[HN Gopher] Mark Zuckerberg on Messenger (2013)
___________________________________________________________________
Mark Zuckerberg on Messenger (2013)
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 175 points
Date : 2022-05-21 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| frob wrote:
| This is eerie for me to read, especially this line: "If messenger
| came with Andrea for everyone, that would clearly be amazing for
| the world."
|
| Eleven months later, FB bought a little startup I was part of to
| try to build exact this. (Spolier: it flopped)
| avivo wrote:
| I'm curious, why did it flop? Internal coordination issues? NLP
| tech not being ready yet?
| frob wrote:
| NLP not being nearly ready. Some of the requests were powered
| by people on the backend and we hoped to use that as a
| training set. We could, but we only were able to automate the
| most basic things like reminders, weather, todo lists, daily
| transit, etc
| woojoo666 wrote:
| It's interesting that Mark Zuckerberg saw the transition to
| privacy / private channels back in 2013. From what I remember,
| sharing to your feed, posting to other people's walls, tagging
| each other in images, were all still very popular back then. But
| as Mark Zuckerberg predicted, usage of these features has dropped
| dramatically (at least from what I've seen).
| noodleman wrote:
| He himself was burned by Facebook's privacy settings when
| private photos of him and his then girlfriend were leaked. In
| other photos his laptop has tape over the webcam and
| microphone. He knows why people are privacy advocates. Probably
| moreso than anyone else, given the data he has access to.
|
| Personally, I think it was always a matter of time until this
| sentiement found it's way to the general public.
| pentagrama wrote:
| I'm wondering if now people like Zuckerberg, for communications
| like this, instead of email will be using something with auto-
| delete features to avoid get this messages on the internet in 10
| years.
|
| Do you think that on the time of writing he knows that this can
| be public someday?
|
| This is public because some law force Facebook to give this
| messages to the government and they publish it? Some recipients
| leaked it? FB was hacked?
|
| I get some negative feeling on reading this messages that seems
| to be written as private.
| xmprt wrote:
| Companies aren't allowed to auto delete messages for legal
| reasons. At any point communications can be subpoenaed for a
| lawsuit and companies will have to show them in court and if
| they are caught deleting messages, they could be in even bigger
| trouble if they don't have a legitimate reason for deleting
| them.
| lwhi wrote:
| I've been a victim of this in the past; it's very easy to excited
| about the flavour of your own Kool Aid.
|
| Mark getting excited about using a message to book a restaurant
| seems like a prime example of this.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Many of the ideas he expressed (in terms of interacting with
| businesses) seem to be how WeChat runs, very successfully
| (never used it myself, just based on what I've heard).
| annadane wrote:
| The problem is it's never been his Kool Aid. He stole the Kool
| Aid from multiple other people and is pretending like he
| invented the concept (yes people will now argue you can't steal
| the 'concept' of Kool Aid, and it's about execution; but my
| point stands, other people can't borrow the concept if one
| person pulls the rug out from everyone else) of Kool Aid
| mrkramer wrote:
| Microsoft stole GUI concept from Apple and Apple stole it
| from Xerox. Good artists copy but great artists steal.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Booking a restaurant is generally ok by phone but if you try to
| do it online you often get some crappy random website that's
| different every time. I can imagine a world where you do it by
| some messenger interface which somehow Facebook make hard to
| fuck up for the business. I can imagine that being good, half
| good (I think there are roughly two kinds of booking. One
| starts with criteria about
| date/time/occasion/party/budget/location/cuisine and looks for
| available places and the other starts with a specific
| restaurant with other particulars relatively free. An
| experience might only work well for one), or bad. But it isn't
| obviously bad.
|
| Much as a decentralised Internet has good properties, having
| every small business outsource a nontrivial online presence to
| a bunch of crappy other companies that lack the scale or
| incentives to do well is not one of them.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >Mark getting excited about using a message to book a
| restaurant seems like a prime example of this.
|
| He was basically explaining chat bot/s without knowing it.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| If you read point (4) he clearly did know it, he just saw it
| as a more ambitious and challenging problem.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Chat bots usually are built by the end service, not acting as
| a meta agent.
| xeromal wrote:
| Just tried to paste the content of the tweets, but too long so I
| dropped it in pastebin for anyways who's interested.
|
| https://pastebin.com/e6af5MRv
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Can haz moar weitspaze
|
| https://pastebin.com/raw/TJypYNGQ
| Jaruzel wrote:
| Thank you for that.
|
| Pasting a long document as multiple images via a Twitter thread
| needs to be some sort of punishable crime.
| xeromal wrote:
| Yeah, twitter is definitely not meant for long content!
| dilap wrote:
| > For Messenger, I think differentiation is extremely important
| and something we haven't focused on yet. We've spent the past
| 6-12 months catching up to WhatsApp and competitors on table
| stakes like performance, reliability, pushability, etc. This work
| isn't done and we will continue to do it, including catching up
| in areas like groups.
|
| > But to get people to ditch WhatsApp and switch to Messenger, it
| will never be sufficient to be 10% better than them or add fun
| gimmicks on any existing attribute or feature. We will have to
| offer some new fundamental use case that becomes important to
| people's daily lives.
|
| They never did catch up on table stakes, nor did they discover
| that new fundamental use case. But they had a good fallback plan:
| Just buy WhatsUp.
|
| Bummer for the users, though.
|
| I find myself wishing something along the lines of antitrust was
| enforced more rigorously to help preserve competition.
| root_axis wrote:
| Why was it a bummer for the users?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's telling that Watsup did never "catch up" on performance
| reliability, and pushability. They started top notch on those,
| and if anything, moved down a bit with time.
|
| That's because you simply can't catch up on those. It's not
| something that happens inside the constraints of software
| development. That's why Facebook didn't.
|
| "Catching up" is even a very weird way to say it. That wording
| implies Watsup was a huge entrenched company with a lot of
| resources spent on development, and Facebook was a nimble team
| that was working hard to add enough development effort to be an
| equal.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > Bummer for the users, though.
|
| The game's not over yet. Maybe Meta sells, or is forced sell,
| WhatsApp. Or maybe people move on to the new thing.
| thomasahle wrote:
| > They never did catch up on table stakes
|
| What didn't they catch up on? To me Messenger seems like a
| better user experience than WhatsApp or any of the other three
| messaging clients I need to use.
|
| Indeed WhatsApp is lacking basic functionality like a desktop
| app. Also, a client tied to a phone number may work well for
| some people, but a pain whenever you change your number, and it
| makes discovery of people much harder.
| jowsie wrote:
| WhatsApp has had a desktop app for years.
| neodymiumphish wrote:
| I think they did, just not in the way they expected. They've
| developed a messaging platform where finding the user you want
| to message is handled outside of something as arbitrary and
| transitory as a phone number.
|
| For example, military members (in the US) rely heavily on FB
| Messenger because deployments, short tours, and overseas
| assignments kill the reliability of using a regular phone
| number to maintain contact with friends and family. Messenger
| handles that by connecting via Facebook and maintaining that
| connection regardless of the users' phone numbers or email
| addresses.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| usrusr wrote:
| Bummer for the users?
|
| I'd say Zuckerberg is the clear loser in this story: what could
| be worse than failing to catch up with WhatsApp and discovering
| a new fundamental use case?
|
| Failing, then spending an obscene amount of money on buying
| WhatsApp, then seeing a considerable part of that money
| enabling the Signal Foundation and watching Signal eat up the
| user base of both WhatsApp and the Facebook Messenger. Users
| are fine.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| > watching Signal eat up the user base of both WhatsApp and
| the Facebook Messenger
|
| Is this actually happening or just wishful thinking
| usrusr wrote:
| Definitely happening in my little corner of humanity. Not
| happening as in usage of the Meta messengers has dropped to
| zero, but it's becoming more and more like "funny how this
| group is still on WhatsApp, do they live under a rock?" At
| least FB messenger has a tiny niche left as the way to
| communicate if you are connected on FB but haven't shared
| phone numbers.
| Closi wrote:
| Not happening here in the Uk - the world over here is
| still on WhatsApp.
| simonswords82 wrote:
| Definitely the latter
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| It's definitely happening in some circles. I was quite
| surprised to hear that my dad's reasonably active sibling
| chat group uses Signal, and we're talking about a dozen+
| mostly technologically-inept people aged 40-70.
|
| To give an example of how inept, my dad recently
| discovered that iOS Safari has tabs, and he's had a
| smartphone for close to a decade and uses Safari heavily.
| I have no idea what prompted them to switch away from
| WhatsApp, and before that, GroupMe (which they used for a
| while because it worked through SMS), but they did.
| hbn wrote:
| Telegram has made some impressive strides over the past few
| years (it's quite mainstream as a messaging platform and
| social platform in some countries)
|
| I don't think I'd say the same for Signal though.
| freeflight wrote:
| Bummer for the users who chose WhatsApp over Messenger. Many
| didn't want a company, like Facebook, to have PII on them,
| yet FB just bought it all up pretty much screwing these
| people.
| badkitty99 wrote:
| menzoic wrote:
| They didn't need to since they bought WhatsApp
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > They never did catch up on table stakes,
|
| In what sense? The table stakes of boring functionality seem to
| me to be much better implemented in messenger than whatsapp.
| Everything from a more intuitive UI to a web option is better
| done in messenger.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| My takeaway from this entire post is that Twitter is not
| appropriate for long essays and people need to stop acting like
| it is.
| queuebert wrote:
| Not only that, but a long essay broken up into dozens of
| screenshots of text. Is there a prize for the most bits per
| character?
| a3w wrote:
| TIL Elon Musk goes by the handle of chinchilla2020 on HN. Just
| kidding.
| triyambakam wrote:
| I find it strange that Facebook communicates across the
| company... using Facebook. It doesn't seem like a medium well
| suited for that.
| didip wrote:
| These are all great ideas. Why didn't they implement many of
| these inside Messenger or WhatsApp?
|
| I also wonder why Meta suddenly lost their competitive spirit in
| Messaging space. WA is so behind compared to WeChat/Line/Kakao.
| azinman2 wrote:
| They did try the agent approach, called M. It failed.
|
| It wasn't a meta-agent, however. My guess is people didn't like
| the idea of only sometimes being used if Facebook thought they
| should route to them, no ability to control end user experience
| or brand loyalty, every random service would need to be world
| class at NLP, and other miscellaneous reasons associated with
| being just confined to a simple textual transaction.
|
| There are also probably less examples of this than you'd think
| -- restaurants and movies are 101, but where else does this go?
| Even getting the next obvious thing -- concert tickets - all of
| the sudden requires picking seats, looking at photos of the
| venue, constraining different options, understanding how many
| seats are together, etc. Even with crappy UI of Ticketmaster
| you want the breadth of options and probably to comparison
| shop. Things quickly get out of hand, and unless you trust the
| agent to make decisions for you and explain it's rationale,
| there are better interfaces than just text.
| [deleted]
| qqtt wrote:
| Amazing how wrong Mark was about lots of things related to
| Messenger, and how just two months after this email FB ended up
| paying 20 billion to buy WhatsApp. You get the sense there was a
| real paranoia about WhatsApp being an existential threat but now
| almost a decade later and it's hard to see how FB got a return on
| that 20 billion investment for that particular acquisition.
|
| Also, I find it particularly interesting how Mark is so focused
| on pushing everything into the public "news feed" style sphere,
| and seems to have a kind of wishful thinking involving messaging
| in particular transitioning from a private activity you do with
| your friends to this public bombastic twitter-esque landscape of
| public figures "sending messages" to their followers and removing
| the barriers between those communications and "real"
| communications between your actual friends. He seems to intensely
| believe that this is really the only way to create a giant
| business - essentially destroying and corrupting personal private
| connections to fill your experience with "more engaging" public
| content to keep you addicted to the platform.
|
| Well, especially for chat, that didn't pan out. And now we are
| entering a period where private stories, private communication,
| and meaningful communication matters more - Instagram growth
| falling to single digits and rapidly losing ground to other
| platforms among younger users (a harbinger of things to come) -
| Mark's dogmatic commitment to the alter of public newsfeed
| paradigms has caused almost all his platforms to evolve towards a
| dying entity one by one - all except for, notably, WhatsApp.
|
| One gets the sense that Mark has one trick, and that trick is no
| longer effective at meaningfully growing and positioning FB for
| the future, especially compared to its historical growth rates
| (maybe those were unsustainable anyway).
| queuebert wrote:
| It's almost like he isn't a good businessman and was just at
| the right place at the right time.
|
| I worry that the majority of billionaires were just lucky and
| confused that for skill. Then we give them disproportionate
| influence over society. Basically letting the pigeons drive the
| bus.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Reminds me of Fiddler on the Roof:
|
| The most important men in town would come to fawn on me! They
| would ask me to advise them, Like a Solomon the Wise. "If you
| please, Reb Tevye..." "Pardon me, Reb Tevye..." Posing
| problems that would cross a rabbi's eyes! And it won't make
| one bit of difference if i answer right or wrong. When you're
| rich, they think you really know!
| hbn wrote:
| This was around the era where Snapchat was starting to take
| off, and I think someone real forward-thinking should have seen
| the writing on the wall that young people don't want to be
| doing all of their social interactions in public any more, nor
| do they want their cringey past coming back to haunt them. They
| were on Facebook, and then their moms all joined Facebook. They
| migrated to Instagram, and then Facebook bought it and pushed
| all the moms there too. Snapchat though, has a couple unique
| aspects that I think were critical to its success.
|
| First, all the interactions are built around curating who sees
| it, and keeping things private and temporary. The most public
| thing you can do is post a story, and that's where you send
| stuff that even if your mom adds you, you can keep that in mind
| while sharing to that. But for anything else, you build up a
| list of people who can see your private story, and send it to
| that one. And everything that goes to either of those places is
| gone after 24 hours, which was also not exactly a selling point
| for the older generation that want to use social media as a
| scrapbook.
|
| The other thing is that Snapchat is quite unintuitive and
| confusing to use. I've seen this stated as a criticism, and
| sure you can make it that, but I think that's also part of the
| secret sauce that made it so successful. The way you use the
| app is like its own separate language compared to all social
| media platforms of the past. And that in itself is enough to
| keep older people off of it, who had enough trouble trying to
| figure out Facebook. Plus I think there's some fun and
| engagement to be had when someone says "hey did you know you
| can do this?" and you discover a new feature in the app. I've
| been of the theory that Snapchat keeps itself awkward to use on
| purpose, because it seems legitimately beneficial to keeping
| its user base.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Re your first part, WhatsApp could've expanded out into a full
| social network the same way LINE and WeChat did in Asia. So I
| think Zuck was onto something
|
| Re: the rest: That's an interesting outlook. I wonder if
| younger audiences are more resilient to being tricked into
| trying to compete for "Likes" in a semi-public forum of their
| friends and family..
| annadane wrote:
| Using a spyware VPN called Onavo might not be the same thing
| as 'onto something'
| nowherebeen wrote:
| > WhatsApp could've expanded out into a full social network
| the same way LINE and WeChat did in Asia
|
| That was never going to happen. If you listen to the
| interviews from Brian Action, he wanted WhatsApp to stay
| minimal. He didn't like those other apps that had tons of
| features/ bloat.
| fragmede wrote:
| Acton _left_ Facebook over a dispute in the direction
| Facebook wanted to take WhatsApp. Changing the app 's
| direction after his departure seems like it would have been
| entirely possible.
| zzzoom wrote:
| > it's hard to see how FB got a return on that 20 billion
| investment for that particular acquisition.
|
| In many many countries you can't live without WhatsApp. That
| can't be said about the rest of their apps.
| jorblumesea wrote:
| Back then, everyone was thinking about how to make a super app
| like WeChat. The thinking was that if you hooked everyone on
| some practical application, like chat, you could add in
| banking, lending, games, news, etc. FB sorta did this with FB
| itself to some extent but never completely achieved that super
| app status. Messenger obviously did not, and neither did
| WhatsApp. If someone did do this, they would have achieved
| complete dominance.
|
| That's why it was worth 20B.
| mlom wrote:
| innovation and differentiation are not things i need or want in
| my messaging app, holy cow, i just want to send messages. use a
| standard protocol or write a new one, i don't care, but the
| problem you are solving is SENDING MESSAGES TO A KNOWN USER.
| write a protocol, document it, and let the client handle the
| rest. omg. grow up
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| Where are the messenger platforms ideas?? The next mails are
| missing :(
| sz4kerto wrote:
| They're in the following tweets. E.g.
| https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1528063317041766400
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| twitter is one of the worst thing that happened to humanity
| viksit wrote:
| It feels like the thrust here was to merge the concept of
| "community engagement" with "messaging".
|
| Public conversations vs private conversations.
|
| The challenge I see is that users don't want to mix the two - I
| imagine a version of "newsfeed meets google reader" (aka twitter)
| being very different from "messages to macys or my friends".
|
| The incentive he's creating for people to move to messenger seems
| to be "combine everything" vs "focus", which ultimately failed.
| Instead it was instagram that propelled that to the detriment of
| messenger.
| blindseer wrote:
| I think a lot of tech companies / products at tech companies,
| (e.g. Netflix, YouTube, Messenger) fundamentally get one thing
| wrong. They don't "value" the user's time and drive for *maximum*
| engagement. Maybe the problem is that there's a new sucker born
| everyday, but I despise using Netflix and YouTube, and I use them
| only because I have to.
|
| With Messenger specifically, I absolutely don't want to spend
| quality time with someone communicating over a digital device.
| I'd much rather just use it to make plans with the person I want
| to hang out with.
|
| And when I am making plans to spend time with a significant
| other, if I made a request to a service for "buying two tickets
| for hunger games at 9pm" and it returned a message saying "I can
| get you two tickets for shoreline at 9:10pm", I'd want to throw
| my phone into the ocean. I'd feel differently if I said "buy two
| tickets to any movie at 9pm", that'd be a completely different
| story.
|
| This is the same problem with YouTube. If you've recently
| subscribed to a user, or watched one of their videos for the
| first time, and then make a search for something completely
| different, one of a first few results will be a video of the user
| you initially interacted with. It is SUCH a bonkers user
| experience for me and I want to never give YouTube any
| information about myself for recommendations just because of
| that.
|
| These platforms / products should be just services. Give the user
| enough information to make the decision themselves, and help them
| make the best decision with the most accurate and pertinent
| information. I hate that these products shove content into your
| face.
|
| Anyone else feel like the golden age of internet services is
| behind us, and this shitty version is the only path ahead of us?
| screye wrote:
| > fundamentally get one thing wrong
|
| I don't think they do.
|
| The user is the person who consumes your product and gives you
| money for it. 'End users' are hostages. The real user is the
| ad-company. Once your product is feature complete, your ability
| to make money from the product doesn't scale with the technical
| quality of the product itself.
|
| Facebook cares about making money. Period. Zuck's emails
| clearly show that his eyes are pointed at the exact point where
| some form of advertisements can be brought into the messenger
| platform. (indirectly through new feed in this case)
|
| Youtube tried to sell people a subscription model, and most
| users do not want to pay the kind of money that youtube would
| lose by allowing them to avoid ads and low-quality content
| wormholes.
|
| Netflix has an entirely different problem all together. It is a
| bunch of mega companies burning capital faster than it can be
| replenished, hoping to win the 'streaming' game. Unfortunately
| for Netflix, Disney practically has a warchest ready to go at
| all times.
|
| Funny thing is, eventually a product comes along that provides
| the same value to the 'end user', without all the baggage of
| the 'money making' service. This is usually the point of exodus
| (digg/orkut/myspace) or acquire. (whatsapp)
| bsedlm wrote:
| I feel as though you're just being nitpicky for the sake of
| missing the point.
|
| the overarching issue is that this " 'End users' are
| hostages. The real user is the ad-company" is a terrible
| problem which needs to be addressed, and politicians and
| other elites are terribly failing to do this in the west.
|
| > _Facebook cares about making money. Period._
|
| you misspelled "every modern corporation"
|
| all this to try to highlight how there's a problem here, and
| there seems to be a failure of society at large in the
| capability to deal with it.
| amelius wrote:
| > The user is the person who consumes your product and gives
| you money for it. 'End users' are hostages. The real user is
| the ad-company. Once your product is feature complete, your
| ability to make money from the product doesn't scale with the
| technical quality of the product itself.
|
| Clearly this is not what society wants, and it would be great
| if there was a law against this business model (at least
| until there are plenty of competitors who behave better).
| V-2 wrote:
| I actually like the YouTube recommendation system. It manages
| to pleasantly surprise me pretty often. I don't have
| significant privacy concerns about it - the stuff I enjoy on YT
| is quite aligned with my public persona, so to speak. I'm not
| disclosing anything that I don't already disclose to the outer
| world.
| V-2 wrote:
| And furthermore, "bare" YouTube experience (what type of
| stuff they promote on their front page when it's not
| customized by my recommendations - basically what I see when
| I'm not logged in) is truly nauseating to me.
| civilized wrote:
| Same as it ever was, I suspect. Why do all parents know in
| their bones that TV is kind of bad and they should limit their
| kids' consumption of it?
|
| It sucks that a lot of problems are very old and just keep
| manifesting in different ways. But the flip side is the
| strategies for resisting are also old and well-known.
| MandieD wrote:
| My toddler is unaware that there is a whole world of video
| content made just for him - as far as he knows, the only
| videos that exist are nature documentary clips, cooking
| shows, church services and tech conference talks.
|
| I know that as soon as some of his daycare classmates can
| really start talking, the veil will be pierced and he'll be
| begging to see (judging by said classmates' t-shirts and
| backpacks) Paw Patrol, Peppa Pig and Frozen.
|
| And I'm not sure how we're going to deal with that.
| civilized wrote:
| Probably time limits.
| Robin_Message wrote:
| N.B. that shoreline is a cinema local to silicon valley, not a
| different movie.
| vmladenov wrote:
| > if I made a request to a service for "buying two tickets for
| hunger games at 9pm" and it returned a message saying "I can
| get you two tickets for shoreline at 9:10pm", I'd want to throw
| my phone into the ocean.
|
| I'm sorry, I don't understand your point here. You asked for 9
| and it gave you an option of 9:10 at the Shoreline theater by
| the Googleplex. That's usually the most common spot in this
| area. Are you saying it's the wrong location for you?
| sophiebits wrote:
| To be clear, "at Shoreline" refers to a specific movie theater
| (probably the Century Cinema on Shoreline Blvd in Mountain
| View), not a different movie.
| blindseer wrote:
| Ah, my bad. I read that section three times and still missed
| that, and feel quite dumb now.
| tqi wrote:
| I think the lesson here is not that you misunderstood
| (which is completely understandable, no reason you should
| know the name of a local theater) but rather that it's
| never a good idea to assume the worst reading of a
| situation.
| darkerside wrote:
| And also that a movie messenger app might need to be
| smart enough to know if you know all the local movie
| theaters?
| [deleted]
| raverbashing wrote:
| Closer to Google HQ than FB HQ for extra irony
| foolfoolz wrote:
| closest venue to where zuckerberg lives
| onetimeusename wrote:
| yes. The YouTube results are horrendous. I get a mix of things
| unrelated to my search that YouTube wants me to look at and a
| mix of related things and what feels like a never ending loop
| through some other material.
|
| Older videos can be very hard to find at times. I sometimes use
| a regular search engine to try to get to it.
|
| This probably isn't because of bad technology though, although
| that is possible. I suspect it is part of a revenue maximizing
| strategy, like you implied about them not valuing user time, to
| get users to focus on viral content to drive engagement
| (addiction) and highly monetized content. But it could be
| because of poor machine learning models I just suspect it's a
| new type of dark pattern.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| > Anyone else feel like the golden age of internet services is
| behind us, and this shitty version is the only path ahead of
| us?
|
| Kind of.
|
| But I also use Fastmail. And Fastmail is shockingly,
| mindboggling good.
|
| And I basically have the tools I need to work from home in
| perpetuity. While I have lots of things to critique about Slack
| or Google Docs, I don't have to spend an hour or more a day in
| traffic anymore, so that's cool. Also Video chat actually works
| now, which is crazy if you think about it.
|
| I just bought an album from an obscure artist off Bandcamp. It
| was seamless. And it comes in FLAC if that's your jam.
|
| Speaking of which I've been meaning to run to a neighborhood
| bakery today and it took 3 seconds to confirm they're still
| open.
|
| Is the party over? Actually, I'm not sure.
|
| Social media has run its course and it's awful. But social
| media is not and never has been the web, despite their power
| grabs.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| > Social media has run its course and it's awful. But social
| media is not and never has been the web, despite their power
| grabs.
|
| Is this really true? I feel like there are some good social
| media sites still out there, like certain small parts of
| reddit and this website we're both commenting on.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| /me nods while switching from Safari to TikTok
|
| According to Screen Time, I spend five times longer on TikTok
| than Safari. HN comes in at just 39 minutes over the last
| week. The two possibilities are that I'm consumed by the
| social media cycle, or that I learn more from TikTok than any
| other source. Since I love learning, empirically social media
| seems to be the web.
|
| Don't slay the messenger; I'm just as nervous about this as
| you. But we've all seen what happens to those who cling to
| old trends, hoping the golden ages will return. It rarely
| goes well.
|
| For evidence, I flicked through about ten nonsense videos
| just now before landing on this gem:
| https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTdtq8Mmc/?k=1
|
| I like the web. It has its purpose. But one could also say
| it's served its purpose. The power grab exists because it
| wasn't serving a very real gap in the transmission of
| knowledge.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| I agree. I think it's fair to say the entertainment/time-
| vortex/scrolling element of the web more or less moved on
| from the open web to mobile apps etc a long time ago and
| there's no reason to think it will come back. I'm not even
| on tiktok, but there's nothing open web about my Apple TV
| either.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| If you'd like to give it a try, I'm currently watching a
| lovely stream where an Irish artist is drawing a pug.
| https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTdtqCc7E/
|
| The smaller streams seem to be the most interesting,
| which is sort of the inverse of twitch. Where else can
| you pass the time while seeing an artist at work?
|
| The history content was the real surprise. I was glued to
| the history channel as a kid, and watching its demise was
| a sad point in life. But it seems to be reviving itself
| in an ad hoc way; there are dozens of channels that go
| into detail about topics I'd never heard of.
| catflop wrote:
| You doxxed yourself sharing that tiktok link.
| rakamotog wrote:
| +1 |or that I learn more from TikTok than any other source
|
| You learn from TikTok, for me thats the place to see hot
| girls(arbitrary).
|
| But,
|
| |empirically social media seems to be the web. '
|
| is true.
|
| Learn has such positive connotation and I want to highlight
| how a sentence with a not so positive connotation looks
| like.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| The key is to use the "not interested" button. You have
| to long press on a video. They make it hard to discover,
| and it's the only way to get away from the phenomenon you
| pointed out. Takes maybe 30 minutes of tuning, and I'm
| also convinced that yesterday's "not interested" presses
| inform the content that shows up today, so give it a bit
| of time. But it's hard to gauge how any of these black
| boxes work.
| ravenstine wrote:
| > This is the same problem with YouTube. If you've recently
| subscribed to a user, or watched one of their videos for the
| first time, and then make a search for something completely
| different, one of a first few results will be a video of the
| user you initially interacted with. It is SUCH a bonkers user
| experience for me and I want to never give YouTube any
| information about myself for recommendations just because of
| that.
|
| YouTube's recommendation system has been terribly broken for me
| for years.
|
| I used to occasionally watch Lex Fridman's show casually, but
| now I despise it because it's all that YouTube's autoplay and
| homepage steers me towards. I guaran-fooking-tee you that I can
| fall asleep to Spongebob Squarepants clips and wake up in the
| morning to Lex's monotone voice... _every single time_.
|
| Worst yet, it doesn't even do much to show me episodes I
| haven't watched yet. It replays the same ones countless numbers
| of times.
|
| Thing is, I _do_ want to watch _some_ of Lex 's episodes when
| they come out, so unsubscribing isn't a good answer. I've tried
| telling YouTube to "show me less of this" or whatever the
| equivalent option is, and it doesn't get the clue that it's
| overwhelming me.
|
| People wonder why I'm such a pessimist about Silicon Valley and
| the world of software engineering despite that I'm a
| programmer. UX patterns such as those found on YouTube and The
| Google are the opposite of excellence. Either they lack
| competence or they are specifically designed to waste your
| time.
|
| I don't even buy the notion that "most users don't care."
| People in my life who aren't technologists complain about tech
| _all the time_.
| narag wrote:
| _Anyone else feel like the golden age of internet services is
| behind us, and this shitty version is the only path ahead of
| us?_
|
| I have this theory, for a long time, that a lot of what sucks
| in computing is simply because at some moment it was the only
| thing that worked at certain scale.
|
| Computing is said to be the second industrial revolution and
| therefore there is an overwhelming force to adopt whatever
| already works, no matter how much it sucks.
|
| Later, inertia keeps the sucking solution for longer that it
| would stand on its own, until someone manages to put something
| obviously better in the market.
|
| Some day recomendation systems will stop sucking. Meanwhile,
| take them for what they are.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| I worry that it's an inevitable outcome of capitalization
| akin to what I think we've seen in physical goods:
|
| Stage 1: make crappy products because you don't know better
|
| Stage 2: make quality products because now you can
|
| Stage 3: realize that you can make more money by making your
| product cheaper. Outsource the labor, turn the metal into
| plastic. People won't even mind if it breaks if they can just
| get another one. In fact, why not _design_ it to eventually
| break so you can sell even more?
|
| Stage 4: realize you can make even more money by turning your
| product into a service with app integration
|
| And it's difficult to go back to a previous Stage because
| you'll always lose, like trying to un-invent gunpowder
| weapons. From the perspective of a consumer who cares and
| wants Stage 2 products, the system's decayed to maximum
| entropy; the forest is gone; all the trees have been chopped
| down; the soil's depleted. :C
| Spooky23 wrote:
| My favorite example of this is the "whirly pop", which is a
| stovetop popcorn maker with a little device for stirring
| the popcorn kernels. They did the MBA thing and slowly
| chipped away at the cost, to the point that the lid is a
| piece of aluminum equivalent to 3 sheets of foil. It's non-
| functional and possibly dangerous - but still $30 at
| Walmart.
|
| The twist is they did go back - you can buy something
| closer to the 1990 version at Williams Sonoma, except it's
| $90.
| darkerside wrote:
| This is just how we've fought inflation for many years.
| Things have gotten more accessible, not by accident, but
| through innovation. And, if your want to pay for quality,
| you typically still can. Seems like the best of both
| worlds.
|
| Oh, I'm sorry, did you want to get all the quality but at
| the low-ball price? Doesn't work that way.
|
| (Not intending to direct this at you specifically spooky.
| Just hammering your point home for parent poster.)
| pm90 wrote:
| As a counterpoint international calling/messaging has
| become free and of much better quality.
| xmprt wrote:
| > Did you want to get all the quality but at the low-ball
| price? Doesn't work that way.
|
| This is patently false. Look at innovation in things like
| TVs and personal computers. Technology has gotten
| significantly cheaper and significantly better quality
| (although TVs have started to decline in recent years).
|
| I understand your sentiment but I don't think it's
| impossible to ask for innovation to allow old products to
| be created cheaper without compromising on quality.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I think you're just getting old. It happens.
|
| Personally, DMs are the only real thing in my life. Everything
| else feels artificial. You even set aside time to go see your
| parents, and make plans to go on vacation.
|
| DMs are where the magic is. Even HN comments are starting to
| lose the feeling, but it's probably because I'm getting old.
| Flankk wrote:
| It's not a getting old thing. Corporations ruin everything.
| Maximizing revenue at the expense of everything else has its
| cost.
| [deleted]
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Is there an alternative?
|
| It's true that in a thousand years, the systems that exist
| today are likely not going to be those of the next
| millennia.
|
| But it's also true that the incentives of society change
| very, very slowly. And right now the most impactful work
| seems to be done by politicians and corporations.
|
| Which means the ambitious will always be attracted to
| those, like flies to sunlight.
|
| I just don't see the point in even recognizing these
| truths, let alone trying to change them. There's nothing
| --- nothing --- that you or I can do about it. Not even YC
| could. They sailed with the wind, not against it.
|
| The most we can do seems to be to maximize our own
| individual happiness.
|
| Speaking of happiness, dear readers, remember that 35 is
| middle age. Working until you're 60 is the biggest
| corporate triumph of them all. Do the things you want
| before you retire.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Is there an alternative?
|
| Yes, make the markets competitive.
| nichos wrote:
| Competition comes from corporations and start ups.
| pm90 wrote:
| And what makes it possible for lots of startups to exist?
| What makes it possible for upstarts to rapidly rise and
| replace an incumbent?
|
| Todays Big Tech replaced the earlier generation. But the
| markets have been so thoroughly captured that it seems
| impossible for any startup to replace Meta or Apple or
| Google. Netflix is struggling not against another startup
| but industry incumbents replicating its technology.
|
| Until the markets get competitive again, there won't be
| much innovation domestically. TikTok should have shocked
| the entire US tech industry but rather than try to come
| up with better products the Tech industry tried to
| dismember the company and gobble up its US assets ( a
| process that stopped only because of a change in
| administration).
| tonguez wrote:
| the alternative is humans decide to invest their energy
| in improving the quality of life of other humans instead
| of pure (financial) domination
| papito wrote:
| Not revenue. "Shareholder VALUE".
| Spooky23 wrote:
| There is a small cohort of people, 40-48 years old, who
| experienced the ideal of instant messengers in the late 90s
| to circa 2005.
|
| After that, everything in the unified/personal communications
| space got technically better but worse.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I exclusively used MSN Messenger in my elementary and high
| school days (which admittedly straddles 2005).
|
| I can't say that an unbloated app like Signal is a
| fundamentally different experience except for some of the
| deficiencies that've been ironed out (better file/image
| sharing is one that certainly comes to mind).
|
| I'm open to being wrong on this point though!
|
| EDIT: Actually, you can add Discord/Signal/Telegram to
| Pidgin for the throwback UI.
|
| https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/ThirdPartyPlugins
| Fargoan wrote:
| I'm 34 and my whole school was on MSN Messenger from 5th
| grade until senior year. Even into college a lot of friends
| were on MSN until Facebook really started catching on.
| That's my experience from rural North Dakota.
| nunez wrote:
| Small? Basically everyone born in the late-80s/early-90s
| used AIM, ICQ, or MSN Messenger when they got into high
| school or college.
|
| That's an entire generation!
|
| I agree that classic IM was best IM, though. Unfortunately
| you can't make money on IM alone, and AOL isn't the portal
| of choice anymore. (Google was so close with Hangouts!)
| markb139 wrote:
| We had instant messaging in the 80's at college on a VAX.
| Admittedly only 8 people in any one chat.
| kortilla wrote:
| Agree but you did the math wrong. Teenagers in 2005 were
| all over instant messengers and they would only be 30s.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| They were, but at that point it was a truly mass market.
| I poorly expressed the population that I was trying to
| describe.
|
| Circa 1999-2000, you could IM random ICQ users and they
| were not 100% dickpic creeps. It was almost like a pre-
| AOL internet for people in the know.
| eastbound wrote:
| I remember! Selecting profiles on ICQ as if on a dating
| website, and talking with someone in China! No dickpic,
| just naive remote friendship, well in fact he did fall in
| love with me but... wait was it _only_ because we had no
| numeric cameras at the time?
| csallen wrote:
| I'm 34 and all my friends were using AIM in middle school
| back in 1999
| natly wrote:
| I really doubt young people don't resonante with this
| message.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Unfortunately I can attest to the fact that chat apps is
| where it's at. I personally would much rather make plans in
| person but it's hard to get anyone to do anything,
| especially now. One of my friends jokes that COVID turned
| us all into "online friends" which is just a little too
| true to be really funny.
| kvathupo wrote:
| I'd disagree with the characterization that Facebook is
| maximizing user engagement with messenger. Rather, they wanted
| messenger to
|
| 1. Be the de facto protocol used by companies
|
| 2. Let people spend less time on messenger, and render planning
| of events efficient
|
| For point 1, this is evident with the mention of the Facebook
| SDK being used by many apps, thereby rendering the adoption of
| a messenger API easy. I find the timing of these emails __very
| coincidental__ since Facebook recently announced an API for
| WhatsApp that effectively achieves "app-to-person messages"
| [1]. Based off rapper Ryan Leslie's great success with
| automating consumer engagement [2], I think this will succeed
| given a right signal-to-noise balance (also mentioned in the
| emails!). That said, interesting __anti-trust questions__ also
| arise, see Twilio, SuperPhone, etc.
|
| For point 2, I frankly welcome messenger facilitating the
| planning of vacations/outings. It's very common for people my
| age to say "let's hang out" or "let's go to this concert", yet
| no one wants to spend the time to plan it. If my non-vacation-
| planning messages can be hermetically demarcated from every
| advertiser's eyes, then I wouldn't mind this addition.
|
| Relevant Note: This comes from the perspective of a Gen-Z
| denizen.
|
| [1] -
| https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/pfbid0TGYGr4hijxJdL9CawU...
|
| [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PtyXnFVNDw
|
| P.S. As an aside, it would be interesting to see the
| implementation of a cryptocurrency to reward users for engaging
| with ads. I conjectured this was the purpose behind the ill-
| fated Libra coin. That said, it's not immediately clear how
| proof-of-work would be implemented, or if blockchain would be
| needed at all.
| [deleted]
| nicbou wrote:
| Yes I wish that more software (and hardware) focused on being
| good tools. I should use software to achieve my ends, not the
| inverse.
|
| Accept my input, produce the output I need, and do it with as
| little friction as possible. Don't assume what I want, and
| definitely don't shove it down my throat.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| > _With Messenger specifically, . . . I 'd much rather just use
| it to make plans with the person I want to hang out with._
|
| Same. I'd much rather tell them to download Discord, add me,
| and then we talk on there. Why are we talking over an inferior
| IM platform?
| mindcrime wrote:
| Then use Discord to tell them to download an XMPP client and
| join a real IM platform that isn't some vendor's proprietary,
| inferior, walled-garden B.S.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| One can dream. :`)
|
| Matrix IMs like Element look cool, but feature parity and
| usability seem far away...
|
| Fat-client P2P IMs like WLM died because there was no
| business model, but there's not even much of one in thin-
| client ones like Discord (which I praise for refusing to be
| bought by Microsoft).
|
| It seems like a market failure thing perfect for an open
| source solution, but alas.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| paulcole wrote:
| > With Messenger specifically, I absolutely don't want to...
|
| The big issues with a proclamation like this are:
|
| 1. You're 1 person and you have to recognize you don't speak
| for anyone other than yourself.
|
| 2. The things people say they don't want to do and what they
| actually don't do are often surprisingly different.
| bozhark wrote:
| Found the FB dev
|
| edit: take your own advice
| neodymiumphish wrote:
| That's nonsense. First, he never spoke for anyone else.
| Second, ask any expert in econometrics; they'll tell you
| he's correct.
|
| Also, it's obvious he's right just based on Facebook's
| interest in Messenger. Otherwise, they'd just work on
| implementing functionality to manage scheduling and meeting
| with friends in person and never develop all their
| extraneous Messenger features to begin with.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| I know you don't realize this, and you think you're a
| legitimately good person. But you're basically saying "We
| know you better than you know yourself, and we're going to
| manipulate you into pissing away as much time and energy on
| our platform as possible because we can"
| reaperducer wrote:
| I hate Facebook as much as the next guy, but this part is
| correct:
|
| _The things people say they don't want to do and what they
| actually don't do are often surprisingly different_
|
| When television ratings measurement started moving from
| people writing down their viewing habits in a diary to
| automated system measuring what they were actually
| watching, suddenly "PBS" ratings tanked, and have stayed
| down in automated measurements.
|
| The same thing happened in radio. People would write down
| that they listen to whatever station was trendy, or cool,
| or advertised the most. But when Portable People Meters
| became a thing, we found out that people listen to a little
| bit from all different kinds of radio stations.
|
| People are sometimes untruthful. Even when they're assured
| of anonymity.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| There is a third interpretation I'd like to posit starting
| from the oft-quoted phrase "Know thyself." One, it implies
| that knowing thyself isn't a guaranteed ability - it takes
| effort for example. Furthermore, we can without difficulty
| agree that knowing thyself has degrees, dimension, and
| quality.
|
| So what then, if someone does not know thyself in some way?
| They leave open the possibility to have others define them,
| take advantage of them, and influence one's agency. This
| doesn't exclude the possibly of someone knowing something
| about you better than you know, only to say that maligned
| agents can capitalize on one's lack of self-knowing.
|
| We can then extend the original quote in this specific
| content to "Know yourself so that you alone can define your
| agency." This extension allows for nuance in
| epistemological introspection and accounts for inter-
| subjective manipulation.
| civilized wrote:
| What people ideally want to do and what they actually do are
| different, yes, but that doesn't mean it's moral or good to
| disregard what they ideally want.
|
| If a heroin user wants to get clean, and you are the dealer,
| it is not okay to say "sure, you say that, but you keep
| coming back to me". It is morally monstrous.
| baisq wrote:
| >2. The things people say they don't want to do and what they
| actually don't do are often surprisingly different.
|
| Personally I find recommendation engines abhorrent. And
| still, when a recommendation engine works well for me, I am
| pleasantly surprised and happy with the product.
| bozhark wrote:
| Market utilization. We must change the rules to change the
| game.
| Lammy wrote:
| The WhatsApp situation was a huge driver behind Facebook's 2013
| acquisition of Onavo.
|
| FB first positioned Onavo as an "Opera Mini"-like data-
| compressing VPN for people with mobile data caps, later as "Onavo
| Protect" so they could scare people into installing it with the
| threat of the big bad open Internet, and lastly as "Facebook
| Research".
|
| It gave FB five years of passive market research data so they
| could identify and acquire (or clone) popular new apps before
| they could grow into WhatsApp-sized competitors. Think of all the
| Snapchat-like features that appeared in Instagram around this
| time, for example, after they failed to directly clone Snapchat
| as "Slingshot".
|
| The data from Onavo was so strategically-important that FB were
| willing to pay teenagers to install it and burned their
| Enterprise iOS cert doing so:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-acquires-onavo-for-...
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/21/facebook-removes-onavo/
| snowwrestler wrote:
| It's funny to read this now; I remember a big surge of excitement
| about Facebook chat bots among organizations. It was going to be
| a cool new way to engage followers on Facebook: they could
| message your org as if it were a person, and a bot would
| immediately handle the most common requests. FB even started
| putting a little score near the message button on pages for how
| fast replies happened. (Still there, last I checked.)
|
| The excitement faded pretty quickly once folks realized that it
| was just a FB chat version of an automated phone menu. We know
| how popular those are. I don't think it ever caught on with
| users, at least among the orgs I'm aware of.
| pull_my_finger wrote:
| They may be more popular outside the US. Where I am a lot of
| big businesses still use facebook for their online presence,
| and use those very annoying chat bots as their support
| gateways. Really frustrating as a user, but that's the state of
| things where I am.
| mjr00 wrote:
| Chat bots are definitely still a big thing, but the value
| proposition has completely flipped.
|
| Zuckerberg (and others) were pushing an experience for _the
| user_ , where they'd be delighted by interacting with a
| humanlike support bot that could interpret their human
| request. The value would come from additional user engagement
| with the platform, and therefore ad revenue.
|
| In reality, chat bots are a cost optimization technique for
| _businesses_ , where they save money by paying support bot
| services in exchange for reduced support staff. Still making
| money for someone, but they're nearly universally a worse
| experience for the end user, and certainly not a reason why
| users would engage with the FB platform.
| xmprt wrote:
| On the contrary, I've had much better experiences with chat
| bots than I have had speaking with customer support on the
| phone. With a chat bot, I can wait for a response and be
| notified immediately. I wouldn't even mind if they took
| multiple hours to fulfill my request. Staying on hold on
| the phone for even 5 minutes feels like hell.
| azinman2 wrote:
| But why not just an app that isn't confined to just text?
| akyu wrote:
| Interesting to get an more raw insight into Mark's thinking. In
| some ways its insightful and prescient, but also feels like there
| is desperation and a kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall and
| seeing what sticks. I suppose Facebook has/had the resources to
| do plenty of spaghetti throwing though.
|
| Another observation is that this would have been the moment for
| Facebook to lean into short video content a la TikTok. But it
| seems like the video content is just an after thought for Zuck.
| Hindsight is 20/20 I suppose, but its interesting that they
| almost got there. Vine already existed at this point and I guess
| Zuck did not view it as a threat. Perhaps that's one downside of
| the "defensibility" mindset that seems to pervade this writing
| and most of the ideas. I get the sense that this is Zuck
| responding to competitors, and not really crafting a unique
| vision for Facebook as its own entity.
| DLay wrote:
| He didn't launch a competitor, but Zuckerberg approved the
| blocking of Vine's API access to find Facebook friends a few
| days after it launched.
|
| TikTok must have paid a pretty penny to have access to it
| today.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| > "[...] if we had gotten the quality balance right _and not
| repeatedly thrashed our ecosystem_ [...] "
|
| I'm choosing to believe even in 2013 this was referring to
| Google's messaging strategy.
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