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.
How is that a joke? It's just looking down on someone because of where they live, eat and their politics (assuming very lose definition of "racist"). And when did the role of journalists start including dunking on random people?
This probably sounds like a real zinger to a certain kind of young person who moved to Brooklyn and thinks everybody back home is a total loser, but this is not the modal Facebook user, so I'm not sure it matters much.
You’re trying to characterize OP as a condescending out of touch hipster, but in my opinion your characterization of the “modal” Facebook user is actually more so. The “modal” Facebook user is equally capable of being dissatisfied with the product as your 2013 hipster caricature is because FB has failed to deliver on its mission. The social side is boring and doesn’t generate as much engagement because it turns out your friends from high school truly are not relevant to your life, yes even the “modal” Facebook user is capable of change and evolution; and the content side leaves users feeling angry, divided, and exhausted after the hundredth flame war they find themselves embroiled in over the political upset of the day. It does matter.
i mean you can easily write the obverse joke and it has the same overall point - “hey, it’s me, your friend from high school that moved to brooklyn and got a tattoo and thinks he’s better than you. here’s an article about how big yogurt’s assumption you can use a spoon is Ableist” still underscores the fact that facebook is a pipeline to deliver brain poison.
I won't argue whether it's accurate, but I think you missed the point. You can swap words around, and get the same for any demographic.
The friend's perception of the poster would be "HEY IT'S ME your facebook friend from high school who went to New York and thinks is better than you. Anyway, here's a woke article."
When everyone is still actively building their friend list (remember this started for college students) its an amazing product because it brings you closer to people in a new way and allows for curation without investing a ton into AI/ML.
For people who stay in a static social bubbles for long times (e.g., your parents, your friends from HS who didn't move to a coastal city) it's also perfect, because they tend to value content related to their social group more than something new and interesting.
But for the highest value users (e.g., the ones with high-paying knowledge-based jobs and a willingness to try new things) the social graph will never keep up with their lives. Bad content from the edges of the graph will slowly creep into feeds (MLMs being a prime example) and those high-value users will seek out new platforms that conform better to their interests.
Instagram was a brilliant stop-gap, but Mark never saw the writing on the wall about algorithmic content (probably b/c Bytedance had the advantage of cutting its teeth in China first) and is just too far behind to ever really catch up.
So now he's trying to out-future Bytedance with VR (and even got them to burn $1bn on Pico), but unless he has some hard-tech rabbit to pull out of his hat, there's just not anything there.
We may very well be seeing the largest (negative) turn-around story in history since Yahoo! play out in front of our eyes.
It's really a perfect assessment. I couldn't articulate why exactly Facebook felt like I was purely wasting time each time I engaged with the experience (few times a year). This description completely crystallizes my thinking.
Actually it’s not. Your early life social group becoming irrelevant to your life a decade later is NOT representative at all. What is accurate to say is the OP is not connecting with his old friends anymore. But let’s be real here, not everyone’s like that. Facebook is just a tool to connect with people. Attributing and expecting Facebook to make your friendships more relevant and meaningful is foolish and hopeless.
Yes. There are some social groups that still use it (“no practice today”) but the novelty has gone and the youngsters have moved on. If the value of the graph increases exponentially with users, each user leaving causes a disproportionate value drop.
A girl I thought was cute in college was totally convinced T***** would retain the Presidency on 1/6, so I guess it was useful as a sign something was going to happen.
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.
Yup, Facebook has their tentacles in so many places that walking away from it is difficult, especially if you are involved in local community activities.
My neighborhood exclusively uses Facebook for neighborhood communication.
My kid's school PTA exclusively uses Facebook.
Most of the local food trucks only post their schedules on Facebook.
Since the pandemic started I have been taking the opportunity to go through my house and clean out lots of things that have just been hanging around for years. I list everything I sell on Facebook, Craigslist, OfferUp, and Nextdoor. I can’t remember the last time I got a bite from any of the other services that aren't Facebook. It’s been awhile.
It honestly drives me be crazy how this company has wormed their way into being such an essential piece of communication infrastructure for so many people that I can’t quit without sacrificing my ability to participate in some of the things I really enjoy.
I am from Europe so I may not get it, but what communication does a neighborhood do that is important? Yard sales?
Do people really participate in something like school PTA and eat often at food trucks?
I guess electronic platforms are more fragmented here in Europe. Google Maps owns business hours, various classified sites (such as Ebay's) own selling stuff locally. But everything might be different in each country really.
I think people have become more vary to post personal things online. I know very little parents that would be okay to publish pictures of their kids online (including on Facebook).
Cal Newport's "Digital Minimalism" addresses this common use-case scenario.
1) Remove the apps from your phone and log out on mobile browser, making each future login a concentrated intentional effort. (You can leave Messenger if that might be used for emergency contacts).
2) Use www version only.
3) Choose a time when you're going to sit by your home computer, and use social media for some pre-determined time slot, let's say 30 minutes.
The social networks are very good at serving this use case - showing most important content first, and relegating the junky stuff further down the feed. This way you won't miss any baby photos or wedding announcements, but will be spared from your uncle getting into a heated political discussion.
The social networks are very good at serving this use case - showing most important content first, and relegating the junky stuff further down the feed.
Only up to a point. I have actually missed wedding announcements because the announcement was pushed far down by more recent but less relevant news. Yes, if you use Facebook for 30 minutes a day, you probably won't miss anything. But if you use Facebook less often than that (like an hour a week, or once a month), you will absolutely miss relevant news because it'll be pushed down by whatever political shoutfest is currently drawing comments and reactions.
It's like that with me and having a phone number.
Day to day I hate it. 95% of time I get scam calls from the "IRS" - actively harmful. Another 4% is marketing - unwanted, wasteful. Only the last 1% is potentially useful.
Is facebook trending in that direction? Seems like it.
I wonder if there's a generalisable statement in there - say, that all communication media will eventually become so swamped in noise that the signal is lost almost entirely?
Seeing pictures of family and participating in group events are all positive in my opinion.
My son's daycare has a facebook page. It's very convenient to stay up to date on my own schedule without having to deal with emails. My pizzeria also has a facebook page. It's an easy way to look up hours or any updates. My gym has an instagram page to post their workouts and schedule. It's very convenient. The owners aren't very tech savvy so its easy for them. And its easy for me because the website isn't broken, gives me everything I need, lets me comment or reach out to the owners and is well indexed
It's like saying "I wouldn't use product if not for the value I get from the product".
Two of your examples can be done using a shared calendar, which is more fitting in these cases than facebook, and integrates more deeply into devices, and the third about looking up hours can be done using the maps app.
They try to make you think they invented the wheel but really they’re just offering the same services as elsewhere under their umbrella.
I don't have any particular love for Facebook, but it remains the best way to share my underwater photography with friends. That's a positive reason. I appreciate how they give me a convenient distribution platform and it's all free.
Why could you not post all of your pics to a shared photo album that’s shared with your friends? It’d even remove the step of posting it only because as soon as it’s on your machine it’s uploaded to your cloud photo album. And it’s still free. Further what if you want to share this with those that aren’t your friends? You’ve required facebook usage with no real gain.
(this was years ago but) I thought this too. I was relatively new to a new city and still building my friend group. I was worried that if I deleted facebook I wouldn't get invited to events, keep in touch with new people I met.
I deleted it anyway. Deleting facebook didn't change my real world in anyway.
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 just wonder where the software for it is at. Oculus is chugging along and I believe that can get quite good.
But building a impressive MMO-like 3D world/game is probably a 5-10 year endeavor and runs a high risk that it won’t be fun or novel. I guess they’ll mainly build the platforms but then they need someone to build the worlds on top of it.
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.
This is the exact same situation as me. As I’ve revisited old hobbies I used to be obsessed with 10-15 years ago, I realize that EVERYTHING has moved from the VB-based forums, to Facebook groups and marketplace.
I don’t mind the marketplace architecture, it’s quite nice actually. But Groups is the absolute worst place to house former forum content because it’s just not indexed well. There a few groups that I’m in that are managed really well, which gives them ~60% the utility of a tradition forum still.
What I’ve done on FB is aggressively unfollowed every single friend and page that I don’t care about. My feed is now strictly a feed of group posts from people I don’t know about my hobbies that I enjoy…it’s actually quite nice!
Yes I agree completely about how poor Facebook is at indexing old content. They are definitely not focused on anything but the absolute present. Same with Reddit. It's really too bad. I understand, though. People just don't have the will to figure out BBcode or create logins for every forum they are interested in.
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.
Seems right. In my and my close friends/family experience it’s all the same - all the cool/interesting people stopped posting many years ago and with each one, more and more followed them or got bored and stopped going. Now it’s just the dorks posting stale memes or boring updates. I haven’t posted anything actively for many years now but still check it now and then and shake my head.
I think it started a slow bleed when they removed the chronological view. After that it became “evil” and not about social connection anymore. No longer was my post being seen by my friends unless the algo thought it was saucy enough. It was a great business but I dont think you’ll ever get the people who are fed up to come back.
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.
Depends on whether you’re focused on immediate sales or building long-term brand image. The old person may only have one car purchase left in their lifetime; the 14-year-old could have six or more.
These decision makers can be way tougher and more expensive to convince.
I don’t want to buy the next card game booster pack in any way or form. I don’t care about theme parks I’ve never heard of, or the new game that lets me save a half naked hottie. And for that matter I also won’t change for a new car insurance.
Now, someone in my life pushing for the formers might force my hand.
Ads targeting kids and teens actually tend to do very well. There's an entire side of youtube where kids review their new (sponsored) toys. Parents get immensely pressured when they feel their kids are getting left out.
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.
That is right in terms of the business. For the consumer though, the Social Graph did (and does) have real utility. It just has zero business value now as it isn't even useful for the retargeting data.
Facebook has basically been a magical money printing machine for political fundraising. Put a dollar in with a nice outrageous ad and get two back in donations.
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.
Better to check in on Google Maps rather than Foursquare so you keep your history when the small companies pivot away or abandon the service. It is bizarre to me that Foursquare didn’t keep it going though
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?
Facebook Groups and Marketplace are both good examples of content graphs. Your social network is irrelevant to them, in fact you may prefer NOT to see the listings made by your friends/family as the negotiation/purchasing is often nicer when it is relatively anonymous. Facebook's one moat is very shallow in this space.
Unlike high attention media with placement and interstitial opportunities, Marketplace and Groups are not great business models.
The social network graphs of the people contributing to e.g. a local group or marketplace helps in making sure that people behave somewhat honestly, I've found. At least in locales with like < 5k people.
> 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.
>> 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.
Don’t forget the US came perilously close to banning TikTok last year. As much as Facebook probably doesn’t have the US government on their side, it’s more on their side that TikTok’s.
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 wouldn't mind if the CCP wants to own all the garbage content on tiktok as a tactic against us, as long as people are aware of the nonsense hosted on there.
I deleted my FB account and the only thing that I went back for was my residents association. I still have no FB friends - which is fun because I can see the algorithm trying to work out who I know. Eerily, it correctly identified my partner and suggests I friend her (and her mother!) every time I login.
> Eerily, it correctly identified my partner and suggests I friend her (and her mother!) every time I login.
That doesn’t seem that eerie to me. Your partner is most likely logging in from the same IP, and perhaps your mother-in-law has done the same at least once, or is friended to your partner. Making this association is pretty straightforward
As in 'slight of hand' employed by a magician. Where someone makes an obvious movement to distract from something they don't want you to see. In this case, the assertion is that the Metaverse is more hype than reality. A shiny object, or concept, to create a plausible narrative that bridges Facebook into a future where they once again dominate, while distracting from the possibility that their current position is in decline with no tangible mitigation plan.
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.
> Controlling the VR metaverse... I just don't see it. Too much innovation. Too much invention.
Remember FB can always purchase themselves into the market - pick up a few startups and bodge together a consistent product.
I think the problem is that VR tech and apps will take too long to arrive to gain any traction with the wider public, before FB needs it. FB needs hundreds of millions/billions of users, VR hasn't punched out of the 'early adopter'/gamer market yet and even those were balking at having to have FB accounts.
Facebook bought Oculus and although their hardware is still good, they are being beat in the software and overall hardware experience by Valve. A far smaller company but they built - Valve Index and Half Life Alyx (widely considered the best game in VR).
The Index isn’t perfect, but the actual story of Oculus is just them making a cruddy MVP, Valve taking the time to show their far superior prototypes, and allowing them to copy them, and then Oculus and part of the Valve team selling out to Facebook (ie Michael Abrash). Virtually all the innovation in VR was made by Valve, the only innovation Facebook has added is inside out tracking.
So Oculus is really just another Instagram /WhatsApp - they purchased a solid team and product, but they’re not out innovating even smaller players in the field.
VR is never going to gain the traction FB is betting on. Absolutely no one wants to spend their day inside a headset cut off from the outside world. It's uncomfortable, antisocial, expensive (for now), and just clunky overall.
If anything is going to come of this it's going to be AR, without a doubt. People want to be able to see the world they are in, they don't want to walk into tables, have to disrobe to answer the door, tend to children and so on.
AR adds value everywhere in the real world. AR can blend meetings, add meta information to day-to-day tasks. Think driving, you can now have your maps, speed, collision warnings, and so on in a virtual heads up display.
Even if Meta knocks it out of the park with early AR it's going to be a long time coming and they will still have a trust issue that younger, faster AR startups won't have.
> I think the problem is that VR tech and apps will take too long to arrive to gain any traction with the wider public
Provided that it happens at all. People tend to extrapolate too far based on something being subjectively attractive for a limited group. Think of 3D TV hype a decade ago (and we're thinking of technology that actually debuted almost 100 years ago).
> even those were balking at having to have FB accounts
It's been like what, 3 years? that I've been patiently waiting for the UE (or someone, in general) to mandate Facebook to remove mandatory account signup and tie-in, before buying an Oculus Quest (now 2). I don't care if this means I end up not buying and enjoying it at all in the end.
Sadly I guess just a minority have such firm positions when it comes to "vote with your wallet", so in the end the vote ends up being nothing more than a self-imposed punishment. But thankfully VR is just a very superfluous experience for now to be missing it, so I am fine with that.
FB does not have access to the M&A trick anymore. Those days are gone. Regulators are tired of seeing GAFAM buying their way out of their lack of innovation. They also want to see new companies succeed on their own. That's where the new GAFAM will come from in the long run. And this is a long run race.
I'm curious if you have any thoughts on why VR remains so niche. Decent VR hardware has been available for years. And yet relatively few people use it.
The way I see it, this is the biggest thing they need to turn around. To a point where they might need to launch a product - or maybe a paid tier - that is somewhat separate from what the FB experience has become.
What users want from FB needs to be explored on multiple levels. Ability to sort posts chronologically between a subset of your network, 'suggested' connections you can filter by relevance to a subset of your interests, customizable local community participation alerts... there are all kinds of ways of exploring vast social networks that can actually benefit society.
I strongly feel that prioritizing content which gets people riled so you can feed them more ads is such a massive negative, showing a willingness to change something so terrible yet fundamental to their current revenue would be the most significant thing they could do. It probably won't happen, but despite my increasing pessimism I still like to imagine better possibilities.
Microsoft has multi-billion dollar branches - Office, OS, Azure, XBox, Activision, I'm sure I've missed one. It also completely fluffed Nokia. And dodged the bullet that is Yahoo.
It's pretty resilient.
FB? Like others have said, the social media FB itself is pretty weak, and like you also said - addiction, and walled garden are the locks in. It can only grow financially by (more) acquisitions.
"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."
I'm curious: do you have any awareness of the fact that there are very unethical actions suggested in what you are discussing here casually?
I think Microsoft is also almost an essential product company. You can either get a PC or a Mac. Or Linux but even that requires getting a PC anyway. Chromebook market is still tiny.
And was never. The Personal-Computer is an original product of International Business Machines (IBM) and not Microsoft. Contrary to most products shipped today it's architecture is open for industry standards and other companies. A huge success for IBM.
Microsoft shipped the pre-installed and required operating-system. You can order desktops and laptops without an operating-sytem or Linux from Lenovo (former IBM), Dell, System76, Purism, Tuxedo and many more. Vendors which aim for cheap distribution to private customers usually only ship Personal Computers with Windows. Most of these are crap and come with questionable pre-installed software - and I don't refer to Windows.
That IBM sold the PC subsidiary was the worst mistake the could ever have done, both Apple and Lenovo show how much money you can earn with long lasting high quality products. IBM lost the contact point to many customers. They need to succeed with Red Hat now. Irony, IBM use and prefer (again) ThinkPads, preinstalled with Linux.
If you say "it runs on PC" you're actually saying your software is compatible to an Intel 286 CPU or higher. Well, if it is portable?
>Or Linux but even that requires getting a PC anyway
I'm not sure I understand what you mean here, if I buy, say, a Dell computer with Linux pre-installed then I don't think MS gets a cut? They don't own the PC platform.
Or maybe you mean that most prebuilt PCs come with some OEM Windows license even if you don't intend to use is, which is fair enough I suppose.
Not that it really matters for desktop PCs where Windows is king anyway. Although from personal experience I'd argue that the "essential product" these days is less Windows itself than the Office suite which is still the gold standard in many institutions.
(That said, ChromeOS still makes up a much smaller percentage of active installations, as Google don't have the legacy hardware base that Apple and Microsoft do)
I very much like your analysis, but retail finance would be an uphill battle for a company like FB that has built such a negative track record of user data handling.
I can certainly see the criticisms mounting, if FB go financial. But, I also recall the many times FB withstood criticism. Criticism from users over product changes. Experts on privacy. Journalists and politicians on social issues and user manipulation. They persevere, and rarely have to give an inch.
OTOH, I think FB is the world leader in gaining leverage from customer data. Their ad business is more based on targeting data than Google's. It could conceivably even survive the demise of FB itself. Finding partners to run ads is doable, and with fb's targeting that still could ad up to major and business.
So perhaps they're not great at securing customer data, though they are probably more as technically capable than most banks. But, they are the very best at leveraging and monetising customer data.
Making WhatsApp into a payments app is going to lead to the most difficult content moderation problems ever known. Everything from content by casual OF performers to extremely illegal and damaging content would be on that platform if it was easy to make payments and still fairly easy to send pictures and video privately.
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.
Anyone remember that Next
Big Thing was supposed to be 3D TVs? I think VR is similarly misguided (ie, will never go mainstream but will have a healthy niche).
I think this is a great analogy in that there are fundamental physiological limits on how much 3D TV the human body wants to watch, and the answer is “not much”. All the VR/AR products I have seen fall into the same boat—a bit of a lark to use for an hour or so, beyond that, no thanks. It is a fundamentally different experience than reading a screen or listening to earbuds, and I don’t mean that in a good way.
> Anyone remember that Next Big Thing was supposed to be 3D TVs?
No. I remember TV companies pushing it since it was cheap for them to include and they hoped people would think of it as the "Next Big Thing", but consumers and especially reviewers during the aughts saw right through it.
3D has come and gone many times over the history of cinema, from the red/cyan glasses, the (Pulfrich) glasses with a single shaded lens, shuttered glasses and polarized screens.
While the image quality and frame rate have improved, there are still fundamental limitations on the technology. One common pushback is that some people will get headaches due to scanning the scene, trying to focus on objects at their false depths.
3D film is a pain, way more than double the work. So most 3D content actually was made 3D in post rather than filming with multiple cameras.
Still, the way you would frame a scene to be 'interesting' in 3D is different from how you would do so in 2D. This usually results in being able to 'tell' whether a movie you are watching was primarily made for one market or another.
VR adds something other than image quality - it adds the ability to be immersed in the content. However you still have the same issues:
- So far, we don't have consumer headsets that enable you to actually focus on the objects in the scene. For example, you can't hold a piece of paper up to your face to read the fine print.
- Trying to capture certain kinds of media is infeasibly expensive in VR, both from a post-production cost perspective and a data size expectation. Live action basically is too difficult.
The latest incarnation of 3D movies were in a sense a clever business maneuver - it created a premium tier of movie experience and got many theaters to start upgrading their older projection equipment and screens to newer digital alternatives.
For home use, 3D movies were weird because they didn't follow the traditional hype curve. A lot of early adoption was by families, where unfortunately the shutter glasses still tended to be too expensive for young hands. But that market has the same thing - manufacturers will eventually take technology and reduce it down to cost, so how can you compel people to buy the newest fancy screen where you still have a good margin?
Note several television manufacturers are now trying to proceed advertising and sales revenue, which is why smart TVs have now taken over - a 15-30% cut on a HBO Max subscription adds up to real money quickly over their typically poor margins on the sale of the set.
VR seems more interactive and way stickier, I don’t think you can necessarily compare it to 3D TVs, in the same way a computer and TV are very different.
Having said that, I’m also skeptical of the whole metaverse thing, as we had that stuff a long time ago already (Second Life) and it was a flop. VR needs to become extremely ubiquitous and hassle-free for such a thing to work.
The first part of your reply doesn't line up with the second. In what way are 3D TVs a healthy niche? They are mostly dead. I also can't remember anyone actually using their 3D TV or buying a TV because of its 3D capabilities (most TVs at that time had the feature anyway). Whereas stores stocked up on Quest during the holidays because of demand. I don't think your reply accurately describes reality.
Also, this isn't the first go round with VR. Google Glass launched publicly in 2014 and the original Oculus Rift launched in 2016. I remember tons of discussions around enterprise adoption of VR in 2016-2017 with use cases ranging from immersive marketing campaigns to technicians using them to troubleshoot equipment.
I am both a fan of blockchain and VR. I also have a strong cynic inside of me that trashes on both of them whenever it can. It's fun being me I suppose :)
Blockchain is IMO in a much much much more questionable state of relevancy and usefulness than VR.
Why?
I workout in VR (supplemental workouts by playing Eleven Table Tennis to the max).
I boardgame in VR (Demeo).
My GF picks up my headset and plays Beatsaber.
You can have multiple screens in VR. While I'm not the biggest fan of them, I will be if I'd travel to another country, not being able to bring my monitors.
Oh, and I've convinced quite a few of my friends to do the same (workout, gaming, productivity).
VR is already here mate. People game, people exercise, people get new experiences by watching VR videos (I got better at skiing because of it), people are using its productivity apps to design stuff (think about designing game in Unreal Engine using VR). There are certain use-cases in which VR outperforms anything else (and in most use-cases it doesn't).
VR has tons of uses!
It's not perfect by any means, but we're slowly getting there. 4000x4000 per eye is the hallmark I will be patiently waiting for. Better omni-directional threadmills are something I will hope for. We already are beginning to have haptic feedback suits from owo. I'm not a fan of haptic feedback suits, but others are.
VR is here to stay. It won't replace anything, it will augment how we are going about our daily stuff.
Whereas with blockchain, well, it's mostly used for speculation and I still haven't seen people use it as a legitimate currency. And this includes myself! Like, I used bitcoin to buy a bitcoin wallet, but does that count? I don't think so. The current use of blockchain in terms of cryptocurrencies is speculation (at the moment) and I am hoping it will change, but I wonder if it ever will. And I am a fan of the whole thing, but let's not kid ourselves. I hope the unbanked will use it. I hope people in super high inflationary countries will use it (because as volatile is bitcoin is, it beats any currency with hyper inflation). Unfortunately, I don't have any insights on the unbanked.
>You can have multiple screens in VR. While I'm not the biggest fan of them, I will be if I'd travel to another country, not being able to bring my monitors.
This is the problem with VR. It started the adoption process the wrong way - instead of positioning itself as a work enabling tool that you buy for a killer feature - it's just a gimmicky toy that has reasonable stigma around it among normal people (non-techies).
If your phone was just a 1000$ gaming handheld it would be a niche product, at best something like a 3DS. But gaming is the biggest market on phones.
Likewise if VR ever wanted to get mainstream adoption it needed to have a killer feature like enabling ultra portable/productive workspaces. Imagine everyone working from home buying a 500$ VR headset for remote work - totally reasonable - in the price range of a monitor. And then you have a huge market for games when the people are used to it. Now it's just a nerdy gimmick.
I rented a VR headset for a month a while ago. I think I bought most of the top games to play around with, but all feel a bit gimmicky and lacking depth.
I'd claim that VR will be niche until it becomes AR. When I can see my keyboard and get multiple floaty screens,that will be productivity.
Pokemon Go in AR? Skyrim AR? AR shooters in converted warehouses? Horror games in my house? That'll be games.
I apologize for the pedantry but "blockchain" != "cryptocurrency." My inner cynic is bearish on cryptocurrencies, VR (at least in broad adoption), and to a lesser extent blockchain tech but of the three the one that has the least-worst chance of finding a useful broad fit IMO is the use of blockchain tech since it's really nothing more than a trustless method of double-entry accounting and a potential means of avoiding the risk of direct federation for service providers (you stop being the single point of failure/data breach target).
Sadly I also suspect that blockchain will go down with the whole cryptocurrency ship due to guilt-by-association, much like the AI winter that followed the overhyped 1980s era took with it a number of viable limited-domain solutions that had to wander the desert for 20-30 years before being revivified for the current AI/ML efforts.
Basically, limited to niche games and simulation training. Where as AR has more usefulness than VR does. But it doesn't matter since Meta is working in both of those industries.
> Whereas with blockchain, well, it's mostly used for speculation and I still haven't seen people use it as a legitimate currency.
What is wrong with using stablecoins? Everyone knows Bitcoin has failed in being useful for payments or how very volatile it is for a business to use.
>>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...
Well. That's the key point. Lots of people did social networks. Several had a lot if success with them. Remember circa 2007? FB was one of many. Zuck made a social network that (a) got and stayed popular (b) made no way and (c) successfully changed user behaviour. Before FB, social media was mostly anonymous and targeted at young, fringe or techno-elite online culture. FB are mass market.
I agree that VR is yet to be seen, and that fb's ability to execute is dubious. But, Zuck is more capable than most/all CEOs of social media seen this far.
Twitter us more if a lucky shot.
It remains true though that social media, generally, is not technically demanding. That said, the demands of scale complicate that. Look at Amazon and aws.
There aren't many fb-scale tech companies out there. It's not competition in an infinite field. It's competition in a field of one.. or perhaps three. JPMorgan or Berkshire Hathaway aren't going to beat them at this game. If it's a matter of beating other mega scale tech shops, it may be just a matter of executing better than not executing.
Competition at the ground floor (say series A) is brutal. Even if you're brilliant, you probably need a great strategy and greater luck. Competition at the mid range is meaningful. A Zara, Boots or OnePlus or whatnot still need to beat other players. At the FB/google level... there just aren't enough players. They don't necessarily compete at all, against other players. Products can succeed or fail, but it's not about head to head abilities. Where competition actually exists, like azure/aws, at best it's usually a field of 2 or 6 possible competitors with a chance of outside disruption. They're not in a "beat restaurant in town" game.
Facebook wasn't just at the right place though. They figured out that people wanted to use their real names on social networks.
I loved Myspace. I met so many cool people in my 20s in that 2-3 year window they had that I never would have otherwise. My mom though was never joining Myspace. Myspace was almost closer to a dating site to find new friends as much as connecting with people you already knew.
VR/AR is already an established and necessary modality at several industrial use cases. It's definetly NOT a gimmick. Think of it as a HUD with situational awareness.
Games are not really a good example of why you would want to have that. Not at least yet.
I personally don't think VR is a good play. Personally, I just can't binge on anything with VR. It's just not comfortable. But maybe we haven't had enough hardware innovation yet.
I have the same experience. I have tried my friends VR set a few times and another one at a work party, and overall it was pretty underwhelming. Uncomfortable, a bit nausea inducing and nothing particularly impressive. Kind of cool to try out, but not something I would want to use every day or pay for. At the current state I don't see what's the fuss about.
Also VR as some kind of social networking replacement seems unlikely to me because huge par of the time people spend on social networks is not while sitting at home dedicating time to this activity. Most people are not going to lug around VR headset everywhere they go.
> Facebook was just in the right place at the right time and executed well.
I wouldn't even go that far: it was merely executed well enough that it didn't squander being in the right place at the right time by being terrible.
This is one of the reasons why getting a minimal viable product out quickly (where the definition of “minimal viable” includes that not-being-terrible caveat) can be so important when working on a new idea.
This is just wrong. I would question if you ever went on Myspace.
Facebook figured out that using your real full name in an electronic social network had huge advantages in terms of connecting your real world social network.
They killed Myspace because of the network effect the above had when people started finding their friends from high school easily online. Early on I think you even had to join a network specifically for your high school so everyone had their first and last names along with their labeling for their high school.
It sounds stupid and obvious now but before Facebook the average person didn't broadcast their first and last name on the internet.
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 agree, despite this headline, the more I see fb becoming a part of everyday life for the vast majority of people (in the UK). It's amazing how much of what normal people consume and even buy now happens on fb. I wouldn't write them off just yet
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.
I agree. Adding Messenger, groups, and events were good moves, but they ruined the feed so badly it soured the whole thing. Should've stuck to being social networking instead of trying to be whatever the feed is supposed to be now.
They could've easily expanded into more social features, longer-form stuff like Livejournal, personal creative stuff like Deviantart, and personal creative/selling like Etsy and Bandcamp and print-on-demand books, etc.
Another killer feature they flopped on was personas. Nobody really wants their entire extended family, current former and potential coworkers and bosses, customers, preacher, old friends, romantic interests, drug dealer, and fetish group all hanging out together in the same room talking. So people made separate accounts and different names but Facebook continually fought hard against that very basic nature of human social networking.
Instead of any social-networking improvements to their core, they just removed all the value from the feed. And then bought out another messenger and another place to post photos, both of which they already had. Then a halfhearted videos thing and now a VR Second Life clone.
I'm pretty much in it for the baby pictures and vacation photos at this point, but those are starting to thin out as my friends and loose connections are moving on from the platform.
Well, I dunno. My friends don't post anything any more. Maybe to instagram, but even that is less now.
Facebook needed to fill that gap with content from elsewhere. That's where influencers and content creators came in. Who are way less interesting than your friends, but they do post content regularly.
Why don't they post? For the same reason I don't post much if anything on Facebook: my posts won't reach my friends except by happenstance. Everyone I know has observed that when you go to look at your friend's profile you will see posts that you've missed because they have never been shown to you before.
It's like only one in ten SMS texts would actually reach the other party: people would complain about SMS being broken just like they complain Facebook doesn't show them what they want to see.
Instead of your friend's posts you will see half a dozen random posts from your friends each day, too often from one prolific poster, and the rest is ads or group spam. Why bother writing anything relevant, deep, or fun when only a fraction of your friends will ever see it.
Facebook changed when it decided its best source of revenue was advertising and that it would own the ad inventory (Google did the same thing, and with similar loss-of-value to users, which also devalued the underlying behavior the company depended upon for quality targeting).
I think that Facebook's only real revenue option that would have also retained the fundamental value of the social network and its effects was to behave either as a third-party sentiment/preference analysis service ala Nielsen Ratings or as a source of ad targeting for individuals (based on their sentiments/preferences expressed within FB) that could be sold for use external to the FB experience... and I have suspicions that even the latter might have eventually led to distorting that core FB experience.
The social network and the behaviors within it were only truly valuable if externally observed without intervention. By pushing behaviors that FB itself wanted users to perform they broke the uniquely valuable part.
That unfortunately doesn't work and hasn't ever. I do get a different selection of recent posts (instead of top posts) but only a few, they're mostly the same through a day, and I'm still missing out on most of my friend's posts (which I can cross-check by visiting friends' profiles).
There used to be way to view posts off a friend list, and you could then create a list of all of your friends to emulate the old newsfeed (or The Wall). This at least tried to work except it also only tracked back so far, it still did miss posts (but not as many as the other two views), and most importantly the friend list feed was scrapped last year.
The current attitude towards VR, and the "metaverse" in general, has got to be the second most delusional thing I have ever seen - due in no small part to the close integration with NFTs, the first most delusional obsession I've seen. It's complete and utter vaporware, with absolutely nothing behind it. I have done lots and lots of reading about the metaverse, what it promises, what it wants, and I still can't find a place where substituting the word "metaverse" with "cyberspace" doesn't create the same sentence. But everyone is afraid of missing out on the "next evolution of the internet" that all rational thought has gone out of the window. VR is not the future of anything besides the mentioned gaming niche.
As much as I like VR I have to agree it will stay a niche product. The need to wear something on your head is a major hurdle. Like 3D TV's that have mostly disappeared. Also when you are in a VR environment you want to interact with it. You need free physical space to do that which is an other hurdle. There are more niches than gaming only though. Like education and product design and demonstration.
The main problem with 3D tv was the content. 3D really only works with bad movies like resident evil. You are not going to have need or want 3d in a movie that is an oscar contender.
The timeline for consumer level glasses with ar + vr will begin shipping 2023. "Apple" level ones 2025. These devices will be as ubiquitious as the smartphone or earbuds.
Note: it already has a health niche. Now that I think about it, one could create a startup in that space. The health niche will be expanding. I'd argue that Apple is excellently positioned for VR.
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 wonder how important this demographic really is. I understand there's an argument for kids being the future, and so on, but almost everyone I know with disposible income is on Instagram and Facebook, via the apps, and seeing ads. As teenage kids stop being teenage kids, they're going to start caring about sharing baby photos and travel photos and cyber-bullying their mayor and stuff, for which the only games in town are Instagram and FB. In short, I don't think it matters if teenagers are ignoring the platforms as long as they age into them, which I think they might well, especially considering kids don't actually have much money to spend.
> I don't think it matters if teenagers are ignoring the platforms as long as they age into them
During my elementary school days, we had a small course to teach us about economics and corporate values. The examine two old companies: Nintendo and Reader's Digest. Both companies predated our grandparents and they asked if they would both outlive us as students. The "correct" answer for the assignment was that Reader's Digest would continue on into the 22nd century while Nintendo would be out of business before the 21st. The reasoning was that Nintendo markets to children, who are both broke and fickle, while Reader's Digest markets to mature professionals, who are loyal and wealthy. No one would continue to play video games after the age of twelve and everyone with a college degree who hit thirty would subscribe to Reader's Digest
For those who are unaware, Reader's Digest declared bankruptcy in 2013 and was solve off for £1. Nintendo is currently worth $55 billion.
I always remember that lesson when people talk about how children will age out of enjoying the things that they currently enjoy and age into caring about the things that their parents care about.
> considering kids don't actually have much money to spend
This does presume that the metric is money and not eyeballs; from where I sit tech in general cares little about revenue and a lot about "daily active users".
Despite that, if you can brainwash 0-15 year olds into the belief that your brand is great, the future goodwill may offer significant rewards as you evolve with your users.
There are shops I never go into, radio stations I never tune into, and products I never buy because in my mind they're frusty and old fashioned. My opinions about them will never change. If FB are in this bracket, their long-term growth is dead without major innovation to cause a reversal.
I remember reading Richard Bransons autobiography, and there’s a line in there about him watching what his kids where into that led him to get into some business that’s was a huge success. Don’t remember any more details, but they are the future consumers. Heck, FB used to only even be available to broke college students!
> they're going to start caring about sharing baby photos and travel photos and cyber-bullying their mayor and stuff, for which the only games in town are Instagram and FB
You're assuming that TikTok won't evolve in a span of 10 years.
I don't think they're competing against each other. TikTok is competing against youtube, which are both competing against traditional network television such as nick or disney. Fb and Instagram's lack of growth has little to do with the success of the other, they just missed their opportunity to move in the more curated video space.
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.
Look at all the massive tech companies that took root in 2000s. Most are tied to privileged kids who won the birth lottery, had access to computers, and the financial cushion to "try shit". Google, Facebook, PayPal, and earlier - Microsoft.
Convincing my parents to buy a computer so I could program was a struggle. We were on public assistance.
I am not saying that it's all like winning a lottery - you still have to take advantage of the opportunity, but they were born in Earth's orbit when trying to launch to the Moon, while most of us had to overcome gravity first.
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?
I feel the exact same way. After my last vacation, I actually felt a little awkward posting pictures of it after- for many years FB had served as a great online photo album, but this was around the election, and it was all hatebook type stuff and posts from news outlets and such, it felt out of place to post pictures from my life on there. It was a very strange feeling, and I think a big harbinger of where they have gone wrong as a company. As less people post about whats going on in their lives, I find less value on the site, and the cycle seems self perpetuating at this point. I am not sure how they turn this around... and I say this as someone who was once something of a fanboy and has held their stock since the IPO.
If I was in Zuck's shoes, I would kill all political content on the site... immediately and banish it to never come back. Really all outside content needs to go, I don't want news of any sort from FB aside from the "original content" my friends produce. And if you want, inject a reasonable number of ads in between, and I can deal with that, but their "product" in my eyes is their social feed, and that is a fraction of the size it once was.
> 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.
Ah interesting - I vaguely remember hearing about this, but since I hadn't heard about it in so long I assumed it died.
I don't know what the uptake on this product is, but this specific product might be a case of "Solving a problem no business is having." For instance I think it'd be hard to justify purchasing this service for an enterprise without a compelling use-case. But I certainly think that Facebook has the resources make something that solves a problem that people really do have.
On the other hand, Slack seems to solve a problem pretty well that most businesses have.
Finally, I don't think VR as it currently exists solves a problem any business (or person) truly has beyond sheer entertainment. It remains "cool tech" that has yet to find a solid, non-gaming use case for the average person. This may change but this is why I currently think Meta is in trouble and I'm puzzled as to why Zuckerberg would go all-in on VR.
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.
Definitely interested in the virtual desktop thing, but everything else feels pretty meh. I do like a VR game from time to time but I really don't think I want to be doing VR meetings and stuff.
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.
I don't think they would do well if they switched to a pay-only system, but they might offer special features as subscriber-only or put limits on certain things in the free tier. If they offered no or limited ads and a simple chronological feed from friends in their paid tier, they might do well. Sort of the "get everyone in the world addicted to your crappy product and then make them pay to get a reasonable version of it" model.
I remember being disappointed when they dropped the college requirement. But I do think that was the right decision. You'll only ever scale so much by only enrolling .edu users.
The people who invited me into facebook do not have a degree. I have not posted anything in probably 5 years. From the activity feed spam FB sends me it looks like they both post quite a decent amount. I have have not logged in, in probably a year. When I got on there it was sort of fun reconnecting with people I had not seen in years. But after a while I remembered why we had drifted apart...
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.
The first VR system I tried was in 1992 (Dactyl Nightmare!). After trying it, I basically came to the same conclusion. Maybe in another 30 years it will finally be compelling.
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.
Well I am writing this on a new M1 MacBook Pro which is the best laptop computer I have ever owned. And that is because Apple developed their own chips that are an amazing leap forward in power efficiency, so I can have a laptop which I do heavy, CPU intensive work on all day without worrying about the battery.
Moreso that Apple bought exclusivity of TSMC/ASML's process about a year past everyone else. Similar to their microdrive exclusivity they bought for ipod.
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 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.
It kind of helps when you use a VPN called Onavo to spy on what apps people are using...
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.
I was locked out of amazon almost a year ago because of some security issue blah blah!!! I never tried to unlock the account and I am OK living in a world where I don't need to deal with that monster!
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.
It's really ONLY the daily users that are dropping, everything else is still going up:
> But not all growth trends were negative. The company’s family of apps, which encompass Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger continued to modestly add users. The number of users logging in monthly to Facebook continued to grow, even as the number of daily users dropped.
What's interesting is that it seems like Facebook isn't counting Messager users as Facebook users and that more users are actually using Facebook every month, just not as frequently as before.
The weird bit is that a drop that small and cause Facebook/Meta to lose that much value. The stock market either reads the news like HN does, or Facebook is a lot more fragile that I would have guessed.
That also would be skewed imho. I use messenger to communicate with my family and I do click on facebook links they sends me but that's about it - am I an active user?
I don't think DAUs would necessarily tell the full story for Facebook. Browsers still get pointed to Facebook a few times a day, but I bet the depth of engagement is a fraction of what it used to be.
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.
I ask this seriously because I’m curious: have either you or the parent comment talked the school/clubs about communicating via other means? Or indicated Facebook isn’t possible for you?
I have not. There's really no sense in which Facebook isnt possible for me. I could say that I have privacy concerns but I'm genuinely not interested in being a weirdo parent that puts pressure on my kids. Most of the organizers are just trying to find a platform that is "gated" (by invite only) and everyone uses. Hard to beat FB for that in 2022.
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"
Yeah but that's what I mean. I'm in my 40s. I can vaguely guess the age differences between Instagram and TikTok kids. I'm sure some new great thing (like Facebook's "Reels") will be next, for the under-12 set. My point is IT'S GOING IN FUCKING CIRCLES and it's still run by the same few companies, and it's always the same. Oh it's NEW? for your 12 year old?
NO: Teach your 12-year old that ALL these things are COMPLETE FUCKING BULLSHIT. Not just Facebook. All of them.
I should also add... when I was young, music from the 50s was dated. When I was starting a company, startups from the 90s felt dated. Yet we are all recycling the same concepts and emotions and hooks and human longing, in a marketing sense, just using one generation's innocence after another, so they all feel like they're new and they're the first. You can't build on a platform like that. In a pissant way that's why facebook doesn't matter, but in a bigger way it's why you need to teach children to see patterns, not just objects of good and bad.
What service did you have as a kid that was "cool" but didn't engage in dubious marketing practice nor sell your data around ?
My personal favorite is Chevignon selling cool clothes for teenagers for years, to then enter the cigarettes market because why not.
Some might argue Facebook/Meta is on another scale, but everything is on another scale, I think we'd need to adjust expectations like we adjust for inflation.
I mean ... "cool" when I was a kid was having a stereo with two tape decks so you could copy and trade music mixes. Or getting together with 14 year old friends to drink 40s in an abandoned house where someone would bring an air rifle and girls would drink Zima. Doing anything online wasn't "cool" as it was all CLI anyway, but for me trading cracked games and porn gifs on BBSs was cool before we got a dialup internet connection and I discovered IRC. Spending hours browsing in a used record shop or book store was a cool use of a Saturday. Going to a party or the beach was cool. Surfing was cool although I sucked at it. Roller hockey was semi lame but I thought it was cool.
Watching TV or talking about shows wasn't cool. Movies were. Having a pager or godforbid a giant cell phone was extremely uncool as it meant your parents could find you. The closest thing to a smart phone was a TI-82 calculator and that wasn't cool at all. I had a Palm Pilot... I even got a cell cradle for it and could browse the web in black and white in 1996. That was considered insanely not cool, and something only a total nerd would do. (But a Lynx or a Game Gear was alright - and a neogeo meant your parents were super rich). Clove bidi cigarettes were cool but they could make your lungs bleed. Weed and LSD were cool. Fake IDs were cool and making them made you popular. Playing in a band even if you didn't have a lot of shows was cool, and if you did have a show half the kids from your school would be there.
I can't really think of anything I did as a teenager that collected data about me or anything that was a "service" run by a company that was cool or would have been considered cool. AOL was extremely uncool, the way facebook is now. A bit later, I guess a lot of us used Friendster and Myspace (and boards like LnC) but none of those things were central to daily activity or something you spent a lot of time on. It wasn't even the third or fourth thing you'd do to waste time, let alone a place to spend time with friends. So just because it wasn't very central to the teenage experience, and the technology wasn't there to track your interactions and location, there was by definition a lot less data to collect.
I'm describing a world that is for all practical purposes dead, buried and forgotten, in which human interaction was mostly unmediated by corporate grifters.
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.
1. Even if FB isn't forced to divest their recent acquisitions, the regulatory environment will make it much more difficult to do the equivalent of buying Instagram in the future.
2. Any good ideas on how I can short "The Metaverse"? I still think the Metaverse is bullshit and will continue to be bullshit for the near future. The very first time I got on Facebook I was pretty enthralled - I was connecting with friends that I hadn't seen in years, and I really liked reconnecting. I have heard basically nobody say they are looking forward to the Metaverse, besides aging tech giants trying to push it.
I'm sorda looking forward to the Metaverse. Or rather, I'm pleased that FB is baiting the rest of the tech giants into an arms race on VR hardware and software development.
I'm a huge fan of VR gaming. The state of the art is incredible right now, but it'll get so much better the more money is shoveled in.
Or perhaps your daughter will start using it in here early 20's when life gets busier and people dont have the same interaction expectations?
I dont know the answer but as a non-FB user I do see limitations when people organise events or group chats on messenger. If my wife wasn't connected to most of my friends I'd probably miss out on a bunch of relevant things. So for youth not on FB, I guess time will bring them back into the fold.
33 years old here. Deleted my FB acct in 2012. I stay in contact with everyone I care to be in contact with still over text/Signal/Slack/email. I cannot say I have regretted not having a FB account once in the last ten years.
You know how some people still think we can live in a world where covid is eradicated? I still think we can live in a world where major social media companies are eradicated. Or at least can't churn out new dangerous variants to re-infect the immunologically naive 14 year olds who think it's a brand new generational trend every year.
I've watched this marketing turnover at least three times now in the music industry, and I really think the killer antibody is exposure to history. The operative question for a 14 year old hearing a super "original" band isn't what does this say to you... because they know what it says to them but they don't know how easily they're being manipulated by the distillation of time-worn, shop-worn, lazy songwriting. The question is: Hey, do you realize who they're ripping off? You'll be a lot cooler if you know.
That's the pill every human needs when they encounter a new and addictive social media platform.
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!
I've literally never logged in to any one of those. I have to say, I'm kind of proud of that.
Occasionally people will send me a link to something and it's on Instagram. Clicking for me give me a Login modal. They make it too easy for me, click.
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?
You're not wrong but what Facebook needs for its investors is growth. If your audience is only old people then the possibility for growth is much more limited. If you frame it like resources then a young audience is renewable. While an aging audience is more like oil, less exciting, and requiring more and more effort to aquire over time.
It’s not hating your family obviously, it’s the fact that all your stupid and embarrassing stuff you typically discuss/share with your friends when you are young is now visible to your extended family.
They did use IG ~2y ago, but then it went out of vogue. Same fate for SnapChat. It is very likely there will be something new next year end they will all move on from TikTok.
Fascinating to observe how they have zero product loyalty. And I realized FB can have a problem, unless they want to spend billions on acquisitions every single year. It’s good for everyone that their monopoly is crumbling a bit.
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.
A company that does not grow can still share profits with the owners, so it makes sense also for not growing companies to stay on the stock market, so people can buy/sell these future profits.
This is not, and have never been, the case. Certain markets are winner-take-all, which necessitates a growth-oriented strategy regardless of the stock market. In the general case, the value of a stock only dips if the risk-adjusted net present value of expected future dividends changes for the worse. What happened here is that the market clearly expected the growth potential to be larger than what was the case, but absolutely not infinite.
Taking the company private means that you have to buy all outstanding shares. How are you going to come up with the money to do that? Valuation is usually around 20x earnings. If you do it through share buybacks, this process will take decades.
Pretty much the only way to do it is with an outside investor and in that case the company still doesn't "own itself".
When you have plateaued post-hypergrowth is not the time to get off the market, it's time to redistribute capital by massively repurchasing shares if you can't intelligently reinvest it all. Preferably after the market slams your ticker.
This is true of Facebook and many other tech stocks, but that is because these companies have never paid dividends. Investors have put up with that because the expectation of higher future profits (and thus higher cash piles for dividends or stock buybacks). A shrinking company that has never paid a dividend is much less attractive from this point of view.
That's not true, public companies can survive on profits and their investors then enjoy dividends. The market just figured out that growth is more lucrative than dividends for specific people, and there is less incentive to make sustainable companies.
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.
Dell went public in the 80's, was bought out by its founder in the early 10's, and then did a reverse merger with vmware to go public once again a few years later.
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.
Slight tangent but the balance of interaction and pulling users back of Wordle is brilliant. Users can saturate and over indulge and reach a point of cutting off over maintaining that momentum.
Oh and yes, TikTok seems to of hit a sweet spot(also the best stock bet currently), but if they can pull off 18 years of solid growth in interaction, that will be amazing.
Paradoxically, the stock market itself for many is their social media outlet, which probably seen a longer streak of growth than any social media platform.
Be interesting how HN growth and interaction has tractioned over the years, but then it doesn't matter as this is the Sparta of social media interaction in many ways and I ruddy love it.
I think that’s the consensus because Facebook specifically blamed TikTok on the earnings call. The question is if we should take that statement at face value.
It’s easier to blame competition than to admit that users are growingly apathetic towards your product (sans competition).
Facebook’s falling engagement, in and of itself, is great news for other social media apps.
TikTok’s rising engagement is, in and of itself, bad news for other social media apps.
I don’t think these two pieces of information net out poorly for other social media apps when overall social media usage is rising.
We’ll see in short order. Earnings calls are coming up in the next 7 days.
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?
Android has more market share but iOS has the users that are most profitable. They're dominant in affluent countries (USA, UK, plenty of countries in Europe, etc) and even in countries where it isn't dominant, it's not rare for iPhones to be the phone of choice amongst the wealthy population.
Wealthier people, I imagine, are not only more likely to want to buy things, they'll also be more willing to spend their money on new things.
To get a sense on how much more valuable "valuable" consumers can be for Facebook: last quarter on average they made $60.57 dollars per user in the USA/Canada, vs just $4.89 for their users in Asia-Pacific, for example [1]. The USA and Canada are still Facebook's biggest money-making region, in spite of also being the one where they have the fewest active users [1].
I'm not sure if an immediate 25% share price dip makes sense either, given worldwide Facebook lost only 1 million DAUs, and the number of users in the USA/Canada has steadily oscillated between 195/196 million since 2020 (the loss was in "Rest of the World" the catch-all region they make the least money in.
A lot of the value of these companies is not necessarily realized value, but value derived from the expectation of continued growth at a certain pace.I can see why investors are nervous; Facebook has never lost DAUs, there's intense competition with TikTok for the young demographic, VR/AR has been a huge bet that still hasn't paid off and the controversy around Facebook weakens the value of the brand. On top of this, in spite of revenue being good, it was not what was expected and effectively advertising on the valuable iOS demographic got much harder. Maybe that warrants a 25% dip, maybe it doesn't— in any case there's definitely reasons to be nervous.
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.
At least I have the feeling that newcomers like TikTok don’t have this "embrace the web" thing that Facebook had during a decade with embedded tracking scripts everywhere on any website.
I feel like TikTok is more closed and that I don’t have a shadow profile on it like Facebook did.
But it’s also because the web (especially the browsers and mobile OS) learnt its lessons.
OTOH, it also means that newcomers will have to make even more efforts to to "compete" with the historical open web which can create even more situations of information disappearing from the open web.
TikTok is essentially a mobile-first reincarnation of YouTube. I’ve yet to see any users use it to socialize with friends and family they know in real life. I’m hesitant to call it a “social network” when there’s little to no socializing there in the first place
Fair point. I do agree with others though, the damage other apps like TikTok do is less for me to be happy about it overall. It's like Transitioning people from an alcohol addiction to a weed addiction, one is much more dangerous than the other, either might not be great for you.
I hope platforms that are focused on topics instead of people will prevail. There is still some exaggerated self-promotion, but it is far less pronounced.
Oversharing is a really bad idea in the long run. Your opinions from 30 years ago are probably hated today. Imagine the trauma that is caused if you could read what your parents thought before you were born.
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.
That stuff matters too but I think the size is what matters. HN stays clean because it stays small. Lots of posts are boring for the average person’s interests. I’ve seen the same thing on Reddit. Once you go above a certain size, a subreddit completely degrades.
All social networks with voting systems are optimised to maximise engagement and promote outrage. Just look at how every single country subreddit is a constant flamewar.
HN _mostly_ prevents this by having strong and good moderation, but there's still a fair amount of negative metrics coming from it.
They’re not completely absent, but design decisions by Hacker News make these three factors less visible.
>maximize engagement
It encourages engagement with upvotes and additional privileges when an account gets more points. However, the site’s design doesn’t maximize it. I don’t get push notifications to check the site, awards, or suggestions for other relevant articles in the comments.
>promote outrage
Outrage can be a factor that causes posts to rise, but deliberate policies avoid optimizing for it. Specifically, the avoidance of editing the submission title, unless the purpose is to make it less clickbait.
>instill a fear of missing out.
This is most subjective, but I get the sentiment that if someone posts an amazing project, there’s a good chance of constructive critique in the comments, or more information from the developer about how they made it.
Other social media websites don’t have the depth of discussion (just photos of the best parts of their life, without talking about the challenges). This is relatively more of a cultural/user base observation versus an interface decision, however.
For conspiracy theories, antivax, and misinformation, the alternative is heavier moderation. It looks like a judgement call by HN moderators to err on being less interventionist with user discussion. There are tradeoffs, but I think the benefits of free discussion outweigh exposure to misinformation, so long as one reads skeptically and critically.
- 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).
NO thanks, I am not planning on using yet another service that is trying to psychologically milk every ounce of my attention. Reddit and Hackernews is bad enough. I am also not interested in looking at lewd teenagers dancing to the latest tune or whatever the kids are doing these days.
"I don't understand this 'Internet' thing the kids are using, have no intention of trying it, and I already don't like the newspapers!"
"at lewd teenagers dancing to the latest tune or whatever the kids are doing these days." ... is a seriously dim view.
TikTok is literally the #1 app in the world, and for someone curious enough to read HackerNews but unwilling to even try app to understand the nature of its impact is a bit odd.
Personally, I despise Twitter, but I read it occasionally, and understand why it works, and what kind of content is on there. I would find it problematic to work in tech with someone who doesn't understand 'why people like Netflix' having never even bothered to stream a video before.
In particular, the feed algorithm is unlike anything else in tech and the content is definitely a lot less toxic.
You should definitely try it, that doesn't mean you have to like it.
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's also a very American-centric view. The rest of the world is going back to forums and single-platform chatrooms and avoiding reddit/twitter/facebook, but never had an AOL/ProdigyCompuServe phase to go through.
If we could just get discord to <insert short feature wishlist> then I reckon the golden IRC days would be back with a vengence.
It was a walled garden in a slightly different sense. AOL tried their best to force companies to buy AOL “keyword” so that the clueless user doesn’t have to type .com or .net at the end. If you want a comparison, that is like Google putting “I am feeling lucky” as the only option and then auctioning off that result.
Yep I guess the pull to be a walled garden is too great. Even Twitter, a product that should have been the true antithesis to walled garden pigeon holed themselves into walled garden state. I wrote a blog post about it a long time ago https://medium.com/@shareU/we-built-this-city-2cb97437942f
This has always irked me. Perhaps it's heavy handed, but I would love a law that (1) requires governments at all levels to use open-access websites (and radio, a local newspaper of record, &c.), and (2) requires services like Facebook to syndicate any news and updates.
Interesting that you would name a newspaper of record as a valid outlet for government news/updates. I feel like Facebook could make an argument for being essentially that today - after all, it is where the eyeballs are, which is why people use it for marriage announcements, birth announcements, classifieds, obituaries.... and on and on.
The government should be creating their own services for both state and local governments to create websites. Instead, you got a 10,000 vendors charging outrageous prices that can't even get something like security right. Something like 18F would be awesome for these cities to start using. Unfortunately, politics is very corrupt so politicians are always going to want to pay a friend of a friend a million dollars to say that it was the vendors fault than to do something right, and the vendor will have some reason why it wasn't their fault. Rinse, recycle, repeat.
This is probably already the case : I can access my local government entities' FB pages without logging in to FB. Google indexes the pages so you don't need the FB search feature to find them.
Same! What a sad state the internet is in when a megaevil corp is used by local services to provide updates. I thought that was what Twitter was for?
I know several pacific islands were going to ban Facebook but apparently it's heavily in use by businesses.
Regina Lepping, a young entrepreneur from capital city Honiara, said the announcement had sent many small business owners scrambling to find alternatives to Facebook.
I've interacted with local businesses that use a Facebook page as a replacement for maintaining a website that they own. The rationale I've read is that their time is best spent providing their quality service versus learning website development (even with a block-based website builder), and hiring a web developer is too pricey, when they can create a Facebook page that is easy to set up.
Most importantly, it's easy for them to update and maintain a Facebook page, versus an independent website.
The federal government should launch its own platform for the US government and state and local governments to push all their updates. Something like Star Wars' Holonet.
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.
This is my question too. I’ve never used Facebook, yet I’ve never had any trouble finding the information I am looking for. Is it just very very specific places?
A lot of small businesses in the UK seem to use Facebook rather than putting up a web page. I can see why they do it, it doesn't cost anything and they don't need to worry about renewing domains or hosting issues. It's not a great experience for their customers though, especially if you don't have a Facebook account.
I didn't have facebook for the last few years and I was wondering if I'd have to come back to it to be able to access local news/info. Never happened and never needed to. It's true though that in some countries that's the primary communication channel for businesses and even governments unfortunately.
It's possible you're not in the same market as us. Lots of small businesses have no interest in running and updating a website, especially when there's a free alternative that most of their customers have access to.
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
All of your customers will continue to be Facebook users if you post things on a Facebook page that only Facebook users can view. And Facebook users are an apparently diminishing portion of the population, as per the article this thread is discussing...
Not a good plan for any business, I would think. Would be nice to see more businesses on Mastodon or (gasp!) just run their own websites again. Can you imagine how difficult it must be for a business to buy a domain, hosting, and slap together a static site in this day and age?
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?
There are many businesses (Restaurants, doggy daycare) that no longer have websites but have transitioned solely to a Facebook page for cost and technical ease of maintenance reasons.
Many restaurants don't have a website anymore. Yes, you can google for directions and opening times, but you can find menu or daily lunch on their Facebook only.
I'm not sure if Google put a stop to it, but in my area there was an issue about 6-8 months ago with the business hours listed on Google being changed by competitors. Usually they would alter opening or closing hours by an hour or two, so it wasn't obvious.
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.
Facebook is doing great. To put things in perspective:
- On average, they net around 35 billion a year. With a valuation (MC) of 887 billion.
- On average, Google net around 51 billion a year. With a valuation of 1.8 trillion.
Facebook is making 68% as much as Google, with its valuation at less than half the price. And over the past 4-5 years Facebook's revenue has grown on average 32%/year, while Google grows 23%/year.
Really undervalued company IMO.
And their revenue did grow. They grew year-over-year. Just missed their target by 3%.
The problem is of course, that Facebook is directly threatened by TikTok, while Google has a much stronger hold on its market segments. Google could continue growing, while Facebook actually shrinks.
I've never really understood this MBA mentality because growth must stop at some point. There are only so many humans on earth. The expectation that a company can grow forever is impossible, at least until we find an alien planet with a population willing to sign up for Facebook.
Right, of course. The claim wasn't "all companies must continue growing forever or they are bad companies / their stock will crash". It was rather "Facebook in particular's current valuation is based on investors predicting it will continue to grow".
When (not if) Facebook stops growing, it will be worth _something_. Owning its stock is a bet on what that number is, and the stock price reflects the market's collective estimate.
The stock market price today is based on the value people EXPECT the company to have at some point, not the one it has. If people expected it to grow much more, and it doesn't, the value falls to the level it possibly should've had in the first place.
It's not MBA mentality, it's stock investors mentality. I don't think Zuckerberg or any other executive is out there buying FB shares at $320. It's outsiders gambling on the continued growth.
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.
There is nothing facetious or self-flattering here, these things aren't achievements, rather reactions to dependence on some massive facets of modern life, which, as it turns out, are not critical or even necessary.
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 sure that was the intent. Maybe I was just mad I couldn't complete the task but somehow the tone of the message really angered me and I never forgot it. It just seemed sarcastic and condescending.
Don't try to be cute in your messaging, just straightforward and direct is my takeaway. Some people might appreciate the cute but others you might anger if you don't get the tone just right.
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.
Yeah, I "log in" a few times a day to answer messages. I don't think that should be considered a user since I'm not consuming anything facebook-related, just responding to messages because everyone is on facebook
They're still growing year-over-year. They were just off their target in the last quarter by 3%. They're valued at $3.67 per share versus the $3.78 expected. Their stock literally dropped ~25% because they were only 3% off expected earnings. And lost 0.15% active users, which is expected as the world opens up again. I don't see what the big deal is. The market is overreacting.
Post close trading can be swing by a lot. The reaction I think is not because that they are off by 3%, the future growth looks only to be pretty dull , perhaps also why FB is making such huge gamble on VR.
The high P/E big tech companies enjoy is on basis of the implicit expectation to keep growing fast[1], if that on confidence on growth is no longer there, then price will reflect closer to a more traditional tech stock.
Tesla trades at P/E of 185x, Amazon - 58x, Microsoft - 35x, Google - 29x and FB - 23x[2]. I think it accurately reflects the market expectation of their respective future growth.
---
[1] Same reason Tesla is valued so high despite relatively modest revenue, the expectation is massive growth on the back of their lead in the space and the accelerating shift towards EV.
[2] SAP, IBM, ORCL all trade in the same range today.
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.
Except TikTok’s also is controlled or controllable by a foreign government whereas we know all Facebook is after is more profit. One of these seems more malicious and abusable than the other.
Early Facebook was wholesome as well, relatively speaking. It's the cycle of addiction. The early days of addiction are always nostalgic. It's only later that an addiction starts to produce anger as much as it produces relief. I see no safeguards preventing Tiktok from going down the same path, if not worse.
I get hypnotized by tiktok even by seeing it over other people's shoulders. HN and reddit already makes me feel guilty. I am not even starting with that one.
That's exactly what TikTok is. I've tried to use it several times, but it was just too dystopian for me to keep going. It was an intensely disquieting experience seeing the algorithm try to "addict" me to the product. I just don't see the appeal in being an utterly passive consumer of entertainment generated by an AI (yes, I know humans nominally generate the content, but the secret sauce is the AI playing conductor). It reminds me of Elsa-gate. Just surreal.
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 ?
Here is an article [1] that shows consumption of coffee and soft drinks in 1946/47 and 2005. Adding coffee and soft drinks together there has been an increase of approx 32% in consumption since 1946.
Coffee 1946: 46.4 gallons per person
Coffee 2005: 24.2 gallons per person
Soft drinks 1947: 10.8 gallons per person
Soft drinks 2005: 51.5 gallons per person
Total caffeinated consumption in 46/47: 57.2 gallons / person
Total caffeinated consumption in 2005: 75.7 gallons / person
The chart seems to indicate tea has stayed relatively flat in the same time period. I'm not sure the history of caffeine pills or ADHD medicine, but those may also contribute to an increased consumption in 2005.
- Gatorade and similar stuff
- A movement to drink water (HydroHomies)
- High caffeine energy drinks (Red bull and the likes)
- Healthy alternatives (juices, smoothies, etc)
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.
I am assume this doesn't refer to "volume of coffee beverage" consumed. As far as I'm aware only the US seems to gravitate towards these extremely large coffee beverages. Other nations drink more coffee, but in smaller serving sizes less diluted by milk/sugar.
Perhaps the US used to drink espressos in the 1940s, I'm not sure. That's if this fact is even accurate.
US consumption in 1946 was apparently ~20 pounds of coffee beans annually per capita, or an average of around 2.5–3 (8 oz?) cups of coffee per day for the ~3/4 of adults who were regular coffee drinkers.
> Most people [in the UK] made coffee in a jug. You boiled the water and added it to ground coffee already in the jug. You let the ground coffee settle and it was ready to pour through a strainer and drink. Some people then boiled the coffee again.
My impression is that coffee preparation was comparable in the USA. Neither paper filters nor instant coffee were common until decades later.
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.
Right, if anything -- coffee consumption has only gone down because we've moved on to more efficient stimulants. Either higher concentration/lower cost artificial substitutes or prescription drugs.
Hardly the best example of America getting over an addiction.
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.
I think this pandemic has proved how sane the idea of a Metaverse would be.
Imagine meeting someone online, dating or friendship, you put on a lightweight VR headset and get transported to a replicated NYC rooftop bar, where loads of people from around the world are sitting, drinking and chatting. Socializing with a date or a group of people at the comfort of your home, going on outings, inviting your friends to your digital house, work meetings in a digital office instead of Zoom (I already seen companies doing this; VR meetings). People will be able to form romantic relationships and stronger friendships from across the world. Zoom, Skype, Discord will seem like old world relics.
It's like the appeal of World of Warcraft when it was a its peak, but not gaming - not appealing to just gamers. Appealing to everyone who's open to socializing online.
I guess it's just a matter of personal preference, because I can't relate at all. That would have sounded awful to me before the pandemic, and the experience of virtual everything during the pandemic only makes it sound even more awful.
> People will be able to form romantic relationships and stronger friendships from across the world.
Romantic relationships without physical proximity sounds totally dystopian to me.
An observation that your post reminded me of: why do all these metaverse concepts replicate very uninteresting real world scenarios? I remember watching Zuckerberg do a demo of a work meeting and everyone was in... a drab meeting room. In a virtual world of infinite possibilities!
God, if I'm forced to strap on a VR headset just to be social with someone at least put me on one of Saturn's moons, not an NYC rooftop bar.
Who the hell wants to do that? After this BS over the last two years? People will absolutely laugh at the idea. Most people are sick and tired of this virtual shit. FB could not have picked a worse time to hype up some unreleased virtual reality world.
I'm pretty sure every tele-technology has had folks who found them just a bit too far beyond the pale. Why call when the people you want to talk to are a walk away? Why send a telegram when you can call? Why send email when you can send a telegram? etc. I also think even if XR does become a reality, it won't be _us_ that truly buys into it, but a younger generation that grows up in it and makes their own norms in it, the way much of my generation was on the early Internet, and the next generation was on the early Web.
For me the killer application is the ability to replace the office. There's already VR software that lets you have a virtual workspace with multiple monitors in VR. It would be so much more convenient to be able to have a large virtual office available to you in VR rather than building a large, physical office IRL.
It’s totally a batshit Hail Mary. Like it’s total vaporware at this point. Where is this metaverse? Where do I log in?
It’s all marketing hype and it’s creating dreams in peoples heads that will come crashing down when they actually use whatever this product is. Because whatever they ship, whenever they ship it, will be a thing that is huge and has little knowledge of what it’s market fit will be.
They aren’t starting small and nimble like a startup. They are betting huge high stakes games with almost no real market testing.
The idea of the metaverse has happened over and over throughout the last few decades and has failed every time. It will continue to fail until the technology backing it is utterly incredible. Oculus is nowhere close. We’re talking about needing an F-16 and currently having the Wright brothers’ airplane. Give it another 40 or 50 years and maybe it will be viable.
This gives them more (young) users, a better connection to their users, a ton of patents, and jumps them out of the smartphone era. They are dead in the water without a gambit of a similar size, buying up the competition (their previous primary strategy) only works as long as regulatory agencies are willing to play ball.
Some of us saw the last wave of VR hype. It was around the same time as PalmOS, iPaq, and other handheld computing devices. It wasn't obvious to most people at the time that one of these technologies would transform the world. But visionaries saw it.
It wasn't VR then and it won't be now. VR has gained a foothold in this wave in its niches of gaming, other "entertainment", and random educational and military applications. General casual use beyond that is a pipe dream.
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.
More likely FBs network effort is the weakest in those markets: less internet penetration, weaker brand loyalty, Fb is also relatively new in these markets, more competition from tiktok and others.
> I still remember it and the changes that came after it, the McDonalds of today is nothing like the McDonalds of 2003.
Building remodels aside, what are you referring to? They have chicken wraps and salads? Otherwise it seems more or less the same McDonalds of my childhood?
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).
Yeah. Agreed. It had stopped working that way for me when I quit, also. And they kept lecturing me and my friends about community standards. I got tired of that stifling, moralizing hypocrisy. I guess I speak more of the original vision of FB.
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)
Instagram is arguably fast becoming the 21st century version of the glossy fashion magazines my parent's generation often read to kill time, where every second page would be a full page advert for a perfume or a watch.
I disagree with everyone about Instagram on HN. Instagram is amazing to me. But, I also love Pinterest which most people here hate (may be because of search results spamming). Where else can you curate a feed of vintage airline tickets? Or vaporwave aesthetics?
Also, ads that I see on IG are always promoting small businesses and never scammy. Actually it is a source of discovery for me.
All friends that I have love IG, been using it since 2013 daily. Visual culture is far more interesting than crap on FB or ephemeral social toxicity on TikTok/Snapchat. My IG contacts/feed never discuesses politics or activism.
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.
What you're forgetting is the 3D TV aspect of this version of Second Life that will push it over the top. What Second Life was missing is a pair of goggles that you had to wear and a Facebook login.
You'll be able to have work meetings at a virtual office. You can do that now, but the experience will be better. You'll be able to socialize with friends across the world, meet up at virtual replicated areas (like a rooftop bar in NYC..) and meet other people while you're there. You'll be able to go on virtual dates with a long-distance partner. You'll be able to put on your lightweight VR headset and be stationed at a better workstation, with larger monitors where you can manipulate the interface with movements of your hands without the cost of buying such a work set-up in real life. You'll be able to sit on your couch, put on your VR headset and watch movies on a 100 inch TV screen without having to furnish your home with a TV.
The possibilities are endless. Where's your imagination?
Maybe I'm just getting old but I have zero interest in "socializing" that way. It sounds horrible, regardless of how good the VR is.
When I watch movies at home often I'm only halfway paying attention to the TV while simultaneously eating or talking to my family or working on my laptop. There's no way I'm going to wear a VR headset most of the time. The TV is hung on the wall so it takes literally zero space.
None of these applications are going to take off until the XR hardware becomes a lot more seamless. It needs to be as easy as pulling out a phone or putting on a pair of sunglasses. The metaverse will not succeed as long as it is tied to clunky VR strap on headsets with bad FOVs and low resolution that make you look like a dork.
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.
VR is gimmicky, like the Wii. Its full of worlds with great freedom of movement that are designed to hide the fact that you have very limited freedom of movement.
> designed to hide the fact that you have very limited freedom of movement.
That highly depends on your setup. The more physical space you have, the better if you want to move.
> VR is gimmicky, like the Wii.
Have you even used modern VR yet before panning it? Google Cardboard is ancient and doesn't count as modern VR. I ask because this answer tends to come from people who haven't tried it.
The 'metaverse' in terms that there will absolutely be a VR cyber/world/land/facebook/sims2/second life experience. Will it be what FB wants it to be (they want to cash in), probably not but this is 100% coming. Looks at every immersive games (WOW, Second Life, etc...) in the past, even if its just that it will be hugely lucrative and successful.
Does Facebook really have the infrastructure in place to host the metaverse? Are they buying up the best gaming firms, have extensive enterprise architecture experience?
Look at Microsoft. My bet is on big enterprise/cloud tech + video game companies.
I agree. It doesn't carry anything intrinsically interesting. You'd have far more luck porting VR into an existing popular game that is fun and making it more of a social hang out scene. You'll struggle greatly trying to make it a mainstream social media platform. Imagine a social media player that you could only log into from your computer at home.
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.
Agreed, and they also could have named this concept after something cooler than the metaverse from Ready Player One. It was a pretty bad book and movie IMO. They should have chosen the "Holodeck" and renamed themselves "Holo".
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.
That is why I related it to people selling real estate on the Moon when moon landings were yet feasible. They are clearing trying to associate the brand Metaverse with Facebook right now, and hoping they can fill in the backend when they (possibly) have the capability to. They are trying to steal brand recognition for vaporware right now. Playing the long game.
I'm curious, how do you expect promotion to actually happen if you feel like "this" (this being a change in branding by a large company) is astroturfing? What is a non-astroturfing way to promote a new idea/product/thing? Or do you think any form of promotion is astroturfing?
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.
Expectations were that it would do like the other internet giants and beat by miles. Yes it's weird that the expectations are not just their own performance, but that's often how the market works.
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.
Was your page full of actual hate speech such as "exterminate the jews" or was it full of "hate speech" such as criticizing politicians who happen to be minorities?
Same question regarding fake news: was your page full of actual fake news suh as "Elon Musk has died", or was it full of political speech you don't like, such as "wearing masks is not worth the inconvenience"?
Unfortunately most of the arguments against wearing masks are petty and bullshit given that the inconvenience of wearing one is insignificant for most people.
Sure, if you have genuine health concerns wearing one then don’t. But most of the people that moaned about it were really just moaning about being told what to do.
I had one mum in my kids school quoting the Magna Carta as a reason not to wear masks, which is simply ridiculous. And others claim that long term use of thermometers could be damaging to kids health, which completely misses the fact that such devices are entirely passive instruments.
That was the point I quit Facebook. I realised my time was too valuable to read so much stupid.
Your definition of hate speech is irrelevant. Whatever the GP saw was enough for them that they made a decision to remove their personal exposure, which is their right. They aren't censoring you or anyone else by making that choice.
If others are looking to keep up with news in a low key way (including the OP), I'd highly recommend this approach that's been working well for me.
1. Create an instagram account to follow just one account.
2. Follow an account called @mosheh. It's run by a former CBS News Producer [1]
3. 1x or 2x per day, go through his stories.
No affiliation but I'd highly recommend this approach for those that are already on instagram or want to use the platform to keep up with the news. He aggregates news stories from most major news sources and in a couple of minutes you can be informed of what's happening around the world.
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.
reddit used to be great until they pulled their great bait & switch, then added all kinds of authoritarian features.
A brief history of reddit:
>We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it.
— Reddit FAQ 2005
>We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content
— u/kn0thing 2008
>A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. [reddit]'s the digital form of political pamplets.
— u/kn0thing 2012
>We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal.
— u/reddit 2012
>We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States - because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse).
— u/yishan 2012
>Neither Alexis [u/kn0thing] nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech
It feels like reddit changed in line with the rest of the Internet though.
In 2022 you have the choice of a) "suppressing free speech" or b) "platforming racists" and there is no middle ground and no way to win. You can't pass the buck to moderators.
Reddit also stopped showing users the red background on their mod-removed comments. So when you're logged in it looks like your comment is live [1]. You can try it here [2].
I once tried looking through their archived code base to find when they made that change but couldn't decipher it. It's possible they never showed authors the red background at all.
Reddit should break off all political content into its own site, porn into another, and keep the rest in place. If a post is porn or political, mods can click a button to move it to the dedicated site. This would be similar to the “move topic” functionality from phpBB and vBulletin.
This might solve a lot of problems, but it would create issues on the edge, like r/pics content that may not be overtly political but clearly has an agenda.
Personally I use Reddit exclusively for political flamewars on one account, and in-depth technical content on another account.
I’m starting to feel pretty unwelcome, though, when it comes to anything “misinformarion” related. Once you get banned from one subreddit, if you have a post reported on the same subreddit from another account, then both your accounts get banned site-wide. Combine this with the dragnet, unsolicited bans that some mods are sending to anyone who posts in certain subreddits and you have a real chilling effect.
The average IQ on Reddit is also about 110, which is just boring in most cases. When you can predict the top comments on a thread, reading them is probably a waste of time.
Circa 2005 reddit was a forum for nerdy young tech people, talking about miscellaneous web links but mostly focused around nerdy tech stuff. Nobody I know who read reddit circa 2005 wanted it to become a white supremacist hate forum. When it started to attract large numbers of white supremacists who deposited their steaming piles of bullshit (hate speech, vicious personal attacks) all over the site, lots of people reading the site (including those who had been there since 2005) were appalled. Obviously advertisers also don’t want to associate their brands with hate speech (or child porn, etc.).
> 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.
Are you a teen or a young adult. I am guessing you are in between age of 35 - 45 because, I am that age myself and have started weaning off of social media lately. The dopamine rewards are just not worth it.
I have, however, moved on to saner places like HN.
I’m not the poster, but I’m between 16-19 and seeing the same thing over last 2 years I’ve been almost completely out of social media,
- 0 minutes of facebook
- 0 minutes of Instagram
- 0 minutes of Twitter
- 20 minutes of Telegram per day to catchup on messages
- 10 minutes of Matrix
A few years back the aggregate was easily 10-12 hrs per day (rest were spent watching movies and writing code) . Nowadays my brain automatically will close the sites if I spend more then 2 minutes on them.
But it’s not just social media, I lost my appetite for movies, tv shows too.
Most of this purge was unintentional , however now that it’s done. I’m glad. Other than that I come on HN once or twice a day to have fun and comment and read stuff.
I wouldn’t say HN is more saner then other social media, most of the peers I engaged with in the more popular social media apps were equally as nice, amicable and fun to talk with.
But these days I mostly spend my days reading story books, blogs, write code, make drinks and cook food, and solve fun puzzles that I design.
Who knows, maybe it’ll all change to something else in 2 years again.
52, and I’m getting tired of a lot of things. May be the testosterone. From a VR standpoint, Battle Royal zombie shooters with bow and arrow mechanics in a game with crafting and skill trees holds NOTHING for me anymore
Every social network (including so many bulletins and forums from ≤90's) models the relationships and culture of its initial cohort, and it always becomes self-isolated to that imprint, so as people change their life priorities they leave and the network dies. The same will happen to hacker news.
There are definitely parts users of HN that are not same, but the conversation is normally at auch higher level and most people welcome a different viewpoint instead of seeing it as an attack.
They finally monitized their products and customers to a breaking point. They run on engagement metrics without common sense or empathy to how fear and anger impact their user's wellbeing.
I most definitely do not need or want a VR immersed version of that toxicity.
VR has nothing to do with facebook, at least at the moment. Just logging in with your facebook account doesn't mean its suddenly sucking all your life from you and piping it right to facebook. If you enjoy video games, its hands down the best way to game right now.
> 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.
What blows my mind are all of the blatant scam replies on sponsored content. You'll get sponsored content from, say, Bloomberg or CNBC, and half of the replies are cryptocurrency scams. I've even seen top replies that were 'ads' for witch doctors that will cast spells for you if you send them money on Venmo.
It makes both Facebook/Meta and the sponsored brands look terrible.
reddit is great if you curate your feed. If you go to "popular" or "trending" it's a dumpster fire. I still love reddit though with my 10 or so subreddits that I follow.
It is just me or there seems to be a strange lack of criticism about TikTok on the same or stricter level than FB. Especially that it is a Chinese company HQ’ed in Beijing. Neither do I ever see discussion about the asymmetry in China’s trade policies with regards to FB/Tiktok. Tiktok enjoys free market access (except India), whereas FB is banned in China just like many other US-based platforms. On the contrary, there seems to be praise about TikTok on HN!
How come we don’t see scathing articles on NYT about TikTok but on WSJ? Has this become a partisan issue (Trump wanted to ban Tiktok)?
The problem with TikTok is that it's even more opaque than Facebook.
Content can be said to exist or not exist on Facebook, and that's usually it. Sure they monkey with the feed, but it's still essentially user-derived.
TikTok effectively exposes one interaction: get next.
What that returns is completely at the mercy of whatever TikTok decides it should be. They've optimized for virality. But it would be pretty easy to tweak that and optimize for something else.
Why do I feel like I've read hundreds of comments saying "is there a strange lack of criticism about China?"
We literally almost banned TikTok, and statements were made about the necessity of doing it from the President of the United States. For weeks. Almost resulting in a government mandated forced sale.
Don't worry, tik tok is just new. Wait a few more years and they'll be put through a similar rigamarole, although I don't think it will be as severe as FB. Maybe youtube level?
I think it's because of the perception TikTok=cat and dance videos, FB=misinformation. At least that's what my feeds looks like. Also: TikTok=kids, FB=adults
I think researchers are starting to notice mass psychological phenomenon specific to the platform already, though maybe 'tiktok tics' just sounds nicer than any of the other social media networks and 'tics'
I don't use either service, but it's my impression that the misinformation on TikTok is more on the "petty harm to individuals" level and less on the "destroys the social and political fabric of societies" level.
Perfect Facebook: Break off groups, silo it. I've been off FB for almost a decade but I'm at the point where I have to actually use it for the first time, as it's where all the types of events I want to go to exclusively get organized. For amateur racing at least, it's pretty much all Facebook.
Groups used to be broken off into a separate iOS app. That time period was blissful. Then they removed that app because it allowed users to escape the newsfeed.
Platforms like Facebook just expose some of the bad parts of human nature such as cult like behaviour. Tech is neither the source of all evil nor the solution to all our problems like people in tech like to treat it to be.
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'm reminded of a Twitter joke from (according to the WaPo) @KevinFarzad:
"HEY IT'S ME your facebook friend from high school who never left our hometown & thinks Olive Garden is fancy. Anyway, here's a racist article."
How is that a joke? It's just looking down on someone because of where they live, eat and their politics (assuming very lose definition of "racist"). And when did the role of journalists start including dunking on random people?
What’s the matter with Olive Garden?
lol classic
This probably sounds like a real zinger to a certain kind of young person who moved to Brooklyn and thinks everybody back home is a total loser, but this is not the modal Facebook user, so I'm not sure it matters much.
You’re trying to characterize OP as a condescending out of touch hipster, but in my opinion your characterization of the “modal” Facebook user is actually more so. The “modal” Facebook user is equally capable of being dissatisfied with the product as your 2013 hipster caricature is because FB has failed to deliver on its mission. The social side is boring and doesn’t generate as much engagement because it turns out your friends from high school truly are not relevant to your life, yes even the “modal” Facebook user is capable of change and evolution; and the content side leaves users feeling angry, divided, and exhausted after the hundredth flame war they find themselves embroiled in over the political upset of the day. It does matter.
i mean you can easily write the obverse joke and it has the same overall point - “hey, it’s me, your friend from high school that moved to brooklyn and got a tattoo and thinks he’s better than you. here’s an article about how big yogurt’s assumption you can use a spoon is Ableist” still underscores the fact that facebook is a pipeline to deliver brain poison.
I won't argue whether it's accurate, but I think you missed the point. You can swap words around, and get the same for any demographic.
The friend's perception of the poster would be "HEY IT'S ME your facebook friend from high school who went to New York and thinks is better than you. Anyway, here's a woke article."
> this is not the modal Facebook user
the increasing hew and cry suggests that it actually is
Well, it was always kind of doomed in this way.
When everyone is still actively building their friend list (remember this started for college students) its an amazing product because it brings you closer to people in a new way and allows for curation without investing a ton into AI/ML.
For people who stay in a static social bubbles for long times (e.g., your parents, your friends from HS who didn't move to a coastal city) it's also perfect, because they tend to value content related to their social group more than something new and interesting.
But for the highest value users (e.g., the ones with high-paying knowledge-based jobs and a willingness to try new things) the social graph will never keep up with their lives. Bad content from the edges of the graph will slowly creep into feeds (MLMs being a prime example) and those high-value users will seek out new platforms that conform better to their interests.
Instagram was a brilliant stop-gap, but Mark never saw the writing on the wall about algorithmic content (probably b/c Bytedance had the advantage of cutting its teeth in China first) and is just too far behind to ever really catch up.
So now he's trying to out-future Bytedance with VR (and even got them to burn $1bn on Pico), but unless he has some hard-tech rabbit to pull out of his hat, there's just not anything there.
We may very well be seeing the largest (negative) turn-around story in history since Yahoo! play out in front of our eyes.
When do the desperate acquisitions start?
It's really a perfect assessment. I couldn't articulate why exactly Facebook felt like I was purely wasting time each time I engaged with the experience (few times a year). This description completely crystallizes my thinking.
Actually it’s not. Your early life social group becoming irrelevant to your life a decade later is NOT representative at all. What is accurate to say is the OP is not connecting with his old friends anymore. But let’s be real here, not everyone’s like that. Facebook is just a tool to connect with people. Attributing and expecting Facebook to make your friendships more relevant and meaningful is foolish and hopeless.
Yes. There are some social groups that still use it (“no practice today”) but the novelty has gone and the youngsters have moved on. If the value of the graph increases exponentially with users, each user leaving causes a disproportionate value drop.
A girl I thought was cute in college was totally convinced T***** would retain the Presidency on 1/6, so I guess it was useful as a sign something was going to happen.
I haven’t seen anyone voledermord trump b4
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.
Yup, Facebook has their tentacles in so many places that walking away from it is difficult, especially if you are involved in local community activities.
My neighborhood exclusively uses Facebook for neighborhood communication.
My kid's school PTA exclusively uses Facebook.
Most of the local food trucks only post their schedules on Facebook.
Since the pandemic started I have been taking the opportunity to go through my house and clean out lots of things that have just been hanging around for years. I list everything I sell on Facebook, Craigslist, OfferUp, and Nextdoor. I can’t remember the last time I got a bite from any of the other services that aren't Facebook. It’s been awhile.
It honestly drives me be crazy how this company has wormed their way into being such an essential piece of communication infrastructure for so many people that I can’t quit without sacrificing my ability to participate in some of the things I really enjoy.
So I begrudgingly tolerate Facebook.
For me, it's the local cycling community. Rides and ride groups all use it as their point of coordination.
>Most of the local food trucks only post their schedules on Facebook.
Oh, god, that's annoying. I've actually seen some businesses forgo a proper web site and instead JUST USE FB, which is crazy annoying.
I am from Europe so I may not get it, but what communication does a neighborhood do that is important? Yard sales?
Do people really participate in something like school PTA and eat often at food trucks?
I guess electronic platforms are more fragmented here in Europe. Google Maps owns business hours, various classified sites (such as Ebay's) own selling stuff locally. But everything might be different in each country really.
I think people have become more vary to post personal things online. I know very little parents that would be okay to publish pictures of their kids online (including on Facebook).
I'm working on another option for some of these things on my platform, Tosslet: https://tosslet.com
Would love some feedback on if you think it would help solve communications from: 1) PTA -> resident 2) Food Trucks -> nearby people
Cal Newport's "Digital Minimalism" addresses this common use-case scenario.
1) Remove the apps from your phone and log out on mobile browser, making each future login a concentrated intentional effort. (You can leave Messenger if that might be used for emergency contacts).
2) Use www version only.
3) Choose a time when you're going to sit by your home computer, and use social media for some pre-determined time slot, let's say 30 minutes.
The social networks are very good at serving this use case - showing most important content first, and relegating the junky stuff further down the feed. This way you won't miss any baby photos or wedding announcements, but will be spared from your uncle getting into a heated political discussion.
The social networks are very good at serving this use case - showing most important content first, and relegating the junky stuff further down the feed.
Only up to a point. I have actually missed wedding announcements because the announcement was pushed far down by more recent but less relevant news. Yes, if you use Facebook for 30 minutes a day, you probably won't miss anything. But if you use Facebook less often than that (like an hour a week, or once a month), you will absolutely miss relevant news because it'll be pushed down by whatever political shoutfest is currently drawing comments and reactions.
It's like that with me and having a phone number. Day to day I hate it. 95% of time I get scam calls from the "IRS" - actively harmful. Another 4% is marketing - unwanted, wasteful. Only the last 1% is potentially useful.
Is facebook trending in that direction? Seems like it.
I wonder if there's a generalisable statement in there - say, that all communication media will eventually become so swamped in noise that the signal is lost almost entirely?
Maybe too pessimistic.
I quit having a phone number and just rent virtual ones for shitty webservices that force me to have a number. Zero regrets.
I quit Facebook years ago and do not miss anything either, so maybe it's just me.
Seeing pictures of family and participating in group events are all positive in my opinion.
My son's daycare has a facebook page. It's very convenient to stay up to date on my own schedule without having to deal with emails. My pizzeria also has a facebook page. It's an easy way to look up hours or any updates. My gym has an instagram page to post their workouts and schedule. It's very convenient. The owners aren't very tech savvy so its easy for them. And its easy for me because the website isn't broken, gives me everything I need, lets me comment or reach out to the owners and is well indexed
It's like saying "I wouldn't use product if not for the value I get from the product".
Two of your examples can be done using a shared calendar, which is more fitting in these cases than facebook, and integrates more deeply into devices, and the third about looking up hours can be done using the maps app.
They try to make you think they invented the wheel but really they’re just offering the same services as elsewhere under their umbrella.
The information you get from businesses USED to be available on their own sites, without requiring you to submit to Facebook's invasive tracking.
I don't have any particular love for Facebook, but it remains the best way to share my underwater photography with friends. That's a positive reason. I appreciate how they give me a convenient distribution platform and it's all free.
Why could you not post all of your pics to a shared photo album that’s shared with your friends? It’d even remove the step of posting it only because as soon as it’s on your machine it’s uploaded to your cloud photo album. And it’s still free. Further what if you want to share this with those that aren’t your friends? You’ve required facebook usage with no real gain.
(this was years ago but) I thought this too. I was relatively new to a new city and still building my friend group. I was worried that if I deleted facebook I wouldn't get invited to events, keep in touch with new people I met.
I deleted it anyway. Deleting facebook didn't change my real world in anyway.
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 just wonder where the software for it is at. Oculus is chugging along and I believe that can get quite good. But building a impressive MMO-like 3D world/game is probably a 5-10 year endeavor and runs a high risk that it won’t be fun or novel. I guess they’ll mainly build the platforms but then they need someone to build the worlds on top of it.
Zenith VR might fit your definition of MMO like 3D game.
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.
This is the exact same situation as me. As I’ve revisited old hobbies I used to be obsessed with 10-15 years ago, I realize that EVERYTHING has moved from the VB-based forums, to Facebook groups and marketplace.
I don’t mind the marketplace architecture, it’s quite nice actually. But Groups is the absolute worst place to house former forum content because it’s just not indexed well. There a few groups that I’m in that are managed really well, which gives them ~60% the utility of a tradition forum still.
What I’ve done on FB is aggressively unfollowed every single friend and page that I don’t care about. My feed is now strictly a feed of group posts from people I don’t know about my hobbies that I enjoy…it’s actually quite nice!
Yes I agree completely about how poor Facebook is at indexing old content. They are definitely not focused on anything but the absolute present. Same with Reddit. It's really too bad. I understand, though. People just don't have the will to figure out BBcode or create logins for every forum they are interested in.
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.
Seems right. In my and my close friends/family experience it’s all the same - all the cool/interesting people stopped posting many years ago and with each one, more and more followed them or got bored and stopped going. Now it’s just the dorks posting stale memes or boring updates. I haven’t posted anything actively for many years now but still check it now and then and shake my head.
I think it started a slow bleed when they removed the chronological view. After that it became “evil” and not about social connection anymore. No longer was my post being seen by my friends unless the algo thought it was saucy enough. It was a great business but I dont think you’ll ever get the people who are fed up to come back.
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.
In terms of monetization, isn't it more profitable to sell ads to decision-makers aka older people, than to kids and teens?
Depends on whether you’re focused on immediate sales or building long-term brand image. The old person may only have one car purchase left in their lifetime; the 14-year-old could have six or more.
These decision makers can be way tougher and more expensive to convince.
I don’t want to buy the next card game booster pack in any way or form. I don’t care about theme parks I’ve never heard of, or the new game that lets me save a half naked hottie. And for that matter I also won’t change for a new car insurance.
Now, someone in my life pushing for the formers might force my hand.
Ads targeting kids and teens actually tend to do very well. There's an entire side of youtube where kids review their new (sponsored) toys. Parents get immensely pressured when they feel their kids are getting left out.
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.
That is right in terms of the business. For the consumer though, the Social Graph did (and does) have real utility. It just has zero business value now as it isn't even useful for the retargeting data.
Election years are big money years for the entire Ad industry. Political advertising is not something that a sane Advertising company will ignore.
Facebook has basically been a magical money printing machine for political fundraising. Put a dollar in with a nice outrageous ad and get two back in donations.
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.
Better to check in on Google Maps rather than Foursquare so you keep your history when the small companies pivot away or abandon the service. It is bizarre to me that Foursquare didn’t keep it going though
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?
Facebook Groups and Marketplace are both good examples of content graphs. Your social network is irrelevant to them, in fact you may prefer NOT to see the listings made by your friends/family as the negotiation/purchasing is often nicer when it is relatively anonymous. Facebook's one moat is very shallow in this space.
Unlike high attention media with placement and interstitial opportunities, Marketplace and Groups are not great business models.
The social network graphs of the people contributing to e.g. a local group or marketplace helps in making sure that people behave somewhat honestly, I've found. At least in locales with like < 5k people.
> have been scrambling to find non-religious home school friends for our daughter
Why do they have to be non-religious?
Why ask why? That’s their stated preference.
Like a more friendlier Reddit?
> 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.
well, chonky cats are always a QOL improvement (-:
I’m personally more interested in the food with threatening auras. That sounds…interesting
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")
https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2022/02/01/mom-opens...
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.
>> 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.
Don’t forget the US came perilously close to banning TikTok last year. As much as Facebook probably doesn’t have the US government on their side, it’s more on their side that TikTok’s.
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 wouldn't mind if the CCP wants to own all the garbage content on tiktok as a tactic against us, as long as people are aware of the nonsense hosted on there.
Thanks, @libsoftiktok.
I think at this point 'Groups' are single-handedly keeping fb alive.
I deleted my FB account and the only thing that I went back for was my residents association. I still have no FB friends - which is fun because I can see the algorithm trying to work out who I know. Eerily, it correctly identified my partner and suggests I friend her (and her mother!) every time I login.
> Eerily, it correctly identified my partner and suggests I friend her (and her mother!) every time I login.
That doesn’t seem that eerie to me. Your partner is most likely logging in from the same IP, and perhaps your mother-in-law has done the same at least once, or is friended to your partner. Making this association is pretty straightforward
> 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?
As in 'slight of hand' employed by a magician. Where someone makes an obvious movement to distract from something they don't want you to see. In this case, the assertion is that the Metaverse is more hype than reality. A shiny object, or concept, to create a plausible narrative that bridges Facebook into a future where they once again dominate, while distracting from the possibility that their current position is in decline with no tangible mitigation plan.
Maybe it’s becoming a major media source?
You know, like your on-demand TV channel that knows what you want, already.
And I'll watch that TV with my 3D glasses.
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.
> Controlling the VR metaverse... I just don't see it. Too much innovation. Too much invention.
Remember FB can always purchase themselves into the market - pick up a few startups and bodge together a consistent product.
I think the problem is that VR tech and apps will take too long to arrive to gain any traction with the wider public, before FB needs it. FB needs hundreds of millions/billions of users, VR hasn't punched out of the 'early adopter'/gamer market yet and even those were balking at having to have FB accounts.
Facebook bought Oculus and although their hardware is still good, they are being beat in the software and overall hardware experience by Valve. A far smaller company but they built - Valve Index and Half Life Alyx (widely considered the best game in VR).
The Index isn’t perfect, but the actual story of Oculus is just them making a cruddy MVP, Valve taking the time to show their far superior prototypes, and allowing them to copy them, and then Oculus and part of the Valve team selling out to Facebook (ie Michael Abrash). Virtually all the innovation in VR was made by Valve, the only innovation Facebook has added is inside out tracking.
So Oculus is really just another Instagram /WhatsApp - they purchased a solid team and product, but they’re not out innovating even smaller players in the field.
VR is never going to gain the traction FB is betting on. Absolutely no one wants to spend their day inside a headset cut off from the outside world. It's uncomfortable, antisocial, expensive (for now), and just clunky overall.
If anything is going to come of this it's going to be AR, without a doubt. People want to be able to see the world they are in, they don't want to walk into tables, have to disrobe to answer the door, tend to children and so on.
AR adds value everywhere in the real world. AR can blend meetings, add meta information to day-to-day tasks. Think driving, you can now have your maps, speed, collision warnings, and so on in a virtual heads up display.
Even if Meta knocks it out of the park with early AR it's going to be a long time coming and they will still have a trust issue that younger, faster AR startups won't have.
> I think the problem is that VR tech and apps will take too long to arrive to gain any traction with the wider public
Provided that it happens at all. People tend to extrapolate too far based on something being subjectively attractive for a limited group. Think of 3D TV hype a decade ago (and we're thinking of technology that actually debuted almost 100 years ago).
> even those were balking at having to have FB accounts
It's been like what, 3 years? that I've been patiently waiting for the UE (or someone, in general) to mandate Facebook to remove mandatory account signup and tie-in, before buying an Oculus Quest (now 2). I don't care if this means I end up not buying and enjoying it at all in the end.
Sadly I guess just a minority have such firm positions when it comes to "vote with your wallet", so in the end the vote ends up being nothing more than a self-imposed punishment. But thankfully VR is just a very superfluous experience for now to be missing it, so I am fine with that.
That was the strategy IBM tried with the Software Group. Buy several 1 to 2 billion dollar companies every year to see what sticks. Did not work.
FB does not have access to the M&A trick anymore. Those days are gone. Regulators are tired of seeing GAFAM buying their way out of their lack of innovation. They also want to see new companies succeed on their own. That's where the new GAFAM will come from in the long run. And this is a long run race.
Depends how fast the market moves. Any acquisition will get enough scrutiny that even if it goes through it will take a while
This will both scare off potential acquisitions and slow things down a lot, enabling others time to make better plays.
Even if they choose all the right targets it will still be hard.
I'm curious if you have any thoughts on why VR remains so niche. Decent VR hardware has been available for years. And yet relatively few people use it.
> what FB wants from users
The way I see it, this is the biggest thing they need to turn around. To a point where they might need to launch a product - or maybe a paid tier - that is somewhat separate from what the FB experience has become.
What users want from FB needs to be explored on multiple levels. Ability to sort posts chronologically between a subset of your network, 'suggested' connections you can filter by relevance to a subset of your interests, customizable local community participation alerts... there are all kinds of ways of exploring vast social networks that can actually benefit society.
I strongly feel that prioritizing content which gets people riled so you can feed them more ads is such a massive negative, showing a willingness to change something so terrible yet fundamental to their current revenue would be the most significant thing they could do. It probably won't happen, but despite my increasing pessimism I still like to imagine better possibilities.
Microsoft has multi-billion dollar branches - Office, OS, Azure, XBox, Activision, I'm sure I've missed one. It also completely fluffed Nokia. And dodged the bullet that is Yahoo.
It's pretty resilient.
FB? Like others have said, the social media FB itself is pretty weak, and like you also said - addiction, and walled garden are the locks in. It can only grow financially by (more) acquisitions.
FB has Oculus, which could be compared to XBox (though not yet in size).
"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."
I'm curious: do you have any awareness of the fact that there are very unethical actions suggested in what you are discussing here casually?
Banking 101. It's not pretty.
I haven't heard of any ethical issues in retail banking. What are they? Anyway, it's not usury if they eat breakfast with you.
I think Microsoft is also almost an essential product company. You can either get a PC or a Mac. Or Linux but even that requires getting a PC anyway. Chromebook market is still tiny.
PC != Windows
And was never. The Personal-Computer is an original product of International Business Machines (IBM) and not Microsoft. Contrary to most products shipped today it's architecture is open for industry standards and other companies. A huge success for IBM.
Microsoft shipped the pre-installed and required operating-system. You can order desktops and laptops without an operating-sytem or Linux from Lenovo (former IBM), Dell, System76, Purism, Tuxedo and many more. Vendors which aim for cheap distribution to private customers usually only ship Personal Computers with Windows. Most of these are crap and come with questionable pre-installed software - and I don't refer to Windows.
That IBM sold the PC subsidiary was the worst mistake the could ever have done, both Apple and Lenovo show how much money you can earn with long lasting high quality products. IBM lost the contact point to many customers. They need to succeed with Red Hat now. Irony, IBM use and prefer (again) ThinkPads, preinstalled with Linux.
If you say "it runs on PC" you're actually saying your software is compatible to an Intel 286 CPU or higher. Well, if it is portable?
>Or Linux but even that requires getting a PC anyway
I'm not sure I understand what you mean here, if I buy, say, a Dell computer with Linux pre-installed then I don't think MS gets a cut? They don't own the PC platform.
Or maybe you mean that most prebuilt PCs come with some OEM Windows license even if you don't intend to use is, which is fair enough I suppose.
Not that it really matters for desktop PCs where Windows is king anyway. Although from personal experience I'd argue that the "essential product" these days is less Windows itself than the Office suite which is still the gold standard in many institutions.
Apparently Chromebooks outsold Macbooks in 2020, and their market share only seems to be increasing:
https://www.geekwire.com/2021/chromebooks-outsold-macs-world...
(That said, ChromeOS still makes up a much smaller percentage of active installations, as Google don't have the legacy hardware base that Apple and Microsoft do)
I very much like your analysis, but retail finance would be an uphill battle for a company like FB that has built such a negative track record of user data handling.
Cheers.
I can certainly see the criticisms mounting, if FB go financial. But, I also recall the many times FB withstood criticism. Criticism from users over product changes. Experts on privacy. Journalists and politicians on social issues and user manipulation. They persevere, and rarely have to give an inch.
OTOH, I think FB is the world leader in gaining leverage from customer data. Their ad business is more based on targeting data than Google's. It could conceivably even survive the demise of FB itself. Finding partners to run ads is doable, and with fb's targeting that still could ad up to major and business.
So perhaps they're not great at securing customer data, though they are probably more as technically capable than most banks. But, they are the very best at leveraging and monetising customer data.
Call it a high risk, high reward investment.
Making WhatsApp into a payments app is going to lead to the most difficult content moderation problems ever known. Everything from content by casual OF performers to extremely illegal and damaging content would be on that platform if it was easy to make payments and still fairly easy to send pictures and video privately.
> FB have never built a successful product besides Zuck's original.
Can we argue the same point for Google?
Considering their dominant position in digital ads, I wonder what this implies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products
I don’t think so. Android, Gmail, Maps, Chromebook…
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.
Anyone remember that Next Big Thing was supposed to be 3D TVs? I think VR is similarly misguided (ie, will never go mainstream but will have a healthy niche).
I think this is a great analogy in that there are fundamental physiological limits on how much 3D TV the human body wants to watch, and the answer is “not much”. All the VR/AR products I have seen fall into the same boat—a bit of a lark to use for an hour or so, beyond that, no thanks. It is a fundamentally different experience than reading a screen or listening to earbuds, and I don’t mean that in a good way.
> Anyone remember that Next Big Thing was supposed to be 3D TVs?
No. I remember TV companies pushing it since it was cheap for them to include and they hoped people would think of it as the "Next Big Thing", but consumers and especially reviewers during the aughts saw right through it.
Even in the 90's I remember it being seen as a short-lived novelty more than anything: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1997-05-02-970502...
Regardless what you think of VR I think there are clearly far more bulls than 3D TV ever had.
A non-trivial percentage of the population get motion sickness easily. VR is a non-starter for them.
3D has come and gone many times over the history of cinema, from the red/cyan glasses, the (Pulfrich) glasses with a single shaded lens, shuttered glasses and polarized screens.
While the image quality and frame rate have improved, there are still fundamental limitations on the technology. One common pushback is that some people will get headaches due to scanning the scene, trying to focus on objects at their false depths.
3D film is a pain, way more than double the work. So most 3D content actually was made 3D in post rather than filming with multiple cameras.
Still, the way you would frame a scene to be 'interesting' in 3D is different from how you would do so in 2D. This usually results in being able to 'tell' whether a movie you are watching was primarily made for one market or another.
VR adds something other than image quality - it adds the ability to be immersed in the content. However you still have the same issues:
- So far, we don't have consumer headsets that enable you to actually focus on the objects in the scene. For example, you can't hold a piece of paper up to your face to read the fine print. - Trying to capture certain kinds of media is infeasibly expensive in VR, both from a post-production cost perspective and a data size expectation. Live action basically is too difficult.
The latest incarnation of 3D movies were in a sense a clever business maneuver - it created a premium tier of movie experience and got many theaters to start upgrading their older projection equipment and screens to newer digital alternatives.
For home use, 3D movies were weird because they didn't follow the traditional hype curve. A lot of early adoption was by families, where unfortunately the shutter glasses still tended to be too expensive for young hands. But that market has the same thing - manufacturers will eventually take technology and reduce it down to cost, so how can you compel people to buy the newest fancy screen where you still have a good margin?
Note several television manufacturers are now trying to proceed advertising and sales revenue, which is why smart TVs have now taken over - a 15-30% cut on a HBO Max subscription adds up to real money quickly over their typically poor margins on the sale of the set.
VR seems more interactive and way stickier, I don’t think you can necessarily compare it to 3D TVs, in the same way a computer and TV are very different.
Having said that, I’m also skeptical of the whole metaverse thing, as we had that stuff a long time ago already (Second Life) and it was a flop. VR needs to become extremely ubiquitous and hassle-free for such a thing to work.
The first part of your reply doesn't line up with the second. In what way are 3D TVs a healthy niche? They are mostly dead. I also can't remember anyone actually using their 3D TV or buying a TV because of its 3D capabilities (most TVs at that time had the feature anyway). Whereas stores stocked up on Quest during the holidays because of demand. I don't think your reply accurately describes reality.
Also, this isn't the first go round with VR. Google Glass launched publicly in 2014 and the original Oculus Rift launched in 2016. I remember tons of discussions around enterprise adoption of VR in 2016-2017 with use cases ranging from immersive marketing campaigns to technicians using them to troubleshoot equipment.
First thing I thought about too.
Metaverse is not a utopia but a dystopia!
edit: typo
I am both a fan of blockchain and VR. I also have a strong cynic inside of me that trashes on both of them whenever it can. It's fun being me I suppose :)
Blockchain is IMO in a much much much more questionable state of relevancy and usefulness than VR.
Why?
I workout in VR (supplemental workouts by playing Eleven Table Tennis to the max).
I boardgame in VR (Demeo).
My GF picks up my headset and plays Beatsaber.
You can have multiple screens in VR. While I'm not the biggest fan of them, I will be if I'd travel to another country, not being able to bring my monitors.
Oh, and I've convinced quite a few of my friends to do the same (workout, gaming, productivity).
VR is already here mate. People game, people exercise, people get new experiences by watching VR videos (I got better at skiing because of it), people are using its productivity apps to design stuff (think about designing game in Unreal Engine using VR). There are certain use-cases in which VR outperforms anything else (and in most use-cases it doesn't).
VR has tons of uses!
It's not perfect by any means, but we're slowly getting there. 4000x4000 per eye is the hallmark I will be patiently waiting for. Better omni-directional threadmills are something I will hope for. We already are beginning to have haptic feedback suits from owo. I'm not a fan of haptic feedback suits, but others are.
VR is here to stay. It won't replace anything, it will augment how we are going about our daily stuff.
Whereas with blockchain, well, it's mostly used for speculation and I still haven't seen people use it as a legitimate currency. And this includes myself! Like, I used bitcoin to buy a bitcoin wallet, but does that count? I don't think so. The current use of blockchain in terms of cryptocurrencies is speculation (at the moment) and I am hoping it will change, but I wonder if it ever will. And I am a fan of the whole thing, but let's not kid ourselves. I hope the unbanked will use it. I hope people in super high inflationary countries will use it (because as volatile is bitcoin is, it beats any currency with hyper inflation). Unfortunately, I don't have any insights on the unbanked.
>You can have multiple screens in VR. While I'm not the biggest fan of them, I will be if I'd travel to another country, not being able to bring my monitors.
This is the problem with VR. It started the adoption process the wrong way - instead of positioning itself as a work enabling tool that you buy for a killer feature - it's just a gimmicky toy that has reasonable stigma around it among normal people (non-techies).
If your phone was just a 1000$ gaming handheld it would be a niche product, at best something like a 3DS. But gaming is the biggest market on phones.
Likewise if VR ever wanted to get mainstream adoption it needed to have a killer feature like enabling ultra portable/productive workspaces. Imagine everyone working from home buying a 500$ VR headset for remote work - totally reasonable - in the price range of a monitor. And then you have a huge market for games when the people are used to it. Now it's just a nerdy gimmick.
I rented a VR headset for a month a while ago. I think I bought most of the top games to play around with, but all feel a bit gimmicky and lacking depth.
I'd claim that VR will be niche until it becomes AR. When I can see my keyboard and get multiple floaty screens,that will be productivity. Pokemon Go in AR? Skyrim AR? AR shooters in converted warehouses? Horror games in my house? That'll be games.
I apologize for the pedantry but "blockchain" != "cryptocurrency." My inner cynic is bearish on cryptocurrencies, VR (at least in broad adoption), and to a lesser extent blockchain tech but of the three the one that has the least-worst chance of finding a useful broad fit IMO is the use of blockchain tech since it's really nothing more than a trustless method of double-entry accounting and a potential means of avoiding the risk of direct federation for service providers (you stop being the single point of failure/data breach target).
Sadly I also suspect that blockchain will go down with the whole cryptocurrency ship due to guilt-by-association, much like the AI winter that followed the overhyped 1980s era took with it a number of viable limited-domain solutions that had to wander the desert for 20-30 years before being revivified for the current AI/ML efforts.
> VR has tons of uses!
Basically, limited to niche games and simulation training. Where as AR has more usefulness than VR does. But it doesn't matter since Meta is working in both of those industries.
> Whereas with blockchain, well, it's mostly used for speculation and I still haven't seen people use it as a legitimate currency.
What is wrong with using stablecoins? Everyone knows Bitcoin has failed in being useful for payments or how very volatile it is for a business to use.
> I still haven't seen people use it as a legitimate currency. And this includes myself
Pre-covid we had a bar that accepted BTC using Lightning Network :(
>>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...
Well. That's the key point. Lots of people did social networks. Several had a lot if success with them. Remember circa 2007? FB was one of many. Zuck made a social network that (a) got and stayed popular (b) made no way and (c) successfully changed user behaviour. Before FB, social media was mostly anonymous and targeted at young, fringe or techno-elite online culture. FB are mass market.
I agree that VR is yet to be seen, and that fb's ability to execute is dubious. But, Zuck is more capable than most/all CEOs of social media seen this far.
Twitter us more if a lucky shot.
It remains true though that social media, generally, is not technically demanding. That said, the demands of scale complicate that. Look at Amazon and aws.
There aren't many fb-scale tech companies out there. It's not competition in an infinite field. It's competition in a field of one.. or perhaps three. JPMorgan or Berkshire Hathaway aren't going to beat them at this game. If it's a matter of beating other mega scale tech shops, it may be just a matter of executing better than not executing.
Competition at the ground floor (say series A) is brutal. Even if you're brilliant, you probably need a great strategy and greater luck. Competition at the mid range is meaningful. A Zara, Boots or OnePlus or whatnot still need to beat other players. At the FB/google level... there just aren't enough players. They don't necessarily compete at all, against other players. Products can succeed or fail, but it's not about head to head abilities. Where competition actually exists, like azure/aws, at best it's usually a field of 2 or 6 possible competitors with a chance of outside disruption. They're not in a "beat restaurant in town" game.
Facebook wasn't just at the right place though. They figured out that people wanted to use their real names on social networks.
I loved Myspace. I met so many cool people in my 20s in that 2-3 year window they had that I never would have otherwise. My mom though was never joining Myspace. Myspace was almost closer to a dating site to find new friends as much as connecting with people you already knew.
VR/AR is already an established and necessary modality at several industrial use cases. It's definetly NOT a gimmick. Think of it as a HUD with situational awareness.
Games are not really a good example of why you would want to have that. Not at least yet.
See for example
https://sitevision.trimble.com/
VR as a new way of human existence as the current metaverse hype claims - for that, I've not seen any concrete proofs of yet.
I personally don't think VR is a good play. Personally, I just can't binge on anything with VR. It's just not comfortable. But maybe we haven't had enough hardware innovation yet.
I have the same experience. I have tried my friends VR set a few times and another one at a work party, and overall it was pretty underwhelming. Uncomfortable, a bit nausea inducing and nothing particularly impressive. Kind of cool to try out, but not something I would want to use every day or pay for. At the current state I don't see what's the fuss about.
Also VR as some kind of social networking replacement seems unlikely to me because huge par of the time people spend on social networks is not while sitting at home dedicating time to this activity. Most people are not going to lug around VR headset everywhere they go.
I strongly believe we didn't have enough hardware innovation. I tried watching movies as well and it sucked.
I would recommend VR videos though, there are a few from Oculus TV which are amazing, they are an entirely new experience.
> Facebook was just in the right place at the right time and executed well.
I wouldn't even go that far: it was merely executed well enough that it didn't squander being in the right place at the right time by being terrible.
This is one of the reasons why getting a minimal viable product out quickly (where the definition of “minimal viable” includes that not-being-terrible caveat) can be so important when working on a new idea.
This is just wrong. I would question if you ever went on Myspace.
Facebook figured out that using your real full name in an electronic social network had huge advantages in terms of connecting your real world social network.
They killed Myspace because of the network effect the above had when people started finding their friends from high school easily online. Early on I think you even had to join a network specifically for your high school so everyone had their first and last names along with their labeling for their high school.
It sounds stupid and obvious now but before Facebook the average person didn't broadcast their first and last name on the internet.
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.
Are we reading the same comment? @randomsearch said it would take decades for the company to decline.
Right, but PaulRobinson is thinking in geological time.
WhatsApp already does payments in India (and few other countries?) [1]
[1]: https://www.whatsapp.com/payments/
This is what I see when I click on your link:
> The payments feature on App is not available in this country.
I agree, despite this headline, the more I see fb becoming a part of everyday life for the vast majority of people (in the UK). It's amazing how much of what normal people consume and even buy now happens on fb. I wouldn't write them off just yet
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.
I agree. Adding Messenger, groups, and events were good moves, but they ruined the feed so badly it soured the whole thing. Should've stuck to being social networking instead of trying to be whatever the feed is supposed to be now.
They could've easily expanded into more social features, longer-form stuff like Livejournal, personal creative stuff like Deviantart, and personal creative/selling like Etsy and Bandcamp and print-on-demand books, etc.
Another killer feature they flopped on was personas. Nobody really wants their entire extended family, current former and potential coworkers and bosses, customers, preacher, old friends, romantic interests, drug dealer, and fetish group all hanging out together in the same room talking. So people made separate accounts and different names but Facebook continually fought hard against that very basic nature of human social networking.
Instead of any social-networking improvements to their core, they just removed all the value from the feed. And then bought out another messenger and another place to post photos, both of which they already had. Then a halfhearted videos thing and now a VR Second Life clone.
I'm pretty much in it for the baby pictures and vacation photos at this point, but those are starting to thin out as my friends and loose connections are moving on from the platform.
Well, I dunno. My friends don't post anything any more. Maybe to instagram, but even that is less now.
Facebook needed to fill that gap with content from elsewhere. That's where influencers and content creators came in. Who are way less interesting than your friends, but they do post content regularly.
I don't think facebook had a choice.
Why don't they post? For the same reason I don't post much if anything on Facebook: my posts won't reach my friends except by happenstance. Everyone I know has observed that when you go to look at your friend's profile you will see posts that you've missed because they have never been shown to you before.
It's like only one in ten SMS texts would actually reach the other party: people would complain about SMS being broken just like they complain Facebook doesn't show them what they want to see.
Instead of your friend's posts you will see half a dozen random posts from your friends each day, too often from one prolific poster, and the rest is ads or group spam. Why bother writing anything relevant, deep, or fun when only a fraction of your friends will ever see it.
Facebook changed when it decided its best source of revenue was advertising and that it would own the ad inventory (Google did the same thing, and with similar loss-of-value to users, which also devalued the underlying behavior the company depended upon for quality targeting).
I think that Facebook's only real revenue option that would have also retained the fundamental value of the social network and its effects was to behave either as a third-party sentiment/preference analysis service ala Nielsen Ratings or as a source of ad targeting for individuals (based on their sentiments/preferences expressed within FB) that could be sold for use external to the FB experience... and I have suspicions that even the latter might have eventually led to distorting that core FB experience.
The social network and the behaviors within it were only truly valuable if externally observed without intervention. By pushing behaviors that FB itself wanted users to perform they broke the uniquely valuable part.
Just use facebook.com/?sk=h_chr, you'll get your chronological feed minus the content recommender.
That unfortunately doesn't work and hasn't ever. I do get a different selection of recent posts (instead of top posts) but only a few, they're mostly the same through a day, and I'm still missing out on most of my friend's posts (which I can cross-check by visiting friends' profiles).
There used to be way to view posts off a friend list, and you could then create a list of all of your friends to emulate the old newsfeed (or The Wall). This at least tried to work except it also only tracked back so far, it still did miss posts (but not as many as the other two views), and most importantly the friend list feed was scrapped last year.
> … 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 current attitude towards VR, and the "metaverse" in general, has got to be the second most delusional thing I have ever seen - due in no small part to the close integration with NFTs, the first most delusional obsession I've seen. It's complete and utter vaporware, with absolutely nothing behind it. I have done lots and lots of reading about the metaverse, what it promises, what it wants, and I still can't find a place where substituting the word "metaverse" with "cyberspace" doesn't create the same sentence. But everyone is afraid of missing out on the "next evolution of the internet" that all rational thought has gone out of the window. VR is not the future of anything besides the mentioned gaming niche.
VR is the future of porn. I’m not convinced it’s the future of anything else. VR gaming sucks.
As much as I like VR I have to agree it will stay a niche product. The need to wear something on your head is a major hurdle. Like 3D TV's that have mostly disappeared. Also when you are in a VR environment you want to interact with it. You need free physical space to do that which is an other hurdle. There are more niches than gaming only though. Like education and product design and demonstration.
The main problem with 3D tv was the content. 3D really only works with bad movies like resident evil. You are not going to have need or want 3d in a movie that is an oscar contender.
(Avatar as the single exception)
The timeline for consumer level glasses with ar + vr will begin shipping 2023. "Apple" level ones 2025. These devices will be as ubiquitious as the smartphone or earbuds.
And perhaps as ubiquitous as Google Glass.
Consumers do not want to wear glasses.
What are you thinking makes them consumer level? Just cheaper? Because price isn’t the main problem.
Note: it already has a health niche. Now that I think about it, one could create a startup in that space. The health niche will be expanding. I'd argue that Apple is excellently positioned for VR.
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.
> Looking at my teenage kids and their friends
I wonder how important this demographic really is. I understand there's an argument for kids being the future, and so on, but almost everyone I know with disposible income is on Instagram and Facebook, via the apps, and seeing ads. As teenage kids stop being teenage kids, they're going to start caring about sharing baby photos and travel photos and cyber-bullying their mayor and stuff, for which the only games in town are Instagram and FB. In short, I don't think it matters if teenagers are ignoring the platforms as long as they age into them, which I think they might well, especially considering kids don't actually have much money to spend.
> I don't think it matters if teenagers are ignoring the platforms as long as they age into them
During my elementary school days, we had a small course to teach us about economics and corporate values. The examine two old companies: Nintendo and Reader's Digest. Both companies predated our grandparents and they asked if they would both outlive us as students. The "correct" answer for the assignment was that Reader's Digest would continue on into the 22nd century while Nintendo would be out of business before the 21st. The reasoning was that Nintendo markets to children, who are both broke and fickle, while Reader's Digest markets to mature professionals, who are loyal and wealthy. No one would continue to play video games after the age of twelve and everyone with a college degree who hit thirty would subscribe to Reader's Digest
For those who are unaware, Reader's Digest declared bankruptcy in 2013 and was solve off for £1. Nintendo is currently worth $55 billion.
I always remember that lesson when people talk about how children will age out of enjoying the things that they currently enjoy and age into caring about the things that their parents care about.
> considering kids don't actually have much money to spend
This does presume that the metric is money and not eyeballs; from where I sit tech in general cares little about revenue and a lot about "daily active users".
Despite that, if you can brainwash 0-15 year olds into the belief that your brand is great, the future goodwill may offer significant rewards as you evolve with your users.
There are shops I never go into, radio stations I never tune into, and products I never buy because in my mind they're frusty and old fashioned. My opinions about them will never change. If FB are in this bracket, their long-term growth is dead without major innovation to cause a reversal.
I remember reading Richard Bransons autobiography, and there’s a line in there about him watching what his kids where into that led him to get into some business that’s was a huge success. Don’t remember any more details, but they are the future consumers. Heck, FB used to only even be available to broke college students!
> they're going to start caring about sharing baby photos and travel photos and cyber-bullying their mayor and stuff, for which the only games in town are Instagram and FB
You're assuming that TikTok won't evolve in a span of 10 years.
I don't think they're competing against each other. TikTok is competing against youtube, which are both competing against traditional network television such as nick or disney. Fb and Instagram's lack of growth has little to do with the success of the other, they just missed their opportunity to move in the more curated video space.
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.
Look at all the massive tech companies that took root in 2000s. Most are tied to privileged kids who won the birth lottery, had access to computers, and the financial cushion to "try shit". Google, Facebook, PayPal, and earlier - Microsoft.
Convincing my parents to buy a computer so I could program was a struggle. We were on public assistance.
I am not saying that it's all like winning a lottery - you still have to take advantage of the opportunity, but they were born in Earth's orbit when trying to launch to the Moon, while most of us had to overcome gravity first.
Luck is not everything, but it IS a factor.
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?
I feel the exact same way. After my last vacation, I actually felt a little awkward posting pictures of it after- for many years FB had served as a great online photo album, but this was around the election, and it was all hatebook type stuff and posts from news outlets and such, it felt out of place to post pictures from my life on there. It was a very strange feeling, and I think a big harbinger of where they have gone wrong as a company. As less people post about whats going on in their lives, I find less value on the site, and the cycle seems self perpetuating at this point. I am not sure how they turn this around... and I say this as someone who was once something of a fanboy and has held their stock since the IPO.
If I was in Zuck's shoes, I would kill all political content on the site... immediately and banish it to never come back. Really all outside content needs to go, I don't want news of any sort from FB aside from the "original content" my friends produce. And if you want, inject a reasonable number of ads in between, and I can deal with that, but their "product" in my eyes is their social feed, and that is a fraction of the size it once was.
Facebook killed the value of their own application for me.
It’s strange that they didn’t spot this happening. They do now, at least!
> 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.
> For instance Facebook could have very easily been Slack for businesses, as well as an enterprise internal social network
They actually have that already. Now it's called "workplace"[1] but before it was called "facebook for work", think Yammer from MS.
[1]: https://www.workplace.com/
Ah interesting - I vaguely remember hearing about this, but since I hadn't heard about it in so long I assumed it died.
I don't know what the uptake on this product is, but this specific product might be a case of "Solving a problem no business is having." For instance I think it'd be hard to justify purchasing this service for an enterprise without a compelling use-case. But I certainly think that Facebook has the resources make something that solves a problem that people really do have.
On the other hand, Slack seems to solve a problem pretty well that most businesses have.
Finally, I don't think VR as it currently exists solves a problem any business (or person) truly has beyond sheer entertainment. It remains "cool tech" that has yet to find a solid, non-gaming use case for the average person. This may change but this is why I currently think Meta is in trouble and I'm puzzled as to why Zuckerberg would go all-in on VR.
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.
Definitely interested in the virtual desktop thing, but everything else feels pretty meh. I do like a VR game from time to time but I really don't think I want to be doing VR meetings and stuff.
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.
I don't think they would do well if they switched to a pay-only system, but they might offer special features as subscriber-only or put limits on certain things in the free tier. If they offered no or limited ads and a simple chronological feed from friends in their paid tier, they might do well. Sort of the "get everyone in the world addicted to your crappy product and then make them pay to get a reasonable version of it" model.
I remember being disappointed when they dropped the college requirement. But I do think that was the right decision. You'll only ever scale so much by only enrolling .edu users.
The people who invited me into facebook do not have a degree. I have not posted anything in probably 5 years. From the activity feed spam FB sends me it looks like they both post quite a decent amount. I have have not logged in, in probably a year. When I got on there it was sort of fun reconnecting with people I had not seen in years. But after a while I remembered why we had drifted apart...
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.
The first VR system I tried was in 1992 (Dactyl Nightmare!). After trying it, I basically came to the same conclusion. Maybe in another 30 years it will finally be compelling.
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.
Well I am writing this on a new M1 MacBook Pro which is the best laptop computer I have ever owned. And that is because Apple developed their own chips that are an amazing leap forward in power efficiency, so I can have a laptop which I do heavy, CPU intensive work on all day without worrying about the battery.
Moreso that Apple bought exclusivity of TSMC/ASML's process about a year past everyone else. Similar to their microdrive exclusivity they bought for ipod.
Do computer games work on this? (Emulation?)
Does it have MS office with macros, or still only a limited version?
> 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
I think their image as a social media company might have prevented them from doing was Amazon has done.
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
Facebook Workplace "from scratch?" It was basically a fork of Facebook.
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.
But a billion people got massively upgraded end to end encrypted communications.
It's not clear what, if any, benefit that has had. But it's going to be something
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 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.
It kind of helps when you use a VPN called Onavo to spy on what apps people are using...
> was able to make deals that at first looked wildly overpriced but in the end seemed to be a steal
I wonder how much survivorship bias there is here. Presumably they've made some truly dreadful acquisitions too?
I think Instagram and WhatsApp were the only very expensive ones. They did buy (and kill) a lot more
https://www.techwyse.com/blog/infographics/facebook-acquisit...
EDIT: and Oculus, too
The problem with accumulating ever more money is that it becomes ever harder to invest properly and try and beat the market.
I suppose it's like, they're not going to be able to buy TikTok are they?
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.
They did, in GTA V
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.
Facebook Marketplace rife with stolen goods and scams.
Is it really more than a Craigslist copy? I mean, I guess it succeeds in replacing Craigslist, but there’s no way it’s gunning for Amazon.
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.
but TikTok comes and basically wins the war because it is as un-facebook as it can be. It can be enjoyed, or better if you follow nobody.
Whatever FB's innovation is, it doesn't age well, otherwise fades so fast
Bro, you wanna send a bunch of emails to keep up with your friends. Facebook is and was the truly first social media for the masses.
I hate Facebook, but I will buy its stock, and I will make money.
Thats just the internet in general isn't it? Show me any site or platform that has stayed the same and hasn't innovated in 10 Years?
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.
I was locked out of amazon almost a year ago because of some security issue blah blah!!! I never tried to unlock the account and I am OK living in a world where I don't need to deal with that monster!
You wait for a week for items to get delivered and pay for expedited shipping each time? What a wonderful world!
> despite working for them for 4.5 years
wow.
Eh, I'd be more surprised/concerned if the Facebook user table had a special flag for whether someone was or ever had been an employee.
Given how rarely you were using it before, I'm surprised you rate the impact so highly - how come?
Closure is powerful
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.
You may keep your messenger account while extinguishing your profile and all.
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.
This article is literally about their daily active users number dropping.
HN Users typically read the heading and jump to the comment section..
It's really ONLY the daily users that are dropping, everything else is still going up:
> But not all growth trends were negative. The company’s family of apps, which encompass Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger continued to modestly add users. The number of users logging in monthly to Facebook continued to grow, even as the number of daily users dropped.
What's interesting is that it seems like Facebook isn't counting Messager users as Facebook users and that more users are actually using Facebook every month, just not as frequently as before.
The weird bit is that a drop that small and cause Facebook/Meta to lose that much value. The stock market either reads the news like HN does, or Facebook is a lot more fragile that I would have guessed.
That also would be skewed imho. I use messenger to communicate with my family and I do click on facebook links they sends me but that's about it - am I an active user?
Sounds like you're actively using Facebook's products, so I'd assume so.
I don't think DAUs would necessarily tell the full story for Facebook. Browsers still get pointed to Facebook a few times a day, but I bet the depth of engagement is a fraction of what it used to be.
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.
I ask this seriously because I’m curious: have either you or the parent comment talked the school/clubs about communicating via other means? Or indicated Facebook isn’t possible for you?
I have not. There's really no sense in which Facebook isnt possible for me. I could say that I have privacy concerns but I'm genuinely not interested in being a weirdo parent that puts pressure on my kids. Most of the organizers are just trying to find a platform that is "gated" (by invite only) and everyone uses. Hard to beat FB for that in 2022.
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"
Facebook is an umbrella term for some kids. TikTok just hit #1 on the app store so this rant feels dated. The teens on Instagram have already grown up
Yeah but that's what I mean. I'm in my 40s. I can vaguely guess the age differences between Instagram and TikTok kids. I'm sure some new great thing (like Facebook's "Reels") will be next, for the under-12 set. My point is IT'S GOING IN FUCKING CIRCLES and it's still run by the same few companies, and it's always the same. Oh it's NEW? for your 12 year old?
NO: Teach your 12-year old that ALL these things are COMPLETE FUCKING BULLSHIT. Not just Facebook. All of them.
I should also add... when I was young, music from the 50s was dated. When I was starting a company, startups from the 90s felt dated. Yet we are all recycling the same concepts and emotions and hooks and human longing, in a marketing sense, just using one generation's innocence after another, so they all feel like they're new and they're the first. You can't build on a platform like that. In a pissant way that's why facebook doesn't matter, but in a bigger way it's why you need to teach children to see patterns, not just objects of good and bad.
What service did you have as a kid that was "cool" but didn't engage in dubious marketing practice nor sell your data around ?
My personal favorite is Chevignon selling cool clothes for teenagers for years, to then enter the cigarettes market because why not.
Some might argue Facebook/Meta is on another scale, but everything is on another scale, I think we'd need to adjust expectations like we adjust for inflation.
I mean ... "cool" when I was a kid was having a stereo with two tape decks so you could copy and trade music mixes. Or getting together with 14 year old friends to drink 40s in an abandoned house where someone would bring an air rifle and girls would drink Zima. Doing anything online wasn't "cool" as it was all CLI anyway, but for me trading cracked games and porn gifs on BBSs was cool before we got a dialup internet connection and I discovered IRC. Spending hours browsing in a used record shop or book store was a cool use of a Saturday. Going to a party or the beach was cool. Surfing was cool although I sucked at it. Roller hockey was semi lame but I thought it was cool.
Watching TV or talking about shows wasn't cool. Movies were. Having a pager or godforbid a giant cell phone was extremely uncool as it meant your parents could find you. The closest thing to a smart phone was a TI-82 calculator and that wasn't cool at all. I had a Palm Pilot... I even got a cell cradle for it and could browse the web in black and white in 1996. That was considered insanely not cool, and something only a total nerd would do. (But a Lynx or a Game Gear was alright - and a neogeo meant your parents were super rich). Clove bidi cigarettes were cool but they could make your lungs bleed. Weed and LSD were cool. Fake IDs were cool and making them made you popular. Playing in a band even if you didn't have a lot of shows was cool, and if you did have a show half the kids from your school would be there.
I can't really think of anything I did as a teenager that collected data about me or anything that was a "service" run by a company that was cool or would have been considered cool. AOL was extremely uncool, the way facebook is now. A bit later, I guess a lot of us used Friendster and Myspace (and boards like LnC) but none of those things were central to daily activity or something you spent a lot of time on. It wasn't even the third or fourth thing you'd do to waste time, let alone a place to spend time with friends. So just because it wasn't very central to the teenage experience, and the technology wasn't there to track your interactions and location, there was by definition a lot less data to collect.
I'm describing a world that is for all practical purposes dead, buried and forgotten, in which human interaction was mostly unmediated by corporate grifters.
Nintendo has historically been decent about not deceiving their customers. Maybe treating them like children, but not an abusive relationship.
They’re not using IG either.
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.
Except there are 2 major differences:
1. Even if FB isn't forced to divest their recent acquisitions, the regulatory environment will make it much more difficult to do the equivalent of buying Instagram in the future.
2. Any good ideas on how I can short "The Metaverse"? I still think the Metaverse is bullshit and will continue to be bullshit for the near future. The very first time I got on Facebook I was pretty enthralled - I was connecting with friends that I hadn't seen in years, and I really liked reconnecting. I have heard basically nobody say they are looking forward to the Metaverse, besides aging tech giants trying to push it.
I'm sorda looking forward to the Metaverse. Or rather, I'm pleased that FB is baiting the rest of the tech giants into an arms race on VR hardware and software development.
I'm a huge fan of VR gaming. The state of the art is incredible right now, but it'll get so much better the more money is shoveled in.
The thing doesn’t even exist. It’s all just smoke and mirrors at this point. Not even that—where is the tech demo?
Or perhaps your daughter will start using it in here early 20's when life gets busier and people dont have the same interaction expectations?
I dont know the answer but as a non-FB user I do see limitations when people organise events or group chats on messenger. If my wife wasn't connected to most of my friends I'd probably miss out on a bunch of relevant things. So for youth not on FB, I guess time will bring them back into the fold.
33 years old here. Deleted my FB acct in 2012. I stay in contact with everyone I care to be in contact with still over text/Signal/Slack/email. I cannot say I have regretted not having a FB account once in the last ten years.
You know how some people still think we can live in a world where covid is eradicated? I still think we can live in a world where major social media companies are eradicated. Or at least can't churn out new dangerous variants to re-infect the immunologically naive 14 year olds who think it's a brand new generational trend every year.
I've watched this marketing turnover at least three times now in the music industry, and I really think the killer antibody is exposure to history. The operative question for a 14 year old hearing a super "original" band isn't what does this say to you... because they know what it says to them but they don't know how easily they're being manipulated by the distillation of time-worn, shop-worn, lazy songwriting. The question is: Hey, do you realize who they're ripping off? You'll be a lot cooler if you know.
That's the pill every human needs when they encounter a new and addictive social media platform.
> Once the teens in IG grow into adults
That already happened btw, teens are on TikTok not IG
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.
You think TikTok is facsimile of Facebook?
I think they're all the same, streams of pics/videos.
Its a lot worse then Facebook, there isn't even any text.
A hybrid of Vine and Instagram designed to make you stare into your screen with the smallest of interactions.
Vine
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.
Facebook is for old people.
Instagram is for moderately old people.
Snapchat is for moderately young people.
TikTok is for young people.
I've literally never logged in to any one of those. I have to say, I'm kind of proud of that.
Occasionally people will send me a link to something and it's on Instagram. Clicking for me give me a Login modal. They make it too easy for me, click.
Everyone uses Instagram, teens most of all.
Hopefully soon Facebook won't even be for young people.
Whenever I see this "social network per age group" depiction, Twitter is never mentioned. I wonder why.
Facebook : boomers
Instagram : millenials
TikTok : gen z
snapchat is sort of irrelevant from what I can gather.
Where does Reddit fit in all of this?
Actually TikTok is now the leader with teens. [0] And I don't believe the CCP would allow a sale to a US-based company, least of all Facebook/Meta.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/18/tiktok-usage-topped-instagra...
Isn't TikTok just videos though (I don't use it so I'm guessing)?
It doesn't really seem useful for sharing the same kind of information that people use Facebook for (mostly text based information, questions, etc).
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?
You're not wrong but what Facebook needs for its investors is growth. If your audience is only old people then the possibility for growth is much more limited. If you frame it like resources then a young audience is renewable. While an aging audience is more like oil, less exciting, and requiring more and more effort to aquire over time.
I stopped using facebook in 2013 when I started getting invites from my aunts and my parent’s friends
Well, thankfully the culture to hate on the elders of your very own family for a lack of cool points is not universal.
It’s not hating your family obviously, it’s the fact that all your stupid and embarrassing stuff you typically discuss/share with your friends when you are young is now visible to your extended family.
if i'm not mistaking most teen and young adult use IG.
Her generation uses TikTok.
They did use IG ~2y ago, but then it went out of vogue. Same fate for SnapChat. It is very likely there will be something new next year end they will all move on from TikTok.
Fascinating to observe how they have zero product loyalty. And I realized FB can have a problem, unless they want to spend billions on acquisitions every single year. It’s good for everyone that their monopoly is crumbling a bit.
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.
A company that does not grow can still share profits with the owners, so it makes sense also for not growing companies to stay on the stock market, so people can buy/sell these future profits.
This is not, and have never been, the case. Certain markets are winner-take-all, which necessitates a growth-oriented strategy regardless of the stock market. In the general case, the value of a stock only dips if the risk-adjusted net present value of expected future dividends changes for the worse. What happened here is that the market clearly expected the growth potential to be larger than what was the case, but absolutely not infinite.
Taking the company private means that you have to buy all outstanding shares. How are you going to come up with the money to do that? Valuation is usually around 20x earnings. If you do it through share buybacks, this process will take decades.
Pretty much the only way to do it is with an outside investor and in that case the company still doesn't "own itself".
When you have plateaued post-hypergrowth is not the time to get off the market, it's time to redistribute capital by massively repurchasing shares if you can't intelligently reinvest it all. Preferably after the market slams your ticker.
Not true at all. Look at Apple.
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.
This is true of Facebook and many other tech stocks, but that is because these companies have never paid dividends. Investors have put up with that because the expectation of higher future profits (and thus higher cash piles for dividends or stock buybacks). A shrinking company that has never paid a dividend is much less attractive from this point of view.
That's not true, public companies can survive on profits and their investors then enjoy dividends. The market just figured out that growth is more lucrative than dividends for specific people, and there is less incentive to make sustainable companies.
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?
Dell went public in the 80's, was bought out by its founder in the early 10's, and then did a reverse merger with vmware to go public once again a few years later.
having investors does not mean you are a public company.
there are private investors, angels, VCs, etc.
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 current consensus is that TikTok takes the time of users. If that is true, every social media other than TikTok is in trouble.
Slight tangent but the balance of interaction and pulling users back of Wordle is brilliant. Users can saturate and over indulge and reach a point of cutting off over maintaining that momentum.
Oh and yes, TikTok seems to of hit a sweet spot(also the best stock bet currently), but if they can pull off 18 years of solid growth in interaction, that will be amazing.
Paradoxically, the stock market itself for many is their social media outlet, which probably seen a longer streak of growth than any social media platform.
Be interesting how HN growth and interaction has tractioned over the years, but then it doesn't matter as this is the Sparta of social media interaction in many ways and I ruddy love it.
I think that’s the consensus because Facebook specifically blamed TikTok on the earnings call. The question is if we should take that statement at face value.
It’s easier to blame competition than to admit that users are growingly apathetic towards your product (sans competition).
Facebook’s falling engagement, in and of itself, is great news for other social media apps.
TikTok’s rising engagement is, in and of itself, bad news for other social media apps.
I don’t think these two pieces of information net out poorly for other social media apps when overall social media usage is rising.
We’ll see in short order. Earnings calls are coming up in the next 7 days.
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."
Well it’s no longer the in thing, and TikTok is the new kid on the block. In the UK kids think FaceBook is for old people and use Snapchat and TikTok.
I knew it was over for Facebook when my 80 year old mother created an account.
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.
There are only 24 hours in a day and if a person spends those hours on TikTok it’s less likely they’ll have time to spend on Facebook or instagram
TikTok wasn’t impacted by the iOS tracking update in the same way that Facebook was, in a way that it drove users from Facebook to TikTok?
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...
Android has more market share but iOS has the users that are most profitable. They're dominant in affluent countries (USA, UK, plenty of countries in Europe, etc) and even in countries where it isn't dominant, it's not rare for iPhones to be the phone of choice amongst the wealthy population.
Wealthier people, I imagine, are not only more likely to want to buy things, they'll also be more willing to spend their money on new things.
To get a sense on how much more valuable "valuable" consumers can be for Facebook: last quarter on average they made $60.57 dollars per user in the USA/Canada, vs just $4.89 for their users in Asia-Pacific, for example [1]. The USA and Canada are still Facebook's biggest money-making region, in spite of also being the one where they have the fewest active users [1].
I'm not sure if an immediate 25% share price dip makes sense either, given worldwide Facebook lost only 1 million DAUs, and the number of users in the USA/Canada has steadily oscillated between 195/196 million since 2020 (the loss was in "Rest of the World" the catch-all region they make the least money in.
A lot of the value of these companies is not necessarily realized value, but value derived from the expectation of continued growth at a certain pace.I can see why investors are nervous; Facebook has never lost DAUs, there's intense competition with TikTok for the young demographic, VR/AR has been a huge bet that still hasn't paid off and the controversy around Facebook weakens the value of the brand. On top of this, in spite of revenue being good, it was not what was expected and effectively advertising on the valuable iOS demographic got much harder. Maybe that warrants a 25% dip, maybe it doesn't— in any case there's definitely reasons to be nervous.
[1]: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q4...
It also came at a bad time, in that there was froth in the market and a phase transition in sentiment was triggered.
US is mostly iOS users and I assume major source of revenue for FB.
iOS had higher ROI/ROAS. 2013 article [0]
[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3020117/when-it-comes-to-faceboo...
Device share by income is going to be a better proxy of importance to FB than overall global share.
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.
This has become me. Facebook encourages you to become confrontational with all your friends.
Pretty sure IRC/ICQ started the 18 messengers. It's too bad Adium/Pidgin can't exist for mobile.
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.
At least I have the feeling that newcomers like TikTok don’t have this "embrace the web" thing that Facebook had during a decade with embedded tracking scripts everywhere on any website.
I feel like TikTok is more closed and that I don’t have a shadow profile on it like Facebook did.
But it’s also because the web (especially the browsers and mobile OS) learnt its lessons.
OTOH, it also means that newcomers will have to make even more efforts to to "compete" with the historical open web which can create even more situations of information disappearing from the open web.
Personally, I applaud decline in engagement with any of the social networks, not just Facebook.
The decline is only one-sided. Facebook down, TikTok up. The mean amount of social network users is not declining at all.
TikTok is essentially a mobile-first reincarnation of YouTube. I’ve yet to see any users use it to socialize with friends and family they know in real life. I’m hesitant to call it a “social network” when there’s little to no socializing there in the first place
Fair point. I do agree with others though, the damage other apps like TikTok do is less for me to be happy about it overall. It's like Transitioning people from an alcohol addiction to a weed addiction, one is much more dangerous than the other, either might not be great for you.
I hope platforms that are focused on topics instead of people will prevail. There is still some exaggerated self-promotion, but it is far less pronounced.
Oversharing is a really bad idea in the long run. Your opinions from 30 years ago are probably hated today. Imagine the trauma that is caused if you could read what your parents thought before you were born.
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.
That stuff matters too but I think the size is what matters. HN stays clean because it stays small. Lots of posts are boring for the average person’s interests. I’ve seen the same thing on Reddit. Once you go above a certain size, a subreddit completely degrades.
All social networks with voting systems are optimised to maximise engagement and promote outrage. Just look at how every single country subreddit is a constant flamewar.
HN _mostly_ prevents this by having strong and good moderation, but there's still a fair amount of negative metrics coming from it.
They are also anonymous. I could be flaming somebody I know in real life but it does matter. Don’t ask don’t tell.
They don't have as much of a network effect either.
I have seen all 3 things on Hacker News. In addition to large threads about conspiracy theories, antivax and misinformation.
They’re not completely absent, but design decisions by Hacker News make these three factors less visible.
>maximize engagement
It encourages engagement with upvotes and additional privileges when an account gets more points. However, the site’s design doesn’t maximize it. I don’t get push notifications to check the site, awards, or suggestions for other relevant articles in the comments.
>promote outrage
Outrage can be a factor that causes posts to rise, but deliberate policies avoid optimizing for it. Specifically, the avoidance of editing the submission title, unless the purpose is to make it less clickbait.
>instill a fear of missing out.
This is most subjective, but I get the sentiment that if someone posts an amazing project, there’s a good chance of constructive critique in the comments, or more information from the developer about how they made it.
Other social media websites don’t have the depth of discussion (just photos of the best parts of their life, without talking about the challenges). This is relatively more of a cultural/user base observation versus an interface decision, however.
For conspiracy theories, antivax, and misinformation, the alternative is heavier moderation. It looks like a judgement call by HN moderators to err on being less interventionist with user discussion. There are tradeoffs, but I think the benefits of free discussion outweigh exposure to misinformation, so long as one reads skeptically and critically.
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.
NO thanks, I am not planning on using yet another service that is trying to psychologically milk every ounce of my attention. Reddit and Hackernews is bad enough. I am also not interested in looking at lewd teenagers dancing to the latest tune or whatever the kids are doing these days.
"I don't understand this 'Internet' thing the kids are using, have no intention of trying it, and I already don't like the newspapers!"
"at lewd teenagers dancing to the latest tune or whatever the kids are doing these days." ... is a seriously dim view.
TikTok is literally the #1 app in the world, and for someone curious enough to read HackerNews but unwilling to even try app to understand the nature of its impact is a bit odd.
Personally, I despise Twitter, but I read it occasionally, and understand why it works, and what kind of content is on there. I would find it problematic to work in tech with someone who doesn't understand 'why people like Netflix' having never even bothered to stream a video before.
In particular, the feed algorithm is unlike anything else in tech and the content is definitely a lot less toxic.
You should definitely try it, that doesn't mean you have to like it.
Hell no.
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.
That's an interesting comparison, I never before thought of AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe as belonging to the walled-garden.
It's also a very American-centric view. The rest of the world is going back to forums and single-platform chatrooms and avoiding reddit/twitter/facebook, but never had an AOL/ProdigyCompuServe phase to go through.
If we could just get discord to <insert short feature wishlist> then I reckon the golden IRC days would be back with a vengence.
It was a walled garden in a slightly different sense. AOL tried their best to force companies to buy AOL “keyword” so that the clueless user doesn’t have to type .com or .net at the end. If you want a comparison, that is like Google putting “I am feeling lucky” as the only option and then auctioning off that result.
Yep I guess the pull to be a walled garden is too great. Even Twitter, a product that should have been the true antithesis to walled garden pigeon holed themselves into walled garden state. I wrote a blog post about it a long time ago https://medium.com/@shareU/we-built-this-city-2cb97437942f
>walled garden
>links medium blog post which can only be accessed behind a login
I wrote a blog post on Medium about wall gardens…
something strikes as peculiar/funny about discussions of walled gardens, but then blogging about it on medium.
It really gets me down when local/state emergency services etc. use it as their primary means of news/updates.
This has always irked me. Perhaps it's heavy handed, but I would love a law that (1) requires governments at all levels to use open-access websites (and radio, a local newspaper of record, &c.), and (2) requires services like Facebook to syndicate any news and updates.
Interesting that you would name a newspaper of record as a valid outlet for government news/updates. I feel like Facebook could make an argument for being essentially that today - after all, it is where the eyeballs are, which is why people use it for marriage announcements, birth announcements, classifieds, obituaries.... and on and on.
The government should be creating their own services for both state and local governments to create websites. Instead, you got a 10,000 vendors charging outrageous prices that can't even get something like security right. Something like 18F would be awesome for these cities to start using. Unfortunately, politics is very corrupt so politicians are always going to want to pay a friend of a friend a million dollars to say that it was the vendors fault than to do something right, and the vendor will have some reason why it wasn't their fault. Rinse, recycle, repeat.
This is probably already the case : I can access my local government entities' FB pages without logging in to FB. Google indexes the pages so you don't need the FB search feature to find them.
Part of the problem is that radio and newspapers require payment and governments are loath to pay for even paper for flyers in many cases.
Same! What a sad state the internet is in when a megaevil corp is used by local services to provide updates. I thought that was what Twitter was for?
I know several pacific islands were going to ban Facebook but apparently it's heavily in use by businesses.
Regina Lepping, a young entrepreneur from capital city Honiara, said the announcement had sent many small business owners scrambling to find alternatives to Facebook.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-01-15/solomon-islands-backt...
I've interacted with local businesses that use a Facebook page as a replacement for maintaining a website that they own. The rationale I've read is that their time is best spent providing their quality service versus learning website development (even with a block-based website builder), and hiring a web developer is too pricey, when they can create a Facebook page that is easy to set up.
Most importantly, it's easy for them to update and maintain a Facebook page, versus an independent website.
The federal government should launch its own platform for the US government and state and local governments to push all their updates. Something like Star Wars' Holonet.
Where I live they use nextdoor for that purpose. I’m not sure which is worse.
Nextdoor infinitely worse. It's such a toxic cesspool.
Also educational institutions
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.
(Bridges) (Open Now)
<< We found this slower route instead >>
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?
This is my question too. I’ve never used Facebook, yet I’ve never had any trouble finding the information I am looking for. Is it just very very specific places?
A lot of small businesses in the UK seem to use Facebook rather than putting up a web page. I can see why they do it, it doesn't cost anything and they don't need to worry about renewing domains or hosting issues. It's not a great experience for their customers though, especially if you don't have a Facebook account.
My local ferry https://www.libertylandingcityferry.com/ only has its service updates on FB https://www.facebook.com/LibertyLandingFerry
I didn't have facebook for the last few years and I was wondering if I'd have to come back to it to be able to access local news/info. Never happened and never needed to. It's true though that in some countries that's the primary communication channel for businesses and even governments unfortunately.
It's possible you're not in the same market as us. Lots of small businesses have no interest in running and updating a website, especially when there's a free alternative that most of their customers have access to.
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.
All of your customers will continue to be Facebook users if you post things on a Facebook page that only Facebook users can view. And Facebook users are an apparently diminishing portion of the population, as per the article this thread is discussing...
Not a good plan for any business, I would think. Would be nice to see more businesses on Mastodon or (gasp!) just run their own websites again. Can you imagine how difficult it must be for a business to buy a domain, hosting, and slap together a static site in this day and age?
Their mobile site forces you to login to even view things anymore.
mbasic.facebook.com works fine
A meta-verse bridge or an actual bridge?
https://old.reddit.com/r/KidsAreFuckingStupid/comments/sa7j9...
If you call a local business you can usually get that sort of information without logging into facebook.
Some local businesses only provide their "number" as a WhatsApp contact, so you're kinda stuck on a Facebook-owned platform anyway.
Can you give an example? I just go to google maps or Apple Maps and type in any business and have all the information I have ever needed.
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.
In there just for collectible items, in my country most of the second hand sellers use facebook.
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?
There are many businesses (Restaurants, doggy daycare) that no longer have websites but have transitioned solely to a Facebook page for cost and technical ease of maintenance reasons.
Yeah it’s terrible and I’m sure it’s costs then a lot of business
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.
Many restaurants don't have a website anymore. Yes, you can google for directions and opening times, but you can find menu or daily lunch on their Facebook only.
does a google search find data that might be visible in google maps?
I'm not sure if Google put a stop to it, but in my area there was an issue about 6-8 months ago with the business hours listed on Google being changed by competitors. Usually they would alter opening or closing hours by an hour or two, so it wasn't obvious.
*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
Facebook is doing great. To put things in perspective:
- On average, they net around 35 billion a year. With a valuation (MC) of 887 billion.
- On average, Google net around 51 billion a year. With a valuation of 1.8 trillion.
Facebook is making 68% as much as Google, with its valuation at less than half the price. And over the past 4-5 years Facebook's revenue has grown on average 32%/year, while Google grows 23%/year.
Really undervalued company IMO.
And their revenue did grow. They grew year-over-year. Just missed their target by 3%.
The problem is of course, that Facebook is directly threatened by TikTok, while Google has a much stronger hold on its market segments. Google could continue growing, while Facebook actually shrinks.
I've never really understood this MBA mentality because growth must stop at some point. There are only so many humans on earth. The expectation that a company can grow forever is impossible, at least until we find an alien planet with a population willing to sign up for Facebook.
Right, of course. The claim wasn't "all companies must continue growing forever or they are bad companies / their stock will crash". It was rather "Facebook in particular's current valuation is based on investors predicting it will continue to grow".
When (not if) Facebook stops growing, it will be worth _something_. Owning its stock is a bet on what that number is, and the stock price reflects the market's collective estimate.
The stock market price today is based on the value people EXPECT the company to have at some point, not the one it has. If people expected it to grow much more, and it doesn't, the value falls to the level it possibly should've had in the first place.
It's not MBA mentality, it's stock investors mentality. I don't think Zuckerberg or any other executive is out there buying FB shares at $320. It's outsiders gambling on the continued growth.
True but Facebook was valued for this growth. Better or worse if they don’t grow their stock price will take a well deserved beating.
Meh, their PE will be like 20 on open tomorrow. That's not really pricing in super growth.
"not only [not] growing"
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.
There is nothing facetious or self-flattering here, these things aren't achievements, rather reactions to dependence on some massive facets of modern life, which, as it turns out, are not critical or even necessary.
because?
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.
I'm sure that was the intent. Maybe I was just mad I couldn't complete the task but somehow the tone of the message really angered me and I never forgot it. It just seemed sarcastic and condescending.
Don't try to be cute in your messaging, just straightforward and direct is my takeaway. Some people might appreciate the cute but others you might anger if you don't get the tone just right.
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.
Also: does visiting a web page with Facebook comments or embedded Facebook video count as login?
>>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.
Worse, Logged in once, then told Facebook to keep themselves logged in forever. This technically means users who have logged in.
Yeah, I "log in" a few times a day to answer messages. I don't think that should be considered a user since I'm not consuming anything facebook-related, just responding to messages because everyone is on facebook
daily active users.. so if you login 1x per 24 hours.
The revenue guidance for next quarter is not very great either, so given the user numbers ARPU is not growing
They're still growing year-over-year. They were just off their target in the last quarter by 3%. They're valued at $3.67 per share versus the $3.78 expected. Their stock literally dropped ~25% because they were only 3% off expected earnings. And lost 0.15% active users, which is expected as the world opens up again. I don't see what the big deal is. The market is overreacting.
Post close trading can be swing by a lot. The reaction I think is not because that they are off by 3%, the future growth looks only to be pretty dull , perhaps also why FB is making such huge gamble on VR.
The high P/E big tech companies enjoy is on basis of the implicit expectation to keep growing fast[1], if that on confidence on growth is no longer there, then price will reflect closer to a more traditional tech stock.
Tesla trades at P/E of 185x, Amazon - 58x, Microsoft - 35x, Google - 29x and FB - 23x[2]. I think it accurately reflects the market expectation of their respective future growth.
---
[1] Same reason Tesla is valued so high despite relatively modest revenue, the expectation is massive growth on the back of their lead in the space and the accelerating shift towards EV.
[2] SAP, IBM, ORCL all trade in the same range today.
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.
TikTok, for it's many faults, is at least not ragebait farming. It is distracting junk. Facebook feels more malicious in my mind.
Except TikTok’s also is controlled or controllable by a foreign government whereas we know all Facebook is after is more profit. One of these seems more malicious and abusable than the other.
TikTok has tons of ragebait farming material. The fact that you're not seeing what you don't likely highlights the effectiveness of their algorithm.
Not yet. If Facebook can produce so many conspiracy theorists and so much radicalization, what will TikTok be capable of?
Early Facebook was wholesome as well, relatively speaking. It's the cycle of addiction. The early days of addiction are always nostalgic. It's only later that an addiction starts to produce anger as much as it produces relief. I see no safeguards preventing Tiktok from going down the same path, if not worse.
I get hypnotized by tiktok even by seeing it over other people's shoulders. HN and reddit already makes me feel guilty. I am not even starting with that one.
With that description, I can't help but think of "the entertainment" from infinite jest.
That's exactly what TikTok is. I've tried to use it several times, but it was just too dystopian for me to keep going. It was an intensely disquieting experience seeing the algorithm try to "addict" me to the product. I just don't see the appeal in being an utterly passive consumer of entertainment generated by an AI (yes, I know humans nominally generate the content, but the secret sauce is the AI playing conductor). It reminds me of Elsa-gate. Just surreal.
Tiktok is absolutely more addictive than Facebook.
Surprisingly this time the dopamine providers are .. us.
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 ?
Here is an article [1] that shows consumption of coffee and soft drinks in 1946/47 and 2005. Adding coffee and soft drinks together there has been an increase of approx 32% in consumption since 1946.
Coffee 1946: 46.4 gallons per person
Coffee 2005: 24.2 gallons per person
Soft drinks 1947: 10.8 gallons per person
Soft drinks 2005: 51.5 gallons per person
Total caffeinated consumption in 46/47: 57.2 gallons / person
Total caffeinated consumption in 2005: 75.7 gallons / person
The chart seems to indicate tea has stayed relatively flat in the same time period. I'm not sure the history of caffeine pills or ADHD medicine, but those may also contribute to an increased consumption in 2005.
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2007/june/coffee-consum...
> Soft drinks 2005: 51.5 gallons per person
Wow, no wonder Diabetes has skyrocketed.
51.5 gallons is almost 900 ml a day. That is about 100 grams of sugar per day.
This is like a epidemic of sugar addiction.
>Coffee 1946: 46.4 gallons per person
>Coffee 2005: 24.2 gallons per person
24.2 gallons per person.. so that is 24.2 gallon / 365 days * 128 oz/gallon / 8oz/cup = 1.06 cup / day.
1 cup per day? That seems crazy low. I guess that must include kids/young adults..
Is coffee stronger now? If you have a latte do all of its gallons go towards "coffee" or just the shot?
Soft drinks mostly, but even that appeared to be in the early stages of tapering as of 2005. What is next?
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/58920/finding_buzbyf...
Current fads that come to mind
- Gatorade and similar stuff - A movement to drink water (HydroHomies) - High caffeine energy drinks (Red bull and the likes) - Healthy alternatives (juices, smoothies, etc)
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.
Drip coffee constant refills. Also, bottled water was yet to be a thing.
I am assume this doesn't refer to "volume of coffee beverage" consumed. As far as I'm aware only the US seems to gravitate towards these extremely large coffee beverages. Other nations drink more coffee, but in smaller serving sizes less diluted by milk/sugar.
Perhaps the US used to drink espressos in the 1940s, I'm not sure. That's if this fact is even accurate.
In 1940, 70% of all coffee grown in the world was drunk in the USA, according to https://espressocoffeeguide.com/all-about-coffee-2/worlds-be... (obviously WWII had a big impact on global supply chains and consumer spending)
US consumption in 1946 was apparently ~20 pounds of coffee beans annually per capita, or an average of around 2.5–3 (8 oz?) cups of coffee per day for the ~3/4 of adults who were regular coffee drinkers.
Per https://www.retrowow.co.uk/food_and_drink/coffee/coffee.html
> Most people [in the UK] made coffee in a jug. You boiled the water and added it to ground coffee already in the jug. You let the ground coffee settle and it was ready to pour through a strainer and drink. Some people then boiled the coffee again.
My impression is that coffee preparation was comparable in the USA. Neither paper filters nor instant coffee were common until decades later.
> Perhaps the US used to drink espressos in the 1940s, I'm not sure. That's if this fact is even accurate.
Espresso was unknown in America back then. Rumor has it that GIs, when exposed to it, diluted it with hot water, giving us the modern Americano. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caff%C3%A8_Americano
> 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.
Right, if anything -- coffee consumption has only gone down because we've moved on to more efficient stimulants. Either higher concentration/lower cost artificial substitutes or prescription drugs.
Hardly the best example of America getting over an addiction.
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.
I think you mean the pre-viagra days.
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
It is suprising, seeing as it would have been more of a luxury item in the past.
When did the begin?
Coffee consumption begin 15th century
Tobacco 18th century
Oil: 347 AD
Social Networks: circa. 2002.
Sorry but tobacco gets to Europe just after Columbus reaches America, and gets consumed in Europe by then.
And the indians of America consumed it much earlier.
Just to clarify.
Thanks. I admit i just wikipedia-ed these quickly
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.
I think this pandemic has proved how sane the idea of a Metaverse would be.
Imagine meeting someone online, dating or friendship, you put on a lightweight VR headset and get transported to a replicated NYC rooftop bar, where loads of people from around the world are sitting, drinking and chatting. Socializing with a date or a group of people at the comfort of your home, going on outings, inviting your friends to your digital house, work meetings in a digital office instead of Zoom (I already seen companies doing this; VR meetings). People will be able to form romantic relationships and stronger friendships from across the world. Zoom, Skype, Discord will seem like old world relics.
It's like the appeal of World of Warcraft when it was a its peak, but not gaming - not appealing to just gamers. Appealing to everyone who's open to socializing online.
I guess it's just a matter of personal preference, because I can't relate at all. That would have sounded awful to me before the pandemic, and the experience of virtual everything during the pandemic only makes it sound even more awful.
> People will be able to form romantic relationships and stronger friendships from across the world.
Romantic relationships without physical proximity sounds totally dystopian to me.
An observation that your post reminded me of: why do all these metaverse concepts replicate very uninteresting real world scenarios? I remember watching Zuckerberg do a demo of a work meeting and everyone was in... a drab meeting room. In a virtual world of infinite possibilities!
God, if I'm forced to strap on a VR headset just to be social with someone at least put me on one of Saturn's moons, not an NYC rooftop bar.
You pretty much described VRChat, but it's off-putting because for some reason everyone's avatar is a furry or sexualized anime child.
Who the hell wants to do that? After this BS over the last two years? People will absolutely laugh at the idea. Most people are sick and tired of this virtual shit. FB could not have picked a worse time to hype up some unreleased virtual reality world.
I am now more convinced than before to short FB.
Roblox proved it. Fortnite is a close second. YouTube is where the money is at.
I'm pretty sure every tele-technology has had folks who found them just a bit too far beyond the pale. Why call when the people you want to talk to are a walk away? Why send a telegram when you can call? Why send email when you can send a telegram? etc. I also think even if XR does become a reality, it won't be _us_ that truly buys into it, but a younger generation that grows up in it and makes their own norms in it, the way much of my generation was on the early Internet, and the next generation was on the early Web.
For me the killer application is the ability to replace the office. There's already VR software that lets you have a virtual workspace with multiple monitors in VR. It would be so much more convenient to be able to have a large virtual office available to you in VR rather than building a large, physical office IRL.
It’s totally a batshit Hail Mary. Like it’s total vaporware at this point. Where is this metaverse? Where do I log in?
It’s all marketing hype and it’s creating dreams in peoples heads that will come crashing down when they actually use whatever this product is. Because whatever they ship, whenever they ship it, will be a thing that is huge and has little knowledge of what it’s market fit will be.
They aren’t starting small and nimble like a startup. They are betting huge high stakes games with almost no real market testing.
The idea of the metaverse has happened over and over throughout the last few decades and has failed every time. It will continue to fail until the technology backing it is utterly incredible. Oculus is nowhere close. We’re talking about needing an F-16 and currently having the Wright brothers’ airplane. Give it another 40 or 50 years and maybe it will be viable.
that's a very fixed idea of what it would take
You really have to try it before you pan it. It's a new class of computing. Google Cardboard and other non 6DOF VR systems don't count.
This gives them more (young) users, a better connection to their users, a ton of patents, and jumps them out of the smartphone era. They are dead in the water without a gambit of a similar size, buying up the competition (their previous primary strategy) only works as long as regulatory agencies are willing to play ball.
Then you’ve never experienced how transformative VR is and you lack vision.
Some of us saw the last wave of VR hype. It was around the same time as PalmOS, iPaq, and other handheld computing devices. It wasn't obvious to most people at the time that one of these technologies would transform the world. But visionaries saw it.
It wasn't VR then and it won't be now. VR has gained a foothold in this wave in its niches of gaming, other "entertainment", and random educational and military applications. General casual use beyond that is a pipe dream.
Transformative, can you be more specific? The "lack of vision" seems like an attack more than a justification that VR is something beyond a gimmick.
Sounds similar to what crypto fanatics say.
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
I hate to tell you that but Instagram is probably two generations too old. I doubt teenagers are joining much anymore.
Tiktok is the most common app among gen z.
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.
Only a few people closed their accounts, many leave them as husks. The account is there but dead.
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
More likely FBs network effort is the weakest in those markets: less internet penetration, weaker brand loyalty, Fb is also relatively new in these markets, more competition from tiktok and others.
These markets likely to first have user attrition
I think they only lost a half million users (which wouldn't even show up as a blib on that number)
This may be like the first time McDonalds posted a loss:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2688665.stm
I still remember it and the changes that came after it, the McDonalds of today is nothing like the McDonalds of 2003.
We'll see what Facebook does, I assume buy out Snapchat or Tiktok or some other product where the kids hang out.
> I still remember it and the changes that came after it, the McDonalds of today is nothing like the McDonalds of 2003.
Building remodels aside, what are you referring to? They have chicken wraps and salads? Otherwise it seems more or less the same McDonalds of my childhood?
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).
Yeah. Agreed. It had stopped working that way for me when I quit, also. And they kept lecturing me and my friends about community standards. I got tired of that stifling, moralizing hypocrisy. I guess I speak more of the original vision of FB.
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.
Don't you love going to Instagram and having it refuse to show you pictures without logging in? I sure do
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)
Instagram is arguably fast becoming the 21st century version of the glossy fashion magazines my parent's generation often read to kill time, where every second page would be a full page advert for a perfume or a watch.
I disagree with everyone about Instagram on HN. Instagram is amazing to me. But, I also love Pinterest which most people here hate (may be because of search results spamming). Where else can you curate a feed of vintage airline tickets? Or vaporwave aesthetics?
Also, ads that I see on IG are always promoting small businesses and never scammy. Actually it is a source of discovery for me.
All friends that I have love IG, been using it since 2013 daily. Visual culture is far more interesting than crap on FB or ephemeral social toxicity on TikTok/Snapchat. My IG contacts/feed never discuesses politics or activism.
> Im considering
In poker they call this a bluff
I dumped facebook, linkedin, snapchat. I can dump another.
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.
What you're forgetting is the 3D TV aspect of this version of Second Life that will push it over the top. What Second Life was missing is a pair of goggles that you had to wear and a Facebook login.
What is it good for?
- Work meetings
- Socializing
- Dating
- Creative endeavors
- Improved workspace
You'll be able to have work meetings at a virtual office. You can do that now, but the experience will be better. You'll be able to socialize with friends across the world, meet up at virtual replicated areas (like a rooftop bar in NYC..) and meet other people while you're there. You'll be able to go on virtual dates with a long-distance partner. You'll be able to put on your lightweight VR headset and be stationed at a better workstation, with larger monitors where you can manipulate the interface with movements of your hands without the cost of buying such a work set-up in real life. You'll be able to sit on your couch, put on your VR headset and watch movies on a 100 inch TV screen without having to furnish your home with a TV.
The possibilities are endless. Where's your imagination?
Maybe I'm just getting old but I have zero interest in "socializing" that way. It sounds horrible, regardless of how good the VR is.
When I watch movies at home often I'm only halfway paying attention to the TV while simultaneously eating or talking to my family or working on my laptop. There's no way I'm going to wear a VR headset most of the time. The TV is hung on the wall so it takes literally zero space.
None of these applications are going to take off until the XR hardware becomes a lot more seamless. It needs to be as easy as pulling out a phone or putting on a pair of sunglasses. The metaverse will not succeed as long as it is tied to clunky VR strap on headsets with bad FOVs and low resolution that make you look like a dork.
I'm hoping for a better looking second life. If they can achieve that..
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.
VR is gimmicky, like the Wii. Its full of worlds with great freedom of movement that are designed to hide the fact that you have very limited freedom of movement.
> designed to hide the fact that you have very limited freedom of movement.
That highly depends on your setup. The more physical space you have, the better if you want to move.
> VR is gimmicky, like the Wii.
Have you even used modern VR yet before panning it? Google Cardboard is ancient and doesn't count as modern VR. I ask because this answer tends to come from people who haven't tried it.
VR != metaverse
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.
The 'metaverse' in terms that there will absolutely be a VR cyber/world/land/facebook/sims2/second life experience. Will it be what FB wants it to be (they want to cash in), probably not but this is 100% coming. Looks at every immersive games (WOW, Second Life, etc...) in the past, even if its just that it will be hugely lucrative and successful.
Does Facebook really have the infrastructure in place to host the metaverse? Are they buying up the best gaming firms, have extensive enterprise architecture experience?
Look at Microsoft. My bet is on big enterprise/cloud tech + video game companies.
I can name plenty of immersive games that were bombs.
We already have video games for that.
I agree. It doesn't carry anything intrinsically interesting. You'd have far more luck porting VR into an existing popular game that is fun and making it more of a social hang out scene. You'll struggle greatly trying to make it a mainstream social media platform. Imagine a social media player that you could only log into from your computer at home.
that's until you get accessible haptic feedback devices and realistic comfortable VR
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.
Agreed, and they also could have named this concept after something cooler than the metaverse from Ready Player One. It was a pretty bad book and movie IMO. They should have chosen the "Holodeck" and renamed themselves "Holo".
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.
It kills me that they are pushing and have everyone talking about the worst, most boring uses of VR
I'm guessing what will happen is that this will open enough doors and develop some early talent to go on to something worthwhile
That is why I related it to people selling real estate on the Moon when moon landings were yet feasible. They are clearing trying to associate the brand Metaverse with Facebook right now, and hoping they can fill in the backend when they (possibly) have the capability to. They are trying to steal brand recognition for vaporware right now. Playing the long game.
> It feels as astroturfed as crypto is.
I'm curious, how do you expect promotion to actually happen if you feel like "this" (this being a change in branding by a large company) is astroturfing? What is a non-astroturfing way to promote a new idea/product/thing? Or do you think any form of promotion is astroturfing?
I feel like "selling acres on the Moon" and "smart" are at significant odds with each other...
If someone asks you for $25.00 for an acre on the moon, you'd probably pay it just in case its a future lottery ticket.
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
I was searching for a way to describe how the meta is being marketed, and this is perfect.
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.
Expectations were that it would do like the other internet giants and beat by miles. Yes it's weird that the expectations are not just their own performance, but that's often how the market works.
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.
Does it count people who have messenger but never open it, but their device is signed it? It is cramware on a lot of android phones.
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 also see them using "Family daily active people (DAP)" and monthly active people (MAP). https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
I wonder if that counts unique/distinct people, taking into consideration a person with multiple accounts -- FB, IG, WhatsApp, etc.
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 just use a simple group SMS.
Signal
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?
NTT data. Is a japanese consulting firm.
They have strong presence in asia, Spain, Portugal, and South america also.
I don`t know how this new department is doing, but I will inquire about. I was in the last newsletter we received.
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.
I'm still hoping that Google buys Pinterest somehow and then let it rot.
When is Clubhouse running out of money?
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.
Was your page full of actual hate speech such as "exterminate the jews" or was it full of "hate speech" such as criticizing politicians who happen to be minorities?
Same question regarding fake news: was your page full of actual fake news suh as "Elon Musk has died", or was it full of political speech you don't like, such as "wearing masks is not worth the inconvenience"?
Unfortunately most of the arguments against wearing masks are petty and bullshit given that the inconvenience of wearing one is insignificant for most people.
Sure, if you have genuine health concerns wearing one then don’t. But most of the people that moaned about it were really just moaning about being told what to do.
I had one mum in my kids school quoting the Magna Carta as a reason not to wear masks, which is simply ridiculous. And others claim that long term use of thermometers could be damaging to kids health, which completely misses the fact that such devices are entirely passive instruments.
That was the point I quit Facebook. I realised my time was too valuable to read so much stupid.
Your definition of hate speech is irrelevant. Whatever the GP saw was enough for them that they made a decision to remove their personal exposure, which is their right. They aren't censoring you or anyone else by making that choice.
actual hate speech is very subjective term. #killAllMen was trending on Twitter. Saying all white people are racist is considered progressive.
If your FB feed is full of false news and hate speech, that says a lot about who your “friends” are.
It says a lot too about FB having no qualms in amplifying and profiting from propaganda and hate.
If others are looking to keep up with news in a low key way (including the OP), I'd highly recommend this approach that's been working well for me.
No affiliation but I'd highly recommend this approach for those that are already on instagram or want to use the platform to keep up with the news. He aggregates news stories from most major news sources and in a couple of minutes you can be informed of what's happening around the world.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosheh_Oinounou
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.
reddit used to be great until they pulled their great bait & switch, then added all kinds of authoritarian features.
A brief history of reddit:
>We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it.
— Reddit FAQ 2005
>We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content
— u/kn0thing 2008
>A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. [reddit]'s the digital form of political pamplets.
— u/kn0thing 2012
>We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal.
— u/reddit 2012
>We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States - because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse).
— u/yishan 2012
>Neither Alexis [u/kn0thing] nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech
— u/spez 2015
It feels like reddit changed in line with the rest of the Internet though.
In 2022 you have the choice of a) "suppressing free speech" or b) "platforming racists" and there is no middle ground and no way to win. You can't pass the buck to moderators.
The choice did not feel so stark in 2005.
Reddit also stopped showing users the red background on their mod-removed comments. So when you're logged in it looks like your comment is live [1]. You can try it here [2].
I once tried looking through their archived code base to find when they made that change but couldn't decipher it. It's possible they never showed authors the red background at all.
[1] https://imgur.com/E3bFvKh
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything/about/sticky
Reddit should break off all political content into its own site, porn into another, and keep the rest in place. If a post is porn or political, mods can click a button to move it to the dedicated site. This would be similar to the “move topic” functionality from phpBB and vBulletin.
This might solve a lot of problems, but it would create issues on the edge, like r/pics content that may not be overtly political but clearly has an agenda.
Personally I use Reddit exclusively for political flamewars on one account, and in-depth technical content on another account.
I’m starting to feel pretty unwelcome, though, when it comes to anything “misinformarion” related. Once you get banned from one subreddit, if you have a post reported on the same subreddit from another account, then both your accounts get banned site-wide. Combine this with the dragnet, unsolicited bans that some mods are sending to anyone who posts in certain subreddits and you have a real chilling effect.
The average IQ on Reddit is also about 110, which is just boring in most cases. When you can predict the top comments on a thread, reading them is probably a waste of time.
Circa 2005 reddit was a forum for nerdy young tech people, talking about miscellaneous web links but mostly focused around nerdy tech stuff. Nobody I know who read reddit circa 2005 wanted it to become a white supremacist hate forum. When it started to attract large numbers of white supremacists who deposited their steaming piles of bullshit (hate speech, vicious personal attacks) all over the site, lots of people reading the site (including those who had been there since 2005) were appalled. Obviously advertisers also don’t want to associate their brands with hate speech (or child porn, etc.).
reddit wouldn't be so bad re: free speech if you could ignore all of the non-sense, sadly they push it out to everyone by design
Is propaganda free speech? That is the question of the open internet.
> 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.
Are you a teen or a young adult. I am guessing you are in between age of 35 - 45 because, I am that age myself and have started weaning off of social media lately. The dopamine rewards are just not worth it.
I have, however, moved on to saner places like HN.
I’m not the poster, but I’m between 16-19 and seeing the same thing over last 2 years I’ve been almost completely out of social media,
- 0 minutes of facebook
- 0 minutes of Instagram
- 0 minutes of Twitter
- 20 minutes of Telegram per day to catchup on messages
- 10 minutes of Matrix
A few years back the aggregate was easily 10-12 hrs per day (rest were spent watching movies and writing code) . Nowadays my brain automatically will close the sites if I spend more then 2 minutes on them.
But it’s not just social media, I lost my appetite for movies, tv shows too.
Most of this purge was unintentional , however now that it’s done. I’m glad. Other than that I come on HN once or twice a day to have fun and comment and read stuff.
I wouldn’t say HN is more saner then other social media, most of the peers I engaged with in the more popular social media apps were equally as nice, amicable and fun to talk with.
But these days I mostly spend my days reading story books, blogs, write code, make drinks and cook food, and solve fun puzzles that I design.
Who knows, maybe it’ll all change to something else in 2 years again.
I hope you have a lovely day !
52, and I’m getting tired of a lot of things. May be the testosterone. From a VR standpoint, Battle Royal zombie shooters with bow and arrow mechanics in a game with crafting and skill trees holds NOTHING for me anymore
Every social network (including so many bulletins and forums from ≤90's) models the relationships and culture of its initial cohort, and it always becomes self-isolated to that imprint, so as people change their life priorities they leave and the network dies. The same will happen to hacker news.
There are definitely parts users of HN that are not same, but the conversation is normally at auch higher level and most people welcome a different viewpoint instead of seeing it as an attack.
They finally monitized their products and customers to a breaking point. They run on engagement metrics without common sense or empathy to how fear and anger impact their user's wellbeing.
I most definitely do not need or want a VR immersed version of that toxicity.
VR has nothing to do with facebook, at least at the moment. Just logging in with your facebook account doesn't mean its suddenly sucking all your life from you and piping it right to facebook. If you enjoy video games, its hands down the best way to game right now.
> 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.
What blows my mind are all of the blatant scam replies on sponsored content. You'll get sponsored content from, say, Bloomberg or CNBC, and half of the replies are cryptocurrency scams. I've even seen top replies that were 'ads' for witch doctors that will cast spells for you if you send them money on Venmo.
It makes both Facebook/Meta and the sponsored brands look terrible.
reddit is great if you curate your feed. If you go to "popular" or "trending" it's a dumpster fire. I still love reddit though with my 10 or so subreddits that I follow.
loses loser users
good.
Paywalled
This is good news. Facebook has proven itself to be a negative influence on people and countries.
It is just me or there seems to be a strange lack of criticism about TikTok on the same or stricter level than FB. Especially that it is a Chinese company HQ’ed in Beijing. Neither do I ever see discussion about the asymmetry in China’s trade policies with regards to FB/Tiktok. Tiktok enjoys free market access (except India), whereas FB is banned in China just like many other US-based platforms. On the contrary, there seems to be praise about TikTok on HN!
How come we don’t see scathing articles on NYT about TikTok but on WSJ? Has this become a partisan issue (Trump wanted to ban Tiktok)?
The problem with TikTok is that it's even more opaque than Facebook.
Content can be said to exist or not exist on Facebook, and that's usually it. Sure they monkey with the feed, but it's still essentially user-derived.
TikTok effectively exposes one interaction: get next.
What that returns is completely at the mercy of whatever TikTok decides it should be. They've optimized for virality. But it would be pretty easy to tweak that and optimize for something else.
Why do I feel like I've read hundreds of comments saying "is there a strange lack of criticism about China?"
We literally almost banned TikTok, and statements were made about the necessity of doing it from the President of the United States. For weeks. Almost resulting in a government mandated forced sale.
Don't worry, tik tok is just new. Wait a few more years and they'll be put through a similar rigamarole, although I don't think it will be as severe as FB. Maybe youtube level?
I think it's because of the perception TikTok=cat and dance videos, FB=misinformation. At least that's what my feeds looks like. Also: TikTok=kids, FB=adults
https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/12/22772157/tiktok-tics-sug...
I think researchers are starting to notice mass psychological phenomenon specific to the platform already, though maybe 'tiktok tics' just sounds nicer than any of the other social media networks and 'tics'
I don't use either service, but it's my impression that the misinformation on TikTok is more on the "petty harm to individuals" level and less on the "destroys the social and political fabric of societies" level.
Agreed - we should symmetrically apply their laws in the US as well and require that they be locally owned.
Or just block them. Maybe that would be better.
I agree that TikTok is much worse, but thankfully I rarely hear about it and don't personally know anyone who uses it.
Perfect Facebook: Break off groups, silo it. I've been off FB for almost a decade but I'm at the point where I have to actually use it for the first time, as it's where all the types of events I want to go to exclusively get organized. For amateur racing at least, it's pretty much all Facebook.
Groups used to be broken off into a separate iOS app. That time period was blissful. Then they removed that app because it allowed users to escape the newsfeed.
Platforms like Facebook just expose some of the bad parts of human nature such as cult like behaviour. Tech is neither the source of all evil nor the solution to all our problems like people in tech like to treat it to be.
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.