[binocarlos]

Perhaps part of that was that IE was really bad at it's job and as users were told about Chrome and Firefox and they tried it and it was much faster - they switched because IE was not nearly as good. Facebook is pretty good at it's job - despite questionable practices. If Facebook started to suck from a user perspective (a bit like MySpace did) - users would move to another thing in a shot.

[lambda_lover]

I would disagree with the claim that Facebook is "pretty good at its job" -- the News Feed is completely full of ads and "suggested content", notifications have become complete noise at this point, and even Messenger has ads in it now, and makes it difficult to get to your actual list of online friends.

In 2011, Facebook was good at its job, with a chronological news feed, meaningful notifications, and a messenger paradigm that worked much like AIM in the early 2000s -- you could see who was online, away, go invisible, etc. In 2018, Facebook has lost all of those positives, and with it a lot of user engagement, all for the sake of cramming the maximum number of ads down the users throats. And I'm not even getting into the nasty dark UX patterns, like hiding the ability to delete your profile (seriously, there isn't a link to do this anywhere on the site -- you need to search Google for it and they change the link all the time to break external guides) and showing random pictures of "friends who will miss you if you leave!" when you try to delete your account. I don't think your average user would mind leaving Facebook much if there was any actual alternative.

[kbenson]

I think you're under the impression that facebook's job is to be good at showing you what you want and being useful. I'm pretty sure they think their job is to balance being just useful enough that you don't quit while maximizing revenue from you, which might entail being pretty crappy to use overall.

[Lionsion]

> I think you're under the impression that facebook's job is to be good at showing you what you want and being useful. I'm pretty sure they think their job is to balance being just useful enough that you don't quit while maximizing revenue from you, which might entail being pretty crappy to use overall.

This is just a minor quibble to lambda_lover's point, which still stands. Facebook may understand it's job is to shove as many ads in its users' faces as they will tolerate, but that's not why users use its app. It's users view its job as being useful to them, and being bad at that makes makes FB vulnerable to competitors or even just general dissatisfaction.