There's a bit of a contradiction right in the first couple of paragraphs here:
Abercrombie [...] became inseparably linked with Americans who came of age around the turn of the century. The price of being so closely associated with one generation was that the next wanted nothing to do with it.
Facebook, which took off around the same time [and] which began as a way for oversexed Harvard undergraduates to rate each other’s looks, is now seen by youngsters “as a place for people in their 40s and 50s”
Those aren't the same! In the Abercrombie case, the case being made here is that the same people are wearing it, but that cohort has naturally aged and younger people don't want to follow them. In Facebook's case, older people have joined the network over time -- the stereotypical aunts, uncles and grandparents on Facebook are late adopters, not the original users who have naturally aged.
Edit to add: to put it another way, if you think of a 37-year-old techie like Zuckerberg, the social network that immediately comes to mind isn't Facebook, but Twitter. Twitter has plenty of problems, but "only my crazy uncle uses it" isn't one of them. Twitter isn't unfashionable because of all the old people on it, at least not to nearly the same degree as Facebook.
Facebook's age demographic has changed beyond naturally ageing out, which might mean that it's possible it could change again in the other direction. I'm skeptical about that, but I don't think Abercrombie is a very good analogy. Fashion brands are famously cyclical; is the same true of social networks?
Facebook optimized for an older demographic, the initial users quickly graduated and started to look like adults.
Teens don’t want to catch up with friends spread across the world, etc. But this means the next generation lacked the critical mass of young people which keeps a social network alive. Worse they eventually turned on monetization strategies which are effective for a captive audience but discourage further adoption.
The real question is a new generation will age into Facebook or is it ultimately doomed to irrelevance.
Facebook is irreparably doomed as a social network, but will continue to thrive as a software innovator (React, osquery, graphQL, etc).
The question becomes whether leadership will set their ego aside, stop trying to make the world like them, and own the actual future. No generation wants a Metaverse. Literally no one was asking for it until crypto got kicked out of Mom's house and needed a reason to crash on the couch.
I agree with you though: Facebook _optimized_ as it is trying to do with the eyeballs of all humans (e.g. VR color theory). Problem is that society learned its lesson. We became aware of how software aggregates our behavior for major ad deals with no regard for our collective health – mental & physical. Just like smoking in 1950, Facebook had its day. It's time to change some laws based on what we learned and get back to building genuinely cool stuff.
Facebook is irreparably doomed as a social network, but will continue to thrive as a software innovator (React, osquery, graphQL, etc).
Can that software really “thrive” if the core part of the business were to fade away, though?
Big companies can’t live on tech alone. I’m thinking of companies like Sun and Yahoo that made some cool software but ultimately didn’t have sustainable businesses.
Steam is a store, for software. Extremely popular store for that. They make technology, but their main income is selling games made by others, digital collectibles derived from these and then collectibles and lootboxes for their own games.
None of that is "tech" as I would understand. No one is for example paying them for their work with Proton to make Windows games run on Linux. And I don't think there is even such market.
Steam provides a great deal of utility for people selling games on their store via technology. DRM for example is technology, but so is validating installation, checking for updates, etc.
I do not think a new generation will age into it. Facebook's problem is not just that their existing users got older and younger people won't join. Millennials, their former bread and butter, have been leaving the platform in droves. I don't think they are going to come back in their 40s and 50s.
It's not a victim of success, it's a victim of expansion greed.
Before your aunt, grandma, and gradeschool cousin could join facebook, it was a place to be pretty open about having fun in college. That openness didn't work well with expanding the population to people who wanted to do what the cool college kids were doing because the college kids didn't want to share their weekend party plans nearly so much when grandma started to comment on them.
>"Inclusiveness" is a pretty loaded term which doesn't really seem to apply when you consider how it is used elsewhere.
How exactly is "inclusiveness" inappropriate here? Because it goes against the agenda that inclusiveness is always good? I guess using different synonyms for positive and negative connotations is one way to preserve doublethink.
Before, Abercrombie was an outdoor supply company.
The movement into generation-focused apparel was a pivot. They didn't make the next pivot to maintain. I think most companies need to continuously evolve.
it had at least one previous pivot. The original was a high-end hunting and fishing store. Then they got bought by Oshman's Sporting Goods. I think I was once in a store from that era. Sort of mid+ range outdoor gear, home furnishings, etc.
A long time ago I read a book In Search of LL Bean that talked about the old A&F. Apparently their Manhattan (I think) store had a gunsmith on premises and carried fly fishing lures that were apparently as specific as this type of fish, in this river, during this month.
This is apparently the lifecycle of outdoor fishing brands. Orvis (100+ yr old fly fishing company) places more emphasis on clothes than fly rods, flies and waders-- the margins and addressable market are probably both larger. Field and Stream is Dick's spinoff to target outdoors customers, and they typically dedicate 70% of floorspace to clothes, too.
Not a fisherman but Orvis is better than most. But they're also still family-owned.
REI is also probably better than most but they're a co-op.
But even in those cases they're pretty mass-market oriented which is pretty inevitable unless you're mostly niche mail order. REI doesn't stay in business and support a broad retail network selling climbing ropes and carabiners.
My father managed an Eddie Bauer flagship in the 70s, and they sold shotguns and climbing gear, as well as camping and fishing equipment. He considered A&F their primary competitor, which is how I learned that history.
I don't know that fashion brands are famously cyclical. Most of the brands haven't been around long enough to have any more than 2 cycles.
The first one is the initial popularity. The second one is the dead cat bounce of nostalgia 20 years later. After that, they become costumes, not fashion.
> Twitter has plenty of problems, but "only my crazy uncle uses it" isn't one of them.
The crazy uncle vibes are off the charts on Twitter. Considered that the two personalities most entwined with the platform are Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
Mark Zuckerberg used to rail on those older them him that they were duds that are out of touch. Quite ironically Mark is now the one turning into a dud that’s out of touch. The only reason to log into Facebook these days is to see what my grandparents are up to… seriously.
Facebook only ever did one thing well, and I think it still does it well enough, and that's being the internet's answer to the telephone book. In the last few years, through the era of social distancing, needing to get in touch with people not already in your personal address book has no doubt declined, but presumably that will return again.
I think facebook does marketplace really well. Whenever I listed something it sold, and I'm talking about really trashy stuff like a $20 microwave. I get a lot of noise (weird messages) but haven't seem explicit scams like you see on CL and you can sell the stuff usually within a day.
They also do events pretty well. It's easy to invite people and most people my age have a neglected facebook account so you can usually find who you want to invite. You just have to make sure you don't miss seeing the event.
I think Marketplace quickly became a goto over Craigslist because a Facebook profile is much more trustworthy than the essential anonymity of Craigslist.
Funny enough, I prefer craigslist because I don't want my personal identity involved in a simple transaction like buying electronics. It's not like you have much recourse if you get scammed on marketplace, the user can just use a fake account and delete it after scamming you
Yeah, but you can quickly look at a profile and get basic verification it looks real. If it doesn't just don't transact with them. I've been 100x more confident in facebook marketplace than craigslist
Profile age doesn't guarantee anything. I sold an iphone 11 on Ebay and a scammer used the credentials from a ten year old account with many legit purchases to try and run some kind of paypal payment request trick.
or cost depending on your perspective. CL is part of the weird, old internet being used in current times, with all the good & bad that comes with that.
Just as a counterpoint, I've sold almost 200 items on CL in the last 5 years in NYC as part of a decluttering project — everything from pro cameras to $3 adapters and cables to furniture. I have a process for when I switch from email to text, when I give my cross streets and train stop, and when I give my exact address, as well as boilerplate about cash, pickup only etc.
On the other hand, I'd been looking for a used car on FB Marketplace for about 3 years and couldn't find a single listing that seemed like it was from a legit owner (i.e. someone who wasn't selling a bunch of random cars parked on the street or a dealer posting fake prices).
Stuff does tend to sell quickly on Marketplace but searching for items is horrendous, there are so many puzzling things about the UI. Why have a 'max distance' field I can set to 40 miles if you are going to completely disregard it and show me things from neighboring states?
I've been working on an app inspired by challenges I had organizing hack nights and poker games. It's kind of a cross between Facebook events and Google Calendar, and allows you to send an invite link and send text updates. Would love to hear your thoughts!
I organized a semi public social meetup group for my city. People should be able to see the kinds of events we do .. but also rsvp/be a member to come out. Sometimes we enjoy the abiltiy to make the location private.
I use marketplace. It's buggy on mobile, didn't work for a year or so, there are scammers on there. I saw a flood of dodgey adverts over the last week. Reported, persisted. I still use of for marketplace and a forum.
Marketplace and messenger are the most useful Meta apps. While I don't use it for any social media wall posting stuff I do know a lot of people my age who do. Mostly people from rural areas.
Interesting point. I was talking about this very issue with someone. Facebook was awesome when it first came out because you could connect with people you hadn't seen or heard from in years. You'd connect through mutual friends mostly.
Those days are gone. People have moved from landlines to permanent cell numbers, so once you have someone's number, you always have it. Email addresses are gmail.com, outlook.com, etc. As with the phone number, once you have an email address, you always have it. Plus, with widespread cellphone usage and unlimited text messaging, it's low cost for both parties to send a quick text message to stay in touch.
Facebook's original source of popularity is now dead. Of course this does not imply that Facebook will disappear.
That's true but there are a fair number of people who are friends of mine or at least acquaintances who I like sort of keeping in contact with--but who I wouldn't necessarily text or email out of the blue. Facebook provides a nice low-friction way of keeping in touch, sharing photos, etc. (That said I don't really have that many friends on Facebook and most of my circle seems to have really cut back on their usage.)
But that's where the design of Facebook gets in the way. With Twitter, I can follow someone without them even knowing. Facebook requires sending a request and then having that request accepted. I interact with many people on Twitter that I'd never consider sending a request on Facebook. For me at least, there's not much of a gap between those I'd send an email or text and those I'd send a Facebook request, and even for them there's not much of an advantage of Facebook over the alternatives in 2022.
You can follow all profiles on facebook but only the public profiles ones on twitter. Becoming a friend take two on facebook and can't be done on twitter
That's pretty much how I think about LinkedIn. Certainly, looking for someone in professional circles, LinkedIn would be my go to--not Facebook. Lots of people aren't on Facebook. Most I know have a LinkedIn profile even if they don't maintain it.
One person’s perspective here, but it seems to me like Facebook sucks for that now. I have had very little success recently looking people up on Facebook, even when I know their name, where they live, and that they have a Facebook account.
I think it is because so many people have low trust in Facebook. For years there has been a huge movement of people encouraging each other to lock down their FB account. So while they might keep an account to check in on old friends and family, they have set their profiles to be not searchable.
The image detection/tagging feature was what got me onto the platform originally. That was way ahead of others in the space at the time, and was a great way to build up a photo album over time as your friends uploaded their own pictures that included you.
I think of Facebook as a photo album. It is perfect for sharing pictures of my kids with my friends and family. It is great for seeing what my distant friends are up to.
I have to aggressively block all jokes (there were funny 1000 shares ago), memes (always stupid, but they seem insightful), politics (left and right wing extremism), cats (not your cat, I don't care), and other things people share that get in the way of the purpose of seeing what my friends and family are up to.
> The only reason to log into Facebook these days is to see what my grandparents are up to… seriously.
Instagram.... Whatsapp... FB marketplace...
I don't have a Facebook account (or Instagram or Whatsapp) but Facebook (Meta) is more than just Facebook. Maybe FB is just the product targeted toward older adults and grandparents now? That seems fine.
How is AARP still a thing. All I can see that they do is beg people to join starting when they are about 55. I don't see that there would be any benefit for doing so.
Arguably he's always been fairly out of touch. He fucked over the twins who hired him to build ConnectU - with the primary mechanism of growth of exclusivity via tapping into the social networks of each university requiring a university email to signup - Mark knowing full well, stating as much, that there don't need to be two platforms, and so purposefully leading on the twins that he was working on ConnectU while he instead of trying to launch TheFacebook beforehand; first-to-market advantage with sociopathy and a total lack of ethics.
Ethically, morally, emotionally (empathy) - he's been pretty out of touch this whole time, not understanding the full breadth of consequences of his actions, and therefore not caring.
He’s a pretty good picture of a boring low-grade low empathy individual causing gigantic harm.
People get confused by the popular media depictions - sociopaths are just people with very little empathy and virtually no remorse. People who do tremendous harm are not sadistic cruel people, they’re often just boring people who have no empathy for others and show very little remorse or none at all when lying or engaging in deception - which is why it’s hard to tell they’re even lying - they don’t show the tells of self doubt and remorse that we use to detect deception.
As far as I know, Facebook has never innovated. It’s either bought or copied every single feature it’s ever implemented, with the exception of course of giant shameless data gathering on an industrial scale that has led to cognitive warfare being part of political battles in the West.
And now of course a huge increase in depression and mental illness due to poor incentives on their social media platforms. If Facebook/Instagram was a physical product that you would take, that lets say reduces anxiety temporarily but increases depression in the long run, it would likely be banned.
And of course they won’t fix anything because “reducing engagement” is a mortal sin for the company.
This is correct. When Hannah Arendt wrote "The Banality Of Evil" she was trying to communicate how ordinary and boring some of the monsters of history were. We might expect them to be dramatic figures like Darth Vader, but in reality they are just bureaucrats who have no empathy and don't think about the consequences of what happens when they sign some document.
Essentially. I didn’t want to go to the tired “but Nazis” analogy, but yeah basically the Russians killing civilians in Ukraine are just low empathy individuals. Same with Eichmann or whatever. These are just boring, low empathy individuals who don’t think much of anything that doesn’t affect them. Those people commit the evil, but often they’re not sadistic, they just don’t care.
Sure there are paranoid delusional maniacs who sometimes lead them (and then you see the real damage). But a person with very low empathy can create enormous damage. I see them often working in finance in London and ignoring the second order effects of ie tax avoidance schemes for the super rich, or selling real estate to the Saudis while going with their friends to the local LGBT disco. They just don’t care.
It's why Jordan Peterson seriously and intensely asks are you so sure you're not someone who could do those horrible things [if the circumstance weren't equal] - because he studied and wrote the book Maps of Meaning on this exact topic: understanding how the horror of tyranny come to be. His conclusion is weak individuals.
Part of the whole origin story of TheFacebook that falls in line with this is that his university actually had a print version of a compilation of people's face - I presume like a yearbook - that they were planning to make an online version of; it was actually called The Facebook from my recollection, and another place Mark wasn't creative or innovative and took from as well.
Apparently they were taking a long time to make the site, Mark couldn't understand why. The reason? Apparently the group who was working on bringing the print version online were brainstorming through the potential consequences of doing so.
I remember reading about it many years ago online in one of the university's student newspapers, I think I remembered it correctly but my memory of it is a little fuzzy; I believe it'll be in one of these articles: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/tag/mark-zuckerberg/
I don't think the problem at Facebook/Meta is that it's a mortal sin to reduce engagement, I honestly think they just aren't creative enough and they don't understand from foundational principles why they have what they have, nor how to improve on it in a nuanced way.
As you said it's basically an industrial machine with very few wheels, where all of the basic or crude parts are in place, where their guide is the most basic-shallow metric possible is whether engagement goes up or down; where it's the network effects that kept it together for so long. Mark certainly isn't a creative visionary, and so with him at the helm, all of his decisions of who he empowers under him will be random as to whether they are beneficial or not - but logical decisions looking at user numbers and growth made purchases like WhatsApp and IG no brainers.
Interestingly, you are actually correct, in that the original meaning for sin is aim related - and so because of their lack of sophistication, the only thing they see or know how to aim at are engagement numbers. The sin will be by not aiming at the only thing they are good at aiming at, where they otherwise miss the mark - and sin; is it irony that his name is Mark and he's arguably been missing the mark this whole time - or perhaps a generous perspective is that he's really good at hitting one specific mark, the Mark? Anyway..
In contrast, Elon Musk functions creatively, an imaginative open mind, and has developed an understanding of first/foundational principles that he works from. Twitter will likely be a good buy once Elon re-lists it. I'll still be investing in my projects though.
I have been working on my own platform solution to solve for our society in crisis mode. It unexpectedly was a relief when Elon bought Twitter, as I am primarily driven by necessity. Elon will course correct Twitter away from the ideological and censorship bent platform it was becoming, so at least there's one major battleship on our side, funded by the person who most definitely has Fuck You money and competent to boot.
>In contrast, Elon Musk functions creatively, an imaginative open mind, and has developed an understanding of first/foundational principles that he works from. Twitter will likely be a good buy once Elon re-lists it.
I'm sure I'll get downvoted for this, but I think there's more to Musk than this. He's incredibly intelligent, and has radically innovated in two industries (Space and EVs), but I don't think he has the maturity/emotional intelligence or societal vision that's needed for combatting the problems that Twitter (and social media) present to democratic societies.
I'm a massive fan of what he's achieved in many areas - and watch every Falcon 9 landing with the same child-like awe that I did the first one that nailed it, and I watched every Starship test live. But this is the same man who had a battle calling a cave rescuer a 'pedo guy' and I'd be surprised if Twitter goes in a direction which will benefit society in the way that EVs and making life interplanetary will do.
> I don't think he has the maturity/emotional intelligence or societal vision that's needed for combatting the problems that Twitter (and social media) present to democratic societies.
I can see where you are coming from with this, and I agree with the general premise, but I think about it a bit differently.
Twitter already had a few "mature" people with "emotional intelligence or societal vision" that ran it at different points in time, and yet here we are in Twitter's current state. Clearly something isn't working.
There is a non-zero possibility that someone like Elon (who is very unlike those previous people who ran twitter) might be exactly the right kind of a person to address the ailments of twitter and course-correct it. He could also fail miserably at it, but I think it is definitely worth a shot to find out.
Elon Musk is a highly creative individual, but I worry he has bipolar. I myself have bipolar, and his actions and things he’s said in the past seem to indicate he might have it too. He seems be in a manic phase at the moment. (He’s actually said once that he thinks he might have it).
If he doesn’t have psychotic phases and how bipolar is not so strong, he can be a high performance individual but I think it’s something he will eventually have to take a look at.
I had no idea he once stated he thinks he might have it. I've always presumed he had it based on his twitter posts. I have schizoaffective disorder, bipolar subtype, and his behaviour matches low-key bipolar very well.
Yep. I think if you’ve had bipolar his behaviour is so familiar it’s hard to believe he doesn’t have any of it. It definitely feels like what I had before I had my first “breakout” like I said - hypomania at least.
I can’t tell nor would I diagnose someone I don’t know.
However
- his current tweet storm has included imo a lot of Juveline type stuff. He also seems to be tweeting more than usual.
- this matches with the impulsivity you’d feel in a manic phase. You’re also full of dopamine so you feel like you “can do anything”. This can lead to irresponsible behaviour and grandiose dreams that you feel “are totally possible”.
- it’s possible he has a low-grade bipolar type mood swings. I had something like bipolar, but not quite, before I had my first psychotic episode. Very high highs and very low lows. Same as he’s described. I’m not sure if you can live your entire life this way, but it’s possible that it is and he’s a case. His behaviour certainly reminds me of my own previous to my outbreak.
- one of the things that destroys you with bipolar and that they warn you about is compulsive buying. Your impulsive behaviour + money is the worst aspect of even a low manic phase, since you can easily blow all your money very quickly.
Looking at his purchase of twitter, his prolific tweeting, the way he’s acting in those tweets (juveline, impulsive) he really really reminds me of someone in a low-grade manic phase.
In a manic phase you are pumped full of absurd amounts of dopamine, so you have tremendous energy, you think you can do anything, you can fall into impulsive buying, and you are so led by impulse you can do a lot of irresponsible behaviour.
Him purchasing twitter reminds me of people who buy boats/homes in mania essentially. He doesn’t seem to have a master plan that I’ve heard about to turn it around. Even if he does have a master plan, his behaviour suggests mania to me.
Like I already said I can’t diagnose anyone, but his behaviour is so familiar I can’t help but wonder.
I’m confused. This reads to me that he was in touch enough to know to hoodwink the twins , make Facebook “exclusive” enough for it to be wanted and make it successful.
I think a common misconception is that one’s morals and ethics prohibits them from doing not-socially acceptable actions. I don’t believe this to be true. Rather , I believe one might hesitate (and for all we know he might have) but if this incentive is greater than aligning with what’s commonly accepted as right, than I don’t see Mark’s actions as Sociopathic. It’s what I expect most people to do , especially in the business world.
Does it not have the same outcome that greed or excitement is overriding morality?
That's a very pessimistic view that you expect most people to function from a lack of conscience. You're probably not wrong that it's more common in the business world as well where there's more to gain. I used to think that too, still to some degree but I understand that most people's selfishness is give themself a comfortable amount.
I think maybe you're confusing my saying he's sociopathic with that it's malicious or with intent, which I don't believe Mark to have conscious or willful intent for harm behind his actions; and he's not a psychopath.
> Does it not have the same outcome that greed or excitement is overriding morality?
Yes but many things can override morality. I believe it all comes down to how strong you hold are to your morals. But I see your point and it’s probably the case.
> That's a very pessimistic view that you expect most people to function from a lack of conscience. You're probably not wrong that it's more common in the business world as well where there's more to gain. I used to think that too, still to some degree but I understand that most people's selfishness is give themself a comfortable amount.
I don’t think it’s a lack of conscience but moreso an overide of it. I think depending on the incentive a lot of people would overide their morals. Though maybe not most people. Idk.
He was portraying a stereotype that wasn’t founded in facts or reality. Yes there are some high flying companies founded by very young people bucking established trends, but by and large successful startups and companies are founded by those that are older and have been around the track a few times. That was true then and is true today.
Too true. The one feature that I really miss on Facebook is decent filtering. Unlike most other platforms I'm on, FB doesn't even pretend to offer keyword filtering. I can supposedly filter by app, but they tend to throw away provenance info so that doesn't really work either. It's quite annoying.
but that's all a social network can be any way. what do you expect? they already own instagram? what are all those engineers doing? if I was Facebook, i would cut the staff and development a long time ago and just rake in the profits..
Maybe it's my 30s talking, but I can't help to be sad at the decline of Facebook the product: there simply was no better way to share photo albums with friends.
Instagram only allows you 10 pictures per album, has no good auto-tagging, and has no good way to download pictures from the app (which causes deep-fried screenshot hell). None of my friends are in Flickr or whatever picture site is common these days.
It's a pity that Facebook the company seems to have prioritised engagement so much over sanity.
I think facebook really used to be a useful tool. It was easy to meet and add people there, organize events, share photos. And then it became more, and more, and more, and stopped being useful at what it was useful at.
If I was heading facebook product, I would move all that fluff to other apps, and make the core of facebook a useful simple tool to connect people again. The removal of the historical newsfeed is the first thing that shows that it’s not made to be useful anymore. Listen to the users.
Agreed, the way to increase its value is to take away features, not to add them. Its value proposition is being the boring, ubiquitous way to connect to your kids' PTA group and to organize your neighborhood cleanup or family reunion and so forth, and if they lean in to that its first-mover advantage will keep it around forever.
OTOH, the way to increase its profit is to add features, not take them away: If it gets out of your way when you're trying to check the agenda for your PTA meeting, and shows you a clean photo album of your family reunion, there's nowhere to slip in sponsored posts or ads.
You want to make Facebook better, but the shareholders want Facebook to make money. And Facebook can, and will continue, to makes a LOT of it by melting the brains of boomers with targeted propaganda.
+1 for Google Photos. So far at least Google has not messed up with the product and I have seen it getting better and smarter over the years in finding blurs, dupes, fixing light, showing pics to archive, searching by pic keywords, ability to easily share albums and pics etc. All in all a great product!
I don't want my kids pictures to be used for training a military drone AI or some other nightmarish computer vision application. I keep all my photos self hosted.
There are a lot options for doing this, I like librephotos: https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos
It's always going to be a never ending battle unless you self-host everything. Just gotta go to the best one and be willing to backup and switch services when it gets too bad.
IMO Google Photos (and to a lesser extent iCloud Photos) has been leaps and bounds better than FB.
Albums are shared intentionally rather than indiscriminately for anyone who you happened to click "Accept" on years ago to view. There are fewer privacy implications - I can be sure that the photos I share aren't crowbar'ed into someone else's feed.
It is incredible how empowering it was a tool to upload photos, tag friends in them, and distribute them when it launched. The introduction of the feed was the beginning of the end.
Telegram is the solution I found to this. You can send hundreds of pictures and can choose to compress or not to compress them, and they are easily downloadable.
>"The film explores the firm’s obsession with employing a certain type of staff—handsome, chiselled, white—which led to damaging claims of racism and sexual harassment."
It seems odd that they would have left out "shirtless" in that list of adjectives to describe Abercrombie and Fitch's obsession. There's a group called "Improv Everywhere" who once staged a funny event where they assembled 100 regular looking guys to descend on the Abercrombie store in SOHO in NYC while shirtless. They proceeded to shop for shirts and perhaps unsurprisingly they were kicked out the store. The video of this outing is available here:
I'm literally seeing the same random guy just changed his profile picture notification as the top post for a week now (which takes up all screen real estate). Slightly less dynamic than my TikTok stream...
I get all kinds of weird "suggested for you" posts that seem like right-wing troll bait or just strange posts about semi-nude people. It's pretty clear it's trying to feed me some red meat for engagement, which is very off putting. I mean, that's been the game for years now, but it seems more blatant than it used to be.
I enjoy how facebook/instagram can't quite figure out who I am and goes through moods between showing me $100k lab equipment, occult toiletries, and engagement rings.
Meanwhile, in my household, Instagram and Youtube continue to show me ads for some product or restaurant I was just talking about, or for a store I just visited. I think my home needs a pi-hole.
My suggested posts have been almost exclusively comics featuring really bad cat jokes. Occasionally, I'll see some third-rate tacticool product. I know it could be waaaaay worse but, really, a little variety would be nice.
There's a similar effect in meat-space too, I remember my (boomer) father telling me that when he moved for work in the 70's that he found he was able to meet people in the area via a society (some kind of rambling and general activity group) that was really good for meeting others in their early 20s.
When he suggested I try the same group for meeting new people when I moved to my first job post-uni we looked up the society, but it was almost exclusively populated by people much closer to his age than mine. While the remit of the society hadn't changed, as people had got older they had never actually left the society to make space for the young, and so the group lost the ability to deliver on its promise.
It's a natural effect and you can't really fight it, people will grow in places their parents aren't, and so they'll seek spaces where their parents aren't.
Facebook has the luxury of generally being able to buy competition as it grows before it's too large to grow too big. Generally they'll still have the metrics and data to be able to spot new competition before it grows very large at all.
Tik Tok is of course an exception, fueled by both a vast amount of inorganic early growth and being out of reach of an easy acquisition before it grew too large.
It happens in neighborhoods too. At one point a neighborhood is full of families with school-age children, so similar people tend to move there. Then 30 years later the same neighborhood is full of retirees and there are hardly any children to be found.
Organizations outliving their founders (or more generally their original cohort) is hard. For example, my wife and I belong to a ski club. (It's not as swanky as it sounds. It's just a way to co-own a kind of dumpy converted motel up in New Hampshire, with arrangements to maintain it and coordinate its use during the season.) The club was founded in 1965, which among other things mean that within the last ten years or so the leadership shifted from the founders' generation to my own. There was quite a bit of conflict about things like maintenance priorities (e.g. do we upgrade some of the bathrooms to be more senior-friendly or do we bring the kitchen up to code) and expanding membership. One of the biggest controversies has been use of electronic devices in common areas during social hours, which mostly put my own generation on the side of our elders opposite those even younger. Apparently the debates about smoking were even more contentious, but that was before we joined.
At this point the oldest members have passed on or shifted to weekday-only use (it's cheaper), so things have mostly settled down, but there was definitely some drama during the transition. And that's with ~50 families engaged in a recreational/social activity. Imagine the same in a huge company with customers and business needs and people's livelihoods involved. That is always going to be a bit rough.
I’d add that Facebook had the luxury of buying the competition. They even used to own a fairly popular mobile VPN provider just for the purpose of collecting data about which apps and services are on the rise.
But that was five years ago. Now every move by Meta is under intense scrutiny by three regulators who love to assert their power: USA, EU and UK.
Post-Brexit, the UK’s antitrust regulator wants to demonstrate its new independence. They blocked Facebook’s acquisition of Giphy even though the latter has no operations in Britain, on the theory that Giphy might eventually sell ads to UK businesses and thus become a competitor to Meta.
Meta isn’t eager to risk another of these multi-year acquisition drama episodes. They’re all in on decades-long metaverse platform building, with organic growth at Instagram and WhatsApp hopefully tiding over until Zuck’s dream AR devices become feasible.
I don't understand what meta is building. The tech to even conceive of building a metaverse is at least 10 years away.
Not only do you need photorealistic graphics (just becoming feasible) but you need these graphics in 8k, on a mobile device with long battery life. The hardware to support this will run 20 pounds with a 500+ watt power draw.
Beyond that, you need to ability for everyone to interact seamlessly over the internet in “fun” spaces that they enjoy hanging out in. This means next generation immersive haptics etc. I don't see much excitement for haptica in the wild.
Then there is a whole crazy idea that users should be able to bring stuff across meracerse games/worlds and have it just work...
I see this ending in 3-5 years with a major AAA studio making a billion dollar met averse experience that flops.
> "The tech to even conceive of building a metaverse is at least 10 years away."
Zuck knows this. He's spending $10-15 billion per year on this tech with the goal of having a compelling consumer experience ready in 2030 — still optimistic, but not outrageously so.
I'm not sure if being early will work for Meta. One could look at Symbian which was very early in the smartphone market, with major investments into a power-efficient C++ based OS and GUI API already in 1996. They got app-capable devices with relatively good graphics and resistive touchscreens in the market early, but all that R&D then became a boat anchor when the iPhone happened and Symbian's embedded-style paradigm was immediately obsolete.
I suppose this is the inevitable evolution of a large tech firm. At some point the only way to drive further growth is with fundamental research, but fundamental research has a mixed track record when it comes to value capture.
Part of my concern is that it's not clear that we even have enough tech to sensibly spend money on. Is the money going to go into BCI interfaces? Haptics? VR? Software? All of the above? Or just big marketing campaigns promising the metaverse?
It is not only about building. It is also having eyes open and trying to buy anything they can (sellers willing to sell and anti-trust authorities agreeing). "Metaverse" is so imprecise so that whatever scheme in the end works, will be retrofitted to be Metaverse as envisioned from the beginning.
> Not only do you need photorealistic graphics (just becoming feasible) but you need these graphics in 8k
Maybe? I mean, it's still possible to have expressive representations at lower fidelity. Cartoon characters are way more expressive (and fun!) than actors in movies.
> Now every move by Meta is under intense scrutiny by three regulators who love to assert their power: USA, EU and UK.
Facebook has proven they need more regulation, not less. Brexit could not have happened without Zuckerberg's gormless leadership. He built a machine for influencing populations and he mindlessly loans it out to authoritarianism while he's off slaughtering goats in his back yard, pretending he's a hunter.
> I remember my (boomer) father telling me that when he moved for work in the 70's that he found he was able to meet people in the area via a society (some kind of rambling and general activity group) that was really good for meeting others in their early 20s.
When I first moved to Chicago, I signed up for "sports" leagues via "Chicago Sport and Social" (it also includes card games and trivia games). They matched you up with a team in a league with your requested skill level (from "I suck but like going through the motions" to "I played in college and want to WIN WIN WIN"). Your team would be sponsored by a bar or restaurant near the playing fields and your team was supposed to go there after the game and get a free pitcher of beer or appetizer to share while you all socialized.
It was around 20 years ago and (checking the website) is still around now, with the same 20-something target market. I honestly can't imagine that there isn't a similar organization in every single big city that has a constant influx of fresh college grads.
Hey Facebook. People are sick of sifting through the bs on your service. They're sick of going to the trouble of posting pictures of their puppies without knowing you'll show those pictures to their friends, if your algorithm decides something else might rile them up more effectively and so drive their engagement.
So, I got an idea, Zuck! Move to the metaverse! Sell us expensive VR headsets tied to your services. That way we can go online and virtually harass each other in person (virtually). It'll be fun! It'll be bigger than Facebook! Go for it.
> People are sick of sifting through the bs on your service
I feel like facebook would be much more usable if I could do two simple things: hide all posts I'm only seeing because a friend commented on a thing I wouldn't otherwise see, and disable posts where a friend re-shared another post without adding or commenting on it. It wouldn't fix everything, but those two are by far the biggest source of low-signal crap.
Though at this point it would probably be too little and too late.
you can carefully select who and who can't see your posts. there's a feature for that there already. and not just broad groups like "friends', "friend of friends", you can even select each individuals, i think.
That just sets the privacy level for the post, selecting if an individual is allowed to see a specific post.
What the parent commenter is talking about is whether the Facebook newsfeed algorithm will even show that post to the people allowed to see it in the first place. Or will Facebook just hide that post from your friends in favor of ads, clickbait, etc. on their feeds.
"Once-mighty sites like MySpace endure, like abandoned digital ruins."
In many ways, Facebook is pulling a Myspace. User count goes down, so, to maintain revenue, ad content goes up. Repeat until it's all ads and few users.
Wouldn't be that weird if they were. Perfect fit every time and any customizations he wants, for a relative cost that'd be indistinguishable from "free", considering how much money he has. Why not? If I could pay nickels per item and get bespoke-everything, I absolutely would.
I think similarly, and I also can see how easily you could end up with bespoke stuff just from all your assistants trying to make you happy and having previous experience connecting their employers with tailors or fashion houses. Especially since the cost and convenience of measuring and selecting has decreased so much.
EDIT: Wow, I have absolutely no idea what made me think this was a New Yorker article. I was apparently posting before fully awake. Sorry to anyone who was deeply confused as a result.
Original comment preserved below for posterity:
The New Yorker is pretty thorough about fact-checking their writers. In general, if you read a statement like “nowadays, x does y” in an article of theirs, it’s unlikely to be something that the author just made up to add color.
This is typical no-information opinion piece. IMO, there is nothing wrong with only having "old" people on your social network. The 30+ age group is the one with cash and eyeballs to spare anyway. The 30- group change their apps like cloths, have little cash and has attention deficit. Which age group should you be focus on?
The problem with FB is just their newsfeed algo. If I go to individual friends, they have lot of interesting posts but none of them show up in my newsfeed. Someone in that org ruined FB.
Dope as in full of scams of stolen profiles posting stuff in 30 different cities and not for shipping. Usually a Ford ranger for 1200 when the market is way above. Or a PS5 for MSRP. If eBay figured out a way of making both parties more at ease, to make local selling easier, and to make transactions less stressful it would take over that small quick sell market.
I think there's a weird cognitive dissonance in how this shows up in their externally visible behavior. Their weird superbowl ad, for example, was simultaneously about getting the gang back together nostalgia for a down-and-out relic of a bygone era ... and the metaverse. It targeted an older generation who perhaps has drifted away from or lost track of the people that used to be important to them, and tries to sell a shared virtual reality. Is the hope really that boomers are going to lead the way into the metaverse?
Outside the HN/tech-enthusiast bubble, yes. In my circle Instagram is the platform of choice. The majority is generally dismissive of Meta's privacy issues.
