Itâs official â Facebook, once the only social platform worth knowing about, has stepped off the podium, dropping to fourth place below Reddit in the USâs most popular websites.
I get it. Having been a Facebooker for the last decade Iâve found Iâm using it less and less, and using social discussion site Reddit more.
Whereas Facebook leaves me comparing my life to my friendsâ â not to mention the fact it canât be trusted to look after my data â Reddit is great for interesting ideas and pictures and I usually feel pretty upbeat after scrolling.
The info has come from web traffic analysis site Alexa, which found that overall Google is still top dog, followed by YouTube and now Reddit, then Faceyb.
Although surveys say that Facebook wasnât impacted by the Cambridge Analytica scandal it looks like it might have to face the fact itâs not as popular as it once was.
Germany banned from social media during World Cup
German football team boss Joachim Low has banned several of his star players from certain âdistractionsâ during this yearâs World Cup â including, probably to the horror of the players, sex and social media.
Given that an increasing number of people would rather give up sex than their phone, Iâm not sure which theyâre going to find harderâŚ
Interestingly theyâre not banned from boozing though, as itâs meant to promote team-building – although Iâm not sure social media is worse for sports than a hangover.
Ohio officer fired for racist social media posts
Itâs easy to forget when youâre putting something on your personal social media that it might have an impact on your job â but then again itâs also pretty surprising in this day and age that people still donât think before they tweet.
One such case this week is of a police officer in Ohio who was fired after apparently making racist comments on social media.
He used some very not-okay words on social about the interim police chief at a college, according to reports.
Heâs said he regrets the posts and called them “off-duty, alcohol-related speech” and didnât consider them racist.
Clearly other people did though, and whether he agrees or not the damage is done, proving thereâs a long way to go in terms of education â both on and offline.
Facebook user auctions social media data
What do you think your social media dataâs worth? Given all the ruckus around Cambridge Analytica and Facebook recently itâd be understandable to think you could get a princely sum for your personals.
Oli Frost, a British writer and developer, decided to put this to the test and listed his personal Facebook data on eBay earlier this week – including likes, posts and comments, his friends list, event invitations and family information.
âEveryone elseâs making money off it, so why shouldnât I? Sell it to advertisers or whatever you want,â he said.
The bidding started at 99 cents and ended up at $300 before it was closed down by eBay for violating Facebookâs terms of service.
Frost wasnât too happy, saying: âMy mistake, I was under the impression I owned my personal dataâ.
He was planning on donating the earnings to EFF â the Electronic Frontier Foundation â and the only thing heâd asked was that people didnât steal his identity âand open a sweatshopâ.
ONO â are the centralized social networks about to be disrupted?
A new decentralized social media platform attracted over 50,000 users in just five days during its beta launch, showing that the people are ready for change.
Across two weeks, two million pieces of content were shared across ONO, which prioritises high-quality social content over clickbait.
It clearly works as 65 per cent of users came back for more, and could be a really interesting challenger to the typical ad-guzzling social platforms.
The platform is built on blockchain technology and users are rewarded with the ONOT cryptocurrency token for sharing good content â sounds pretty interesting to me.
Community creates wheel change
A heart-warming story from the world of social takes us to Pittsburgh this week after a nine-year-old autistic boy had his bike stolen.
Despite the sad start to this story, the local community rallied together on its Facebook page and everyone contributed $10 to buy the boy a new one, raising $165 in total.