Facebook Backlash
Facebook's obnoxiousness has not only lead to natural attrition (and a decade in users), but it started a movement called #DeleteFacebook... and some prominent names like Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak decided to lead by example and delete his presence. It doesn't have much momentum yet, despite some upstarts like MeWe or Gab are trying to encroach on Facebook turf.
I don't think any of the competitors have a viable platform yet, and one of the problem of these alternatives is that they're only going to filter for edge cases at first -- and that means the ratio of extremists/activists will be higher than in FB itself. So combatting partisan echo-chambers, with a new echo-chamber, is a big millstone around their neck. And the other platforms can be anti-competitive under the excuse of protecting us from the racist/bigots on those other platforms (while ignoring the ones on their own).
Either way, the point is that many customers aren't thrilled and they're starting to look for alternatives or quit. Whether that's enough to ruin Facebook today, is irrelevant to me. It shows that Facebook is like Quark: a tech company that made a hugely successful desktop publishing / Page Layout application, that was the dominant player for 10+ years -- but were such jerks to their customers that when Adobe finally made InDesign to compete with it, Quark's entire market moved over in a few years because they were so tired of dealing with Quark. Facebook is desperately trying to re-live the Quark-Effect.
References
- https://www.dailywire.com/news/29218/apple-co-founder-wozniak-joins-deletefacebook-paul-bois
- https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-04-13/10-us-facebook-users-deleted-their-accounts-over-data-privacy-scandal-survey-shows
- 2014 = Princeton wrote a paper predicting Facebook would lose 80% of its users by 2017. The paper was criticized and it did not happen by 2017, but there has been a significant slowing of new user acquisition and a noticeable drop in usage in the last couple years. So not quite the doom and gloom predicted, but there is a stagnating effect. (I looked back at the comments I made in 2014 in response to the paper, and at the time, I explained for FB to die there would need to be something better and that Twitter and GooglePlus weren't yet it. I still feel like that today. Facebook may not have their recipe right, but the competition tastes worse. And there's not a big external disruption event that's driving a change to the landscape... yet.
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