From Fast Company:
Headlines over the past few weeks–nay, years–have been hard on Facebook. If it’s not a story detailing how the company mismanaged user data, it’s another scathing report about how it misleads customers, can’t get fake news under control, or is killing the news business.
And analysts are getting increasingly worried.
Yesterday, an advertiser filed a lawsuit, seeking class-action status, over Facebook allegedly misrepresenting its “Potential Reach” statistic. In Myanmar, the company’s attempt to fight hate speech is reportedly going terribly. The list goes on.
With all of this, Pivotal analyst Brian Wieser sees a big problem. Though he’s given the company a “sell” rating for a while, these latest headlines further bolster his opinion. “Although we don’t have a tangible sense of financial consequences these situations may bring they are illustrative of systemic mis-management at the company which is mostly under-appreciated as risks by investors,” he writes in a new note.
Link to the rest at Fast Company
PG suspects he’s not the only one who has substantially reduced his time on Facebook in recent months after the deluge of negative publicity, but that’s not the worst thing from Facebook’s standpoint.
The worst thing is that PG has found he doesn’t really miss Facebook.
I stopped using FB regularly years ago. There’s just nothing there I’m interested in. Signed up on a similar site called MeWe a few months ago though. They make their money by selling phone app stuff and cloud services as far as I know, and they’re big promoters of users’ right to privacy. Will let a user use literally whatever/any name they wish (I remember a time when FB was banning accounts for using “fake” names). I mainly signed up to communicate with long-distance writer friends because they moved there, though I do post stuff there.
Yep, pretty much ditto for me. Despite being an Indie author, I found that I felt unseemly using ‘Social’ media as a venue to sell my stuff. I felt like I was some sort of Amway salesman (you younger kids won’t get the analogy LOL)
I left the Social Media for socializing, period. And I rarely use it too. However, my wife’s on it for a couple hours a day, looking at kittens, touching base w/ family, and catching some odd news stories. Go figure.
I’m of the opinion that 5 years from now the media landscape is going to be radically different than what it is today. There’s such a powerful churn of change we’re in the midst of.
I don’t enjoy Facebook. I dutifully check it every day or so in case a family member or one of a few friends posts something about their life. Of course, due to Facebook’s perverse algorithms, there is a good chance that I won’t read it anyway.
“The worst thing is that PG has found he doesn’t really miss Facebook.”
Heh, like smoking. One winter my dad got so sick he couldn’t even smoke for two weeks. He got better and unwrapped/trimmed one of his cigars. Mom said he just looked at the silly thing for half an hour before setting it back down – still unlit. He told her if he could go two weeks without smoking he didn’t need to smoke.
Facebonk is a lot like smoking, all the cool kids were doing it – but it ain’t as cool anymore and health risks are now being shown …