Nobody hates Facebook users more than Facebook, I guess. :-/
I've tried to type out several pithy comments, but the bottom line (to me) is that Facebook just doesn't respect its users or care about their needs.
Can you imagine if brick-and-mortar businesses tried to do this? You go out for a Big Mac, but it's not on the menu anymore because Taco Bell had a few really good quarters, so McDonald's decided to pivot to tacos. Maybe you can still order the Big Mac if you know to ask for it, but most people won't, and they'll leave disappointed instead of getting what they wanted.
Edit: To clarify, this example is contrived and the details are not the point. The point is that Facebook offered something to their users, spent years and billions of dollars making sure that as many people as possible got it from Facebook, and then decided to just yank the rug out from under all those people to chase the fairy tale of endless growth.
> Facebook just doesn't respect its users or care about their needs.
Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers. You and I aren't Facebook's users; we are the ore Facebook has been mining at a cost approaching zero for over a decade and selling at a huge markup to its actual customers. But now the mine is playing out. We no longer cost Facebook zero to mine and the advertisers are beginning to realize the gold (us) is no longer 24-carat because nobody under 30 uses FB any more.
Like any mining entrepreneur when the mine begins to play out, FB is panicking. They're throwing whatever they can think of at the wall to see if anything sticks.
None of it will work. FB will keep publicly saying "everything is fine" until one day they will simply slink away in the middle of the night leaving several thousand mine workers unemployed and holding the bag.
> one day they will simply slink away in the middle of the night
leaving several thousand mine workers unemployed and holding the
bag.
When that day comes, the moment Facebook and Meta are declared dead I
will go out, order the most expensive bottle of champagne, and
celebrate all night. Future generations of an advanced technological
society will look back in horror and disbelief that a small cadre of
privateers were allowed to run amok dominating the cultural
communications of billions of people. The harms to individuals and
society will take decades to reckon with. The lost opportunities for
us to evolve instead of "amusing ourselves to death" will be one of
the great questions of the future. "Why, while the planet was
burning", they will ask, "did people spend all day sending each other
selfies?"
The problem is not Facebook or Meta. The problem is the disgusting business model of targeted advertising coupled with algorithmic curation of content to increase ad impressions. Facebook happens (happened?) to play that game perfectly but it's not limited to them by any means and another player will just take its place if Meta dies.
I'll keep my bottle of champagne for the day targeted advertising is regulated away, either on privacy grounds or on "Section 230" grounds (if you're curating content to increase engagement it's fair that you should be considered an editor and thus lose Section 230 protection and start being liable for any inflammatory content you promote to increase engagement).
Its funny how little attention your post got. I consider it the most important take on this subject. This is not about Facebook. It's about a corrupt and destructive business model that reflects the insane world we live in today. When that model goes away, it will reflect on other models that revolve around deceptive business practices. So more to the point, when ethics becomes an integral point of doing business, Then I will celebrate the real achievement of our time.
That's not how Section 230 works: it's explicitly designed so that some editing does not open you to full liability for user provided content (but it's common to think it does the opposite). https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/no-section-230-does-no... explains.
Why do you signal out “targeted” advertising? Would it be a different story if they advertising was not targeted? I think it would probably be an even worse junk land.
Why do you consider TikTok to be social media? Isn't it just videos shot in a smartphone aspect ratio + comments and a clever discovery algorithm? Is YouTube also social media?
A reasonable definition of social media is that it refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, and/or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks. "
In other words, roughly: a medium in which media created and consumed by the crowds vs. institutions.
Yes. "YouTube is an American online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube
Yes? Of course? I don't think there is a solid argument against HN being social media either. Same goes with Discord, Telegram, and Signal.
They are all media that you interact with and also interact with others via. The distinction is made with television/radio, where interaction is purely one-way, and is therefore not social media.
> dominating the cultural communications of billions of people
I think it is much worse than dominating. Let me try: as a FB user, your "communication" with your network is not only mediated by FB, but actively manipulated to such a degree that you're no longer communicating directly with individuals in your network. When we give up the ability or the pattern of communicating directly with each other, bad shit happens.
Well, should really look into the history of communication technology in the 19th and 20th centuries. Television, the telegram, and radio were all dominated by private cos that crushed open competition at every opportunity. Do you ever give that any thought? I recommend The Master Switch by Tim Wu if not!
The day meta is declared dead will be the day some other corporation has released an alternative to Facebook/Instagram/etc, probably worse. Hardly anything to celebrate. The cat is out of the bag.
I'm really curious to know what you think that "cat" is ?
Are you thinking that digital technology is irrevocably corrupted and
hereafter can only be employed toward abusive and manipulative ends?
Or are you supposing that because we have allowed some companies to
damage society through abuses of technology, that the situation can
never be remedied. No laws can ever be brought to bear?
Or are you alluding to something within the collective psyche, making
a social-anthropology statement of sorts, that people, having tasted
the ruin of apathy, nihilism and decadence will not recover in spirit
and build a more positive technological world?
Or something else?
I'm genuinely curious what you imagine is the powerful force that
underwrites malevolent entities in the digital realm?
I've said it before and I'll say it again - social media is not the root of the problem here. I believe that there could be a great social media platform that respects its users and their privacy. But the minute you let marketing and sales into the room the game changes. They are the ones that see their users as the advert dollars, not the people building the platform. The highly paid executives whose only goal is to squeeze every last penny out for their own personal gain are the issue. This is a systemic problem in technology today: when the goal is profit first, the end user is lost as the target market.
I'm working for a small company currently and am watching the same thing play out on a much smaller scale. The company was growing organically at a good clip. We've had zero customer churn in 6+ years and service some of the largest companies in their respective verticals. Company fires the current CEO based on board recommendations, hires a CRO who was in sales at Oracle for 7 years, CRO brings in his overpriced underlings to "manage", CRO starts refocusing all concerns around the sales process (starting with making everyone spend an inordinate amount of time learning/relearning MEDDPICC) and tying up hours of the work week in unproductive oversight meetings. Now I haven't been here long but I've seen this play out before. CRO will sit here for 2+ years and milk it into the ground blaming everyone for every failure but himself. He'll even throw his guys under the bus if needed (which is why they're there in the first place - ownership buffer). We're starting to see product issues because of the focal shift internally and the distraction this guy is creating. It's so unfortunate - I've yet to hear the CRO talk about a customer outside of the subject matter of revenue. It's sick and twisted. These types of "executives" are narcissists through and through and they are the toxic seed that kills great companies.
You forgot the part where after 2 years they are shown the door but with a huge payout and glowing references ostensibly because "We don't want to ruin their careers" but actually: We don't want the market to know we hired this idiot and it took us 2 years to work it out and we don't want to be sued by their high-priced lawyers.
Then they take their "success" to the next company and the cycle repeats.
I suppose the technological implementation of a sort of “bad faith” ethos is the cat, here. And as tends to happen with that sort of degradation of values, other organizations pick up the technique since the bar is lowered. That’s my 2 cents anyway.
> technological implementation of a sort of "bad faith" ethos
Indeed, that's what the parent commenter said.
What I do is look at all those historical "slippery slopes of bad
faith" that didn't survive, and ask "Why not?". What changed in
society and stopped that?
Child labour was set to explode in the industrial revolution. Kids as
young as 7 or 8 worked in factories. At the time it would have been
reasonable to extrapolate that in a few decades all children would need
to be employed in mills and mines. And we can talk about slavery, and
disenfranchisement of women, and many more things in the same way.
To take a counter-example, the proliferation of cars on the roads is
something we have not been able to stem through reason alone. I think
this sets up a sense of "technological exceptionalism" in which
theories of determinism currently dominate. In my opinion this is a
very immature (Level 1 civilisation) view of things.
But when we look at all the malevolent trajectories that were
corrected, it always begins when we name it. Naming a problem
(acknowledging it as undesirable) sets in motion the progress towards
overcoming it.
I think we are living through precisely that age with digital
technology. We are in a process of naming, qualifying and
understanding new harms. We are starting to apply the same progressive
models we have for race, gender and public health, to technology. The
course is set. It might seem time is not be on our side, but the
industrialists of today are no more powerful than those of yesterday
against the tides of society.
You are looking at the last 200 to 300 years and extrapolating. I think however that if you expand the horizon to several thousand years what you see is a very different cycle. A cycle where progress is made over a few hundred years and then is all lost. Every time progress is made everyone thinks, this time is different and then they are wrong.
There are substantive differences to this time around. We had a technological explosion for one which meant in terms of technology we jumped much farther forward than we had before. However the same cultural and civil failings are still there and still proceeding in much the same cycle.
I don't think Social Media is evil per-se. I do think that it is an extremely effective Mob amplifier. We used to have mobs form at a local level and their effects rarely managed to expand to a national level. Now we get global mobs via social media. Mob's have been around forever in human society.
They are rarely rational. Even when they are motivated by real problems they often tear down or destroy as much or more of the good as they do the bad. They tend to be indiscriminate and I don't think we are really prepared for the types of Mobs that Social Media enables. Maybe we'll be able to name this for what it is and find a counter to it. But I haven't seen any effective attempts to name the phenomena for what is. Instead I just see yet another Mob forming with a complaint about how companies are getting away with exploiting people. In this case I think it's less exploitation and more just amplification, intended or otherwise.
How do you limit the amplification without limiting free speech?
> Or are you supposing that because we have allowed some companies to damage society through abuses of technology, that the situation can never be remedied. No laws can ever be brought to bear?
I can't speak for the rest of the world, but in the United States? Absolutely yes.
It’s not that profound. Humans have become addicted to sharing every moment of their lives through social media, and then watching what other people have shared. Most people no longer have time to themselves since they feel like if they don’t share what they are doing they aren’t doing anything. And if they aren’t doing anything they have to keep up with others (FOMO). Meta will only disappear when someone else creates an even more engaging and therefore malignant platform.
> People have become addicted to sharing every moment of their lives
through social media
So, pretty much "option 3". A social shift.
> Meta will only disappear when someone else creates an even more
engaging and therefore malignant platform.
I agree that there has been a profound change in "western" culture,
and about a third of all the world are in this space (a staggering
three billion people!). But I disagree that is an irreversible state
of affairs and therefore a downward spiral towards worse and worse
technology.
Let's not suppose the worst of people. Can they not change. Do all
sick people and addicts remain sick and addicted forever? Or do they
recover?
I wrote a chapter in Digital Vegan that presses a striking metaphor.
The chapter is "Hatland" [1]
It's based on a funny discussion I have with students in lectures
about a photo from the 1940s. Every single person in a crowd of
hundreds of people is wearing a hat! Trilbys, bowlers, caps... men the
women too. In the 40's you just didn't go out without a hat in polite
society. (It's also parodied in Python's "The Meaning of Life")
What people didn't realise is how parochial and fleeting that moment
was. At the time people would have said "The hat is out of the bag!"
A photo from 20 years later has nobody waring hats, but everyone with
long hair and tie-dyes.
By your reasoning we would all be wearing 10ft high top-hats by now,
because "someone else will create an even more engaging and therefore
malignant head wear" :)
It's only when you look at culture as a historian/anthropologist that
you break out of parochialism see the bigger truths.
I don't know that fashion or cultural norms (e.g. hat wearing) are of the same fleetingness as deeper human behaviors like FOMO, narcissism, vanity, etc. These seem so deeply ingrained and transcending hundreds of years that I think it does likely point us in a certain direction.
One might label it a flaw in human evolution (even though it might have had positive selection pressure), something that can be "cured". Perhaps.
> Do all sick people and addicts remain sick and addicted forever? Or do they recover?
I don't know that any significant number of addicts, let alone many or most, ever "recover". But I also don't know that they don't. My money is on the former until we deeply understand addiction and can cure it.
I really appreciate your optimistic perspective — thank you for posting it. I think it's very easy to be cynical and just assume that things will get worse than they are now, and when you do that, you get to be a wise, world-weary and jaded commentator.
It's actually a lot more work to imagine a better society, because that requires actual ideas for what could be different and how we might get there. Saying, "things will be the same but worse" is a lot easier than saying, "things could be different and better, and here's how". (Full disclosure: I'm stealing this idea from Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit, which I'm currently reading and thoroughly enjoying.)
Notwithstanding its potential to become (or current reality as) a propaganda tool of the Chinese government, based on my very limited experience with it, TikTok actually feels both healthier and stupider (in a vapid entertainment sense) than Facebook and Twitter. I have yet to be outraged by anything I've encountered on TikTok, whereas if I so much as glance at a tweet on Twitter on its web interface, while not logged in, I'm almost guaranteed to be presented with other tweets from people who infuriate or disgust me. Discord also feels healthier than either of those platforms, it's really just a much better version of IRC. As such, perhaps we are already seeing a more healthy ecosystem emerge.
But setting aside the platform side of things, this discussion [1] on the Ezra Klein show calls the current disruptive era "transitory" in the same way that the dawn of other communication media were disruptive and transitory. Eventually, people adjust. Perhaps we are on our way to becoming immune to attention hijacking, outrage politics and FOMO. Speaking for myself, I've certainly become far better at resisting the pull of those phenomena.
> Meta will only disappear when someone else creates an even more engaging and therefore malignant platform.
I don't think this is necessarily true. Maybe this will end a different way.
For n=me, I've used facebook when I was younger but stopped using it (and all other social networks for their stated purpose - sharing and connecting) when the algos replaced the chronological order and tried to shove odorless excrement in my eyes non-stop. I'm not looking for a new one.
What I do now? I have a couple of private Signal groups where I and my friends shoot the shit. That's where I get most social value out of the Internet. I use Twitter for news. I use Reddit a bit for trash-browsing. That's it.
Now, this might be a function of me getting older and grumpier and preferring meeting people I already know, sure. I wouldn't however assume that this all will end in a more and more terrible "social" networks. Then again, I might be totally off base because I see that TikTok is eating facebook's lunch and it's not any better for humanity I think.
Well, the only active users I see anymore are engaged in advertising even if not necessarily for profit. (Self) Promotion always was one of the draws of fb.
Really? I have not used FB in like 5 years. One of the things it had for it compared to Instagram and Twitter is how it was not celeb or micro-celeb oriented.
In my experience, the people doing self-promotion on FB are generally not trying to be famous, they are trying to drum up customers for their own or their friend's business.
So no one is really trying to get you to "follow" them, they just hang around neighborhood groups to see if they can find someone who needs a caterer or a contractor.
Speak for yourself, i know loads of people who use it to keep in touch with family and friends and posting updates every once in a while.
There’s a lot of stuff wrong with FB but it’s fundamentally a useful thing where there’s no great alternative (being vaguely aware of what not-so-close acquaintances are doing)
> a useful thing where there’s no great alternative (being vaguely aware of what not-so-close acquaintances are doing)
It has also basically eaten Craigslist where I live (Baltimore)
My wife and I were not Facebook users five years ago, but our neighborhood organizations are on Facebook, and so are the best places to find secondhand stuff. So we're Facebook users.
> Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers
Anyone who's tried to use their advertiser tools is unlikely to agree with this. Hard to remember any software I've used with a worse user interface in recent memory.
Google ads is pretty bad too but facebook's business portal / ad manager / whatever they call it this week almost seems to be designed to be a nightmare to use on purpose. I sincerely hope a player comes along to disrupt this market with a product that is actually nice to use and offers decent customer support - these shouldn't be unrealistic wishes!
Actually I think this could be the reason. Given the sufficient number of A/B testing, it may turn out the more complex the interface is, the more likely the customer is likely to (make the mistake of) spending more.
There's no way to disrupt that market without first owning the audience. Facebook and Google can afford to build awful ad management software, because that's the only way advertisers can reach their audiences.
Perhaps it's the classical case of enterprise software - the people who make the call to spend on Facebook ads mostly don't have to work with the advertiser UI themselves - they have underlings for that.
I need to explain the user interface of Facebook to one of my clients but it would be a lot easier if the interface didn’t change every week and it didn’t had 4 points of contact for settings all in different places. I guess design by committee is at work here.
My guess is that (just like other big players) they have a team for each part/page/section of their platform. There is no cohesive product vision and no product principles (promises) to the users.
Experimented with it recently to see if we could advertise to people with an interest in our audio plugins. Ended up with a bunch of likes from mostly single mothers in Mexico who didn't seem at all interested in spectral audio processing :'(
> Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers.
> You and I aren't Facebook's users
A user is someone who uses a product, by any reasonable definition.
Advertisers are certainly (commercial) customers, but the average person IS a user of Facebook.
> we are the ore Facebook has been mining
This I do agree with, my own metaphor has been harvesting rather than mining (like in the Matrix or in Jupiter Ascending). But being something mined/harvested does not preclude also being a user.
"Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers."
The elephant in the room is advertising tracking. Nothing to facebook matters. If I as an advertiser can't see what I am paying for, I am leaving. Advertisers DO NOT want to pay for impressions - they want to pay for conversions (clicks/installs/etc). Without a way to see if a particular ad spend converted - all ad spend ends. Facebook could now be doomed. Apple has changed its policies [1] to help its users to remove advertiser tracking. Mobile has taken over almost all impressions.
"They're throwing whatever they can think of at the wall to see if anything sticks." They are beyond fucked here. Whatever they create, apple is blocking tracking. So new products/features do NOT matter. They need a way to figure out tracking - I don't have a solution (besides leaving and just using apple store iads).
well, aren't older eyeballs more valuable anyway? Like more disposable income, maybe more free time for those retired? The mine might be empty some day in the future, but it doesn't seem to be the case right now
I'm no advertising expert but IIRC marketers tend to like the younger demographic because even though older folks have more money they also are wise enough not to spend it on stupid shit they don't need.
Unless you're selling a new kind of golf putter or a very expensive prescription medicine for high blood pressure. Then you want the oldsters.
As someone the wrong side of 50, I can actually tell you that practically none of my friends in my age group use FB any more either. For my non-techie friends, we're all in whatsapp groups.
The only thing that keeps me on facebook are sports clubs that I'm a member of, organise a lot of activities via facebook.
Yep, 47 here, and no one except a couple of right-wing, anti-immigration activist "friends" seem to actively use Facebook anymore, out of hundreds. In fact, that's the main reason why I and many of my friends don't use it — it's around 90 % conspiracy theory, and hatred towards government and minorities now, and it's super tiresome. Everyone else is long gone.
In my opinion it's not the UI that is the problem; it's the decision they made to allow all nutcases with their nutjob theories to run rampant, in order to make a quick buck out of peoples' outrage.
The signal-to-noise ratio gets lower and lower with every "overhaul" of FB. Without even looking (and I can't be bothered either), it feels like 1 friend post to 10 or more group or ad posts.
They don't even care about their advertisers, they knowingly perpetrate click fraud (and lying about video metrics). They don't care. Because Zuck doesn't care, he has contempt for everybody, advertisers and users alike
Instagram’s incessant design tweaking, it’s algorithm adjustments which now give preferential treatment to “reels” to an absurd degree and the expansion of advertising on the feed (I’ve seen people write as much as 5x more) all positively reeks of desperate product managers. Instagram is going the same way as facebook it just has a bit further to go
This is endemic to Metas culture though, they’re a metrics driven company so metrics drive their design decisions.
No one important at Instagram is fighting for the vision of what IG is. They’re just fighting to try and claw eyeballs away from emerging platforms and their success is being judged on how many people they get to push on these new formats. They don’t care if it’s at the detriment to what made their product great to begin with, because all they’re looking at is “how many reels are they watching. How many stories are they posting”.
Thing is with this strategy because there is no overall vision and no one standing up and saying “we shouldn’t add this” you get the equivalent of a burger restaurant serving sushi and tacos too but their burgers just suck now.
Crazy seeing it happen as the competing experiences encroach on screen space. IG now has Snapchat at the top and TikTok “ad breaks” in the feed. Twitter now has Clubhouse at the top. Etc.
Algorithmic feeds are the harbinger of doom for social media. They all get immediately and progressively worse when it's implemented (and it always will be because that's the business model).
Instagram isn’t dead, but it does appear to be doomed. At the moment all it does it buy them a bit of time to find a way out, which they almost certainly won’t (as they’ve had a longer period to do so already).
WhatsApp isn't dead, but it isn't really monetisable. We'll see how Telegram Premium goes - personally i have it, but i doubt many people are willing to pay for a chat app with tons of free alternatives.
I'm genuinely curious, what are the reasons you wouldn't pay for Telegram? Is that only a matter of preference, or does Telegram have some critical issues?
But if Facebook turned around and would say "hey if you all start paying us we can drop the whole evil thing" then yeah they'll get my middle finger. They just have lost my trust.
Have you ever used Line? It’s the most privacy-invasive app I’ve used after FB. Constantly asks for access to location, contact book, photos etc. Line is mostly popular in Thailand, outside its very much Telegram and WA.
> Constantly asks for access to location, contact book, photos etc.
a) Isn't that reasonable for a chat app? I mean, contact book, photos, location are all things that are likely part of the fabric of your chats with others?
b) It might ask for permission, but does it stop working if you deny permission? (I genuinely don't know since I'm not a user). If it doesn't prevent you from chatting, I don't think this is a strong argument.
Instagram is moribund. People's accounts are being stolen left and right, users' feeds are full of unasked-for shit, and "stories" are an absolute mess.
Facebook and its properties are dead. Good riddance.
and Sun, Netscape, etc. Just because some of these predictions didn't happen doesn't mean a lot of them did.
Sun Microsystems appeared solid.
Apple _did_ almost die.
IBM is only a shadow of their former self (IMO, the original IBM _did_ die).
FB and Google are still young in comparison.
I have no stake in either, but IMO Google is more likely to survive than FB. FWIW, both have high quality staff that will bail if the growth stalls.
The old IBM really just sold itself off in little pieces.
What's left is a few pieces that have no idea what they want to be but they just keep doing what they do because the brand name assures them customers.
True, but despite MySpace once being dominant, it’s peak scale was a tiny fraction of where Facebook is now.
MySpace was popular for some specific English speaking age groups mainly. Facebook is basically everywhere but China.
My parents who still refer to Google Maps as Mapquest are even on Facebook. It will take a pretty big screwup to flush out those types of users (not early adopters).
Your parents are the only ones left on Facebook. As long as that demographic can sustain it, so be it. But nobody under 70 is going to be on there much longer.
Actually, red-state cousin-humpers might still be on there a while longer. They have no place else to go, after Trump's predictably shambolic attempt at creating a competitor.
FB is still a thing among the late-30s - early 40s and older than that in some countries in Europe (I'm from Romania myself, in my early 40s), but younger than that there's almost no-one active on FB.
Anyway, good riddance, it pained me to see how most of the national politics was being carried out at a certain moment in time (~2014 - ~2019) almost exclusively on FB, a private network. That wasn't right.
People who use the phrase “red-state cousin-humpers” are generally pretty stupid, but I’ll go ahead and try to explain it.
The context of this discussion was large populations that might sustain a social network. Implying that people who engage in incest in states that have a majority of Republican voters in recent elections would be a large enough population to sustain a social network is obviously laughable in the literal sense (incest rates are minuscule). So that leaves the implication that a much larger population of “cousin-humpers” does exist and the association with “red-state” implies that cousin humping correlates with political views.
In case you're too lazy to click, here are the top 20:
Kentucky, Maine, Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, Washington, Georgia, Oregon, Indiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, West Virginia, Montana, Alabama, and South Dakota.
You’re still too confused to understand why that doesn’t imply anything about red states as a general statement and wouldn’t be relevant for keeping a social network alive (what this thread is about).
Here is an exercise for you. New Mexico is not a red state. What generalization do think was being made about “red-state cousin-humpers” that wouldn’t apply to the New Mexico cousin-humpers?
Sounds awful, but it could be worse. At least the Facebook-managed McDonald's is trying to chase after what most people seem to want. A Google-managed McDonald's would just shut down, even though everyone loves McDonald's, because somebody at Google figured starting a new fast food chain is the best path to a promotion.
Google would open up 5 competing, different burger places next to each other and then close them all down a year later, confused that none of them did well enough. All to open a new Taco stand on the other side of town and claim it's got the same great food you liked before (it doesn't).
Apple would sell exactly one kind of burger, which is great but costs $20. The wrapper is rose gold or space grey. Only Apple-certified condiments can be applied to the burgers, and a packet of ketchup is $5. Each year the faithful queue outside for the privilege of obtaining the latest burger.
The burger is nearly always great, but occasionally it tastes strange. You are not allowed to see the ingredients and the staff suggest you might be able to improve the situation by re-wrapping and re-unwrapping the burger. This does nothing. The senior staff suggest leaving the burger in the fridge overnight and trying again in the morning. This does nothing. None of the staff actually know how to make a burger, but they will swap your strange burger for a refurbished burger for only $18.
Microsoft would license their burger recipe. All the licensees would sell unique, subpar versions. They'd also for some reason have a $10 billion contract to supply burgers to the military.
and drinks would come in cans that require a special adapter but the adapters are so expensive you need to carry one around with you so you can drink when you’re thirsty.
and more and more people would simply accept that great burgers cost $20 and come from Apple if you want a decent one. While there are some other burgers that sound great at a lower price point, they occasionally give you e-coli. Mediocre burgers at a low price are still widely available.
All mediocre burgers are also sponsored by local companies who pay to have their logo on the wraps and their commercials on the wall in the restaurant.
Some new people try to make fresh burgers and get funding, only to be bought up by Mediocre Ads Burger and killed a year later.
Unfortunately people found out that they payed $20 for the sense of a great burgers, but found out that they were mediocre at best which began a new trend of making your own burgers - either from ready made components from all kinds of price/quality or even make them more or less from scratch. Though, some people insisted on keep buying overpriced burgers as they believed the ads made in the format as objective benchmarks or reviews.
They'd also switch how one orders food every 18 months, and have them migrate to the new way of ordering food. Food ordering in gmail, food ordering as an app, food ordering using a kiosk, then back to an app, then merge it into the wallet app because why not.
They'd start giving out a free family meal, which is a medium combo version of their corporate banquet pack, and they'll promise it's free forever.
Then after 15 years, they'll, give you three months to upgrade, then five months, then after three months of pushback, they'll begrudgingly let you keep having the free family meal, so long as you promise you're not using it to cater for a business event.
The five wouldn't compete, one would sell buns, another patties and lettuce, one would have a door so confusing that nobody knows what it actually sold inside, another would sell burgers but advertise itself as something completely unrelated, and the final one would be an acquisition that immediately shut down for a complete rebuild while its staff are fired or reassigned to the other stores.
"Hey, As some of you know, we've been working hard on a complete redesign of BurGer, and we are happy to announce that it's ready! The new GerBug is square, with cheese and bun swapped places. All is this to give our customers a new great experience. Truly yours, the GerBur team."
AWS would provide one large kitchen in backstage for all of these people to cook. You’d be like “Well I could just buy the appliances” but regulations mandate a certain way of cooking with autocleanup of desks, that can only happen in the AWS kitchen, unless you want to hire dozens of workers to do menial tasks.
I don't think it's what people want, per se. I think it's what some metrics say people want. Might be good for "engagement", but bad for retention in the long term. People were on facebook for the features facebook had.
And they were on Facebook instead of MySpace because Facebook worked better for sharing news snippets. Then facebook changes to the "most interacted-with posts", then politics took a dump on everypne's sharing from about 2015 onward, then facebook changed to a bunch of spammy videos from "content creators", and most of everyone gave up and left.
I lost track of the number of people saying (myself included) "Give me all my friends posts, in chronological order", and facebook just ignored us and slowly removed the ability to do anything close to that.
Ironic how Google tried Google+ and failed because Facebook had all the users and content. If Google had just shelved theirs as-is for 10 years and pulled it back out now, people would flock to it because it would actually be a feed of your friends/family posts in chronological order, with user-customized filtering, again.
Anecdotally I quit Facebook in 2016 but of my friends and family that still use it, I would say most simply use it for marketplace. They may still view the updates that people still post to see what's going on but it doesn't seem to be near as about keeping in touch (I'm in the US).
For those of us in families that are spread over the globe in a dozen time zones and separated in different countries, what other methods of connection even come close to social media? Facebook (and the rest) have provided a way for us to vicariously experience glimpses into each other's lives and in many cases reconnect with people who we never would have otherwise.
I have siblings, cousins and other relatives and friends spread around the globe.
We keep in touch over Signal, WhatsApp, FaceTime, Jitsi, Messages... It's a little more work. We don't speak as often as we used to see each other's posts on Facebook but when we do get in touch it's a lot more personal and meaningful. It's not rare either. I speak to some pretty much daily, others weekly to monthly, and others perhaps more spread apart but it's always great when we do get in touch.
No vicarious experiences, no voyeurism into one another's lifes. Only pure and intentional human connection with all the imperfections that come with it. I recommend it.
I am way past that point. I used to use Slack personally but I like Slack about as much as FB, so I now primarily have reverted to my own personal blog, where I make posts with video etc and take comments, and post those posts on FB, Twitter and other social media. It's like I have gone back to what works. My closest family and friends have a login to that blog where we share posts that are private. All our YouTube videos are unlisted and embedded on the blog with settings to prevent "Watch on YouTube" etc. I have my own nix servers and maintain shared family audio/photo/video/media content. We extensively use Signal, Facetime and Skype. When you have a large extended group that wants to stay interconnected globally there is only so much you can do - different participants have their own preferences and if you want to stay connected with them you have to use their poison of choice. It is unrealistic to alienate users who only know one or two platforms and lack the technical expertise, time and yes money to invest in yet again something new.
Also, I never did understand the benefit you get from deleting your FB/Instagram account - Meta still owns your content. It never gets deleted. Isn't it better to maintain your account but lock it down to your own standards? (e.g. link external content, share content to focused groups of users, etc). You can use Messenger (which is all some people actually use). What do you gain by deleting the account? Just losing control.
EDIT: One thing I think is great with FB is the ability to export all your content. I do that at least annually and have a MySQL database into which I import it all (which gives me the coveted ability to search for a specific post either by date back in 2008 for instance, by text etc). Why would I want to lose all that?
I urge you to read Facebook's "Terms of Service" [0]. 'Facebook's terms allow them "a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook." In layman's terms' [1]
Obviously the internal procedures Meta follows regarding content is unknown. It is probably different for different countries - you mention GDPR, well very little of my content is shared in Europe, so I'm sure the rules that apply to me are completely different from rules that apply for Europeans. It is probably different for different time periods in Facebook history, and it is definitely different for different levels of universality of sharing. That is if you post something "Publicly" then it gets shared by another user, then the original post account is deleted, in all my testing the content that was shared by the other user persists. Facebook has argued that it is "public" content [2]. I personally have seen corporate posts get LIKED and commented by users who delete their accounts, but their content endures on the corporate page.
I do not envy Meta. Knowledge of the legal environment in every country for a global operation makes programming in assembly seem trivial by comparison. I had a friend who was a federal (securities) agent who told me back in the 1980's that the legal environment in the US is deliberately complicated/obfuscated to the point where if you are in compliance with one law, you are automatically in violation of another. It is up to you to pay for representation to contest constitutionality on appeal to a high enough level for acquittal.
If you are unsure about what Facebook does and it matters to you, then test it - you will find FB still has a few human users, some of whom may be interested in running tests with you. Posting content of different types, different sharing, deleting different users etc ... test it! Just delete your account. Then later try and recover the account. It is all still there.
For me, I just assume when FB says 'it may retain copies of "some material" from deleted accounts' [2], I just assume there is no privacy and that I own nothing.
> Knowledge of the legal environment in every country for a global operation makes programming in assembly seem trivial by comparison.
That may be so but they still need to comply.
I've just signed up with the same email address I had on my old account. I can't say for certain whether my data has been permanently deleted but I can't find any of it.
I'll try to get in touch with others who have had access to my old posts and comments and see if they are still there.
Edit to add:
The deletion option on Facebook states:
Delete account
This is permanent.
When you delete your Facebook account, you won't be able to retrieve the content or information that you've shared on Facebook. Your Messenger and all of your messages will also be deleted.
I wish you every good thing. I'm going down something of a rabbit hole on this and was so surprised at the Wikipedia discussion on US privacy:
'Some conservative justices do not consider privacy to be a legal right, as when discussing the 2003 case, Lawrence v. Texas (539 U.S. 558), Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia did not consider privacy to be a right, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued that there is "no general right to privacy" in the U.S. Constitution in 2007. Many Republican interest groups and activists desire for appointed justices to be like Justice Thomas and Scalia since they uphold originalism, which indirectly helps strengthen the argument against the legal protection of privacy.' [0]
My extended family shares a paid Slack instance and it works great. Some of them are on Facebook as well, mostly for marketplace and groups; I don't use FB (I am not really interested in seeing glimpses of distant relatives' lives). I think there is a real future for services targeting the middle ground between the very public nature of Facebook and the very private nature of an email.
I can understand this for sure! In my experience Facebook degraded and a lot of people that just posted pictures with small updates moved to Instagram. Again, anecdotally, I have a pocket of friends in Prague and they mostly used Instagram. But now Instagram is moving the same way with a clutter of suggested posts or 'reels' - or whatever their version is.
My chosen family (most of the people of my bio family I kept in touch with have passed on) are very much like that, but I keep in touch with them via a mixture of IRC, gchat and twitter DMs (fascinatingly the one member of my bio family I enjoy talking to who's still here uses twitter DMs to talk to me.)
The people who're local to me I catch up with in person, and regularly get "oh, yeah, you're not on facebook, I can actually tell you about this" with a huge grin and it's a big happy for me every time.
I've found that for whatever reason people's twitter feeds are "stuff I've found interesting" and I catch up with them separately from that, which I've found fine.
(note: this is an observation of what works for me, please don't consider this as in any was a criticism of your use of facebook if it's working for you, keeping in touch with people is awesome and "whatever works for that is good" applies)
Why not "closed world" apps like Whatsapp or Discord ? I personally loath them (specifically Discord) but they seem optimized for the kind of use case you want. Facebook and friends are a huge and dysfunctional towns square, but you don't need a towns square to talk to your family, you need a private shed.
One of the things I do enjoy is Google Meet videos with my grandchildren that allow for the video to be saved. I can then save that video in my own (private) blog on my own private server. I have found that recording Facetime QT video on macOS/iOS is too problematic.
Yep. One of the reasons that old-style classified ads in newspapers worked is that you had to pay to post an ad. Did people run scams in newspaper classifieds? Yes, but by and large the ads were legit. Today, legitimate online marketplace ads are drowned by the scam ads.
Some of the private groups are still pretty good, it's what the web should have been, could have been, if a better commenting system had been in place and if we had had a better aggregator.
I think it's nice. It provides some additional accountability that Craigslist doesn't provide.
I don't know what you mean by "walled-of version of the web". At least, I don't know what kind of warning you are talking about, with respect to Facebook Marketplace.
I think they mean Facebook is the new AOL where it has it's own content (Marketplace) that non-users can't access. While Craigslist is available to anyone on the web.
Engagement is a pretty shitty metric when used in isolation though. I've worked at places where changes that increased engagement were considered successful at higher levels even though the support team knew the increased engagement was caused by increased confusion and friction in using the product.
Well not quite. Shutting it down takes effort. First you have to let it sit and rot away until it becomes a meme. Then you can squeeze another round of promotions out of the deprecation work.
> They could have added more cooks, and another cashier, keeping the responsiveness and speed of old, keeping their food fast for walkins.
McDonald's hasn't been fast food for a long, long time -- and this has nothing to do with Doordash/delivery.
In the 80's and 90's at least, all food was made ahead of time. There were rows of burgers sitting under heat lamps, and once you paid the cashier, they would grab your entire order in under 30 seconds and hand it to you. It was fast food.
But as competitors started making better-tasting food freshly prepared (e.g. Wendy's made all hamburgers to-order), McD's had to catch up. So the burgers under heat lamps are long gone, and you have to wait 5-15 minutes for your food to be made. You get a number on your receipt and walk over to a pickup area now.
Also the 7 minutes to have your order taken has nothing to do with DoorDash/delivery -- it's the fact that McD's raised their minimum wage a few years ago, so they can only afford 1 cashier instead of 4-5, and they want you to use a kiosk/app to order using a touchscreen.
McDonald's didn't bork anything. Their hot, fresh quarter pounders are now almost infinitely tastier than the old shriveled ones in dried-up buns baking under a lamp for 30 minutes prior that we ate in the 80's and 90's. But that comes at the cost of waiting for them to make them fresh.
With how much McDonalds has raised their prices in the last 2 years, I don’t understand how they can even be competitive on DoorDash. When I can get actual food for less money and the same exact effort, why eat McDonalds?
Until very recently I used to be able to get a full meal for ~$4, but now it’s hard to get out for under $12. The only reason to ever eat McDonalds at this point is the “it’s there” factor when I have left the house.
Huh, they're still ridiculously cheap here in .uk still ... though perhaps only if you pick the least profitable things off their menu.
Triple cheeseburgers reheated in the microwave with a brick of extra mature cheddar added between two of the patties first remain one of the most cost effective "my depression is trying to eat me but I really should still actually have food" meals I've figured out though. (the trick is to microwave it just enough to soften the cheddar then cut it in half, stupidbrain finds a whole burger upsetting but half a burger twice acceptable, yes I know how little sense that makes logically but the entire point here is "working around my brain being irrational.")
I'm in Germany, and I've always liked McDonalds. I enjoyed eating there maybe a handful of times a year, even when doing so was considered "uncouth" by the majority of the people I know.
No more. Why? Because they've stopped selling burgers.
They've switched almost all of their restaurants to a "made to order" model, wherein they assemble your order on demand from warming trays, instead of producing them ahead and storing them in this huge heated cabinet.
Now the result looks exactly like the product shot on the menu, but is so lukewarm that the cheese hasn't even melted. That's not a burger, that's a at best a strange sandwich.
The margins are better on "premium, made-to-order" food so they do this to justify their increased prices. Unfortunately this is working well for them, and at scale, people don't seem to care about the extra wait: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MCD/mcdonalds/gros....
Another way to look at this is that McDonald's is making customers feel like they're getting restaurant quality food for less money. Personally, like you, I miss the cheap fast food.
The patty/bacon should definitely not be cold and that's not my experience with McDonalds. However it is less warm than "scolding hot from sitting under a warmer for 45 minutes."
McDonalds was an assembly line for burgers. As far back as the 80s, and as late as last year, in Canada, during busy times, they'd definielty have burgers under the warmer. During slow times, none.
They can cook and assemble a burger in 2 minutes, along with fries... even a dozen burgers.
This was McDonald's specialty! How to keep ahead of the crowd, in sync with demand, and also, how to build a burger fast.
The fact that they don't have 50 big macs on the go, during doordash/dinner peak, is a major problem.
No, it's not difficult, not for them, they've been doing it for 70 years!
There may be some merit to some of what you say, but it just leaves one with more questions.
> Made for you MFY has been around at Macca's for a long, long time. It's not a recent change.
Don't know where you're from, but you gotta remember that Macca's is not quite the same all around the world. In Europe as an example, you can notice clear differences between the different countries Macca's. So even though MFY exists for a long time where you live, it's very well possible that the other persons local Macca's only recently-ish changed too.
I guess that change is not only noticeable between countries, I'm pretty sure you'll get a different experience if you either visit a big restaurant in a city vs. a smaller restaurant on the countryside.
Originally New Zealand (so makes sense as we're used as a test market for a lot of stuff) but UK now. I'm surprised, even with us as a test market, that it took _so_ long to propagate to other countries, though. Sure Macca's has diffs, but usually only in menu, their general restaurant practice usually seem to be pretty in-sync.
That's the thing, yeah. In Germany, this changeover started just a few years ago, and it has only been dominant for around two.
About the regional differences - I remember visiting an Amsterdam restaurant in the mid-2000s that still served the food in styrofoam trays, many years after those had been phased out in Germany. And being able to pump my own ketchup and mayo into little waffle cups in another one in Denmark. There are quite a few regional differences.
> In Germany, this changeover started just a few years ago
In Switzerland as well, yes. And I can't remember which burgers or items it were, but I remember seeing items in a german McDonalds which I've never seen in Switzerland.
In Italy you can order a couple of different beers, even from self-service terminals. In Switzerland I remember them only being available when ordering at the counter, and they only offer one kind of beer. Not that I care about beer at McD, just something I noticed.
I noticed the last time I went to a McDonalds a huge sign on the door advertising that they're on DoorDash, Uber Eats, etc., basically saying "don't come here!"
Really short term thinking if that's true. DoorDash/UberEats might not be around forever. Its also not clear whether people will order the same amounts if an actual recession rolls around.
By prioritizing DoorDash over in-store customers, you're just destroying your long-term value prop and brand.
Plus there's one small detail: you can still enjoy e.g. a pizza that's not hot anymore; other food (Indian, Chinese, ...) can mostly be kept hot without losing its quality. With burgers and fries (especially McDonalds), you have to eat them hot, and trying to keep them warm during delivery results in a soggy mess that's not enjoyable at all anymore IMHO.
There is something about McDonald's fries that gives them the sharpest drop off in quality over time compared to literally any other fast food restaurant. I swear, it's like they are 100% within a couple minutes of being pulled out of the oil, merely okay for the next three, and then literally inedible by six minutes.
Or at least they are supposed to… I would probably be eating a lot more McDonald's if I could be assured of getting fries that weren't dead every time.
I used to think this with burgers until I found the secret to reheating a fast food burger:
1: set the veggies aside
2: put the whole burger in the microwave upside-down for half the time it takes to reheat (usually 30 seconds for this step if cold from the fridge)
3: flip it and nuke it the rest of the time
4: restore veggies to rightful place
I was amazed the first time I did this and had a 100% sog-free bun. The burger was indistinguishable from fresh. I don't know exactly what's going on, or what's different from just nuking it all the way on one side, but it works.
I'd say it's long-term thinking. McD's is a franchise, and paying commercial rents at the levels they're at now is not economically viable in a lot of cities, especially if your walk-in traffic is mostly delivery service workers.
They'd probably make more money if they moved spaces into a ghost kitchen and cut out walk-in traffic entirely.
Where I live, there is tons of empty retail space because of Amazon, eBay, etc. I would assume that would push commercial rents down, but I evidently don’t understand that market at all.
I'm thinking about fast food locations in cities, not suburban strip malls and stuff. We expect Starbucks for example to have nice locations in high-rent downtown areas, but I always see McD's not far away from there too.
A more important reason that McDonald's has become slow is that they've switched to just-in-time assembly of burgers. They used to have an inventory of burgers, and for most orders, you ordered and the person taking your payments immediately assembled your order. Now there is no buffer, and everything is made fresh.
They switched to MFY instead of pre-made stuff (in New Zealand at least) around 2002-2005 or so? It's been like that a long time.
The reason for the slowdown is purely just the delivery apps. Staff doing payments & cooking/assembly are usually different people unless it's like 3am on a weekday.
So far as I've seen here in .uk they still have an inventory and most orders happen that way. (given them being a franchise this may not generalise beyond the locations I visit, of course)
The issues is that until the delivery business model runs into a brick wall (which IMO is inevitable), we'll see this continue. It's hard to blame them because being slow to disruption can be fatal to a business. It's just hard to tell at the beginning which disruptive ideas will end up taking over, and which ones end up as duds.
There is a local company (morecambeeats.co.uk) that was set up during the covid lockdowns to provide -just- centralised online ordering to local businesses that already had delivery drivers.
I first learned about them because I ordered a kebab on Just Eat and my order arrived with a flyer inside saying "please use them next time, they charge us less."
The site is honestly a bit janky and regularly annoys me slightly ... but only slightly, and I'm happy to deal with that to have all the revenue go to a local company and my favourite food places - and the cost is at worst identical to the venture capitalist subsidised companies and sometimes lower.
I have a possibly misplaced hope that they'll survive the collapse of the VC players. I intend to live in hope anyway though because (a) I much prefer my money to stay local (b) they're the easiest way I've found to order from the chinese place with the best prawn toast I've ever had.
If they disappear at some point I'm going to have to go back to phone calls and paying cash on delivery, and while I love the places I order from enough to do that if I have to I'd really rather not.
Curious why you think it is inevitable? The convenience of having the whole city available for delivery for consumers, and for restaurants to have access to a broad base of on-demand drivers and these customers, seems like an intractable modern day invention.
The issue isn't the delivery, we've always had local food delivery and it's a subsidised bundled service to sell the main product. The issue is whether they can run a tech company off the margins of delivery, where they take the risk setting the physical infrastructure to do delivery, but have little to no control over the actual restaurants providing the products.
Their business has gone up. If those customers were to show up in person you'd be in line behind them parking, in the drive-thru, in line with them fiddling for coins and change and ummmm-ing on what to order.
as someone who has managed the front lines recently at a fast food restaurant, companies like Doordash have been a boon for the in-house efficiency
I remember being in Bilbao, Spain wanting to eat fries and a cheesburger in a Burger King. They didn't have anything like that. All I could choose from where potato wedges and weird Spanish style burgers with way too much stuff on it. Is it too much to ask for fries and a regular old hamburger in a Burger King nowadays?
> the bottom line (to me) is that Facebook just doesn't respect its users or care about their needs.
Wouldn't a consequence of this be that Facebook would be losing users in drovers? And yet the data seem to disagree. This is a type of take that feels very "inside baseball" and fueled more by the feelings of its proponents than any kind of empiricism.
I think another perspective is that this is a case of businesses chasing (or being forced to chase) endless 'growth'.
Facebook is likely optimising to increase engagement and revenue.
But in my humble opinion the Facebook of the early 2000s was close to perfect in terms of use. Obviously leaving the product the same wasn't going to drive that revenue and make the careers of all the employees.
I wish Facebook remained as the platform I could jump on a couple of times a week to see what distant friends and my Grandma was up to. For a while they somehow managed to have just the right balance where it seemed like everyone on the planet would eventually sign up.
It felt like this was a huge step forward in how the world communicated.
Logging onto Facebook in 2022 is a cesspit of flashy videos and clickbait posts. What a disappointment.
I continue to think that the difference in taxation between capital gains and dividends was a market distorting error. "Not growing noticeably but being steadily profitable" is IMO both underrated and overtaxed.
Facebook is still that for me - I don't follow groups and my feed is 99% far flung friends posts about their lives - we've also moved past the "look, everything in my life is perfect!" phase and people are more honest.
I removed half of my friends and almost all of my information in a digital konmari exercise last year and Facebook is still like 1/3 ads, 1/3 videos I don't care about (and never asked for), and 1/3 actual posts or comments made by my "friends". It's an adridden wasteland.
Probably Snapchat, as it was the last of the social networks to focus on person-to-person communications and group chats. 2008 Facebook was more about "stalking" someone's profile and looking at who was commenting on their "wall".
The place where everyone communicates like they're sending a job application and most of your inbox is just recruiter spam...? That place is like Facebook in '08?
Users who believe they can get something out of Facebook that speaks to their vanities or insecurities will ignore being disrespected or not cared about by the platform. Moreover, many of those users will accept the terms because their use of the platform is free. Some users might be consciously aware of the fact that the disrespect and lack of caring is mutual, and accept it that way.
"Facebook doesn't respect me or my needs, but I likewise don't respect Facebook or care about its needs. so it's kind of fair. It's free, and I think I'm getting more out of it than it's getting out of me. Plus almost everyone I know is on there, so ..."
> Wouldn't a consequence of this be that Facebook would be losing users in droves?
Do we know that they aren't? Certainly my Facebook usage has dramatically changed since 10 years ago, and I would say that's true of the majority of my network too. I still use Messenger and I still log in about once a week or so, so I imagine I still count towards Monthly Average Users, but still: there was a time in my life 10-15 years ago where my entire social life was mediated through Facebook specifically, and now if it disappeared tomorrow, I'd barely notice other than Messenger. All my social media "attention" is on Instagram and Twitter now.
It depends how you measure it, right? I now only use Facebook for events and that is because there is nothing else that competes. Everything else in the Facebook app is awful, and even events is increasingly user-hostile. I recently deleted instagram (an app I actually used to really like!). But I still count as a daily active user in their reporting.
I wonder what their internal engagement metrics look like. I bet Facebook’s feed engagement (which is their primary ad display) on the Facebook app is way down, because the feed sucks. Instagram risks doing the same with this frenzied push for engagement.
> I now only use Facebook for events and that is because there is nothing else that competes.
This is a big reason I still use Facebook, and am extremely unhappy that they keep removing features :(. I used to be able to browse events easily for random dates in random locations on my phone, a feature that now only seems to exist on desktop... but, even then, it doesn't seem to support not having a search term :/. When you combine that with fewer and fewer events being on it due to fewer and fewer people being in the target market of using it it is in a death spiral.
They just posted their first net user loss - so maybe not "in droves" but their username is certainly declining and will continue to do so without drastic change
Where are you getting this information? AFAIK, 2Q22 earnings (and metrics) are released tomorrow. The whispers I've heard are that any loss of M/DAU is contained to Europe and is caused by Russia going offline.
> Social media giant Facebook has seen its daily active users (DAUs) drop for the first time in its 18-year history.
> Facebook's owner Meta Platforms says DAUs fell to 1.929bn in the three months to the end of December [2021], compared to 1.930bn in the previous quarter.
Ah yes, the familiar "everything is Putin's fault" refrain.
He's a bad guy and invading Ukraine is horrible, all the usual caveats. But Putin under every rock and behind every bush being responsible for every toothache and hangnail is getting old.
The 80s covered the end of the cold war, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Iron curtain, so surely you're not including that decade.
The 90s covered the fall and breakup of one of two world powers, and had a gulf war and the breakup/war in Yugoslavia, so that's similarly rules out.
The 00s covered terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and London, changing air travel worldwide, starting wars and inspiring more terrorism (Madrid, Mumbay). Oh, and a financial meltdown compared to the Great Depression. So that's probably also not in your "last few decades".
That leaves the 2010s, which cover (amongst others) the start of the corona pandemic. I guess you're including that event in your "recent decades".
Plenty omitted from the above, such as famines and wars in Africa, news from Latin-America, "where's my vote" in Iran, the Arab Spring, Rohinga & Myanmar, ...; in short: we've been in a couple of tumultuous decades for a while now.
Even if so, the point here needs more information: are they going to a different platform which respects them and cares about their needs? Or just some different-but-same thing?
It’s not that easy. This is life and death for Facebook. TikTok is really taking over and is a force. It’s also a Chinese company and so they can’t buy it. They are forced to compete, either they do this or become fully irrelevant
Facebook is dying because they stopped being Facebook. If they gave what's left of their userbase what they actually wanted (chronological feed, seeing friends posts, not seeing spam, more ways to interact (bring back pets, gifts, superpokes etc)) they'd do ok.
It doesn't help that their core code is a steaming pile of bloated dung that doesn't seem to be tested by anyone.
> Facebook is dying because they stopped being Facebook
a) No evidence they are dying. All we have is a single quarter's result i.e. statistically meaningless.
b) No evidence that staying true to the original Facebook is the best strategy. Unquestionably, Stories has been a popular feature in both Instagram and Facebook ecosystems and perhaps certain features from TikTok will be the same.
But there is plenty of evidence that the opinions of HN, Reddit etc. often do not match that of the broader public and so should be taken with a grain of salt.
There's an army of users out there accustomed to and just simply want to see what their friends are up to and posting.
Are they as sexy as the bajillion TikTok users out there? No.
Are they enough to build a solid business aruond? Yes.
Would facebook ever consider stepping up to the plate that built their core business again? No, because Facebook management sucks.
I don't give a shit about algorithmic recommendations and of horse-shit force-fed happiness content don't anticipate ever changing that. Many of my friends are the same way.
> just simply want to see what their friends are up to and posting
People keep saying this is what people want. Show me the numbers that it's true.
Because when Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, Youtube etc. all move to this model and stick with it the evidence is clear that it's not want people want.
Did you ignore the OP's long tail mention on purpose? It may very well be not the majority wants, so we cannot be talking about wishes of any singular "people". And for this reason, this strategy may no be suitable for "growth".
But as a solid, sustainable profit source? Are you claiming that only a marginal number of people want this, or what?
> So clearly they know a little bit about what is a solid, sustainable profit source.
It is more than a "solid, sustainable" profit source, it is a best-in-class cash cow that feeds a growing monstrosity for shareholders that want more, more, more.
The business they left behind is still sustainable.
I'm fairly certain that drug dealers' numbers indicate that people "want" more addictive drugs.
Facebook and other social media isn't quite at that level, but the same logic applies to your argument: there are fundamentally different kinds of "wants", and the drug dealer/social media metrics invariably cater to the unhealthy kind.
The evidence may be clear, but it is also driven by tech that is increasingly effective at pressing our dopamine buttons. I'm not sure that the opinions of a drug-addled constituency are important for the far more simple question of, "is there a sustainable business here?"
I used to see posts from 50-100 friends/family each week. Now I see posts from about 5 of them. I barely use facebook because it crashes my iPad browser (I refuse to install the app) and because the feed is so packed full of autoplay videos I can't stand it. Facebook is "dying" for myself and my entire sphere of friends/family but of course that's just an anecdote.
Ive wondered about the drop in activity. Like is it less busy because people are using it less and it's boring or w/e or are the 20year olds who were posting party pictures everyday and having friend group drama just aren't doing much anymore and grinding through life without shareable stuff
The experience for each person is probably different. I never had that sort of stuff in the first place; mostly just pictures of people's concerts, vacations, dance events, car shows, family gettogethers, home improvement projects, new cars, lots of kid pictures, etc. None of these could compare to the level of "interaction" of the 2016 political cycle, though, so all the good stuff got buried under vitriol and arguments and un-friending and I feel like it never recovered.
> the 20year olds who were posting party pictures everyday and having friend group drama
You're describing Instagram. Facebook has been the "parents' generation water cooler" for several years now. They don't even post "original content" like party pics unless it's an obituary. It's all "shares" of news and political content.
That’s perhaps also the bit that Facebook investors/management ignores. You cannot have over a billion users and expect any significant growth. You also have to accept that any change you do might alianate a small percentage of your existing users.
You may very well be right. Facebook is adjusting their offering to keep a certain segment of users. That will eject another group, or at least reduce their engagement. That’s fine, if it ensures profitability for the next five years.
It’s just interesting to be part of a group of users that aren’t intersting to the social media platforms. Which in a way just confirms that the social media part of Metas business isn’t actually important to them, only the ad revenue that it might bring.
I think it's really difficult to tell if they are dying or not. I don't think MAU or DAU gives the full picture as it doesn't tell us what people are using it for, what sort of new accounts are coming online (are they real people, bots, businesses or what?), and how active people actually are. Are people logging in for easy auth or are they spending more or less time actively browsing the site.
You're right that HN is not the right place to judge this. I will say, as someone who works with high school kids, almost none of them have seemed to use it over the last 4-5 years.
> But there is plenty of evidence that the opinions of HN, Reddit etc. often do not match that of the broader public and so should be taken with a grain of salt.
There is a lot of biases and nonsense in here and in the news being spread around over the death of Facebook (Meta) or even the beginning of its death, which has been greatly exaggerated.
It's a quarter where we are seeing an inflation explosion, COVID and international uncertainty which is causing recessionary behaviour. Companies across the IT sector are cutting jobs and revising forecasts either because of actual or expected drop in revenue.
Can't think anyone serious would look to derive any meaning from a single data point in this environment.
For all we know the entire DAU drop could be from Ukraine and Russia alone.
> inflation explosion, COVID and international uncertainty...recessionary behaviour...cutting jobs and revising forecasts...drop in revenue.
Literally none of these things account for people not logging in to FB. In fact, some (all?) of those sound like the sorts of things that would drive engagement among millions of bored and frustrated people.
Yeh lol at the facebook is dying bot. I left social media 5yrs ago (no fb, never used tiktok). I remmeber MySpace and how i left it for FB.
You cant build a buisness on a bubble. You can build a bubble and extract money from investors, but honestly, the only people who use facebook are doing it because they are addicted and likely not internet savy. Its like hooking people on sugar. Except fb doesnt own the sugar, and cant only buy up the competition for so long before your no longer the hot stuff investors belevied.
Facebook is a fad. Social media is not, it has overtaken traditional media in less then a decade. Social media will morph, it is not static. You cant own it. And Facebook is not the defination of it anymore.
When I started using Facebook it wasn't a newsfeed, it was just a personal homepage with a photo album and a bulletin board attached.
I'd love to have something like that again that everyone uses, but everything is about goosing the influencer economy now rather than letting me socialize.
I'd love it if Meetup had a threaded discussion board with a way to pin photos and video. All my social networks would use it.
That's actually what Google+ was with circles before the morons in charge forcibly bundled it into Youtube and killed it. Google should have had some patience like the people over at Musical.ly and built an audience organically rather than shoving unwanted garbage down our throats.
I honestly liked MySpace. I think it was superior to Facebook in every way. At least you could enjoy some cool music on someone’s page when you visited it. The page was about them.
That's basically what Facebook was (though really it drew more from Friendster). As I remember it, the big appeal of Facebook over MySpace was that the interface was clean and that people felt like migrating from MySpace to The Facebook was a way of shedding their high school selves and reinventing how they presented themselves for college. So it was still loose but looked a bit more "adult." But they very much were viewed as doing the same thing.
I think they wanted hockey-stick growth and prospects of a big payout, while the sustainable model may be a lifestyle business that barely pays for itself.
This. Though I'm not even sure about the "barely pays for itself." I mean, Automaticc/Wordpress sustains itself okay and had the resources to buy Tumblr. I think they're just under $100M in annual revenue. Outside the world of absurd Silicon Valley valuations, that would be considered very respectable
I remember the introduction of the News Feed and how creepy and invasive it felt at the time. Here’s all the interactions you previously had to look for explicitly, now pushed in front of you. It was a harbinger of things to come.
> (chronological feed, seeing friends posts, not seeing spam, more ways to interact (bring back pets, gifts, superpokes etc)) they'd do ok.
I don't think so. TikTok is vastly more addictive and fresh in its content. How much content can your circle creating in a day? No more than 20 posts I would say? If facebook stays being facebook, they will die anyway.
Problem in facebook right now, there isn't enough people to interact with, it is a social network, but tiktok is not. Tiktok is the new TV, with endless contents. I follow zero people there, but still I using it the right way.
I think the core issue here is that Facebook can't afford to merely "do OK": they have to "make a gazillion dollars and take over the world with an ever-increasing source of bottomless revenue" or they are considered "a failure".
> Problem in facebook right now, there isn't enough people to interact with
FB took care of that by removing the chronological time line. As soon as it went away from a time line of things that happened to the people I love into a addiction stimulating ever refreshing list of flashing images it took away the interactivity. It became more of a consumption site place and they're leaning heavily into that (with Instagram too). This then means that content creation is moving from users you know to professionals (people playing the algorithm).
Facebook is where my older relatives social network. As soon as it became a place where people over 40 went, it lost its appeal to the young people that Facebook is really after.
It's not just that the people over 40 are on it, it's that your grandmother comes and leaves confused comments about unrelated topics on your friend's posts.
Smartphone attention is not zero sum. Average daily usage could increase with some novel super-addictive app or platform. Smartphone usage probably went up during the pandemic.
> Facebook is dying because they stopped being Facebook. If they gave what's left of their userbase what they actually wanted (chronological feed, seeing friends posts, not seeing spam, more ways to interact (bring back pets, gifts, superpokes etc)) they'd do ok.
I have no horse in this race, but why do you think you know what's better for FB more than the thousands of smart engineers and PMs working there?
They clearly saw TikTok as a direct threat, and, probably fueled by thousands of data-driven tests, confirmed that this change results in more engagement and keeps more people on their site for longer.
What you seem to want from FB is likely what a minority of its older userbase wants, but wouldn't make graphs go up and right as much. They need to attract younger generations and new users if they want to do that.
> doubt they're the ones making the big strategic decisions
Of course not, but I doubt that the ones making these decisions are ignoring the metrics that the thousands of smart engineers are generating.
All the large companies are able to afford extra staff whose job is exclusively to generate and analyse metrics.
It seems a reach to conclude that the company pays thousands of people for a specific output, just to throw that output away. It may happen to one or two of them, but certainly not to all of the people generating the metrics.
My theory is that it's also the behavior of users that has changed.
In my own network (age brackets 25-40), I rarely see any people posting updates or uploading pictures, which was common 5 or 10 years ago.
On the other hand, Meta managed to keep the younger generation audience by acquiring Instagram, but apparently, it failed to acquire the Next-Bing-Thing (Tik-Tok)
Facebook is a sinking ship. It's hard to turn that around.
It seems like it would've been easier to go after TikTok with Instagram - which is basically the same product, growing, and still has some brand value.
Maybe other people's feeds are different (admittedly I don't do much on it), but almost all I see on instagram are screenshots of twitter, tumblr, reddit, and tiktok videos. Very little content original to the platform.
If you don't much on it that seems right. That seems like generic content. I used to get a lot of that, now mine is the stuff I follow. Mostly art and people I know in real life
Meta already knew Facebook would sink someday. As they have Instagram, they don't care and Meta will be around for another 10 years to extract more from Instagram and their other unused platforms.
I'd expect the hype and growth around TikTok to peak once their parent company IPOs, as more corporations, advertisers, mainstream media accounts, move in to the platform to ruin it just like they did with the rest of the other social networking platforms, especially for YouTube and Instagram.
If they don't IPO soon, TikTok will get much worse for their users. Either way, the users will eventually get annoyed by TikTok's changes, pushed and boosted by the company.
> once their parent company IPOs, as more corporations, advertisers, mainstream media accounts, move in to the platform to ruin it j
> If they don't IPO soon, TikTok will get much worse for their users
So, if they IPO TikTok gets worse and if they don't TikTok gets worse? I don't see why bringing up an IPO matters.
Meanwhile, it seems unlikely they'll IPO soon if ever. They apparently raised a 2 billion round in December 2020, and they won't want to IPO in a recession. And IPOing is going to be a political act, and if I were them I would hesitate to incur the CCP's wrath.
That day is very far into the future (in tech terms). 1.96 billion users are a whole fucking lot of a base to bleed. I would bet actual money that they won't dip below 1 billion by 2035, and that they would be still there (in whatever profitable form) with the same trademak in 2050.
> That day is very far into the future (in tech terms). 1.96 billion users are a whole fucking lot of a base to bleed. I would bet actual money that they won't dip below 1 billion by 2035, and that they would be still there (in whatever profitable form) with the same trademak in 2050.
While I broadly agree with you, I'd only bet money depending on the odds the bookie is giving, and I wouldn't bet on 1:1 odds either.
The reason is because those timescales are a full generation away. Since the entire value of FB is in the social network of people, it's possible that the upcoming generations bypass FB altogether for a competitor, and FB is unable to risk the pivot[1].
[1] FB might have to intentionally discard the aging existing users for the new users if the featureset that the new users want is exclusive with the featureset that the old users want.
And that explains why they have another separate 1 billion+ monthly active users on Instagram?
If they didn't think their main product would decline or get unpopular soon, why would they bet on spending $1B on buying Instagram before anyone else and copy the greatest hits and main features found in other competitors (Stories, Disappearing posts, etc) directly into Instagram first?
Without Instagram, Facebook would likely have sunk much faster and I already said they will be around for 10+ years.
So the death of Meta Platforms has been greatly exaggerated.
You don't raise almost $10 billion dollars for a steady, stable lifestyle business. You raise almost $10 billion dollars to reach a liquidity event that pays it back to the investors with a huge profit.
Is it taking over the same space though? I use Facebook because it's the only place I can see the schedules at my gym, or the menus as many local restaurants despite them not having updated their Facebook page in two years. As far as I know Tiktok doesn't really try to compete against these things.
Facebook tries so hard to push junk and noise content at you it’s ridiculous. They’ve become a parody of themselves, and the obvious knockoff of TikTok looks pitiful.
You can hate Facebook all you want, but it's quite the stretch to call TikTok "amazing". It's very addictive, while the algo knows what you want, but that's mostly it.
Obviously anecdotal and personal opinion here, but me & many other people I know tried it a bit, spent MANY hours mindlessly scrolling, and eventually got bored. Nonetheless, it's still growing like a wildfire, but I deeply suspect it'll be a very, very fast fire. Which is a deep irony, since Facebook is following TikTok into the same cliff.
So that means what? That other social medias can't exist unless they are on the absolute top? Sounds like a race to the bottom, patched up with investor creole language bullshit.
Did you forget how Friendster and the ones before lost their user base overnight? Facebook was not in that situation because so far there hasn’t been a worthy competitor. They bought the last two, and it’s not possible with TikTok. Facebook is pissing it’s meta pants.
I didn't forget. I also didn't forget that they burned all of their money, and didn't pay their taxes. I think you're extrapolating a lot from nothing.
'creole' has developed a linguistic meaning that parallels the ethnic one you may be interpreting.
From Wikipedia: a stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language.
I still found the comment to be a bit of a stretch with that usage.
You all need to get out of Silicon Valley. Creole languages, such as Jamaican are not only completely normal and exist, it's actually not antiquated if you look outside of the US.
I do think you need to read more about this. You seem hung up on a singular meaning, which to me says a lot more about you than me. In this context, unless you're going to be obnoxiously pandentic, creole simply means "a bunch of words and phrases smashed together" Really not worth going into highschool mode about.
What was said is it sounds like bullshit spouted by investors in a pidgin language they made up. Derogatory intent seems doubtful.
TIL creole can be a trigger word. I've only heard it used as "a creole language" and have never even heard anyone use the word relating to its original meaning (though I was vaguely aware of it). Personally, I'm more likely to use the word "creole" than "pidgin language", not sure about others though.
Yeah, except no one said that except you. "your sense" and my own words aren't the same, clearly. All of the words you just used to describe "creole" weren't even on my radar. Didn't even know it was a thing. Take a rest, guy.
> Yeah, and you used it in a way that made it sound derogatory.
> "Creole bullshit"
They didn't write that it sounds like "creole bullshit", they wrote that it sounds like "investor creole language bullshit" ie) bullshit in an investor creole language ie) investors saying bullshit in a language consisting of words which mean one thing in English but which have a different meaning in the language the investors are speaking.
You've clearly totally misinterpreted the original post due to an unfamiliarity with the linguistics term "creole language", a term which does not even derive from the Creole peoples of Louisiana (although both the people and the term share a common French root).
Creole, such as Jamaican, are languages that exist - and discounting them is the actual racism. This post isn't even about race, or even a group of people. Take a rest.
You realize I was calling the practice of ignoring facts and bullshitting people "bullshit", right? How is this hard to follow? Next time instead of reacting, try humanity. Creole languages aren't even predominantly non-white. Feels like projection of your own bigotry, honestly.
In the above context it seemed to be used as a derogatory term. Perhaps the more neutral “jargon” would have been less loaded and more accurate, since marketing jargon is not, in-fact, a creole
> Facebook just doesn't respect its users or care about their needs.
Not only that, they're actually killing and destroying art forms. Many forms of art don't lend themselves to 15-second videos, and they're being actively downranked and not even shown to their own friends and followers anymore. Facebook is gatekeeping content between friends. You could have spent 500 hours painting a picture but Facebook will HIDE it from your friends just because it isn't a 15-second "Reel".
Zuck: "We want Reels to be the best place for creators to connect with their community and make a living"
Well, did you even bother asking the creators? A lot of them CANNOT make a living through short videos. They need still pictures, writing, interactive pages, and other ways to present their creations.
No, Zuck, you don't want it to the best place for creators. You actually don't give a flying f about creators. You just want to copy and compete with TikTok.
I do a lot of landscape photography and astrophotography, and my views have been slashed to 1/3 of what they were last year. Same quality content, it's Instagram HIDING stuff from my own followers and friends. I'm just glad I don't make a living from it, but feel really bad for those who do.
Yep, rather than focusing on how they are are different in providing value (connecting people) they are chasing attention and ad revenue. It’s sad because that type of person to person social connection is being relegated back to instant messengers which still function more or less like the ones from the 2000s.
> It’s sad because that type of person to person social connection is being relegated back to instant messengers which still function more or less like the ones from the 2000s.
What about mixing forum-like experience with open messaging? That's what we're doing over at https://sqwok.im
The person to person interaction went back to messengers because most people don’t like the exposure of all their social interactions being laid bare for all to see.
TBH this is also exactly what Google tried to do with Google+ back in the day. Facebook was a new model that provided online folks with a new and more personal experience, which scared Google management, so they tried to pivot the whole company to become a social network, including forcing their users to abandon their pseudonyms and reveal their irl identity, despite the original implicit social contract allowing pseudonyms. It was idiotic. You would think Facebook would have learned from their primary competitor's (at the time) mistake.
To quote the article Facebook really has "unleashed waves of democratic empowerment" among the youth in certain countries where democracy is not present or is under serious assault and the domestic media is censored. If some random dictatorship has strict anti-speech laws Meta is way more lax about following them than the domestic media (who are just going to get arrested if they don't). This really has created a generation of young people in some places who have a less censored view of the world and have a more pro-democratic, pro-egalitarian, anti-dictatorship bent. The only people who miss this are the ones whose reality is generally confined to an e.g. US-only point of view where democracy is secure and stable and the only "threats" to it are basically a joke, like the whole panic over January 6, and you've never seen tanks roll into the capital and depose your elected officials.
In countries where real threats to democracy like that exist, Facebook and Twitter have played a huge role in communicating suppressed information, aiding protest organization, etc. and by and large the kids are into it.
As for a pivot to a Tiktok-style experience -- that's a hard pass for me, it's like mixing cocaine with television. The kids are into that too and it's pretty scary to watch them switch off their brains, set aside their humanity and obediently wait for the ML algorithm's function calls to twitch_human_thumb() that arise every few seconds. Of course people were saying something similar about MTV, remote controls and the boob tube back in the day and somehow we survived...
Ultimately if you're Meta and the government tells you it's OK for you to sell cocaine, after all they're OK with your Chinese competitor importing it -- who are you to say no?
Under the current climate my only confusion is why we haven't let Coke reintroduce their namesake ingredient to their formula. Or to use your example yes I could totally see Taco Bell lacing their meat with drugs if it was allowed!
I agree with most of your point but why be dismissive of the very evident reality of how corroded democracy has become in the Western world in large part because of how Facebook-poisoned certain demographics and their elected representives have become?
Two-thirds of respondents (67.2%, 95% CI 66.1%, 68.4%) perceived “a serious threat to our democracy,” but more than 40% agreed that “having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy” and that “in America, native-born white people are being replaced by immigrants.” Half (50.1%) agreed that “in the next few years, there will be civil war in the United States.”
Because frankly all of that stuff isn't really a big deal (and I knew I'd get a rise when I brought this up, couldn't help myself).
I've seen a coup staged firsthand, directly experienced it happening in a country I lived in, watched the tanks rolling down the road to the government district which they proceeded to occupy, and everything that came before and after.
In the US there are a lot of people with loony opinions out there, but fundamentally there's a military which is on the side of the elected government. There's an elections process which is too distributed to suspend or corrupt nationally (sure it can get screwed up locally and does). There's also a free media and Internet. These are the pillars that hold up both the good and bad democracies around the world.
People with a lot of anxiety will poke holes in all of those statements, they will list the ways the US is messed up because that's what they know. But it's just not the same as a country where the elected government actually falls. US institutions today are all vastly healthier today than the countries where that happens.
I think it's good to have some degree of anxiety because it pushes us to solve problems but the US just isn't having a civil war or having its civilian government replaced any time soon, I'd stake everything I own on it.
I'd recommend you take a long hard look around if you think fascism isn't possible in the US. The modern GOP is now predicated on a belief that the last election was stolen, and that they need to steal the next one to compensate. Fascism doesn't require a coup, and it's plausible that US fascism won't use one.
The US has always been fascist when it comes to international politics. First its reach was mostly limited to the Americas, but after World War 2 and the start of the Cold War, its fascist control spread across the globe.
It would be more of a surprise if the fascism they display internationally would never make it back to the US. After all, it is the same people making the decisions internationally and domestically, and the disappearance of the call logs from January 6th show that there are parts of the military open to negotiations.
By the force of their numbers occupying the seat of government and forcing the elected representatives and the chain of government (VP, Speaker, President of Senate) to be isolated.
No one knew whether or not the rioters were armed or not. Therefore, the assumption had to be that they were, or that there were those that were hidden in the crowd.
Until they were cleared from the Capitol buildings, they controlled the electoral process and disabled the counting of the electoral college votes. That delayed the part of the transfer of power between one POTUS and the next.
> Ok so then they were considered to be a legitimate threat?
You put informants to know what's happening. They knew they did not carry weapons (only very few did).
> The history of domestic standoffs does not support this claim.
Oh yeah? When was the country taken over by a small group of people in the past?
> There absolutely was a risk (of a coup d'etat)
Please explain me how things would have turned after more than a day, and how the country would have been run by a bunch of guys with viking hats with 300 million other people not doing anything about it.
> Please explain me how things would have turned after more than a day, and how the country would have been run by a bunch of guys with viking hats with 300 million other people not doing anything about it.
The United States of America has a very real and very well understood domestic terrorism problem. These are not all cartoon characters wearing dumb costumes.
I mentioned Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Oklahoma city. In case you are unaware Ruby Ride and Waco were both standoffs between the Federal Government and anti-government groups they went sideways and innocent people died. This motivated two men to build a bomb in a truck and blow up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City killing 168 people. This was in 1995.
Ruby Ridge and Waco are often cited in militia circles as examples of why our government can’t be trusted.
More recently than Oklahoma City there was the Malheur standoff where some tax dodgers occupied a federal building for 40 days. In the end one of them was killed resisting arrest. The leader in that standoff was Ammon Bundy, who has also led other standoffs and the armed mob I mentioned in the Idaho Capitol building.
There is a delicate peace between the US and these terrorists. An event like taking over a state or national capitol or especially a military response to such a takeover could easily trigger a revolution.
You don’t appear to be an American. I encourage you to look into the domestic militia movement. Especially post-Oklahoma City. This is a very real threat.
> An event like taking over a state or national capitol or especially a military response to such a takeover could easily trigger a revolution.
Again I fail to see how occupying a building ends up being a take-over. Even if someone captures the White House, it does not make them the president of the US unless everyone else agrees with it.
As I have exhaustively explained it isn't just occupying a building. It's about the people who are inside that building. In this case congress and the vice president.
There's also an element of symbolism that could embolden similar groups to take over other seats of power.
This isn't about taking over the US Government as it is currently. It is an existential threat to the current paradigm. There's no natural law that says the US must be a federal democratic republic. It could easily be a military dictatorship.
You don't control a country by controlling a single building. And worst case, you send the military and the crisis is over in a few hours. If you believe that this was an insurrection, that was the most peaceful insurrection ever in History.
> You don't control a country by controlling a single building.
This isn't some random building, it's literally the Capitol, with Congress in attendance. This was also not an isolated incident.
In 2020 Ammon Bundy of Malheur standoff fame led an armed mob which forced its way past the State Patrol into a session of the Idaho State House of Representatives. After occupying the gallery above the House they were "allowed" to stay and observe the session, with their guns.
On January 6th itself an armed mob forced its way past the gate at the governors house in Washington state.
Also on January 6th attempts were made to enter the capitols in California, Georgia, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Oregon. Some of these involved armed mobs and gallows.
On January 9th an armed mob showed up outside the Kentucky State Capitol.
Consider the connection between Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Oklahoma City to see how this escalates.
> And worst case, you send the military and the crisis is over in a few hours.
That worst case involves the mob actually reaching the representatives, killing them and claiming power. In that case the military can't just magically set everything right. If hostages are involved nothing is getting done "in a few hours". The military isn't going to undo any damage.
A successful attack on Congress that incapacitated, killed, or persuaded enough representatives absolutely could lead to control of the country.
> If you believe that this was an insurrection, that was the most peaceful insurrection ever in History.
A woman was killed by the Secret Service after breaching a barricade in pursuit of the Vice President. Members of the mob used chemical weapons on police. Call it whatever you want but it wasn't peaceful and it wasn't innocent.
Even if that did happen, that would not be enough to take over the country. You'd elect new representatives after the crisis. A small group of people would never be able to resist the power of the US Military for very long.
> A woman was killed by the Secret Service after breaching a barricade in pursuit of the Vice President. Members of the mob used chemical weapons on police. Call it whatever you want but it wasn't peaceful and it wasn't innocent.
"Most peaceful" does not mean there were no incidents. In the history of actual insurrections, that was the most peaceful one ever, if you even consider it one. Insurrections cause massive death of civilians and police/authorities, and this was clearly not it.
> Even if that did happen, that would not be enough to take over the country.
That assumes the next system is a democracy. Since the mob had been convinced election results were not trustworthy I see no reason that would be a requirement.
> A small group of people would never be able to resist the power of the US Military for very long.
How do you think that plays out? Is the capitol building even serviceable at that point? How many people die? I very clearly explained that this is more than a small group, and how escalation plays out.
> "Most peaceful" does not mean there were no incidents. In the history of actual insurrections, that was the most peaceful one ever, if you even consider it one. Insurrections cause massive death of civilians and police/authorities, and this was clearly not it.
You are the only person using the word “insurrection”.
My assertion is that the reason we didn’t see a bigger body count as a result of January 6th is that the mob failed. The potential was absolutely there and success was worryingly close.
Sorry, it wasn't and isn't a "media narrative" that is relevant here. Neither is there anything related to the trope of the "MSM" or power of the FAANGS.
There was obvious collusion and conspiracy to cause the properly cast and certified electoral college votes to be questioned.
There was also obvious collusion and conspiracy to a) riot, and b) attempt to occupy the Capitol, and c) stop the actual process of counting the electoral college votes, both real and fake.
So there were two different, but intertwined, especially at the top, conspiracies to stop the process of the transfer of power.
In France, Spain or whatever that would just have been another election riot and considered completely normal. The police would be flamed for shooting protestors though.
We do know. Joe Biden would still be president. The question is what would have happened if that mob actually got their hands on the representatives. We have a pretty good idea there too, and it isn't pretty.
Facebook doesn't respect it's users, it's staff, or it's retail investors. As the companies stock is currently structured it exists as Mark Zuckerberg's personal plaything and no one can get rid of him until he runs out of cash.
And nobody hates Facebook more than Facebook users. I don't use Facebook and because of that I don't have many problems with it. Same goes for the people that don't use Facebook that I know. The only people I see complaining about Facebook are Facebook users.
To give a counterexample of one, I've never been a user of Facebook (never signed up to FB, IG or WA) but I absolutely loathe the company and its sociopathic behaviour under Zuckerberg. I hate everything the company represents. I take an active interest in its travails and will celebrate its downfall.
I agree with that. I just mean I'm pretty much never directly interacting with Facebook so I don't have to think about them. People who use Facebook every day are constantly experiencing the terribleness directly. So yes, I hate Facebook, but luckily it's not a direct part of my life so I don't have to think about it.
This isn’t “Taco Bell outsold McDonald’s for six months so all of a sudden McD’s sells McTacos.” This is, “McDonald’s realizes about two years too late that no one wants to eat burgers anymore so in a last-ditch attempt they add tacos to the menu.”
Then you make burgers hip again. You extend the menu. You bring out cool new styles. You advertise hard. You give samples, you discount, you run specials, you collab with others. 100 things you can do to reinvigorate your 'boring Burger' business.
You don't just pivot to copycat the tacos business years late. Why would customers go to you rather than staying with their Taco brand of choice?
I believe the real world analogy would be that McDonalds started using real beef and chicken in their food, expanded out the breakfast menu hours. Which they did, deciding whether it strengthened their future prospects is an exercise best left up to each individual.
Your analogy doesn't work because people /do/ like Tacos, and people /do/ like Facebook to not be TikTok. The proof is in the active users. Silicon Valley is such a self important circle jerk. You can operate a business, it lose users, and still exist. Christ.
Counterpoint: facebook are going to add the classic chronological friends and family experience as a second tab “feeds”. In your analogy it would be like mcdonalds splitting down the middle, with the main entrance leading you to tacodonalds and a side door from that hallway leading you to the classic mcdonalds. Parents could send their kids to tacodonalds for a burger taco because that’s what the kids love, while nearby they could enjoy a classic big mac. Most people would probably prefer it that way.
This is just diversification to reach more market segments, and as long as that feeds tab exists they aren’t doing anything different from e.g. youtube, where the home tab is not what I want at all, but the subscriptions tab does exactly what I want.
Not to mention the fact that the feed itself wasn't part of Facebook's original proposition but was a controversial change introduced despite user protests, and the content of the feed today doesn't remotely resemble the content of the feed in 2006 which doesn't remotely resemble the content of the feed in 2009 or 2015
If McDonalds had been a pizza joint within the memories of much of its user base before introducing a Big Mac which was chicken one year and beef the next with constant tweaks to the sauces and vegetable content, I'm not sure the introduction of tacos would be that controversial.
It'd be more like if McDonald's used the same ingredients and stuffed them into taco and burrito shapes and lazily renamed themselves to something like mcdonaria, had their employees say hola when you walk in and their receipts say gracias...
The issue is Facebook misunderstand both their customers and their competition so they're just blindly smashing things together
I blame modern tech hiring processes that filter out people who aren't conforming enthusiastic obedient cheerleaders.
You get a sustain and self-extinguish product instead of one that can respond to what the necessity of the times demand
You must have passionate grumps otherwise you're just shaking pom-poms as you run over a cliff.
Just so we're clear, the users are NOT the customers. I think Facebook absolutely understands their customers -- the companies that spend the most advertising and marketing through Facebook.
All of the paying customers have Facebook accounts and most personally use them.
If it's a bad experience and "boosting" posts leads to noise and garbage they're going away.
The tiering of customers and users is incorrect, Facebook is the meeting place for the two sides of the attention market and they are increasingly doing a failed execution.
The clean delineated hierarchy model where the users are treated as foolish rubes is part of the problem. There's an insular Silicon Valley elitism that is excessively self-congratulatory and is positively allergic to systemic criticism
Poor comparison. McDonalds and Taco Bell are not as culturally divisive as Tik Tok and Facebook. Governments don't request nearly as much sensitive data from fast food chains as they do from modern IT companies. It's more like China having too much power over American citizens and Facebook desperately trying to overtake their market share, either for control or for a platform to fall back on once, or if, Tik Tok were to go under.
Poor comparison was also my first thought. Taco bell and McDonald's fundamentally do different things (although they seem to be expanding into each other turf with things like nacho fries), but Facebook and TikTok really don't, neither does Twitter or Instagram or any other social network (even email for that matter, the oldest social network).
They're communication tools. On all of these platforms you can post video, images, and text either privately or publicly. I can use Facebook the same way someone might use Twitter. I can post only images to TikTok or Facebook and forget about Instagram. I cannot buy a hamburger and taco bell, or tacos and tostada's at McDonald's.
A better comparison would be saying that Chili's saw Applebee's have a great year and decided to make the inside decor and outside building look more like Applebee's. Both restaurants basically serve a bit of all types of food and the menus probably overlap heavily.
Didn't Facebook already die years back? People moved onto Instagram, Whatsapp, Snap and a few other places already. The only reason Facebook was able to pull along was because it bought Insta and Whatsapp so they did not have to compete. But that now that they have to actually compete, the cracks are showing.
Not disputing that facebook is uniquely poison, but that's most sane users on social giants. Users of reddit and twitter specifically absolutely and openly loath them, users of instagram and linkedin are too stifled by the ultra-superficial cheeriness of the platforms to openly admit their hatred on the platform itself, but it's burning inside them quietly.
Socials are an amazing\terrifying experiments in how you can use the herd instincts of humans to hold them hostages against their will.
>Maybe you can still order the <burger> if you know to ask for it, but most people won't, and they'll leave disappointed instead of getting what they wanted.
Facts. I went to InNOut with a friend because he swore by it and I ordered first. I got a tasteless burger and he got one that actually had food between the buns. AND his fries looked actually edible. I was confused, asked which options he chose, and he said something about secret menus which pisses me off. Why must I be prepared with inside knowledge for a store that claims to be fast and easy? I ate my crappy meal and dont plan on going back when there are other places that are full willing to show you what meals are available
Aside from iPods, which they have wisely cannibalized themselves with the iPhone, Apple still sells all those items, with headphones a Fortune 500 company all on its own.
It's not that Apple changed its menu, it expanded it.
Apple brought the sensibilities that made their computers interesting to other consumer electronics. Facebook seems to be doing the opposite and trying to mimic whatever's popular. The only "Facebook" sensibility they ever bring to the table seems to be figuring out ways to over-optimize and over-monetize until the golden-egg-laying-goose dies.
More like MTV non longer showing music videos imo. Facebook could have stayed your personal Rolodex and serve that use case but decided to chase engagement wherever it could.
Maybe it was inevitable and necessary to avoid death or maybe they abandoned their primary purpose and turned off their users and therefore the network / social graph from which they derived value.
That did happen! MTV was showing more 'reality shows' and such for a while as they were more successful. Then you had MTV2 and MTV3 showing actual music videos.
What killed MTV was youtube around 2007-2008, not another tv channel, but a completely different tech.
The change for Apple was a slow boiling pot. And initially you couldn’t even set up an iPhone without a computer (with Mac OS integration making it a lot smoother).
I'm now down to Facebook on my phone only, and it gets checked once or twice a day, and the first N posts are all "not friends" - group posts, ads, surveys.
There's hardly any of my friends left actively using it.
All my friends are now in fb messenger groups, whatsapp groups, discord, and so on.
Until they get "monetized", then we'll be off to somewhere else I suppose.
> Nobody hates Facebook users more than Facebook, I guess. :-/
Beg to differ there. Facebook should be broken up and senior execs facing charges. [1] Loads of people think so and has been motivating for many to delete their account. Don't overlook that group of people. (There are dozens of us, DOZENS!)
[1] In weaker moments this can be expressed with rather more venom.
I have a feeling that 1) this is a global phenomenon 2) it's due to computing lightness (it costs few energy to change programs and websites compared to physical things).
Google keeps swinging secondary apps in and out of existence, social networks come and go every 5 years. It's low energy high frequency, low integration and unstable.
But they just need to convince shareholders for a couple quarters so a couple employees don’t get collateral called on shares they borrowed against and the corporation can dilute more shares issued on behalf of the same employees
> Can you imagine if brick-and-mortar businesses tried to do this?
The difference is that, similarly to how social networks grow exponentially when things are going well, they lose users even faster when things are going bad. There are tons of academic papers explaining this.
I understand that they think growth is in the younger users, but I can't see granny creating twerking videos. There is a sizable chunk of people that just want to post text and look at pictures of their relatives.
I don't think they hate them, they - I believe that despite hoarding all this supposedly useful data - simply have absolutely no idea who they are and what they want/need.
The brick and mortar is a good example because if they did what Facebook is doing fewer may have gone bankrupt when they were destroyed by Amazon.
I’m not a fan of the ad driven business model and the damage it’s done, but Zuckerberg and Facebook are correct here. They know the users better than the users know themselves. It’s been true since the launch of the news feed.
Don’t listen to what users say, watch how they behave.
Everyone says they want to be fit but people just sit around and eat chocolate cake.
Zuckerberg has reorganized and saved Facebook a few times now despite hysterics from users and the press. I’d give him the benefit of the doubt.
I wonder if somebody will create a "keep track of your friends" application again. There is obviously a need, but there isn't a channel that enables it to appear anymore, unless Google allows (hum... that's how industries die).
Anyway, user hostile is how any software acts nowadays. From becoming difficult to interact with, exploiting the user on unexpected ways, all the way into refusing to fulfill its primary use case. Users don't seem to care.
Pro tip, you will get better service in the Drive-Thru. The large majority of their sales come from there, and they prioritize filling drive thru orders to keep the line moving.
I think Facebook user numbers could drop just as fast as they rose. The network effects that drive a social network to add members could operate in reverse as well when higher engagement users drop and the remaining users either leave or become dormant.
It’s crazy to think the social media era may finally be ending. There’s really no viable platform anymore where you can just go passively keep up with what friends and acquaintances are doing. Everything is about feeding you content you didn’t ask for but may be targeted enough to catch your attention.
And for what? To show you some ads here and there? To collect data that can be used to… sell more ads and products?
Instagram was once my favorite app. There was a golden age before stories came a long where people just posted random pictures of what they were up to or what they were seeing. Things weren’t too memefied or political, unlike Facebook. Then photos got more and more glamorized and more about flexing and showing how much cooler and more awesome your life was. People started following themes and niches for their profile content rather than just posting random unorganized series of photos. Businesses and brands started getting built on the platform.
Building an Instagram clone the way it used to be is fairly trivial these days. I could probably throw one together in a few months, but growing its popularity is practically impossible these days with such entrenched incumbents and no niches left to start a user base with.
…unless perhaps… we build a social network on the blockchain
Why don't you see, we'll solve the social dysfunction created by a commercialized monetized internet by hypercommercialization and monetizing it even more!
There is no alternative! It'll be the end of history!
To respond to the dead comment below, the last two disjointed sentences are from Margaret Thatcher and an allusion to Francis Fukayama's "End of History".
I've given that guy a fair shake, I think he's a well spoken idiot. I wish I could come to some other conclusion.
There's an adage that (properly defined) economic liberalism warps the imaginary and closes off possibilities, he may be a victim of it. The guy is clearly sincere and passionate and I really like that, I just think he's really mistaken
There's healthier futures possible based on we and not on me, one that pulls from more human emotions than greed and fear and there's something that precludes the man from considering it possible or palatable.
I think something like mastodon could be like that with a group of friends, but most people don't seem to want to keep up with that kind of decentralized platform. Lol we certainly don't need blockchain though. That literally brings nothing to the table and unnecessarily complicates it. I think people just keep adding and adding anything and everything to Instagram and Facebook, and it just turns into an amorphous fatberg. I pared both down a lot to more or less my top 50 friends/family/groups and it's a lot more useful, sorting by "most recent" doesn't turn up bunch of junk and defeats the facebook algorithm.
It really is weird, isn't it? To have what was essentially a solved problem 10 years ago become... what you described.
On Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/LinkedIn, I still have tons of people I'd be interesting in passively keeping up with. Maybe even actively, sometimes. But all that latent sociality is increasingly just dead out of the gate, seeing as I no longer use any of those platforms regularly.
My closest friends, the ones I will actually put in effort to talk to? Group chat. The polar opposite of the public social media ecosystem that we used to have. A closed, private space that admits no outsiders, marketers, or clout chasers, but strongly discourages developing relationships with new people or expanding one's horizons.
> A closed, private space that admits no outsiders, marketers, or clout chasers, but strongly discourages developing relationships with new people or expanding one's horizons.
Sounds wonderful. This is how the vast majority of humans have experienced socialising for the vast majority of human history. And they were happier for it.
No, it was definitely possible to meet new people. The propagation of these closed spaces worsens the loneliness epidemic, which is way worse than at any point in history.
The closed space of a group chat with friends worsens the loneliness epidemic? And arguing with random strangers on Reddit alleviates it? It's very much the opposite. Big, open and often anonymous social spaces are terrible at making you feel part of a group. Spaces with few people who you actually know and like and can depend on are key to not feeling lonely, and yes they tend to be closed.
Closed doesn't mean undiscoverable. The biggest closed group chat I'm in is the Telegram channel for a podcast I listen to, and it's plugged in every episode. Discord has issues, but group chats there are still mostly fed by public activity like subreddits or YouTube channels.
Closed just means you can't open a page and read the full history like a forum. It doesn't mean it's only knowable to people currently inside and people they invite.
I think a social network that combines something like Discord and old Facebook timelines would be interesting. Basically group chats would become first class citizens, and the platform should help you discover group chats that your friends are in. That was the missing piece from Facebook messenger group chats. They tried to introduce "Rooms" but it failed since other platforms had already taken over that space. Maybe it is still too late.
I agree. I setup a Discord server for a few friends and it turned out to be infinitely better then current social media platforms when it came to keeping up with what everyone was up to.
+100. I have different slacks and discords for different groups. One for extended family--we share pix there.
I sometimes post the same content to two groups, but it's pretty rare.
I do miss the broader reach of classic Instagram where I could follow friends without them needing to be in a close circle with one another. Lots of them are unwilling to join the chat.
But I don't miss it enough to put up with f---ing TikTok behavior.
> A closed, private space that admits no outsiders, marketers, or clout chasers, but strongly discourages developing relationships with new people or expanding one's horizons.
I find it much better. If I want to, there are hobby groups like discord, anonymously, not show off to all for likes and follows kind of social media.
There should be no need to passively know what people are doing all the time. If anyone do that, it becomes addiction.
>A closed, private space that admits no outsiders, marketers, or clout chasers, but strongly discourages developing relationships with new people or expanding one's horizons.
I've been thinking about these exact tradeoffs in building Haven[1]. Completely private, self-hosted or paid-hosting so no ads, or tracking. Built on RSS so you even get interoperability with the rest of the web.
But also no discovery.
I haven't decided yet if there is a reasonable way to do discovery which doesn't turn into a cesspool of promotion--I think it would have to lean on peer recommendations of some form, kind of a pseudo curation. Or maybe we just leave discovery to FaceTok.
Agree. I still check FB from time to time hoping to see something from friends and acquaintances, but my main "social media" has become a family group chat on WhatsApp.
I think "recommendations" are polarising rather than exclusively a (business) mistake. some people, like me, you and probably most of HN, see them as an intrusive waste of time and go out of their way to avoid them; however, I would imagine there is a very large slice of society that doesn't actively moderate how they spend their free time, or really question the things they're presented with online, to whom "recommendations" will have become a very engaging way to find new content and spend their time. that description isn't a euphemism for "stupid" either. I know plenty of intelligent people who scroll through a feed endlessly when they want a way to occupy their mind
Recommendation feed engines probably gives encouraging numbers in the beginning, until the users realize that they are fed BS clickbait instead of baby pictures and other gossip.
While I am quite sure some are hooked on the feed, the core of Facebook (friend gossip) is gone.
> There’s really no viable platform anymore where you can just go passively keep up with what friends and acquaintances are doing.
IMO it’s pointless to “passively keep up with what friends and acquaintances are doing”. We should either actively keep up (thus actually maintain the relationship), or let it go~
Sure, but there is a desire or even need to have robust and interactive options in our communication devices for keeping in touch with all the people we know in a more inclusive and less active way than just directly messaging or calling a specific person, which to be clear people are still doing.
People want something like Facebook as an option. It has usefulness- sharing photos, inviting people to events, a simple platform for small business. I’m not going to get into the negatives of Facebook which, I feel, outweigh the benefits.
Facebook has become a net negative on society but in the early days it was quite good. The problem isn’t social networking apps as much as the sad reality that these services can’t exist without ads or sweeping changes to drive growth. If only it were possible to have something like Facebook but without the suits.
This is the single use case that kept me on Facebook for a while, I decided it wasn't worth it but just by their network effects so many people were on the site that it was very good for that.
I think we need some public alternative(s) - then you don't have to worry about funding it through advertising or the company trying to use the users for profit by selling data.
I used to be a DJ for a few years and Facebook was useful for organizing and promoting my parties. I’m not interested in getting into a semantic debate if such a need is necessary or good for society, but it was useful for me and many people did want to go to my parties. This is a modest example.
Also, people are artists or learning. It’s nice to have a simple and organized way to save your public work online to share with friends.. I can keep going. It’s easy to forget the usefulness of facebook.
To be clear, Facebook has done harm and the company is at fault for much, but I do think there is something in the structure or DNA of facebook which could be salvaged and become useful.
I don’t think that Likes, algorithmic feeds, or sharing political/insane links with everyone you kind of know are quality features of facebook.
Events and parties (organising and discovery) were something no platform ever got close to being good at. Facebook completely nailed it, probably purely through the social connections. It's still maybe the number 1 thing everyone i know agrees is a big loss, and nothing has come close to taking its place as we're so dispersed again
> simple and organized way to save your public work online to share with friends
I think Instagram still works for that. You can also do that by having a blog.
But if anyone needs more than that, it's addiction generated by fb, the red notification, likes, followers, desire to open the app, desire to know what others are doing, gossip, all this kind if things. Fb was pretty effective to create this desire and it permanently changed how we function mentally.
I agree with Instagram being better.. but we are either forgetting, or weren’t present for, the internet just before facebook. It used to be Geocities for sharing amateur art. Instagram exists because of photo sharing on facebook.
My main point is that there are functions or core uses in FB which are worth having.
Sure, I'm not arguing there aren't genuinely beneficial uses of FB, et al. I was responding to:
> there is a desire or even need to have robust and interactive options in our communication devices for keeping in touch with all the people we know in a more inclusive and less active
OP seems to take this as axiomatic. I'm not so sure.
It's been an interesting path. It went from the early days where you'd post just about anything, then people tightened up on what felt "good enough" and some of the charm was lost. I got the sense that people became more anxious about what reached that "good enough" mark. A friend who was making a living from putting up Instagram content just abruptly started turning down money and stopped posting. No one should be fretting about sharing content because they worry about how their grid looks - it's idiotic. I think that slowdown in content in part (also, fending off rivals) brought about Stories.
I grew to appreciate Stories as a way to tell the behind-the-scenes story of the main feed highlight shot/video. And the ability to save those screens into actual stories (of an outing or a project).
Then they ramped up ads, added Reels and wrecked the way the main feed works with integrating Reels. Reels feels like the step too far. Revert the main feed UI, let me switch off all suggested content (not just for 30 days, you bastards), tone down the ads, and I'll be OK.
> I got the sense that people became more anxious about what reached that "good enough" mark
Bo Burnham has some interesting comments in his "Inside" special about how social media makes us disassociate from ourselves and think about both living in the moment and how it will be perceived afterwards. I think that's a big part of what causes this - after you know that you're not just posting for fun then you have to think about why you're posting something and what it means. This has caused by to basically stop using them because it never seems "worth it" to post something
The feed anxiety thing predates the pandemic. People using it semi commercially were stressing about the right colour tones of their grid, etc. I find myself avoiding posting shots in a particular sequence because I don't want a cluster of ocean photos or video icons adjacent, etc - less so because I care, but because my prospective clients would think about it showing a lack of attention to detail. Very silly.
In a scrolling feed, no issue. If you were creating a collated folio of best work, no issue. I think having a chronological grid is what irks people. Better to let people choose a grid that represents them. A photographer could have their best work, someone else might choose to have their most popular, and others could leave it chronological.
Food blogs were one of the first genres to develop once they evolved beyond links. There were jokes about how nobody wants to read a blog about what you ate for dinner before there were jokes about how nobody wants to read tweets about what you ate for dinner.
Bitcoiners in general say this too. Blockchains don't make sense except in the single, highly specific use case for which has already been implemented.
I have two Instagram accounts. One just for my friends and family. And one for mindless content feed, brands, entertainment, etc. The separation has helped me reduce the mindless scrolling amazingly. I log into my friends and family account and catch up in five minutes per day. I very rarely choose to switch to the other account. Splitting into two accounts has been really healthy for me.
Yeah it's always been an option to use Instagram this way. Most people don't want to use it that way apparently, using it as a content machine instead of a traditional social network. But I know plenty of people who still do just share photos of themselves/family and only like/comment on culture stuff.
The time thing is the biggest takeaway for me, not only I spend less time overall on Instagram but I also feel way more "productive" (Weird word to use, but you know what I mean) as I actually look at every story from my friends instead of navigating through a bunch of spam from {SPORT} or {CELEBRITY}
> There’s really no viable platform anymore where you can just go passively keep up with what friends and acquaintances are doing.
Whatsapp, Telegram and Signal fill that place quite nicely.
I regularly check my Whatsapp contacts status messages. Most of them are filled with things from their daily lives.
I have a bunch of groups in Telegram, both personal and professional.
I feel FB style of "feed" thing has become a chore solely due to the mind-numbing complexity of the interface. WA is dead simple. I know what I am looking at, I can interact with the person who put the status message, I can block them or delete them or archive them.
SM has evolved itself into chat apps, which, funnily, was what we used FB for in the first place.
The likes of IG, TT, etc are a mixed broadcast medium, that are natural evolutions of the Twitter model.
Also, FB is finally evolving into a form that is close to how users use it.
What OP means with WhatsApp status is the photo/video stories that only last for 24 hours. What you're describing is now called the "About" section of your profile.
> There’s really no viable platform anymore where you can just go passively keep up with what friends and acquaintances are doing.
The Facebook general experience is to slowly (or immediately) dislike your family. Instagram's general experience is to like posts from strangers and occasionally your friends. Tiktok's experience is to really disconnect from your social circle and get sucked into shockingly personalized content from strangers.
Facebook's feed is a dying product, Instagram is barely keeping its head above water, and Tiktok is growing so fast the government is worried that it's a national security threat.
> and Tiktok is growing so fast the government is worried that it's a national security threat.
Nah. The government calls it a national security threat because Facebook has been lobbying pretty hard for it. They did ban tiktok in india for this very reason. Though for the same so called national security threat. But interestingly, facebook allows ruling fascist party's pages to call for genocide quite openly on its platform, and has recently invested a ton of money into businessmen close to the ruling party.
Then just leave for Telegram which is infinetly better (their native windows client is just incredible compared to the other atrocious electron based chat apps) or even better for Signal which is not as feature rich yet but open source.
The “if we just go back to the old app” theory ignores half the problem. People learn how to be good at instagram and how to use it to their advantage over time.
To pretend that Facebook is the only party extracting value is wrong. People (who aren’t you) cause a lot of the problems that drive these apps to the places they end up.
Turns out that most people would prefer to see the Kardashians over their friends most of the time. Sad, but there it is.
Mmmmm yes, documenting my shitty cringe opinions in an immutable record forever with the full force of a global distributed hashing network.
Unironically though, imagine where we would be if logging to social media was even a tiny bit more expensive than free, PoW was originally invented to combat email spam after all.
> There’s really no viable platform anymore where you can just go passively keep up with what friends and acquaintances are doing.
Is this something that people really want to do though... I did that for a bit back when fb was still new but quickly and I mean quickly fell off the habit and stopped using fb.
Just as myself and most of my friends and acquaintances all started using FB because we’d all started using it, we also all stopped using it because we’d all stopped using it.
In theory, yes. But maybe the average circle of friends and acquaintances isn't sticky enough without more encouragement, karma, whatever? I don't mind if a platform feels quiet because it takes less time to keep up with, but the platform itself would see a downturn as a serious failing.
I have an even better idea. How about creating a big network where everyone could have their little space and put whatever they want in it? The main method of content discovery would be by adding “links” to other people's places. Since it would be interconnected like a spider web, we could cáll it “the web” or something…
> Building an Instagram clone the way it used to be is fairly trivial these days. I could probably throw one together in a few months, but growing its popularity is practically impossible these days with such entrenched incumbents and no niches left to start a user base with.
Setting aside the fact that the social media platform you are cloning is probably going to sue you for copyright infringement if it takes off, you'd still be fighting the network effect. I'm not saying it is impossible, but I doubt that building a clone of a product will successfully move people from the original. Signal and telegram haven't been able to best WhatsApp.
Building it in a decentralized way probably makes it even harder.
The answer to the one platform that resisted all temptations and did this well: Twitter. The #metoo #blacklivesmatters and not to mention numerous international protests and movements sprouted there.
As both cause and effect, Twitter has missed the capitalistic financial success of similarly sized and engaged companies.
Twitter does seem to be replacing most of their feed with random posts from people you don't follow, poorly categorised by AI into topics they incorrectly think you're interested in though.
Twitter is full of self-important people and I hate that as much the firehouse ads and follows on facebook. It's more of an echo chamber. I only use it to follow a couple of people who are important to me (and not just themselves), some memes, and try to have a variety of news source from the middle out so I don't get stuck in wokeville or fascisttown echo chambers.
I know it sounds dumb but its hard to say we haven't moved closer to what only ~10 years ago we considered a "playful exaggeration" on the worst of humans and social media.
In WallE, everyone is floating around in chairs having their content spoon-fed to them with a generous amount of ads mixed in. If you've ever scrolled or seen someone scroll, its kinda close. Just mindlessly moving their thumb up and down, taking in content that will be forgotten within minutes. Ask a tik tok user to tell you even 10% of the videos they saw within the last hour. I'd be surprised if they could.
I hope its not too "old man yelling at cloud" because I do my 15 minutes of mindless instagram scrolling but I have a timer that locks the app and I usually only need 15 minutes, more just feels bleh. Some of my family/friends "brag" about having 7+ hrs of "tik tok time" on their iphone stats. Just crazy.
> Ask a tik tok user to tell you even 10% of the videos they saw within the last hour. I'd be surprised if they could.
Heck you could ask the same for any HN user as well :)
Yes this is social media. Yes some of it is mindless time wasting. For me personally I sometimes get useful information that helps improve my work / profession. At least that’s how I justify it.
Haha, true! Tbh tho I usually only click on a few of the posts on here, the one's that interest me. The signal to noise ratio just seems awful on tiktok, marginally better on reddit and HN. There you can scan the page and see what interests you. On these new "endless scroll" types you have to at least invest a few seconds time into each video. Say you skip ~10 videos, that's ~10 seconds to just find a 10 second video you wish to watch.
At the very least I think we have to admit a 15 min session on HN will be more productive, memorable and engaging than 15 minutes on tiktok. Again, if your goal is mindless scroll, I get it, I do it too... but still, lol
Not to get all high and mighty but I dunno, I guess I see it like alcohol. A little is fine but I can't imagine a barrage of second-sized content being optimized to perfection (to keep you scrolling) is a "good" thing for any long period of time.
Other humans often perceive updates on their friends, family, and connected entities as much more valuable than the discussion we are having. The most important rule for HN is that this forum and the people on it are not representative of the general population.
For sure... but I wonder just how many people are actually doing that vs mindless scrolling, even on FB.
Especially when it seems these companies are doing everything they can to emulate tiktok.
Again, people can value even mindless scrolling for 6 hours a day. My OP was more about how not even 10 years ago, having quick and mindless content spoon-fed to you was seen as a satirical exaggeration of future humans. We're much closer to that now than we were 10 years ago.
That picture gets distorted quickly, as people have 200 "friends" on social media, most of whom share a rather filtered and polished image of themselves online. People in many cases don't really get an accurat idea.
of course you compare HN somewhat in jest (I think), but HN is also generally long-form content that doesn't just slip in and out of your head in 15 seconds. additionally I remember it better because it's written down
I like the comparison with Wall-E, but I'm not sure TikTok is worse than watching/zapping television for an hour (regarding your 10% of last hour question). That's what a couple of generations of adults has been doing with their evenings already. Also, your 15 minutes timer seems like a good idea! I should try that.
I don't know. An hour of TV is one drama show, or two sitcoms, or half to two-thirds of a movie. Complete with setting, plot, character development, story arcs, and some drama and/or comedy. Chances are I'll remember more than 10% of that. Especially since I don't usually watch more than that in a day.
Tiktok, reels, stories, etc., on the other hand, are just like watching a constant barrage of seconds-long commercials, often even shorter than traditional TV commercials were. And without the catchy jingles that stick in your head for years. Of course they'll be less than 10% memorable.
It seems strange to me that for so many years people complained about commercials, hated them, paid extra to watch shows without commercials, etc. And now it's the hot new popular trendy thing for people to watch them for hours on end?
Oh yea, I think TV is just as bad in a lot of ways. It could arguably waste more time as the "nonsense" can be longer... but at least there's no magic DVR that is playing you carefully selected channels designed to keep you hooked, haha.
I totally get that ppl have been doing this forever... it just seems tiktok has taken it up another level. A real time/attention sucker on a truly massive and global scale beyond TV/Youtube.
And yep! I think 15 minutes is perfect. I think there is benefit to just having funny/mindless/interesting videos lined up to unwind at the end of the day or on a break... its just I can't imagine how some ppl rack up close to "part-time job" hours on it haha.
Sometimes you see someone standing perfectly still on the sidewalk, locked into their phone, people passing them on both sides. After a while they sorta snap out of it, look around to reorient themselves, and continue walking. I've watched people stay in this locked state for hilariously long times.
I call them lost souls.
We've all been there in one way or another but seeing someone in that trance, from the outside, is very disconcerting. These phones are no joke.
Yep. I think its concerning just how easy it is to get into that zone now, for practically everyone now. It used to just be teenagers, which I can forgive a bit more... but now it seems to be everyone.
I feel like half the comments here about "facebook dying" and how "facebook can't compete with tiktok" are missing the big picture about facebook.
For a lot of people, facebook basically is the internet. The same way AOL was a long time ago. Everyone they want to talk to as they go about their day is there. Basically every business in the US that bothers with an online presence at all either has a facebook page or exclusively has a facebook page. Craigslist is being eaten by facebook marketplace. Even Facebook messenger is still a wildly successful chat app and it's like... their 3rd or 4th-place messaging platform.
Facebook has become a sort of digital town square that is a pretty significant part of the economy; the real-world brick-and-mortar economy. Tiktok and instagram are much more recreational.
In Vanuatu, where I am now. Facebook is free to use on mobile phone networks provided by Vodafone or Digicel.
Consequently, Facebook is 'the internet' for most here. We have Facebook groups with member counts that are 1/3 of the country's population. For example the group 'Yumi Toktok Stret' has 128K members for a country of 300k. It is an amazing look into the thoughts of a nation since everything from jokes and gossip to serious arguments on policy occur there.
Maybe I am weird, but I never see the Facebook page of companies. It's always Instagram for non-tech/normal companies and groups and Twitter for more "online" or techy companies.
For looking up a business it's always Google/Website, Yelp, and Instagram for me.
I love companies using Facebook Messenger for support inquires. External chat popups suck, since the chat gets destroyed when you close the window/you lose connection.
With Facebook chat you just send the inquiry and they respond when they log back in the morning. My ISP actually responded immidiately at 2AM once, that was also a nice surprise.
>Maybe I am weird, but I never see the Facebook page of companies.
I may be reaching too far here but maybe it is your adblocker? A lot of times companies use the "facebook page integration" thing in their websites which I think most adblockers (including mine) filter out.
It's not just Facebook. For some people Instagram is the internet. For others Reddit is the internet. For others YouTube. Lots of people log into one app or website and get all their news, culture, politics, entertainment, sports in that one place.
It's interesting that you call it the new Aol, to me it's the new Yahoo.com.
Facebook DOES NOT OWN social networking. Facebook improved on an existing design at the right time, PERIOD! Now, as before, the world has moved on, and the bubble has burst. The laggards in 3rd world countries will flock to the next service to disrupt social media, just like before. Facebook innovated at a time when mobile phones were being delivered to these countries. Not because they were a superior service or somehow godlike in its ability to hold mindshare. Tiktok, by its very nature, is its own worse enermy. Chinas economy is crumbling as we speak, and its not going to be long before the CCP will get caught with their hands in the cookie jar. No one makes money in China without authority from the superme leader. And No one can be more famous then the supreme leader. Tiktok, tiktok; Huawi 2.0.
This actually makes me pretty sad. For all of Facebook's ills, it did at least do a good job of keeping me connected with friends before it got weird. Same with Instagram. Twitter is fantastic because it helps me discover new people, new interests, new worlds, in a way.
TikTok doesn't feel social at all. It feels entirely too performative. Everything on there is a performance. Everything is an act. Everything is simply an effort of some kind or another. Sounds more exhausting than fun.
Really wish there was a thriving ecosystem of small online communities that had some sort of financial structure that could collectively create as much money as these larger companies do.
Facebook was indeed very innovative, I loved it and I was fascinated by the things it made possible up until 10 years ago. I also made my first money by creating apps and selling them back in 2008.
I guess it's always more fun when the VCs pay for all that and all the fun evaporates when they want their money back.
I've been working on an app https://aurdia.com/creators/ to create an ecosystem of communities that provides multiple ways outside of advertisements for the community admins to get paid from the support of their members. I think there needs to be a movement away from people's data being sold as the product from these services to really improve the quality of what we experience on the web.
Unfortunately there are grammar errors throughout this page.
E.g. the heading "Your communities place to connect" should be "Your community's place to connect".
In fact, reading through more of it, it comes across as if English is not your first language? It would be worth it to find someone to copy-edit all your content.
I agree entirely but I'd argue that this is a feature rather than a flaw. It's more like community TV than a place for dialog with social connections.
> It feels entirely too performative.
I think this depends greatly on the niches of TikTok that you have led yourself to. Some is definitely very performative and it can feel like you're on the receiving end of an endless stream of pitches for your attention. But other parts are far more laid-back. SynthTok, for example, is mostly just context-free synthesizer jams.
If you look at platforms like Twitch, Substack, and Patreon, I think it's pretty clear people are willing to entertain other models in large enough volume to support the livelihoods of the recipients. I do find it curious why there isn't a "paid" option from services like Facebook where you pay a monthly fee to essentially opt out of being their product opposed to user and not get targeted with ads. I guess in their case the monetization prospects from the hyper targeting they are able to do is probably too lucrative to even give people the option to opt out of.
Part of the basic issue with that kind of "opt out" system is that the users who will pay for no ads probably have more disposable income and are therefore desirable advertising targets.
I believe I've heard it said that Hulu makes _more_ money per user on "with-ads" tier users than those that pay extra to remove the ads.
All the platforms have their own TikTok style mechanism now. YouTube has Shorts, Facebook has its Reels feature which is tightly integrated with Instagram and you need an Instagram account to engage with Reels on Facebook, which is a bit of a growth hacker dark pattern. For now, Reels is not interspersed with ADs which is refreshing, but that could all change.
The whole vertical video craze is a weird one, and one I’ve only recently tried to adjust to. I mean the pace of it is so fast, and I barely have time to process each video before moving to the next one. A whole generation are going to be raised on cheap dopamine hits and will probably suffer mild ADD symptoms because of this.
I want the slow web back where I can chew on long form content and mull over large pieces of text and long winded podcasts, not boiled down snippets of info that prey on my base instincts and giddy 1 minute dopamine fixes.
> I want the slow web back where I can chew on long form content and mull over large pieces of text and long winded podcasts…
It is what you make it, really.
I watch YouTubers who make long videos, go deep diving on subjects which have no real use in my daily life and have very, very few apps on my phone — all but one are something which makes my life easier than not having it and the exception is because I want to buy a condo.
No Instagrams, Facebooks, TikToks, Twitters, nothing.
I don’t even feel I’m missing out on anything worthwhile either.
I did this because my relationship to social media was unhealthy, and now it feels much better.
Hacker news, because duh.
Instagram is for softcore porn.
Facebook I deleted years ago, no regrets. (I'm aware they own Instagram, and I don't care. This is just a personal issue for me.)
Tiktok I watch funny videos when people send them to me, I feel no need to install an app.
Twitter, I read tweets when people link to them, and every time Twitter reminds me why I'm glad I don't use Twitter.
I understand why other people use them, and some people can do it in a healthy way, but for me, this is the absolute maximum I can use social media without losing myself.
Here you go: https://jakeseliger.com/. Scroll through and note the most interesting or useful venues. Then, there are an array of RSS readers available; I've been using NetNewsWire but think that Feedly seems to be the most common.
i wish we had usage stats that were as simple as FB or insta’s “monthly active users”. because i feel like there’s an ebb and flow to this. 15 years ago, blogs had comment sections, pingbacks, RSS. 10 years ago, SEO displaced the blog. 5 years ago, blogs grew again with Twitter announcements replacing the role of RSS. today, email lists are back in style and my friends ask me for RSS reader recommendations.
then there’s the whole aspect of forums. most of the forums i used growing up are effectively dead. on the other hand, there are still new ones i run across monthly. it’s very difficult for me to separate my own trajectory from the overall “small web” trajectory: i just wish i knew of clean stats to illuminate the true state of things.
Exactly. Where are the users? What are the demographics? What places are seeing inflows/outflows of users? IRC, newsgroups, Discord, blogs, HN? Is it true that small message boards are as popular today as in 2005, it's just that the internet overall is bigger so they have a smaller share? Personally it absolutely does not feel true.
Ha, I found your website late last year and eventually started publishing lists of things I had found interesting in a per week, week in review: https://photogabble.co.uk/topic/week-in-review/
The "slow web" never left it just became more underground as the flashy algorithms paved over it in favour of turning visitors into media consumption addicts then into a product to sell to advertisers.
I feel that Facebook really hurts lots of small organization. They fell into a trap of using a free website...instead of building up their own members, email lists, content.
For instance lots of birders post their pictures to Facebook, it helps to connect with people and get tips about birding locations. But...at the cost of depth. The pictures look good, but you don't learn very much about nature. It's like fast food, not nutritious.
It also sucks the air out of the room, and prevents other sites from growing. Sites that could grow into something more useful.
> Reels is not interspersed with ADs which is refreshing, but that could all change.
I feel like it's the opposite. Everything on Reels is either a meme, scam or an ad (be it influencer ad or a blatant one). My theory why Youtube shorts and Instagram Reels turn out this way is that they are attached to an existing network with developed spam/influence markets where's TikTok had to reinvent in and in the progress the culture managed to reduce the obcenity of it. Though, TikTok is getting worse by the day as these markets develop.
Yet somehow me and my group of friends all use Instagram to keep in touch in the same way we’ve done for years, and in the same way we will likely continue to do so for years longer, mostly undisturbed by the changes that come and go…
I try to use it the same way but find the changes disturbing. More and more ads. More and more suggested content. The ratio of stuff I'm there to see versus the stuff I don't want to see isn't very good in 2022.
I get the impression all of these sites that use quick 10-15 second video clips followed by screenshots of a tweet or quote are a dystopian method of controlling human behavior.
It seems like a way to implant a thought or feeling and minimize critical thinking.
In the past social media sites reddit / facebook had great comment sections and links to actual articles. Although this still exists (to some extent and on niche subreddits for example) it seems to be rapidly changing to screenshot of a tweet, or quote or a short video clip. Followed by one line responses or even just a single emoji.
For example you will see a quote from politician x … as a screenshot …. ughh that makes me so mad!!! But little context is provided about the quote, when it was said, was it actually said and is the the expanded text available to help understand.
Nope it’s .. just a quick emotion that makes me mad!!… followed by scroll to cat video #532
Watching people sitting at parks, waiting for a bus, waiting at a restaurant … lots of the same … scroll scroll … giggle giggle… go political team A they are saving world … ugghh political team B is so bad and makes me mad they hate everyone … scroll .. scrolll .. did you know if you eat Kale you live forever … scroll … scroll
Just something really off putting about this experience IMO. Seems very shallow / minimal thinking …
It's the reduction of attention-span. Can't have critical thinkers if they can't focus for more than 15 seconds at a time.
I've noticed a lot of people hold conservative views despite growing up fairly liberal because a lot of the solutions to difficult problems are difficult. An easy way out is to accept the first thing that seems fine without any thinking involved. Add to that the fact that it's a worldview that doesn't make sense at first (like many things in maths and science) and people just give up.
Facebook hasn't actually showed me a timeline of what my family and friends have posted in YEARS.
I stopped using FB years ago because of this. I've also stopped using instagram on the last couple of years for the same reason. I'm constantly being shown recommended posts from either random people or ads rather than a basic linear timeline of people I actually give a fuck about.
> Facebook and its rivals call this a "discovery engine" because it reliably spits out recommendations of posts from everywhere that might hold your attention.
All I can think about is how every big social media company continues to invent persuasive technology to keep everyone glued to their devices and steal away our most precious asset in our lives; our attention.
Where your attention goes, your life goes. I'm only 30 and much of my 20s went to these platforms. I can't say for the better. I think we all need to be bored again and not have a constant IV drip of dopamine in our hands at all times.
I'll admit that I deleted my Facebook account years ago, and thus haven't seen what this redesign looks like, but this sounds like a baffling move. Facebook has been less and less popular with the younger crowd; and is now mainly associated as a place for older generations, who like use it primarily as a way to keep track of friends and family and secondarily as a way to see the news. I can't see the "Tiktok-ification" of their platform as being successful at all. My grandmother wants to see pictures of their neighbor's holidays, not scroll through the antics of kids she doesn't know. Again, the article doesn't give any screenshots, but expanding the feed pool to encompass the whole world is the exact opposite of why people are still sticking around.
basically the redesign is exactly the same as its always been, only they sexied up the lefthand column with friends, saved, pages, now marketplace is there because presumably a lot of people just use fb to sell or buy crap. The top bar with notifications got moved to the left hand side, and the chat window is expanded to the entire right third of the screen. It looks like any other electron-esque app now basically, and it takes longer to load to the point where they've added a splash screen. Every other item in your news feed is a sponsored post or something someone put up days ago versus the most recent content.
"TikTok and Facebook's antics (existence?) have me seriously considering quitting tech. I feel like no matter what I do, I am feeding one of these societal cancers by implementing tracking for whoever is paying me currently, lifting dark patterns, etc, using the API of Google... I tried to avoid doing these things for awhile but nobody pays me to be ethical.
My only marketable skill is software development and I pretty much hate what it has become. 16 years down the drain."
It's sad how they aren't instead capitalizing on their niche and going back to their roots, instead choosing to go against TikTok which is probably a futile endeavour because they already grabbed and established that culture.
If I've learnt one thing from social networks, it's that competitors only rarely succeed in capturing another network's niche. Instagram has tried to become TikTok too but few would say the Reels concept is a smashing success... Facebook has tried to be Snapchat as well with ephemereal messaging, but few would say Facebook is known for that and recapturing the youth culture today. Meanwhile, Snapchat still thrives at a more rapid rate than Twitter and Facebook. You can not simply copy features and then the culture will come.
And when Google+ was rising, Facebook desperately tried to introduce more ways to handle your friend lists due to the innovative "circles" of Google+. These features still remain but few today are aware that Facebook posts to Friends aren't seen by friends in your Acquaintances friend list because those are there to only see Public posts... This is an example of a relic from those days but there are other examples too.
Despite the confidence you would expect them to have from having more than a billion users, they are surprisingly unsure of themselves and who they want to be. You can also see it happen with Meta and VR. Is that supposed to now work in tandem with the TikTokification (how? a clip feed is hardly interactive?), or are they still just confused about who they want to be? I wonder how much of it has to do with Zuckerberg himself?
You are not the target audience. The fact that HN thinks this spells doom for Instagram just shows how out of touch HN users can be with the average Internet user.
When facebook bought Instagram and changed everything around, people screamed wolf, but IG's popularity exploded. When IG copied snapchat and added stories, techies said it was terrible, the end of IG, but it only caused its popularity to skyrocket, snapchat to practically die, and stories to become the main way people used IG. The average user doesn't care - IG will continue growing and most users will get used to the new normal. A few unhappy users will leave, but they won't even make a dent. Competition in the platform will only increase as every company and "content creator" tries to be on top of the reels feed.
I say this as an outsider that doesn't really use IG.
Several years ago I saw an ad on Tumblr (I know, I know), for a strange meme site. After seeing several hundred of these ads, I got curious about how it could be profitable to run such nonsense and clicked. Content that was just funny enough to keep me scrolling mixed with ads. It turned out, that was a site run by an Israeli ad-tech media company that used algorithms to find out how many ads they could could put in while maintaining attention, a sort of google ads style auction running on the page to determine if it should add an ad or a meme to the page next.
Linkedin has public research doing the same type of thing.
I always thought Facebook sat at a very awkward, uncanny-valley type position on the social media spectrum. On the one hand it doesn't feel (or is) private or personal. The feed mechanic doesn't really make for great conversations and everything is half public, the line between friends and other people isn't that clear, and so on.
Chat platforms like Telegram/Discord/Whatsapp and TikTok clearly lean into one direction (albeit on opposite ends of the spectrum). TikTok tends to be a mile wide and an inch deep but at least it leverages what the internet is good at, and chat apps do the reverse.
I think that bifurcation is just happening in general, not just on social media apps. There's more interest in private spaces as well as mass popular culture but the middle-ground isn't that appealing any more.
Yeah it started off basically private, social, with people you care about and has gradually slid into people you don't really know commenting on non-social stuff.
Nobody I know uses it anymore and we were Facebook's core audience when it started. We all just use WhatsApp now.
I recently download the Facebook app to sell something in the marketplace. It has become so bloated and un-user friendly, I question why anyone would use it on a daily basis. The new feeds is a bunch of irrelevant posts I don’t care about. I guess it was bound to happen when you hire thousands of workers to work on one app. It’s been optimized into a deformed monster.
Exactly. I never really got it until I grew up and ditched the social media apps but when people say "its just nonsense" it truly is just nonsense. It's "news" for the sake of news. Do I need to know there was a robbery in some town a few states over? Do I need to know Selena Gomez celebrated her birthday in a pink brand dress? Do I need to know Trump recently returned to DC for the first time in a year?
(taken from just seeing front page of news site)
No, no and no. It's all nonsense. Yet to some degree, I will have to use energy to process and engage with it. If it "annoys me" I may comment, which wastes even more energy. (and yes, I do get the irony of complaining about this, lol)
I'm not saying all news is bad or to turn it all off... just that one has to realize so much of it is news for the sake of news and the world will still turn without your investment in it.
You hit the nail on the head. News for news sake; drama for drama sake. At some point we need to realize this and give up on it.
It does nothing to help us in life other than give us misery. There are enough problems in life to handle. I don’t need to know about the drama of another stranger.
Went to facebook for the first time in months to check this out. Clicked the little TV icon and waited for 20 seconds on a blank page before some worthless smut loaded. I don’t see this going well for facebook.
I sometimes try to use Facebook to find events and such. Finding an old invite to my friends event was quite impossible since it was drowned out by spam. It feels like it could have a lot of utility but the incentives are very misaligned.
Somewhat unrelated, but the other day I was trying to see which of my friends still live in the city I used to live in, as I was about to visit.
I could not find a way to filter friends by current city. Seems like such an obvious feature meant for a side supposedly about connecting you with friends. Guess it wouldn’t move the right KPIs.
This seems obvious to the younger generation but “my friends who live in X” works just fine on Facebook. I know the older (my) generation is used to more filters but google/fb/ig/tt handle context-free queries fine by default.
I like to go against the current on these topics, try to bring a different perspective even if I don’t fully agree with what I’m saying:
I think the TikTok threat to Meta is overblown. They’re a one trick pony and their trick is the unhealthiest of them all, presenting the user with the least amount of control and provided by the most opaque, state controlled, spyware-esque organisation.
You thought Russia using Facebook for political interference was bad? The CCP is hardwired into TikTok for fucks sakes!
I think Facebook has a longer runway. They will keep milking insta and will prob start doing a better job of monetising Whatsapp.
Also, I think the Occulus is actually pretty great, especially for the price. I can envision a “dumber” version, lighter and with more battery life but 5G dependent for the compute requirements being a thing for external use.
Once a company gets VR done well the smartphone is OVER.
> Once a company gets VR done well the smartphone is OVER.
AR maybe. I seriously doubt that VR will ever be the primary way people interact with computers. People tend to use their phones as a distraction in public, and as a brief reprieve in private. VR entails completely submerging yourself in the computer interface, which might be fine occasionally, but I doubt will ever be most people's preferred way to access social media and the like. AR would enable you to distract yourself while still leaving you aware of what's going on around you. The issue there being that its much more difficult to do AR well. I doubt that VR will take off until someone does AR or MR really well, after which enough people will be already using the headsets for a VR application to become popular.
Can someone please explain to me why Facebook shouldn’t be treated as a news publisher? They are now outright choosing what content to show you. This is indistinguishable from opinion or freelance journalism sites.
Facebook is now explicitly deciding which content to allow, editorializing content at will, and dictating the content that you see.
Looks like a news publisher. Sounds like a news publisher. Acts like a news publisher.
Facebook should not receive Section 230 protections any longer.
Agree completely. If you want Section 230 protection, present posts chronologically or based on some user-chosen criteria. If you want to "curate" people's feeds based on some opaque algorithm you should not be able to hide behind Section 230 when people complain about the results.
It's very difficult to get much engagement on Facebook anymore without boosting your post artificially by paying. I remember being able to just post some random article or status to my timeline and friends would chime in and give their opinions or share jokes...can't really do that anymore, at least not consistently. Now I mostly just use Facebook for chat and news. Tiktok is fun, but I don't understand why it needs to be replicated. There is plenty of room for multiple avenues on how to engage with people, or your friends, etc.
It's not just Facebook either, Twitter is also becoming harder and harder to get good engagment on unless you're already a big account. It wasn't always like that.
Am I the only one who found the article's formatting confusing and unnecessary? The bullet points don't seem to be used for lists, and it isn't clear to me why many words are bold... can someone educate me on this formatting?
This Axios „article“ is the written version of a TikTok session, in an ironic turn of events. The bite sized information and the excessive use of bullet points is designed to keep readers engaged in a world driven by ultra short attention spans. I bemoan the lack of a well researched, deep article around this latest pivot of Facebook.
I mean, this style of writing is actually very old. It's just a thing. Have you ever read Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, for example? Similar brief and punctuated style. Written in 1845.
He says users are using Reels more, even though they say they don't want Reels. Replies say content creators are reluctantly making Reels because the algorithm favors Reels over regular posts. Ironically, he posted this on Twitter (as a video) because it's a better medium for reaching Instagram users?
Back around 2009 when Facebook was first becoming ascendant, people wondered if social networks were generational. I.e., would each younger generation be willing to use the same social network as their parents?
I think the de facto surrender of Facebook to TikTok here is evidence that social networks ARE generational. That implies that TikTok may reign supreme for about 20 years, but thereabouts, they'll have to contend with yet another rising challenger.
What's going on with Facebook product management? It's shocking to see core products deteriorate, others barely every improve (where's instagram and whatsapp for iPad?), while competitors (these days tiktok, before Snap) are merely imitated years later.
Actually kind of sad to see considering I'm a big fan of Social and 'Meta' has been on the forefront for years. I hope they find a way to rethink this.
Ya, this is it. Myopically metrics driven cultures like this have a failure mode where you're too successful at chasing the metrics and the organization's sense of taste atrophies (you grow to lose trust in your taste because it's disagreed with the metrics so often, or other people push back on it because the metrics say ____)
So there you are: your organization has no taste or ability to create 'good' things that people enjoy, you're also so large that big or wild bets are too hard for the org to stomach. What options do you really have? Pretty much just 1) buy companies or 2) fade into obsolescence...
I don't miss it being run by google or forced into every product, but google+ circles were so much better then facebook friend lists.
But I refuse to be nostalgic for FB, it's always been meh to me.
And the sad thing with all these changes is it's going to frustrate all the old retirees who just want their computer to do the same thing that it used to do.
If you look at the recent Facebook news in concert - "turning up the heat" on employees, Oculus price increase, and copying TikTok as quickly as possible - it seems like Facebook is in real trouble. This is the flailing of a drowning man.
I am very surprised that there are nearly 500 comments on this item and none mentioned VR. VR is the uncharted territory of social media. Facebook has a head-start but TikTok is also investing billions and will catch up. Just as desktops are legacy, soon smartphones will be too.
I also saw no comments about this "Facebook will continue to provide old-school friends-and-family networking via a subsidiary tab. Those posts will be chronologically ordered, as some users have long wished for."
One final point is political ads being big business at FB. So it'll be interesting how are their numbers in the 4th quarter.
I stopped using this years ago, except I still have an account and minorly check once a week or month depending on my mood. I'll give the same refrain I expect from most: how do I keep up with goings-on of long-lost friends, family members with whom I don't want to directly interact but want to know what they're "up to" and to know about major life events? Maybe the answer is that I should delete facebook and go back to beforetimes when the world was smaller and I only interacted with people in my immediate geographic area except at decennial family reunions.
You ask some good questions. I wonder sometimes; if Facebook disappeared tomorrow, how badly would my life be affected? And it's strange to me that the disappearance of a platform which seems to pervade my daily life would only cause minor inconvenience.
I'll admit that Messenger has greater sway over my daily life, but I could probably switch over to an alternate messaging platform with minimal pain.
> Maybe the answer is that I should delete facebook and go back to beforetimes when the world was smaller
It's absurd how highly we've come to value a platform that brings only an incremental amount of joy to our lives (and who knows how much grief). I would be lying if I said I don't enjoy seeing what my old friends are up to, or knowing who's had kids, etc. But well, maybe I'll have to call them up for coffee and a chat instead.
Remarkably, given the variety of social platforms and amount of money invested in them, this appears to be an unsolved problem. It was solved previously, but they've managed to unsolve it again!
Sure. You see them once in a blue moon and catch-up. Or you go back to ye ole grapevine, and ask the people you do want to talk to about the people they talk to that you don’t. Or you forget about them and life carries on.
Facebook will die with what is currently the older generation. They're addicted, and while they're still around, Facebook will survive. Nobody else seems to care so much about Facebook anymore.
I think this suggests that isn’t the case. Facebook knows they can’t survive long term with that strategy and they aren’t happy stagnating, so they’re making changes to try to attract younger users. Except they’re going to fail to do that while also driving away their existing users.
Facebook can not only survive, but thrive if it fires 95% of it's employees and goes git checkout facebook from 5-10 years ago.
That's all it has to do to be a great, profitable, thriving business.
But that's not what 95% of the employees at facebook want, for obvious reasons :)
It's that classic tragedy of the commons - what a business school/marketing/advertising graduate wants is always at odds with what's good for the rest of society.
All social networks are fads and generational, Tik Tok is no different. I think Facebook still has value when it comes to private social networking and marketplace. Tik Tok isn't made for any of that.
Personally I don't like Tik Tok. I'm sure there is good content on that platform but I don't like the format, just like I despise Twitter. It's all made for people with a short attention spam and I've seen way too much creepy and unhinged stuff on it.
The hacks I've done to make facebook kind of useful
- Turn on every privacy setting they have available and "serve me up generic ads only"
- Unfollow EVERTYTHING and EVERYONE, cut your friends list down too, or click on the "follow" only of your real most frequent friends of concern except your core groups of interest, pare it down to less than 20-30, and more so if your groups are active.
- Turn off active status except for your top 10 friends/family and treat messenger like email otherwise (I do the same with do not disturb mode on iphone)
- Use the "Most Recent" button on the left and make it a habit so you don't see the same posts over and over.
It become a lot more useful of a tool after that. Everyone whines but like a lot of things for it to be useful you have to put in a little bit of time and trim your hedges instead of letting them grow into amorphous blobs. or delete it, there's not much in between. Also I hate hate hate tiktok and this whole video thing, I don't think they bring very much more useful info to the social media conversation.
I used to do this to keep my feed concise, only showing posts my friends interacted with (I don't follow any pages), but recently it has become more or less useless. Facebook decided that it wanted to show content that might catch interests by throwing it under the header "Suggested for you". Some time before that, I can simply dismiss it and it won't show again for some time, but right now it showed every day, and I can't dismiss it at all. The most "suggested" page in my feed right now is a fan page of One Piece's author, which posted memes or content related to the manga despite I not showing interest in it, and I can't make it perish.
To me it seems that all social media platforms converge to some user hostile version of Reddit. You can argue that it got worse over time too, but it still is the platform that gives me most control over what I like to see.
The other model that seems to work well for users are obviously platforms like Signal/Matrix/Whatsapp.
It is strange that it is so difficult to be social on a platform that is supposedly "social media". For example, I cannot just follow my friends' feed like I want, the comment editor is often unusable on mobile phone. I cannot send messages to others without installing the app, etc.
Social media facilitates the forming of grassroots movements and this challenges the existing power structures. What Facebook does is curiously well aligned with preventing people from forming grassroots movements.
It does not require a conspiracy for this to happen. It may just be that FB gets pressure from some governments to set up policies that effectively curb down grassroots movements, and if it does not comply, it would get pushed out.
IMO this is the normal lifecycle of any social media. I would even argue that advertising just a part of it.
Kids think its cool and use it -> Slightly older generation enters because its cool with the kids -> even older generation enters -> now its cringe for the kids -> they find something else.
Add on top the fact that the business model incentive is to push as many ads as possible and any medium is transformed from an exclusive sharing space to a public square with your awkward aunt and a million ads.
TikTok is not escaping this. Its still early and people share a lot of intimate things on there (and they are proud that they can do it), but that will quickly change as it becomes more mainstream.
I hate to say this but Google, particularly YouTube, has the best "discovery engine" in my experience. I'm a fan of long-form content so that must be the primary reason why I prefer it over other platforms.
I really miss the experience I had with MySpace back in 2004-2007. It gave users a lot of control over their personal pages, and I had a lot of fun adding all sorts of wacky things. I got to communicate with some of my favorite bands and authors, all the content in someone's profile was contained in a single place. There was almost a diy feel to it. I sometimes even feel nostalgic about the "Top 8" drama. It was a simpler time. I was also young so I probably overlooked the darker side of things then. People did warn a lot about putting your real name online because it might give murderers your information, granted there were fewer people on the internet then and it had a certain wild west vibe to it, the great unknown with associated fears- somewhere along the way society did a 180 and everyone started putting all their information online. It's really strange to think about the shifts, but even stranger to think about the sources of the moving parts bringing the changes.
There are alternatives to corporate-run social media (the Fediverse, to name one off the top of my head) that are less-known. I've personally just left social media altogether. I had a period of time I spent in cycles of addiction/absrinence and I have to say I much prefer to keep in touch with people on more personal direct contact (snail mail, e-mail, messaging) without meddling, extra baggage, advertisers, my data being sold off to unknown entities to do as they please according to their most likely not benign motivations. But the biggest factor in my exit from social media was how negative it all became.
I joined facebook in 2007 when you needed to be invited in and it was basically mostly students. Ober the years things went from "so neat I can connect to people all over the world" to an online battleground in the span of a decade (arguably 2 decades, depending on your online experience). The convenience of keeping in touch with relatives/friends overseas and the wonderment of making friends online has become eclipsed by all the other things which have nothing to do with people being able to connect. If anything these big platforms have become all about (directly, indirectly, incidentally, regardless) gaming the divisions between people to push them apart and foment rifts they can profit from, at least that's how I see it and I am just done with all that.
The "discovery" setups of increasingly all social media platforms is a big turn off for my use case of actually being social with my friends when we are away from each other.
In instagram the only redeeming feature left is the "story" buttons at the top. I stopped using Facebook long ago, though I still use messenger.
I also use Slack and WhatsApp to communicate, basically SMS texting but in groups.
Whatever the "social" platforms now are, they are very off putting to say the least. Maybe good for killing time writing for the bus? A reversion back to cute cat and dog videos.
I hope my child does not fall into the tiktok future. How can I fight against it? I don't use such app but I'm sure it's popular for younger people especially teenagers.
FB/Meta still has phenomenal value, just the FB app is being sunset.
The Whatsapp acquisition, fb friends list and all those photos you have uploaded will be worth so much in time to come.
Where FB wins is it owns the best connections. Who cares what the app shows you, FB actually knows more about who you care about. When that comes to the metaverse that will be like owning the yellowpages and always brings added value.
What they really sell is user's attention , and dashboards for advertisers. The user connections and photos are useful for maintaining that attention but are rather a burden without it.
The same problem has destroyed instagram.
I closed my Facebook account years ago, pre COVID, but still enjoyed instagram.
In the last six months, a steady rot has crept into instagram. I hardly see any of my friend's photos anymore. Just reel after reel after reel from people I have never heard of. I wish they had a settings button to block all reels, but they don't.
Does this mean Facebook’s privacy model is going to change radically? [1] TikTok’s “for you” feed works because all posts are globally-visible, but on Facebook isn’t sharing generally limited to your social network? Will they change things so that every Facebook post is globally visible by default?
[1] Or maybe it changed already. I haven’t used Facebook in a long time.
FWIW, I deleted my Facebook account years ago and never looked back. I’m not on Twitter, TikTok, instagram, or Snapchat. I only maintain presence on LinkedIn due to work (staying in touch with clients), painful as it it. Perhaps there is white space for a new generation of social networks, which are not privacy hoarding ad machines?
> The dominant player in social media is transforming itself into a kind of digital mass media, in which the reactions of hordes of anonymous users, processed by machine learning, drive the selection of your content.
It's becoming more and more evident that this whole thing is one giant intelligence bootstrapping simulation.
Investors believed for 5 years to the "growth first, profit later" theory. But now, another competitor (TikTok) is stealing their market share and profits for FB will never arrive.
This is also a confirmation that not always focusing on growth will give you confidence on market share.
Havent used Facebook in ages, so cant say what they have become. But one of the primary reasons why i left FB was because it had become junk, and was of no value.
Will i go back and use it because it has a new design. probably not, as i believe FB's core approach has not changed
What’s up with the format and writing style of this article? Bulleted lists are used to make points rather than list things, and the first few words of some paragraphs are bolded. Is this a new style of writing that their algorithm shows them is effective?
No sunset, just two different kind of products that coesists. Social networking still strong but shifted to direct messaging app like whatsapp or telegram. The difficult for meta is structure Instagram to keep this two kind of products together.
I belive this is the future of “social media” short snippets of video that does not require a attention span greater then that of a goldfish. Facebook will follow tiktok example, since it seems like that is what people wants to see
I'm curious if this decision was made to be ready for an eventual TikTok ban? The drums have been beating on that for a while. FB might know this is coming and wants to slurp up the displaced users when it happens.
Only a Mark kinda guy would invest in building a whole new ecosystem to try and win in it just because he didn't come up with the fact that video is much more catchy than your grandma's motivational pics.
Spending a few minutes coming back to FB after this article, the chronological feed and news feed seem pretty similar in terms of content. Maybe that's just who I'm friends with though.
I wanted to read this out of sincere curiosity but it put a big popup covering everything that I couldn’t dismiss or even agree to. So welp so much for the content, good luck with all your fish.
building an open, white-label, embeddable Instagram/Tiktok as SAAS solution at alvin5.com. The idea is that communities and individuals can create their own Instagram like social media app/feed (Shopify for Social media), would love to meet with interested parties.
Did Facebook ever really need to become such a behemoth? Could they not have been mildly profitable just hosting pictures and helping people stay connected? Would it have been impossible for them to simply keep operating without capitalism's Blob-like need for growth at all costs?
I pray that someday an original-Facebook social media site returns. I'd really like to keep in touch with friends and family over large distances. I'm even willing to put up with ads in the sidebar, or at this point in my life donate to a site that provides such a valuable service.
But I won't use or even condone a product that actively manipulates its users via dark patterns. Such a blatant disrespect for personal choice and autonomy. No thought about the consequences on democratic systems, or radicalization of folks exposed, or mental health... just greed, money, and growth above all else.
There is a very special place in hell for people who talk in the movie theatre. And Mark Z.
It's the IT industry we're talking about here. I feel like no one in IT is capable of "just stopping" when the product is good enough. Everything is required to have scope creep or at the very least feature creep and regular UI redesigns for no good reason, seemingly by law.
When money (credit) is cheap and plentiful, there's all the incentives to push the company to bigger and more speculative growth. When credits expensive, you actually have to sell something. Let's see if this downturn is an end to this eras fast money or just a temporary blip before the helicopters of cash start flying again.
If you look into Mark Suckerborg's history, his character, his decisions and their consequences... it becomes pretty evident there are few motivations involved in what he chooses, and even fewer scruples about the consequences.
What a unique garden-path sentence.[0] I had to re-read that a couple times since I thought it was referring to Mark Zuckerberg given the title of the article..
I've tried to type out several pithy comments, but the bottom line (to me) is that Facebook just doesn't respect its users or care about their needs.
Can you imagine if brick-and-mortar businesses tried to do this? You go out for a Big Mac, but it's not on the menu anymore because Taco Bell had a few really good quarters, so McDonald's decided to pivot to tacos. Maybe you can still order the Big Mac if you know to ask for it, but most people won't, and they'll leave disappointed instead of getting what they wanted.
Edit: To clarify, this example is contrived and the details are not the point. The point is that Facebook offered something to their users, spent years and billions of dollars making sure that as many people as possible got it from Facebook, and then decided to just yank the rug out from under all those people to chase the fairy tale of endless growth.