Princeton Article vs. Facebook's response

Here's a fairly recent article authored by Princeton PhD students about how Facebook will go extinct in the near future. Although I agree FB currently faces serious challenges, I thought their response was pretty hilarious.

Article written by Princeton PhDs (not peer-reviewed):
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.4208v1.pdf

Facebook's response:
http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/23/facebook-losing-users-princeton-losing-credibility/?utm_campaign=fb&ncid=fb

4 Comments
 

Facebook being a douchebag. The site has become an endless stream of buzzfeed and spammy ads. I literally use it simply to chat with people, nothing else. Younger people, the ones who Facebook needs as the older people (me) are getting sick of it, are using Twitter and Instagram more. So while they can send a snarky reply to Princeton research they would be better suited towards working on their product.

Do I think FB will disapear? No. But Myspace is still in existence. I think Facebook will slowly decline, reinvent themselves and become something else, but I don't think they will be the same as they are now in 3-5 years.

 
Best Response

Filter your traffic. 95% of the crap comes from the same people. Since it's no longer acceptable to defriend people you can instead put them on a restricted profile list (so they don't see what you post) and "mute" them from your feed (so you keep seeing the good stuff your smart friends are sharing). Every time you see something you don't like from someone, do this and in a week or two your feed will look much better. Remember that the Feed doesn't show you everything, only the highest rated items (most looked at, most comments, etc.) based on Facebook's ML algos. It works best if you help them out.

This is true of most other social networks, in particular Quora which has plenty of decent content which doesn't seem to be declining.

 
TNA

Facebook being a douchebag. The site has become an endless stream of buzzfeed and spammy ads. I literally use it simply to chat with people, nothing else. Younger people, the ones who Facebook needs as the older people (me) are getting sick of it, are using Twitter and Instagram more. So while they can send a snarky reply to Princeton research they would be better suited towards working on their product.

Do I think FB will disapear? No. But Myspace is still in existence. I think Facebook will slowly decline, reinvent themselves and become something else, but I don't think they will be the same as they are now in 3-5 years.

Agreed, I also use it almost exclusively for the chat. I just thought using search queries to prove FB was dying didn't make much sense. I mean, who googles: "Facebook"?

“Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.” - Michael Lewis
 

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