Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/20/quit-now.html
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They found that "the average Facebook user would require more than $1000 to deactivate their account for one year.
I’ll take 20 bucks. Maybe less.
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I tried to Uninstall Facebook from my Galaxy S7 yesterday and limit my use of it to my laptop at home. To my complete dismay, all I can do is Disable it. No doubt it’s still tracking my every move and reporting back to the Mother Ship. I HATE it and would LOVE competition in this space!
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Is it pre-installed on your phone by the carrier?
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I didn’t think it was. I’m pretty sure I installed it when I got the phone about 2 years ago and that it’s become a system app since then, somehow.
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I’d pay to have my old FB data truly and permanently deleted OTOH.
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FB just keeps buying the competition. This is where some anti-trust enforcement would be handy…
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Yeah I was putting it at about the $20 price range too. Then I started thinking (well, get me a good bottle of scotch and I’m gone for good 
)
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They couldn’t pay me enough to join.
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Maybe the average US user would take $1k to quit, but that’s only 100 million people.
What would the users in Africa, India, or other countries with lower average incomes take to quit? (Apologies in advance if they did actually take this into account…)
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I don’t think social media is any different from any other fad.
To wit: with a fad you have massive, instant and universal buy in from a broad spectrum of people. Then eventually people move to the next thing and the fad dies. A concrete example here would be the fact that quite a few people valued their beanie babies at well over $1k at the peak of that craze. Whether they were ever really worth that amount is a different story.
Myspace supplanted Friendster and in turn Facebook supplanted Myspace. To maintain relevance, Facebook made acquisitions and blatantly ripped off competitors. At the end of the day their time will come too.
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Hey guys, can I get my thou now? Cash is fine.
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God, I hope so!
I once had a coworker who insisted PC’s were a fad…
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Only to be replaced wth another data-sucking, privacy-invading, user-exploiting bunch of lying corporatists?
You may be right about fads (logos and configurations) but the late-stage capitalist model is proven - and apparently robust if it takes $1000 to make someone give it up for one year.
Did they ask how much it would take to give it up forever?
Humans are communicators. The bastards have figured out an addictive method for enabling that, that gives them almost as much control over the user as they could dream about in their wildest fantasies.
ETA - thinking some more…
Imagine if somebody had said ‘have all your phone calls for free but you have to listen to an advert at the start of each one, and we’ll record them all for us to figure out how to give you better phone calls in future’ … or ‘forget the penny black, you can send all your post for free but all envelopes must be obtained from us and will have adverts on, and the postperson will read all your letters and copy them so we can figure out how to get you better letters in future’. At the time, would anyone have agreed, or would they have decided to pay after all? The Internet has changed society’s view on all this. I mourn the disappearance of the small window when micro-payments might have become a thing. It has long since been well and truly locked shut.
further edits for typos
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ha’penny.
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If you disable the app on Android, that should prevent the app and all associated services from running. It should also uninstall all updates that were applied above the version installed to the system partition. There’s no reason to believe that Facebook has higher privileges than other system apps. If you don’t trust the OS on your phone on the other hand, then there’s really no hope.
Ultimately, I think the competition here will come from services like Mastodon and Diaspora. As mentioned in the original post, the greatest value that Facebook provides its users is connections to other users. Leaving Facebook means losing access to those users. Leaving one instance of Mastodon or Diaspora doesn’t force you to give up access to all of those users, since you can access them from another instance.
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This is idiotically bogus, of the subspecies of accounting known as marketing accounting. The kind of stuff used car salesmen or vacation time-share agents do on the back of an envelope at very high speed.
The way you assess the market price of something is to put a price on it. The question is NOT “how much would I have to pay you to turn off your account,” it is “I just turned off your account, how much would YOU pay me to turn it back on, or set up a new one.”
I’d bet you, oh I dunno, $1000, that it most assuredly is NOT $1000.
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Want to make a bet on how long it would take for them to bought out by facebook once they’d become credible competition?
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In the early 90’s my first wife was in law school. Went to a lot of law school cocktail type parties. Almost every time I would end up with a few bro’s asking me if this internet thing was going to last and what was it really good for anyway. I usually told them it was going to last but there wasn’t anything there they would be interested in. Obviously they all found the information highway on ramp eventually. I tried to shoo them away. “Get away, nerds only!”
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I don’t know… for a cool thousand in cash, I’d certainly make an account just to delete it.
I’m almost annoyed that not having one has left me out in the cold on this revenue opportunity. Curses, foiled by the Zuck again!
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