This is sort of emblematic of the Facebook Faux Activist generation. While they are so prepared to step up and say something about their convictions, wrapped up and emotionally spirited after been told, all throughout their school lives about how their parents were activists (for things that actually mattered, but that's a different story), my generation lacks what matters when it comes to being an activist:

The ability to realize actions speak louder than words. As long as it doesn't involve going outside, standing in a line or otherwise stepping away from your precious Macbooks for a few hours a day to actually form a peaceful, but resolute protest about a matter, it's very unlikely that this generation will actually accomplish things like this. And even then, something like deactivating your Facebook account turned out to be a flop.

What's more shocking is that they were more than willing to take part in a day in which thousands of people stood up, and willfully desecrated the holy figure of another religion, whether or not they actually understood the overtones of what they were doing, or understanding the undertones of the moderate followers of the Muslim community who reached out to media outlets to explain why the Muhammad drawings disturbed them (Muhammad did not want to be worshiped as an Idol, and they felt that depicting him in the form of an image would detract from the central message he was trying to convey).

Surprising, yet expected all at the same time.

Given there are followers of Islam out there who (off the top of my head) bombed the Danish embassy in Pakistan, murdered Theo Van Gogh and put a bounty on Salman Rushdie's head I don't find it shocking at all that there were people willing to stand up and declare that they weren't intimidated.

You might like the phrase "slacktivism", it seems similar to what you're trying to describe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacktivism

As I've said before: "Quit Facebook Day" is bound to be useless. What we need is "Join Alternative X Day". Where X is something you can recommend with a straight face.

It's as if they had declared "Quit Internet Explorer Day" before Firefox was even released.

People should remember that before Facebook, MySpace was the unstoppable juggernaut. It's only when there's something to steal Facebook's thunder that it will go the way of MySpace and we'll all forget about it.

The problem for Facebook isn't that people are going to quit, it's that they're going to stop sharing anything worthwhile.

Once the majority starts treating it as a glorified address book there's much less reason for people to visit regularly.

This is silly, they have no idea how many people actually quit. Not that I think many people quit anyways.

That's exactly what I was thinking; it would be more interesting to know how many people kept that pledge. Still, it does put it into perspective; the vast majority of people simply don't care, or don't know, about Facebook's privacy issues, despite all the noise lately.

I was thinking more that the people actually concerned with their privacy might not want to submit their name and email address on some random site. So the the number of pledges could under represent the people that actually want to quit (or did quit).

But, yeah, it's far more likely that most people just don't care.

I used to be on Facebook quite a bit. I deleted my account a week ago, and the abrupt change felt surprisingly liberating. Facebook was becoming a chore to manage, but I didn't realize this until after I left.

Sems like there's still room for something more simplified (but not to Twitter's extreme.) Buzz?

It's not a "flop". Many of the most respected tech bloggers have permanently deleted their Facebook accounts. I did so myself about a month ago when I heard that Zuckerberg called FB users "dumb fcks". Who cares about hooking up with people you went to high school with anyway?

> It's not a "flop".

Agreed. It's a change in direction. Facebook is no longer on an easy, upward, unchallenged trajectory.

A business plan to compete directly with Facebook no longer seems foolish. Regardless of Diaspora's success, the overwhelming support of $200,000 of real money proved that there is a hungry market for a Facebook competitor; someone just has to build it.

That's the wrong way to calculate the "flop". 1 in 15k registered accounts quitting is a flop, but it can easily be argued that not all 500 million heard about the day. It's a marketing/awareness issue and language barriers (in how many languages did the day get promoted?).

The more correcet number is how many have pledged to quit and actually did? That's the real number. Even then it's not fool-proof because those pledging are already self-selecting. However, if zero (or very close to zero) people from pledgers actually quit, we even can call it a win for Facebook.

I have multiple Facebook accounts back from the day an edu address was required. I never bothered to delete them. Same with my main account.

I am not sure why everyone takes Facebook's 500 million member number at face value when a quick look around reveals numerous spam, fake, and barely updated accounts.

That's their active user number, not their total-user-accounts-in-our-database number.

Why would you believe that is their active number?

Back when I was active on Facebook, there was no shortage of fake accounts that survived multiple attempts by Facebook to purge them.

So much for the thinking that people would leave FB in droves after the latest privacy mishap(s). The thing is that people have invested too much time and effort in FB. Unless there's a one-button migration button to some other rival system, many people just won't leave.

I'm sure some of the people that get involved with a pledge like this will rejoin when the realise they made no impact. After all if you have no thought for making an impact why would not just quit quietly?

Of course it flopped. People who have strong objections to Facebook have already quit, or never joined in the first place.

This was bound to fail: it's very hard to pledge to quit if you have > 0 friends that you actively follow.

fb says it has > 400 million users. thats about 27k who quit in a day. now if we knew what the baseline quit rate is, the #s might mean something..