Probably not at all. Facebook's collective desire for higher engagement and profit will likely outweigh any concern for individual or collective users.
I think it will be a minor blip. There's been such a drum beat about FB being bad for privacy over the years that most users probably don't care. I know it's just one data point, but none of my friends have mentioned this latest episode.
Additionally, re-building a social presence on another network would be a lot of work for many users. There's a certain dopamine rush to making a post and getting a ton of likes. In the short term, users are not going to get that kind of engagement if they move shop to another platform.
To be more specific, do you all think that this will reach enough of mainstream audiences to have a considerable negative impact on Facebook's reputation?
probably not because it's basically a Pyrrhic victory long-term. It'll drastically increase the chances of Facebook facing those issues in other countries, which would be devastating to the global business model of US software firms, and Facebook might get regulators attention again if the only significant competitor dies. I think Zuckerberg even said as much.
This isn't the end of facebook. These privacy changes will affect all social networks and they all run a free membership model. It will certainly change their profitability but facebook is earning so much money there's a long way to go before this becomes an existential problem. If anything these new changes might eliminate some of facebook's competitors because they will have a much harder time to grow their user base without the additional revenue from spying on their users.
I am not on FB but I use Reddit and I’m a little worried about how they will try to monetize when they go public. I have a feeling eventually it will become unusable. I’ve been a Redditor for 10 years now and I really hope the marketing via outrage culture doesn’t make its way there but I feel like it’s only natural.
Unlike some I'm not convinced that facebook will fail. However, I think the risk that they will lose a lot of their userbase and/or they will fail to massively increase per user monetization over the next, say, 10 years is pretty high (maybe 50/50 as a SWAG).
The advertising revenue risk is a big one, but there are bigger ones I think.
First, we may be nearing the end of an era where monolithic social sites make sense. Social Graph as a Service and federated social networking just plain makes sense. I think the biggest risk to facebook isn't necessarily the one big competitor (like google) but a thousand tiny competitors who offer the same full suite of services as facebook but are more targeted toward a particular social niche.
Second, as technology advances the ease with which someone can bootstrap a company that has 10 million, 100 million, or even a billion regular users drops dramatically. Right now supporting a billion users takes over a thousand employees and data centers around the world. How will that change in 5, 10, 15, and 20 years? In 2022 it might be possible for a site with the same usage load as facebook to be supported by a company with less than a hundred employees and other expenditures on the same scale as payroll. When, not if, that happens it'll open up facebook to a much greater degree of competition. It also fundamentally changes the game, because then you will have situations where "fad" sites rise up and then evaporate away in a matter of only a few years, months, or days and yet still have gigauser popularity at their peaks.
Third, related to the other 2 points, social is just plain going to change, a lot, over the next several years. Anyone who thinks that the way social on the web works today should be set in stone and never changed is either clueless or evil. There is a lot that's missing and a lot that's broken today. Facebook has so much work to do just to be able to increase its monetization to a level that justifies their stock price, but they will also have a tremendous amount of work to do to fix and change social networking. If they do one and not the other they are doomed, but their competitors can get away with doing only one and they'll eat facebook's lunch.
Either way, it'll be exciting to watch what happens.
I mean, let's not pretend that in Facebook's ideal world where they own the market, there _wouldn't_ be somewhere else to go to. Obviously that's not the case today, but I'm concerned that it'll get there eventually just based on how network effects seem to be trending.
I don't think anybody expects this surge of anti-Facebook articles to continue indefinitely. Personally I'm just hoping that all of this makes people dislike the company just enough to shatter the illusion of usefulness. Plenty of people will still heavily use Facebook, but if we can pull even 5% of the technologically-aware, that's a smidgen of influence that Facebook no longer has and a chunk of people who no longer serve as lures for others to join.
It's not going to happen quickly, but if this awareness gains momentum a much more healthy (federated, preferably open source) social media site could have a higher chance of survival. I think that's worth something.
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