10 dB by having a social network 10x bigger should increase the error rate about the recent train accident by a calculable estimable ratio at a physics based limit. So the bigger your social media network, the dumber you would be about current events. Real world may not operate anywhere near that limit, of course and if it doesn't it may or may not shadow the physics based minimums as laid down by Shannon. It could be an interesting paper, I'm surprised there's apparently nothing out there.
I would imagine there's various EE / control theory type models too. So you have a PID controller of mood or sanity or WTF and as the noise input increases via social media, the output of the controller will destabilize in a surprisingly predictable manner, at least at a large scale. Maybe the PID mood controller is depression or people acting violently. You could see how close the observed real world is to the theoretical world of control theory based predictions. Experimentally verifiable predictions like 10% more noise input from social media traffic graphs results in x% more instability so the amount of psychoactive drugs prescribed should increase x%. Might be wrong, but at least it would be testable predictions.
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Wednesday February 10 2016, @03:42AM
There are some fun ideas here.
I was thinking in terms of the traffic jam model brought up recently on SN where the low traffic state is like a fluid, and a traffic jam is like a transition to a crystalline solid with cars being packed tightly enough that they constrain each other into rigid motion.
If you apply the noise model you mentioned to some sort of mesh network, you have a similar state transition when you create some form of over saturation. I only know enough here to assert the similarity of the situations, not enough to convert that into a prediction though.
I'd also posit two distinct saturation effects: (1) as you mentioned limits on signal propagation due to noise and (2) a computational capacity constraint on nodes that are also doing some quantity of work unrelated to the network (day job, etc.). Actually, I'll equate (2) with your mood/sanity/stress element. Each node has an internal priority queue and at some saturation point it has to start dropping jobs or exhibiting some other failure behavior.
There is a loose equivalent of a PID controller model in economics called a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. In these models, you posit interaction rules for a set of actors so that each actor maximizes their utility, and that gives you differential equations for the composite system. Basically, your individual actors have responses to an error condition (P controllers). The trouble is that these models are notoriously useless for quantitative predictions. Basically they end up being used as props to illustrate a hypothesized qualitative effect. They also typically need to be naive in some portion of their specification in order to be tractable.
Basically, those models only really give weak predictions like saying that if people save 0% of their income or 100% of their income the economy will run off the side of the road into a ditch. The predictions associated with a particular savings rate or an estimate of an equilibrium savings rate are mostly useless.
Over the short term, I expect any model comparing what a social network is to what a social network does to be overwhelmed by noise in confounding variables. Right now social networks are still in a growth phase and growth among some demographic groups may have peaked while others are just ramping up. This heterogeneity would be likely to frustrate any kind of model fitting even if you have inputs and outputs that are easy to observe.
But I think I do have a qualitative prediction: Facebook's game plan of eventually being a single sign on and conduit for online comings and goings of a super majority of the world's population isn't going to pan out and social networks will stabilize into some other model than a single dominant player. Possibilities include a moderately stable oligopoly with some ebb and flow in participation or distinct niches, or a birth and death model where individual social networks grow, sometimes to large size, but ultimately eventually shrink through migrations to newer platforms which are on an upswing.
I could also be wrong and there may be iterative ways of restructuring a social network that avoid any kind of saturation effects.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday February 10 2016, @04:15AM
I can't remember the name either, but IIRC the limit averages at around 50, is differs significantly between people.
OTOH, there are certain assumptions buit into the calculation. Email lists expand the number of people you can have shallow, but meaningful contact with, e.g. So it probably doesn't apply strictly when you start including on-line communications, as a part of the figure was the amount of effort required to maintain the relationship.
There is still going to be a limit out there, and the original limit was stepped, with fewer non-family intimate contacts and more contacts of a more distant nature. So the actual figures aren't going to be correct when applied to on-line contacts, but the general idea will still apply. You can ask for different levels of help from different degrees of intimacy, and you will provide differing amounts of help when asked. (As such, you might consider how much help a "Facebook friend" could expect to get from you in response to a request for help.) Also note that family contacts are figured differently. "Blood is thicker than water.", etc. You don't need to put continuing effort into maintaining the existence of a family relationship, though degree of support will, clearly, vary depending on how well and how much you get along.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Covalent on Tuesday February 09 2016, @02:55AM
Facebook and the rest make their money by having access to eyeballs. And these teens are going to grow into adults who don't give these networks their eyeballs.
And then hopefully they'll die. When there's no money in it, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest will wither and die.
Anything that makes us dumber is not something we should want. And I don't think you can successfully argue that social media makes us smarter.
Now, that's not to say that the replacement (and there's always something) will be better. But at least it won't be social media.
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday February 10 2016, @05:36PM
Have you noticed how Yahoo is still around? Facebook will still be around for the next 10 to 20 years just from the fact that they aren't keeping all their eggs in one basket. Sure, they are Facebook, but they are buying up Real things like Oculus Rift.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @06:03AM
I know I'll be happy when information on the Internet goes back to being stuff I searched for, rather than stuff some algorithm thought I'd like to see because it's the same thing I've already seen 50 times this week and if I liked it once I'll surely like it again.
Social media has taken creation of echo chambers to a science.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Tuesday February 09 2016, @03:42AM
At the Gartner conference last year, their theory was in a similar vein. They call it unbundling. As new social apps that target specific functionality of broader social apps before them and narrowing the information sharing space.
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Tuesday February 09 2016, @04:20PM
Yes, I want to pass my little folded paper note only to the specific person who is supposed to see it. Well, maybe I want to make copies and pass to a handful of people. But of course I want it to be fast, not like hand-writing and putting it in an envelope . . . . Hey, instead of an electronic equivalent of a bulletin board or billboard or writing on a bathroom wall, how about an electronic equivalent of mail?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday February 10 2016, @04:21AM
FWIW, enencrypted email is the analog of a postcard, not of a letter. And most standard email programs don't, by default, even sign (securely) the messages sent, so they're the analog of postcards written in pencil rather than in ink.
It would be rather easy for a new application to be created that was the analog of a letter...just encrypt the message by default, and have a mechanism for exchaning public/signing keys. Retrofitting that into an email system requires abandoning most of the current email clients, and that's more difficult.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday February 09 2016, @04:52PM
In other words, teen flight
Something I've been thinking about, having watched my own kids abandon facebook, is kids abandon stuff in general much quicker than adults.
So kids wear and discard bell bottoms very quickly compared to adult businessmen and business suits. Even necktie width doesn't vary quickly.
You can also see this in music, what passes for culture in movies and TV. Fads. Clothes. Foods, to some extent. Slightly older teens (teens inside twentysomething bodies) tend to drink in a fad like fashion, see hipsters and their fanatic copying of each other drinking PBR.
So its highly likely its not a FB problem, not a social media problem, its just kids being kids and old people being old people. Grandma may never abandon facebook once she gets into it, ever, AOL style, just like knitting, but its also normal for her grandkids to be completely uninterested in bell bottoms a mere half decade after they fall out of style.
This means facebook is probably doomed as a millenial-ish era cultural artifact, just like CB radio was doomed as a mid-70s cultural artifact. And thats OK, I guess (well FB might disagree as much as CB radio mfgrs disagreed, but too bad)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:43PM
It could be that Facebook is not shiny anymore, so it's time to go to the new shiny.
Two or three years after that, it'll be time to migrate to the new shiny.
Two or three years after that, it'll be time to migrate to the new shiny.
Ad frakking nauseam.
Which is why thinking any particular social media platform is worth holding as a long term investment amazes me.