Almost all activity online has shifted away from the Social Graph to a Content Graph. Almost nobody wants to see what their friends are doing online anymore. In a lot of ways it can be cringey. People just want the latest, catchiest content. TikTok and Youtube are the OGs here, but it's everywhere when you start to look. Twitter timeline changes being an awkward but working example. Discovery > Static friends list.
The entire premise FB was founded on is eroding. This isn't just Apple privacy and some regulatory strangulation. It's seismic to the business. The reason most people are still going to Facebook is incompatible with their primary activities online which is: consuming content from people-you-don't-know.
Facebook is where you find out your highschool friend is super in to a MLM, your uncle has drastic political views you don't share, and that your historical social class and network is largely irrelevant to your life a decade later.
They are doing everything they can to try to move in this direction, but the more they push it the less useful Facebook is for the average user. Instagram's discovery page is a prime example. But Reels are less good than TikTok, and whatever they are doing for short form video in Facebook is surely a hopeless game of catch up. This is classical innovator's dilemma.
The very idea that Zuckerberg straight up said they need to copy the competition harder is incomprehensible considering the resources they have.
They are going to try to do a few things. One is to anti-trust Apple (in the media at least), and the other is to hand wave (Metaverse).
The reason the Metaverse was such a non sequitur is that it is so clearly a last minute thrust coming out of the C-Suite. If you've ever worked at a highly visible tech pubco, you've seen this happen before. Weak quarters mean that product announcements get pushed up. When it is as all encompassing as the Metaverse announcement, you know something is up.
"Facebook is where you find out your highschool friend is super in to a MLM, your uncle has drastic political views you don't share, and that your historical social class and network is largely irrelevant to your life a decade later."
This is probably the most accurate description of Facebook I've seen.
I think there are a lot of people who are in my position, which is "I would absolutely love to ditch FB entirely, but I can't because of ____".
The value of ____ might be "seeing pictures of family", or it might be "coordination of/participation in a group that has settled on Facebook as the easiest path" (<-- this is me), or it might be "professionally necessary to be there" or a number of other things.
But none of these are positive reasons. There is no love of Facebook behind any of them. It's Facebook being tolerated. This is bad for Meta.
This is probably good for society at large, though. Or at least I hope it will be.
Re: metaverse, it's not really a handwavey after thought - they've been investing quite significantly ($10bn lost last year alone while all of Google's bets including deepmind and waymo lost ~1.45bn. >10k people working on it now AFAIK).
I think Facebook just got burned by not having a hardware platform this cycle - Apple and Google control the phones and Microsoft has the PC, XBox etc. They just want control over the next big hardware platform.
Whether that's a reasonable bet or not who knows? But I wouldn't be as dismissive of their ambitions in the space.
I use Facebook more these days than I did 5 years ago. It has replaced Craigslist as the place to go for local things, especially buy/sell/trade. Our town, and even certain villages within the town, has a few discussion groups that is where I hear all the important talk/annoucements about what is going on. Groups tend to be like a Subreddit but with geographic IRL connections instead of anonymous interest-based associations.
Perhaps I'm just an outlier, but it's the same with Twitter for me. I use it more these days than I did some years ago, but I also use it mostly like an RSS feed. I follow video game devs, musicians, etc. so I can be kept in the loop on the latest releases and whatnot.
I think you make a good point about content graph. I think there is some truth to that, although I have never really taken any interest in anything but the kind of content that YouTube offers.
What all of this points out is that Facebook never really solved the "MySpace/Friendster" problem, they just had the better product at the right time and were able to get a few more years of safety by acquiring threats (which is not a long term strategy).
It's wild that FB has become such a highly valued company despite the fact that they have always been resting on rather shaky foundations.
We can also start to see Goodhart's Law in action at scale. Running your company by constantly optimizing for metrics (as so many startups mimic now) eventually does catch up to you. The vitriolic content that initially got them massive engagement eventually gets more and more people repulsed by the service.
In the end, just like MySpace and Friendster, there is nothing that really prevents users from exiting from the platform extremely fast once the tide of the network effect turns the other way.
I'm not sure this is right. I think the problem with Facebook is that long ago it shifted to a content graph in terms of use. I have less than 60 people friended because I limit it to people I actually know and want to know what they're up to, and by and large they're people that aren't constantly sharing memes, videos, or other crap. Of course, this means that I can check it out once a week and that's enough to keep up with everything, which doesn't make Facebook money.
I believe the reason Instagram, Snapchat, and now TikTok grew the way they did was because the parents weren't on those apps. Even now we see that young people migrate to other platforms as their parents start paying attention to the current one.
Facebook was never ever about the Social Graph. It was always about user profiling and activity/interest monitoring which could be sold to advertisers. The Social Graph was just one tool for that.
Coincidentally the profiling is also extremely useful for political leverage and behaviour mod. I'm sure that never occurred to anyone around the company, and the links to operations like AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica are incidental among the ad noise.
The incoming anti-trust cases are going to be interesting.
I really do miss the utility apps of the early 2000s that went social. I'm travelling soon and want to re-visit a restaurant I went to some time ago and none of the apps on my phone will make it easy to look up where it was I ate before. When I was living abroad in the early 2000s, the social apps like Foursquare made that kind of utility-to-me feature fun and useful.
FB, as a social platform, is moving away from being a social app. Same thing happened to other social apps. The original utility they had in the early days was subsumed by social, which is now being subsumed by something else. The original utility can't be found anywhere... it was dragged down into the depths and drowned.
In some ways, my iPhone now is less useful to me than it was before. I can look things up in the moment, but in terms of connecting me to my past activities -- not so much.
Only if you're a marketer and see others as little more than consumers. Next thing to burn is commoditization of "content" as the young see through the nonsense and reach out for sincerity.
There are mountains of quality information online and while I would absolutely resent having to grow up in the age of social media, the kids are way better at parsing and questioning rapid onslaughts of information because of the tribulations there.
They get caught up for a while, but the guise wears away. Young people can easily see outside their immediate world, and any adopted worldview, unlike we've ever known. When I was growing up that meant a lonely kid wandering down to the library to flip through magazines from the big city to inject some new ideas into one's world. Now, young people from anywhere can dig into the most arcane of information and worldviews in seconds and begin integrating them earlier on in their lives.
The world will look very different in outlook in a short amount of time, and it will not be for the sake of "content". Just gimme some truth, all I want is some truth.
Agree with most of this, but I'm curious where Facebook groups fit in here. We recently moved to Florida and have been scrambling to find non-religious home school friends for our daughter (homeschooling because of Covid). Facebook has been pretty much only resource available, and I've joined a number of local groups that have proved somewhat helpful. I'm wondering whether groups may provide a level of stickiness and user retention that the timeline may not?
> Almost nobody wants to see what their friends are doing online anymore.
Fact. I unfollowed pretty much every person connected to me on facebook, and now my feed consists primarily of posts from 'This cat is C H O N K Y', 'Foods with threatening auras,' and the like. Huge quality of life improvement, second only to basically never using Facebook at all.
One reason the Metaverse bothers me so much is a) because it's related to the company in general calling itself Meta, which itself is most likely a smokescreen to distract from the company's negative image and b) because it includes all the properties Zuckerberg has directly lied about and made worse - notice how the Instagram people left after conflicts with Zuckerberg, how Whatsapp users are forced into data sharing with Facebook, how suddenly you need a Facebook for the Oculus - if Meta/Metaverse was a conglomeration of home grown properties, in-house, or at worst previously competitive products that neverthelss they did a good job with and fostered to grow, and weren't annoying to use, and didn't pull bait and switch - why, sure, this Metaverse thing might seem like a pretty neat idea. As it stands, not only is Zuckerberg's vision of a utopia "copy and kill everyone else" but Meta/Metaverse is directly using basically stolen properties ("let's buy up these guys to destroy the competition")
Feels like Yahoo in the days it realized it was losing the search arms race to Google and Microsoft. There was this uneasy sense of the underlying seismic shift and that the game had changed and you didn't have the best hand.
Yep, you nailed it. TikTok is hitting Facebook and they are unable to respond. May be they will by copying the algorithm but things are going to get worse before they improve. Not sure if they will change Facebook itself though. That is too entrenched and too many users to change. This is going to be tough for fb to fight.
Facebook replaced the phone book. In the 1990s it was difficult to find someone's contact information. With Google, you can find a way to contact someone, find their email. With everyone having smartphones you can find a way to get a text message to someone.
Interesting: is it possible that this shift towards the content graph has something to do with a more active approach to content moderation? I mean, if your whacky aunt says something on covid, then it seems that he gets a nice label and that his message are propagated to a smaller number of his friends. Is it possible that all these moderation mechanisms have had a ripple effect on the entire network? I mean is it possible that the active stance on content moderation (some call it censorship) has caused the shift towards the content graph versus the social graph? In other words: if they choose to show less content by your whacky aunts, then they still need to fill the timeline with something, so welcome to the content graph!
I mean to say that a change of editorial policy in a given media outlet is often related to a change of political direction; is that the case?
Funny aspect: big tech wants to obtan some real influence and weight in society, so they introduce more censorship as a means of obtaining this weight. Now incidentially this erodes their base, as their clients loose interest in the toy, and start to use something else instead.
Honestly the reason I use facebook still is to consume content from people I don't know, facebook groups are the only social thing left on the website, and the rest of it I use for fb marketplace which at least in my area has totally stolen the spotlight from craigslist.
The reason Facebook is losing, is because they're boxing with two hands behind their back. They're blocked by de facto anti-trust from ever acquiring their relevant competitors.
Acquisitions are a critical instrument for large corporations in terms of competition. TikTok's parent, ByteDance, is not restricted by such problems despite how massive they are, for example.
ByteDance is a $400 billion market cap company that doesn't have to play the game the same way Facebook does despite the fact that they're clearly competing in the same tier of scale now.
And that's not a statement of woe-is-Facebook, nobody should feel bad for Facebook, it's just the fact of the real context they're stuck with and their giant competitor is not.
It seems like it should be easy for FB to pivot to the content graph. Their ability to serve relevant ads is unrivaled. They should be able to do the same with content. Old people buy stuff and love FB. MLM people love Instagram and buy stuff. FB should just roll out a new short video platform, pay influencers a lot to join, and use their algorithm to recommend the best content.
Bizarre how Tiktok went from being a Chinese sovereign state/public enemy that was going to be 'bought' by Oracle/Walmart but is now starting to destroy the 2nd gen social networks, the original concern.
I've assumed for a while FB was being sunset'd/Yahoo'd to prep for a next gen surveillance capitalism engine but the TT Chinese data mining allowance continues to surprise.
Meanwhile the 'off' platforms - Rumble etc - continue to expand, and given Trump's vast small donation $100m+ war chest it seems likely there will increasingly politicized factional networks very soon
This is how the narrative of Facebook looks to me:
Zuckerberg got lucky and then executed brilliantly, transitioned from nerd hacker to CEO amazingly well. He deserves a lot of credit for that.
Since then, Facebook have innovated very little. Zuckerberg recognised this, and bought Instagram and Whatsapp in lieu of building an innovative company. The latter is clearly really difficult to do.
Without a stream of new ideas and products (unlike, say, Apple) Facebook double-downed on maximising revenue growth from their core advertising business. This led to all the scandals and disasters they have brought us, including destabilising societies.
Inevitably, this led to the core product becoming less attractive, and people were also turned off by the negative press. Zuckerberg's rigid control of the company has led to him being a lightening rod for the backlash against big tech and especially adtech. His media skills are awful, so insisting on control and making himself a figurehead has further damaged the business.
Zuckerberg knows the only way out is another home run. He's a super smart and prescient thinker, so he can see VR is a good play. It looks like the timeline for VR won't be short enough to save FB, but even if it were arriving soon enough he must know that FB probably isn't capable of delivering a truly new thing.
This then marks the beginning of the end for the company, as it continues to bring in revenue from Instagram and monetises Whatsapp. Its sheer size means decline is going to take decades.
I wouldn't be surprised if Zuckerberg leaves in the next few years, before the failure of Meta strategy becomes apparent.
What they _should_ have done is debatable, but developing some sense of ethics might have helped. I think they could have focused on building Whatsapp into a payments (etc) app, which would have created an enduring product, and then used the time that bought them to rebuild the company.
Microsoft are showing that it can be done, but I wonder if Facebook has the capacity to do great things. Perhaps the lesson from MS is that only a new leader can rescue such a mired company.
Microsoft, for all its flaws, has strengths. They're grittier than most and ultimately, know how to deliver software products and build businesses around them... very different products and very different businesses. Leadership was a lever to these, but there was something to lever
FB have never built a successful product besides Zuck's original. They have never created a good business besides the FB and program. They pushed both to the max.
FB pushed the walled garden hard. They pushed hard on acquiring the competition. They pushed hard on making the product "addictive" and optimising it on a "what FB wants from users" basis.
In its ad business FB pushed hard on leveraging data. Google's AdWords was always based on user intent. Someone searches for "divorce lawyer," and AdWords finds them a divorce lawyer. FB ads are premised on targeting, not intent. So... leverage data to create a segment with >n chance of wanting a divorce lawyer. It worked.
That's FB in a nutshell. They push hard on simple things.
What they need is something else to push on. I agree on making WhatsApp a payments app. IMO, retail finance would suit FB perfectly. They'd be better at it than Apple or Google. Look at retail banks, like Citi. It's all about pushing for revenue. Some newly invented fee that most customers don't know they're paying. Some new way of charging both sides of a transaction. More of something. Generating revenue from customer data, float, 3rd party deals... taking advantage of moat. FB would be really good at that.
Controlling the VR metaverse... I just don't see it. Too much innovation. Too much invention. Too many elements to balance. Too avante garde. It's not Zuck.
I agree with most of what you wrote up to this point:
> He's a super smart and prescient thinker, so he can see VR is a good play
He made a school yearbook on the internet and copied some features from existing social networks like MySpace. Facebook was just in the right place at the right time and executed well.
The jury is very much still out on whether "VR is a good play", too. It might turn out to be a gigantic over-marketed gimmick like blockchain has.
I don't think it's going to die as quickly as you think - it's a pretty sticky product. The network effects that made it attractive might kill it pretty fast when they evaporate, but it's going to be a major player in adtech for at least a decade, which might just give it time to be "saved" by some of the plays they're now pivoting towards.
On the ethics thing: they introduced some mechanisms around this, but the appointment of Nick Clegg to drive this as head of "Global Affairs" was always an eyebrow-raiser for those even slightly politically aware in the UK, and predictably less effective than FB management needed him to be (note: I voted Lib Dem in 2010 because I believed in his leadership - it's what he did next that showed the warning signs).
I think another quarter of decline and we might see a major shake-up, and I wouldn't be amazed to see Whatsapp getting payment (including crypto) functionality as a bit of Hail Mary to build another social network moat.
I hope they hadn't even tried. Initially, Facebook offered lots of value in the early years in the form that users were actually able to follow their friends' lives and stay connected. You had a bunch of friends and you would see a mostly chronological list of what they had posted that you read until you recognized something you had already seen. If they had kept it that simple Facebook might actually be something I'd be willing to pay for. The newsfeed is absolutely the core of the product and they started ruining it about ten years ago, and very steadily at that.
The acquisition strategy could have worked going forwards, seeing as there's not much anti-trust will in the U.S. against M&A, but the problem is that they missed the chance to buy musical.ly (bought for $1 billion by ByteDance in 2017) which became TikTok. If they had made this acquisition they would be in a very different position.
Looking at my teenage kids and their friends, they barely use Instagram (let alone Facebook), it's all about TikTok.
I think the shift to VR is actually FB acknowledging they lost the mobile platform battle and can not depend on Apple and Google for its future, so it must move the game on.
VR is a platform in which they have a head start and own top to bottom with Oculus.
Essentially Zuckerberg is fast forwarding the future so he’ll have place to sell ads in without a 3rd part like Apple setting the rules.
This is also why he goes full VR and not AR which would likely require a phone somewhere on the side.
> Zuckerberg got lucky and then executed brilliantly, transitioned from nerd hacker to CEO amazingly well. He deserves a lot of credit for that.
I used to work for an extremely unfashionable website that nevertheless was one of the most visited on the web (even though you'd probably be surprised by that if you knew the site) and my experience there was that leadership tried to replicate that success with dozens of other products and never once was able to do it. So much of what made the original site successful was timing and luck.
What baffles me is how they pretty much destroyed the social network aspect of it.
10 years ago Facebook was the place to know what’s going on in your social circle. You’d find out about events or share experiences, setting relationship status was something of significance.
Then the feed became more and more laden with sponsored posts or posts by meme pages. Sharing something personal in this kind of environment suddenly felt awkward.
These days it’s rare to see posts by actual people you know - so why bother?
> Microsoft are showing that it can be done, but I wonder if Facebook has the capacity to do great things. Perhaps the lesson from MS is that only a new leader can rescue such a mired company.
No, the lesson from MS (and IBM, Oracle and SAP) is that once you have a large enough moat of captive users who can't really move away, you can just "go on" and deliver crap to your users as long as the quality of the competition stays below the quality of your crap. And if there is someone coming close, buy them up.
The problem of FB is that there is, at the core, nothing except the "network effect" that creates such a moat. No multi-year contracts with governments or megacorps worth billions of dollars, no source of recurring revenue other than ads, there is nothing that fundamentally ties customers - both "end users" and advertisers - to Facebook.
I don't think this is unreasonable, but I'd also watch out for the "Facebook is dying" narrative that has been popular amongst certain communities for years and years now. Revenue was still up. Profit was still billions and billions. Yes, things are going the wrong way for the first time but it has always felt like people were very fast to jump on the "well this is finally the end" narrative.
I think the correct thing to do would have been to pivot away from user data and ad targeting as business model and start offering premium, paid services. For instance Facebook could have very easily been Slack for businesses, as well as an enterprise internal social network. Another thing would have been to start offering appliances for private hosting of individual Facebook instances. Finally Facebook could have also started competing in cloud and leveraging its massive infrastructure for other companies to use.
I might be wrong but it seems like these could have replaced Facebook’s current revenue model with stable, reliable recurring revenue while also resolving its longstanding PR problems.
I am an owner of Oculus Quest 2, had some VR hands-on experience before and I think that Quest 2 is a solid product worth every cent (but probably heavily sponsored). It is a best of two worlds: I can use it standalone and I can connect it to my PC and play Steam VR titles.
Meta has interesting products for VR work: virtual desktop, meetings/calls with presentation slides. They are one step from decent AR: their passthrough mode is quite good.
They have enough cash to buy any decent VR product and a team behind it, if they see a potential synergy.
So I think Zuck's bet on VR may in the end play out. A hype around everything "metaverse" is unprecedented right now.
Disclaimer: I have a long stake in $META in my portfolio.
Ironically, Facebook was great back when MySpace and Orkut wasn’t a great experience.
I suspect that’s because it wouldn’t just let anybody in. Looking back, the decision to open Facebook up to everyone was (in my book) a bad one. I’ll use the nightclub analogy — a good social network, like a good nightclub, must have bouncers (of sorts) to ensure a quality experience. I realise the conflict between this and Metcalfe’s “law”.
Also, seriously, why not just charge for Facebook and WhatsApp. WhatsApp usage is at levels now when a lot of people will pay for it — and at one point (pre-Facebook) they weren’t free in first-world markets.
What does the future of Apple and Google look like decades from now? If you believe that AR/VR will eventually be a trillion-dollar market then even a second or third place position for Facebook will bring them billions in revenue, they just need to be in the market when that time comes and they already are with Oculus.
The historical analogy in Microsoft is more correct than one might think. For Microsoft, it was a question of relinquishing control (e.g. going from proprietary to open) that helped them grow so much again. They are in many ways, a wholly different company than 20 years ago.
If Facebook could have embraced the mainstream interest in privacy and converted themselves to become a global digital identity provider, they could have become so much more and be on ethical side of history. Now they are almost pursuing both, while not realizing that they have to let go of one (and incur short-term losses) to pursue other.
> It looks like the timeline for VR won't be short enough to save FB, but even if it were arriving soon enough he must know that FB probably isn't capable of delivering a truly new thing.
I think it is...eventually. But the technology to go from where we're at -- where it's mostly just useful for games -- to a true game-changer in the big picture, it's just not there yet. Gonna be several years at the bare minimum, probably, a lot of problems still need to be solved.
FB is an ad business. Changing their DNA to something else is very hard to do.
I had hope that Libra (now Diem) would bring them into personal finance. There are hard problems to solve and the industry is ripe for disruption. Every FB user could have a FB wallet. Remittance, Marketplace, loans, etc.. So many things possible across the entire globe. Not just in the West. They could eat PayPal's lunch.
Instead, Zuck turned his focus to the Metaverse. I really don't get it.
> Without a stream of new ideas and products (unlike, say, Apple)
Apple has no new products in a long time, just overpriced toys that are sold due to good marketing. Most of their money comes from market positioning and closed eco system.
Thry were innovative in the past (that first iphone reveal), but for last years they basically are an app store that takes a 30% cut.
It's a good play only if he finds a way to monetise it on a similar scale he does with the social network. I might have my open-mindedness failing me, but I simply can't see a way how VR can be monetised even close to selling the access to and influence over masses on a global scale.
"Zuckerberg got lucky", that could be said about nearly every start-up. I don't like him (based on his public behavior), but have to admit he was already brilliant before facebook.
You are kind of right about innovation force at facebook. Although, really not sure, why they didn't do more of it. Like getting into cloud similar to google. Especially pytorch kind of feels better then tensorflow. Really strange.
On the other hand google innovated like hell, but in the end it's still google search which makes most of the profits. So maybe there is just not much potential in innovating and holding it's position is more important (which they are doing).
> Zuckerberg got lucky and then executed brilliantly, transitioned from nerd hacker to CEO amazingly well. He deserves a lot of credit for that.
“I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS. People just submitted it. I don't know why.!They ‘trust me’. Dumb fucks.” - Mark Zuckerberg at 19 years old.
No, he always had scummy intentions and does not deserve credit for exploiting people’s trust.
I’ve always thought one possible next step for Facebook would be in the cloud business. Among the big tech companies they are the only ones not reselling their platform expertise but perhaps it’s just not worth it
Brilliant analysis. I would add to the list that a much higher level of scrutiny from M&A regulators is going to be the last nail in the coffin (making new massive acquisition a lot harder).
> What they _should_ have done is debatable, but developing some sense of ethics might have helped.
I don't see how you could do that. Even recognizing a blind spot like that is extremely difficult and then changing that company DNA is near impossible, it might be even harder than pushing for more innovation.
Both are the same problem though: changing culture. That is only possible with a drastic change at the top, which didn't happen.
Zuck would have had to have a personal epiphany for that to happen because he's un-fireable.
He did innovate and more importantly, executed well. Facebook groups, marketplace, buying Oculus, all great plays. They have something like 1.9B daily users. At this point there isn't much growth left and user decline is expected. Facebook don't need to be rescued. Still very healthy.
Now regarding VR. I'm really happy he is going all in on it. He might fail but it's a bold move. Too early to tell but I'm not betting against him.
Zuckerberg was never capable of coming up with products. Facebook is arguably not even his idea. He bought the competition when he couldn't innovate. But the competition got smart and they're not selling anymore. They can smell the blood in the water.
I'm just surprised it's taken this long for it to start affecting hard numbers.
From a technical (software) perspective, what you say aligns as well - I would claim that Facebook has done very little in terms of actual innovation of their core product since their popularity in early 2010s. I want you to think of a snapshot of facebook.com in 2010 where there wasn't much interactivity on the site and everything relied on good 'old hyperlinks and compare it with its present state - where everything is a clusterfuck of react components with unpredictable behaviour.
What I mean by that is - random disappearing newsfeed elements, and random exposé of page admins' personal accounts while commenting on something, bizarre disappearance of comments, loading signs everywhere and for everything and what not.
Sure, one can argue their investment into ReactJS could be considered as innovation. But, look at the business side of things - What value has ReactJS ACTUALLY provided to the site NOW compared to what it was in 2010? Not much.
In 2010, Facebook was this minimalist website where you could add people and post stuff on each others' walls and yeah, occasionally message them. Today, it is a beast that is tons of megabytes downloaded to your computer on the first page visit with a "Messenger platform" - which is just rebranded basic messaging functionality and the clusterfuck that is "Facebook business suite" which is an unnecessarily complicated garbage UI for basic page admin functionality and their "Ads Platform" whose feature set various with where and how you use it. Not to forget Facebook's screwing up of m.facebook.com (the mobile site) where it is barely usable now and with half the features not working (eg. links in stories). Oh, and did I mention about Facebook Lite, Facebook App, Pages App, etc etc. and none of them look like a complete, polished product.
Facebook is a classic case of a taking a good product and screwing it up with needless complexity to the point where the core product is unusable. All this Meta push is just a nail in the coffin for users like me who have had enough - whose expectation wasn't much - just to stay in touch with friends and family. Sometimes, innovation could be as simple as maintaining a stable, core value proposition. I am noticing a lot of people around me are switching back (anecdotal observation) to plain old websites and blogs to express their thoughts and I love that.
I for one, can't wait for the downfall of Facebook, so we can go back to less bloated non-react-vue-js powered SPAs and just back to bare hyperlink powered static webpages :)
FB buys TWTR, only short-term distraction tactic I can think of right now. I jest... I dont think that would be a good idea for many reasons. But FB seems it will only innovate through acquisitions - and now would be the time.
>Facebook have innovated very little. Zuckerberg recognised this, and bought Instagram and Whatsapp in lieu of building an innovative company. The latter is clearly really difficult to do.
I can't remember who it was - maybe Stratechery - that theorized that Zuckerberg thanks to his experience running Facebook had a really good intuition for when Social media where going to go far and thus was able to make deals that at first looked wildly overpriced but in the end seemed to be a steal.
Perhaps their problem right now is that there hasn't been a social media with the growth potential that has been worth their acquiring.
At any rate not sure if I would say just because they failed one time (even with scandals of last few years) that they're really in trouble, that strikes me too much like most financial journalism that says oh no company X had a bad quarter that's it they're toast and then it turns out they come back the next quarter. I say that as someone who does not care for Facebook or any of their acquisitions (although lots in my family like Whatsapp)
I mostly agree, but I'm not convinced they're going to fail at the VR thing. When my mom (she's a grandma) got a headset and loved it. It made me think twice about it being irrelevant.
I think all centralised social networks have a shelf life.
The question has always been if META manages to create/buy the next big centralised social network after facebook.
And this has always been a long shot.
A lot of companies acquire to expand. What has Cisco invented since the router in the early 90’s? Their entire product line can be traced to an acquisition.
> What they _should_ have done is debatable, but developing some sense of ethics might have helped.
Right? Imagine what could've been if they would acknowledge problems they've caused and co-operate with society to help overcome them. Such a radical idea. Instead, in the hands of capitalism, they were focused on the short-term giant profits that everyone knows won't last forever. It'll be joyful to watch it collapse. I think they were to proud of themselves to admit what they've created - a 21st century phonebook and that's it.
It's just that most users they lost went from "I use Facebook" to "I don't want to use Facebook, but kinds still have to" (because friends, family etc.).
All people below 40y I know which have Facebook fall more or less in the second category...
I fall into a 3rd category: I used to log into FB once a month or so to check in. For some reason, they decided I was a fake account (despite working for them for 4.5 years) and asked for my ID. The resolution on my 10-year-old MBP was too low for FB's contractors so they rejected my ID 3 times and I seem to now be locked out of my account indefinitely.
Definitely in the top 10 best thing to ever happen to me.
There's even a metric for that: Daily Active Users. I bet Facebook does not publish that number (or the historical values for it). I bet that number has been going down lately, at least for North American users. There's a reason they changed their name.
My children's school communicates a lot of information through their Facebook page. I had to reactivate my dead account after years when my kid started kindergarten. There was particularly important information that they did not send out anywhere but on Facebook. Meanwhile, they have a "news" page on their actual school website that has not been updated in years. I hate it and I think it should be illegal to force the use of a private, ad-driven platform for public/governmental information.
Facebook may count me as a user, but my account has absolutely no information listed about myself and the only pages I subscribe to are for the school.
I notice the same thing with local governments, where the Office of Emergency Management or Police will post updates about public safety to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Worse now with these services requiring login to see the pages, so now without an account I cannot get the information. This should absolutely not be allowed.
My kid's school uses software called Wilma to communicate with us parents. It suffers from the problems that all enterprise software suffers, but has no ads or tracking and is at least ostensibly secure.
Its android app has a rating of 1.9, but jeez, at least it's not Facebook.
Same. My kids are in sports and Facebook is how they communicate with us, including changes to schedules, "snack duty", pictures and videos from games, etc. It's basically impossible to be a judicious parent and not be on Facebook for me.
If she uses Instagram she's using Facebook. If she has a Facebook account and goes anywhere on the web while she is logged in, she's giving money to Facebook. It is not so simple now. She doesn't have to "use" Facebook for them to monetize her image, her privacy, her network of friends. A company like Meta will always have new products to take in kids. That's what their new "Reels" is about, trying to compete with TikTok. They know that their old product is not cool. This is why they changed their name to "Meta"!
This is a battle you and your kids can't win unless your kids know how to identify when a nasty company is trying to steal their data. If your daughter thinks something else is cool, I bet that's another nasty company trying to steal her data instead of Facebook. Our society can't get out of this trap until your daughter says, "they all SUCK"
I guess the business model of social media companies is coming to fore.
FB has a captive audience, that is aging with facebook and will continue using it.
It is clear why FB purchases IG / WA. They are paying money to capture audiences with money earned from FB.
Going ahead, the cycle will repeat. Once the teens in IG grow into adults, FB will use money from that to buy / make another platform.
In this context, the metaverse makes sense. It is a virtual world, where new SM platforms are churned, with all future populations being part of one or more platforms. FB wants to be the owner of all the platforms.
From a business point of view, it makes more sense, in that, FB can now target ads across platforms, meaning, they target the same number of individuals, but with ads being channeled through different platforms, the ad density comes down, and the feeling of "the feed is all ads" might reduce.
In my circles the only time I have to use Facebook is when Gen Xers are organizing something that requires my participation there, and I delete the account afterwards.
Or I wind up in small town America and the people there believe that Facebook marketplace + groups has better resources for sale and meetups. My experience with that was that generally accessible forums (even with being private and an “approval” process) all being full of scammers and time wasters. I found resources and niches in person. I checked the same groups 6 months later and nobody was getting anywhere with anything. YMMV of course, but the scammers are integrated everywhere.
Small town America is a big place so there is a market for the illusion of utility!
Nothing wrong with old people. There's quite a few of them in our world, and only increasing. Also, old people have money, unlike teenagers. Also, old people stick around, unlike teens that switch networks every year or so.
So...what is the appeal of teenagers again? Is it being "cool"? What can I buy for cool?
Yes, but the stock market works on the premise of growth, they try to raise money by virtue of being on the stock market, in order get the money required to finance that growth.
I would think, that a company that has plateaued should take itself off the stock market, however this doesn't seem to be happening. Such a move would probably imply some drastic changes in how a company is goverend.
yeah but for a long time their stock price was built on the dream of growth. Of course you can have a publicly traded company with a steady business. A good board and leadership can keep it going.
Right now it feels like Wall street is realizing the growth party at Meta is ending. Now it's about figuring out how much, if at all, it's going to contract and what the real value of the business will be going forward.
My 2 cents, not that it's important, is that Facebook killed it's own product by A/B testing for user engagement. The product went from a cool place to see what your friends were up (bit like insta was for a while), to this sh*thole place filled with junk viral videos, adds, whacky content from a few insane friends, etc. It became like a cheap social porn dumping ground.
I really just want to see what my friends are up to. I don't want to feel that the posts I get are heavily filtered by algorithms or that 'unpopular' opinions are hidden or whatever.
The original Facebook product back in 2008-2010 was really good. If anything, I think Facebook shows how important is it to develop a product vision that is more than just 'clickbait+++' which is basically Facebook's strategy. [Around 2010, I imagine a bunch of overly nerdy socially maladjusted 20-something programmers sitting around Fakebook HQ describing to robotic-Mark how an excel-driven click-bait approach can make Fakebook way more popular than ever. "Look popularity with maths".]
Now the only thing I really use it for is business pages. [I don't even know why Google don't have a slightly better business-page experience on their maps.]
Zuckerberg, I think is a bit of a genius, but seems to lack much capacity or instinct to display technological 'taste'. That rare thing Steve Jobs valued and talked about. It's why Apple is and remains cool and why it's able to handle PR better. Apple are just much more sophisticated at controlling people's perception around the appeal of the brand. Apple provide a 'luxury' brand experience to 50% of the (developed) world. Facebook's brand is so toxic it decided to change it's name to Meta. [Note, timing the change to Meta not long before the growth slows a lot. I'm surprised Facebook was really even growing much. Well I heard most growth has come from outside the developed economies and it's a waste ground among the young in the West.]
Zuckerberg - from afar - looks like a robotic alien trying to work out the grandest legal pump and dump scheme he can pull off. I do salute him because he's so successful and I still think he'll work out how to make Meta's transition. He's got lots of cards to play in his hand and he seems pretty good at business poker. So, I also congratulate him.
My take away from this is amazed they have had increased daily user activity for 18 years, that alone (whatever you think of FB) is pretty amazing from a business perspective. Which is probably why this is an eventful news worthy note.
I'm now wondering if such a blip could snowball via the markets and see a tech crash at some level and a sign of that will be how this news from Facebook plays out upon the other social media outlets. Will TikTok, Twitter and in-part via YT, google, also see a dent in share prices based upon this! Maybe, given how much of the market is based upon perception and momentum. Though that is just my thoughts upon this and certainly I'm not burried into the markets knowing every nuance and sign.
[EDIT ADD] I somehow missed this poignant aspect in the article "Shares in other social media platforms, including Twitter, Snap and Pinterest, also fell sharply in extended trading." So does somewhat lean into my thoughts upon how markets operate in some ways. How that holds and if this blip is just a knee-jerk reaction over a period of time is more the indicator in-play here.
I rarely pick stocks, but I took a long position in Twitter, Snap and Pinterest this morning bc, imo, this is definitely an over-reaction.
The time the average person spends on their phone (and social media) has only been increasing year over year. If Facebook's growth is slowing, that's directly at the hands of competitors.
The big reason behind losses was likely the iOS 14 tracking update. Right after it a ton of Facebook Advertisers groups on Facebook started complaining all of their carefully crafted campaigns were not producing revenue anymore. Targeting and regathering stopped making sales for advertisers and they quickly stopped spending on FB. The people who still spend are now doing videos as ads. Small advertisers were the canary in the coal mine.
No. The real reason behind the losses is that TikTok became the number 1 app in the world today, and is directly taking away social engagement time from Instagram and Facebook. Heck, Zuckerberg admitted it himself in a post today:
"[...] there are two things that I want to call out that are having an impact on our business. The first is competition. People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly."
Android has more market share.[0] Is there something intrinsic to FB ads that are significantly more successful for iOS users rather than Android users? Does FB cater their apps to iOS somehow more successfully, e.g Android users are more savvy and less likely to take to digital nudges?
If that's not the case, then the 25% of market loss doesn't make sense to me -- are FB ads bulk purchases somehow, or are they by user?
People like to hate on Facebook, but how is any other social media different? They are all free services that profit from your personal information. Some just have better PR than the other.
The problem is that there is social media. Facebook is the biggest success, which is why people focus on it. Facebook displaces other forms of communication I prefer to use. I used to use email heavily to communicate with friends. Email was the best format for me, now no one uses it. Everyone is on 12 messaging platforms, Facebook started that trend with messenger.
I used to be able to go to business websites and get the information I needed, now everyone primarily uses Facebook pages to post information, which means I have to log in on many occasions to view the content. The Internet before Facebook was much more convenient for me.
Facebook hasn’t resulted in any positive interactions for me. Something about the platform drives people to be confrontational. Years ago when I participated on the platform I would reply to friend’s posts. Sometimes I would get replies from their friends and they tried to argue with me. It boiled down to them believing I said something in my post that I did not write. That drove me to not write my thoughts about something, and when I did reply, it was with shallow positive comments. That is a very boring way to interact with people, so I stopped using the platform.
Because it is rotten to the core? Because of its utterly unsympathetic upper management? (Ok, Bezos as runner up). Because of all of the deceptive things it has done over the years?
>People like to hate on Facebook, but how is any other social media different?
I think the main reason for it is that most of us are just old enough to remember what facebook was before they started filling the site with ads and recommended/paid/suggested/etc posts. It was really fucking great back when you would logging and there would be literally no content/ads other than what your friend manually took the time write/post.
they gave us a taste of what a great minimalist social media platform could be and then turned monetisation/engagement to 9000.
Imagine if HN was bought by reddit and they decided to use the reddit platform (new skin only, no "old.XX...") with all the ads and everything. That's kinda what happened to facebook.
Exactly. It is no different to the rest of them. This game is simply one tyrant (TikTok) dethroning another (Meta) and all of them make money out of our personal data.
Facebook (the social network) was known to be in decline for years. The real attention is on Instagram and WhatsApp are still adding users. I wouldn't rush to rule them out yet over this.
Hacker News and other relatively smaller forums are different. They are free social media networks that aren't optimized to maximize engagement, promote outrage, or instill a fear of missing out.
- they have/had a critical size. No other social media was that big, and size matters.
- they required (still do?) real IDs. Forcing people to use their real name is a special kind of awful, especially when it's the main network
- they push a unified account platform for everything they owned. Other companies tried too but most failed (I also hate Apple for that, if you were to ask).
Its already frustrating enough having to use Facebook just to look up a restaurant's information, the set times for a concert, or whatever about a local business or event. If all that stuff starts to disappear behind a meta-verse wall, I might just leap off the nearest bridge instead.
Yes, it feels like a return to the walled-garden days of America Online, Prodigy, CompuServe, etc. Essentially, they seem to be want to create a separate network that they control--one that is not "internet-ed" to other networks in an open fashion.
You're right, it's dismal. I appeal you make it the furthest away bridge, give yourself plenty of time to reconsider, and maybe find a nice restaurant, concert, business or event along the way.
Thanks for putting into words what I've been noticing and feeling. There's something dreadful that ephemerally appears whenever a service or someone links to an FB page.
This is the reason I went anti facebook years back not because of privacy implications but I felt with facebook the web will become less open. As most business will make a facebook page instead of a website accessible to everyone
I wonder what percentage of Facebook's users are only there because of 3 or fewer friends, bands, groups/clubs/interests, or businesses that still use Facebook as their primary means of communication.
I basically still log in for interest group posts (e.g., photos from my son's preschool) and to RSVP for party invites. I'd love to see alternatives take over for these.
I only use it to find local events. If it weren’t for fb and insta you’d think nothing was happening at all. The old local publications were all mothballed by the pandemic.
I have never used Facebook and I’ve never had trouble finding that kind of information on non-Facebook sites. Are you just used to looking on Facebook first?
My take: fb failed as a social network. Its a data sink you put stuff in but you can't get anything out. You cannot represent real social networks in fb. In real social networks you have different social circles and a different name. Facebook devides the world into friends and public, you yourself have one identity only, and that's not a good model for mapping real social networks into digital ones.
During the pandemic when we all really needed social networking fb failed to map your local bars social network onto fb.com.
If they focused on being a social network tool, instead of eating competition so they are _the_ (only) social network, people might increasingly use their products.
Their users growth has been lowering towards 0 for a few years and it's expected that users will eventually shrink. It's just symbolic when you pass the tipping point (although this might be local and not be the definitive tipping point).
I am thankful to these evil companies. Thanks to them - I spend less time online, try to read more books, appreciate real-life conversations, rely on locals for information and news, and let my mind wander.
When Facebook first started getting users I tried to access it from a script using Lynx. I don't remember why but it was nothing nefarious, I think I simply wanted to download something for GF periodically.
I got a message that said "We aren't cool enough to support your browser".
Something about the sarcastic snootiness of the message really angered me and prevented me from ever opening a Facebook account. Later I blocked all Facebook domains in Host files and it's been that way ever since.
For awhile it was a bit awkward with people demanding to know why I didn't have a Facebook page but apparently I hold grudges for a long time. It's been delightful to see people come around to my point of view on Facebook.
They really are like a seedy bar in the bad part of town. With snooty messages for circumventors. But I have to thank them for that snooty message otherwise I would have probably caved and opened an account years ago.
> I got a message that said "We aren't cool enough to support your browser". Something about the sarcastic snootiness of the message really angered me and prevented me from ever opening a Facebook account.
Really? I think Facebook's message is kind of nice compared to the standard "Please use a different browser". Whereas the common message implies that you are the problem for using an unusual browser, Facebook's message acknowledges that they are the problem for being less cool than you.
Tbh, you don’t have a point of view on Facebook that people have come around to. You didn’t like FB for their condescension. Today people are walking out of fb for their business practices (and ppbly a myriad other reasons).
Your reason and theirs have little overlap though it could be argued that condescension is a symptom of internal malaise which is also reflected in shady business practices which is causing users to now abandon FB.
The fact of the matter is they still have close 2 billion active logins each day. Even if they have settled in matters of user acquisitions they haven't stopped harvesting increasing amounts of profit from each users. I would like to know how the statistics of revenue per user would be from this point on.
I'd like clear qualifying of what a login means. Does that mean I goto facebook.com or open FB app at least once a day? I imagine "daily login" could be artificially inflated in all sorts of ways like having fb.com tab open on my browser and never actually going to it as one example.
Peak oil production (global): unknown, maybe 2020-2030
Peak Facebook: ??
That's an incomplete peer group, but I find it interesting that at some point, society does start to unplug from addictive substances. The tapering off is quite slow, though. Unclear whether heavy users cut back, or new generations just don't develop the habit as older ones die off
Facebook has been primarily displaced by Tiktok, which is considerably more addictive than FB. It's like zonking out in front of cable TV in the olden days, if the cable TV had access to an essentially unlimited content library of short-form dopamine hits, was capable of determining exactly what you like, and showing you exactly that forever.
The difference is, the US population kept growing, so while per capita figures falling is noticeable, total coffee/cigarette consumption may not have fallen.
Facebook's numbers are falling despite a growth in world population, and I'd bet a larger growth in the internet-connected population. That's worse, especially for a platform heavily reliant on network effects.
I think it has more to do with alternatives (except perhaps in case of cigarettes which have direct measurable health effects) availability rather than society starting to unplug from addictive substances.
Peak coffee is in 1946, but what have consumers moved onto from then? Alcohol, Tea, Energy drinks, Soft Drinks ?
Wow I had no idea Americans used to drink more coffee than now. Surely serving sizes have grown and grown - absolutely nobody was having a 20-ounce coffee in 1946, but now that's normal. Doesn't seem to add up but I'm sure you're right.
This one interested me. We're at a local maximum in terms of coffee consumption in recent years. After WWII coffee fell off in popularity and due to the substitute of carbonated soft drinks. Most likely in simplest terms it was a cheaper energy drink for the poor.
Big difference in comparing an entire product area with a specific company and brand. Individual cigarette companies, coffee shops etc. have been going in an out of fashion the entire time. Similarly, the total number of social media users is nowhere near its peak.
I'd say it is actually remarkable just how long Facebook (the site) has been able to maintain relevance, whereas people should have been bored and migrated to something newer and shiner a long time ago (as is now finally happening with apps like TikTok).
I think 2014. Just by looking at things like wall posts on my personal page, around 2015, things went downhill and after 2016, it became really quiet. Almost none of my friends (23 to 33) use Facebook anymore except for the occasional photo dumps. Most are on instagram but even the number of stories posted has gone down as well.
If you include Facebook then you may as well include all other social media platforms.
Facebook is the least of my problems when it comes to addictive substances. Youtube, Reddit, Hackernews, TikTok. They're all the same even if they don't go out of their way to insight addiction.
How is the coffee one even possible? I don’t drink coffee, but almost everyone else I know does. There is a Starbucks on every corner. Every coffee shack always has lines.
I'm not surprised. The complete company doesn't provide any actually required product or value, just aggregating "users". And the company has the worst imaginable reputation (closed-source, awkward and stupid censorship, clear name enforcement, advertisement, users are not customers but a resource, and much more).
It doesn't talk about software, development, technology or service. Merely, buy others. If you don't innovate yourself you have to buy quickly everyone else before they can harm you. That is what Facebook is doing.
And thus begins their gamble. They’re going to have to bet the entire biz on virtual. Most public companies can’t do this, but FB has a unique control structure that gives Zuck the ability to bet the farm.
Does anyone else find this on the level of batshit crazy insane? Meta, are we really going to divest so far from the physical world that the a virtual reality is worth that much? I mean VR is realistically a video game. I just don't see it but I do see desperation from FB.
This is exactly it. They are going to bet the farm on the metaverse. Personally, I don't even like their odds there. Their risk of not existing 10 years from now is 10x any of the other FAANG companies IMO.
They'd be smarter to keep their head down and just keep buying whatever network get's cool down the line IMO.
They have to invest in something if they want to remain relevant. They make loads of money from their ad revenue. They may not be able to acquire the next Instagram or TikTok when it comes.
I use Facebook almost exclusively for local motorcycle groups and my BJJ gym.
For small, local groups, Facebook is a great free way to setup events (like group rides) and share hobbies.
My motorcycle group used to use Meetup but it has a fee and has much lower engagement.
I've stopped using it as a way to communicate with family and friends because of the toxicity related to political divisions. I had to leave a family group messenger chat when two of my brothers started calling my oldest brother vulgar names while talking about my Aunt and Uncle dying of COVID.
Yup. You’d think they’d wait until they had an actual product (heck, even a janky demo) to unveil the metaverse. This whole thing feels like a grift.
It’ll keep the investors distracted for a few years, which will buy Facebook some time to actually put together a real product (who knows if it’ll be something anyone wants to use)
People associate with the most toxic people, subscribe to the shadiest pages, and spend their day talking non-sense in dangerous groups, then complain they have a shitty Facebook feed.
People say that about YouTube as well. They'll complain about conspiration theories and fake news, when there are literally videos on practically any subject (physics, History, cooking, sports). It's is YouTube!
It's like people will ignore every delicious food on the planet, go directly to the sewers to feast on feces, and then accuse everyone else.
At some point, someone who likes to feed on shit ought to question their culinary choices and take responsibility.
Do you know what sort of posts they were? There are some real nutty pro-violence Republicans in WA state (ex: Shea) which could trigger bans or suspensions.
Due to past behavior and FB's justification of that behavior, I quit using the company's services and products years ago. I remain unwilling to be a FB user of any kind.
Same. In fact, I literally just abandoned it. I didn't try to delete it. I just deleted it off my phone and never logged back in again. Been like this for 4 months now. Feels great!
Speaking as someone who deleted his Facebook account years ago, a positive that FB brings to the world is ubiquitous and easy sharing of personal information with the public. With an FB account, you can keep in touch with even casual acquaintances, perhaps forming a connection. That's pretty deep, and a net positive for humanity, and fulfills the promise of the internet.
I predict that what we call "social media" today - this specific aspect of ubiquitous human connection - will continue long after FB is gone and forgotten. I foresee that the ultimate successor will likely be more of a protocol like RSS or FOAF that various platforms can plug into, rather than another web app you log into, owned by yet another monetizing corporation.
The picture you paint of connecting with friends and acquaintances is no longer how Facebook works for me.
The last years, my Facebook feed has been completely dominated by a few groups I'm in (OK, I guess - but not what I signed up for originally), news and commercial entities I have "liked" at some point, and ads.
I never see my friends there any more, unless they're the marketing hustle type. It feels honestly not entirely unlike LinkedIn, which is not a compliment.
As a test, I visited some of my better friends profiles to see if they have posted anything lately. None had. For YEARS. All their content has moved either to Instagram or Snapchat, or they have just stopped posting altogether.
But my group of friends still use Facebook as our primary Event invitation system, and roughly everyone has FB Messenger (as that's the standard here in Norway).
I think social media has shifted from wanting to keep up with friends and family to serving as a distraction from the general malaise most seem to feel. TikTok and Instagram are bright and shiny and distract people via images of attractive hopeful people. Facebook is just seeing that everyone else is doing as badly as they are or perhaps worse, better. I think it ties in with the boom in crypto, everyone is looking for a moonshot to escape. I think the country is going through something very unique, like a social despair and that companies need to adapt. I could be projecting.
I think this has been pretty obvious for a while... MAU doesn't tell the real story and I think we all have anecdotal evidence that the engagement and demographics changed substantially over the last 5 years.
That's why I was commenting last week here that the antitrust lawsuit in US on monopoly is bogus.
Tiktok has come out of nowhere in the span of last few years to compete. FB doesn't have a market capture as the US lawmakers and Lina Khan accuse them of having.
Also, the same issues like disinformation etc which FB suffered from is going to be a problem for any social media platform, even Tiktok. Tiktok has far less infra and resources invested into stopping it, so it will be interesting to see if the target shifts on to Tiktok now.
Theres so many ads on instagram Im considering dumping it. Thats the only social platform I ever liked because I dont have to hear peoples opinions on things. But Im at a breaking point.
Exactly. The main feed doesn't hold any meaning for me now. I find I miss around 50% of my friend's posts and reels if I don't check their profile manually. I only use it for seeing and posting stories now. I'm sure stories would get similarly ad-clogged in 1-2 years as well.
Just to clarify, I'm fine with seeing some ads in between chronological posts. But the feed is entirely ads after 5-6 posts. Hoping some brave instagram PM reads this comment.
It's almost impressive how much of Instagram is just ads. I keep it around to follow a few people, but it seems like more than half of what scrolls by is either ads or totally off-base account recommendations (Which are themselves, essentially ads)
As people commented already, meta / facebook will be a enormous cash cow for quite some time. This raises the interesting question of whether it could actually reinvent itself in some way.
Having an almost 100% concentration on a business model that is (thankfully) increasingly seen as a socially detrimental aberration, it means that they would need to diversify into more conventional tech business models the way, e.g., Alphabet/Google is trying to do [0]
The problem is, of-course, that honest tech business models are a well occupied ecological niche and in the absence of some regulatory/political granted monopoly the competition tends to turn lethal.
They could launch a cloud business for example, with the unique selling point: we know best how to collect and monetize your data, so we know best how to protect it :-).
[0] I am dismissing the "metaverse" thingy as some sort of smoke and mirrors that seems to be necessary to provide cover for precisely the kind of news now being discussed
When the metaverse actually launches they will skyrocket. They were smart to pivot early. Saying the 'metaverse' is on FB right now is similar to people selling acres on the Moon before anyone landed. FB is planting an imaginary flag on the 'metaverse' hoping they can technically catch up to their claims and capitalize on it.
What is it, besides an ugly, much less functional Second Life? Who's launching it? What is it good for? Why would someone use it over...well, you have to define what it's good for before I can even ask that question.
I'm long on Meta as well and I really like the Quest (2), but the metaverse already had a soft launch. What Meta has been able to accomplish so far is impressive, but it's still not enough.
What's the status quo with VR problems?
- Price: This was fixed with Quest 2
- Complexity: This was also fixed with Quest.
- Socially acceptable: Nope. Even when you remove the issue of the toxicity surrounding Facebook's brand, most people refuse to either try or use VR regularly. Case in point, Meta is giving away Quest 2's to their employees and contractors. imo it's surprising to me that not all of them took the offer. One common answer I get is, "This is going to be as gimicky as the Wii right?". imo the form factor is what drives normal people away. It has to be smaller and closer to goggles before mass acceptance happens. Apple is most likely right on their approach, based on their patent submissions. Conversely, Apple's weakness will be price.
I think renaming was a massive strategic mistake. The metaverse, even if it succeeds from a technical standpoint, will need to be deemed 'cool' for people to adopt it. And generally, if you have something cool, you don't prematurely blurt it out to the rest of the world.
Your first sentences and last sentences contradict each other in my mind. They're selling nonense. I don't know why they're pushing the metaverse so hard in media. It feels as astroturfed as crypto is. I'm not putting on a VR headset to go to a meeting, I would literally never want that.
The main issue with selling "the metaverse" is that Facebook can't do it. Zuckerberg has made sure that the would be early adopters are steering clear of anything coming out of Facebook/Meta.
You can't piss of the tech entusiasts, reviewers, podcasts and everyone in between by constantly exhibiting poor judgement, arrogant behavior and blatantly invading peoples privacy, and then expect them to be excited about your next venture.
Facebook has burned pretty much any goodwill it might have had, and now it want's you to emerge yourself in it's VR world? Zuckerberg has to be incredibly delusional if he think that's going to sell.
The metaverse already exists. It has for 10+ years.
FB isn't betting on the metaverse existing. They are betting that they can make some new walled portion off it that will be so big that it will esentially be the whole thing.
Yes, unfortunately I bought in 2 days ago. The market is irrational. Facebook literally missed its projections by 3% and loses 0.15% of its active users (mostly due to things opening up) and investors panic. Good time to buy in.
Yup. Average daily users is such a meaningless stat. There’s a huge difference between spending 5 hours a day on Facebook, and briefly opening Messenger to respond to a single message, but both are equally considered a “daily user”
Anecdotally, I know several people who shifted from Facebook, with its toxic space for arguments, to Instagram in the last few years.
I stopped using Facebook a few years ago, when it was mainly for a few topic focused groups. I wish there were a way to download all the group posts and comments (or at least the ones I participated in) in some kind of an open text based format I can store locally and refer to. If you know of any such tools, please share.
There’s so much information locked into the platform, and with no way for search engines to index and no easy way to even lookup information within it (Facebook search has always sucked), it’s a huge loss.
I really don’t get this argument. Facebook is just people. The same people you find on Facebook are everywhere else. You think ig is clean? Let me introduce you to my antivax cousin.
Junk is everywhere and I don’t understand how people focus on the company. Everyone here should understand how difficult it is to combat spam, especially on a planetary level like on Facebook.
People need to be careful with that because Instagram is much more powerful while seeming innocuous. (Even before copying TikTok with the reels feature, and before chilling Snapchat with the stories feature. Now it’s all amplified.)
Which is impressive because I still have Facebook I just don't login and never use any of its services - the account now exists to simply hold a lock on my name on the service.
I haven’t worked at FB in almost 5 years, and it’s definitely a clear milestone on growth not being massive always, but shaving 2 dimes off the market cap seems, abrupt. You’d think the cap might slow its growth more gradually and (if DAUs go up again) gain more gradually.
I appreciate companies only release rock solid figures on a certain cadence, but there’s like a zillion analysts who can read tea leaves.
IMHO tech equities are pricey in general, but for someone who wants FAANG exposure this might be the bargain at Barney’s Upper East?
The language around this is confusing and contradictory around the article. Did overall users fall or did user growth fall? Is it decelerating or shrinking?
Google hasn't really ever been a place to be. Search isn't a place to hang out. Google seems more likely to hang around a long time, it's products are utilitarian and win based mostly on scale at this point.
I work in a big consulting firm that really believes that the Metaverse is gonna be the future, and are even creating a team just to develop aplications for clients in the Meta. I don`t think this is what going to save the company. PAssing all day with an VR device in your face seens very uncorfotable to me, and I can see works adopting it.
I used facebook for a brief period only because I was trying to sell some stuff on the marketplace. That being said marketplace is a crapshoot most of the time it seems so it ended up not working out. Every time I visited that cesspool of a website I regretted it immediately. Had to add a stylus script to disable loads of unwanted content
The biggest asset of Facebook for now is the facebook platform, perhaps a more durable asset will be the social graph sourced by the facebook platform. What would it mean for a durable social graph commercialization model? I'm not sure, but at a minimum it would need to be exportable and portable between platforms and ecosystems.
In many ways TikTok re-creates the best part of myspace - being able to express your personality. You can dance, make fun of yourself, post a thirst trap or make history memes. You can't do any of that on Facebook and I'm sure the fact your videos can go viral is way more appealing.
The Fb home feed is becoming a cesspool of brag photos disguised at wanting to share their daily lives with friends and family.
There are better ways to do that than having 500 friends on your list and hoping someone would see it and press like. It feels a bit disgusting now that people actually use it more like their Instagram feed
If you think about how metrics works, they probably had friendly fraud pumping their numbers -- think about them counting bots as new users when in fact it was just bots. Zuck sells Nov'2021 because he knows this info (insider trading works this way), earnings come out and news is released from the prior quarter.
Zuck and other executives sell on a schedule right? I agree this is plausible but your second sentence sort of implies he in short time frame defrauding investors by selling before releasing numbers. Not sure that is the case, its the same as Elon Musk asking Twitter if he should sell but already had scheduled sales disclosed prior.
I wonder how many people are like me...they see this article and think, "Hey, I have a Facebook account, I should see what it is going on there since I haven't looked at it in however many days." Then I look and see there are no messages or anything and close it...for who knows how long again.
I used to use Facebook for events, but faced a bug recently where random friends could see the event details for a private event, as if invited, despite not being invited. A pretty serious bug, leading to some awkward messages!
In any case, I now only use FB for one single niche community. If that goes elsewhere, so will I!
The number 1 reason FB has missed is the IDFA change from Apple. It has completely crippled their ad business and their effectiveness and the majority of spend I know has gone to Google.
When FB was clearly 1st or 2nd in all GEO's around the world, they now are not even in the top 3 in many GEOs.
Instagram is monetised to fuck. It’s 50% ads these days. Almost useless and they keep “tweaking” the time line algorithm so nothing is in chronological order and you see the same things again and again. Often from days ago.
WhatsApp is yet to be monetised but doing so is going to be tricky and messy. There are excellent alternatives with the same functionality for free such as Signal that while not a perfect drop in replacement are more than good enough.
If they fuck up WhatsApp they could lose their users very quickly. That’s the trouble with so many messaging platforms. WhatsApp is nothing “special”. I would argue the only “special” service is iMessage due to the exclusivity of iOS although that seems to be more of a US thing than elsewhere.
I think Facebook see they’re in a shit place with WhatsApp which is why they are yet to make any real changes despite owning them for years.
It is the only acquisition they have made that they haven't made any substantial changes to as I honestly think they don't know how to do so and as it is all tied to a persons cell number anyway migration is pretty painless.
People don't need to share a new username with anyone, just blast a message to all their friends with "Hey it's [redacted], I'm using $NewMessageApp now as WhatsApp got all weird with their changes". You get a few people to do that and people happily switch and the network effect takes over.
Most people are using multiple messaging services anyway so it isn't even switching just dropping.
Look at the hell they brought on with their last small change with the privacy policy. You had so much backlash to a small change that they pushed back the deadline and then dropped it altogether.
Imagine actual real monetisation. It would be the end of the service in the blink of an eye.
Sorry but Instagram is full of ads. So full that it bothers me and avoid looking at stories.
WhatsApp is not monetized yet. Though, I believe it can be easily exchanged with a different service (e.g Signal, Telegram, …) if they start throwing ads at the users.
I use FB to keep track of a few old friends, a couple of online "clubs", and to just kind of monitor the goings-on and general sense-of-the-crazy from That Side of the Family (if you have one of those, you know what I mean).
FB is inessential. If it collapsed tomorrow, I'd remove a bookmark.
A shame Facebook hasn't seen the massive upside in pivoting to "be a force for saving democracy, with a side line in diminishing inequity, political (and wealth!) polarization, and inculcating respect for the commons, the middle ground, and public wellbeing."
The upside that I hope to see from this is that the faster Facebook loses its shine and becomes a negatively viewed legacy product on a downward trajectory, the more likely Meta is to make good on relaxing the Facebook account requirement for Oculus.
FINALLY. Can‘t wait for the failure of „meta“ (i refuse to let evil FB Inc. own that word) and see all the awesome devs working there, finally work on something else than exploiting the privacy of people to fill pockets of all these zuckerbergs…
Facebook, great engineering org as it is, has done a lot of less than great things. Not just bad stuff to others, but less than optimal stuff for themselves as well. Could this be karma? Zuck's chooks coming hoome to roost?
Another issue: dumbing down. Connecting via web / browser has gradually dropped a lot of stuff and has become just like the mobile app.
I used to log in a couple of times a week; now it's not even once a month.
I am seeing fewer and fewer of my friends and relatives on Facebook anymore. My feed is overwhelmed with intrusive advertising. I wish I could give it up, but I have to stay because some customers are on it.
I love Facebook, but it's been dead for a while. A car that runs out of gas while accelerating downhill doesn't stop - or even stop accelerating - for a long time
The only reason I still have a facebook account is because I have logins for other sites tied to it. Haven't personally logged into facebook on purpose since 2016.
"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." (Winston Churchill). One can only pray.
Facebook pulled a Myspace. Growth slowed, so they added more ads to compensate. Growth slowed even more and went negative. For Myspace, that was a death spiral.
we all know how hard is to get out, to remove a FB account, so to be (with their figures) considered a lost user: the financial consequences of this news is another reason why it's so hard :)
Now the wall has fallen.
You can hide many things, but sooner or later the figures have to come out: as a paradox, their "statistics" department can probably start to relax a bit now.
These buffoons are responsible for the spread of mis-information and should pay for the murder / unwarranted deaths caused by their desire for more views during the past two years by giving every village idiot an amplified voice!
I have reported so many mis-information post and they do nothing. They could create thousands of jobs by having more humans for verifications, but no. They want to maximize profits and depend only on AI with no appeal possible. They do not want to create more jobs to balance the transition to digital from analogue world so I am glad their stock price is getting avg'd out.
They really don't think long term of their role/responsibility to society. All their top brains and fancy school hires cant even grasp long term consequences of their short term on-steroid decisions.
Every empire / entity / co. will come to an end, it's the law of nature due to stagnation & complexity. So will this. Good riddance!
Literally all Zuckerberg has to do is not be the kind of person he is... his product itself did achieve success in that a huge number of people are using it, but then he had to prove himself to have no ethical standards
It's funny because Zuckerberg isn't even a public figure. I'm sure someone will make some ethical claim, but I've read all the articles and they are hardly conclusive. It's probably better to just wait for a regulatory decision, otherwise you're just going to be reading someone else's agenda.
Hitting quarterly numbers, amassing wealth and power is difficult to do if he is not doing what he does.
Human greed has no limits. And once someone gets a taste of that amount of wealth and power, it is difficult to not get morally and ethically corrupt, either directly, or by turning a blind eye to reality.
I don't have much to add to this, but Facebook couldn't go away faster for me. My account is still active, but I deleted the app on the phone and probably only check my home page once every two weeks.
My friends and family just aren't that interesting when they post stuff or it's awful content. I find myself sharing everything with people I want to interact with over text.
Zuck is a sociopathic asshole, so I hope Facebook fails miserably.
I deleted my FB a while ago and it truely helped my online mental health. The fb feed was full of false news and hate speech. I reported as much as I could but nothing happening. There wasn't any regulations and I felt more toxic on the contents. I am not gonna lie there was a positive side like knowing the news instantly but It's not worth it apparently.
It's so interesting how different people's Facebook feeds are so different. I do have excessive ads for products, that's fair enough, but I have absolutely nothing political. My only issue with Facebook is that it's poorly designed, actually very dated and cluttered, and none of my friends really use it for personal posts except me.
I suspect that each Facebook user exists in a different bubble. Possibly they see someone reporting frequently and think "oh great, here's an engaged user, let's show them some more hate speech to get them even more engaged".
In my experience FB is what you make it to be. It requires some curration effort but you can mold it to be useful. But you can’t just add, you’ll have to block as well, including ads - each ad source can be turned off.
For me, FB is the main source of news about local concerts. Sure, you’ll find about major ones anyway, but there’s no way to effectively track small ones. It doesn’t have to be music. FB is the easiest way to track niche local businesses, events, or groups of interest. Some of them even don’t have web sites and FB is where they post. Even when they have sites, you wouldn’t visit each of them every day to find out what is new and interesting and you’ll miss stuff.
This is exactly what happens. What's worse, I thought it was doing that because I had responded to some political post, but FB just sees "you engaged with person-X, I will now alert you when person-X posts, and when people respond to his posts, even if you haven't looked at it"
This led to increasingly divisive messages literally showing up in my notifications that I had nothing to do with. This still happens months after I stopped responding to any of those messages.
Yeah same here, the only thing I see are posts from the groups I've joined which are mostly field of work related, the occasional corporate promotion and maybe a friend post about someone's holiday or something once in a blue moon.
When people say "I deleted facebook because of all the hate" it just makes me wonder what kind of assholes they're friends with. Removing their facebook posts from your view just hides who they are, they don't stop being assholes. What they really need to fix is their damn social circle.
My FB isn't full of fury and hate speech. It's boring!
Half of my friends like to post anodyne motivational quotes, "hilarious" forwarded jokes, pretty pictures of events they attended, and their own not-so-interesting musings. Unfortunately, that half is by far the most active on Facebook.
The overall atmosphere is mawkish. The best aspect is seeing pics of people's kids. You can't fault that.
Facebook shows you whatever is working to keep you there. I do like reading about politics but I also mute or unfollow anyone that is putting too much of that on my feed.
Twitter is where I go to be mad about news. I've managed to keep FB about old-friend stalking.
I have very little content on my news feed. Friends used to post a lot more often, but now all I see are posts from local government accounts and, of course, ads between every two or three posts. After a few pages of this I get an error message asking me to reload the page and a reload page button that does nothing.
100% agreed that it is poorly designed. I suspect it's that design (and the bugs) that are driving away my friends.
You may think you've deleted your FB account, but its probably still there...
I "deleted" my FB after they acquired FriendFeed (still the best social network I've ever come across) back in 2009.
I was puzzled, then, to receive an email in November last year asking if I had tried to log in. "Impossible", I thought, "that account was deleted!". So, I visited Facebook, and because my old username/password were still in my password manager, I was able to log in! Imagine my shock to find my old profile, still there with it's old profile pic, my old connections, etc.
When will "delete my account" actually mean my account is deleted?
(The final kick in the nuts to this story is that within 2 minutes of logging in, I get a chirpy, "Welcome back to Facebook!" email. Fuckers.)
Deleting FB account is slightly more complicated. After you have deleted it, don't try to login for months to check out if it's gone.
To permanently delete your account:
1. From your main profile, click account in the top right of Facebook.
2. Select Settings & Privacy, then click Settings.
3. Click Your Facebook Information in the left column. If you have Facebook access to a page in the new Pages experience: Click Privacy, then click Your Facebook Information.
4. Click Deactivation and Deletion.
6. Choose Delete Account, then click Continue to Account Deletion.
7. Click Delete Account, enter your password and then click Continue.
That is important to know but orthogonal to the GP's point.
Removing Facebook from my Browser bookmarks etc. improved my life a lot. However I didn't delete the account as some shops unfortunately update their opening times etc. only there and especially in current pandemic world that sometimes is needed to check ...
At least the account blocking features still works for users, unlike with youTube and Twitter.
The UI is more and more horrid though on FB and Instagram with every update. My ability to do the most simple things is extremely frustrating, and I don't understand how they believe those changes help to inspire deeper engagement, It's getting really difficult to see any value in either platform as they shrink organic engagement of each post to 1-2 people when I have over 1k followers. I refuse to pay for ads just to reach the audience that has already chosen to follow me. Instagram shows a mile of ads and posts from accounts I follow on every news feed before my desired content now, it's totally outrageous.
Likes are completely worthless across the web right now, they mean absolutely nothing... and the stats aren't even accurate on so many of these sites, they're really showing desperation by pushing their user base away, I honestly can't believe that "brilliant minds" are at the helm any more... It feels like they sacked the experienced development minds and are just left with interns, marketers, and psychiatrists on staff. Something's either got to fail or change majorly before year end or I'm going back to IRC and local message boards for good, social media has become a total waste of energy.
Totally agree with your criticism of the UI and news feed. I rarely use Facebook to begin with, but I noticed a major decrease in user experience and usability as of late.
Infinite scroll is just...laggy. I don't have this issue on Tiktok (which to be fair I also don't use often). The news feed used to be curated for me specifically, but now it seems to be the same recycled content I see on YouTube recommendations.
I don't want to see the same sh*t over and over again, show me something unique and new.
You might lose access to things you logged in with "Login with Facebook" or lose out on some connections that are only on FB. Doom-scrolling FB is a bad idea, but whenever I log in to FB, I do it with a purpose (usually to text someone on FB)
That's a big jump from the time when typing "facebook" in the address bar used to almost be a reflex on opening a new tab.
Another approach is to unsubscribe from everything (friends, groups etc.). You feed is empty, but you can still visit profiles/groups etc. but nothing will be pushed to you.
The change I made was to change my facebook bookmark to messenger, and thus I can still chat to all of my mates who use it to talk but otherwise have to consciously decide to visit facebook itself. I find myself doomscrolling WAY less, and maybe visit it once a day if I'm bored.
I recently reported a hate speech targeted at Indian minority (not Muslim). The text literally had gen$c!d3 threats and other usual trigger words in it, and there were like copy paste of same post in thousands (probably a campaign). Facebook replied "does not violate their conditions blah blah".
I guess it very much depends on the minority in question, FB like the government only responds to "mi orities" with street veto or global muscle power.
I actually didn't have any false news and hate speech in my feed - I used FB purity and consistently blocked all bad actors. I left the FB anyway, because it's has been a terrible platform for discussing anything even before the latest bout of censorship, but with redesigns, bans and constant intrusive hectoring about what I am supposed to be thinking is really getting old. It just became not good for anything but wasting time, and even that wasn't really enjoyable.
And there are so many other places to get news nowdays...
Reddit can be like this.
But delete your account,
Make a new one then add r/homelab r/homeassistant and r/chainsaw and it becomes a very positive place. Your desired subs may be different.
I once reported explicit pornography that posted on an electronics group I belonged to and the response I got from the system was that it was deemed not inappropriate and no action would be taken.
I don't know what good reporting does for anything...
I reported a comment thread discussing which ethnicities needed to be put in camps, and got the same thing about it somehow not being against the community standards.
I did catch a 30 day ban for saying that 'men are trash; I'm going back to dating women' though.
I believe there's something much more sinister than that going on with that feed. I believe it's specifically programmed to fish out your mental vulnerabilities and bully you with content that touches on exactly that.
Just unfollow everybody. It's such a liberating thing to do.
You can still manually check on people if you want to and you can still message them.
After a few weeks it feels like a superpower "wow, so I can just use facebook for 5 minutes every couple of days and easily stop using it? Unbelievable!"
The only useful thing about it was messenger but they disabled that on mobile browsers, so I stopped using the whole predict and then deleted it altogether.
For me, personally, FB just became boring and uninteresting at some point. I sometimes open FB for Marketplace and, I think, this is it. Had no need to go cold turkey and delete the account.
I still have it for Messenger which I use as an app both for desktop and mobile because I don’t want to lose touch with my friends, esp. during these times.
Social media worsens people’s perceptions of the world can actively influences what they share and consider their own opinion.
The same point applies to family, for example, and whether I need better family or not they’re all I’ve got. And Facebook has pushed them really far down whatever fringe they had a slight inclination to. Before Facebook any extreme views could be tempered a bit in family conversations, but now everyone thinks they have the weight and authority of the whole world, or at least their tribe, behind every argument.
This bait and switch is not something we agreed to as a society. We joined for the pics of partners, kids and puppies, and to stalk and ‘poke’ people we had real life crushes on. We stayed because we found a million welcoming tribes all defined by hatred and anger.
Maybe I’m old school, but there’s usually more to someone than what they share on Facebook. One of the funniest people I know, and a good real life friend for nearly a two two decades, posts dumb stuff like that all the time. We also have great conversations full of conflicting viewpoints, which I love, and we’ve both changed the others perspectives. I don’t really care what their political beliefs or medical choices are. We can find common interests outside of that. It doesn’t affect me. For some reason, that’s now the primary focus of many peoples lives and identity. He’s more than that, and I hope I am too.
You’ve identified what makes Facebook evil. If your friend shares two things, one of which enrages you and causes you to post an angry comment, and one of which causes you to smile gently and scroll on by, which one do you think Facebook is going to show you?
They probably don’t need better friends. We need a communication medium that isn’t powered by hate.
Have you ever used Facebook? You see divisive rage-bait garbage regardless of whether your connections specifically shared it. The Algorithm(tm) decides what you see, and it favors whatever is as "engagement"-worthy as possible.
I hear this very often and while deep down it's a reasonable take, the more you think about it, the less useful as advice it becomes.
While I can't comment about Facebook specifically (I haven't been on it for over a decade by now), but I've seen the same happen on many other platforms as social media has become staple of life.
I know people I've been friends with (and I mean, close friends) for almost two decades by now. I have all kinds of family members, far and close friends, acquaintances, online friends that go back to a decade or two ago on IRC channels, etc. I'm not saying every single one of them has changed, but a very LARGE portion of them has. We all have our own demons, our own beliefs, our own pet peeves and general grievances. People are sharing all kinds of sensationalist news and (let's say it) garbage all the time related to whatever orbits their belief or view of the world (or what they are afraid of). The more sensationalist something is, the more divisive it is, the more rounds it will do and the more it will get entrenched into the minds of someone.
Very often, that someone can be you, your friends, or your family. That doesn't make them (or you) bad people necessarily. I know people who I'd consider to be very good people, nice, caring, outgoing, friendly, etc. And yet they still share their demons on social media. The vitriol-induced "us vs them" articles, the fake news-style misinformation, the half truth, whatever fits their view of the world (because we simply don't know better).
It's a huge mental and emotional toll to be consistently bombarded by this kind of stuff. I don't mind talking about certain topics with certain people, what I do mind is getting consistently dragged (either willingly or not) into the same topics/conversations all the time, mostly fueled by emotional outrage (whether it is justified or not).
This doesn't make them "bad" friends. It just makes them "human" friends. You can definitely be completely and utterly emotionally drained talking with friends about topics that you care about, not in a bad way, it's just the way it is. The world is being more and more painted like it's all going to shit (whether or not that's true depends on what news you're being fed, I'm not making judgement here), and that does have a toll on you as a human.
Sorry for the long rant, but I just had to get it out there.
I don’t think all friend need to share political views. Just from my own group of friends, I know our views vary wildly. I am libertarian, I don’t buy the COVID and climate change narratives and I just want to live my life and want to deal with as little of the government as possible. However most of my friends like big government (socialist welfare state) and do buy in the COVID narrative as pushed by big media and government.
In the past we’d sometimes have very heated discussions around the COVID situation (initiated by a friend who shares my views), but as I noticed people becoming very “aggressive” in the debate, I asked everyone to just not discuss this issue anymore. And happily everyone agreed on this.
So now we’re still all great friends, but we just avoid this very sensitive topic, which I feel is for the better. It’s not worth it to lose friends just because you don’t agree on some issues.
We do our discussions over Signal by the way, I haven’t used Facebook for many years now. Most of my friends have quitted Facebook. In the past we mainly used Facebook to organize group events (weekend get-togethers), but we use Signal for this functionality now.
My FB feed is essentially zero content (500+ friends mostly over 25). It’s an aggregator nowadays of group discussions and primarily page content, even pages I don’t follow. Nobody but boomers use it to share nowadays.
I haven’t been on Facebook for a few years, but I saw the same the last year I was on the site. I had unfollowed everything, except friends. You could go through my entire feed in 3 minutes once a week.
Almost nobody was posting anything, mostly it was shared posts. If it wasn’t for Facebook killing forum and small websites, more people would have left years ago.
I went back to my forums, find myself easily disengaging from Reddit (around the election, Reddit was nothing but stress), Check Twitter maybe 10 minutes a week, go to Instagram once a week because my kid posts his artwork there.
But in general, ALL of the sticky sites aren’t…sticky anymore. I took 2 weeks off at the worst of it and it did an amazing job of breaking the feedback loop.
Facebook tried to take over forums and mailing lists, their market was full of scams (which had me going round and round with Paypal and the bank when ‘Sally’ selling an iPad from Massachusetts sent a receipt with an email from a Guy in Turkey.
Then they started poking around with VR and Meta and man, I really don’t want to use this headset if I’m forced to log into Facebook and you’ve got 6 outward facing cameras, Zuckerberg.
The past 5 years I only used messenger and miniature wargaming groups. That's all the utility FB provides, and sadly, I don't see the wargaming groups move anywhere else.
Related ongoing thread:
Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185214 - Feb 2022 (436 comments)
There is something else going on around FB.
Almost all activity online has shifted away from the Social Graph to a Content Graph. Almost nobody wants to see what their friends are doing online anymore. In a lot of ways it can be cringey. People just want the latest, catchiest content. TikTok and Youtube are the OGs here, but it's everywhere when you start to look. Twitter timeline changes being an awkward but working example. Discovery > Static friends list.
The entire premise FB was founded on is eroding. This isn't just Apple privacy and some regulatory strangulation. It's seismic to the business. The reason most people are still going to Facebook is incompatible with their primary activities online which is: consuming content from people-you-don't-know.
Facebook is where you find out your highschool friend is super in to a MLM, your uncle has drastic political views you don't share, and that your historical social class and network is largely irrelevant to your life a decade later.
They are doing everything they can to try to move in this direction, but the more they push it the less useful Facebook is for the average user. Instagram's discovery page is a prime example. But Reels are less good than TikTok, and whatever they are doing for short form video in Facebook is surely a hopeless game of catch up. This is classical innovator's dilemma.
The very idea that Zuckerberg straight up said they need to copy the competition harder is incomprehensible considering the resources they have.
They are going to try to do a few things. One is to anti-trust Apple (in the media at least), and the other is to hand wave (Metaverse).
The reason the Metaverse was such a non sequitur is that it is so clearly a last minute thrust coming out of the C-Suite. If you've ever worked at a highly visible tech pubco, you've seen this happen before. Weak quarters mean that product announcements get pushed up. When it is as all encompassing as the Metaverse announcement, you know something is up.
"Facebook is where you find out your highschool friend is super in to a MLM, your uncle has drastic political views you don't share, and that your historical social class and network is largely irrelevant to your life a decade later."
This is probably the most accurate description of Facebook I've seen.
I think there are a lot of people who are in my position, which is "I would absolutely love to ditch FB entirely, but I can't because of ____".
The value of ____ might be "seeing pictures of family", or it might be "coordination of/participation in a group that has settled on Facebook as the easiest path" (<-- this is me), or it might be "professionally necessary to be there" or a number of other things.
But none of these are positive reasons. There is no love of Facebook behind any of them. It's Facebook being tolerated. This is bad for Meta.
This is probably good for society at large, though. Or at least I hope it will be.
Re: metaverse, it's not really a handwavey after thought - they've been investing quite significantly ($10bn lost last year alone while all of Google's bets including deepmind and waymo lost ~1.45bn. >10k people working on it now AFAIK).
I think Facebook just got burned by not having a hardware platform this cycle - Apple and Google control the phones and Microsoft has the PC, XBox etc. They just want control over the next big hardware platform.
Whether that's a reasonable bet or not who knows? But I wouldn't be as dismissive of their ambitions in the space.
I use Facebook more these days than I did 5 years ago. It has replaced Craigslist as the place to go for local things, especially buy/sell/trade. Our town, and even certain villages within the town, has a few discussion groups that is where I hear all the important talk/annoucements about what is going on. Groups tend to be like a Subreddit but with geographic IRL connections instead of anonymous interest-based associations.
Perhaps I'm just an outlier, but it's the same with Twitter for me. I use it more these days than I did some years ago, but I also use it mostly like an RSS feed. I follow video game devs, musicians, etc. so I can be kept in the loop on the latest releases and whatnot.
I think you make a good point about content graph. I think there is some truth to that, although I have never really taken any interest in anything but the kind of content that YouTube offers.
What all of this points out is that Facebook never really solved the "MySpace/Friendster" problem, they just had the better product at the right time and were able to get a few more years of safety by acquiring threats (which is not a long term strategy).
It's wild that FB has become such a highly valued company despite the fact that they have always been resting on rather shaky foundations.
We can also start to see Goodhart's Law in action at scale. Running your company by constantly optimizing for metrics (as so many startups mimic now) eventually does catch up to you. The vitriolic content that initially got them massive engagement eventually gets more and more people repulsed by the service.
In the end, just like MySpace and Friendster, there is nothing that really prevents users from exiting from the platform extremely fast once the tide of the network effect turns the other way.
I'm not sure this is right. I think the problem with Facebook is that long ago it shifted to a content graph in terms of use. I have less than 60 people friended because I limit it to people I actually know and want to know what they're up to, and by and large they're people that aren't constantly sharing memes, videos, or other crap. Of course, this means that I can check it out once a week and that's enough to keep up with everything, which doesn't make Facebook money.
I believe the reason Instagram, Snapchat, and now TikTok grew the way they did was because the parents weren't on those apps. Even now we see that young people migrate to other platforms as their parents start paying attention to the current one.
Facebook was never ever about the Social Graph. It was always about user profiling and activity/interest monitoring which could be sold to advertisers. The Social Graph was just one tool for that.
Coincidentally the profiling is also extremely useful for political leverage and behaviour mod. I'm sure that never occurred to anyone around the company, and the links to operations like AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica are incidental among the ad noise.
The incoming anti-trust cases are going to be interesting.
I really do miss the utility apps of the early 2000s that went social. I'm travelling soon and want to re-visit a restaurant I went to some time ago and none of the apps on my phone will make it easy to look up where it was I ate before. When I was living abroad in the early 2000s, the social apps like Foursquare made that kind of utility-to-me feature fun and useful.
FB, as a social platform, is moving away from being a social app. Same thing happened to other social apps. The original utility they had in the early days was subsumed by social, which is now being subsumed by something else. The original utility can't be found anywhere... it was dragged down into the depths and drowned.
In some ways, my iPhone now is less useful to me than it was before. I can look things up in the moment, but in terms of connecting me to my past activities -- not so much.
Only if you're a marketer and see others as little more than consumers. Next thing to burn is commoditization of "content" as the young see through the nonsense and reach out for sincerity.
There are mountains of quality information online and while I would absolutely resent having to grow up in the age of social media, the kids are way better at parsing and questioning rapid onslaughts of information because of the tribulations there.
They get caught up for a while, but the guise wears away. Young people can easily see outside their immediate world, and any adopted worldview, unlike we've ever known. When I was growing up that meant a lonely kid wandering down to the library to flip through magazines from the big city to inject some new ideas into one's world. Now, young people from anywhere can dig into the most arcane of information and worldviews in seconds and begin integrating them earlier on in their lives.
The world will look very different in outlook in a short amount of time, and it will not be for the sake of "content". Just gimme some truth, all I want is some truth.
Agree with most of this, but I'm curious where Facebook groups fit in here. We recently moved to Florida and have been scrambling to find non-religious home school friends for our daughter (homeschooling because of Covid). Facebook has been pretty much only resource available, and I've joined a number of local groups that have proved somewhat helpful. I'm wondering whether groups may provide a level of stickiness and user retention that the timeline may not?
> Almost nobody wants to see what their friends are doing online anymore.
Fact. I unfollowed pretty much every person connected to me on facebook, and now my feed consists primarily of posts from 'This cat is C H O N K Y', 'Foods with threatening auras,' and the like. Huge quality of life improvement, second only to basically never using Facebook at all.
One reason the Metaverse bothers me so much is a) because it's related to the company in general calling itself Meta, which itself is most likely a smokescreen to distract from the company's negative image and b) because it includes all the properties Zuckerberg has directly lied about and made worse - notice how the Instagram people left after conflicts with Zuckerberg, how Whatsapp users are forced into data sharing with Facebook, how suddenly you need a Facebook for the Oculus - if Meta/Metaverse was a conglomeration of home grown properties, in-house, or at worst previously competitive products that neverthelss they did a good job with and fostered to grow, and weren't annoying to use, and didn't pull bait and switch - why, sure, this Metaverse thing might seem like a pretty neat idea. As it stands, not only is Zuckerberg's vision of a utopia "copy and kill everyone else" but Meta/Metaverse is directly using basically stolen properties ("let's buy up these guys to destroy the competition")
Feels like Yahoo in the days it realized it was losing the search arms race to Google and Microsoft. There was this uneasy sense of the underlying seismic shift and that the game had changed and you didn't have the best hand.
Yep, you nailed it. TikTok is hitting Facebook and they are unable to respond. May be they will by copying the algorithm but things are going to get worse before they improve. Not sure if they will change Facebook itself though. That is too entrenched and too many users to change. This is going to be tough for fb to fight.
Facebook replaced the phone book. In the 1990s it was difficult to find someone's contact information. With Google, you can find a way to contact someone, find their email. With everyone having smartphones you can find a way to get a text message to someone.
Interesting: is it possible that this shift towards the content graph has something to do with a more active approach to content moderation? I mean, if your whacky aunt says something on covid, then it seems that he gets a nice label and that his message are propagated to a smaller number of his friends. Is it possible that all these moderation mechanisms have had a ripple effect on the entire network? I mean is it possible that the active stance on content moderation (some call it censorship) has caused the shift towards the content graph versus the social graph? In other words: if they choose to show less content by your whacky aunts, then they still need to fill the timeline with something, so welcome to the content graph!
I mean to say that a change of editorial policy in a given media outlet is often related to a change of political direction; is that the case?
Funny aspect: big tech wants to obtan some real influence and weight in society, so they introduce more censorship as a means of obtaining this weight. Now incidentially this erodes their base, as their clients loose interest in the toy, and start to use something else instead.
I would listen to your podcast.
Honestly the reason I use facebook still is to consume content from people I don't know, facebook groups are the only social thing left on the website, and the rest of it I use for fb marketplace which at least in my area has totally stolen the spotlight from craigslist.
The reason Facebook is losing, is because they're boxing with two hands behind their back. They're blocked by de facto anti-trust from ever acquiring their relevant competitors.
Acquisitions are a critical instrument for large corporations in terms of competition. TikTok's parent, ByteDance, is not restricted by such problems despite how massive they are, for example.
ByteDance is a $400 billion market cap company that doesn't have to play the game the same way Facebook does despite the fact that they're clearly competing in the same tier of scale now.
And that's not a statement of woe-is-Facebook, nobody should feel bad for Facebook, it's just the fact of the real context they're stuck with and their giant competitor is not.
It seems like it should be easy for FB to pivot to the content graph. Their ability to serve relevant ads is unrivaled. They should be able to do the same with content. Old people buy stuff and love FB. MLM people love Instagram and buy stuff. FB should just roll out a new short video platform, pay influencers a lot to join, and use their algorithm to recommend the best content.
Bizarre how Tiktok went from being a Chinese sovereign state/public enemy that was going to be 'bought' by Oracle/Walmart but is now starting to destroy the 2nd gen social networks, the original concern. I've assumed for a while FB was being sunset'd/Yahoo'd to prep for a next gen surveillance capitalism engine but the TT Chinese data mining allowance continues to surprise. Meanwhile the 'off' platforms - Rumble etc - continue to expand, and given Trump's vast small donation $100m+ war chest it seems likely there will increasingly politicized factional networks very soon
I think at this point 'Groups' are single-handedly keeping fb alive.
> They are going to try to do a few things. One is to anti-trust Apple (in the media at least), and the other is to hand wave (Metaverse).
What does 'hand wave' mean in this context?
Maybe it’s becoming a major media source?
You know, like your on-demand TV channel that knows what you want, already.
i believe this is true but it is not reflected in the public earnings at all.
User growth in the US may be flat but earnings per US/CA active user is up which implies that the value is here and growing for users in the US/CA
This is how the narrative of Facebook looks to me:
Zuckerberg got lucky and then executed brilliantly, transitioned from nerd hacker to CEO amazingly well. He deserves a lot of credit for that.
Since then, Facebook have innovated very little. Zuckerberg recognised this, and bought Instagram and Whatsapp in lieu of building an innovative company. The latter is clearly really difficult to do.
Without a stream of new ideas and products (unlike, say, Apple) Facebook double-downed on maximising revenue growth from their core advertising business. This led to all the scandals and disasters they have brought us, including destabilising societies.
Inevitably, this led to the core product becoming less attractive, and people were also turned off by the negative press. Zuckerberg's rigid control of the company has led to him being a lightening rod for the backlash against big tech and especially adtech. His media skills are awful, so insisting on control and making himself a figurehead has further damaged the business.
Zuckerberg knows the only way out is another home run. He's a super smart and prescient thinker, so he can see VR is a good play. It looks like the timeline for VR won't be short enough to save FB, but even if it were arriving soon enough he must know that FB probably isn't capable of delivering a truly new thing.
This then marks the beginning of the end for the company, as it continues to bring in revenue from Instagram and monetises Whatsapp. Its sheer size means decline is going to take decades.
I wouldn't be surprised if Zuckerberg leaves in the next few years, before the failure of Meta strategy becomes apparent.
What they _should_ have done is debatable, but developing some sense of ethics might have helped. I think they could have focused on building Whatsapp into a payments (etc) app, which would have created an enduring product, and then used the time that bought them to rebuild the company.
Microsoft are showing that it can be done, but I wonder if Facebook has the capacity to do great things. Perhaps the lesson from MS is that only a new leader can rescue such a mired company.
Microsoft, for all its flaws, has strengths. They're grittier than most and ultimately, know how to deliver software products and build businesses around them... very different products and very different businesses. Leadership was a lever to these, but there was something to lever
FB have never built a successful product besides Zuck's original. They have never created a good business besides the FB and program. They pushed both to the max.
FB pushed the walled garden hard. They pushed hard on acquiring the competition. They pushed hard on making the product "addictive" and optimising it on a "what FB wants from users" basis.
In its ad business FB pushed hard on leveraging data. Google's AdWords was always based on user intent. Someone searches for "divorce lawyer," and AdWords finds them a divorce lawyer. FB ads are premised on targeting, not intent. So... leverage data to create a segment with >n chance of wanting a divorce lawyer. It worked.
That's FB in a nutshell. They push hard on simple things.
What they need is something else to push on. I agree on making WhatsApp a payments app. IMO, retail finance would suit FB perfectly. They'd be better at it than Apple or Google. Look at retail banks, like Citi. It's all about pushing for revenue. Some newly invented fee that most customers don't know they're paying. Some new way of charging both sides of a transaction. More of something. Generating revenue from customer data, float, 3rd party deals... taking advantage of moat. FB would be really good at that.
Controlling the VR metaverse... I just don't see it. Too much innovation. Too much invention. Too many elements to balance. Too avante garde. It's not Zuck.
I agree with most of what you wrote up to this point:
> He's a super smart and prescient thinker, so he can see VR is a good play
He made a school yearbook on the internet and copied some features from existing social networks like MySpace. Facebook was just in the right place at the right time and executed well.
The jury is very much still out on whether "VR is a good play", too. It might turn out to be a gigantic over-marketed gimmick like blockchain has.
I don't think it's going to die as quickly as you think - it's a pretty sticky product. The network effects that made it attractive might kill it pretty fast when they evaporate, but it's going to be a major player in adtech for at least a decade, which might just give it time to be "saved" by some of the plays they're now pivoting towards.
On the ethics thing: they introduced some mechanisms around this, but the appointment of Nick Clegg to drive this as head of "Global Affairs" was always an eyebrow-raiser for those even slightly politically aware in the UK, and predictably less effective than FB management needed him to be (note: I voted Lib Dem in 2010 because I believed in his leadership - it's what he did next that showed the warning signs).
I think another quarter of decline and we might see a major shake-up, and I wouldn't be amazed to see Whatsapp getting payment (including crypto) functionality as a bit of Hail Mary to build another social network moat.
Since then, Facebook have innovated very little.
I hope they hadn't even tried. Initially, Facebook offered lots of value in the early years in the form that users were actually able to follow their friends' lives and stay connected. You had a bunch of friends and you would see a mostly chronological list of what they had posted that you read until you recognized something you had already seen. If they had kept it that simple Facebook might actually be something I'd be willing to pay for. The newsfeed is absolutely the core of the product and they started ruining it about ten years ago, and very steadily at that.
> … VR is a good play
I find your analysis excellent apart from this bit. It’s really far from obvious to me that VR has any future outside a gaming niche.
The acquisition strategy could have worked going forwards, seeing as there's not much anti-trust will in the U.S. against M&A, but the problem is that they missed the chance to buy musical.ly (bought for $1 billion by ByteDance in 2017) which became TikTok. If they had made this acquisition they would be in a very different position.
Looking at my teenage kids and their friends, they barely use Instagram (let alone Facebook), it's all about TikTok.
I think the shift to VR is actually FB acknowledging they lost the mobile platform battle and can not depend on Apple and Google for its future, so it must move the game on. VR is a platform in which they have a head start and own top to bottom with Oculus.
Essentially Zuckerberg is fast forwarding the future so he’ll have place to sell ads in without a 3rd part like Apple setting the rules.
This is also why he goes full VR and not AR which would likely require a phone somewhere on the side.
> Zuckerberg got lucky and then executed brilliantly, transitioned from nerd hacker to CEO amazingly well. He deserves a lot of credit for that.
I used to work for an extremely unfashionable website that nevertheless was one of the most visited on the web (even though you'd probably be surprised by that if you knew the site) and my experience there was that leadership tried to replicate that success with dozens of other products and never once was able to do it. So much of what made the original site successful was timing and luck.
What baffles me is how they pretty much destroyed the social network aspect of it.
10 years ago Facebook was the place to know what’s going on in your social circle. You’d find out about events or share experiences, setting relationship status was something of significance.
Then the feed became more and more laden with sponsored posts or posts by meme pages. Sharing something personal in this kind of environment suddenly felt awkward.
These days it’s rare to see posts by actual people you know - so why bother?
> Microsoft are showing that it can be done, but I wonder if Facebook has the capacity to do great things. Perhaps the lesson from MS is that only a new leader can rescue such a mired company.
No, the lesson from MS (and IBM, Oracle and SAP) is that once you have a large enough moat of captive users who can't really move away, you can just "go on" and deliver crap to your users as long as the quality of the competition stays below the quality of your crap. And if there is someone coming close, buy them up.
The problem of FB is that there is, at the core, nothing except the "network effect" that creates such a moat. No multi-year contracts with governments or megacorps worth billions of dollars, no source of recurring revenue other than ads, there is nothing that fundamentally ties customers - both "end users" and advertisers - to Facebook.
I don't think this is unreasonable, but I'd also watch out for the "Facebook is dying" narrative that has been popular amongst certain communities for years and years now. Revenue was still up. Profit was still billions and billions. Yes, things are going the wrong way for the first time but it has always felt like people were very fast to jump on the "well this is finally the end" narrative.
I think the correct thing to do would have been to pivot away from user data and ad targeting as business model and start offering premium, paid services. For instance Facebook could have very easily been Slack for businesses, as well as an enterprise internal social network. Another thing would have been to start offering appliances for private hosting of individual Facebook instances. Finally Facebook could have also started competing in cloud and leveraging its massive infrastructure for other companies to use. I might be wrong but it seems like these could have replaced Facebook’s current revenue model with stable, reliable recurring revenue while also resolving its longstanding PR problems.
I am an owner of Oculus Quest 2, had some VR hands-on experience before and I think that Quest 2 is a solid product worth every cent (but probably heavily sponsored). It is a best of two worlds: I can use it standalone and I can connect it to my PC and play Steam VR titles.
Meta has interesting products for VR work: virtual desktop, meetings/calls with presentation slides. They are one step from decent AR: their passthrough mode is quite good.
They have enough cash to buy any decent VR product and a team behind it, if they see a potential synergy.
So I think Zuck's bet on VR may in the end play out. A hype around everything "metaverse" is unprecedented right now.
Disclaimer: I have a long stake in $META in my portfolio.
Ironically, Facebook was great back when MySpace and Orkut wasn’t a great experience.
I suspect that’s because it wouldn’t just let anybody in. Looking back, the decision to open Facebook up to everyone was (in my book) a bad one. I’ll use the nightclub analogy — a good social network, like a good nightclub, must have bouncers (of sorts) to ensure a quality experience. I realise the conflict between this and Metcalfe’s “law”.
Also, seriously, why not just charge for Facebook and WhatsApp. WhatsApp usage is at levels now when a lot of people will pay for it — and at one point (pre-Facebook) they weren’t free in first-world markets.
It's not even just about the lack of innovation, the demographic of facebook has changed and I can't blame people for wanting to leave
It used to be for young uni students and posting photos of your night out, nowadays it's for retirees arguing about politics.
What does the future of Apple and Google look like decades from now? If you believe that AR/VR will eventually be a trillion-dollar market then even a second or third place position for Facebook will bring them billions in revenue, they just need to be in the market when that time comes and they already are with Oculus.
The historical analogy in Microsoft is more correct than one might think. For Microsoft, it was a question of relinquishing control (e.g. going from proprietary to open) that helped them grow so much again. They are in many ways, a wholly different company than 20 years ago.
If Facebook could have embraced the mainstream interest in privacy and converted themselves to become a global digital identity provider, they could have become so much more and be on ethical side of history. Now they are almost pursuing both, while not realizing that they have to let go of one (and incur short-term losses) to pursue other.
> It looks like the timeline for VR won't be short enough to save FB, but even if it were arriving soon enough he must know that FB probably isn't capable of delivering a truly new thing.
I think it is...eventually. But the technology to go from where we're at -- where it's mostly just useful for games -- to a true game-changer in the big picture, it's just not there yet. Gonna be several years at the bare minimum, probably, a lot of problems still need to be solved.
FB is an ad business. Changing their DNA to something else is very hard to do.
I had hope that Libra (now Diem) would bring them into personal finance. There are hard problems to solve and the industry is ripe for disruption. Every FB user could have a FB wallet. Remittance, Marketplace, loans, etc.. So many things possible across the entire globe. Not just in the West. They could eat PayPal's lunch.
Instead, Zuck turned his focus to the Metaverse. I really don't get it.
> Without a stream of new ideas and products (unlike, say, Apple)
Apple has no new products in a long time, just overpriced toys that are sold due to good marketing. Most of their money comes from market positioning and closed eco system.
Thry were innovative in the past (that first iphone reveal), but for last years they basically are an app store that takes a 30% cut.
> he can see VR is a good play
It's a good play only if he finds a way to monetise it on a similar scale he does with the social network. I might have my open-mindedness failing me, but I simply can't see a way how VR can be monetised even close to selling the access to and influence over masses on a global scale.
"Zuckerberg got lucky", that could be said about nearly every start-up. I don't like him (based on his public behavior), but have to admit he was already brilliant before facebook.
You are kind of right about innovation force at facebook. Although, really not sure, why they didn't do more of it. Like getting into cloud similar to google. Especially pytorch kind of feels better then tensorflow. Really strange.
On the other hand google innovated like hell, but in the end it's still google search which makes most of the profits. So maybe there is just not much potential in innovating and holding it's position is more important (which they are doing).
> Zuckerberg got lucky and then executed brilliantly, transitioned from nerd hacker to CEO amazingly well. He deserves a lot of credit for that.
“I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS. People just submitted it. I don't know why.!They ‘trust me’. Dumb fucks.” - Mark Zuckerberg at 19 years old.
No, he always had scummy intentions and does not deserve credit for exploiting people’s trust.
I’ve always thought one possible next step for Facebook would be in the cloud business. Among the big tech companies they are the only ones not reselling their platform expertise but perhaps it’s just not worth it
Brilliant analysis. I would add to the list that a much higher level of scrutiny from M&A regulators is going to be the last nail in the coffin (making new massive acquisition a lot harder).
> What they _should_ have done is debatable, but developing some sense of ethics might have helped.
I don't see how you could do that. Even recognizing a blind spot like that is extremely difficult and then changing that company DNA is near impossible, it might be even harder than pushing for more innovation.
Both are the same problem though: changing culture. That is only possible with a drastic change at the top, which didn't happen.
Zuck would have had to have a personal epiphany for that to happen because he's un-fireable.
> I think they could have focused on building Whatsapp into a payments (etc) app
Yep, I am surprised they didn't do this many years ago. WeChat does this pretty significantly in China.
He did innovate and more importantly, executed well. Facebook groups, marketplace, buying Oculus, all great plays. They have something like 1.9B daily users. At this point there isn't much growth left and user decline is expected. Facebook don't need to be rescued. Still very healthy.
Now regarding VR. I'm really happy he is going all in on it. He might fail but it's a bold move. Too early to tell but I'm not betting against him.
> Since then, Facebook have innovated very little.
Facebook has created Facebook Workplace from scratch which is very successfull, is this not innovating ?
Facebook has resisted the growth of Snapchat, is this not innovating ?
WhatsApp has continued to grow after its acquisition and is very successful today.
Facebook is clearly one of the most innovative company of this size.
Buying companies and being able to make them grow is clear proof that Facebook is innovative. In the real world most acquisitions end up failing
If you followed the Winkelvoss trial, it's clear that even Facebook itself was a stolen idea, so Facebook have never innovated anything, ever
If there only was a way to monetize users without getting into ever-shadier ad-tech and dark patterns...
I was really sad the day that WhatsApp stopped charging money.
Zuckerberg was never capable of coming up with products. Facebook is arguably not even his idea. He bought the competition when he couldn't innovate. But the competition got smart and they're not selling anymore. They can smell the blood in the water.
I'm just surprised it's taken this long for it to start affecting hard numbers.
From a technical (software) perspective, what you say aligns as well - I would claim that Facebook has done very little in terms of actual innovation of their core product since their popularity in early 2010s. I want you to think of a snapshot of facebook.com in 2010 where there wasn't much interactivity on the site and everything relied on good 'old hyperlinks and compare it with its present state - where everything is a clusterfuck of react components with unpredictable behaviour.
What I mean by that is - random disappearing newsfeed elements, and random exposé of page admins' personal accounts while commenting on something, bizarre disappearance of comments, loading signs everywhere and for everything and what not.
Sure, one can argue their investment into ReactJS could be considered as innovation. But, look at the business side of things - What value has ReactJS ACTUALLY provided to the site NOW compared to what it was in 2010? Not much. In 2010, Facebook was this minimalist website where you could add people and post stuff on each others' walls and yeah, occasionally message them. Today, it is a beast that is tons of megabytes downloaded to your computer on the first page visit with a "Messenger platform" - which is just rebranded basic messaging functionality and the clusterfuck that is "Facebook business suite" which is an unnecessarily complicated garbage UI for basic page admin functionality and their "Ads Platform" whose feature set various with where and how you use it. Not to forget Facebook's screwing up of m.facebook.com (the mobile site) where it is barely usable now and with half the features not working (eg. links in stories). Oh, and did I mention about Facebook Lite, Facebook App, Pages App, etc etc. and none of them look like a complete, polished product.
Facebook is a classic case of a taking a good product and screwing it up with needless complexity to the point where the core product is unusable. All this Meta push is just a nail in the coffin for users like me who have had enough - whose expectation wasn't much - just to stay in touch with friends and family. Sometimes, innovation could be as simple as maintaining a stable, core value proposition. I am noticing a lot of people around me are switching back (anecdotal observation) to plain old websites and blogs to express their thoughts and I love that.
I for one, can't wait for the downfall of Facebook, so we can go back to less bloated non-react-vue-js powered SPAs and just back to bare hyperlink powered static webpages :)
FB buys TWTR, only short-term distraction tactic I can think of right now. I jest... I dont think that would be a good idea for many reasons. But FB seems it will only innovate through acquisitions - and now would be the time.
>Facebook have innovated very little. Zuckerberg recognised this, and bought Instagram and Whatsapp in lieu of building an innovative company. The latter is clearly really difficult to do.
I can't remember who it was - maybe Stratechery - that theorized that Zuckerberg thanks to his experience running Facebook had a really good intuition for when Social media where going to go far and thus was able to make deals that at first looked wildly overpriced but in the end seemed to be a steal.
Perhaps their problem right now is that there hasn't been a social media with the growth potential that has been worth their acquiring.
At any rate not sure if I would say just because they failed one time (even with scandals of last few years) that they're really in trouble, that strikes me too much like most financial journalism that says oh no company X had a bad quarter that's it they're toast and then it turns out they come back the next quarter. I say that as someone who does not care for Facebook or any of their acquisitions (although lots in my family like Whatsapp)
I mostly agree, but I'm not convinced they're going to fail at the VR thing. When my mom (she's a grandma) got a headset and loved it. It made me think twice about it being irrelevant.
I think all centralised social networks have a shelf life.
The question has always been if META manages to create/buy the next big centralised social network after facebook. And this has always been a long shot.
A lot of companies acquire to expand. What has Cisco invented since the router in the early 90’s? Their entire product line can be traced to an acquisition.
Not every company needs to be Apple to succeed.
> What they _should_ have done is debatable, but developing some sense of ethics might have helped.
Right? Imagine what could've been if they would acknowledge problems they've caused and co-operate with society to help overcome them. Such a radical idea. Instead, in the hands of capitalism, they were focused on the short-term giant profits that everyone knows won't last forever. It'll be joyful to watch it collapse. I think they were to proud of themselves to admit what they've created - a 21st century phonebook and that's it.
Why didn't Facebook build a phone? We all know that to control eyeballs, you need to control the device.
Let's maintain some perspective here. They went from 1.93 billion DAILY active users, to 1.92 billion.
Brilliant and well put comment, thank you.
Facebook Marketplace is pretty awesome. I see it as a potential Amazon competitor.
I don’t think got lucky and executed brilliantly to hand in hand very often. That’s already a huge win.
You lost me at Zukerburg got lucky. Facebook changed social media forever, they completely innovated this domain.
I think they lost users much much earlier.
It's just that most users they lost went from "I use Facebook" to "I don't want to use Facebook, but kinds still have to" (because friends, family etc.).
All people below 40y I know which have Facebook fall more or less in the second category...
I fall into a 3rd category: I used to log into FB once a month or so to check in. For some reason, they decided I was a fake account (despite working for them for 4.5 years) and asked for my ID. The resolution on my 10-year-old MBP was too low for FB's contractors so they rejected my ID 3 times and I seem to now be locked out of my account indefinitely.
Definitely in the top 10 best thing to ever happen to me.
North American users (US & Canada) were reported to show declines at least as early as 2019, see:
https://hypebeast.com/2019/3/facebook-user-base-decline
WaPo links to US declines as early as 2018:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/10/30/faceboo...
The big news here is a worldwide decline, which shows a rather larger weakness.
I know too many of my friends only used FB because of the events feature. However during COVID, that usage dropped too.
I also wouldn't be surprised if FB is fudging those numbers and it's declining even with their fudging.
After inflating the video play numbers I don't put anything past FB.
Facebook replaced sms/voicecall with family. If it wasn't for that I'd have already deleted my account years ago.
There's even a metric for that: Daily Active Users. I bet Facebook does not publish that number (or the historical values for it). I bet that number has been going down lately, at least for North American users. There's a reason they changed their name.
My children's school communicates a lot of information through their Facebook page. I had to reactivate my dead account after years when my kid started kindergarten. There was particularly important information that they did not send out anywhere but on Facebook. Meanwhile, they have a "news" page on their actual school website that has not been updated in years. I hate it and I think it should be illegal to force the use of a private, ad-driven platform for public/governmental information.
Facebook may count me as a user, but my account has absolutely no information listed about myself and the only pages I subscribe to are for the school.
I notice the same thing with local governments, where the Office of Emergency Management or Police will post updates about public safety to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Worse now with these services requiring login to see the pages, so now without an account I cannot get the information. This should absolutely not be allowed.
My kid's school uses software called Wilma to communicate with us parents. It suffers from the problems that all enterprise software suffers, but has no ads or tracking and is at least ostensibly secure.
Its android app has a rating of 1.9, but jeez, at least it's not Facebook.
https://www.visma.fi/wilma/en/
Same. My kids are in sports and Facebook is how they communicate with us, including changes to schedules, "snack duty", pictures and videos from games, etc. It's basically impossible to be a judicious parent and not be on Facebook for me.
My 16yo daughter says FB is for old people and nobody in her age group is using it.
If she uses Instagram she's using Facebook. If she has a Facebook account and goes anywhere on the web while she is logged in, she's giving money to Facebook. It is not so simple now. She doesn't have to "use" Facebook for them to monetize her image, her privacy, her network of friends. A company like Meta will always have new products to take in kids. That's what their new "Reels" is about, trying to compete with TikTok. They know that their old product is not cool. This is why they changed their name to "Meta"!
This is a battle you and your kids can't win unless your kids know how to identify when a nasty company is trying to steal their data. If your daughter thinks something else is cool, I bet that's another nasty company trying to steal her data instead of Facebook. Our society can't get out of this trap until your daughter says, "they all SUCK"
I guess the business model of social media companies is coming to fore.
FB has a captive audience, that is aging with facebook and will continue using it.
It is clear why FB purchases IG / WA. They are paying money to capture audiences with money earned from FB.
Going ahead, the cycle will repeat. Once the teens in IG grow into adults, FB will use money from that to buy / make another platform.
In this context, the metaverse makes sense. It is a virtual world, where new SM platforms are churned, with all future populations being part of one or more platforms. FB wants to be the owner of all the platforms.
From a business point of view, it makes more sense, in that, FB can now target ads across platforms, meaning, they target the same number of individuals, but with ads being channeled through different platforms, the ad density comes down, and the feeling of "the feed is all ads" might reduce.
I feel that way except I’m older than 16.
In my circles the only time I have to use Facebook is when Gen Xers are organizing something that requires my participation there, and I delete the account afterwards.
Or I wind up in small town America and the people there believe that Facebook marketplace + groups has better resources for sale and meetups. My experience with that was that generally accessible forums (even with being private and an “approval” process) all being full of scammers and time wasters. I found resources and niches in person. I checked the same groups 6 months later and nobody was getting anywhere with anything. YMMV of course, but the scammers are integrated everywhere.
Small town America is a big place so there is a market for the illusion of utility!
Please tell her how she feels when 23 and whatever websites she uses are replaced by some random new fac simile with a different css.
I doubt many kids want to share a common platform with their parents. Since the older generation is more numerous this will probably be true.
But they use Instagram instead. Either way Zuck wins.
Nothing wrong with old people. There's quite a few of them in our world, and only increasing. Also, old people have money, unlike teenagers. Also, old people stick around, unlike teens that switch networks every year or so.
So...what is the appeal of teenagers again? Is it being "cool"? What can I buy for cool?
I stopped using facebook in 2013 when I started getting invites from my aunts and my parent’s friends
if i'm not mistaking most teen and young adult use IG.
I always find the constant expectation of growth puzzling. and that it is a regular occurrence.
For a long time, DELL grew and grew and got bigger. Then they plateaued (for a while) and the investors were mad.
There are only so many people in the world who want an FB account. and only so many companies and people who need a DELL computer.
Infinite high growth is impossible to sustain. Physically.
Yes, but the stock market works on the premise of growth, they try to raise money by virtue of being on the stock market, in order get the money required to finance that growth.
I would think, that a company that has plateaued should take itself off the stock market, however this doesn't seem to be happening. Such a move would probably imply some drastic changes in how a company is goverend.
Growth means a share bought today will have a bigger value tomorrow.
Investors (people) expect a remuneration for their money. So, a public company can only survive with growth.
Growth and risk/reward balance is what keep companies alive.
yeah but for a long time their stock price was built on the dream of growth. Of course you can have a publicly traded company with a steady business. A good board and leadership can keep it going.
Right now it feels like Wall street is realizing the growth party at Meta is ending. Now it's about figuring out how much, if at all, it's going to contract and what the real value of the business will be going forward.
Isn’t Dell famously a private company?
My 2 cents, not that it's important, is that Facebook killed it's own product by A/B testing for user engagement. The product went from a cool place to see what your friends were up (bit like insta was for a while), to this sh*thole place filled with junk viral videos, adds, whacky content from a few insane friends, etc. It became like a cheap social porn dumping ground.
I really just want to see what my friends are up to. I don't want to feel that the posts I get are heavily filtered by algorithms or that 'unpopular' opinions are hidden or whatever.
The original Facebook product back in 2008-2010 was really good. If anything, I think Facebook shows how important is it to develop a product vision that is more than just 'clickbait+++' which is basically Facebook's strategy. [Around 2010, I imagine a bunch of overly nerdy socially maladjusted 20-something programmers sitting around Fakebook HQ describing to robotic-Mark how an excel-driven click-bait approach can make Fakebook way more popular than ever. "Look popularity with maths".]
Now the only thing I really use it for is business pages. [I don't even know why Google don't have a slightly better business-page experience on their maps.]
Zuckerberg, I think is a bit of a genius, but seems to lack much capacity or instinct to display technological 'taste'. That rare thing Steve Jobs valued and talked about. It's why Apple is and remains cool and why it's able to handle PR better. Apple are just much more sophisticated at controlling people's perception around the appeal of the brand. Apple provide a 'luxury' brand experience to 50% of the (developed) world. Facebook's brand is so toxic it decided to change it's name to Meta. [Note, timing the change to Meta not long before the growth slows a lot. I'm surprised Facebook was really even growing much. Well I heard most growth has come from outside the developed economies and it's a waste ground among the young in the West.]
Zuckerberg - from afar - looks like a robotic alien trying to work out the grandest legal pump and dump scheme he can pull off. I do salute him because he's so successful and I still think he'll work out how to make Meta's transition. He's got lots of cards to play in his hand and he seems pretty good at business poker. So, I also congratulate him.
after the dawn of extremist content--i dont even want to see what my friends are up to anymore lmao
My take away from this is amazed they have had increased daily user activity for 18 years, that alone (whatever you think of FB) is pretty amazing from a business perspective. Which is probably why this is an eventful news worthy note.
I'm now wondering if such a blip could snowball via the markets and see a tech crash at some level and a sign of that will be how this news from Facebook plays out upon the other social media outlets. Will TikTok, Twitter and in-part via YT, google, also see a dent in share prices based upon this! Maybe, given how much of the market is based upon perception and momentum. Though that is just my thoughts upon this and certainly I'm not burried into the markets knowing every nuance and sign.
[EDIT ADD] I somehow missed this poignant aspect in the article "Shares in other social media platforms, including Twitter, Snap and Pinterest, also fell sharply in extended trading." So does somewhat lean into my thoughts upon how markets operate in some ways. How that holds and if this blip is just a knee-jerk reaction over a period of time is more the indicator in-play here.
I rarely pick stocks, but I took a long position in Twitter, Snap and Pinterest this morning bc, imo, this is definitely an over-reaction.
The time the average person spends on their phone (and social media) has only been increasing year over year. If Facebook's growth is slowing, that's directly at the hands of competitors.
The big reason behind losses was likely the iOS 14 tracking update. Right after it a ton of Facebook Advertisers groups on Facebook started complaining all of their carefully crafted campaigns were not producing revenue anymore. Targeting and regathering stopped making sales for advertisers and they quickly stopped spending on FB. The people who still spend are now doing videos as ads. Small advertisers were the canary in the coal mine.
No. The real reason behind the losses is that TikTok became the number 1 app in the world today, and is directly taking away social engagement time from Instagram and Facebook. Heck, Zuckerberg admitted it himself in a post today:
"[...] there are two things that I want to call out that are having an impact on our business. The first is competition. People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly."
That makes sense for revenue but how would that drive a loss of users? I’m not seeing the connection and would like to understand.
Android has more market share.[0] Is there something intrinsic to FB ads that are significantly more successful for iOS users rather than Android users? Does FB cater their apps to iOS somehow more successfully, e.g Android users are more savvy and less likely to take to digital nudges?
If that's not the case, then the 25% of market loss doesn't make sense to me -- are FB ads bulk purchases somehow, or are they by user?
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272698/global-market-sha...
This article is about losing users.
People like to hate on Facebook, but how is any other social media different? They are all free services that profit from your personal information. Some just have better PR than the other.
The problem is that there is social media. Facebook is the biggest success, which is why people focus on it. Facebook displaces other forms of communication I prefer to use. I used to use email heavily to communicate with friends. Email was the best format for me, now no one uses it. Everyone is on 12 messaging platforms, Facebook started that trend with messenger.
I used to be able to go to business websites and get the information I needed, now everyone primarily uses Facebook pages to post information, which means I have to log in on many occasions to view the content. The Internet before Facebook was much more convenient for me.
Facebook hasn’t resulted in any positive interactions for me. Something about the platform drives people to be confrontational. Years ago when I participated on the platform I would reply to friend’s posts. Sometimes I would get replies from their friends and they tried to argue with me. It boiled down to them believing I said something in my post that I did not write. That drove me to not write my thoughts about something, and when I did reply, it was with shallow positive comments. That is a very boring way to interact with people, so I stopped using the platform.
Because it is rotten to the core? Because of its utterly unsympathetic upper management? (Ok, Bezos as runner up). Because of all of the deceptive things it has done over the years?
>People like to hate on Facebook, but how is any other social media different?
I think the main reason for it is that most of us are just old enough to remember what facebook was before they started filling the site with ads and recommended/paid/suggested/etc posts. It was really fucking great back when you would logging and there would be literally no content/ads other than what your friend manually took the time write/post.
they gave us a taste of what a great minimalist social media platform could be and then turned monetisation/engagement to 9000.
Imagine if HN was bought by reddit and they decided to use the reddit platform (new skin only, no "old.XX...") with all the ads and everything. That's kinda what happened to facebook.
Exactly. It is no different to the rest of them. This game is simply one tyrant (TikTok) dethroning another (Meta) and all of them make money out of our personal data.
Facebook (the social network) was known to be in decline for years. The real attention is on Instagram and WhatsApp are still adding users. I wouldn't rush to rule them out yet over this.
Personally, I applaud decline in engagement with any of the social networks, not just Facebook.
Hacker News and other relatively smaller forums are different. They are free social media networks that aren't optimized to maximize engagement, promote outrage, or instill a fear of missing out.
The three critically different things to me:
- they have/had a critical size. No other social media was that big, and size matters.
- they required (still do?) real IDs. Forcing people to use their real name is a special kind of awful, especially when it's the main network
- they push a unified account platform for everything they owned. Other companies tried too but most failed (I also hate Apple for that, if you were to ask).
TikTok is very different and will probably turn your view of what drives engagement upside down. Try it for a bit, it's an alternate universe.
Its already frustrating enough having to use Facebook just to look up a restaurant's information, the set times for a concert, or whatever about a local business or event. If all that stuff starts to disappear behind a meta-verse wall, I might just leap off the nearest bridge instead.
Yes, it feels like a return to the walled-garden days of America Online, Prodigy, CompuServe, etc. Essentially, they seem to be want to create a separate network that they control--one that is not "internet-ed" to other networks in an open fashion.
It really gets me down when local/state emergency services etc. use it as their primary means of news/updates.
You're right, it's dismal. I appeal you make it the furthest away bridge, give yourself plenty of time to reconsider, and maybe find a nice restaurant, concert, business or event along the way.
Why have I never ever run into this problem in the ten years of not having Facebook?
Admittedly I use Google for the answers. But I’ve never once needed FB. Is this a regional thing? Some areas exclusively use FB for a storefront?
Thanks for putting into words what I've been noticing and feeling. There's something dreadful that ephemerally appears whenever a service or someone links to an FB page.
This is the reason I went anti facebook years back not because of privacy implications but I felt with facebook the web will become less open. As most business will make a facebook page instead of a website accessible to everyone
Given the efficacy of Facebook's targeted advertising this may be inevitable.
Some random website containing a restaurant's information simply isn't worth maintaining if all your customers use Facebook anyway.
Their mobile site forces you to login to even view things anymore.
A meta-verse bridge or an actual bridge?
If you call a local business you can usually get that sort of information without logging into facebook.
I wonder what percentage of Facebook's users are only there because of 3 or fewer friends, bands, groups/clubs/interests, or businesses that still use Facebook as their primary means of communication.
I basically still log in for interest group posts (e.g., photos from my son's preschool) and to RSVP for party invites. I'd love to see alternatives take over for these.
I only use it to find local events. If it weren’t for fb and insta you’d think nothing was happening at all. The old local publications were all mothballed by the pandemic.
I have never used Facebook and I’ve never had trouble finding that kind of information on non-Facebook sites. Are you just used to looking on Facebook first?
why don't you just use Google search for checking such info as restaurant hours, direction etc? Much easier than checking on FB I suppose.
*oculus off the nearest bridge
My take: fb failed as a social network. Its a data sink you put stuff in but you can't get anything out. You cannot represent real social networks in fb. In real social networks you have different social circles and a different name. Facebook devides the world into friends and public, you yourself have one identity only, and that's not a good model for mapping real social networks into digital ones. During the pandemic when we all really needed social networking fb failed to map your local bars social network onto fb.com.
If they focused on being a social network tool, instead of eating competition so they are _the_ (only) social network, people might increasingly use their products.
But they give nothing back.
18 continuous years of user growth, covering almost literally half the population of planet earth, and they FAILED as a social network?
I beg you to please get some perspective.
Google plus did exactly this and look at where that went.
They lost 3 million active users out of 1.93 billion active users.
That's 0.15%? As countries are opening up more. And that's newsworthy?
I don't see how that justifies the stock crashing -25% in 15 minutes.
Trillion dollar tech giants are expected to GROW to justify their valuations.
Look at the numbers alphabet and apple posted the last few days. Huge growth.
Facebook is not only growing but much worse, shrinking.
I’ve been bullish on FB from the ipo date but this seems like the beginning of the end unless the meta verse is out of this world
Their users growth has been lowering towards 0 for a few years and it's expected that users will eventually shrink. It's just symbolic when you pass the tipping point (although this might be local and not be the definitive tipping point).
It actually didn’t crash. Check the price.
I am thankful to these evil companies. Thanks to them - I spend less time online, try to read more books, appreciate real-life conversations, rely on locals for information and news, and let my mind wander.
Careful not to pull something patting yourself on the back like that.
When Facebook first started getting users I tried to access it from a script using Lynx. I don't remember why but it was nothing nefarious, I think I simply wanted to download something for GF periodically.
I got a message that said "We aren't cool enough to support your browser".
Something about the sarcastic snootiness of the message really angered me and prevented me from ever opening a Facebook account. Later I blocked all Facebook domains in Host files and it's been that way ever since.
For awhile it was a bit awkward with people demanding to know why I didn't have a Facebook page but apparently I hold grudges for a long time. It's been delightful to see people come around to my point of view on Facebook.
They really are like a seedy bar in the bad part of town. With snooty messages for circumventors. But I have to thank them for that snooty message otherwise I would have probably caved and opened an account years ago.
> I got a message that said "We aren't cool enough to support your browser". Something about the sarcastic snootiness of the message really angered me and prevented me from ever opening a Facebook account.
Really? I think Facebook's message is kind of nice compared to the standard "Please use a different browser". Whereas the common message implies that you are the problem for using an unusual browser, Facebook's message acknowledges that they are the problem for being less cool than you.
Tbh, you don’t have a point of view on Facebook that people have come around to. You didn’t like FB for their condescension. Today people are walking out of fb for their business practices (and ppbly a myriad other reasons).
Your reason and theirs have little overlap though it could be argued that condescension is a symptom of internal malaise which is also reflected in shady business practices which is causing users to now abandon FB.
I'm surprised that message irked you that much, doesn't sound that bad to me. Almost sounds sincere, rather than sarcastic.
The fact of the matter is they still have close 2 billion active logins each day. Even if they have settled in matters of user acquisitions they haven't stopped harvesting increasing amounts of profit from each users. I would like to know how the statistics of revenue per user would be from this point on.
I'd like clear qualifying of what a login means. Does that mean I goto facebook.com or open FB app at least once a day? I imagine "daily login" could be artificially inflated in all sorts of ways like having fb.com tab open on my browser and never actually going to it as one example.
The revenue guidance for next quarter is not very great either, so given the user numbers ARPU is not growing
Peak coffee consumption (per capita/US): 1946
Peak cigarette consumption (per capita/US): 1963
Peak oil production (global): unknown, maybe 2020-2030
Peak Facebook: ??
That's an incomplete peer group, but I find it interesting that at some point, society does start to unplug from addictive substances. The tapering off is quite slow, though. Unclear whether heavy users cut back, or new generations just don't develop the habit as older ones die off
Facebook has been primarily displaced by Tiktok, which is considerably more addictive than FB. It's like zonking out in front of cable TV in the olden days, if the cable TV had access to an essentially unlimited content library of short-form dopamine hits, was capable of determining exactly what you like, and showing you exactly that forever.
The difference is, the US population kept growing, so while per capita figures falling is noticeable, total coffee/cigarette consumption may not have fallen.
Facebook's numbers are falling despite a growth in world population, and I'd bet a larger growth in the internet-connected population. That's worse, especially for a platform heavily reliant on network effects.
I think it has more to do with alternatives (except perhaps in case of cigarettes which have direct measurable health effects) availability rather than society starting to unplug from addictive substances.
Peak coffee is in 1946, but what have consumers moved onto from then? Alcohol, Tea, Energy drinks, Soft Drinks ?
Wow I had no idea Americans used to drink more coffee than now. Surely serving sizes have grown and grown - absolutely nobody was having a 20-ounce coffee in 1946, but now that's normal. Doesn't seem to add up but I'm sure you're right.
> Peak coffee consumption (per capita/US): 1946
This one interested me. We're at a local maximum in terms of coffee consumption in recent years. After WWII coffee fell off in popularity and due to the substitute of carbonated soft drinks. Most likely in simplest terms it was a cheaper energy drink for the poor.
Big difference in comparing an entire product area with a specific company and brand. Individual cigarette companies, coffee shops etc. have been going in an out of fashion the entire time. Similarly, the total number of social media users is nowhere near its peak.
I'd say it is actually remarkable just how long Facebook (the site) has been able to maintain relevance, whereas people should have been bored and migrated to something newer and shiner a long time ago (as is now finally happening with apps like TikTok).
I think 2014. Just by looking at things like wall posts on my personal page, around 2015, things went downhill and after 2016, it became really quiet. Almost none of my friends (23 to 33) use Facebook anymore except for the occasional photo dumps. Most are on instagram but even the number of stories posted has gone down as well.
If you include Facebook then you may as well include all other social media platforms.
Facebook is the least of my problems when it comes to addictive substances. Youtube, Reddit, Hackernews, TikTok. They're all the same even if they don't go out of their way to insight addiction.
Back in the good ole days when people drank coffee after dinner.
But coffee has just been replaced by sugary soda drinks, laced with 4x the caffeine...
How is the coffee one even possible? I don’t drink coffee, but almost everyone else I know does. There is a Starbucks on every corner. Every coffee shack always has lines.
We reached peak coffee long ago!? Sad news indeed
When did the begin?
Coffee consumption begin 15th century
Tobacco 18th century
Oil: 347 AD
Social Networks: circa. 2002.
I'm not surprised. The complete company doesn't provide any actually required product or value, just aggregating "users". And the company has the worst imaginable reputation (closed-source, awkward and stupid censorship, clear name enforcement, advertisement, users are not customers but a resource, and much more).
Interestingly this article was featured here recently: https://luttig.substack.com/p/dont-forget-microsoft
It doesn't talk about software, development, technology or service. Merely, buy others. If you don't innovate yourself you have to buy quickly everyone else before they can harm you. That is what Facebook is doing.
And thus begins their gamble. They’re going to have to bet the entire biz on virtual. Most public companies can’t do this, but FB has a unique control structure that gives Zuck the ability to bet the farm.
Does anyone else find this on the level of batshit crazy insane? Meta, are we really going to divest so far from the physical world that the a virtual reality is worth that much? I mean VR is realistically a video game. I just don't see it but I do see desperation from FB.
This is exactly it. They are going to bet the farm on the metaverse. Personally, I don't even like their odds there. Their risk of not existing 10 years from now is 10x any of the other FAANG companies IMO.
They'd be smarter to keep their head down and just keep buying whatever network get's cool down the line IMO.
They have to invest in something if they want to remain relevant. They make loads of money from their ad revenue. They may not be able to acquire the next Instagram or TikTok when it comes.
I use Facebook almost exclusively for local motorcycle groups and my BJJ gym.
For small, local groups, Facebook is a great free way to setup events (like group rides) and share hobbies.
My motorcycle group used to use Meetup but it has a fee and has much lower engagement.
I've stopped using it as a way to communicate with family and friends because of the toxicity related to political divisions. I had to leave a family group messenger chat when two of my brothers started calling my oldest brother vulgar names while talking about my Aunt and Uncle dying of COVID.
I feel like all of the Metaverse stuff we've heard over the last few months was in preparation to try and distract/deflect from this.
Yup. You’d think they’d wait until they had an actual product (heck, even a janky demo) to unveil the metaverse. This whole thing feels like a grift.
It’ll keep the investors distracted for a few years, which will buy Facebook some time to actually put together a real product (who knows if it’ll be something anyone wants to use)
EXACTLY!
Just like with MySpace and Hi5.
We are now at yet another generation switch and newer one is somewhere else.
To Instagram, which they already bought
Now that‘s some good news today. - FB is toxic, for individuals and societies alike. The sooner they diminish, the better off we are.
People associate with the most toxic people, subscribe to the shadiest pages, and spend their day talking non-sense in dangerous groups, then complain they have a shitty Facebook feed.
People say that about YouTube as well. They'll complain about conspiration theories and fake news, when there are literally videos on practically any subject (physics, History, cooking, sports). It's is YouTube!
It's like people will ignore every delicious food on the planet, go directly to the sewers to feast on feces, and then accuse everyone else.
At some point, someone who likes to feed on shit ought to question their culinary choices and take responsibility.
It's about as toxic as every other social network.
Facebook suspended the official washington state republican group multiple times for posts, they finally moved over to mewe.
Facebook is a shadow of what it use to be after running off everyone.
> Facebook is a shadow of what it use to be after running off everyone.
Yes, everyone ran off, leaving only 1.9B subscribers.
Do you know what sort of posts they were? There are some real nutty pro-violence Republicans in WA state (ex: Shea) which could trigger bans or suspensions.
Yes but lets not talk about fb's harming algorithm that amplifies dumb views
IMO, they most likely predicted this, and was part of the motivation for Meta.
> Daily active users dropped from 1.93 billion to 1.92 billion, with the drop coming from Africa and Latin America.
Isn't it suspicious that the losses conveniently happened in Africa and Latin America which contribute to a smallest share of their revenue
I think they only lost a half million users (which wouldn't even show up as a blib on that number)
Do we have any hypotheses, anecdotes, etc for why that's happening in these regions?
Due to past behavior and FB's justification of that behavior, I quit using the company's services and products years ago. I remain unwilling to be a FB user of any kind.
Good. Keep going. Facebook, doing harm at scale.
Same. In fact, I literally just abandoned it. I didn't try to delete it. I just deleted it off my phone and never logged back in again. Been like this for 4 months now. Feels great!
Likewise. I'm still stuck using WhatsApp because it's the de-facto messaging standard over here, but I moved as many people as I could to Signal.
Speaking as someone who deleted his Facebook account years ago, a positive that FB brings to the world is ubiquitous and easy sharing of personal information with the public. With an FB account, you can keep in touch with even casual acquaintances, perhaps forming a connection. That's pretty deep, and a net positive for humanity, and fulfills the promise of the internet.
I predict that what we call "social media" today - this specific aspect of ubiquitous human connection - will continue long after FB is gone and forgotten. I foresee that the ultimate successor will likely be more of a protocol like RSS or FOAF that various platforms can plug into, rather than another web app you log into, owned by yet another monetizing corporation.
The picture you paint of connecting with friends and acquaintances is no longer how Facebook works for me.
The last years, my Facebook feed has been completely dominated by a few groups I'm in (OK, I guess - but not what I signed up for originally), news and commercial entities I have "liked" at some point, and ads.
I never see my friends there any more, unless they're the marketing hustle type. It feels honestly not entirely unlike LinkedIn, which is not a compliment.
As a test, I visited some of my better friends profiles to see if they have posted anything lately. None had. For YEARS. All their content has moved either to Instagram or Snapchat, or they have just stopped posting altogether.
But my group of friends still use Facebook as our primary Event invitation system, and roughly everyone has FB Messenger (as that's the standard here in Norway).
About time. Unlike Google or Microsoft before them, this company was evil from day 1.
0/10 for them and anybody who made their money there
I think social media has shifted from wanting to keep up with friends and family to serving as a distraction from the general malaise most seem to feel. TikTok and Instagram are bright and shiny and distract people via images of attractive hopeful people. Facebook is just seeing that everyone else is doing as badly as they are or perhaps worse, better. I think it ties in with the boom in crypto, everyone is looking for a moonshot to escape. I think the country is going through something very unique, like a social despair and that companies need to adapt. I could be projecting.
I think this has been pretty obvious for a while... MAU doesn't tell the real story and I think we all have anecdotal evidence that the engagement and demographics changed substantially over the last 5 years.
https://archive.md/PPaDg
That's why I was commenting last week here that the antitrust lawsuit in US on monopoly is bogus.
Tiktok has come out of nowhere in the span of last few years to compete. FB doesn't have a market capture as the US lawmakers and Lina Khan accuse them of having.
Also, the same issues like disinformation etc which FB suffered from is going to be a problem for any social media platform, even Tiktok. Tiktok has far less infra and resources invested into stopping it, so it will be interesting to see if the target shifts on to Tiktok now.
Theres so many ads on instagram Im considering dumping it. Thats the only social platform I ever liked because I dont have to hear peoples opinions on things. But Im at a breaking point.
Exactly. The main feed doesn't hold any meaning for me now. I find I miss around 50% of my friend's posts and reels if I don't check their profile manually. I only use it for seeing and posting stories now. I'm sure stories would get similarly ad-clogged in 1-2 years as well.
Just to clarify, I'm fine with seeing some ads in between chronological posts. But the feed is entirely ads after 5-6 posts. Hoping some brave instagram PM reads this comment.
It's almost impressive how much of Instagram is just ads. I keep it around to follow a few people, but it seems like more than half of what scrolls by is either ads or totally off-base account recommendations (Which are themselves, essentially ads)
> Im considering
In poker they call this a bluff
Agreed. They have really bumped up the advertising the last couple of years. Now every second or third story or post in my feed is an ad.
As people commented already, meta / facebook will be a enormous cash cow for quite some time. This raises the interesting question of whether it could actually reinvent itself in some way.
Having an almost 100% concentration on a business model that is (thankfully) increasingly seen as a socially detrimental aberration, it means that they would need to diversify into more conventional tech business models the way, e.g., Alphabet/Google is trying to do [0]
The problem is, of-course, that honest tech business models are a well occupied ecological niche and in the absence of some regulatory/political granted monopoly the competition tends to turn lethal.
They could launch a cloud business for example, with the unique selling point: we know best how to collect and monetize your data, so we know best how to protect it :-).
[0] I am dismissing the "metaverse" thingy as some sort of smoke and mirrors that seems to be necessary to provide cover for precisely the kind of news now being discussed
When the metaverse actually launches they will skyrocket. They were smart to pivot early. Saying the 'metaverse' is on FB right now is similar to people selling acres on the Moon before anyone landed. FB is planting an imaginary flag on the 'metaverse' hoping they can technically catch up to their claims and capitalize on it.
> When the metaverse actually launches
I think you need to define "metaverse".
What is it, besides an ugly, much less functional Second Life? Who's launching it? What is it good for? Why would someone use it over...well, you have to define what it's good for before I can even ask that question.
I'm long on Meta as well and I really like the Quest (2), but the metaverse already had a soft launch. What Meta has been able to accomplish so far is impressive, but it's still not enough.
What's the status quo with VR problems?
- Price: This was fixed with Quest 2
- Complexity: This was also fixed with Quest.
- Socially acceptable: Nope. Even when you remove the issue of the toxicity surrounding Facebook's brand, most people refuse to either try or use VR regularly. Case in point, Meta is giving away Quest 2's to their employees and contractors. imo it's surprising to me that not all of them took the offer. One common answer I get is, "This is going to be as gimicky as the Wii right?". imo the form factor is what drives normal people away. It has to be smaller and closer to goggles before mass acceptance happens. Apple is most likely right on their approach, based on their patent submissions. Conversely, Apple's weakness will be price.
I predict the Metaverse will fail, and fail early. It will be Google Plus, but worse.
No one I personally know cares about Metaverse, including young people and Facebook users.
I think renaming was a massive strategic mistake. The metaverse, even if it succeeds from a technical standpoint, will need to be deemed 'cool' for people to adopt it. And generally, if you have something cool, you don't prematurely blurt it out to the rest of the world.
Your first sentences and last sentences contradict each other in my mind. They're selling nonense. I don't know why they're pushing the metaverse so hard in media. It feels as astroturfed as crypto is. I'm not putting on a VR headset to go to a meeting, I would literally never want that.
I feel like "selling acres on the Moon" and "smart" are at significant odds with each other...
The main issue with selling "the metaverse" is that Facebook can't do it. Zuckerberg has made sure that the would be early adopters are steering clear of anything coming out of Facebook/Meta.
You can't piss of the tech entusiasts, reviewers, podcasts and everyone in between by constantly exhibiting poor judgement, arrogant behavior and blatantly invading peoples privacy, and then expect them to be excited about your next venture.
Facebook has burned pretty much any goodwill it might have had, and now it want's you to emerge yourself in it's VR world? Zuckerberg has to be incredibly delusional if he think that's going to sell.
You sound like an NFT believer
The metaverse already exists. It has for 10+ years.
FB isn't betting on the metaverse existing. They are betting that they can make some new walled portion off it that will be so big that it will esentially be the whole thing.
Personally, I don't like their odds at all.
Stock dropped by 22% as well.
This is huge. Facebook is 2% of the S&P 500, it basically dragged the whole market slightly down.
Yes, unfortunately I bought in 2 days ago. The market is irrational. Facebook literally missed its projections by 3% and loses 0.15% of its active users (mostly due to things opening up) and investors panic. Good time to buy in.
Facebook has been losing users for a long time, but has kept this hidden by only removing bot accounts sparingly, to mask their decline.
But I guess the decline has become undeniable, but I suspect even now they're manipulating the statistics to dampen their fall.
Yup. Average daily users is such a meaningless stat. There’s a huge difference between spending 5 hours a day on Facebook, and briefly opening Messenger to respond to a single message, but both are equally considered a “daily user”
Anecdotally, I know several people who shifted from Facebook, with its toxic space for arguments, to Instagram in the last few years.
I stopped using Facebook a few years ago, when it was mainly for a few topic focused groups. I wish there were a way to download all the group posts and comments (or at least the ones I participated in) in some kind of an open text based format I can store locally and refer to. If you know of any such tools, please share.
There’s so much information locked into the platform, and with no way for search engines to index and no easy way to even lookup information within it (Facebook search has always sucked), it’s a huge loss.
I really don’t get this argument. Facebook is just people. The same people you find on Facebook are everywhere else. You think ig is clean? Let me introduce you to my antivax cousin.
Junk is everywhere and I don’t understand how people focus on the company. Everyone here should understand how difficult it is to combat spam, especially on a planetary level like on Facebook.
People need to be careful with that because Instagram is much more powerful while seeming innocuous. (Even before copying TikTok with the reels feature, and before chilling Snapchat with the stories feature. Now it’s all amplified.)
I don't get it, aren't there also discussions on Instagram? I don't use it much but I thought people could comment on posts there just the same.
Which is impressive because I still have Facebook I just don't login and never use any of its services - the account now exists to simply hold a lock on my name on the service.
I suspect I'm not the only one doing this.
The stat being referenced is daily active users, so not counting people who have an account but never login.
I mainly use it to sell things locally. Or maybe there's a local apartment rental group. That's about it.
This would be reflected in change to Monthly Active Users which seems way more relevant than total users.
I don't use the main Facebook app much, but I use Instagram and Messenger daily, Whatsapp sometimes as well.
What do you use for your friend group chats?
I'm starting to notice this trend in my group of contacts.
I am not sure why they have been unable to build the right set of features to grow WhatsApp for Business in India.
That's almost a Billion DAUs where a lot of business transactions happen via chat on WhatsApp.
I haven’t worked at FB in almost 5 years, and it’s definitely a clear milestone on growth not being massive always, but shaving 2 dimes off the market cap seems, abrupt. You’d think the cap might slow its growth more gradually and (if DAUs go up again) gain more gradually.
I appreciate companies only release rock solid figures on a certain cadence, but there’s like a zillion analysts who can read tea leaves.
IMHO tech equities are pricey in general, but for someone who wants FAANG exposure this might be the bargain at Barney’s Upper East?
I hold no FB stock btw.
People have many reasons for disliking Facebook.
We have the personal data usage and integrity problems.
Then they wanted to get clean from this and did it by way of censoring and silencing what can be called conservative voices.
And now they want you and your kids to waste your life in some VR "meta" world...
Facebook does still serve a purpose. It's a popular and easy way for local communities and associations to stay in touch.
I couldn't stand Facebook though so I find myself not being able to join these conversations. Hoping something better comes along.
FB lost US about 2M users in summer 2020, but has been pretty flat since then.
See FB's slide 13: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q4...
The drop this round is in the rest of the world and not US, Asia, or Europe which are flat or even up
The hot takes of Peak Facebook are unfounded, or at least premature.
This just in: Can't grow infinitely within a finite world.
The language around this is confusing and contradictory around the article. Did overall users fall or did user growth fall? Is it decelerating or shrinking?
Ever try to find out where your old friends live? Like, hey, don't I know someone in Philly? Very basic utilities are missing in Facebook.
I remember when AOL or Yahoo or MSN was the place to be.
Then myspace or Hi5 was the place to be
Now it's google and facebook.
How long will they last?
Nokia was the phone to have
Then Blackberry was the phone to have
Now it's iPhone
How long will this last?
Google hasn't really ever been a place to be. Search isn't a place to hang out. Google seems more likely to hang around a long time, it's products are utilitarian and win based mostly on scale at this point.
Capitalism. The market speaks with their time and money. If you cannot keep them, someone will innovate on your idea and the herd moves.
Well, diminishing returns
Mark Z talked about S curves 10 yea to ago
I seem to recall that one of the regulars here said this would never happen just a few months ago. Have they issued a mea culpa yet?
I work in a big consulting firm that really believes that the Metaverse is gonna be the future, and are even creating a team just to develop aplications for clients in the Meta. I don`t think this is what going to save the company. PAssing all day with an VR device in your face seens very uncorfotable to me, and I can see works adopting it.
Which firm is that? Are there VR specific positions for that I might be able to apply to?
I used facebook for a brief period only because I was trying to sell some stuff on the marketplace. That being said marketplace is a crapshoot most of the time it seems so it ended up not working out. Every time I visited that cesspool of a website I regretted it immediately. Had to add a stylus script to disable loads of unwanted content
I'm not sure craiglist is better... I think for the general folk that FB is quite a bit better.
The biggest asset of Facebook for now is the facebook platform, perhaps a more durable asset will be the social graph sourced by the facebook platform. What would it mean for a durable social graph commercialization model? I'm not sure, but at a minimum it would need to be exportable and portable between platforms and ecosystems.
TikTok has crushed them in the Gen Z market.
In many ways TikTok re-creates the best part of myspace - being able to express your personality. You can dance, make fun of yourself, post a thirst trap or make history memes. You can't do any of that on Facebook and I'm sure the fact your videos can go viral is way more appealing.
The Fb home feed is becoming a cesspool of brag photos disguised at wanting to share their daily lives with friends and family.
There are better ways to do that than having 500 friends on your list and hoping someone would see it and press like. It feels a bit disgusting now that people actually use it more like their Instagram feed
If you think about how metrics works, they probably had friendly fraud pumping their numbers -- think about them counting bots as new users when in fact it was just bots. Zuck sells Nov'2021 because he knows this info (insider trading works this way), earnings come out and news is released from the prior quarter.
Zuck and other executives sell on a schedule right? I agree this is plausible but your second sentence sort of implies he in short time frame defrauding investors by selling before releasing numbers. Not sure that is the case, its the same as Elon Musk asking Twitter if he should sell but already had scheduled sales disclosed prior.
If only the VR division was its own thing (while still having the resources). Their VR stuff is pretty damn awesome.
I wonder how many people are like me...they see this article and think, "Hey, I have a Facebook account, I should see what it is going on there since I haven't looked at it in however many days." Then I look and see there are no messages or anything and close it...for who knows how long again.
I used to use Facebook for events, but faced a bug recently where random friends could see the event details for a private event, as if invited, despite not being invited. A pretty serious bug, leading to some awkward messages!
In any case, I now only use FB for one single niche community. If that goes elsewhere, so will I!
The number 1 reason FB has missed is the IDFA change from Apple. It has completely crippled their ad business and their effectiveness and the majority of spend I know has gone to Google. When FB was clearly 1st or 2nd in all GEO's around the world, they now are not even in the top 3 in many GEOs.
Why would that affect the number of users?
As for the stock price, it will come back. FB users may be down but FB now owns Instagram and WhatsApp and they haven’t started to monetize them yet.
Not to say they have genuinely been trying new technologies with AR/VR and with their stash of cash can buy any startups in AR/VR space.
If anything FB is way underpriced IMO.
Instagram is monetised to fuck. It’s 50% ads these days. Almost useless and they keep “tweaking” the time line algorithm so nothing is in chronological order and you see the same things again and again. Often from days ago.
WhatsApp is yet to be monetised but doing so is going to be tricky and messy. There are excellent alternatives with the same functionality for free such as Signal that while not a perfect drop in replacement are more than good enough.
If they fuck up WhatsApp they could lose their users very quickly. That’s the trouble with so many messaging platforms. WhatsApp is nothing “special”. I would argue the only “special” service is iMessage due to the exclusivity of iOS although that seems to be more of a US thing than elsewhere.
I think Facebook see they’re in a shit place with WhatsApp which is why they are yet to make any real changes despite owning them for years.
It is the only acquisition they have made that they haven't made any substantial changes to as I honestly think they don't know how to do so and as it is all tied to a persons cell number anyway migration is pretty painless.
People don't need to share a new username with anyone, just blast a message to all their friends with "Hey it's [redacted], I'm using $NewMessageApp now as WhatsApp got all weird with their changes". You get a few people to do that and people happily switch and the network effect takes over.
Most people are using multiple messaging services anyway so it isn't even switching just dropping.
Look at the hell they brought on with their last small change with the privacy policy. You had so much backlash to a small change that they pushed back the deadline and then dropped it altogether.
Imagine actual real monetisation. It would be the end of the service in the blink of an eye.
Sorry but Instagram is full of ads. So full that it bothers me and avoid looking at stories.
WhatsApp is not monetized yet. Though, I believe it can be easily exchanged with a different service (e.g Signal, Telegram, …) if they start throwing ads at the users.
I don't know about WhatsApp, FB has been running ads on Insta for awhile now. How else are they going to monetize it?
Instagram is old cohort. The fresh demographic is tiktok
I use FB to keep track of a few old friends, a couple of online "clubs", and to just kind of monitor the goings-on and general sense-of-the-crazy from That Side of the Family (if you have one of those, you know what I mean).
FB is inessential. If it collapsed tomorrow, I'd remove a bookmark.
A shame Facebook hasn't seen the massive upside in pivoting to "be a force for saving democracy, with a side line in diminishing inequity, political (and wealth!) polarization, and inculcating respect for the commons, the middle ground, and public wellbeing."
The upside that I hope to see from this is that the faster Facebook loses its shine and becomes a negatively viewed legacy product on a downward trajectory, the more likely Meta is to make good on relaxing the Facebook account requirement for Oculus.
I wonder if they tried to buy wordle... What's the hottest social network they could buy?
Twitter (and I'm only half joking). Clubhouse. Discord. Pinterest.
TikTok
"...they could buy"
Nope
That ship sailed a long time ago.
FINALLY. Can‘t wait for the failure of „meta“ (i refuse to let evil FB Inc. own that word) and see all the awesome devs working there, finally work on something else than exploiting the privacy of people to fill pockets of all these zuckerbergs…
What a great day.
You make it sound like these devs did not consciously choose to work for a privacy-exploiting company in the first place
Facebook, great engineering org as it is, has done a lot of less than great things. Not just bad stuff to others, but less than optimal stuff for themselves as well. Could this be karma? Zuck's chooks coming hoome to roost?
Another issue: dumbing down. Connecting via web / browser has gradually dropped a lot of stuff and has become just like the mobile app. I used to log in a couple of times a week; now it's not even once a month.
I am seeing fewer and fewer of my friends and relatives on Facebook anymore. My feed is overwhelmed with intrusive advertising. I wish I could give it up, but I have to stay because some customers are on it.
There are ways to block Facebook's ads on your feed. But the only way to win is not play.
I love Facebook, but it's been dead for a while. A car that runs out of gas while accelerating downhill doesn't stop - or even stop accelerating - for a long time
By the way, this has been so far my best upgrade:
cat /etc/hosts
...
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 m.facebook.com
The only reason I still have a facebook account is because I have logins for other sites tied to it. Haven't personally logged into facebook on purpose since 2016.
You should untie those. What happens if your FB account gets frozen?
"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." (Winston Churchill). One can only pray.
Facebook pulled a Myspace. Growth slowed, so they added more ads to compensate. Growth slowed even more and went negative. For Myspace, that was a death spiral.
I have been without FB for almost 3 years now and never looked back. People still look shocked at me when I tell them I’m not on IG or Twitter.
we all know how hard is to get out, to remove a FB account, so to be (with their figures) considered a lost user: the financial consequences of this news is another reason why it's so hard :)
Now the wall has fallen.
You can hide many things, but sooner or later the figures have to come out: as a paradox, their "statistics" department can probably start to relax a bit now.
Is this including all facebook owned platforms (such as instagram and whatsapp, or just facebook.com [and the associated apps])?
Good. We’re tired of what they did to society.
Everyone I know is getting off Facebook. I got out a month ago. It distorts reality and takes over your life.
I am here with popcorn watching and relishing. I hope the decline continues and accelerates.
My account is deactivated, but not deleted. I wonder if I am still in their counts?
Finally!
Although you still need facebook to login into several other things, like tinder etc.
Meta recruiter (sipping coffee): Let me close this candidate today.
The Market: hold my beer.
Good!
These buffoons are responsible for the spread of mis-information and should pay for the murder / unwarranted deaths caused by their desire for more views during the past two years by giving every village idiot an amplified voice!
I have reported so many mis-information post and they do nothing. They could create thousands of jobs by having more humans for verifications, but no. They want to maximize profits and depend only on AI with no appeal possible. They do not want to create more jobs to balance the transition to digital from analogue world so I am glad their stock price is getting avg'd out.
They really don't think long term of their role/responsibility to society. All their top brains and fancy school hires cant even grasp long term consequences of their short term on-steroid decisions.
Every empire / entity / co. will come to an end, it's the law of nature due to stagnation & complexity. So will this. Good riddance!
Literally all Zuckerberg has to do is not be the kind of person he is... his product itself did achieve success in that a huge number of people are using it, but then he had to prove himself to have no ethical standards
Why does it seem like I'm the only one who doesn't hate Zuckerberg?
I'm genuinely confused.
Can someone please explain this to me?
I want to understand better.
Hate has always been popular, the punching bag just changes every few decades.
It's funny because Zuckerberg isn't even a public figure. I'm sure someone will make some ethical claim, but I've read all the articles and they are hardly conclusive. It's probably better to just wait for a regulatory decision, otherwise you're just going to be reading someone else's agenda.
Hitting quarterly numbers, amassing wealth and power is difficult to do if he is not doing what he does.
Human greed has no limits. And once someone gets a taste of that amount of wealth and power, it is difficult to not get morally and ethically corrupt, either directly, or by turning a blind eye to reality.
Literally all Zuckerberg has to do is be the same person who made him worth $80 billion.
Your point is taken, but I think it's kind of clear Facebook's only strategies are "lie" and "copy/buy everyone else"
He’s worth $80 billion for now.
"for the first time"
i mean yeah if you believe their numbers
Cant wait for this frustrating company to shut down.
#deleteFacebook
I'm praying they are forced to sell WhatsApp
Insert Ron Swanson happy dance gif here
Almost everyone I know is getting off Facebook. It distorts reality and takes over lives. I got out a month ago and don't miss it.
Good to know. Not using it anyways.
There may be hope for humanity yet
I don't have much to add to this, but Facebook couldn't go away faster for me. My account is still active, but I deleted the app on the phone and probably only check my home page once every two weeks.
My friends and family just aren't that interesting when they post stuff or it's awful content. I find myself sharing everything with people I want to interact with over text.
Zuck is a sociopathic asshole, so I hope Facebook fails miserably.
Hacker News is starting to feel like Reddit /all more and more every day
bye bye facebook
I deleted my FB a while ago and it truely helped my online mental health. The fb feed was full of false news and hate speech. I reported as much as I could but nothing happening. There wasn't any regulations and I felt more toxic on the contents. I am not gonna lie there was a positive side like knowing the news instantly but It's not worth it apparently.
It's so interesting how different people's Facebook feeds are so different. I do have excessive ads for products, that's fair enough, but I have absolutely nothing political. My only issue with Facebook is that it's poorly designed, actually very dated and cluttered, and none of my friends really use it for personal posts except me.
I suspect that each Facebook user exists in a different bubble. Possibly they see someone reporting frequently and think "oh great, here's an engaged user, let's show them some more hate speech to get them even more engaged".
FB is RSS for non-tech content.
In my experience FB is what you make it to be. It requires some curration effort but you can mold it to be useful. But you can’t just add, you’ll have to block as well, including ads - each ad source can be turned off.
For me, FB is the main source of news about local concerts. Sure, you’ll find about major ones anyway, but there’s no way to effectively track small ones. It doesn’t have to be music. FB is the easiest way to track niche local businesses, events, or groups of interest. Some of them even don’t have web sites and FB is where they post. Even when they have sites, you wouldn’t visit each of them every day to find out what is new and interesting and you’ll miss stuff.
This is exactly what happens. What's worse, I thought it was doing that because I had responded to some political post, but FB just sees "you engaged with person-X, I will now alert you when person-X posts, and when people respond to his posts, even if you haven't looked at it"
This led to increasingly divisive messages literally showing up in my notifications that I had nothing to do with. This still happens months after I stopped responding to any of those messages.
People are bad at removing friends and family that contribute to their poor mental health.
Yeah same here, the only thing I see are posts from the groups I've joined which are mostly field of work related, the occasional corporate promotion and maybe a friend post about someone's holiday or something once in a blue moon.
When people say "I deleted facebook because of all the hate" it just makes me wonder what kind of assholes they're friends with. Removing their facebook posts from your view just hides who they are, they don't stop being assholes. What they really need to fix is their damn social circle.
My FB isn't full of fury and hate speech. It's boring!
Half of my friends like to post anodyne motivational quotes, "hilarious" forwarded jokes, pretty pictures of events they attended, and their own not-so-interesting musings. Unfortunately, that half is by far the most active on Facebook.
The overall atmosphere is mawkish. The best aspect is seeing pics of people's kids. You can't fault that.
Facebook shows you whatever is working to keep you there. I do like reading about politics but I also mute or unfollow anyone that is putting too much of that on my feed.
Twitter is where I go to be mad about news. I've managed to keep FB about old-friend stalking.
I have very little content on my news feed. Friends used to post a lot more often, but now all I see are posts from local government accounts and, of course, ads between every two or three posts. After a few pages of this I get an error message asking me to reload the page and a reload page button that does nothing.
100% agreed that it is poorly designed. I suspect it's that design (and the bugs) that are driving away my friends.
You may think you've deleted your FB account, but its probably still there...
I "deleted" my FB after they acquired FriendFeed (still the best social network I've ever come across) back in 2009.
I was puzzled, then, to receive an email in November last year asking if I had tried to log in. "Impossible", I thought, "that account was deleted!". So, I visited Facebook, and because my old username/password were still in my password manager, I was able to log in! Imagine my shock to find my old profile, still there with it's old profile pic, my old connections, etc.
When will "delete my account" actually mean my account is deleted?
(The final kick in the nuts to this story is that within 2 minutes of logging in, I get a chirpy, "Welcome back to Facebook!" email. Fuckers.)
If you live in Europe, you can contact the facebook DPO and request a (legally mandated) hard delete.
They're then allowed to keep data for legal reasons (tax, legal intercept, etc) but not beyond.
You just deactivated your FB account.
Deleting FB account is slightly more complicated. After you have deleted it, don't try to login for months to check out if it's gone.
To permanently delete your account:
1. From your main profile, click account in the top right of Facebook.
2. Select Settings & Privacy, then click Settings.
3. Click Your Facebook Information in the left column. If you have Facebook access to a page in the new Pages experience: Click Privacy, then click Your Facebook Information.
4. Click Deactivation and Deletion.
6. Choose Delete Account, then click Continue to Account Deletion.
7. Click Delete Account, enter your password and then click Continue.
That is important to know but orthogonal to the GP's point.
Removing Facebook from my Browser bookmarks etc. improved my life a lot. However I didn't delete the account as some shops unfortunately update their opening times etc. only there and especially in current pandemic world that sometimes is needed to check ...
> "I was puzzled, then, to receive an email in November last year asking if I had tried to log in."
Happened to me exactly the same, but I don't remember the password and I can't "delete" it again.
At least the account blocking features still works for users, unlike with youTube and Twitter.
The UI is more and more horrid though on FB and Instagram with every update. My ability to do the most simple things is extremely frustrating, and I don't understand how they believe those changes help to inspire deeper engagement, It's getting really difficult to see any value in either platform as they shrink organic engagement of each post to 1-2 people when I have over 1k followers. I refuse to pay for ads just to reach the audience that has already chosen to follow me. Instagram shows a mile of ads and posts from accounts I follow on every news feed before my desired content now, it's totally outrageous.
Likes are completely worthless across the web right now, they mean absolutely nothing... and the stats aren't even accurate on so many of these sites, they're really showing desperation by pushing their user base away, I honestly can't believe that "brilliant minds" are at the helm any more... It feels like they sacked the experienced development minds and are just left with interns, marketers, and psychiatrists on staff. Something's either got to fail or change majorly before year end or I'm going back to IRC and local message boards for good, social media has become a total waste of energy.
Totally agree with your criticism of the UI and news feed. I rarely use Facebook to begin with, but I noticed a major decrease in user experience and usability as of late.
Infinite scroll is just...laggy. I don't have this issue on Tiktok (which to be fair I also don't use often). The news feed used to be curated for me specifically, but now it seems to be the same recycled content I see on YouTube recommendations.
I don't want to see the same sh*t over and over again, show me something unique and new.
Why not just stop visiting FB?
You might lose access to things you logged in with "Login with Facebook" or lose out on some connections that are only on FB. Doom-scrolling FB is a bad idea, but whenever I log in to FB, I do it with a purpose (usually to text someone on FB)
That's a big jump from the time when typing "facebook" in the address bar used to almost be a reflex on opening a new tab.
Another approach is to unsubscribe from everything (friends, groups etc.). You feed is empty, but you can still visit profiles/groups etc. but nothing will be pushed to you.
I deleted my FB account years ago primarily due to its aggressive tracking. The mental health benefits have been a nice bonus.
The change I made was to change my facebook bookmark to messenger, and thus I can still chat to all of my mates who use it to talk but otherwise have to consciously decide to visit facebook itself. I find myself doomscrolling WAY less, and maybe visit it once a day if I'm bored.
I recently reported a hate speech targeted at Indian minority (not Muslim). The text literally had gen$c!d3 threats and other usual trigger words in it, and there were like copy paste of same post in thousands (probably a campaign). Facebook replied "does not violate their conditions blah blah".
Just curious, why did you write “gen$c!d3”? The options I can think of are:
1. You’re worried that a script on HN will delete your comment, similar to how this seems to work on YouTube
2. You’re censoring that word to avoid “triggering” people
3. You’re copying verbatim an excerpt from the hate speech you’re referencing
I’m asking in earnest; I honestly don’t know which of those three (or any other option?) it is.
I guess it very much depends on the minority in question, FB like the government only responds to "mi orities" with street veto or global muscle power.
The reports are useless. I guess the reviewers have to achieve some KPI and have to just click past reports to have a chance.
I actually didn't have any false news and hate speech in my feed - I used FB purity and consistently blocked all bad actors. I left the FB anyway, because it's has been a terrible platform for discussing anything even before the latest bout of censorship, but with redesigns, bans and constant intrusive hectoring about what I am supposed to be thinking is really getting old. It just became not good for anything but wasting time, and even that wasn't really enjoyable.
And there are so many other places to get news nowdays...
Reddit can be like this. But delete your account, Make a new one then add r/homelab r/homeassistant and r/chainsaw and it becomes a very positive place. Your desired subs may be different.
Some of the subs are just so helpful and so good.
I once reported explicit pornography that posted on an electronics group I belonged to and the response I got from the system was that it was deemed not inappropriate and no action would be taken.
I don't know what good reporting does for anything...
I reported a comment thread discussing which ethnicities needed to be put in camps, and got the same thing about it somehow not being against the community standards.
I did catch a 30 day ban for saying that 'men are trash; I'm going back to dating women' though.
I have seen zero hate speech, but I mostly use FB to share pictures of my kids.
It is because this person is surrounded by toxic people.
My feed is updates from friends. I don't really hate speech or anything toxic.
Shame on you then for violating their privacy.
Why use FB for that and not a picture sharing site, just out of interest?
You must have spent a lot of time arguing politics with your friends. My feed is really benign. It's mostly family/travel/outdoors photos.
> false news and hate speech
I believe there's something much more sinister than that going on with that feed. I believe it's specifically programmed to fish out your mental vulnerabilities and bully you with content that touches on exactly that.
Just unfollow everybody. It's such a liberating thing to do. You can still manually check on people if you want to and you can still message them.
After a few weeks it feels like a superpower "wow, so I can just use facebook for 5 minutes every couple of days and easily stop using it? Unbelievable!"
The only useful thing about it was messenger but they disabled that on mobile browsers, so I stopped using the whole predict and then deleted it altogether.
For me, personally, FB just became boring and uninteresting at some point. I sometimes open FB for Marketplace and, I think, this is it. Had no need to go cold turkey and delete the account. I still have it for Messenger which I use as an app both for desktop and mobile because I don’t want to lose touch with my friends, esp. during these times.
If that's what your friends were sharing then maybe you need better friends?
Social media worsens people’s perceptions of the world can actively influences what they share and consider their own opinion.
The same point applies to family, for example, and whether I need better family or not they’re all I’ve got. And Facebook has pushed them really far down whatever fringe they had a slight inclination to. Before Facebook any extreme views could be tempered a bit in family conversations, but now everyone thinks they have the weight and authority of the whole world, or at least their tribe, behind every argument.
This bait and switch is not something we agreed to as a society. We joined for the pics of partners, kids and puppies, and to stalk and ‘poke’ people we had real life crushes on. We stayed because we found a million welcoming tribes all defined by hatred and anger.
Maybe I’m old school, but there’s usually more to someone than what they share on Facebook. One of the funniest people I know, and a good real life friend for nearly a two two decades, posts dumb stuff like that all the time. We also have great conversations full of conflicting viewpoints, which I love, and we’ve both changed the others perspectives. I don’t really care what their political beliefs or medical choices are. We can find common interests outside of that. It doesn’t affect me. For some reason, that’s now the primary focus of many peoples lives and identity. He’s more than that, and I hope I am too.
You’ve identified what makes Facebook evil. If your friend shares two things, one of which enrages you and causes you to post an angry comment, and one of which causes you to smile gently and scroll on by, which one do you think Facebook is going to show you?
They probably don’t need better friends. We need a communication medium that isn’t powered by hate.
Have you ever used Facebook? You see divisive rage-bait garbage regardless of whether your connections specifically shared it. The Algorithm(tm) decides what you see, and it favors whatever is as "engagement"-worthy as possible.
It's not friends.
Facebook's boosted content/recommended content is what it is.
Having a friends only feed would actually save the product.
Yes and no. Groups are the best part of Facebook and with good information also comes the spam.
I hear this very often and while deep down it's a reasonable take, the more you think about it, the less useful as advice it becomes.
While I can't comment about Facebook specifically (I haven't been on it for over a decade by now), but I've seen the same happen on many other platforms as social media has become staple of life.
I know people I've been friends with (and I mean, close friends) for almost two decades by now. I have all kinds of family members, far and close friends, acquaintances, online friends that go back to a decade or two ago on IRC channels, etc. I'm not saying every single one of them has changed, but a very LARGE portion of them has. We all have our own demons, our own beliefs, our own pet peeves and general grievances. People are sharing all kinds of sensationalist news and (let's say it) garbage all the time related to whatever orbits their belief or view of the world (or what they are afraid of). The more sensationalist something is, the more divisive it is, the more rounds it will do and the more it will get entrenched into the minds of someone.
Very often, that someone can be you, your friends, or your family. That doesn't make them (or you) bad people necessarily. I know people who I'd consider to be very good people, nice, caring, outgoing, friendly, etc. And yet they still share their demons on social media. The vitriol-induced "us vs them" articles, the fake news-style misinformation, the half truth, whatever fits their view of the world (because we simply don't know better).
It's a huge mental and emotional toll to be consistently bombarded by this kind of stuff. I don't mind talking about certain topics with certain people, what I do mind is getting consistently dragged (either willingly or not) into the same topics/conversations all the time, mostly fueled by emotional outrage (whether it is justified or not).
This doesn't make them "bad" friends. It just makes them "human" friends. You can definitely be completely and utterly emotionally drained talking with friends about topics that you care about, not in a bad way, it's just the way it is. The world is being more and more painted like it's all going to shit (whether or not that's true depends on what news you're being fed, I'm not making judgement here), and that does have a toll on you as a human.
Sorry for the long rant, but I just had to get it out there.
I don’t think all friend need to share political views. Just from my own group of friends, I know our views vary wildly. I am libertarian, I don’t buy the COVID and climate change narratives and I just want to live my life and want to deal with as little of the government as possible. However most of my friends like big government (socialist welfare state) and do buy in the COVID narrative as pushed by big media and government.
In the past we’d sometimes have very heated discussions around the COVID situation (initiated by a friend who shares my views), but as I noticed people becoming very “aggressive” in the debate, I asked everyone to just not discuss this issue anymore. And happily everyone agreed on this.
So now we’re still all great friends, but we just avoid this very sensitive topic, which I feel is for the better. It’s not worth it to lose friends just because you don’t agree on some issues.
We do our discussions over Signal by the way, I haven’t used Facebook for many years now. Most of my friends have quitted Facebook. In the past we mainly used Facebook to organize group events (weekend get-togethers), but we use Signal for this functionality now.
My FB feed is essentially zero content (500+ friends mostly over 25). It’s an aggregator nowadays of group discussions and primarily page content, even pages I don’t follow. Nobody but boomers use it to share nowadays.
I haven’t been on Facebook for a few years, but I saw the same the last year I was on the site. I had unfollowed everything, except friends. You could go through my entire feed in 3 minutes once a week.
Almost nobody was posting anything, mostly it was shared posts. If it wasn’t for Facebook killing forum and small websites, more people would have left years ago.
I’ve seen some of it. But it’s an essential app to maintain contact with my friends around the globe.
Upvoted because THANK GOD
get woke go broke
who cares about facebook but zucky.
I went back to my forums, find myself easily disengaging from Reddit (around the election, Reddit was nothing but stress), Check Twitter maybe 10 minutes a week, go to Instagram once a week because my kid posts his artwork there.
But in general, ALL of the sticky sites aren’t…sticky anymore. I took 2 weeks off at the worst of it and it did an amazing job of breaking the feedback loop.
Facebook tried to take over forums and mailing lists, their market was full of scams (which had me going round and round with Paypal and the bank when ‘Sally’ selling an iPad from Massachusetts sent a receipt with an email from a Guy in Turkey.
Then they started poking around with VR and Meta and man, I really don’t want to use this headset if I’m forced to log into Facebook and you’ve got 6 outward facing cameras, Zuckerberg.
Good. Can’t come soon enough.
loses loser users
good.
Paywalled
This is good news. Facebook has proven itself to be a negative influence on people and countries.
The past 5 years I only used messenger and miniature wargaming groups. That's all the utility FB provides, and sadly, I don't see the wargaming groups move anywhere else.
It might have very much to do with their shoddy 2FA rollout.
I have heard of quite a few among my circles who got locked out.
They hurriedly pushed out something that did not work in the first place.
I am glad that people are finally seeming to catch on.
Good. Facebook needs to die.
It was me guys. I finally deleted my account.