[HN Gopher] Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over
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Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over
Author : FinnLobsien
Score : 374 points
Date : 2025-04-24 08:19 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| ColinWright wrote:
| From the article:
|
| _" The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in
| "the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world
| and discovering what's going on." This under-recognized shift
| away from interpersonal communication has been measured by the
| company itself. During the defense's opening statement, Meta
| displayed a chart showing that the "percent of time spent viewing
| content posted by 'friends' " has declined in the past two years,
| from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and
| from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram."_
|
| So they algorithmically force various other posts into your feed,
| and then observe that people are spending more time looking at
| that crap and less time actually connecting with real people and
| friends.
|
| Colour me unsurprised.
| vseplet wrote:
| Yes, they themselves are making more and more efforts to
| isolate each individual user. Facebook or VK - but the essence
| is the same
| d13z wrote:
| Very true and I think is part of their business model. A more
| lonely/isolated user is more likely to buy stuff to soothe
| themselves thus clicking in the advertisements they show.
| troupo wrote:
| Not just theirs.
|
| The recent Switch 2 ad with Paul Rudd replaced friends coming
| to join him with tiny images on screen, leaving him utterly
| alone.
|
| Or the Apple "Intelligence" ads that insist on never having
| any human-to-human communication (let an AI send that letter
| to mom) etc.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Yes, I read that quote in befuddlement.
|
| The only things I _want_ to see are my family and friends, but
| Zuck keeps shoving softcore porn into my feed.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| you could just delete your accounts. i find that my family
| and friends still seek out connection and interactions with
| me, as i do them, even without some sort of computational
| facilitator like instagram.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Easy Asian countries still appear to be heavy FB users even
| among Millennials. Most of my family is there so it is how
| I keep tabs on them.
| grugagag wrote:
| Don't be surprised if your family gets radicalized with
| some idea they were against just a generation ago.
| Facebook and social media is so many bad things at the
| same time: propaganda, surveilance, consumerism,
| deception, addiction, and complete isolation from one
| another. I find social media responsible for a lot of
| modern ills in our society.
| tboyd47 wrote:
| Net neutrality is not a thing there and telcos usually
| offer free GBs of FB/TikTok access.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| IG has slowly become a gateway to OF hasn't it?
| martin_a wrote:
| My recommendations are _full_ of girls with very few
| clothes on doing sports, showcasing outfits and whatnot. IG
| is just broken at this point.
| netsharc wrote:
| But is it not observing what grabs your attention, and
| then serving you more of it? ;-)
|
| I get what you're getting too, also wall-of-texts multi-
| image posts, often content reposted from reddit, I guess
| the algorithm thinks "Oh, user is engaged for many
| seconds with all the images on posts like this, gotta
| serve them more of them!".
|
| I've programmed Tasker to kill Instagram after a minute
| of me opening it and I've made another Tasker script that
| asks me to input a 9-digit random number, makes me wait
| between 5-45 seconds and then allows me 10 minutes of the
| app before making me do the whole process again.
| martin_a wrote:
| Women with few clothes (sadly) always grab my attention,
| yes. But I think that content is also being pushed
| despite my attention to other things because it works in
| general.
|
| But you get the point, the recommendations are just a
| stream of nonsense-content, screenshots of screenshots of
| Reddit posts...
|
| I don't get it. Either there's no good, original content
| available out there or the algorithm just doesn't want to
| show it.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > But is it not observing what grabs your attention, and
| then serving you more of it?
|
| I'm reasonably certain clicking into a piece of content
| to block the account still counts as more engagement for
| that _type_ of content. They don 't seem to have a
| "clicked, then immediately blocked" sort of signal.
| vlachen wrote:
| There is a workaround to clean up IG: I only use the
| browser to view it, even on mobile, and I use Firefox +
| uBlock Origin and the following filter:
|
| www.instagram.com##article:has-text(Suggested for
| you):style(visibility: hidden !important; height: 300px
| !important; overflow: hidden !important)
| Pxtl wrote:
| Whenever using a Meta product I have to be hyper-aware of
| what i stop scrolling on or click on, because Meta is all
| about "revealed preference" instead of what I explicitly
| tell them I follow and like.
|
| IE: Don't let your eyes linger on eyecandy on Meta's
| platforms or they will feed you a firehose of horny slop.
| cg5280 wrote:
| If you don't look at those posts (and even flag one as
| "not interested" when it pops up) they go away pretty
| quickly.
| kodt wrote:
| Flagging them will clean it up for a while, but I find
| eventually it will show you a few more here and there. If
| you stop scrolling and ogle for a little bit then it
| starts feeding you more again.
| simion314 wrote:
| >If you don't look at those posts (and even flag one as
| "not interested" when it pops up) they go away pretty
| quickly.
|
| this is broken, I get stupid posts with same image, about
| body parts and english words for them, I marked it as not
| interested at least 3 times, but it appears again and
| again from other poster . So FB is incapable to now show
| me the exact same thing over and over again despite me
| telling them 3 times I am not interested.
|
| Also I doing some math stuff with my son so now I am
| getting images with math in them, tracking really works
| mrweasel wrote:
| > IG is just broken at this point.
|
| It's all broken because the incentives are all broken.
| Everything is optimized for maximum profit through
| maximum screen time and maximum ad impressions.
|
| If anything the online advertisement industry has shown
| that it cannot be trusted as a means to support
| businesses while having those businesses provide a
| healthy, no addictive, worth having product.
|
| Would it truly hurt Facebook, Google or YouTube to make
| less money. Many companies could provide better
| solutions, if they where happy with less profit.
| iamcalledrob wrote:
| I'd bet that this is ultimately about people's preferences for
| consuming content, unfortunately.
|
| People will _say_ they only want content from friends, just as
| they _say_ they want to eat healthily. But the desire and the
| reality end up looking very different.
|
| People at large will spend time in whatever surfaces are the
| most engaging (~addictive), and if a platform like Facebook
| removed those "other posts", it's likely that people would just
| spend time on another platform instead -- TikTok, Reddit,
| YouTube Shorts, etc...
|
| It's like if the #1 grocery chain removed all the addictive
| stuff. No junk food, no soda, no alcohol. In the short term,
| people might consume less bad stuff. But in the long run, the
| #2 chain would take over, and we'd be back where we started.
|
| I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it's a very tricky
| problem to tackle at scale.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| > It's like if the #1 grocery chain removed all the addictive
| stuff. No junk food, no soda, no alcohol. In the short term,
| people might consume less bad stuff. But in the long run, the
| #2 chain would take over, and we'd be back where we started.
|
| What you are observing is a case where market signals result
| in obviously undesirable outcomes. The problem cannot be
| solved from within the market, the market's signaling needs a
| tweak. In the case of this example, a tweak to bring
| purchasing behavior inline with what people _want_ to be
| buying in the long term, what they know is good for them.
| This could be achieved by mandating some form of friction in
| buying unhealthy food. Banning outright tends to go poorly,
| but friction has seen great success, like with smoking.
|
| I'm not sure exactly what this looks like for social media,
| or if it's even a necessary form of action (would banning
| surveillance-based advertising kill feed-driven platforms as
| a side effect?) but as you say, the market will not resolve
| this even if an industry leader tries to do the right thing.
| rightbyte wrote:
| There is a good reason I don't stock my freezer with
| microwave pizza.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > People will say they only want content from friends
|
| I actually don't want content from friends, at least not in
| the way Facebook presented it before becoming another TikTok.
|
| Facebook showed me the worst of my friends: polarizing
| political opinions, viral marketing, etc... These come from
| really nice people in real life, but it looks like Facebook
| is trying its best to make me hate my friends, it almost
| succeeded at one point. Thankfully, we met some time later,
| didn't talk about all the crap he posted on Facebook, it and
| was all fine.
|
| I'd rather hate on public personalities and other
| "influencers", at least, no friendship is harmed doing that.
|
| The only thing I miss about Facebook is the "event" part. If
| you want to invite some friends for a party, you could just
| create an event and because almost everyone was on Facebook,
| it made knowing who came and who didn't, who brings what,
| etc...
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| Exactly. If people weren't liking it, it wouldn't be
| successful. The point of these apps has become to be the
| thing you do when you're slightly bored and want to
| experience that's not the line at the deli counter, subway
| ride to work or sitting on the toilet.
|
| It almost doesn't matter what the content is as long as it's
| more engaging than that actual moment of life.
|
| I have neither TikTok nor Instagram nor Facebook (anymore),
| but I know from when I had Twitter that the endless videos
| are engaging. I'm not above having my attention captured by
| them, so I know not to engage with the networks themselves.
|
| It's precisely what you say: I would like to say I just find
| that stuff horrible. But no, if I had those apps, I'd be
| using them as distraction too.
| nottorp wrote:
| So how is this different from people sitting in front of a
| TV and watching endless samey series?
|
| Only that it's portable.
|
| If we didn't have "social media" we'd be all watching samey
| tv series on our phones.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| It absolutely makes a difference because tv shows are
| usually 20 mins at least, which means watching 3 minutes
| in the supermarket line is actually a bad experience, so
| it requires more deliberation.
|
| I'd also argue that the average TV show is more edifying
| than the average social media post but that's another
| topic.
| nottorp wrote:
| > I'd also argue that the average TV show is more
| edifying than the average social media post but that's
| another topic.
|
| Nope. In my experience most modern series can be remade
| as 1 hour movies ... per season.
| zanellato19 wrote:
| > If people weren't liking it, it wouldn't be successful.
|
| When you talk to people, most of them want to do less of
| those apps, so its not about wanting it. Its the fact that
| _all_ companies know how to make really addictive stuff and
| they only lose when more addictive things come out.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| Yeah exactly. Nobody's happy with their internet/phone
| usage these days. But also, I do know quite a few people
| who genuinely enjoy using TikTok.
|
| Either way, what should we do about it?
|
| We're not going to ban vertical short-form video. Mandate
| screen time controls? People will get extra devices. And
| expecting people to just Do The Right Thing has not ever
| worked.
|
| Social media is genuinely like cigarettes, where it's so
| ubiquitous and people are so addicted to it that you
| can't just ban it.
|
| Cigarettes were reduced a ton by banning them in most
| places indoors, taxing it way higher and making them
| harder to access (i.e. ask for them behind a counter vs.
| vending machine)
|
| But cigarettes also have negative externalities like the
| smell and the effects of breathing in a room full of
| smoke. Phones don't have that--if someone's scrolling on
| their phone, it makes zero difference to you, so there's
| far less of an anti-phone movement than there was in
| smoking.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| There's more engagement with consuming content, therefore
| more ad opportunity and more revenue. But entertainment
| sources are more fungible than communication platforms. So in
| turning FB into a media company (effectively) they may have
| grown faster, but they also made themselves more vulnerable
| to a disrupter like TikTok.
| ColinWright wrote:
| $ URL="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/mark-
| zucke..."
|
| $ lynx -dump $URL | less
| throw_a_grenade wrote:
| https://archive.is/UnNjh
| misja111 wrote:
| Does anybody know a good alternative to Facebook that doesn't
| force you to read its feed suggestions? I only have FB because
| I'm member of some groups where people post content that I'm
| interested in. I'm not interested in anything else. I find FB's
| constant stream of suggestions annoying as hell.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| If the only thing keeping you on Facebook is sources of
| specific content, you're looking for a platform that also has
| sources of that specific content. So it depends on what that
| content is, doesn't it?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Can operator be used to extract my social network data from fb?
| mkayokay wrote:
| Maybe there are subreddits or discord servers about your topics
| ColinWright wrote:
| I use Mastodon almost exclusively.
|
| It requires that you curate your connections, and
| discoverability is a known problem.
|
| But I get to see posts from the people I follow, and "boosts"
| of posts they think are worth seeing, and there are no ads, and
| no algorithms deciding what I should be seeing and filling my
| feed with them.
|
| I'm not saying it's a _good_ alternative, but I 'm finding it
| useful and refreshing.
| nottorp wrote:
| > discoverability is a known problem
|
| Is it? Are you sure centralized authorities for "discovery"
| are a good thing? After all, the "discovery" algorithm is
| making people move off FB to Mastodon...
| ColinWright wrote:
| The challenge is:
|
| You join Mastodon and want to find a specific friend.
|
| Good luck!
|
| People are accustomed to using centralised sites. They
| search by typing the target's name into a search box and
| get presented with a collection of options. That's less
| successful on Mastodon.
| Zambyte wrote:
| > You join Mastodon and want to find a specific friend.
|
| Ask for their username? How do you think people found
| each others email addresses?
| ColinWright wrote:
| I'm trying to point out that people have experience of
| Facebook and Twitter and other platforms, and they expect
| when they join a new platform that they can type in their
| friends' names and get results. They then find that
| Mastodon doesn't work like that, and complain about the
| lack of "discoverability".
|
| And they're right ... discoverability on Mastodon is not
| like on other platforms, and it is harder to find things.
|
| Yes, I know how to do these things, I am, after all, a
| moderator on an instance with over 20K users. I'm just
| trying to point out that for some people the fact that
| "discoverability" doesn't work as it does on other
| platforms is a huge stumbling block.
| new_user_final wrote:
| I think Facebook app an option to see feed from your friend
| list and following page/group only . I can't remember, probably
| long pressing on feed tab will show this option.
| xeromal wrote:
| You gotta find those small communities. I'm into 4wheel drives
| and use facebook groups but I'm often on Ih8mud now. Just a
| better place to be imo. You got to find where your people are
| at
| coldpie wrote:
| The Something Awful forums.
| CPLX wrote:
| The relevant fact here is contained in this article's
| subheadline, which starts with: "During testimony at Meta's
| antitrust trial..."
|
| He's saying "social media is over" because if it is then his
| company, which dominates social media, does not have market power
| and thus is not a monopolist.
|
| The statement should be evaluated for what it actually is, the
| statement of an accused lawbreaker during a prosecution by the
| government.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| I actually think he's correct and the gov's case doesn't really
| correspond to reality.
|
| It's actually true that social media as it was in the 2010s
| (when the Instagram and WA acq's happened) is basically over.
|
| They're no longer social, they're mostly just media: apps
| designed to be portals into consuming as much content as
| possible, by whomever (so you watch more ads).
|
| I'm not saying Meta is a great company or Zuck is a great
| person, but the idea that Instagram & Facebook compete with
| TikTok and YouTube is 100% true.
| gessha wrote:
| > gov's case doesn't really correspond to reality
|
| It does because if Facebook didn't monopolize the social
| media space maybe we would see innovation instead of blatant
| feature copying. Instead we have 3(4 if you consider Threads
| as one) platforms owned by the same company that push the
| same content - posts, reels, stories and actively try to
| unify and cannibalize each other. Breaking them down to
| individual companies will absolutely improve the market.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| But how will it improve the market? By making a less
| addictive (read: less engaging) app that does social media
| "the old fashioned way" where you connect with friends an
| not much else?
|
| I love that intention, but it wouldn't be competitively
| viable. That's why yes, social media in that form is over.
| The reason Instagram and Facebook are valuable is because
| billions of people have accounts there and are habituated
| to go there in every spare second and look at whatever the
| screen serves them, whether that's Johnny from 7th grade
| math getting married or a snake being friends with a cat in
| rural Egypt.
| gessha wrote:
| > connect with friends an not much else
|
| Not necessarily. Breaking the companies up will foster
| innovation via competition. Who knows what will come out
| of it? Will it be better than Facebook burning stacks of
| cash on Zuck's latest fancy(XR/AI/?)? How long will the
| market be confident in his dollar pyromania? I will short
| that company like there's no tomorrow if I was in any
| position to do so.
|
| This is more my opinion than time and market-backed
| statement but I don't believe addictive design is good
| for the long-term market positions of those companies
| because they may be addictive now but a lot of people
| loathe them* and are looking to escape from their design.
| They will jump on whatever comes next and not look back.
| What's good for the company long-term is to provide value
| to the user - local groups, FB marketplace, etc and
| become embedded in the culture and society.
|
| * needs citation but it looks like the article supports
| this view
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| Sure, I also hate what all of this is doing to society
| and people more generally! But it's also fair to say he
| is actually correct in saying that social media as we
| know it is over and it's now about generic content
| consumption.
| netsharc wrote:
| I read this yesterday about Zuck. God, Zuck, what a cunt. It's a
| review of Sarah Wynn-Williams' book, which Meta tried to kill.
|
| It also mentions Zuck's motivation for learning Mandarin.
|
| Yes it's off-topic, but I think it's important to know when
| discussing Zuck/Meta:
|
| https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf
|
| > There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like
| Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who
| accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game
| of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet).
|
| > At one point, Wynn-Williams gets Zuck a chance to address the
| UN General Assembly. As is his wont, Zuck refuses to be briefed
| before he takes the dais (he's repeatedly described as unwilling
| to consider any briefing note longer than a single text message).
| When he gets to the mic, he spontaneously promises that Facebook
| will provide internet access to refugees all over the world.
|
| [...]
|
| > Meanwhile, Zuck is relentlessly pursuing Facebook's largest
| conceivable growth market: China. The only problem: China doesn't
| want Facebook. Zuck repeatedly tries to engineer meetings with Xi
| Jinping so he can plead his case in person. Xi is monumentally
| hostile to this idea. Zuck learns Mandarin. He studies Xi's book,
| conspicuously displays a copy of it on his desk. Eventually, he
| manages to sit next to Xi at a dinner where he begs Xi to name
| his next child. Xi turns him down.
|
| > After years of persistent nagging, lobbying, and groveling,
| Facebook's China execs start to make progress with a state
| apparatchik who dangles the possibility of Facebook entering
| China. Facebook promises this factotum the world - all the
| surveillance and censorship the Chinese state wants and more.
|
| [...]
|
| > According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook actually built an
| extensive censorship and surveillance system for the Chinese
| state - spies, cops and military - to use against Chinese
| Facebook users, and FB users globally. They promise to set up
| caches of global FB content in China that the Chinese state can
| use to monitor all Facebook activity, everywhere, with the
| implication that they'll be able to spy on private
| communications, and censor content for non-Chinese users.
|
| [...]
|
| > Despite all of this, Facebook is never given access to China.
| However, the Chinese state is able to use the tools Facebook
| built for it to attack independence movements, the free press and
| dissident uprisings in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Mark sounds like he negotiates as well as his "Art of the Deal"
| buddy Donald.
| Loughla wrote:
| That's really fucking gross.
|
| Someone who is willing to sell their life, including naming
| their literal child, and all of their morals that might exist,
| for cash, is gross. Zuck is gross and should be embarrassed.
|
| He's winning at money but losing at human.
| netsharc wrote:
| I suppose for a few billion dollars (or even a smaller sum),
| I'd let a lot of things happen to me.
|
| Well OK, the difference would be, would it be just affecting
| me, or my daughter (already quite gross), or affecting the
| lives and freedom of millions of exiled Uyghurs, Tibetans and
| other dissidents around the world by creating a spying
| apparatus against them.
|
| There's also the difference that the few billion dollars
| being a sum of money I don't already have, compared to Zuck
| already having dozens, and wanting another few...
| energy123 wrote:
| I consider all Meta employees culpable for enabling this
| company and I will blacklist you all when I am reviewing your
| resumes. You are wealthy and educated enough to know better but
| you chose to make money at the expense of the world around you.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| i feel the same way about former Raytheon/Lockhead/Palantir
| types as well.
| cryptopian wrote:
| Comments for this article -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43780363
| pcarolan wrote:
| I've noticed my kid (12) primarily uses group chats over social
| apps. Some of his chats have several dozen kids in them. It could
| be social media got so bad that the protocols became the best
| alternative. An old programmer like me sees a glimmer of hope in
| a sea of noise.
| bognition wrote:
| Group chat has always been the killer social app. 6 years ago I
| convinced my browser friends group to adopt Telegram and since
| then we've all abandoned FB, Instagram, etc... We have a ton of
| different threads all with different topics: kids, food,
| gardening, exercise, pets, memes, and a bunch of serious topic
| threads as well.
|
| It's been incredibly effective at keeping us connected and
| engaged as we've all moved across the country and grow in an
| apart physically.
|
| The take away is; what people want from social media is to be
| connected with their real friends. However that isn't as
| engaging as a random feed, so the companies push people away
| from that.
| foobarian wrote:
| I'm in a similar group but using Discord. It seems that lack
| of advertising or any kind of algo feed is the common
| feature. Who runs your Telegram server?
| robrtsql wrote:
| Do you mean 'run' as in run the community in some sort of
| administration sense? Telegram cannot be self-hosted
| (unless I am misinformed..).
| balamatom wrote:
| Neither can Discord; its usage of "server" in particular
| is a weaponized misappropriation.
| balamatom wrote:
| >Who runs your Telegram server?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Security_Service
| pookha wrote:
| I hate group chats (hate). It's a cliquey childish high-
| school cafeteria mode of communicating (thus why
| highschoolers use group chats). It's a clear step backwards
| and is representative of the covid-era stazi-like mentality
| people developed where they felt it was unsanity to share
| their views or life with the world at large (and maybe, given
| what we've learned about social media and nation-states,
| that's not without merit -- i.e the UK). Perfect world social
| media is a means of forming connections and expanding your
| little room(s).
| simonask wrote:
| Is it - hear me out - possible that you are overthinking
| this? People tend to use group chats for coordination and
| quick banter with people they already know. Not as an
| alternative to the phpBB boards of old.
| photonthug wrote:
| Eh, I think the parent has a point. You underline it
| yourself when you say "people they already know".
|
| The internet didn't always involve a choice between "talk
| to people I know" vs "bravely/foolishly taking on the
| vitriol of a wild horde of angry delusional maniacs", but
| now we've lost almost all of the space in between those
| extremes. People like hacker news exactly because it's
| the rare place that's still in the middle *(sometimes, on
| some topics, for now)
| balamatom wrote:
| >overthinking
|
| Ah, the self-referential thought-terminating cliche.
| Favorite invention of XXI century by far.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Call this out! This community loves thought terminating
| cliches so much! It's intellectually bankrupt and proves
| that those who accuse others of it are underthinking.
| jjulius wrote:
| >It's a clear step backwards and is representative of the
| covid-era stazi-like mentality people developed where they
| felt it was unsanity to share their views or life with the
| world at large...
|
| ... _what_? I 'm in my late 30's and group chats have been
| a part of life for myself, my friends and my family since
| the late 90's. I've never wanted to share my views with
| "the world at large" online, but I have no problem being
| myself and sharing my views in meatspace, where being open
| and honest about who I am is _far_ more impactful to those
| I interact with and the world around me than it ever has
| been on social media.
|
| Within the world of the pop-web, even on this website to a
| point, the ability to have a _truly_ nuanced discussion has
| essentially been eliminated. People would rather throw out
| hot takes based on disingenuous interpretations of someone
| 's comment/statement rather than try and have an impactful,
| open conversation.
| photonthug wrote:
| Sounds like you'd have appreciated 90s era irc, which was
| good for nuanced and sincere discussion, but also did not
| require talking to people that you already knew.
|
| There's a sweet spot between open/closed and
| known/unknown and somewhat focused but not too niche
| where it kind of works. Theres a certain size that works
| too, ideally Lots of users and yet occasionally you
| recognize someone. But I don't think that's what people
| mean at all by group chat today, which regardless of
| venue tends to be rather more insular and thus echo'y.
| esafak wrote:
| In IRC, and as many do here, you used an alias to have
| the confidence to speak freely. Products like WhatsApp
| where people reveal their real identities don't lend
| themselves to that frankness when membership is open.
| jjulius wrote:
| I very much appreciated 90s era IRC back in the day. I
| find community comparable to what you described in still-
| existing phpBB and phpBB-esque hobby-focused forums that
| I use regularly.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| There's far too much downside to sharing your genuine
| thoughts, especially on politics, or things you find funny,
| etc. with the entire Internet because regular people and
| nation-state level actors will vilify you and nowadays even
| have you deported for things you say publicly.
|
| That's why we all use group chats and messaging. There's no
| safe alternative
| esafak wrote:
| There is nothing preventing you from expanding your group
| chat roster. It is just that random strangers can't drop
| in; you have to add them.
|
| You would have to sacrifice the privacy of your group if
| you wanted to support serendipitous membership growth. Do
| you want to be constantly reviewing membership requests?
| That's what Facebook groups look like. And you have little
| information to judge the requests by, since the profiles
| can be fake, especially today. And when complete strangers
| can join the group, the dynamics change.
| lukan wrote:
| "Perfect world social media is a means of forming
| connections"
|
| What stops people from being part of X group chats? All a
| connection on their own?
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| I guess group chat would be fine if all your friends are
| friends of each other. High School and college ages maybe,
| but as an older adult, I have so many different groups of
| people that I interact with that it would be obnoxious to
| deal with. I also find that there are certain people in group
| chats who are lonely and spam crap.
| sbarre wrote:
| You can have many group chats though?
|
| I do that in Signal, I have group chats with different
| circles of friends ,and we also regularly create short-
| lived purpose-built chats for events or other things...
|
| It's a bit more friction perhaps but in the end it works
| well and we've been doing it for years.
| nottorp wrote:
| Even facebook basically started as a group chat.
|
| Back when we all had pet dinosaurs in our back yards and you
| only saw what your friends post.
|
| This is a useful function as opposed to what the engagement
| algorithms push these days. So no wonder everyone moves to
| other options for group communication.
|
| You mean you don't have a "where do we go out this saturday"
| chat group with your friends circle?
| jjani wrote:
| I never understood why they became less popular when mobile
| phones took over. Even in the 00s so many people were already
| in group chats through MSN, ICQ and so on.
|
| All Microsoft had to do was make the former into a proper
| mobile app. Instead they wasted billions on Skype to replace
| their golden opportunity.
| burkaman wrote:
| Did they become less popular? I think they are just less
| visible by nature, they've always been pretty common. I guess
| some people switched to Facebook Groups for a time, but even
| that is sort of a form of group chat.
| foobarian wrote:
| They never worked properly on phones, including images/video
| and history. Same for SMS chats on top of being hideously
| expensive because the phone companies thought it was still
| the 1960s.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Yes, that's why they should have made them work properly.
|
| Simply put the main problem was that those old IMs required
| a persistent connection to the server when you "just" had
| to add a new protocol that can do session
| resumption/polling. Then make a pretty mobile UI and make
| it possible to find other users by phone number - imo this
| was the number one reason why WhatsApp and iMessage won.
| It's an app on your phone, so it uses your phone number,
| not another artificial number or name or mail address -
| it's something the most tech illiterate gets. Because then
| it's just "SMS but with groups and photos". But you could
| have allowed to merge it with your existing account from
| desktop times, so all the young hip people would've kept
| all their contacts.
| bentcorner wrote:
| IIRC one of the reasons WhatsApp has done so well is that
| they basically supported every platform under the sun,
| which was a technical challenge back in the day.
|
| These days the field is much narrower but 10+ years ago
| finding an app that supported everyone's device was a
| challenge.
| jlokier wrote:
| > one of the reasons WhatsApp has done so well is that
| they basically supported every platform under the sun
|
| Not really. There's still no iPad version.
|
| My friend installed Whatsapp from the App Store for their
| iPad, to find it didn't behave quite as expected, and
| didn't match their phone and desktop experience.
|
| That turned out to be because it was an app from some
| random third party with its own features. It used
| Whatsapp in the name, and had a similar logo.
|
| When my friend realised they were unexpectedly using a
| third party app, from a provider they'd never heard of,
| they were worried they'd accidentally given away access
| to their account full of sensitive messages to someone
| they didn't trust.
|
| I was surprised my cautious friend would install the
| wrong app by mistake, as the Apple app store is normally
| good for well known services.
|
| While scrolling through Whatsapp apps, it took me a while
| to realise the top search result, which my friend had
| installed, wasn't actually from Whatsapp (but looked
| similar). Even though the logo was a little different, I
| assumed that was just a quirk. It's just so unexpected to
| find that what you get on iPad isn't the real thing, when
| searching for Whatsapp gets you the real thing if you're
| looking from an iPad or Mac.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| Feels like it went myspace -> facebook -> snapchat and never
| went back to such "public profile" ideals and stayed in chat
| apps. When I was in college in the early '10's, it seemed
| like everyone was obsessed with the "temporary chat" idea and
| actually believed that you could guarantee a message or
| picture could be temporary.
| ksec wrote:
| >?All Microsoft had to do was make the former into a proper
| mobile app.
|
| I begged Microsoft to make MSN on Windows Mobile and later on
| Android or iPhone.
|
| They just dont get it nor do they care. Whatsapp wasn't even
| a thing on Smartphone. Its dominance came a little later.
|
| And without a smartphone or mobile network, people keep in
| contact especially those not in close group via Social Media
| aka MySpace and Facebook or Friendster.
|
| Now smartphone ubiquitous in most places. The contact list
| has taken over. Social Media became a news feed.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Wasn't Skype a proper mobile app decently early ?
|
| The core issue was of course being a second class citizen on
| iOS, using a Skype phone number purely on mobile was real
| PITA for instance.
|
| Personally I put a lot more blame on Google for everything
| they did on the messaging front.
| asveikau wrote:
| I remember using a lot of very low quality, buggy Skype
| apps on mobile over the years. I don't think it ever
| approached desktop quality.
|
| To be honest it didn't even work great on laptops that got
| turned on and off or went in and out of connectivity. The
| networking piece seemed designed for an always on desktop.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| And let's be honest here, Skype on desktop was also quite
| shitty.
| sanderjd wrote:
| This is actually one of the great entrepreneurship lessons of
| my career, which I think about a lot.
|
| Around 2009, as smart phones were on their exponential leg
| up, and when I was still pretty new in the workplace, I
| remember thinking (and talking with my coworkers) about how
| messaging and chat rooms were really well suited to the
| technology landscape. But I lamented "too bad the space is
| already too crowded with options for anyone to use anything
| new.
|
| But all of today's major messaging successes became household
| names _after_ that! What I learned from this is that I have a
| tendency to think that trends are played out already, when
| actually I 'm early in the adoption curve.
| esafak wrote:
| And markets are growing.
| jjani wrote:
| Heh, this reminds me of a vaguely related lesson I learned
| recently. Sold Nvidia mid-2023. "Surely everyone
| understands by now just how much money they're going to be
| making the coming 2 years, and this is already completely
| priced in, it's so blatantly obvious!". Heh.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Ha, someone who has money to invest asked me about an
| investment thesis at the end of 2022 related to the
| release of chatgpt. I said nvidia seemed like the most
| clearly likely to benefit in terms of public equities,
| but he said no way, it was already overpriced. :shrug:
|
| Everything hypey overshoots eventually, but nobody knows
| exactly when!
| kalleboo wrote:
| I think those networks never figured out how to make money
| off of it. Without the tracking (and piles of VC cash) that
| modern social media got, the ads were not worth enough.
| Microsoft and AOL just saw them as cost centers so when the
| mobile ecosystem didn't support their legacy persistent-
| connection-style protocols they saw no value in investing in
| rewriting everything.
| jjani wrote:
| Piles of VC cash were never necessary, FWIW. Tracking,
| potentially. They may indeed have massively undervalued
| ads, or even other monetization options - Line makes
| millions off of emojis and such, and if they'd have been as
| big as Whatsapp, possibly billions. Meta too is not even
| tapping 5% of Whatsapp's monetization potential, FWIW. I
| wonder if it's intentional to prevent anti-trust concerns.
|
| But I don't think monetization matters too much. Ms tried
| making the botched Skype play, and as a company there's no
| way they didn't understand the value of hundreds of
| millions of eyeballs, daily usage market share. They
| understood that with IE, despite it being a zero-revenue
| product in and of itself.
|
| > when the mobile ecosystem didn't support their legacy
| persistent-connection-style protocols
|
| You may know more about this then I do - what's the main
| difference? I used them back in the day and as end-user
| they felt the exact same as modern messaging apps. I send a
| message, it gets saved on some server, the receiver gets it
| from there. When I used it, it definitely didn't require
| both parties to be online to send/receive.
|
| Or is it about the notifications?
| hylaride wrote:
| It's been that way for awhile, though they do use instagram
| and/or tiktok for consumption.
|
| iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids with
| android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for teens
| that exclusion.
|
| The kids have been taught the dangers of sharing things on the
| internet, so the risk is minimized sharing in private chats
| (though obviously still there).
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids
| with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for
| teens that exclusion.
|
| Craig Federighi fought against supporting iMessage on Android
| and RCS for a long time saying, quote, "It would remove
| obstacles towards iPhone families being able to give their
| kids Android phones."
| handfuloflight wrote:
| > iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids
| with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for
| teens that exclusion.
|
| Are kids really that simplistically divided?
| dcchambers wrote:
| 100%.
|
| iMessage is THE number one thing selling iphones these
| days, and has been for a long time.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| But why does it matter if the majority of cellular plans
| provide unlimited texting?
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Its about the extra features iMessage has because of
| Apple's superset of the underlying SMS/MMS functionality.
| Its also about having a blue bubble (not-poor) versus a
| green bubble (poor).
|
| It defies belief how much some demographics care about
| this stuff, I didn't believe it when I first heard
| either. Some of it is improving with RCS but its got a
| ways to go.
| dcchambers wrote:
| Exactly this. Even if RCS does everything iMessage does,
| you still have a dreaded "green bubble" in iOS messaging
| which is a huge (anti) social signal to teens.
|
| Does it justify their reason for hating on Android/green
| bubbles? Of course not, but that's 100% the reality of
| the situation.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Teens care about silly things like that, but a real thing
| I care about as an adult is group chats working properly.
| Like, I was looking for a realtor last year when buying a
| house. One of them had Android, and I really thought
| about it, do I want to take a nonzero chance of that
| somehow screwing the plans up on closing?
|
| That's not the main reason I went with another one, but I
| still paid attention to how many group iMessages we were
| in with the bank, seller's realtor, or just me + wife +
| realtor. Things really did come down to the hour during
| negotiating and closing, so it might've mattered.
| baggachipz wrote:
| Apple's implementation of RCS is such hot garbage that I
| disabled it and revert to regular SMS to text with
| Android people. I'm sure the shoddy RCS support is just a
| terrible mistake and not by design...
| pirates wrote:
| Would you mind listing a couple issues you've seen with
| it? You've got me curious if they affect me and I just
| don't notice it what. I don't have all that many contacts
| though, so it may be just be a numbers game.
| frollogaston wrote:
| It doesn't matter so much for 1:1, but SMS group chat is
| a mess (or MMS? RCS? idk).
| theshackleford wrote:
| Maybe in your neck of the woods, I see no evidence for
| outside of that. iMessage is completely irrelevant where
| I live. SMS/MMS full stop is irrelevant.
| kube-system wrote:
| In the US, people overwhelmingly use SMS/MMS/iMessage by
| default. It works with every phone, it's the one platform
| that people won't say "I don't have that" to.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Adults too
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| it's just a new version of "preps don't hang out with
| goths"
| procinct wrote:
| I see this line of thinking online a lot, with people
| mentioning kids are excluded because they have green
| bubbles as if it's some sort of highly superficial
| exclusion based on only wanting to talk to Apple users.
|
| The main issue is that including a non-iMessage user
| changes the protocol of the group chat from iMessage to SMS
| and SMS can basically make group chats unusable.
|
| I also don't like that kids who don't have an iPhone can't
| participate in iMessage group chats, but when we make out
| like it's just kids being cruel and not an actual
| functional incentive to not include those kids then we are
| losing sight of where the pressure should be applied.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| It literally works seamlessly though? Just converts to MMS
| and you don't notice outside the "liked BLABLABLA" sort of
| messages that trickle in without the imessage emoji system.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| I don't think seamless integration with MMS is enough to
| outweigh being different/not having "the real thing" or the
| full experience in the eyes of a young teenager. This reads
| as the HN version of the "but we have iMessage at home"
| meme (I mean this humourously, not as snark).
| mckn1ght wrote:
| Even that has been fixed by now in my chats with android
| friends. The only reason to display green bubbles anymore
| is to indicate lack of E2EE. But that will be coming to RCS
| interop soon as well.
| frollogaston wrote:
| In theory it's ok. In practice, MMS group chats are broken.
| It's not even an iPhone thing, as evident in Android-
| dominated areas still relying on WhatsApp instead.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| That's not why WhatsApp took over. WhatsApp rose to
| popularity back when texting (especially internationally)
| was not unlimited and free.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Internationally maybe, but if someone in the US is using
| WhatsApp, it's because of the group texting problem. My
| family included.
| devmor wrote:
| iMessage chats also include rich media that is either
| degraded in MMS (photos, videos unless you have RCS
| support) or just doesn't exist (like multiplayer games,
| invites, apple cash, etc).
|
| This may not seem like a big deal to you, but if you
| remember what it's like to be a kid, you should get it. The
| smallest friction can be a reason to exclude someone
| socially.
| futuraperdita wrote:
| Non-iMessage chats are also segregated by color, a visual
| affordance that identifies you as a member of the non-Apple
| outgroup. The other.
| serial_dev wrote:
| Whenever I hear this iMessage thing I'm surprised. Is that a
| US / Canada thing?
|
| Here in Europe, everybody uses WhatsApp and/or similar
| products for chat and they are all multi platform.
| herbst wrote:
| This. In 98% of all cases I get away with only having
| telegram (no phone number even) most people have one or
| multiple IMs
| hylaride wrote:
| iOS/iPhones are the majority of phones in Canada and the US
| (~60%). However, if you take the upper half of household
| incomes that number skyrockets to 80-90%. Comparatively, in
| the UK it's 50/50. In the rest of europe android mostly has
| a 60-75% market share (tends to drift more towards android
| the more eastern you go - signalling wealth has a lot to do
| with it).
|
| The reasons why are varied (everything from wealth
| signalling to switching being a pain and iphone mostly had
| a first mover advantage for quality and availability for
| the first several years), but it's only in the last two
| years that I've seen people start to use multi-platform
| chat apps here. Most of my peer group with other parents
| all default to imessage group chats for sharing photos,
| stories of our kids.
|
| I am also starting to notice a loosening on apple's
| services. Spotify is used by more people than Apple music
| even amungst the apple households I know.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Kids are ruthless about anti green bubble discrimination
| and it's part of the reason for the rise of incels. The
| overwhelming majority of incels are android users, and
| the mainstream cultural media likes to make clear that
| one of the reason for being incels is them using a
| "poordroid"
|
| https://leafandcore.com/2019/08/24/green-bubbles-are-a-
| turn-...
|
| https://outsidethebeltway.com/the-dreaded-green-bubble/
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-
| winning-...
|
| https://gizmodo.com/im-buying-an-iphone-because-im-
| ashamed-o...
|
| https://www.npr.org/2024/03/28/1241473453/why-green-text-
| bub...
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/90391587/why-we-dont-want-
| you-an...
| oenton wrote:
| Whoa hold on. I was with you until "the overwhelming
| majority of incels are android users." How did you draw
| that conclusion?
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The countless myriad number of TikTok's, reels, etc from
| women calling out how using an android is a dealer
| breaker. The community made polls of "incels.us" about
| this exact question, and the other links I cited showing
| green bubble social discrimination.
|
| My original post has enough receipts. If you don't
| believe me you're free to remain wrong. But here's more
| anyway:
|
| https://www.joe.co.uk/life/sex/owning-an-android-is-
| official...
|
| https://www.dailydot.com/debug/android-relationship-
| iphone/
|
| https://www.studentbeans.com/blog/uk/the-biggest-student-
| dat...
|
| https://archive.thetab.com/uk/2020/10/16/girls-are-
| sharing-w...
|
| These memes posted on short video sites also have
| parallel ones of women making fun of guys who try to do
| the whole "hold on let me pirate this movie and HDMI
| connect it to the TV thing" instead of having Netflix.
| frollogaston wrote:
| I don't doubt that some women make fun of men for green
| bubbles, but this doesn't mean the majority of incels are
| Android users. If that were true, wouldn't they just get
| an iPhone?
|
| Also the HDMI thing is hilarious because it's exactly
| what my wife would say about me.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| > The overwhelming majority of incels are android users
|
| Seriously ?
|
| I have read your links, it shows that some kids are
| stupid and discriminate over what phone brand one is
| using.
|
| First of all, that's purely a USA issue.
|
| Secondly, it says nothing about incels.
|
| A phone brand doesn't make you more charismatic, in fact
| in my experience I have seen more iPhone user being
| insecure than Android user.
|
| Especially the one who invest heavily into Apple <<
| ecosystem >>, they are more often than not (in Europe)
| nerds.
|
| Just to be honest, I write that from my iPhone. Really
| got no bias.
| bluGill wrote:
| WhatsApp never caught on in the US since cell phones and
| SMS were a great deal for keeping in touch. By the time
| WhatsApp arrived US carriers were not raping their
| customers for phone calls or SMS messages (in the early
| days of cell phones they were - be very careful responding
| as the state of the world has changed many times over the
| years and so it is quite possible you remember a time where
| your country was better than the US for reasons that are no
| longer true!). Note in particular calls and SMS to a
| different state is included, and typically Canada is
| included as well. As such we never developed the WhatsApp
| habbit as it didn't give us anything.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Yes. WhatsApp isn't nearly as popular in the US as in many
| other countries.
|
| Idk what the stats are on this, but anecdotally, all my
| friends use FB Messenger if they want cross-platform group
| chat, but that's slowly changing to some fragmented list of
| alternatives. And usually it's not for semi-important
| things like get-together plans.
| morkalork wrote:
| Group chats are: free, have no ads, and sharing is with exactly
| who you intend. When I want to send a photo to direct family
| and in-laws I don't blast it on social media, I send it to the
| group chat that has direct family and in-laws in it. That's it,
| easy-peasy. Even my 70-something mother in-law participates in
| it.
| gwd wrote:
| ...but you have to share it specifically with each separate
| group. When I take a cute photo of my son doing something, I
| have to share it with the family group for my side, and that
| of my wife; and none of my friends or random extended family
| get to see it. If my wife's fam shares a photo of my son that
| I think my fam wants to see, I have to manually port it over.
| Back in Facebook's heyday, I could just share it; or if my
| wife's fam tagged me in the photo, my family & friends would
| see it as well.
|
| And, of course, in group chat, your different friend groups
| never interact. One of the coolest thing about Facebook in
| its heyday was when two of your friends who didn't know each
| other had a cool conversation on your wall and then became
| friends themselves.
|
| Unfortunately there really doesn't seem to be a proper
| replacement -- BlueSky and Mastodon are replacements for
| Twitter, not Facebook. Group chats aren't as good, but
| they're the closest thing going.
| parpfish wrote:
| i actually think it's _good_ that you need to explicitly
| share the photo with each group. people like getting a
| message that they know you decided you wanted them (or
| their little group) to see.
|
| if i see a photo that a friend broadcasts out once on a
| social feed, i see it and move on.
|
| if a friend puts a photo in a text/group chat, i know that
| it's something they wanted to share _with me_
| simonask wrote:
| Isn't it pretty common for the "share" function to allow
| selecting multiple recipients, including multiple groups?
| esafak wrote:
| Yes, but who remembers that? There are so many features.
|
| I'd like to see the usage history of that feature. I bet
| my bottom dollar it's decreased over time.
| xnyan wrote:
| >...but you have to share it specifically with each
| separate group
|
| For me personally, this is a feature not a bug. I want
| things I see to be things that somebody wrote just for that
| channel. It's why I use group chat over social media.
| esafak wrote:
| Facebook had and still has visibility options, but as it
| grew in features people forgot about it. A lesson in
| discoverability and product complexity.
|
| https://www.facebook.com/help/233739099984085/
| Kalabasa wrote:
| I think this was what Google Plus was going for.
|
| Instead of friend graphs (mutual) or follower graphs
| (directed edges), they had Circles.
|
| Circles sound a lot like group chats.
|
| I guess "social circles" may be a better way to model
| social relationships than follower graphs.
| morkalork wrote:
| IMO it absolutely is the better way to model it. There's
| a reason that verbiage already existed in English. The
| other commenter is right though, there are the rare
| interaction between social circles that are lost but
| honestly I remember seeing just as many poor ones on FB
| back in the day as spontaneous positive ones.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Circles was basically an ACL system, which isn't fun.
| Even if you do care exactly who you're sharing things
| with, it's not easy to tell with a Circle who that is.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| I go to sci fi cons and telegram has become the de facto method
| of coordination for everything. Party, meal, event we all want
| to attend, any kind of meetup we create a channel for it to be
| used ephemerally and invite everyone who's going. It's a
| million times better than any event invite functionality of
| social networks, absolutely frictionless and without all the
| frankly stupid stuff social networks add.
| dev_l1x_be wrote:
| Say hello to iRC
| comboy wrote:
| I bet kids these days don't even know how to do a hostile
| channel takeover with a bunch of eggdrops.
| trbleclef wrote:
| *** Ja mata!
| pier25 wrote:
| The kids are alright. They are going back to IRC.
| misswaterfairy wrote:
| Really makes you wonder if/when Discord goes IPO, that Meta
| would buy a controlling stake in it?
|
| Fortunately there are open source alternatives even if they
| aren't as popular as Discord at the moment, such as Revolt
| Chat: https://revolt.chat/
|
| I miss the days of self-hosted forums; sadly it seems that
| algorithms, and the need to satisfy the need for 'instant'
| connection/information are ruining forums for young
| newcomers...
| mcflubbins wrote:
| Revolt looks neat thanks for sharing.
| dan_quixote wrote:
| I've seen the exact same and immediately my mind thinks of IRC
| :)
| arrosenberg wrote:
| It's kind of obvious, right? Most of us grew up on AOL Instant
| Messenger (or, heaven forbid, MSN Messenger).
| selfhoster wrote:
| I would totally welcome IRC back and USENET.
| immibis wrote:
| They're both still alive.
|
| IRC: irc.libera.chat, irc.efnet.org, something rizon
| something; there's technically ircnet but don't bother
|
| Usenet: eternal-september.org - you might find others after a
| while but there are no other major free text servers. If you
| pay another company for binary access (these are mostly used
| for piracy) you can also use it for text though.
| Gormo wrote:
| My "social media" in the '90s consisted largely of hanging out
| in IRC channels. Everything old is new again!
| comoloaf wrote:
| The disproportionate amount of impact this one hit wonder had on
| civilization is astonishing.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Mark owns 3 of the most popular apps in existence. Hard to call
| him a one hit wonder even if his other hits were just
| recognizing which companies to buy
| oofManBang wrote:
| True. He hasn't actually built anything since the very first
| days.
| CPLX wrote:
| The other hits came from breaking laws against anti-
| competitive behavior by his company, which is the exact
| subject of the trial this article is based on.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| > recognizing which companies to buy
|
| I bet it's really simple from the vantage point of being the
| owner of the biggest social app with billions to spare.
| knorker wrote:
| Buying WhatsApp was about having the money and not being
| obviously blocked by courts.
|
| Not exactly galaxy brain to decide to buy a lottery ticket
| that's already declared the winning one.
|
| And not like they ruined it, I mean integrated/synergized it.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| lots of people had money. Only mark bought whatsapp
| fullshark wrote:
| It was a defensive acquisition most likely and the app
| has pretty much not changed functionally one bit from
| when he acquired it. He had no vision for it clearly.
| knorker wrote:
| I'm getting a bit of reddit vibes in that you only took
| part of what I said out of context, and ignored the rest.
|
| But also yes it was very much a defensive acquisition,
| and my point about them not (yet) ruining it shows that
| there was no plan.
|
| Buying another company from the spoils of your first hit
| doesn't make you _not_ a one hit wonder. Especially since
| most of your bidding competitors would have been blocked
| by antitrust.
|
| I don't know if the same is true for Instagram. I've
| never used it.
| trooperscoop wrote:
| "Recognizing which companies to buy" is your argument? That's
| how low the bar is: money = smart. Buying your competitor for
| crazy high prices while paying even more to avoid antitrust
| laws is kinda the tech bro playbook.
| seydor wrote:
| > Meta displayed a chart showing that the "percent of time spent
| viewing content posted by 'friends' " has declined in the past
| two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on
| Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram
|
| Such a liar. Of course users will watch whatever FB shoves in
| their eyes. That doesn't make it a preference.
|
| > Meta exhibited a graphic of a boxing ring showing the logos of
| Instagram, Facebook, and the various companies that Meta argues
| are competitors, including TikTok, YouTube, and Apple's iMessage,
|
| So his defense is that Facebook & Insta are just like youtube and
| tiktok. But Google is already under fire for divesting youtube,
| and tiktok is banned. Is that a good defense?
| martopix wrote:
| It depends on what you mean by "preference". If you show me a
| pic of a hot guy and the picture that a friend took while
| hiking, I'll probably look at the hot guy for longer, so one
| could claim I _prefer_ it. But that doesn 't mean I think it's
| better to spend my time like that.
| coolThingsFirst wrote:
| ofc they aren't, they show ads and they are focused on damaging
| the mental health of their users.
|
| Facebook is all slop nowadays. X is amazing thoughj.
| grugagag wrote:
| X is full of bots and forcefeed content.
| coolThingsFirst wrote:
| You don't have to follow the bots.
|
| My feed is amazing tech content and people attempting to do
| crazy things. It's pretty awesome.
| differentView wrote:
| Name one amazing thing on X.
| oofManBang wrote:
| dril
| cryptopian wrote:
| Also on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/dril.bsky.social
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| just buy the book, it's enough dril for a lifetime
| alex1138 wrote:
| The fact that the old system would ban people for completely
| absurd reasons (including covid "misinformation" that all
| turned out to be true, but not exclusively that) and one
| thing Musk did do is put a stop to some of that
|
| I'm fully willing to listen to all the arguments that he's
| actually a horrible person but I don't see how people feel
| that part of it wasn't necessary to fix
| bbqfog wrote:
| Musk bans people all the time. Remember the jet tracker?
| coolThingsFirst wrote:
| Many many reasons. There are incredibly smart people on X who
| are writing and sharing their thoughts on things. There's
| nothing comparable to that on the internet.
|
| It may be ok for you if you live in an area with highly
| concentrated talent but for me I'm pretty isolated so it
| makes a tremendous difference.
| bbqfog wrote:
| No there are not. There are a bunch of moronic VCs saying
| incredibly stupid things and paying for blue checkmarks.
| coolThingsFirst wrote:
| Literally all the Deep learning and systems whizs are on
| X.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Virtue signaling political incorrectness is the only reason I
| can imagine people promoting Twitter right now.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| If social media is over, how does Meta's revenues keep climbing?
| bamboozled wrote:
| We're just scrolling random content now and not using "social
| media". Basically like watching tailored made, but really
| really shit quality TV. Instagram is massive for this.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > Meta displayed a chart showing that the "percent of time spent
| viewing content posted by 'friends' " has declined in the past
| two years,
|
| Yeah, because you filled the feed with garbage so obviously they
| don't get to see as much.
|
| Has 'percentage of time viewing content' declined?
| martopix wrote:
| Instagram actually used to be quite nice when it was pics of
| friends. Now I find it _scary_.
| carefulfungi wrote:
| IG was a social network that made me feel better after using
| it. It used to be a peaceful, well presented, personally
| curated stream of still photos.
|
| It really sucks that every single platform is lured into the
| brain-attention hack of short form video and the optimization
| of attention quantity over interaction quality. All cycles
| repeat though - here's hoping.
| xtiansimon wrote:
| > "It used to be a peaceful, well presented, personally
| curated stream of still photos."
|
| Ha! This is the opposite of my experience. I feel Tumblr
| was superior platform for images and art on small phone for
| no other reason than you can easily pinch and zoom. I still
| prefer still images on the Tumblr platform, and my feed is
| filled with artists, designers, photographers and comic
| book covers.
|
| I never liked the experience of viewing stills on Instagram
| and only when my friend started producing small videos and
| another friend started sending me fishing meme videos, did
| I start engaging. Now I do spend some time each week in
| Instagram (same as YouTube shorts). The platform is perfect
| for sharing small instructional videos. My feed is full of
| motorcycle mechanics hacks, fly fishing lessons, fitness
| instructions, and camping knots--all to my recreational
| interests--I'd rather be fishing.
| kodt wrote:
| It seems to largely be a mirror for tik-tok these days.
| rco8786 wrote:
| Seriously, talk about self fulfilling. "We stopped showing
| people content from their friends, and people started spending
| less time viewing content from their friends. It's
| inexplicable, really."
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The unspoken thing really is: We couldn't find a way to make
| mega-bux on showing people content from their friends, so we
| stopped being a social network almost entirely so we could
| make mega-bux showing them garbage ads and disinformation
| campaigns instead.
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| The last thing I want to see is what random people I don't know
| are posting. Maybe there's a stream where I can see that, but
| not in MY news feed. I want to only see what my friends are
| doing, and maybe what is going on in a group that I belong to.
| Nothing else. No AI prompts or responses, no suggested friends,
| videos, groups, etc. To make Facebook even tangentially useful
| to me I have to use FBuster or other extensions to remove all
| of that junk.
| zabzonk wrote:
| > The last thing I want to see is what random people I don't
| know are posting
|
| Most of us right here?
| AppleAtCha wrote:
| This is why I left Facebook and I'm sure it drove away many
| others.
| hackerbeat wrote:
| Yeah, how about improving Facebook (which has been neglected
| for years) instead of building out Threads (which nobody
| needs)?
| orangepanda wrote:
| Did FB chose to replace friends' posts with garbage, or was it
| that less and less people were posting, and FB had to replace
| the feed with _something_?
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| Looking for cause and effect in a feedback loop is a fool's
| errand
| acdha wrote:
| Those aren't mutually exclusive options. Facebook wants to
| always have new things to show people so they stay on the
| site, but it was absolutely their choice to deprioritize your
| friends' posts below advertisers and the "engaging" slop.
| corobo wrote:
| Visiting friends' profiles, they still seem to be posting but
| I rarely see them on my feed.
|
| No I haven't got them muted or anything haha, and I can't
| speak for why the algorithm thinks I don't want to see the
| content. Maybe it's broken.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Some mid-level manager idiot's a/b test revealed that they
| could maximize engagement by showing more rage bait and less
| family. This increased revenue and nobody wants to suggest a
| change that lowers it.
| esafak wrote:
| They have relevance guardrails but they keep eroding.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I'd like to know how much that time spend viewing content
| posted by "friends" are down since 2012, because I bet it's
| more than in the past two years, by a lot.
|
| There's also:
|
| > "The F.T.C. is arguing, instead, that Meta's purported
| monopoly has led to a lack of innovation and to reduced
| consumer choice."
|
| Not really, because no one gave a shit about providing a good
| social media experience, everyone wants to copy Zuckerbergs
| homework.
|
| If you want to blame Facebook/Meta for anything is it breaking
| the trust of people to the extend that no other social media
| can exist for a decade. Meta has burned the would be early
| adopters to the extend that they will NEVER sign up to a new
| social media platform ever again. Meta (and Google, Microsoft
| and so many others) have shown that spying on customers and
| selling their private data is business and now the tech savvy
| users that would be the first onboard and advocating are no
| longer signing up to anything that cannot guarantee absolute
| privacy.
|
| Facebook also killed of pretty much any other marketplace, but
| I am interested in seeing how the newer generations are going
| to affect that, given that many of them doesn't have a Facebook
| account.
| techterrier wrote:
| I hope so, and things might go back to having nice platforms for
| niche verticals, im making one of my own, for wildlife
| photography now that insta hates us :D
|
| https://toggr.io
| jmyeet wrote:
| Another way to put this: Tiktok won.
|
| I agree that the days of posting "this is what I had for dinner"
| are over. Facebook is a cesspool of your weird uncle posting
| conspiracy theories. IG isn't a friends network anymore. It's for
| following influencers.
|
| Tiktok has a following tab but anecdotally I don't know anyone
| who uses it regularly and as a significant portion of time on the
| app. It's all about the FYP. And Tiktok's algorithm is far
| superior to any other in this one way: how quickly it updates.
| You watch a video about ducklings and within 2-3 videos you'll be
| seeing more videos about ducklings.
|
| Compare this to FB, IG and Youtube: it seems like the process of
| learning what you like is far less responsive, almost like
| there's a daily job that processes your activity and updates the
| recommendation engine to your new interest levels.
|
| Also, Tiktok is very good at localizing your interests. By this I
| mean, the other platforms will push big creators on you. On
| Tiktok it's a common occurrence to stumble on a video from
| someone I've never heard of who has 20M+ followers and this is
| the first video I've seen in 2+ years from them. On FB or IG, if
| someone has a massive following, you'll almost have to block them
| to avoid seeing them if it's something you have zero interest in.
|
| These companies like the whole friends connection because it's a
| network effect, keeping users on the platform. Without that, it's
| so incredibly easy to switch when the new thing comes along.
|
| I would say that the rise of group chats instead is evidence of
| how social media is failing users. People do want to communicate
| with a closed group. It's like they say: any organization app has
| to compete with emailing yourself. Any social media has to
| compete with a group chat.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| I think you're right (though YT is crazy good and finding what
| you like imo).
|
| > I would say that the rise of group chats instead is evidence
| of how social media is failing users. People do want to
| communicate with a closed group. It's like they say: any
| organization app has to compete with emailing yourself. Any
| social media has to compete with a group chat.
|
| This is true, but the truth is that you spend maybe 1 hour (if
| that) in group chats, while many people spend 4-5 hours a day
| on Tiktok/IGReels. So the revealed preference is that yes, they
| want to be connected to their friends via group chats, but they
| want mindless entertainment a lot more.
| incomingpain wrote:
| I only have facebook for messenger, but lets look at my feed now.
|
| 1 sentence question from a page i dont follow.
|
| Funny joke from a page i dont follow.
|
| 3dmakerpro ad
|
| swimsuit picture of sister in law.
|
| 3d ai studio ad
|
| anti trans post from page i dont follow
|
| polymaker ad
|
| Reels?
|
| polymaker ad
|
| picture from highschool friend
|
| science/astronomy post from page i dont follow
|
| planetarium ad
|
| Less than 20% are anything I might even be interested in; the
| rest are pushed. I havent 3d printed in quite awhile. Astronomy
| is cool i guess.
|
| SOCIAL media is over if you're on facebook.
| 3np wrote:
| So briefly, Zuck is arguing that the social media which was
| Facebooks main business of 2010s no longer exists and that
| Facebook has now pivoted to generic content consumption,
| competing with YouTube, TikTok, Reddit etc.
|
| The article says FTC is in a bind here.
|
| IMO it's veey simple: Yes, FB shifted their focus and are now a
| content hose. They still have monopoly on some market(s) - not
| where they are competing with e.g. TikTok. Local events,
| marketplace, genuine personal social networks.
|
| That doesn't mean that they don't also compete with TikTok
| elsewhere, where further market consolidation could be a concern.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Anyone who uses instagram should be abundantly aware of this.
| The default behavior of the app became "Serve you all content
| we think you would like, in the order we think you would enjoy
| it". This pretty much means "You may or may not see the content
| of channels/people you specifically follow".
|
| The app went from just showing you a stream of posts from
| people you follow, to just showing you a stream of posts it
| thinks you would like.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| I use it exclusively for announcements from certain brands
| with e.g. seasonal rotations or sales (small shops,
| especially, are often way more consistent about updating one
| or more social media accounts, often Insta, than their
| website, if they even have a website) and it's such a pain in
| the ass for that reason. I don't trust ads or their
| "algorithm" to promote quality (I reckon they're more likely
| to promote rip-offs and fly-by-night operations) so I _super_
| don 't care about anything else they want to show me, even if
| it's directly related to the kinds of brands I'm following. I
| deliberately _do not_ do new-stuff discovery in the app,
| because they have incentives to screw me.
|
| The only thing I want out of it is to see the posts made by
| the accounts I'm following, since the last time I checked.
| That's 100% of the functionality I care about, and the app
| goes out of its way to _not_ deliver it.
| 3np wrote:
| And the shops are on FB/Insta/WhatsApp only because that's
| where users are. Classic entrenchment of network effects is
| a two-sided matketplace.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| What is worse is that the feed is generated on the fly.
| Switch apps for a second and your os kills instagram in the
| background, and you might not ever find those posts it showed
| you a few minutes ago ever again.
| immibis wrote:
| I have the opposite problem. Every time Instagram starts in
| the background (allegedly to check for feed updates but
| probably to get my geolocation) it uses so much memory it
| pushes out things like my on-screen keyboard. No doubt Meta
| has figured out ways to manipulate Android to get priority
| over the keyboard, and only tested it on the very latest
| phones.
| imhoguy wrote:
| I've singed up to Instagram first time about 2 weeks ago and
| it is literaly TikTok clone, including no history what I have
| watched.
| LPisGood wrote:
| They don't really have a monopoly on local events or
| marketplace.
|
| Facebook is popular for these things but that's because
| Facebook had a big user base, not because they keep competitors
| from forming.
|
| They have a network effect that smaller competitors don't.
| Thus, at the end of the day it's the user's choices that keep
| Facebook a sort of monopoly in those areas.
| wcfields wrote:
| > They don't really have a monopoly on local events or
| marketplace.
|
| Yeah, I'd say from 2004 - 2015 was the heyday for me on local
| events for small bands, house shows, and punk/DIY venues.
| Eventually FB Events died out socially by not being able to
| send invites to mass groups of friends/previous attendees,
| and attrition, and so on... A real shame for non-major venue
| events and the DIY scene.
|
| Marketplace is semi-useful still, quasi-better than
| craigslist, but keeps getting filled with a lot of cruft of
| drop-shippers and scammers.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| I had almost forgotten about the 2004-2015 music scene on
| Facebook. For me things died down around 2011 when the
| police started using Facebook to identify and break up
| unlicensed events.
| 3np wrote:
| > Facebook is popular for these things but that's because
| Facebook had a big user base, not because they keep
| competitors from forming.
|
| That's a separate legal argument and as I understand it not
| necessary to qualify a as monopoly.
| paxys wrote:
| > They still have monopoly on some market(s) - not where they
| are competing with e.g. TikTok. Local events, marketplace,
| genuine personal social networks.
|
| Yes, but none of these are a valid reason to force them to
| divest from Instagram and WhatsApp.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Them grapes are mighty sour, eh?
|
| Social media is just fine.
|
| Yes, paying people to post content has created a wider divide
| between content-creators and social follows, but social follows
| still exist.
|
| It's just Facebook that is over.
| geff82 wrote:
| So there is now a new possbility to create a new social network,
| retro style in a sense.
| mikez302 wrote:
| Kind of on that subject: https://directing.attention.to/p/why-
| is-no-one-making-a-new-...
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Well, thank god for that.
| corobo wrote:
| I've just loaded my Facebook home page. 6 'pages' (I know it's
| infinite scroll but you know what I mean) before I saw an actual
| friend's post, and it was from 2 weeks ago.
|
| Jeez Zucky, I wonder why social is dying. Is it because there's
| no bloody social between the ads and random algorithm shite
| anymore?
|
| E: haha, the rest of the comments say likewise. Redundant comment
| but +1 anecdata.
|
| Also for what it's worth I've checked a few profiles and yeah
| friends are still posting, I'm just not seeing it. I guess I
| scrolled past some post about something too quickly and now
| Facebook thinks I don't care? Maybe the algorithm is just broken
| lol.
| esperent wrote:
| It's because everyone moved over to using Whatsapp groups
| instead, for the actual social stuff, and TikTok, Instagram,
| and YouTube for the gratuitous lusting after other people's
| perfect lives stuff. It used to be that we looked at the
| perfect shared moments from our friends lives, but this didn't
| make us feel bad enough so we outsourced it to models backed by
| teams of experts so that we can compare ourselves to impossible
| highs and thusly feel only the most exquisite of lows when
| comparing our own real and therefore often shitty lives.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| This is the right answer, and it's something I believe Meta
| has also said publicly, that messaging apps have become the
| family and friends connection machine as people shifted to
| using mobile phones and messaging became free and able to
| handle multimedia.
| zpeti wrote:
| Yes this is the key point, and I really don't think
| Zuckerberg is to blame for this. It's just how the market
| moved. Before tiktok Zuck did actually try and move facebook
| back to friend territory, but tiktok became such a threat to
| time spent online they had to shift to "engaging content"
|
| And everyone is in whatsapp groups anyway for personal
| content...
|
| When Elon bought twitter he bought back the "following" tab
| on twitter, and frankly, I used it a few times then stopped.
| It was just boring. Shifting through pages and pages of
| random content from people I follow is just too much energy.
|
| The fact is, personalised feeds do just work. We hate this,
| but it works.
|
| It's a bit like sugar, I know it has zero benefit in 2025
| eating sugar, but I just do it, because its nice and it
| works, and it feels good. My brain knows its bad for me, but
| I just can't resist.
|
| Now you can blame restaurants and ice cream shops for this,
| but the fact is, if the particular ice cream shop I buy ice
| cream at closed, or offered less sugar alternatives, it would
| in fact lose market share. And of course, there are sugar
| free ice cream shops, but their market share will never be
| that big.
|
| If facebook wanted to actually stay on top, they were forced
| into this.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Long term will show whether it was the right decision by
| FB. If he now claims social media dead, then maybe already
| signs are showing, that the decisions were not as smart as
| he originally thought. Short term thinking kills many
| businesses.
| alex1138 wrote:
| And that's fine except people have missed seriously
| important life updates because of selective post non-
| showing
|
| Facebook already had people up in arms when the feed was
| first introduced (probably because Zuckerberg seemingly
| doesn't believe in privacy as a concept, at all) and now
| they want to ruin it (especially now but it's been like
| this for years) by defeating the point of it?
|
| And I do blame him, anyway
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
| corobo wrote:
| Missing things is another one I noticed yeah. In my case
| it's gigs from local places I actually follow.
|
| Why show an event that happened last Friday? They even
| know it's time sensitive because it's an event with a
| date and time attached!
| Nursie wrote:
| It's not universal though - they don't work for me, I don't
| want or care about any of the "value add" in a feed. I
| don't want reels, I'm not there for suggestions.
|
| Clearly I'm a minority as I'm sure they have research
| saying it does drive engagement for large Numbers of
| people, but Facebook appears to be worse for all that other
| stuff and as a result is failing everyone.
| juancroldan wrote:
| Facebook is now a birthday-reminder and old-connection-keeper
| tool loaded with empty content to feel less sad. Instagram and
| TikTok are also trending towards content consumption. Messaging
| and group chats are the only real social media now
| corobo wrote:
| Ooh speaking of birthday reminders - if Facebook is browsing
| this thread looking for things to fix: bring back the
| birthday iCal feed!
|
| You literally had notifications via my calendar bringing me
| back to your site every few days/weeks to say happy birthday
| and maybe have a bit of a browse. Now the reminders are in my
| todo list and I say happy birthday via text or call instead.
| Path of least pain in the backside.
|
| Absolutely bizarre they ditched the birthdays and events iCal
| feeds.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Funny that you think they'd prioritize something that'd be
| useful, good for you.
| corobo wrote:
| Haha of course. I was probably just one of a mere few
| hundred million people using it in a way that brought me
| back to the algorithm so it got scrapped for
| underutilisation :(
| pixl97 wrote:
| Boss: "you're only allowed to work on things that serve
| more ad views"
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| Remember when they told us that capitalism would cause
| people to trip over themselves to give us what we want
| and need because that would naturally be where most of
| the profit could be had? Why do you think it didn't do
| that in this case? The answer of course is that facebook
| does serve it's customers. It serves the people who can
| afford to buy ads, and what it serves them is _you_.
| anonymars wrote:
| The missing ingredient is usually "competition"
|
| Same thing with the "private sector is always better"
| religion - if there's no meaningful competition, you end
| up no choice coupled with a profit motive, vs. no choice
| but I can at least nominally vote and be represented
|
| ISPs are usually a good example in the US. My old
| apartment had one provider, and wouldn't you know it, at
| my new apartment with multiple providers, I got five
| times the bandwidth for half the price.
|
| See also: enshittification
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| In light of competition being the missing ingredient, the
| question becomes how does one maintain ongoing
| competition in a system where the bigger of two
| competitors tends to win and the winner of two
| competitors tends to get bigger? That's exactly what
| happened here: Facebook was bigger than WhatsApp, and
| FB+WA is bigger than Insta, so FB+WA+Insta is a lot
| bigger than anyone else.
|
| Back in the day when Microsoft was the one in the DoJ's
| sights someone compared it to a dog race. Dogs don't have
| jockeys, so you have to figure out some other way to
| induce them to run. The way most tracks (probably all,
| idk much about dog racing but it's a useful metaphor
| here) do that is by having a mechanical bunny that runs
| out ahead of the dogs and activates their prey drive. The
| bunny has to be ahead of the dogs, but not so far ahead
| that they don't think they can catch it and give up. That
| means that every once in a while a dog will get the
| timing just right, go extra hard, and actually catch the
| bunny. At that point, the race is over for everyone until
| someone steps in to shake the dog loose from the bunny
| and give everyone a reason to run again. Our system is
| like that: we have to encourage everyone to do everything
| they can to catch the bunny but also ensure that they
| never actually do. Bill Gates was the first person in my
| memory to catch the bunny, and needed to be shaken loose.
| Now it's Zuckerberg, and probably Google, that need to be
| pried off of their respective bunnies so that everyone
| else has something to chase.
| safety1st wrote:
| For a start, and it might even be enough, you strictly
| enforce anti-trust laws which are already on the books
| that prevent sufficiently large firms from acquiring
| their competitors and doing exclusivity deals. These laws
| have largely been ignored for decades and I don't know
| what to call that other than blatant corruption of our
| government, but it's slowly starting to change, in a
| bipartisan way.
|
| Microsoft escaped the worst of what the government wanted
| to do to them for their anti-trust violations. It may not
| go so well for Google as they hold the distinction of
| being the only company in US history to have been tried
| and found guilty in three separate cases of possessing
| three illegal monopolies all at the same time. Two
| example measures under discussion in the court at the
| moment are forbidding any renewal of their browser
| default deal with Apple, and forcing them to sell off
| Chrome. We will see soon enough what comes next.
| Whoppertime wrote:
| Foreign competitors is how you get competition usually.
| The big 3 auto companies can lobby Congress and
| discourage competition. When American Cars started
| installing tailfins (purely cosmetics) instead of
| competing on fuel performance, maintenance or price, they
| were opening the door for the Japanese auto industry to
| eventually take over, with the crisis of the oil shock
| being the instigating factor for people changing their
| consumption habits
| thesuitonym wrote:
| That only works as long as the companies don't pay
| Congress to keep foreign competitors out of the market.
| To continue the automobile example, consider why the
| market for light trucks in the US is almost exclusively
| American brands.
| jerf wrote:
| The missing ingredient here is that there is a gulf
| between what people really need, and what they do.
| Capitalism/market forces/etc. optimize on that "what
| people really do" and not what they need, and especially
| not what they say they want. See also, for instance, the
| layout of your grocery store.
|
| The good news is that capitalism is in fact _really good_
| at serving exactly the preferences you reveal through
| your actions, and there are ways in which that is good.
| The bad news is that the farther away we get from our
| "native environment" the farther our needs and revealed
| preferences are diverging. I can think of no equivalent
| threat in our ancestral environment to "scrolling away
| your day on Facebook". Sloth and laziness aren't new, but
| that _enticement_ to it is very new.
|
| The discipline to sit, think with your brain, and realize
| with your system 2 brain [1] that you need to harness and
| control your system 1 urges is moving from "a recipe to
| live a good life" (e.g., wisdom literature, Marcus
| Aurelius, Proverbs, Confucious, many many other examples
| dating back thousands of years), but one a lot of people
| lived reasonably happily without, to a _necessity_ to
| thrive in the modern environment. Unfortunately, humans
| have never, ever been _collectively_ good at that.
|
| And the level of brutality that system 2 must use on
| system 1 is going up, too. Resisting an indulgent dinner
| is one thing; carrying around the entire internet in your
| pocket and resisting darned near every vice
| simultaneously, continuously, is quite another. In my
| lifetime this problem has sharpened profoundly from minor
| issue to major problem everyone faces every hour.
|
| For a much older example, see "drugs". Which is also a
| new example as the frontier expands there, too.
|
| I have no idea what a solution to this at scale looks
| like. But I am quite optimistic we will ultimately find
| one, because we will _have_ to. The systems can 't just
| keep getting better and better at enticement to the
| short-term with no other social reaction.
|
| [1]: https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-
| guide/philosophy/system...
| anonymars wrote:
| Ultimately capitalism "works", but only if externalities
| are incorporated into the price.
|
| Hence vice taxes on liquor, cigarettes, the short-lived
| Bloomberg tax on soda. See also - carbon pricing.
|
| What would that look like for social media, I don't know.
| If we're truly brainstorming, what if Facebook were
| forced to charge you cash money for usage beyond a half
| hour per day? Or past a certain amount of posting?
|
| I'm well aware that politically this would die even
| faster than the soda tax... selling a policy is often
| more difficult and important than policy itself
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Or, hear me out, what about "competition exists but I
| also get to vote and be represented." Where I live, there
| are two ISPs, the local cable conglomerate, and a telecom
| coop.
|
| The cable company, as you might expect, is completely and
| utterly awful. They go for all of cable's greatest hits,
| from low introductory payments that explode after the
| first year, to service that is constantly down, to
| sending you to collections for equipment you returned.
| They do it all. The speeds are slow, and the customer
| service is non-existent.
|
| The coop, on the other hand, is beyond delightful. The
| speed _always_ exceeds what I 'm paying for, and every
| couple of years they readjust their packages to give me
| more speed for the same price. Only three times in almost
| a decade have I had any problems with them: One was an
| outage that was caused by a natural disaster, and the
| other two were problems with my ONT that were fixed next
| day at no charge. Oh, and since it's a coop, I get a
| check every year as part of the profit sharing. For me,
| it only equates to about a free month of service, but
| it's still pretty nice.
|
| So I guess the tl;dr of it all is that you don't need to
| get rid of free markets to have social control of things.
| And since the profits go to the people paying for the
| service, there's no incentive to extract extra value, so
| there's no real enshitification.
| ryandrake wrote:
| And, any time some company gets close to "give us what we
| want and need," the company will be bought by Facebook,
| or funded by VCs, and new ownership will "correct" the
| problem.
| asimpletune wrote:
| Honestly, everything would be much better if either a.)
| people just paid for stuff or b.) governments decided ad-
| tech in its present form should not be a thing, and
| regulated the retention of personal data as a liability,
| to make targeted advertising less-
| personalized/unprofitable.
|
| As a system for discovering price, free markets work
| really well. The downsides comes from politicians not
| understanding/caring the limitations of free markets and
| what kinds of problems they're simply not intended to
| solve. These are the economic factors beyond price. More
| broadly, they're our values.
|
| If we outsource the need for philosophy/wisdom to the
| free markets then there is no reason why the market will
| not demand child labor, 7 day work weeks, single use
| everything, and privatized security forces. We failed to
| take action earlier, and the same kind of stuff has
| already happened to the environment. Not to mention that
| gambling and security fraud are making a comeback.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| I'm 100% with you on the idea that it's time to start
| paying for services on the internet instead of the ad-
| funded model we have today. The problem is that the
| people who decide when and how to monetize things seem to
| be moving toward a model where they charge you for the
| service, sell your data _and_ feed you ads.
| bdangubic wrote:
| 100% this... everything you pay for is already selling
| your data and will eventually feed you ads.
| asimpletune wrote:
| If lawmakers regulated data retention to make targeted
| advertising unprofitable, then businesses would have no
| choice but to compete for customer's money directly by
| providing value.
| philjohn wrote:
| They already send an email or push notification ... so
| yeah, there would be very little metric movement to
| justify this as having enough impact for year end PSC.
| fallingknife wrote:
| We don't pay them, so really why would they? I don't do
| work for people who don't pay me either.
| jandrese wrote:
| iCal feeds don't bring you into the site. The whole point
| of Facebook is to be a walled garden that discourages you
| from going elsewhere. You're lucky they are not like X and
| deprioritize external links. Or maybe they do, I have not
| tested it myself.
|
| https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people
| corobo wrote:
| I would click the link in the event to go say happy
| birthday to the person! I guess I wasn't the norm though
| aye, it's big numbers that matter
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| Sounds like you use iOS? Add the birthday to the friend's
| contact and it'll appear in your calendar automatically.
| You're welcome in advance.
| diggan wrote:
| > Instagram and TikTok are also trending towards content
| consumption
|
| Huh? They were explicitly built for that purpose, not
| "trending towards". Without content consumption, those
| platforms are nothing.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| I guess he meant content produced by "professional" content
| creators with the only goal of earning money instead of
| interesting pictures from your friends' life.
|
| At least that's how I experience Instagram these days. It's
| a chat app where people send each other content made by
| others in the DMs.
|
| Very few of the people I know personally have posted in the
| last few years, but most of them seem to casually use the
| app to explore whatever the algorithm shows them.
| xyst wrote:
| Anybody worth keeping in contact with, I have their phone
| number.
|
| The only use for Facebook is for the marketplace.
| the_af wrote:
| Sadly for me, there's another use case for Facebook:
| special interest groups (as in niche groups for hobbies).
|
| When the Great Migration away from phpbb forums and
| bulletin boards happened, lots of these groups moved to
| Facebook. I loathed it, but joining the migration was the
| only way of keeping up with stuff that interested me.
|
| Now there's another Great Migration to Discord, which I
| won't follow. Real-time chat simply triggers my FOMO and is
| stressful to me. So any community that moves primarily to
| Discord will lose me as a member. I suppose nobody will
| miss me though.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Facebook is now a birthday-reminder_
|
| It isn't even good at that. I'll often see "it was
| [whoever]'s birthday yesterday" when I did login on the last
| couple of days, and it didn't bother to mention the fact
| then. Too many ads and pointless reals to show me on those
| days, to have space to insert the now/upcoming birthday
| reminder, presumably.
| boringg wrote:
| Actually it's biggest value is marketplace though the
| scammers know that too.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Marketplace is the absolute worst UX I could imagine.
| slt2021 wrote:
| highly overpaid Facebook engineers must be forced to use
| Marketplace to try to buy their cars, instead of buying
| from a dealer.
|
| maybe that way they would improve things a bit
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| I was thrilled to find out that I can block facebook.com in
| my etc/hosts and still have access to messenger. Hard
| limiting the time I spend being "social" with robots and
| hostile outsiders has gone from being a good idea to being a
| survival strategy as we got further into the
| industrialization of the attention economy.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| (now as in 10 years ago)
| wil421 wrote:
| Facebook groups are like the new Internet forums. There's
| tons of stuff that's moved to Facebook groups like Fishing
| and Car forums. For a lot of content Facebook groups are much
| better than forums.
|
| Marketplace seems to be the new Craigslist and much better
| IMHO.
|
| Posting is probably dead or dying. I haven't done it in a
| decade or so.
| HeadsUpHigh wrote:
| >For a lot of content Facebook groups are much better than
| forums
|
| Facebook groups are very disjointed and the algo does a bad
| job and keeping the good bits floating to the top.
| throw042425 wrote:
| That's interesting. In what sense would you say FB groups
| are much better than forums?
|
| But yeah I agree, groups and marketplace are the only
| things keeping FB alive.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| They're better in the sense that people actually use them
| shanecleveland wrote:
| Probably true with most successful things. Marketplace is
| just a low barrier to entry for people already using
| Facebook. I find it generally terrible, but that's where
| people are selling.
| ultrarunner wrote:
| They could be huge in this, but sadly they'll continue to
| ruin it because (IMHO) they are rotten at the core. I can't
| tell you how many times I've seen a question posted on a
| relevant topic, switched tabs to consult the manual to
| verify my memory, and then gone back only to see Facebook
| do its ADHD reload and bury the question.
|
| Once people get sufficiently frustrated and the ad revenue
| declines below the cost of running the servers, we will
| immediately lose _all_ of the information shared there.
| None of it will be archived like the old forums. It 's a
| genuinely sad situation.
| bschwindHN wrote:
| > and then gone back only to see Facebook do its ADHD
| reload and bury the question
|
| Does anyone know why facebook does this? It's the most
| infuriating thing, like it's assuming the poor user
| doesn't know how to "refresh" a page so it does it for
| them, because clearly they got stuck on an old crusty
| piece of content.
| zoky wrote:
| You know exactly why they do it. To generate
| "engagement".
| dboreham wrote:
| In my experience the Facebook groups always turn to crap,
| especially if it's a group that attracts more than about
| 500 users. Abusive posts, scam posts, fake groups with the
| same name created by bots. I've reverted to old school
| forums for all my special interests. Marketplace is still
| the best classifieds product though.
| freehorse wrote:
| It depends on the mods and the specific communities the
| groups are about. I have seen what you describe in some,
| but not at all in others.
| shanecleveland wrote:
| Only reason I caved and joined Facebook a few years ago was
| to get access to a group dedicated to Boston Whaler boats.
| There were two previously-thriving forums that were slowly
| dying. The forums were great. The Facebook group was not
| better, just alive.
| naijaboiler wrote:
| would rather use reddit for foruming than facebook groups
| freehorse wrote:
| I would rather have ol' good forums. I would rather have
| years long posts in the frontpage and the ability to bump
| a long burried post when new info is up, and not missing
| the opportunity to engage with a topic just because 1-2
| days passed without me logging in and thus the post,
| being more than 1-2 days old, is not in the frontpage
| anymore.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| > For a lot of content Facebook groups are much better than
| forums.
|
| How so? I find FB groups strictly worse than old-school
| forums.
| freehorse wrote:
| Also events, it's probably the platform affecting
| discoverability of events the most.
|
| The ways fb is (still) the most useful to users are the
| ones meta cares the least about.
| mrspuratic wrote:
| "mbasic.facebook.com" was a vastly simpler UI, and had
| notably less noise content. Sometimes "back" navigation even
| worked properly. They killed that last year :/
|
| Were it not for distant family using it, I would almost
| certainly download my content and nuke my account.
| bentcorner wrote:
| Discord are where the kids are at. But with them going public
| it's going to enshittify quickly and it's only a matter of
| time before they move onto something new.
| endemic wrote:
| > Messaging and group chats are the only real social media
| now
|
| This is accurate as far as I'm concerned. Interacting
| directly with actual friends; no ads or clickbait content
| injected.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| Not sure when they will take it away, but for now, there is a
| cleaner option - go to Feeds on the left (I use it on the
| computer), and then Friends (as opposed to All or Groups). That
| gets you the latest posts from friends in reverse chronological
| order.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Honestly it feels like a hostage situation
|
| Like some engineer in the company begged Mark like, "Please,
| people are going to drop your product completely unless you
| give them some control" (remember Top Stories vs Most
| Recent?)
|
| And Mark's like "yeah, ok, cool" (it'll be removed in 2 years
| when said engineer quits/is fired)
| corobo wrote:
| Oh wow I actually forgot about this.
|
| I used to have a bookmark that took me directly to the
| friends feed but it would seem it just redirects to the
| homepage now, and the navigating to the feeds fresh just
| loads within the page rather than via URL (at least on mobile
| web, m.facebook.com, not checked desktop)
| tanjtanjtanj wrote:
| About couple years ago I logged onto Facebook for the first
| time in nearly a decade to sell something on marketplace. I
| took a peek at my feed and the set up was:
|
| Post from some guy I barely knew in high school talking about
| giving all at his job with zero comments or likes followed by
| Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad endlessly. I just kept scrolling and scrolling
| and hitting more pages of ads.
|
| I refreshed and got a different single post followed by more
| ads. I took a short video of the feed to show my friend who
| worked at Facebook at the time and he said "oh it might do that
| when it doesn't know what to show you, if you use it more it
| will get better"
|
| I asked how it would learn what I liked when it was just
| showing me ads and he didn't have a good answer. I guess nobody
| cares there.
| reginald78 wrote:
| And why would some one continue to use it if all it does is
| show ads? You have to put some cheese on a rattrap if you
| want the rat to stick his head in it.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| I don't see a lot of friends posts, but I see some groups which
| are pretty active, and sometimes even useful. For instance,
| local hiking group, people post pictures, organize hike. I
| thought facebook was dead, but there's still a lot of activity.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Facebook has a Friends feed[1] which only shows posts from
| friends (and ads, but that's a whole other discussion). Even
| so, like 80% of the posts from my friends are just them re-
| sharing news articles or random memes; I wish there was a way
| to block reshares from pages or something like that.
|
| Also, personal pet peeve: Instagram has a way to turn off
| "suggested posts" in the feed... for 30 days, then the setting
| gets automatically turned back on. This is such a blatantly
| user hostile anti-pattern it's almost as bad as if they didn't
| have the setting at all.
|
| [1]: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
| rrauenza wrote:
| It's odd that in the iPad version, the friends button at the
| bottom doesn't take you to the same feed, but rather lists of
| people to add.
| mindtricks wrote:
| I used to count how many non-friend items there were between
| friend posts. If I recall correctly, my max count was 20. And
| similarly to you, when I do see something it's from 3 days ago
| and feels no relevant to comment or interact with. I know so
| many people hate Facebook, but I used to really enjoy those
| small moments with friends where we could interact over small
| life updates and photos. Now they feed me garbage to groups
| I've never subscribed to based on some "guess" around my
| interests.
| brap wrote:
| Fun game. I just had 7, then 3, then I gave up after 30. And
| those 2 friend "posts" were 1. someone sharing a page's post,
| and 2. a friend posting what appears to be an automated happy
| birthday on someone else's wall. I did not see any actual
| content from friends at all.
|
| Most stuff on FB seems to be 1. pages I don't follow 2. ads
| 3. posts from groups I no longer care about 4. random people
| who are not my friends but somehow I still get to see their
| posts in my feed (not even popular posts) 5. sometimes, some
| uninteresting activity by an actual friend (commented on
| something, shared something) 6. occasionally a friend's IG
| story pops up (I guess these are automatically cross-posted
| to FB or something)
| malexw wrote:
| I've also done this and my record count was 120. 120
| sponsored or suggested posts about things I don't care about
| in between the posts from people I'm actually interested in.
|
| I'll echo what others have said - if social media is dead,
| it's because they killed it themselves.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| I never load the homepage. Feeds>friends in a firefox container
| with FBPurity is the only way I'll touch that abomination.
|
| I also find that I have to mute a lot of over sharers. I feel
| for those people because I know they are like rats pushing the
| social lever for some imaginary sense of connection.
| jc_811 wrote:
| I don't know if their newsfeed algorithm is broken, or just
| grasping at straws, but whenever I log in (fairly often simply
| for FB marketplace) my feed is full of posts and
| recommendations for things that don't even make sense for me.
| For example hiking groups that are in a random mid-size city
| 2,000mi from me. Or student housing groups in a random
| international city.
|
| I've tried to even provide feedback on them not being relevant,
| but they still always appear. I don't know, it really does seem
| that their newsfeed relevancy is fundamentally broken
| corobo wrote:
| I thought it was being insulting for a while but I guess I
| did pause on it to screenshot and make a witty post but I'm
| constantly getting Dull Men's Club, and more recently the
| knockoff versions haha
|
| Facebook, I'm not into these, and I've told you so! It was
| just that "Suggested for you: Dull Men's Club" was funny the
| first time!
| Throw9444 wrote:
| I haven't had a Facebook account in about a decade at this
| point, and I recall continually discussing already how
| useless it was without chronological sorting and recommending
| you random crap (and I'm not just talking about the ads).
| rcruzeiro wrote:
| I spent over one year being served sponsored content
| advertising sales of firearms, cloned credit cards and drugs.
| Last time I logged in, I've noticed that I was being served
| content based on interests of my close friends. For example,
| a close friend got really into rock climbing, so I got tons
| of rock climbing meme accounts.
|
| I have now grown tired of all of that and, when I realised
| that it had been ages since I had seen someone I actually
| know post anything, I deactivated it all.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| The thing that always surprised me about this when I still
| used FB was that they clearly had the expertise available in
| Meta to do it right because my Instagram ads/recommended
| content was almost stunningly well-tailored: events I
| actually wanted to buy tickets to, products that actually
| interested me, even down to reels from new comedians I find
| genuinely funny...
|
| My FB feed, by comparison, was almost exactly like yours -
| not just irrelevant interests, but geographically crazy
| irrelevant interests.
| alex1138 wrote:
| It's almost like once you lose Systrom/Krieger it all goes
| to shit
|
| (The same people Zuckerberg was accused of bullying out of
| the company)
| dekhn wrote:
| I think the main Facebook product is basically running on
| autopilot now- the folks who wrote the pipelines got promoted
| and went to work on other stuff.
|
| (note that if you click Friends or Feeds you will see
| somewhat more personal content, but basically, the main
| stream is just a list of irrelevant garbage)
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| My girlfriend also gets the same stuff over and over, most of
| it AI-generated garbage she's absolutely not interested in.
| No matter how often she selects "not interested", they always
| come back. Strangely, this started only recently on her
| account and mine is still comparatively okay. From what I've
| heard, it's much worse for US users.
|
| One thing that amazes me is that Facebook thinks I'm
| interested in content I was interested in more than 25 years
| ago before Facebook even existed. It's mysterious.
| 1auralynn wrote:
| Once I looked at the comments for a disgusting AI-generated
| tiny house picture to see if anyone else knew it was AI-
| generated and then all it showed me were more disgusting
| AI-generated tiny house pictures no matter how many times I
| tried to block it.
| rvba wrote:
| There used to be a hidden "only friends" feed - it got removed,
| or is hidden even better. Also you couldnt default to it.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| On desktop - left sidebar, Feeds > Friends (not Friends at
| the top level). On mobile (or at least iOS, which I have) the
| bottom sidebar, second left button Friends are not perfect
| for me but cut out 90% of the garbage.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| This. My facebook feed is 10% posts from friends, and 90% ads
| or weird content posts.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| I was a very early Instagram user and would even defend it over
| the years as "influencers" became a thing. "I don't see it as a
| problem... if you don't like those people then don't follow
| them."
|
| Nothing about my tastes have changed over the years, but I now
| find Instagram to be painful to look at. If social media is
| over, it's because Meta made the conscious decision to kill it.
| jonathanlb wrote:
| I would argue that social media's positive-feedback engine
| contributed to its own demise. Anec-data:
|
| After being terminally online on Instagram, I decided to took
| a two-week break because I was noticed I was mindlessly
| scrolling through content that I enjoyed. After the two
| weeks, it was striking to note that almost all videos
| followed a pattern- a jarring hook in the first two seconds,
| a provocative question, rapid-fire cuts and a soundtrack.
| Most videos have to follow this proven formula, but in doing
| so, they'll be like all the other videos and will then have
| to take the next step to engage users, so videos become more
| aggressive and formulaic, which for me, gets in the way of
| the content.
|
| This is completely omitting the fact that quickly scrolling
| past accounts you follow will trigger Instagram to suggest
| clips that are more provocative in an effort to capture one's
| attention. Even if you're intentional about what you consume,
| the app is adversarial to your own intentions.
| selfhoster wrote:
| That's an eloquently stated view. I'm not on FB or
| Instagram, but everything you said somehow resonated with
| me as a YT user.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It's MBAs on the eternal quest to juice profits. If a
| social site ran itself lean like Craigslist they could win
| the entire prize without the need to manipulate content for
| the benefit of advertisers.
| smcin wrote:
| Sure, but don't mislabel that _" positive-feedback
| engine"_. Engagement, attention loop, reinforcement,
| clicks, views, comments, likes, follows, longer average
| visit time, distraction engine, compulsive behavior, higher
| advertiser revenue, whatever, but it isn't positive and it
| isn't really feedback.
|
| If you had a friend who in the middle of interactions
| habitually pulled out a bag of cocaine and snorted some (or
| gambled), you wouldn't say they were giving positive
| feedback to the dealer (/casino). You'd say they were
| annoying and unable to function.
|
| What happens on Instagram if you vote dislike/ignore
| attention-bait clips and try to find longer-form (>10
| minute) content, and use searches rather than feed?
| jonathanlb wrote:
| > don't mislabel that "positive-feedback engine".
|
| But it is a positive feedback loop in a technical sense.
| Think of a microphone providing sound to an amplifier,
| and that amplifier in turn providing amplified sound into
| the original microphone. It's self-reinforcing.
|
| > What happens on Instagram if you vote dislike/ignore
| attention-bait clips and try to find longer-form (>10
| minute) content, and use searches rather than feed?
|
| The thing is, I don't want to be on Instagram. It's
| basically TV for me, and I'd rather not engage with
| content that way because it's passive and messes up my
| attention span. I already stare at a screen for eight
| hours a day for work, and I'd rather not have to spend
| any more time on screens than I have to.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| I feel it's all a side effect of chasing numbers. They show
| us a bunch of junk, which is addictive for a while but
| eventually we quit it for good. If they had decided "ok,
| Facebook is just going to be the place for friend updates"
| many of us would have stayed.
| guappa wrote:
| It all started because they needed to fill it up after the
| content shared by your friends is finished.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Well, in theory they could have just stuck to being a
| humble social media site, even if the traffic were to
| plateau or drop slightly. Something like what Craigslist
| did, but slightly more modern.
|
| But of course if they'd done that Meta wouldn't be worth
| a hundred gazillion dollars now.
| macNchz wrote:
| Well yeah, scrolling through and liking a picture of your
| friend's vacation and commenting "Adorable!" on a video
| of your cousin's toddler only gives you, say, 10 minutes
| to see ads, whereas getting fed an endless stream of
| progressively more intense and precisely-tuned content to
| tickle at your inner psyche (be it most susceptible to
| anger, lust, envy, greed etc) means you might spend hours
| on there scrolling past ads.
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| Meta made the decision to take control of what users see via
| the feed, and to show them mostly content which is NOT from
| friends. Content that "performs well".
|
| The testimony is disingenuous, but true. People see less of
| their friends because they are show less of their friends.
| Friends post less becuase no one sees it.
| guappa wrote:
| Yeah with my friends we moved to a matrix group.
| dazh wrote:
| I'm no Meta apologist, but I don't know if we can blame them
| on this one. Unfortunately in the digital age, everything
| reverts to the mean so quickly. It probably turns out that
| the most effective way to capture user attention is to give
| them an algo feed of addictive slop.
|
| Unfortunately capturing user attention is also the best way
| to sell advertising, so it makes sense that all their
| products converged on algo feeds.
| mrandish wrote:
| > Meta made the conscious decision to kill it.
|
| No, it wasn't conscious, they just incrementally and
| iteratively optimized the site to maximize page views and ad
| revenue. Turns out that ends up eventually killing it -
| without ever having the intention of doing so. But you can
| rest assured that every decision on that long, slippery slope
| optimized some metric toward a local maxima.
|
| It's been 8 years since my last post on Facebook and I visit
| less than 10 mins a year (only because I have one friend who
| uses FB messenger to communicate with me when he's
| traveling).
| ethbr1 wrote:
| It begs the question of how much time Zuckerberg and Meta's
| leadership spend actually using their own products,
| nowadays.
| mseepgood wrote:
| Why would they? They're not dumb.
| nrclark wrote:
| The first rule of dealing is "don't get high on your own
| supply".
| ethbr1 wrote:
| At some point, Facebook (and Amazon and Google before it)
| were products that delivered what their users wanted.
|
| The essence of enshittification is product leadership
| losing the plot on their users' desires and piloting
| everything off the cliff by solely following growth
| metrics.
| bravoetch wrote:
| When a fb exec gave a talk at our then small startup about
| their 'north star' being monthly active users, I thought
| maybe they had just given up on serving their customers,
| that was in 2014. He detailed how they measured 'active'
| etc.
|
| Our CEO immediately adopted a north star of 'revenue',
| again just shoving end-users into a pile for exploitation.
| Companies are not making products to solve an end-user
| issue, or even add value. The VC is the customer, and if
| your fb feed and IG is toxic, it's because that's working
| well for the investors.
| conductr wrote:
| I use SM very seldom. But IG was my fav for a long time. I
| only had about 50 friends, all real people that I knew, they
| didn't post daily, it was roughly 1:1 ratio of
| follower:following, so - I could open it up about once a
| month, scroll through a dozen or so images and see the
| "you're all caught up" notice and bounce. At some point, I
| remember it saying my account wasn't showing me Ads because I
| had low follower count / low engagement - which I thought was
| great and it went on that way for a few years. Then at some
| point it became clear it changed. At first, it wasn't Ads,
| just posts from random people inserted into my feed. I never
| engage with anything overtly - no likes, comments, etc. But,
| I think I do spend more time on things that I "like" and do
| swipe through if there are multiple images if I find
| something interesting. So that was all the training that it
| needed. Soon after that, all I see on IG are half naked women
| in form fitting attire and construction content. Turns out
| I'm a hetero male that has a hobby of building stuff/home
| improvement, but I already knew that. I stopped using it all
| together.
|
| The funny part is because of my construction hobby & interest
| in building science; I started seeing Ads in Spanish which I
| don't speak. I get this on YT too as that's where most my
| "how to build a ...." stuff ends up.
| grokgrok wrote:
| It's not so much dead as resembling a mangy, depressed tiger
| stuck in a cage at a discount-tier circus
| intrasight wrote:
| Just filter everything out that's not an actual post by a
| friend. Filter out news, shares, ads, etc - all that nonsense.
| notwhereyouare wrote:
| you can't. they don't give you a filter to show just friends.
| you have to slog through all the "recommended" posts
| intrasight wrote:
| I didn't say to use a filter that they provide. It's your
| "user agent" - have it do your bidding.
|
| I use FBP: https://www.fbpurity.com/faq.htm
| FireBeyond wrote:
| The only ways FB are tolerable to me:
|
| Desktop - left sidebar, Feeds > Friends.
|
| Mobile - Friends button on the bottom menu.
|
| Not perfect, but cuts out 90% of the garbage.
| chpatrick wrote:
| I highly recommend the FB purity extension to remove all that
| crap: https://www.fbpurity.com/
| magicmicah85 wrote:
| Zuck did announce rather recently the Friends feed is more
| prominent on the app. It's always been well hidden, but I think
| they know people are getting sick of the mindless scrolling.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/news/637668/facebook-friends-only-f...
| xbmcuser wrote:
| For me social is now family, extended family, siblings, school,
| high school and university friend groups on whatsapp with just
| people sharing big news wishing birthdays etc. All the info in
| the groups is in silo from each group. Where you actually
| behave in the groups like you would in real life ie differently
| with different groups.
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| Facebook has devolved to the realm of the unreal now.
|
| I signed-in a few weeks back and the whole thing was just
| bizarre clickbait, ads, and bizarre clickbait generated image
| spam.
|
| I really don't see how there's a future for this.
|
| Is this (the abandonment and subsequent mass-sloppification) an
| American thing?
|
| Is there a user base in other countries? It seems like a relic
| of a previous era.
| gre wrote:
| On my feed I get AI-generated pictures of castles and houses
| in the woods. There are enough real places where we don't
| need to make stuff up. Makes me feel bad, actually.
| jandrese wrote:
| Yes. I also got fake airplanes and way too long Wikipedia
| summaries of random things. It seems to me that there are
| really only a handful of outfits that really have the
| Facebook algorithm over their knee. It seems like the sort
| of thing that content moderators should be able to combat,
| but Facebook has just sort of given up.
| burningChrome wrote:
| I've been on Instagram for less than a year for a photography
| and now my feed regularly includes what people are now
| calling "rage bait". which I found are people purposefully
| posting things to get people to engage with their content and
| are rewarded when more people comment on that content.
|
| I 100% agree that I cannot see a future where people think
| this is healthy and can continue.
| sebastiennight wrote:
| > I cannot see a future where people think this is healthy
| and can continue.
|
| The first is not a prerequisite for the second. See: fast-
| food, car-optimized cities, Electron apps, microplastics,
| AI-controlled drone warfare, trap music, etc.
| ben_w wrote:
| I'm British living in Berlin, and it's _almost_ that dead to
| me. 1 /3rd irrelevant ads, 1/3rd irrelevant suggested
| content, 1/6th one single poster who mostly shares political
| messages that other people created, 1/6th everyone else
| combined.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I have that "one single poster" guy as well. It is annoying
| as hell--I even agree with all his politics but, man, it is
| just overwhelming.
| robotnikman wrote:
| Enshitification. Investors want their ever increasing return
| on their investment, even if it means plastering the product
| with ads
| brainwad wrote:
| It's shit even with an ad blocker. The problem is that
| there's just very little organic content anymore, because
| the fad of posting all the time on social media passed. A
| social media site can't subsist on birthdays, wedding and
| babies, but that's all people post about these days. The
| interesting stuff has moved (back) to topic-based groups or
| pseudonymous forums (like this one).
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| There are limits to this--at some point it reaches a
| tipping point, and the people leave.
|
| We've broadly seen this on FB with American Millenials (the
| "core" original FB demographic, there's only so much people
| can take or so much "value" they get from sinking their
| time there.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| > In the course of the past decade, though, social media has
| come to resemble something more like regular media.
|
| That seems accurate to me, and it makes me think of the old-
| media saying, _" If it bleeds, it leads."_ In other words,
| anything to get eyeballs/clicks.
|
| _Meet the new-media. Same as the old-media._
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Your friend feed is here:
|
| https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr
| corobo wrote:
| Unfortunately not on mobile web, just takes me to the
| homepage (even if I replace the www with m to rule out a
| blanket redirect to mobile)
|
| I guess I could restrict my Facebooking to desktop if it
| still works there but then I'll visit even less haha
| jedberg wrote:
| Maybe I'm in a test group, but my interface recently got a
| "friends only" feed. It's great.
| jghn wrote:
| I pretty much never use their algorithmic feed. I've switched
| to going in, selecting `feeds` and then `friends`. There's
| usually at most a half dozen posts per day. I also belong to
| some groups, but I'll go to them directly when I want to see
| what's going on there.
| Justin_K wrote:
| I've basically stopped using the site for all the same reasons.
| I think it is because their engagement by real human users is
| near zero. In order to keep it freshfor whoever is left, like
| seniors hoping for an occasional pic of their grandkids, they
| fill it with the garbage
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Is there a setting to only show content from friends? Last used
| FB 13 years ago.
| neogodless wrote:
| On web site -
| https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Can't see that - requires a login. So, there is a setting.
| Believe you.
| dtauzell wrote:
| They have a friends feed which will also include some adds
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Sad seeing so many people here addicted to drugs.
| jandrese wrote:
| Facebook is probably the worst social media company at
| combating AI bot spam, although it is a tight race with
| Twitter/X. Even with aggressive pruning of AI generated
| "content" it's impossible to get ahead. No matter how many bots
| you block there are 10 more to take their place. I had to
| abandon the platform.
|
| Facebook doesn't even seem to care that their platform is being
| strangled with fake posts. At least Twitter/X has the excuse
| that Elon fired the people who were trying to combat the spam.
| I don't know what Facebook's excuse is.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| can we really measure whether they're bad at something they
| don't actually earnestly try to do?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| YouTube has lots and lots of bot comments as well.
| lizardking wrote:
| Even worse, YouTube is presently being over taken with AI
| slop content.
| meroes wrote:
| Haha those "how it's made" thumbnails of a fully formed
| cake shaped like a car plopping out of a spigot or other
| nonsense.
| gspencley wrote:
| Not only that, but people have discovered that comments
| shown to you on YouTube videos are also subject to
| "algorithmic scoring", based on your preferences, just like
| video recommendations.
|
| About a year ago a video went viral where someone in a
| romantic relationship demonstrated that the opinions
| expressed in comments on videos shown to her differ
| radically from the opinions expressed in comments on the
| exact same video when viewed by her significant other using
| his account.
|
| My wife and I then immediately verified that this was true
| for us as well.
| sebastiennight wrote:
| The current trend is, relevant-looking top-upvoted comment
| followed by a thread where an innocent-looking account will
| ask an innocent question/request for recommendations, and
| get a helpful reply from multiple concerned kind "people"
| recommending the same resource... All AI bots from top to
| bottom
| jandrese wrote:
| Yeah, but who gives a shit about YouTube comments? They've
| always been useless at best.
| DrBazza wrote:
| > Jeez Zucky, I wonder why social is dying. Is it because
| there's no bloody social between the ads and random algorithm
| shite anymore?
|
| Well, there is a 'tab' (at least on mobile) that is eventually
| marked 'Friends' buried inside 'Feeds'. The irony is lost on
| Zuck I suppose, as that used to be the front 'page' and KSP of
| Facebook.
|
| All of my friends and family just have big whatsapp groups
| instead.
|
| Guess what will be the next target of randomly inserted ads?
| rootnod3 wrote:
| Pretty sure the next target IS gonna be WhatsApp. Ads
| inserted at random intervals into groups. Give that whole
| cycle enough shit iterations and we are back to mailing lists
| and IRC channels.
| enaaem wrote:
| Make FB responsible for the information from automatic feeds.
| No need to regulate fake news and stuff. Just make them liable
| for offences like scams and defamation.
|
| FB defence would be that they are like a telecom company and
| aren't responsible what is said over the phone. But if they are
| pushing scammer to call you, then they should be co-liable.
| ars wrote:
| > 6 'pages' ... before I saw an actual friend's post
|
| I opened mine, and the first post was from a friend, as were
| about 75% of the remainder of the posts. The other 25% were
| from Facegroup groups I joined.
|
| There were zero news stories, and zero AI stuff.
| vel0city wrote:
| Yeah, this experience could really vary from person to
| person. I wonder if this person has anyone in their "friends"
| actually regularly posting? If nobody in their network is
| posting anything, there's not posts from their network to
| appear.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I just opened Facebook (for the first time in months) and 3 of
| the top 5 stories are from friends. Not sure why you have such
| a different experience.
| rootnod3 wrote:
| I tried the same a while back. I am now pretty sure it's part
| of the algorithm. If you stay away long enough, it reels you
| back in to scrolling by showing you some important updates
| first and before you know it, it draws you back into the
| abyss of AI generated content and ads and influencers.
|
| edit: s/tells/reels
| Twirrim wrote:
| Likewise, Facebook has become spectacularly useless for me.
| I've missed important moments in friend's lives for several
| days because Facebook has decided that shoving random fan pages
| and adverts are what I actually want to see.
|
| A friend's dad died and I didn't know for 5 days. He was busy
| dealing with everything that comes with such a major life
| event, posted it to facebook assuming that would be an
| effective way to communicate it.
| sgregnt wrote:
| I see posts from my friends all the time. Most of the post in
| my feed are from friends or groups I follow.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Facebook and instagram: less and less posts by real people.
|
| Reddit and other discussion sites: Controlled by "basement
| dwellers"(i.e. doomers w/ too much free time), trolls and,
| soon, AI bots. Dominated by groupthink and devoid of friendly
| discussion.
|
| I think the only exception is my local community page on
| Facebook. People do seem to be civil(real names and close
| physical proximity help) and it's all real content.
| huijzer wrote:
| > Reddit and other discussion sites: Controlled by "basement
| dwellers"(i.e. doomers w/ too much free time), trolls and,
| soon, AI bots. Dominated by groupthink and devoid of friendly
| discussion.
|
| I sometimes have the feeling that most HN commenters are also
| unemployed or in academia and most non-commenting readers are
| employed.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Fundamental problem with moderation sites like reddit and
| HN: discussion is controlled by those with the time to
| moderate. These are also the least likely people you want
| controlling the discussion.
|
| If only there was a reputation based site where, idk,
| people with more accomplishments got more weight...
|
| Twitter is, in a way, like that. I can follow, say, John
| Carmack, and get things he says or has reposted and ignore
| content from people I don't care about. I think that's why
| I still find myself there. It's a high signal-to-noise site
| where I can still participate(and actually have discussions
| with high achievers and ignore basement dwellers. Vs say
| reddit where I'm constantly dragged down into debates with
| the basement dwellers).
| huijzer wrote:
| > If only there was a reputation based site where, idk,
| people with more accomplishments got more weight...
|
| Very good point. I personally find Reddit or HN fairer
| since it doesn't depend so much on reputation (actually:
| popularity). But you are right there is a benefit to
| weighing certain people more. I sometimes wonder whether
| people like Dijkstra or Feynman would have bubbled up on
| Twitter too. I guess so. Both were pretty outspoken so
| the algorithm would pick up on that like people would
| pick up on Feyman lectures or Dijkstra letters. They had
| some virality about them.
| nimbius wrote:
| correction: _my_ Social Media _site_ Is Over.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| I actually find Facebook's feed much better than LinkedIn's for
| example. Meta seems to be pretty good at showing me posts from
| groups I often visit and even the "random" stuff is pretty
| relevant (although mostly a waste of time reels). LinkedIn
| "random" stuff is always the same stupid content that for some
| reason has 1000+ likes. Twitter is not much better, the push
| stupid videos, but at least they have the "following" feed that
| is much more relevant and I usually don't even bother with the
| "for you" feed.
| caymanjim wrote:
| This is the primary reason that I'm closer than I've ever been
| to deleting my Facebook account. I stopped using it in any
| meaningful way over a decade ago. I think I've posted about six
| times in the past decade. But I did still check at least a few
| times a week to see what my friends posted. Now I can scroll
| for 15 minutes and see only a tiny handful of friend posts,
| with about six ads and garbage meme posts (not shared by
| friends, just pure noise injected by Facebook) for each real
| friend post. I think the ratio is probably even worse than
| that.
|
| The other day something popped up in the Facebook Android app
| advertising a new feature to "just see your friends' posts" and
| when I clicked on that, it really did only show me friend posts
| and a couple actual ads. I can't find it in the app anymore,
| though. It's what should be the default view. It's the only
| thing I will ever care about.
|
| I'm willing to accept a reasonable amount of advertisement as a
| necessary evil to support the service. What I can't understand
| is why I'm seeing an endless stream of garbage memes from
| random accounts that I do not follow and couldn't care less
| about. Stop "suggesting" things to me. I don't want to "Follow"
| these morons. I never intentionally interact with any of them,
| yet I'm flooded with them.
|
| There's little chance of me making it to the end of this year
| without deleting Facebook entirely. It does nothing to keep me
| connected to friends anymore, because it hides 99% of their
| posts unless I view their profiles one at a time, and the few
| things it does put in my feed are lost in the noise.
| lizardking wrote:
| The moment they started broadcasting any comment I made on any
| news story to everybody in my network was when it stopped being
| useful for me. It's one thing for it to be discoverable if
| people looked, it's another thing to feature every thought I
| have prominently in the feed of every person I'm connected to.
| This was probably a decade ago, and I haven't used it much
| since then.
| xuhu wrote:
| That creeps me out, and probably everyone who realizes it.
| But, and it's not a tongue in cheek question, why not try to
| use it to your advantage ?
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| There are people who live for every ounce of attention, us
| introverted tech folk probably aren't the majority of
| users.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| The FB feed has been completely useless for a few years now. I
| stopped posting a while ago because it didn't really make sense
| anymore. Meta sucking up to the MAGA crowd broke the last straw
| for me and I've finally deactivated my account.
| neogodless wrote:
| FWIW this is the only way I use Facebook:
| https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
|
| (That plus having FBP installed.)
|
| Still feels like my friends never post any more, except for
| like 1% of them?
| ksec wrote:
| This also means it is now the time to reinvent Social Media.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Or we can let it become a relic.
| fullshark wrote:
| I think this will be the case, part of the charm of early
| social media was everyone was authentically oversharing. That
| got people in trouble or they embarrassed themselves. That's
| why snapchat with automatically deleted posts got a foothold,
| there wasn't a permanent record of your embarrassing fuck
| ups.
|
| That will not happen again, we won't be so collectively naive
| and any new social media will be taken over by PR + brand
| advertisers almost immediately. Just look at how threads
| started.
| jdross wrote:
| In my life this has been replaced by group chats on WhatsApp,
| iMessage, Signal etc
| dgimla20 wrote:
| Why bother reinventing it? The only social apps that have ever
| been needed are basic chat apps (group or private) and tools
| for meeting up in real life (such as group chats).
|
| Everything else has always only ever been fluff.
| jajko wrote:
| You mean make them as they originally were? Sure, but better
| learn lessons about how FB ended up such a shithole while still
| massively used, or you will just repeat that lesson (while
| massively less successful due to initial momentum)
| TomMasz wrote:
| Says the man who killed it. Has he even used his own product in
| recent years?
| NullPointerWin wrote:
| So Meta basically turned Facebook from 'connecting with friends'
| into 'doom-scrolling random content' and now claims that's what
| users wanted? That's like a restaurant replacing all their food
| with candy and then saying 'See? Nobody wants real meals
| anymore!'
| curiousllama wrote:
| I think it's more like a restaurant offering both candy and
| burgers.
|
| When candy sales outpace burgers, they're naturally going to
| invest more in candy. Eventually, they start to compete more
| with Hershey's than McDonald's.
|
| Businesses evolve or die, no?
| diggan wrote:
| > Businesses evolve or die, no?
|
| What I constantly see, are businesses that would be just fine
| continue doing the same, but die instead because they tried
| to evolve into something and alienated all their existing
| customers/users and couldn't attract new ones because what
| they evolved into made no sense. But no, businesses want to
| take over the world (or at least have a large slice from the
| pie) so they "evolve" no matter what.
|
| Case in point: Facebook.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Numbers must go up. In the stock market anything steady
| state is dead.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Infinite growth!!! How silly we still are as a species.
| The more of us there are, the stupider we act, and we
| don't even do anything to prevent it, we just let the
| consequences of our own stupidity roll over us one day,
| when they can no longer be stopped.
| ViktorRay wrote:
| This isn't quite true. There are many businesses like
| Colgate that are steady state with a reasonable amount of
| growth that do fine in the stock market.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| But that doesn't conform to the internet's stereotype of
| mustache-twirling capitalists in top hats and monocles,
| so obviously it can't be true . . .
|
| </SARCASM>
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| Numbers can naturally go up with the population, unless
| the product stays the same and newer generations decide
| they don't want it. Facebook suffered a double hit from
| both changing the product to scrollslop instead of a way
| to check on friends, and from becoming "uncool" with
| young people because it's what their boring parents used.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I guess the problem with this analogy is that it fails to
| capture the essential nature of Facebook: that its base
| product ("hamburgers") has a network effect, and the new
| product ("candy") doesn't.
|
| If Facebook is a social network for seeing my friends, then
| there's nowhere else for me to go. They're on Facebook and
| it's unlikely they're all going to join some new network at
| the same time.
|
| If Facebook is a high engagement content farm designed to
| shove random engagement-bait in my face, then it's just
| competing with Reddit, Digg, Twitter, 4chan, TikTok. Folks
| can get addicted to this in the short term; but they can also
| get bored and move on to another app. Based on conversations
| with all the IRL human beings I know, this is what they've
| all done. (The actual question I have is: who is still
| heavily using the site? Very old people?)
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| It is what people wanted though, _from Facebook_. Most people,
| including you and I, connect with friends through DMs in
| various apps, WhatsApp, or an equivalent group chat messenger
| (iMessage, etc.)
|
| Facebook has become a lot like TikTok because that's what
| people want from an app that has a feed. We, en masse, don't
| engage with a feed of just our friends' posts (FB actually has
| a friend's feed which gets relatively little usage). When we
| open a feed-based app, we want the long doomscroll. I do think
| your restaurant analogy is apt. I mean nutritious food is
| healthier for people, but a miniscule number of restaurants
| serve such a thing, and none do which aren't trying to fill a
| small niche in the market
| skydhash wrote:
| > _it is what people wanted though, from Facebook._
|
| I doubt that. In my entourage, Facebook was always thought as
| a social hub for internet presence. Like maintaining a web
| site, but with less tediousness. So you fill it up with
| personal details, then share happenings with your friends.
| And just like an hub, it's the entry way for more specific
| stuff, like messenger for DM, groups for social activities,
| pages for personal or business activities. The feed was just
| a way to get updates for stuff that's happening around you.
| i80and wrote:
| > FB actually has a friend's feed which gets relatively
| little usage
|
| I've never seen this, despite frequently being irritated with
| Facebook mainly showing me random shit I don't care about.
|
| Companies always squirrel away the "works correctly" button
| and then are like whelp nobody is using the thing we hid!
| Nothing we can do!
| dkarl wrote:
| > It is what people wanted though, from Facebook
|
| Facebook used to provide a good experience of staying in
| loose touch with people I didn't know well enough to have
| ongoing conversations with. It was nice to know roughly what
| was going on with people, and if something big happened (like
| a kid, a new job, a death) I would see it and could reach out
| with congratulations or condolences.
|
| But some people posted every meal and cup of coffee, and
| others only posted occasionally, and Facebook decided to bury
| the occasional posters and promote the high-engagement users
| instead. That's when Facebook became more bad than good for
| me, and I left.
|
| If we could go back in time to that point, and prioritize
| posts in inverse relation to the poster's frequency instead,
| I'd use that service.
| flkiwi wrote:
| > FB actually has a friend's feed which gets relatively
| little usage
|
| Because everything about the Facebook user interface
| discourages its use.
|
| What if, and I know this is craaaaazy, the friend feed was
| just the feed? Facebook was growing fine with that.
| baxtr wrote:
| Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want".
|
| Any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into
| recommendation media over time.
|
| It's our human lizard brain on dopamine.
| wussboy wrote:
| It makes one wonder whether "what I want" is really the best
| thing to optimize for.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| Yeah that's the problem. Ultimately, people want to distract
| themselves more than they want to connect with people.
|
| And with both in the same platform... I know where I'm going.
|
| I think another problem are network effects. They make it
| much harder to build a reasonable alternative
| bilbo0s wrote:
| There already is a reasonable alternative for connecting
| with the people you know. Group chats.
|
| Your implication is correct in that there is no reasonable
| alternative for distracting oneself. At the same time, I'm
| not sure that if you were to build an alternative, it would
| not degrade into "content" scrolling as well.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| That's the problem:
|
| -under network effects, you can't spin up a viable indie
| alternative (like you could for a note taking app)
| because you need to massively attract users
|
| -the less engaging social platform is the less
| economically viable social platform
|
| So the natural end point for any social app is content
| doomscrolling
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Facebook has simply been climbing towards a local maxima
| that is poorly correlated with what people need to connect.
| They rely on mountains of data for their optimization but
| their reward function is just off.
| AndroTux wrote:
| While that's true of course, I find that a bit of a harsh
| conclusion. Yes, that's the end result for any greedy company
| in a world without regulation.
|
| But you can make that case for most business models.
| Restaurants? They'll all eventually turn into fast food
| chains, because our human lizard brain appreciates fat and
| sugar more than actually good meals.
|
| Gaming? Let's just replace it all with casinos already. Loot
| boxes are just gambling anyways.
|
| There's absolutely a market for proper social media that's
| actually social. It's just that companies are way too greedy
| currently.
| kevinob11 wrote:
| I know from a strictly economic standpoint the things I do
| are the things I want. But is doing an activity are you
| addicted to what you really want in a human sense?
| otikik wrote:
| That is true but you have to be very specific about who your
| "users" are.
|
| If your "users" are the guys in charge of showing more ads to
| people, then yes. People, on the other hand absolutely prefer
| watching their contacts' posts first. Recommendations related
| with their individual preferences, second. Random dopamine-
| inducing stuff, only from time to time. If you prioritize the
| third kind only is like someone said already on the commments
| here: like a restaurant that only serves candy. They will
| have customers for a while but eventually they will burn them
| down (or kill them).
| dan_quixote wrote:
| > Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want"
|
| I might fine tune this to "users most likely to click ads"
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| >Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want".
|
| With this approach, everybody wants fentanyl.
|
| Open a restaurant masquerading as providing high-quality,
| locally sourced organic food, discreetly sprinkle the hardest
| drug on the most popular plates, slowly increase the dosage
| until people are completely hooked, and voila, you can
| legitimately claim "people wanted the drug; it was their
| choice."
| baxtr wrote:
| What do you think Starbucks is?
|
| Sure there are nice small restaurants. But look at all the
| big chains.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > With this approach, everybody wants fentanyl.
|
| And we all probably would want it if we tried! It's not
| that we're in any way better than the folks suffering from
| opioid addiction. It's all just chance.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| It think the second paragraph sort of agrees with you.
| disqard wrote:
| Right, and the things preventing restaurants from doing
| this:
|
| 1. At-scale boycott: would you eat at a McD's where the
| "Happy Meal" has fentanyl in it? But somehow, this doesn't
| work for "social" media -- we're all aware what it is, yet
| we still use it, unironically.
|
| 2. Regulation: if a food inspector eats at your restaurant
| and confirms rumours that your food is actually addictive,
| your restaurant will get shut down. But somehow, FB/IG/etc.
| can operate without regulation, and free of any
| consequences. Sarah Wynn-Williams' book "Careless People"
| is worth reading.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| > Would you eat at a McD's where the "Happy Meal" has
| fentanyl in it?
|
| This is largely a communication problem. Fentanyl is
| unacceptable, but a large subset of people would be glad
| to get food with CBD oil for free. Or caffeine - as last
| year's Panera charged lemonade scandal [1] revealed. Or
| alcohol, that's already very normal. Or monosodium
| glutamate, a personal favorite of mine which was once
| surrounded by negative press, or high-fructose corn
| syrup, or trans-saturated fats. Or maybe not an
| intentional part of the food, but traces of herbicides,
| pesticides, and antibiotics may end up in food, and
| microplastics or PFOS from packaging will be eaten as
| well. And I'm sure you've seen old advertisements for
| cure-all elixirs that contained cocaine.
|
| Health experts know that certain ingredients are bad, and
| many others are regularly consumed in quantities far, far
| exceeding their safe levels, but you don't have to look
| too deeply at a grocery store shelf or fast food menu to
| realize that the contents are boycott worthy but
| normalized to the point of being inescapable.
|
| People know even less about what Meta is doing with their
| data or what their addictive apps do to their brains, and
| are equally powerless to learn about it or change it.
|
| [1] https://apnews.com/article/panera-charged-lemonade-
| drinks-ca...
| dfxm12 wrote:
| People start using/abusing alcohol (and cigarettes, etc.)
| knowing it is addictive and damaging. This has not
| affected the business of bars/pubs. With this in mind, it
| shouldn't be a surprise that people still start using FB,
| IG, etc.
|
| The fact that Zuck (and Elon) are all buddy buddy with
| the current admin in Washington shouldn't be lost in the
| conversation.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > we're all aware what it is, yet we still use it,
| unironically.
|
| Well, part of that is because people got addicted
| gradually, starting before it was common knowledge.
| Another part of it is that people actually do need to use
| these services (for some reasonable definition of "need")
| because some friends, family members,
| government/community services, etc. can only be contacted
| via these services.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| You just described Starbucks
|
| It started as small roaster of coffee but now it's a
| Sugar+Caffeine drink system for addicts.
| spacemadness wrote:
| Advertisers are also good at weaponizing psychology to
| manufacture wants that people didn't know they had and in
| many cases don't want to have after the purchase.
| caseyy wrote:
| What users want, and what they collectively consume, are two
| different things. This is very evident in the AAA games
| industry, which is facing a 10x downturn in funding,
| abysmally bad (negative) ROI, and exhausted growth engines
| because it shaped itself around what players would consume
| for years, ignoring what they actually wanted. And the
| players got tired[0].
|
| It turns out that demand matters when you sell a product or a
| service. And it is elastic in ways other than price (such as
| convenience, value, appeal), but not infinitely so. In plain
| English, you can force anti-social media onto the market by
| making it appealing/hooking/addictive/convenient/supposedly
| valuable for a while, but not indefinitely. People do demand
| proper socializing, especially recently. Many are realizing
| they've been sold a total bag of goods just because they
| consumed it, and it's not good enough to displace real human
| connection.
|
| [0] https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025
| badc0ffee wrote:
| > This is very evident in the AAA games industry, which is
| facing a 10x downturn in funding, abysmally bad (negative)
| ROI, and exhausted growth engines because it shaped itself
| around what players would consume for years, ignoring what
| they actually wanted. And the players got tired[0].
|
| My takeaway from that presentation is more that:
|
| * Games cost more to make but there is resistance from
| players to pay more
|
| * A number of growth areas (mobile, social gaming,
| displacing other forms of media, battle royale) are
| exhausted
|
| * A lot of attention in China is moving to Chinese-made
| games
|
| * The marketplace is overcrowded with titles
|
| * Gaming is more social now, so a significant number of
| users are sticking to the same big 5/10 games where there
| friends are, which leaves even less room for the zillions
| of new games to gain traction.
|
| I think the industry had a role in this, namely in locking
| people in to games, and simultaneously overspending on and
| underpricing games. But I'm not getting the sense (at least
| from this presentation) that the new games that are coming
| out aren't what users want.
| caseyy wrote:
| There is much to be said about the industry. Most game
| releases compete for significantly less than 20% of the
| net bookings each year. Others are black hole games (the
| multi-year/multi-decade lifespan games that attract
| players and hardly let go at all), accounting for about
| 30% of the annual net bookings. The top 20-30 franchises
| account for about 50%, and the 20,000 other games made
| annually account for about 20%. Of the 20%, the top 50
| releases each year will take 19% of the bookings, with
| remaining 19k+ sharing the 1%.
|
| Just like Facebook, the first-mover advantage has favored
| many now-established studios and franchises. They
| exploded game-development costs because they could, and
| funneled these costs into marketing and moat features
| indie developers could not build (such as huge open
| worlds, amazing sweaty character face wrinkle rendering
| tech, and SOTA systems). But many of these companies did
| not respect the player's wishes for well play-tested
| games with interesting stories and mechanics. Still, they
| captured the top 20-30 franchise part of the annual net
| bookings, and strongly compete in the top-50 game part.
| Some even built some black hole games (GTA Online,
| Rainbow Six: Siege, Fortnite). For a long time, they
| avoided much of the pressures felt strongly by smaller
| companies. They were "above" the 99% of games that have
| to compete for close to 1% of the revenues. Their
| marketing was so strong (plus, they strengthened it with
| access journalism) and features so moated, they could do
| no wrong.
|
| However, over the last 5 years, things have changed. Many
| AAA industry legends have left their jobs at major
| studios to start small studios and create games as a form
| of interactive art, rather than to make publishers rich.
| Ultimately, in their view, the greed and blind following
| of what players would consume (trends) in large numbers
| led to a sterile industry that could no longer create
| art.
|
| The growth engines got exhausted because players did not
| actually demand what they were offering, such as season
| passes, eSports corporate shooters, microtransactions,
| padded playtimes, user-generated content, and the other
| things. The new growth engines (AI, targeting kids, etc)
| are also what the players don't want very much. The
| industry understands it, and investors are starting to
| catch on after facing a decade of poor returns, too. The
| crucial point I am trying to make is that the industry
| spent a lot of money on these growth engines that the
| players didn't truly want, led by market metrics that
| genuinely showed they were consuming it. But now the gig
| is up, the writing is on the wall, and everyone inside
| and out of the industry sees it.
|
| As a contrast, many Eastern companies (Nintendo is an
| especially prominent example) stuck to classic pricing
| models, did not inflate the cost of their games with
| their money for moat (most indie developers can make
| games to compete with Nintendo outside of the IP), and
| never used the growth engines used in the West. These
| companies, along with many people in them whom I know
| personally, are largely unaffected by the industry
| crisis. They were always making games their users wanted.
|
| Finally, I have to say, the industry is split in two.
| 8/10 AAA companies are struggling because they cling to
| the growth engines (old and new) that the players don't
| want. About 2/10 game developers and publishers genuinely
| build games that people want, even in the West. And now
| that the pressure is up, some AAA executives from the
| 8/10ths are becoming acutely aware of this. Emphasis on
| "some". So, yes, the industry in some part was, is, and
| will continue to make games that players want. But the
| more interesting part for our discussion is the large
| part of it that wasn't, isn't, and perhaps won't be.
|
| Of course, there's some probability I'm reading this
| wrong. I'm making my business bets in the industry based
| on it, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily right.
|
| And thanks for reading the report before engaging in the
| discussion. That is appreciated.
| maxsilver wrote:
| > Games cost more to make but there is resistance from
| players to pay more
|
| It's a little bit more involved than that. Games don't
| _have_ to cost much more to make, they just are due to
| declining quality of leadership and poor executive
| decisions. It 's more like, _" AAA studios are running
| their budgets up (arbitrarily, usually not driven by any
| customer request or engagement)"_ and _" players are
| resistant to paying for that"_.
|
| "Clair Obscur Expedition 33" literally just came out a
| few days ago. It's gorgeous high-fidelity AAA-like art,
| it's super well done, it's incredibly well received, and
| it's retailing at $50 ($60 for the 'Deluxe Edition') at
| launch (not including current steam sale). It's doing
| great, because they made a great product, kept to a
| reasonable budget, and sold it at a reasonable price.
| Oblivion also just got a remaster at the same pricing by
| Virtuos, and it's doing really well. Baldur's Gate 3 is
| also another example, amazing title, AAA quality
| graphical fidelity, $60 launch pricing (digitally on
| Steam & GOG, anyway).
|
| Compare that to something like Ubisoft's "Star Wars
| Outlaws", which was $70 digital base ($130 Deluxe
| Edition) at launch. Yes, it's high-fidelity and AAA-like
| too, but it's very much not well done, it's not well
| received, and it's arbitrarily super expensive on top of
| all of that.
|
| Games don't just "cost more to make" automatically, it's
| mostly not based on inflation or underlying costs. AAA
| studios are increasingly more mismanaged (or just
| demanding higher margins) than they did before, and that
| mismanagement is impacting their cost structures. Instead
| of fixing those mistakes, companies are expecting players
| to just forever eat those additional costs.
|
| If the game is _really, really_ good, they might get away
| with it. (Nintendo, probably). If their games aren 't
| that good, players are going to walk (Ubisoft).
|
| It's not "the market is saturated". It's not "the market
| is overcrowded". It's "the market is _competitive_ and
| _expects quality_ ", you can't just shove a half-baked
| only-ok game at high pricing, and expect it to be a
| success.
| caseyy wrote:
| Similar thoughts by Jason Schreier: https://www.bloomberg
| .com/news/newsletters/2025-01-10/why-so...
|
| https://archive.is/oLwbP
| badc0ffee wrote:
| > Games don't just "cost more to make" automatically,
| it's mostly not based on inflation or underlying costs.
|
| That doesn't contradict what I wrote, so much as expand
| on it. The presentation linked above (which I was
| attempting to summarize) says there's a push for, for
| example, more photorealism, that players don't really
| care about, but balloons various costs. It also mentions
| recurring costs for online games too unpopular to cover
| their expenses.
|
| > It's not "the market is saturated". It's not "the
| market is overcrowded". It's "the market is competitive
| and expects quality", you can't just shove a half-baked
| only-ok game at high pricing, and expect it to be a
| success.
|
| I don't doubt what you're saying about quality of
| gameplay, but that's really not the focus of the linked
| presentation. It mentions that too many game studios are
| chasing dead trends, and unpopular payment models. But
| it's also making the claim that there might be tons of
| great new games coming out, but hardly anyone is even
| trying them.
|
| Honestly I'm out of my depth with this, as I barely game
| at all, and if you had asked me yesterday, I would have
| thought the industry was still booming. I clicked
| caseyy's link and expected something concise about the
| state of gaming, but ended up reading (most of) a
| 200-slide presentation.
| stock_toaster wrote:
| [delayed]
| watwut wrote:
| Except that facebook is slowly failing into obsolence. Or
| fast.
| bluGill wrote:
| Are they? I know that many of us have got off. The question
| is are we minor outliers or a wave? I don't know.
| timewizard wrote:
| > Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want".
|
| No it isn't. No one "wants" to be addicted.
|
| > Any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into
| recommendation media over time.
|
| They will measure you then do everything they can to increase
| the number of minutes you spend on the site. The media
| recommendation is a consequence of cost. It's very cheap for
| them to maximize your time spent using other peoples content.
|
| > It's our human lizard brain on dopamine.
|
| There are tons of ways to get dopamine flowing into your
| brain. Which is why it was important for Meta to monopolize
| and dominate the field. Turns out lizard brains are
| exceptionally fickle.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Missing ingredient: endless greed.
|
| Social media is just fine. Trillion dollar ad conglomerate
| staffing menlo park software engineers making 500k/yr? That
| requires enshittification.
| tim333 wrote:
| Users, or me at any rate, want more than one thing. For my
| family and friends I want to see what they say without junk
| added and my family has currently moved from facebook to a
| whatsapp group to achieve that.
|
| I also browse random junk on xitter. It's a different thing.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > it is exactly what users "want"
|
| It's actually what users want "now". When instagram initially
| stopped chronological feed users didn't want it. When they
| started injecting random posts from people you didn't follow.
| Users didn't want that either. When they launched reels, they
| also didn't want that. When they started almost exclusively
| showing reels like TikTok, users still didn't want that.
|
| The problem with all of the above is that users eventually
| got used to the new norm and their brains established the
| dopamine rewards pathways according to what they were
| offered. And that's why they think they "want" it now.
|
| But we've seen this happen before. FB did the exact thing and
| now it's almost dead, even Zuckerberg acknowledged it. But
| they somehow think, users won't eventually get off Instagram
| because somehow this time it's different?
| bluGill wrote:
| Or users eventually get used to it until one day they wake
| up and realize that the thing they went there for isn't
| what they get.
|
| I check Facebook less than once a month. I want to see what
| my distant friends are doing. Instead though I see
| subversive political memes, and other things (jokes) that
| are fun once in a while but not worth spending much time
| on. Because Facebook isn't giving me what I really want I
| gave up on them. But it took me a while in part because the
| things I want to see are there - they are just hard to
| find.
| motoxpro wrote:
| It's just how you define "want." They a-b tested the algo
| vs chronological feed and the algo one because more people
| used it. It's just stated vs revealed preference. As a
| business, who's goal is to make money, does something that
| makes them more money, are they supposed to stop?
|
| Whether it's good for society is another question but,
| users definitely didn't show that they "wanted" a
| chronological feed, they only said it. There was a JUMP in
| engagement, not a decline.
| TheBicPen wrote:
| "want" is different from "will consume if offered".
| Arguably, the definition of "want" that most people use
| is one of higher-order desire. E.g. a drug addict wants
| drugs, but doesn't want to want drugs. People might
| choose a certain feature if offered and they aren't aware
| of its negative impact on their mental health. Then they
| might become cognizant of the negative effects but by
| then the choice to not use that feature is no longer
| available so they're stuck with what they have.
| Alternatively, the choice to not use the feature might
| still be present, but the neural reward pathways have
| already been built. The user then wants the feature, but
| they don't want to want it.
| einpoklum wrote:
| You do realize that by applying quotation marks you've
| basically nullified your argument, right? :-(
| al_borland wrote:
| It's only what they "want" after the various social media
| companies to deliberate steps to addict their users to feeds
| that maximize engagement.
|
| Does an addict really want to be an addict? The Light Phone,
| screen time features, and various other things exist for a
| reason. People don't want this, but feel helpless to break
| free from their addiction, which entered their life like a
| trojan horse.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| People want slop, they always wanted slop and there is no
| magical mind controlling powers in a Facebook feed. It was
| the case in the age of TV, magazines and when nobody had
| any idea how to even measure what people want.
|
| If Mark Zuckerberg forcibly injected educational material
| and long form journalism into everyone's feed the average
| user would uninstall the app. People have been consuming
| crap since they were able to draw boobs on cave walls with
| chalk. Do you know why every belief system that claims
| people are ensnared by some false consciousness fails?
| Because they aren't, there's no such thing. Mark Zuckerberg
| is exactly right about one thing, he gave the people what
| they wanted, and if he's going to lose to a platform like
| TikTok it's because they're even better at it
| twelve40 wrote:
| Well people really-really "want" many other things too, like
| free money, sex, etc etc. Does it mean that something that
| started as a way to connect with friends and family must turn
| into Only Fans for example? Or cater to all those other wants
| that have nothing to do with friends and family, just to make
| a few more bucks?
| Clubber wrote:
| I agree. People want to eat well, quit smoking and get in
| shape, but mostly they eat crap and sit on the sofa in front
| of the TV (present company included). Which is what they
| really want?
| zombiwoof wrote:
| We don't know it's what we don't want because of the
| addictive nature
| toofy wrote:
| > ... what users "want".
|
| what *some* users want.
|
| sure, it may have been a majority at the time. but imo
| chasing that was incredibly short sighted.
|
| many many many people warned them this would be the outcome.
| in typical fashion for these people, they ignored it,
| imagining themselves to be smarter in every area than
| everyone else.
|
| i've said it before and i'll say it so many more times: we
| need to better at realizing where our intelligence is behind.
| some people are untouchably genius in social situations but
| absolutely terrible at stem. and some stem people may be
| absolute genius at engineering work but entirely lack
| understanding of social/humanity issues.
|
| far too often only one of those two groups understands their
| lack of understanding. if you ask the best party planner in
| the state to engineer an automobile, they're going to look at
| you like you're a crazy person. ask the best engineer in the
| state to plan the years most important ball, we're going to
| fully delude ourselves into thinking we can do it better than
| the party planner.
| wij4lij5 wrote:
| It's what "remaining users" want after the many users who
| didn't want that left
| tantalor wrote:
| High end restaurants work against this trend by cultivating
| taste. They convince their customers to eat their vegetables,
| literally. They can do this because there is an ethical value
| associated with dining which is embedded in our culture. You
| enjoy a fine restaurant because it is right to enjoy it.
|
| Facebook failed because there is no ethic associated with
| social media. You can continue to degrade the quality and
| nobody will say "hey stop, it's not supposed to be like that".
| FB bootstrapped by co-opting the instinctual value of social
| connection with your friends, which TikTok and IG also copied
| but with strangers instead of friends.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I would venture to say 95% of people don't enjoy (and/or
| cannot afford) "fine" restaurants. But mostly don't enjoy.
| And a restaurant would go bankrupt trying to convince them to
| eat healthy. The proof is the existing state of the market.
| Although daily GLP-1 pills might be able to change that.
| tantalor wrote:
| This is very true, and pairs well with the other comment
| about netiquette.
|
| 95% of people would not enjoy polite technical discussion
| forums, but the 5% that do are enough traffic for a site to
| survive.
| toxik wrote:
| HN is a kind of this thing. It's netiquette. We still stay
| around here because it's the only place with tech discussions
| and at least some amount of decorum.
| xandrius wrote:
| I don't really get your comparison with restaurants. Could
| you elaborate?
| tantalor wrote:
| That was parent comment:
|
| > That's like a restaurant replacing all their food with
| candy
| peacebeard wrote:
| Casinos say gambling is what people want. Tobacco companies say
| cigarettes is what people want. Drug dealers say fent is what
| people want.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| at least until it kills them!
| zbendefy wrote:
| This is such a good analogy. Awereness about social media
| shluld be like awereness about junk food you consume.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| On the flip side, there hasn't been enough worthwhile posts
| from friends in years.
| spoonsort wrote:
| > doom-scrolling
|
| Just wait 'til you find out about imageboard doom-scrolling.
| gus_massa wrote:
| There are icecream stores, where you can seat and take icecream
| and most of the time also cofee or cake.
|
| I've seen candy stores, but they don't have chairs and tables.
| blibble wrote:
| you know what this means
|
| he has plans to start injecting "feed content" (eg shrimp jesus)
| into whatsapp group chats
| adverbly wrote:
| Does this confirm at least part of the dead internet theory?
| timbit42 wrote:
| The internet's not dead. The web maybe.
| curiousllama wrote:
| There has actually been a friends-only feed on FB for years.
| Timelines -> Friends filters everything down.
|
| The problem? Nobody I care about posts anymore. The "flywheel" is
| broken.
|
| Social Media hasn't died - it just moved to group chats.
| Everything I care about gets posted there.
|
| Honestly, I would love a running Feed of my group chats. Scan my
| inbox, predict what's most engaging, and give me a way to respond
| directly.
| dataflow wrote:
| > There has actually been a friends-only feed on FB for years.
| Timelines -> Friends filters everything down. The problem?
| Nobody I care about posts anymore.
|
| Is that really the only problem? How many taps/clicks do you
| need to get there? Can you make it the default? And how obvious
| is it that it actually exists?
| yason wrote:
| My facebook bookmark takes me to
| https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
|
| I still see other content, even there, but it's still somehow
| manageable. I run out of updates very quickly though whereas
| I'd like to just start seeing older posts from friends that
| I've seen already.
| dataflow wrote:
| This just opens the app for me on mobile. I guess on
| desktop it might do something.
| voxic11 wrote:
| It takes 2 clicks and you can just bookmark it.
| https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
| alanbernstein wrote:
| For fb app users (most) I think bookmarks are irrelevant.
| notlisted wrote:
| Open in browser and add to homescreen. What's more, FB
| can't track you if you use the browser instead of the
| app.
| dataflow wrote:
| > What's more, FB can't track you if you use the browser
| instead of the app.
|
| For the numerous people who use Messenger or WhatsApp or
| other products this seems false and irrelevant.
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| They actually made it even easier to find recently on mobile.
| Right there at the bottom.
| dataflow wrote:
| I literally have no idea what you're referring to, and I
| just updated the app. Could you share a link or screenshot
| or something?
| pests wrote:
| Facebook commonly runs A/B testing on their UI. It is
| almost weekly for me and one of my friends to ask each
| other "hey do you have the <x> tab at the bottom" for
| Meta apps. Marketplace, Dating, "All Chats" in messenger
| which was just the same as the slide out menu I bet
| people didn't use much. I also think they change per-user
| depending on what they use.
|
| edit: I decided to check real quick and I do have the
| friends tab. Here's a crop of it, note I edited out the
| last "Menu" tab for privacy.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/6pFa1XF
|
| Tabs are: Home, Friends, Marketplace, Dating,
| Notifications, Menu.
| dataflow wrote:
| Not only was that Friends tab not there for me by
| default, but it also does not do the aforementioned when
| I customize the top(? not bottom) tab bar to I include
| it. What it does is to show me a _list_ : of pending
| friends, and friend requests. No space to show any posts
| to begin with. To see my friends' posts, I have to click
| the hamburger, then Feeds, then Friends, then (sometimes)
| manually pull down to refresh, because it usually just
| lies to me that I've already caught up. This is designed
| to be actively user-hostile, as if they were forced to
| implement this against their will.
| pests wrote:
| The Friends tab for me brings me to the actual friend
| feed you mentioned last but also includes pending
| requests and some other top matter.
| notlisted wrote:
| I've bookmarked the friends feed and the groups feed (
| https://www.facebook.com/?filter=groups&sk=h_chr ) which
| saves me a LOT of aggravation.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| I used to be TL of the Facebook News Feed.
|
| People in UX research told us constantly they wanted the feed
| to be about friends, and chronological.
|
| Several times we ran A/B tests with many millions of people
| to try exactly this. Every time all the usage metrics tanked.
| Not just virality and doomscroll metrics, but how many likes,
| messages, comments, re-shares, and app-opens. We never even
| measured ad-related things on that team.
|
| So people say they want this, like they say they want
| McDonalds to offer salads. Nobody orders salads at McDonalds.
| rcxdude wrote:
| >Several times we ran A/B tests with many millions of
| people to try exactly this. Every time all the usage
| metrics tanked. Not just virality and doomscroll metrics,
| but how many likes, messages, comments, re-shares, and app-
| opens. We never even measured ad-related things on that
| team.
|
| Well, yeah, but this has an implicit "engagement === good"
| assumption. Exactly the same thing that incentivizes
| unhealthy McDonald's food: they make more money when they
| sell food that still leaves you hungry. So, yeah, people
| probably did want this, and when they got it they started
| using Facebook in a healthy manner (no point opening it at
| every available moment to just scroll through 'new' trash),
| which tanked your metrics. If you're actually worrying
| about your users you should also consider that them using
| your product more might not actually be what they want or
| need.
|
| Ironically enough, I think the same mistake (or rather,
| it's more of a mistake because there's not quite such a
| naked financial incentive to make this worse for the
| affected users) has happened with the youtube analytics
| dashboard: multiple youtubers have said that it's actively
| addicting and really bad for their mental health, but any
| change that feeds that probably looks really good in their
| metrics because, hey, creators are using it more, that must
| mean it's good, right?
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| Trust me, I came in there full of motivation for "do what
| is good for the actual humans", and most of the rank of
| file were the same. FB's employees are not evil or
| exploitative, though I won't say its unfair to describe
| the leadership in such terms.
|
| Many times in product design meetings I would interject
| with "but this hurts people!" etc.
|
| We hated that our personal careers were directly tied to
| increasing the junk-food factor. It didn't feel good at
| all. But the choice, as crafted by HR and senior
| directors was clear: Junk food this thing, or lose your
| jobs.
| dataflow wrote:
| I really appreciate the reply, thanks for sharing that.
|
| > Every time all the usage metrics tanked.
|
| What if that's exactly what people want? Less usage of
| Facebook (horrifying, I know -- it can't be true, right?),
| with a focus on friends etc. when they _do_ use it? I know
| you 'll dislike the analogy, but isn't all that different
| from smoking. You think usage metrics tanking implies the
| outcome is bad... why exactly? Is it that unthinkable that
| less quantity and more quality is better for people, and
| what they actually want?
|
| > So people say they want this, like they say they want
| McDonalds to offer salads. Nobody orders salads at
| McDonalds.
|
| You seem to be missing that the people who have the means
| to eat out wherever they want _don 't eat at McDonald's
| every few hours_. They go in _moderation_. They actively
| want to _avoid_ McDonald 's most of the time. Once in a
| while they get a craving, or get super hungry and don't see
| other options, etc. and they cave in and go there. Of
| _course_ the get the tasty unhealthy option when they go,
| but it 's foolish to think they prefer to eat McDonald's
| all the time. (Do you seriously believe that??)
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| I don't dislike the analogy. I eventually reached a point
| where I couldn't stomach the TikTok-ification of the
| product that Zuck forced us to keep marching towards, so
| I left.
|
| Personally I agree with your point, less social media is
| better. I personally never go to Facebook anymore and set
| up app limits on my phone for my health. I won't let my
| kids use it at all.
|
| But I worked at a company and drew a considerable salary,
| so I did what I was expected to do to make the product
| make money.
| macleginn wrote:
| It's called Feeds in the version of the interface I see in the
| browser.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| I think they recently made a big deal about this even? The fact
| that they would "promote" something that likely reduces time
| spent scrolling and viewing of ads means that no one is going
| to use it as an alternative to doom scrolling. They know they
| got you hooked on the good stuff and are just pretending to not
| be the bad guys
| arch_deluxe wrote:
| You might be interested in FreeFollow.org [full disclosure, I'm
| one of the engineers working on it].
|
| It combines the economic model of web hosting (users pay to
| host spaces, reading is free, and writing in someone else's
| space is also free), the simple UI of social media (you have a
| profile and write posts), and the E2EE security model of
| 1Password (we actually implemented their published security
| model). It's also a non-profit so there's no pressure from
| owners to exploit users.
|
| It's aimed primarily at parents of young kids who are annoyed
| at constantly sharing via text groups, but non-parents are also
| surprisingly into it.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Since it's E2EE, do you have a limit on the number of members
| in a group/friends?
| arch_deluxe wrote:
| Nope.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Independent social media run in a cost-effective way and
| actually helping their community is the future. I really hope
| non-American devs learn this because most American devs are
| too busy trying to get rich.
| grahar64 wrote:
| Write an algorithm to maximize in app time, so he ended up
| building a content media platform not a social one. If the goal
| is to show as many ads as possible, you will always end up with
| more media than social
| frollogaston wrote:
| Not if they think long-term they should focus on retaining
| users so they can be shown ads forever.
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| Ok I am going to click on FB for the first time in a month or so.
| Here we go, not expecting much.
|
| I have two notifications, one is about a birthday today, one is
| about someone I don't know asking me to like an AirBnB page.
| Let's go to the feed.
|
| 1. Sales thing from some group
|
| 2. A Boomer looking "reel" of a classic car (I don't like classic
| cars and nothing I have done suggests I do)
|
| 3. People You May Know (I've seen these same suggestions over the
| last several years, still don't know any of them and still don't
| want to connect)
|
| 4. Friend post, death in the family
|
| 5-9. Also friend posts
|
| 10. That exact same Boomer reel again
|
| 11-15. Friend posts or people I follow
|
| 16. "Memes Daily," which I don't follow so must be an ad
|
| 17-20. Friend posts and a group post from a group I follow
|
| Overall, this really isn't bad, surprisingly. At one point, which
| is when I stopped checking it for months at a time, it was
| literally post after post after post from people I don't follow
| of the most garbage AI generated slop, like the sloppiest you can
| imagine. For example, the AI generated ones with the wounded
| soldier and a birthday cake with some message like "it's my
| birthday and no one came" level of slop, or an AI generated lady
| with an AI generated picture saying something like "this is my
| first painting but no one liked it," each with tens of thousands
| of likes and Boomers commenting things like "It's ok I am giving
| you a like happy birthday," just maddeningly ad infinitum and
| nausea-inducing.
|
| So, maybe they fixed the above. Still, I can live without
| Facebook so am not planning on going back.
| zpeti wrote:
| This is quite an interesting post. I would guess that facebook
| does actually show you friend content if that's what you engage
| with. After all their single metric of success is ads viewed on
| the platform, which is the same as time spent.
|
| So theoretically, everyone here complaining about not seeing
| friend content should probably try and train the algorithm to
| show more of it.
|
| Or to be an asshole about it - if you see generic clickbait
| content on facebook, its your fault. You engage with it...
| alex1138 wrote:
| Which is a horrible way to do it
|
| Ok, let's say you're my friend on Facebook. I care about you
| (I haven't explicitly unfollowed you) enough that I want you
| in my feed
|
| Do I now click Like on every post you make? Is that how I get
| the "privilege" of seeing more of you?
|
| Some people may dislike Likes because it leads to narcissism,
| and ok, fine, whatever. But nobody knows what it does and how
| it influences what you see (Liking certain pages has in the
| past auto subscribed you to them) and I consider that to be
| broken behavior
| pixl97 wrote:
| The problem with algorithms is they tend to be kept secret...
|
| For example if I were trying to get a person hooked to the
| application I'd ensure they have a good experience. If there
| is someone like the parent poster that only opens the app at
| an infrequent basis it's probably not a good idea to scare
| them away.
|
| But your FB junkie. It doesn't matter if they only click on
| their friends feed or not, show them ad after ad after ad
| because they are coming back anyway.
|
| No evidence here on my part, since FB wouldn't really confess
| either way, but if I were manipulating people that would be
| one of the screwdrivers in the toolbox.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| Or they only show a few friends' posts if you haven't opened
| Facebook for a while. This makes it appear more social and
| organic than you last remember, and for good reasons: if you
| come back, Facebook hopes they can develop your habit over
| time; also, it makes curious people like you less worried about
| this addicting app. But then, once they know you're finally
| coming back regularly, they can turn up the dopamine level
| gradually, and make social posts harder to find. You'll
| doomscroll to find them, and they know it.
|
| Every dealer probably knows better than to let people overdose
| on their first sniff. Especially if they're relapsing.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| >Meta's counter-argument is, in a sense, that social media per se
| doesn't exist now in the way that it did in the twenty-tens, and
| that what the company's platforms are now known for--the digital
| consumption of all kinds of content--has become so widespread
| that no single company or platform can be said to monopolize it.
|
| Sure, and as long as people are making things Ford can't
| monopolize the auto industry. As long as people talk to each
| other Bell can't monopolize telephones.
|
| This thing where people just generalize the conversation into
| meaninglessness is so frustrating. Everyone knows what social
| media is and does until it's time to do something about it then
| all of a sudden like a Roman salute no one actually has any idea
| what this is and really telephones are also social media but also
| social media doesn't exist anymore at all and also some social
| media is an existential threat to democracy and human rights but
| not the one that I own which, again, doesn't exist but still
| somehow makes me enough money that I can put the president on
| layaway.
|
| I generally trend away from authoritarianism but I can see the
| appeal in just saying "Jesus Christ shut up we all know what's
| actually going on here" and just doing _something_
| atum47 wrote:
| Don't remember the last time I saw a post from a friend in
| Instagram. It is just random shit and ads
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| You can turn off suggested posts in settings, but Instragram
| flagrantly turns them back on after 30 days.
| atum47 wrote:
| Haven't seen that one, I'll try it. Thanks
| osigurdson wrote:
| All we ever really wanted was to watch nasty but injury-free car
| crash videos all day. Even Linked-in is getting into the game
| these days.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Maybe JG Ballard's rotating corpse can power a data center
| acureau wrote:
| Completely off topic, but I stumbled across a comment you
| made about commuting from NO in the monthly hiring thread. I
| checked your profile and you're the only other user in our
| state who registered on the meet.hn platform.
|
| So, hello HN neighbor!
| selimthegrim wrote:
| There are at least three others on here that I know of who
| live in NOLA and one in BR.
| midzer wrote:
| Long live the Fediverse!
| fredgrott wrote:
| actually its alive and well on bluesky...my profile:
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/fredgrott.bsky.social
|
| join me on on bluesky
| pmdr wrote:
| Interpersonal social media is dead thanks to Zuck and his
| companies, sacrificed on the altar of endless growth. His
| objective now is to profit from keeping people addicted to slop.
|
| I wonder if he ever had a moment of self-reflection to understand
| how far he veered off the path he'd started on. If he ever
| considered himself a hacker, then I doubt that all he wanted to
| build was slop machines.
| throw0101d wrote:
| Someone made the observation that the problems started when
| things changed from social _networking_ (family /friend) to
| social _media_. From actually keeping up with _people_ to
| 'keeping up' with _content_.
| Frieren wrote:
| Yes. Social sites had a card blanche to publish anything
| without consequences because it was user-generated content.
|
| Social sites used that power to publish their own stuff under
| the same protection.
|
| That has broken the system. Social media sites are 100%
| responsible for all the misinformation, scams, and hate that
| they publish or promote. And they should be legally accountable
| for it.
|
| "We are not accountable because the users are the ones posting
| the media"... but we post and promote whatever we want is a
| terrible way for the world to work.
| jt2190 wrote:
| Turns out most people don't have a friends and family group
| that can generate exciting content at a rate that most people
| want. The platforms oblige this with "reshares" and "you may
| also like" content, and eventually everyone's like "who gives a
| s*t about aunt Millie's cupcake recipe, check out this dude
| trying to skateboard off of the Eiffel Tower!"
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| A rate people want, or advertisers?
|
| I'm sure I could (indeed, I do) get pertinent updates from
| actual friends and family with <10 minutes of checking
| messages, voicemails, and emails per day. I wouldn't mind
| increasing that to 15 minutes if it meant I got a few less
| relevant but still interesting updates about their lives.
|
| But that's way, way under the daily minutes spent by most
| people on TikTok. And if I wanted/my addiction demanded
| another hit of that "Oh, neat!" buzz when I'd just put my
| phone down 10 minutes ago, there's little chance that anyone
| in my small circle would have posted a single thing in the
| interval.
|
| I don't spend nearly enough time in my group chats to justify
| Facebook's valuation. And there are no ads (yet, I'm sure
| they're working on it) in those chats.
| MattDaEskimo wrote:
| Social Media suffered the same fate as all companies. A constant,
| relentless, unnatural pursuit of growth by stripping all humanity
| and focusing on numbers.
|
| Social Media has turned into an unhealthy addiction
| Nckpz wrote:
| I think it just took the world a while to realize that social
| media is a replacement for cable TV and magazines, not a
| replacement for communication tools. Looking at old high school
| classmates' lunch and vacation photos was never good content,
| never good for business or mental health, and higher quality
| communication works fine with texting + Discord.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Social media has now reached a state of equilibrium with normal
| society.
| everdrive wrote:
| Zuckerberg is one of the architects responsible for its demise,
| so he'd be well-placed to declare its death. Early facebook
| really was an amazing product; all you saw was content from your
| friends, no one shared links, it was just a way to communicate
| with each other. Importantly, very few people were on facebook,
| which helped people be much, much more candid on the platform.
| Zuckerberg killed both of these features -- pushing garbage and
| ads, pushing the feed, and populating facebook as thoroughly as
| possible. I looked at my early feed (~2008?) years ago, and it
| was actually just friends catching up and girls flirting with me.
| I wasn't even that popular. To them, it was just another chat
| venue. They'd never consider the same these days. The platform is
| a cesspool.
| thrownaway561 wrote:
| Thank God!!!
| ycombinatornews wrote:
| Maybe should have not done 2016 Facebook elections?
|
| Ads all the way, almost no posts from my network, and bunch of
| unmoderated, Onlyfans promoting reels. Thanks.
| synergy20 wrote:
| it's over for me 10 years ago, I spent 10 minutes annually on
| facebook, life is good without it.
| RyanOD wrote:
| Same. I closed my FB account 16 years ago and I've never once
| missed it.
| Fokamul wrote:
| In my country (CZ) Facebook is now only used by people 40+ for
| Russian/Anti-government propaganda (and it works sadly)
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Same in the US for the most part
| havaloc wrote:
| I support a small group of elderly people on the side. At least
| once of week they land on a Facebook video which then leads to
| the "your phone has 78 viruses" scare ad. I tell them to stop
| using Facebook and they look at me like I'm crazy. One of them
| even said, if I turn off my phone when I get that scary ad, does
| that keep me safe?
| jjulius wrote:
| >During the defense's opening statement, Meta displayed a chart
| showing that the "percent of time spent viewing content posted by
| 'friends' " has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two
| per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per
| cent to seven per cent on Instagram.
|
| I find this very interesting. Yes, there has been a decline, but
| even before this decline, this data suggests that users "viewing
| content posted by 'friends'" was only at 22% on FB and 11% on IG.
| That feels incredibly low to begin with to me, and suggests that
| it already _wasn 't_ about friends. I wonder what the longer
| trend looks like.
| fourteenfour wrote:
| How can they honestly present a chart like that when they are
| the ones serving the content on the feeds?
| jjulius wrote:
| I don't expect them to be honest at all. But if we're
| operating under the assumption that they can't be trusted to
| be honest with their data, it makes it _even weirder_ to me
| that they would start with numbers that already showed such
| low friend-focused usage when trying to make their point.
| imhoguy wrote:
| We can assume the data is both made up and honest - they
| tuned feed algos to show more non-friend content and these
| results reflect that exactly.
| Hilift wrote:
| META creates $70 billion per year in NET profit. Mark Zuckerberg
| is the best business person in the history of business. He's an
| angel to investors and advertisers. Vanguard has 43 million
| shares of TSLA. They lost $10 billion in stock depreciation since
| peak in December 2024. Vanguard has 191 million shares of META
| valued at $101 billion. No one is losing money on META.
| DudeOpotomus wrote:
| Conflating luck and timing to skill and intent is a hell of a
| way to lionize someone. One man's wealth is not a measure of
| skill, it's a measure of greed.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Both META and TSLA are magic stocks, completely unaffected by
| reality.
|
| Zuckerberg says social media is over... so why isn't his stock
| tanking? Meta is a social media company!
|
| Tesla reports huge dips in sales, nothing... sure it's down
| since December, but it's still up year to year.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| this is a baffling and terrifying worldview/basis of principle.
| the_af wrote:
| A lot of people here are arguing there's no use for Facebook
| anymore, save maybe for Marketplace.
|
| But there's another big reason to use it, and it's how I use it
| primarily: special interest groups, such as hobbies, communities
| around games, etc. They used to be hosted in forums and bulletin
| boards in the olden times, but there was a big migration to
| Facebook (even though Facebook was objectively worse for keeping
| track of conversations) and that was that. If you wanted to keep
| in touch with those communities, you had to be on Facebook.
|
| Now there's another migration going on for hobby/game groups, one
| I won't follow this time: Discord. Discord stresses me out, real-
| time chat is all about being constantly connected and FOMO. And,
| to me, the UX sucks even more than Facebook's, which is saying a
| lot! Not for me.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| I really never understood discord. The last thing on earth that
| would be healthy for me is yet another real-time chat program.
| Yet maybe I'm missing out avoiding it.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| We still need the 'organization' part. Clubs and social circles
| moved from blogs etc to Facebook because it was easy.
|
| Room for a startup? A simple club hosting site, that does
| substantially what you get from a facebook club page. Maybe even
| a tool to scrape facebook and automatically create your ClubPage
| entry painlessly?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| https://mobilizon.org/ ?
| DudeOpotomus wrote:
| Apple could / should be the one to tackle this by allowing
| iPhone iOS users the ability to create their own social
| circles. They dipped their toes into this a little with
| Invites.
|
| Do we really need a central server to manage our friends and
| our circles? Decentralize the whole thing and it neuters FB and
| the ad surveillance universe.
| belthesar wrote:
| The key thing that Facebook Groups and Pages solved was the
| network effect. If you were on Facebook already, you could join
| a group or a page without signing up users. If a post from a
| Group or a Page came in, it came in through a common
| notification platform. It was the place where people already
| were, and if they weren't there, eventually there was enough
| pressure to join because "everyone else was already there". And
| all of this was good for Facebook, because it was at the time
| when they were trying to capture more users, which brought more
| eyeballs to ads.
|
| I think any startup trying to solve this problem is going to
| have a really hard time because it will ultimately be external
| to the platforms where people already are, and user behavior
| has shown that they're inherently sticky to platforms. I wish
| it wasn't this way, because I think it'd be great for folks to
| be able to do this on their own.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Aren't we positing that Facebook is no longer sticky? What
| solution is there now.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Zucchini my boy, it's over because you killed it
| nixass wrote:
| He tells it like its bad thing.
|
| Anyway.. I was listening Acquired podcast on Meta yesterday (yes,
| the whole 6h30min thing) and what we have today is so far away
| and different than what he was preaching 15-20 years ago and so
| distanced to original idea of connecting with people you know and
| you want to be connected with. Don't even want to talk about
| ads..
| balamatom wrote:
| Good fucking riddance. Now do smartphones.
| dedlockdave wrote:
| And we killed it
| delfugal wrote:
| sudo nano /etc/hosts page down, add 0.0.0.0 facebook.com 0.0.0.0
| linkedin.com 0.0.0.0 adobe.com Ctrl z
|
| Life is so much better now.
| latexr wrote:
| No longer works if you use Safari on macOS.
| DarkNova6 wrote:
| Social media has died many years ago. What we are left with is
| corporate media.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| Ack, I'm getting the sense that the author of this article is
| getting caught up in the argumentation prepared for use in the
| trial. Of course the Meta people are going to do everything they
| can to get everyone feeling it's like this to shake at the
| logical foundations of the case.
|
| The F.T.C. is _not_ chasing an old problem. A case like this may
| serve as precedent.
| MaxGripe wrote:
| GitHub and X are the only social media I respect :-)
| partiallypro wrote:
| This is kind of bad, because it makes it very hard to reach
| people for social events. I run a fan group for a European soccer
| team and it's very hard to do outreach because no one is really
| checking social media for that type of thing. Even meet-ups in
| general are difficult. There is of course meetup.com but it's
| niche and expensive.
| bk496 wrote:
| some say it never started
| trbleclef wrote:
| Mark Zuckerberg Says Social Media Are* Over
| JamesLeonis wrote:
| > The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in "the
| general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and
| discovering what's going on." This under-recognized shift away
| from interpersonal communication has been measured by the company
| itself. During the defense's opening statement, Meta displayed a
| chart showing that the "percent of time spent viewing content
| posted by 'friends' " has declined in the past two years, from
| twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from
| eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.
|
| There is a Peter Thiel tactic of Monopolies where you deny you
| are monopolizing a sector by defining your company as "in
| competition" with a much larger and hazy market. The example in
| _Zero To One_ is Google disguising its online advertising market
| by comparing itself to the total global advertising market, both
| online and offline.
|
| I see the same tactic here, where Facebook is trying to hide its
| user data monopoly [3] by situating itself to general news,
| lifestyle discovery, and general communications. However this is
| counter to the actual internal communications where Facebook
| would discuss buying or crushing competitors, like Snapchat [0]
| [1] [2], as a way to maintain their hegemony.
|
| Don't be fooled by what Facebook says about itself. Concentrate
| on what it values.
|
| [0]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/facebook-developers-help-us-
| destr...
|
| [1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/facebook-
| secretl...
|
| [2]: https://www.wired.com/story/copycat-how-facebook-tried-to-
| sq...
|
| [3]: https://www.vox.com/business-and-
| finance/2018/12/6/18127980/...
| kmeisthax wrote:
| In other words, "We can't be a monopoly, we haven't even taken
| over the government yet"
| kstrauser wrote:
| Hey, it's my day to be the Mastodon Guy! But for real, small,
| federated social media is so freaking pleasant compared to
| Facebook and friends. No, the kid from my 8th grade soccer team
| isn't on it, nor is my next door neighbor, or my kid's nanny from
| 3 moves ago, _but that 's fine_. Sure, I wish more of the authors
| I like to follow were on there, and it's not a great way to call
| out megacorp support teams when something breaks horribly, but
| I'm completely OK with that tradeoff.
|
| What I get instead is a collection of small, resilient servers
| where the feed algorithm is FIFO, there's no advertising, and
| moderation is local.[0] It's my favorite parts of the old
| Internet before things got centralized and enshittificated.
|
| I hope megasocial media is over. I doubt it, but a guy can wish.
| That doesn't mean _all_ social media is dead.
|
| [0]Mastodon doesn't have moderation. Individual servers do.
| That's the way it should be.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| I just wish an owner of a journal of record like Conde Nast
| would "adopt" a Mastadon instance, they already have Reddit but
| that's so impersonal.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I agree. There's probably money to be made running an
| enterprise Mastodon hosting service.
| krapp wrote:
| I have seen some journalists and orgs move to Mastodon but
| the culture being what it is, people will be hostile to
| anything that looks like an attempt by corporate entities or
| propaganda outlets to capture and commoditize the platform.
|
| And honestly, I'm fine with it. Corporate media is a
| cesspool. It can all choke on its own fetid stench and die
| for all I care.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| right, but save for.. threads federation... there's been
| trepidation in my more normal friends to use anything other
| than the shibboleth. I'd rather an incompetent like Nast
| manage the platform than a company like Facebook that knows
| all too well how to leverage their scale. Anyways they're
| one of the better ones.. from what I've been told.
| jeromegv wrote:
| Same for me. No algo, no ads. I follow who i want. No surprises
| in my feed.
|
| Just like RSS, I get exactly what I want.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| I've always wished an owner of a journal of record like Conde
| Nast opened a mastadon instance or the like. I know they already
| have Reddit but that's not personal media
| joduplessis wrote:
| I'm surprised about the amount of comments here berating FB &
| social media companies. You have the option to deactivate your
| account and stop using it, to "vote with your feet". Meta is a
| company and will maximise revenue & engagement - what's actually
| more worrying is that people still use these sites and doom
| scroll their nights away (generally speaking of course).
| blueprint wrote:
| yeah - he killed it
|
| when was the last time you were social on Facebook?
|
| and maybe threads would count if it weren't 95% filled with bots
| and mentally ill weirdos pretending to know quantum physics (and
| how dare you judge them for doing so; whether or not they know
| quantum mechanics is like totally subjective and your frequency
| is clearly too low).
|
| so either social is not dead or he killed it
| dehrmann wrote:
| He's a bit late to this conclusion. For a while, Facebook
| supposedly didn't see TikTok as competition because it isn't
| social, but Facebook and Instagram have been entertainment feeds
| for a decade, now.
| mxfh wrote:
| So it Twitter now, breaking news only bubble up after 6 hours
| after all the engagement slop has been served.
| tartoran wrote:
| I think I know why TikTok made it to the top of social media.
| They did not coerce weird corporate rules and let the users have
| what they wanted. Simple as that. Grown organically. That does
| not mean it isn't bad for the users in the long run but at least
| they get what they want.
| k__ wrote:
| Interesting how quickly social media started resembling mass
| media.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Did they finally dogfood their own shit and realize what a
| dumpster fire it is? :)
| erelong wrote:
| tiktok is thriving
| slicktux wrote:
| I recall having Facebook and always had that feeling the
| algorithm was messing with me and my posts... Come to find out a
| few years later it was exposed that Facebook was conducting mass
| social experiments to users and their comments and posts. Shadow
| banning and I just never liked the feed...it was not organic.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| I checked Facebook the other day. Every post is a vertical video.
| I'm on desktop. If I wanted to see vertical videos, I'd go to
| TikTok.
| Havoc wrote:
| >"the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world
| and discovering what's going on."
|
| What a unique way of saying algorithmically maximizing addiction
| to doomscrolling!
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| By "over" he means it isn't going to make him billions of more
| dollars.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Grim Reaper proclaims he's done his job?
| bdangubic wrote:
| if social media is over why is anyone still on facebook? to watch
| ads? (asking for a friend, I got off Facebook long time ago...)
| :)
| tantalor wrote:
| _Teens Migrating From Facebook To Comments Section Of Slow-Motion
| Deer Video_. March 20, 2014
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4mMY2Kl3GY
| torginus wrote:
| At this point he's just saying what he thinks is expedient in
| order to avoid the government breaking up his companies.
|
| It's why the whole Meta thing exists - they wanted to be seen as
| a VR company who has a side hustle in social media to avoid being
| classified as a monopoly. That argument has failed so now he's
| asserting that social media doesn't matter.
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| I login to Instagram and I see:
|
| - Ad promoting "investment" platform with deep fakes of
| personalities
|
| - Ad from radicalized politician promoting hate speech
|
| - Semi-naked girl promoting their "other" social media (OnlyFans)
|
| - Ad disguised as content of some dude promoting a random
| restaurant
|
| I agree with Zuckerberg, it's not social media anymore. I don't
| see content from any friend, only scams.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| I've noticed that every single website that I enjoy on the
| internet is non-profit. Did we optimize for the wrong metric
| since the beginning?
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
| frollogaston wrote:
| My YouTube account had recommendations for music because that's
| what I use it for. When they launched YT Shorts (basically
| their version of TikTok), that section was 75% thirst trap
| videos, albeit still music-related. Like "cool violin solo" but
| played by a girl sorta pointing the camera up her skirt in the
| thumbnail. I never watched those or anything similar, but I
| guess they knew I was male and wanted to hook me.
| selfhoster wrote:
| I dislike Shorts with a passion.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Social Media is over because the quest for infinite growth killed
| it.
| taco_emoji wrote:
| Yeah I wish
| nothrowaways wrote:
| Yeah, let's do metaverse lol
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Zuckerberg saying this is more or less perfectly analogous to
| Jared Leto's character killing the nascent replicant in the Blade
| Runner sequel.
|
| The more you consider this assertion, the more true it will
| appear.
| charliebwrites wrote:
| What I wonder is did everyone stop posting because there was too
| much content spam or did they fill the newsfeed with content
| because everyone stopped posting?
| Hansenq wrote:
| I'm surprised most commenters haven't mentioned that the presence
| of Tiktok as the biggest reason why Facebook was pushed into this
| direction.
|
| Ben Thompson of Stratechery did a great deep dive into Facebook's
| Three Eras here (https://stratechery.com/2025/meta-v-ftc-the-
| three-facebook-e...). Essentially, Meta could afford to
| prioritize positive well-being when it had a monopoly on social
| media, but as soon as Tiktok came onto the scene and Meta started
| bleeding users to it, they had to respond. Now, everyone
| (Instagram, Youtube Shorts, Twitter, LinkedIn) is copying the
| model of vertical auto-scrolling short-form videos, because it's
| a battle for attention.
|
| What _was_ Facebook supposed to do when it saw all of its users
| leave Instagram/Facebook for Tiktok? Not do anything? Though it's
| terrible that everything is now a short form addicting video
| platform, I understand the logic behind why the company did what
| they did (and why everyone is building this). People say they
| want real connection, but really, they just want to be
| entertained.
| alex1138 wrote:
| People want connection too and Facebook won't give it to them
|
| Maybe the reason people were leaving for TT is they were doing
| this kind of thing for years already
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719
| ViktorRay wrote:
| Reminds me of that Netflix documentary. The Social Dilemma.
|
| "Race to the bottom of the brain stem"
| chasing wrote:
| > What _was_ Facebook supposed to do when it saw all of its
| users leave Instagram/Facebook for Tiktok? Not do anything?
| Though it's terrible that everything is now a short form
| addicting video platform, I understand the logic behind why the
| company did what they did (and why everyone is building this).
| People say they want real connection, but really, they just
| want to be entertained.
|
| Innovate.
|
| It's not necessary to turn your company into a toxic disaster
| to compete.
| _hao wrote:
| I've been of the opinion for the last 5 years at least, that if
| Meta and all of it's associated products and platforms suddenly
| disappear from existence, nothing of actual value will be lost.
| There are better competitors for everything they do. I don't
| think I can pinpoint one single unique thing about
| Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp at this stage in time. Everything
| they do is done or executed better by a competitor. They had some
| sort of advantage in the late 2000's and early 2010's, but that's
| it. I'm not optimistic for their future and relevance.
| pesus wrote:
| I would go even further and say the world would be a
| significantly better place without any Meta products (and most
| other social media). At this point, they are a considerable net
| negative on society as a whole.
| olejorgenb wrote:
| What's a good event planner/organizer?
| tmpz22 wrote:
| I'll reach for it - Meta increases consumer spending and has
| enabled a lot of small businesses to profit during the previous
| economic booms. Yeah they were drop shipping products from
| China using the de minimis exception, or hocking worthless
| supplements, or promoting influencer products that are no
| different then the generic but costs twice as much, but a lot
| of people made a living off an ecosystem that arguably would
| not exist without Meta.
|
| Further the success of Facebook was arguably the biggest
| contributor to startup culture ever - I would expect we'd have
| seen a fraction of the growth in VC if Facebook had never come
| to pass.
|
| Groups, WhatsApp, etc, would be replaced overnight with, at
| least initially, a worse version. More hacking, probably worse
| moderation at scale, worse accessibility, etc.
|
| Meta also gentrified East Palo Alto, and the Zuckerbergs now
| own a substantial amount of real estate in Redwood City and
| elsewhere. They've made a big footprint on the peninsula that
| deserves credit for the now $8 lattes in my hometown.
| davidjade wrote:
| For better or worst, Fb has become the de facto place for
| cruising sailors to share information about different regions
| of the world. Tips, alerts, advice, questions, etc. I sail the
| world and there is no other place for groups quite as good for
| finding the information we need. There's a niche group for
| every area around the world full of people sharing advice and
| answering questions. The good groups have great moderation and
| quality content.
| immibis wrote:
| Network lock-in: successful
| paxys wrote:
| Sure, but you can say this about every company & product in
| existence. Either a better version already exists, or will pop
| up in minutes after the current one disappears. Network effects
| are strong enough that this simply won't happen. Meta has close
| to 4 _billion_ active users across all of its apps. That 's
| literally half the planet.
| malthaus wrote:
| isn't that the same guy who said the metaverse is the next big
| thing?
| dhruv3006 wrote:
| social media just got started.
| flkiwi wrote:
| It's astonishing to read this and see not only Zuckerberg but
| also the article itself present this as something that happened
| _to_ Facebook /Meta rather than something driven by Facebook/Meta
| to satisfy Wall Street. Social media did not naturally evolve
| into what it is today: engagement bait, consumption of content
| creator and advertiser content, etc. resulted from purposeful
| business strategic decisions to pivot from a place to learn your
| first cousin remarried to a place where advertisers and
| monetization rule. Towards the end of my time on Facebook, I
| never, ever saw content from family, including from my own sister
| documenting her terminal disease. But I sure did see lots of car
| dealerships from states I don't live in, news stories about
| people with two heads, and nubile young women surely-SURELY-
| attractive to a middle aged man like me.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >Social media did not naturally evolve into what it is
| today...resulted from purposeful business strategic decisions
|
| I disagree about the actual mechanism at play. It is a cart
| before the horse situation. Yes, it was driven by business, but
| that business was being driven by Web 2.0, which was being
| driven by the natural evolution of communication technology.
| lukev wrote:
| Let's follow this train of thought.
|
| What are the selective pressures on the "natural evolution of
| communications technology?"
| tux1968 wrote:
| Consumers willing to engage in any specific tech, enough to
| trigger network effects.
| lukev wrote:
| So you think consumer engagement ultimately drives what
| types of tech that companies invest in building? I can
| see that argument.
|
| Why do companies want consumer engagement to start with?
| charcircuit wrote:
| Engagement is a proxy for user value. Things that User
| value can be monetized.
| lukev wrote:
| So it's fair to say that effectiveness at monetization is
| an extremely strong evolutionary pressure on how
| technology evolves?
| conductr wrote:
| No. You have it backwards. It came out of a web 2.0 phase but
| everything it became was driven by a focus on metrics &
| growth.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| And metrics and growth was driven by the new ability to
| make discussions out of posted content (i.e. Web 2.0)
| saltcured wrote:
| I feel like you have that exactly backwards? To me it was
| a shift in roles in the old field of dreams storyline.
| I.e. "if you build it, they will come".
|
| In Web 1.0, you posted content and an audience came. In
| Web 2.0, you tried to open an empty field and commenters
| came and played with each other.
|
| If anything, what happened next was a sort of halfway
| reversion, as the platforms tried to stratify and
| monetize two types of user. A subset who were the Web 2.0
| contributors and another tier of more passive consumers.
| I think a lot of the "likes" stuff was also less about
| self-moderating channels and more about making passive
| users feel like they're engaging without actually having
| to contribute anything substantive.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| There was plenty of discussion online prior to
| XmlHttpRequests, see vBulletin, Fark, Digg, etc. The only
| thing new about "Web 2.0" was a page refresh not being
| needed after an http request.
| conductr wrote:
| No, metrics and growth always existed and could be
| measured there wasn't some technological breakthrough to
| enable that with Web 2.0. They, Facebook, decided to use
| it as their guiding principle. They decided to force the
| feed on their users. They knew their users had no real
| alternative and the value they had built with getting
| everyone on the network itself.
|
| If anything, their move was anti-web 2.0. As they moved
| forum and blogs and news, pretty much all open and
| accessible content into their walled garden. Even the
| famous quote "know what's cooler than being a
| millionaire? Being a billionaire." Or however it goes, is
| a ruthless capitalist telling Zuck he needs to wake up
| and realized how valuable this thing he's built really
| could be.
|
| Carry on if you want but I think you're very much the one
| that gets it backwards? Do you remember how it all
| transpired or are you too young to really understand what
| it was and what Web 2.0 really was about?
| dleary wrote:
| This is crazy.
|
| You're saying that Facebook was somehow helpless to avoid
| changing from a "friends feed" to an ad-maximizing outrage-
| inducing misinformation machine because of web2.0
| communication technology?
|
| Someone invented XmlHttpRequest and Facebook was like, "well
| that's the ballgame, I guess we have to suck now?"
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Much like a shot of heroin, yes, this is the take. Facebook
| got a taste of Web 2.0 and couldn't use it recreationally.
| It became their entire life. They immediately integrated it
| into every part of business until it was the only thing
| that mattered.
| nrb wrote:
| Letting unchecked greed guide decision-making is not a
| new phenomenon that came out of Web 2.0 though. To use
| your metaphor, the heroin was human attention. Web 2.0
| was, at best, the syringe.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Yes, this is why I disagreed with the mechanism, and not
| the phenomenon.
| dleary wrote:
| What I'm taking issue with is you disagreeing with the GP
| assertion that Facebook made purposeful business
| decisions.
|
| I agree that a Facebook had a powerful incentive to act
| this way. But they didn't _have_ to. The fact that they
| chose to reflects on their moral character.
|
| Internal leaks let us know that Facebook has pretty
| advanced sentiment analysis internally. They knew that
| they were (are) making people miserable. They know that
| outrage causes engagement.
|
| Other internal leaks let us know that Facebook was aware
| of how much disinformation was (is) being used on their
| platform to influence elections. To attack democracy.
|
| They didn't just look the other way, which would be
| reason enough to condemn them. They helped. When they saw
| how much money the propagandists were willing to pay,
| they built improved tools to better help them
| propagandize.
|
| After the UK was shattered by the Brexit lies, when
| Facebook were called in front of parliament and congress
| to explain themselves over the Cambridge Analytica and
| related misinformation campaigns, they stalled, they
| lied, they played semantic word games to avoid admitting
| what is clearly stated in the leaked memos.
|
| These were all choices. People should be held accountable
| for making awful choices.
|
| _Even if those choices result in them making a lot of
| money._
|
| It sounds kind of crazy to even have to say that, doesn't
| it? But that is where we are, partly because of arguments
| like yours from otherwise well-meaning people.
|
| Don't absolve them. Hold them accountable.
|
| Zuckerberg wants to own the whole world and thinks you're
| an idiot for trusting him. An egocentic sociopath who
| can't imagine trusting anyone else because he knows what
| he will do when you give him your trust.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Some communication technology isn't paid for by behavioral
| advertising. I think that's probably the most relevant
| distinction here.
| nprateem wrote:
| You don't think he's saying it so he can say "... so there's no
| point breaking us up"?
| flkiwi wrote:
| Sure. Taking that perspective even begins to explain some
| things, like a lot of the pointless me-too developments
| (short form videos?) Facebook has been implementing for
| years: if they dilute the product by incorporating others'
| ideas, even if those ideas go nowhere FB can claim everybody
| is in the same boat.
|
| But it doesn't make it any less ridiculous. This is like the
| meme of the guy shooting the other dude in the chair.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| The argument I would make as the government is the reason
| Facebook isn't a social network is because it is a monopoly
| and didnt need to innovate and compete
| zeptonaut22 wrote:
| Mark Zuckerburg's superpower is being like Jack Sparrow at the
| beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean: he steps off one boat
| just as it's sinking onto another, and he has the humility to
| not really give a damn which ship he's on. (I say "humility"
| even as someone frustrated by his net impact on society.)
|
| I think on the How I Built This Instagram episode the Instagram
| founder said that Zuck was basically reading the data from
| Facebook's interactions and saw that the demographics and
| sharing tendencies of Facebook users meant that it was in a
| death spiral: people were moving interactions to private
| channels, reducing the available "friend" content. IMO, the
| causal factor here is that people became wary of public
| oversharing and the result was FB pivoting away from "social
| network" (OG Facebook) to "social media" (2010-2015 FB) and
| eventually just "media" (Instagram, Reels).
|
| Looking back at what I posted on FB in 2008-2012 is like
| observing an alien from another planet: it was a completely
| different platform.
| pipes wrote:
| It was just never clear who I was sharing with. At least on a
| private chat there's a list of users and that's it.
| zeptonaut22 wrote:
| Definitely true, but back in the day that was sort of the
| fun of it -- similar to putting up an AOL Instant Messenger
| away message, it was just... a blast of a funny thought to
| the people that you knew.
|
| Over time, that network got stale and it included "people
| you sort of used to know", and then it included your
| grandma and uncle and rest of the world. There are few
| things that are at the intersection of the Venn diagram of
| "things I want to share with all of those people",
| especially as I get older.
| RajT88 wrote:
| That was intentional. I recall testing this out every time
| there was a new "oops, we're sorry, we reset your privacy
| settings to default -- AGAIN".
|
| The privacy settings were carefully designed to have vague
| wording that how they worked on the surface wasn't how they
| really worked. Each and every one of them which had a
| different functionality than what the wording suggested on
| its surface resulted in you sharing to a much wider
| audience than you thought you were.
|
| I recall carefully testing it out with a burner account
| which my main was not friends with, and it consistently
| taking 2-3 tries to get the privacy settings back to where
| I wanted them to be.
|
| I would take those days over what Facebook is today - which
| is to say, useless. The only thing I use it for is groups,
| which have the good sense to only be about the thing you
| want to learn about when you look at the group. Still
| though - it is sad that FB Groups killed off small web
| forums.
| hinkley wrote:
| All decisions based on numbers and vibes.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| To be fair, the demise of the major BBS hosts / platforms
| + Reddit and then Discord was what killed off small web
| fora.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > people were moving interactions to private channels,
| reducing the available "friend" content. IMO, the causal
| factor here is that people became wary of public oversharing
| and the result was FB pivoting away from "social network" (OG
| Facebook) to "social media" (2010-2015 FB) and eventually
| just "media" (Instagram, Reels).
|
| Adding to that, the people who kept posting as if nothing
| changed typically were extremely low-value posters. Political
| ranters, zero-commentary meme reposts, etc...
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| >> people who kept posting as if nothing changed typically
| were extremely low-value posters
|
| absolutely not, ... these were (and are) always there.
| instead it was Facebook management decisions choosing to
| amplify exactly this. Let's not blame a minority of
| (misguided) content creators for the shortcomings of Zuck
| and his sycophant senior managers.
| hinkley wrote:
| Like a large room full of people talking until an event
| starts, and that moment when half the crowd has realized
| that someone has gone on stage while the other half has
| gotten sucked into an argument/discussion and forgotten why
| we were all here in the first place.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > Mark Zuckerburg's superpower is being like Jack Sparrow at
| the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean: he steps off one
| boat just as it's sinking onto another, and he has the
| humility to not really give a damn which ship he's on. (I say
| "humility" even as someone frustrated by his net impact on
| society.)
|
| That's like saying a tapeworm is humble because it doesn't
| care which colon it's sitting in.
|
| The tapeworm lacks the faculties to care about the colon. It
| just needs nourishment. Same with Zuck. You can't blame the
| worm, because it's got no concept of reality beyond the
| things needed to serve its survival. Zuck, as a human, can
| only do that by very likely having a serious personality
| disorder.
| bitpush wrote:
| > That's like saying a tapeworm is humble because it
| doesn't care which colon it's sitting in.
|
| A more VC speak of this is
|
| "Strong ideas loosely held"
| billy99k wrote:
| Now it's 99% AI generated click bate.
| grandempire wrote:
| Zuckerbeg's super power is actually operating a giant tech
| company successfully, executing on multi-year visions, and
| just barely turning 40.
| calimariae wrote:
| You might manage the same if you're rich enough to hire
| top-tier advisors. Let's not kid ourselves--OG Facebook
| wasn't a tech marvel or even particularly original. It just
| landed in the right place at the right time and snowballed
| from there.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| In recent years, operating it successfully despite burning
| through billions for their metaverse boondoggle, sure
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Nailed it
| kryogen1c wrote:
| Zuck is learning theres a difference between shallow short term
| engagement and deeper long term engagement. Who could have seen
| this coming, except literally everyone?
|
| It's like a tragedy of the commons, except there's only one
| party destroying all resources for themself
| const_cast wrote:
| In Zuck's defense, it's not just him, it's the entire
| American school of business.
|
| They never learn. GM, GE, RCA, you name it. They always want
| to make more money now now NOW. They don't understand they're
| taking on a metaphorical loan. They don't understand the
| interest they have to pay.
|
| It's the ultimate greedy algorithm. Just make the decision
| that makes the most money right now, every time, over and
| over and over again. Don't look at anything else.
| thephyber wrote:
| What makes you think "they don't understand the interest
| they have to pay"?
|
| They are optimizing for short-medium term profits. The
| people there in the early days pull the ejection code when
| the "interest" is due. The company coasts until some
| private equity runs the numbers and realizes the parts are
| worth more than the whole.
|
| This is capitalism. You are using "interest" (a finance
| term) seemingly in a moral / ethical critique. If so, use a
| moral / ethical term instead.
| grugagag wrote:
| They need not learn, they do as they're primed, to go for
| profit, squeeze and profit, profit and profit some more.
| Then profit even from the dead husk on the way out. That's
| the hyper capitalist lifecycle of a business product.
| tombert wrote:
| I recently bought a new account on Something Awful [1], having
| not been on there in about seventeen years.
|
| It's almost surreal, because it still feels like 2005 internet,
| but people will talk about current topics and the community is
| generally more engaging.
|
| The moderation isn't some soulless ML model designed to
| optimize marketing revenue, it's a few dedicated people who
| want to make the community more fun and I've actually really
| enjoyed re-discovering the community there.
|
| I guess I had simply forgotten about linear web forums as a
| concept. Places like Reddit (Hacker News, etc.) have a
| recursive reply model, which is nice in its own right, but
| there's something sort of captivating about everything being
| one long giant thread. It's more chaotic, it's less refined,
| but it's also kind of unpretentious.
|
| [1] I already had one from when I'm a teenager but the name of
| that account will die with me as I posted too much on FYAD.
| isk517 wrote:
| I did the same about a year ago. Large enough that the
| community is extremely diverse with a wide range of life
| experiences but small enough that you'll start to recognize
| certain people. Also the completely linear threads means
| people will actually see what you post and not just ignore
| any conversation that isn't part of the top 10 most uploaded
| replies.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, and the simple $10 one-time-fee actually is
| surprisingly effective at filtering out spam bots and
| people who post crap content. People don't just make an
| account in thirty seconds and create a bunch of spam until
| they're banned, or at least they don't do that much because
| it would get relatively expensive fairly quickly.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| My Something Awful account recently turned 20 years old and I
| signed in on its birthday for the first time in over a
| decade. I felt the same thing as you. I looked for some new
| feature or something to show the passage of time, but found
| nothing. I had to manually click through pages. Forum
| signatures still exist.
|
| I also posted in FYAD enough to have my own "personality".
| Some of the posters from my time are still at it, with
| accounts pushing thirty years old. I wonder if we ever
| interacted.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| I spend much more time on three old school web forums related
| to poker and the KC Chiefs than I do on social media.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > [1] I already had one from when I'm a teenager but the name
| of that account will die with me as I posted too much on
| FYAD.
|
| Did you get teased by the San Jose Shark when you tried to
| make smash mouth eat the egg?
| Wilsoniumite wrote:
| > [...] as something that happened to Facebook/Meta rather than
| something driven by Facebook/Meta to satisfy Wall Street.
| Social media did not naturally evolve into what it is today:
|
| As soon as you have any platform which says "hey you there with
| an email address, you can put content on here that can be seen
| by anyone in the world." you will slowly end up with a scene
| that looks like all these sites we have now. Advertiser's and
| influencers will be there, at your behest or otherwise. There's
| only two options to avoid this. 1. Aggressively tune your
| algorithm against pure engagement and toward proximity. 2.
| Explicitly dissallow broad reach of content. And when I say
| aggressively I really mean it. If people can "follow" others
| unilaterally, even only showing "followed content" will still
| lead to most people seeing mostly high engagement posts, rather
| than their friends. At what point (degree of intervention) does
| something go from "natural" to "driven"? It's a hard question,
| but one things for sure, a Facebook that didn't allow high
| engagement content would already be dead.
| davidcbc wrote:
| Exclusively chronological timelines improve this situation
| immensely.
|
| As soon as you're using "algorithmic" timelines the battle is
| lost.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| I only use Facebook on desktop, and I use Fluff Busting Purity.
| I still see enough family and friends content to make it
| worthwhile.
|
| Every now and then I browse FB on my phone and it's an endless
| hellscape of ads and promoted content.
| mac3n wrote:
| and the new thing is the metaverse, right?
| gilbetron wrote:
| Broadcast social media is so odd to me now. It feels like walking
| to the center of town and shouting about your life to everyone.
|
| I go to Facebook once a week or so, scroll for about a minute,
| then close it. It was a novel experience reconnecting with people
| from my past, but in the end, I just found out too much about
| people, realized it may be best to let people in your past stay
| there, and that comparison is truly the thief of joy.
|
| Now, I just like watching interesting people talk about
| interesting things. I get that here, somewhat, reddit but lately
| only in a very narrow way, tik tok as long as I carefully
| maintain the algorithm, and youtube. All of them I have to be
| careful with, otherwise I can get pulled into hellholes of
| outrage bait. And I'm really, really wary of engaging in
| dicussions anymore. HN is about the only place, and even then I
| often regret it.
|
| One time, on reddit, there was a discussion about dishwashers,
| and how people needed to clean food off dishes, otherwise it
| would fill up the filters. I posted a link to a user manual
| showing that it was common to hook up the dishwasher to the
| garbage disposal to take care of that. I was downvoted into deep
| negatives, and I think one or more negative replies for just
| posting something simple and factual.
|
| Even here, half the time I post, I feel I will end up regretting
| it.
| disqard wrote:
| I've had the same mental model as you (shouting in a town
| square) and that's why Twitter always seemed weird to me.
|
| Lately, I've found that another mental model fits that sort of
| medium even better:
|
| Hot takes scrawled on the bathroom walls of pubs.
| amiantos wrote:
| And here, if you post something you later regret, you can't
| delete it or delete your account, which is pretty questionable
| on a social network in the modern age. So much for 'the right
| to be forgotten'.
| rglover wrote:
| Glad to hear my own experienced echo'd. I've been dialing off
| of the stuff (even HN) for these very reasons. The staggering
| one is this:
|
| > I was downvoted into deep negatives, and I think one or more
| negative replies for just posting something simple and factual.
|
| One of the darker side-effects of social media is that
| everything now feels very ideological and "team sports." You're
| either "with us" or "against us," nuance has basically been
| obliterated. Even more shocking is that in some places, it
| seems like anything that's truthful/factual or plausibly
| truthful triggers a visceral negative reaction in people (to
| the point where, what used to be polite disagreement is now a
| rage-dump).
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| At least once a day, I type up a comment somewhere, proofread
| it, think about whether I really want/need to post it, and then
| hit the back button. I figure that next-to-last step of asking
| myself whether it's really something I want out there is a good
| habit, and if the answer is always yes, I probably haven't
| thought about it enough.
| gilbetron wrote:
| I definitely do the same thing and in fact did exactly that
| with my original post! It's a good instinct to build up.
| yason wrote:
| Shouldn't be too hard to rewrite 2010 Facebook from scratch, and
| keep it like that. Follow what your friends are doing, and when
| you post yourself be certain that your friends will actually see
| your update.
| asadm wrote:
| fb has a tab that works like this now.
| yason wrote:
| Can you elaborate? Where do I find this? (Using desktop
| version.)
| namuol wrote:
| Good riddance.
| jader201 wrote:
| It should be pretty obvious, but...
|
| When social media started out, it was simply a feed of what you
| followed. FB, Twitter, Reddit, everything -- they showed you a
| chronological list of everything that the people/groups you
| followed posted.
|
| It was glorious.
|
| But it wasn't making money. These platforms were all funded by
| investors in hopes that they would someday make money.
|
| And now they are -- through ads and sponsored content that no one
| asked for or wants, via algorithms designed for one thing:
| profit.
|
| It's zero surprise to me that social media platforms have become
| the garbage that they are now.
|
| I've moved on from all but a couple platforms (HN, Board Game
| Geek, and Bogleheads -- arguably not social media platforms in
| the same vein as the others mentioned, because they aren't trying
| to monetize, except BGG which monetizes via traditional banner
| ads, which I'll take 10/10 over "content ads").
|
| But I have zero interest in returning to anything that injects
| their sponsored content in the middle of feeds.
|
| If social media platforms can't figure out a way to monetize
| without injecting this garbage, I'll stick to these others.
| wood_spirit wrote:
| How much is the algorithm swayed by the behaviour of stealth bots
| trying to act human in order to gain the cred to be a more
| effective bot?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Kind of hilarious to juxtapose with recent news of OpenAI
| (contemplating) starting its own social network to mine training
| data
| selfhoster wrote:
| Is it a diversionary ploy, perhaps the DOJ is looking at breaking
| up megacorps or something? I think you have to subscribe to read
| the full story either that or it was really short. Either way, I
| didn't see a mention of the DOJ on the page.
| mullingitover wrote:
| If social media is over, why isn't Zuckerberg laying off staff in
| social media? Instead he's laying off Reality Labs staff[1].
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/meta/655835/meta-layoffs-reality-
| la...
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| This kind of reminds me of when Fox News had to admit (in court)
| that their news wasn't really news, it was entertainment. It's
| wild how they always say the quiet part out loud when they're
| being sued.
| camilo2025 wrote:
| Every time I open my FB I get hammered with dozens of random ads.
| Also, a randomly generated lists of posts from my network where
| things pop up, and are then completely lost in the aether,
| because that is how FB thinks it is going to increase engagement.
|
| Facebook, and Instagram, is a frustrating, infuriating, alarming
| experience that really does not "bring joy" to my life.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| Mandatory "enshittification" comment.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The writing was on the wall a decade ago when everyone and their
| cat was posting junk content. Zuck's original idea was
| outstanding. He slowly cannibalized the massive success into
| outright gross platform:
|
| Get to know girls at Harvard!
|
| ---
|
| Get to know girls at select universities!
|
| ---
|
| Get to know anyone we've invited! We're so popular, we've got
| profiles of people at every major university! Write them
| messages, organize parties, etc! Upload pictures of parties or
| anything interesting!
|
| ---
|
| And now you can play addicting games on Facebook!
|
| ---
|
| And you can make a profile if you don't have a school!
|
| _And be fed ads and clickbait!
|
| ---
|
| _while we quietly dump-sell all your info to anyone!
|
| ---
|
| _Now meet 20% more criminals and scammers! Sell your car on our
| marketplace! You 'll regret every message!
|
| ---
|
| _Now with international crime!
|
| ---
|
| _Now with more bots than humans!
|
| ---
|
| _Why is everyone not respecting us? Oh, its over!
| JCattheATM wrote:
| Social media predates the term social media by decades. It isn't
| dead and won't ever die because humans love to socialize and we
| will continue to use tech to facilitate that.
|
| Commercial social media on the other hand may well be dying.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| "We brought you into this world, and we can take you out!"
| elijahbenizzy wrote:
| And then says... "you're welcome"
| blitzar wrote:
| Someone tell him Amazon now sells more than books and Netflix
| doesn't send DVD's in the post anymore they beam it directly into
| your home.
| npc_anon wrote:
| Meta is an ad business. You maximize ad revenue by maximizing
| time spent. You maximize time spent with a slot machine that
| exploits our psychological weaknesses.
|
| Meta intentionally drives this and don't forget that it's helped
| by millions of influencers that learned how to maximize
| engagement.
|
| A good-faith Facebook with exclusively a friends-only timeline
| might generate 20% of the current ad revenue. And it won't matter
| much because the bad-faith competitor will do the dopamine
| approach and users will be attracted to it like flies.
| freitasm wrote:
| Says the person running a social network website where I see one
| of my friend's posts amid eight "suggestions" that bear no
| interest to me.
|
| I have kept my FB account open just to contact some members of
| the family that live far away. Or to check someone I know in my
| circle that I haven't heard from a while.
|
| But scrolling? Nah. I don't have the app and only open it once a
| month.
|
| There's a word for it: enshitification. Blame yourself for making
| it a crap experience, Mark.
| CalChris wrote:
| So I hate Medicare Advantage (and conversely rather like
| Traditional Medicare) because private companies have perverse
| incentives when managing public goods. I think social media is a
| public good and what we've seen is a result of Facebook's
| perverse incentives. A friend asked what do we do about the
| perverse incentives? That's kind of difficult when Citizens
| United represents regulatory capture by corporations.
| herbst wrote:
| Pretty sure Zuck never looked at Telegram Group's and Channels if
| he concludes that
| rubyfan wrote:
| Didn't he also say the metaverse was the next big thing?
| omoikane wrote:
| Offtopic, but I wonder why they have the umlaut in
| "reevaluating".
| ranadomo wrote:
| this is a somewhat unique new yorker style habit
| https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...
|
| Umlaut is a separate concept from diaeresis but shares the
| symbol
| chasing wrote:
| "We added cocaine to our menu and now nobody's buying our
| healthier food options. Also our customers are acting
| increasingly deranged."
| Animats wrote:
| This has been called "pulling a Myspace", back from when Myspace
| lost to Facebook. The sequence:
|
| - Competition appears, usage decreases, revenue declines
| somewhat.
|
| - Ad density is increased to increase revenue.
|
| - Usage decreases further as users are annoyed by excessive ads.
|
| - Ad density is increased even further.
|
| - Death spiral.
|
| How could Zuckerberg not know this? He was on the other side of
| it last time around.
| paxys wrote:
| Why do you assume he didn't know this? He very knowingly
| pivoted from friends' content to where the real money was -
| politics, clickbait, outrage bait, doomscrolling, gambling,
| scams, illegal ads.
| jason-phillips wrote:
| Not once in the article does Mark say social media is over.
| film42 wrote:
| To quote David from the Acquired episode on Meta:
|
| > I really want to keep hitting on this insight again, that Mark
| correctly identified of social shifting from the town square to
| the living room. This is a second order effect of that shift that
| the company didn't see coming. Because once you shift social from
| the town square to the living room, it now becomes possible to
| divorce media from social. You're already getting your social now
| in private, in your digital living room. The town square can
| become something that is completely not social.
| zelon88 wrote:
| How can social media be dying when people like Elon Musk have
| like, 6,000 profiles?
|
| /sarcasm
|
| Seriously though, if Facebook put in even a modicum of effort to
| block the traffic from like, a dozen cities or usernames the
| platform could regain some semblance of what it used to be.
|
| Failing that, they could provide users with bulk blocking based
| on geolocation or regex username match and let users take some
| control over what they get spammed with. The tools provided are
| completely inadequate.
| wij4lij5 wrote:
| LinkedIn is the only social whatever that I still use, and that's
| only bearable with a LOT of filtering courtesy of uBlock Origin.
| Even after that, it's 95% corporate advertising and 5% humans I
| know.
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