It's astonishing to read this and see not only Zuckerberg but also the article itself present this as something that happened to Facebook/Meta rather than something driven by Facebook/Meta to satisfy Wall Street. Social media did not naturally evolve into what it is today: engagement bait, consumption of content creator and advertiser content, etc. resulted from purposeful business strategic decisions to pivot from a place to learn your first cousin remarried to a place where advertisers and monetization rule. Towards the end of my time on Facebook, I never, ever saw content from family, including from my own sister documenting her terminal disease. But I sure did see lots of car dealerships from states I don't live in, news stories about people with two heads, and nubile young women surely-SURELY-attractive to a middle aged man like me.
Mark Zuckerburg's superpower is being like Jack Sparrow at the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean: he steps off one boat just as it's sinking onto another, and he has the humility to not really give a damn which ship he's on. (I say "humility" even as someone frustrated by his net impact on society.)
I think on the How I Built This Instagram episode the Instagram founder said that Zuck was basically reading the data from Facebook's interactions and saw that the demographics and sharing tendencies of Facebook users meant that it was in a death spiral: people were moving interactions to private channels, reducing the available "friend" content. IMO, the causal factor here is that people became wary of public oversharing and the result was FB pivoting away from "social network" (OG Facebook) to "social media" (2010-2015 FB) and eventually just "media" (Instagram, Reels).
Looking back at what I posted on FB in 2008-2012 is like observing an alien from another planet: it was a completely different platform.
> people were moving interactions to private channels, reducing the available "friend" content. IMO, the causal factor here is that people became wary of public oversharing and the result was FB pivoting away from "social network" (OG Facebook) to "social media" (2010-2015 FB) and eventually just "media" (Instagram, Reels).
Adding to that, the people who kept posting as if nothing changed typically were extremely low-value posters. Political ranters, zero-commentary meme reposts, etc…
Like a large room full of people talking until an event starts, and that moment when half the crowd has realized that someone has gone on stage while the other half has gotten sucked into an argument/discussion and forgotten why we were all here in the first place.
Hilariously, this is kind of how I felt reading the comments here. I thought every commet would start of by saying this is such a pathetic superficial ploy for the trial in question that it's idiotic to respond to it in earnest outside of a courtroom. But then obviously the comment would go on to explain why that's the case.
Whatever sort of business Facebook, Insta, TikTok and Twitter are called now, it's pretty clear they co-evolved into it near identically by watching the others' product. If fb isn't social media, then neither are the rest. If fb is a purple cow then so are the others. The point is they were called "social media" at the time FB purchased Insta.
If Zuck is going to show a graph illustrating how force fed cows in a cage were unable to walk by themselves as time progressed, then someone should put up a graph tracking the number of Whatsapp groups that were created as time went by. If that number was going up, what is left to talk about for fuck's sake.
>> people who kept posting as if nothing changed typically were extremely low-value posters
absolutely not, ... these were (and are) always there. instead it was Facebook management decisions choosing to amplify exactly this. Let's not blame a minority of (misguided) content creators for the shortcomings of Zuck and his sycophant senior managers.
As anti-Zuck as I am, I argue this is simply human nature. I've seen the same effect all across internet interactions, from Gamefaqs to 4 chan to Tumblr to Tiktok. controversial content will simply draw in more discussion (i.e. flamewars) than any other kind of contnet. sad content, happy content, funny content; it all falls to rage bait.
The only blame on Facebook's end is a failure to moderate and mitigate it. But at that point you ask if that would have simply pointed the controversy to the moderators (something also commonly seen).
They actively amplified any content that got high engagement, not ragebait specifically. That's why you see this trend across nearly all social media, not just Facebook. There's a strong financial incentive to get people to engage with your service, and amplifying the content that is already getting the most engagement is a simple way to do that.
You could blame this on advertising, but I think even if Facebook were a paid service (ignoring for a minute that that would have killed any chance it had of being successful in the first place) there'd still be an incentive to prioritize content that people's revealed preferences indicate they want to see more of.
Countering this natural human tendency requires a significant, thoughtful, concerted effort on the part of everyone involved.
> Encourage online tribalism that exacerbates the societal division....creating exploitative products that drive conflict over conversation, division over unity, and misinformation over truth
Highest engagement and ragebait are apparently the same thing.
I see no disagreement here. Due to human nature, ragebait is a subset of content that gets high engagement, so it gets amplified the same as any other high-engagement content.
I think you under estimate how much of the angry political stuff is driven by paid for content by people with an agenda - and companies like Meta have just taken the money.
Sure in the end it sweeps up indviduals but money and professional narrative shapers are often behind these things.
There are a cadre of highly competance professionals in the advertising/PR area that were massively enabled by the tools that Meta et al provided ( for money ) - suddenly you could run campaigns that were highly effective, relatively cheap, and almost invisible.
This has been ruthlessly exploited by people and organisations with more money that morals.
Goverments have in part been asleep at the wheel, but also too keen to use such tools for their own ends.
In Imgurs case it's all left leaning. Lots of scaremongering about what project 2025 and how close we are to dictatorship and lots of alarmist ragebait.
I saw a post just over a week ago from a user who predicted that Trump would declare martial law on April 20th because that was the day such and such report would advise him to do so.
It made the front page with hundreds of upvotes and comments agreeing. it's an extreme example but the site is full of this kind of stuff, most often bringing your attention to some obscure ruling or decision, some new political depth plumbed that will mean x,y, and z will now happen.
The aspect of real people posting worthwhile stuff stopped regardless of Zuck's decision to amplify engagement bait. IMO, it was because many of them had their life stage progress beyond college and had better things to do than post to social media.
I think you got cause and effect mixed up. One would normally move on in life and tune down college life rather than shut it down entirely.
I've made a fb account very early on and a new one periodically. Each time I add few friends who have few friends. I post some content daily for two weeks, content these friends would always respond to. The feed had nothing they posted and my posts never got any engagement.
I didn't simply move on, they actively disqualified themselves.
Users are much better of making a whatsapp group. You don't have to leave the college group (you could ofc) but you can mute and archive it or add a few contacts from it (before leaving)
> Mark Zuckerburg's superpower is being like Jack Sparrow at the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean: he steps off one boat just as it's sinking onto another, and he has the humility to not really give a damn which ship he's on. (I say "humility" even as someone frustrated by his net impact on society.)
That's like saying a tapeworm is humble because it doesn't care which colon it's sitting in.
The tapeworm lacks the faculties to care about the colon. It just needs nourishment. Same with Zuck. You can't blame the worm, because it's got no concept of reality beyond the things needed to serve its survival. Zuck, as a human, can only do that by very likely having a serious personality disorder.
A reference to Larry Ellison as a lawnmower, perhaps? [0]
> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle. — Brian Cantrill (https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s)
Generally this is relevant advice for thinking about important people. We know little about them, almost all of it is projection that reflects more of my perspective than any reality of the object’s psychology.
Humans love to think we know why someone behaves the way they do. We love to diagnose disorders in strangers based on a very very tiny bit of information.
It is best to treat the decisions as black boxes, or else we are just projecting. I think it’s called the fundamental attribution bias?
No, the takeaway from that talk isn't that we shouldn't judge Ellison's intentions. Quite the opposite, actually. Bryan Cantrill states that Ellison's motives are simple. It's only about money and no other human emotions are involved.
There are so many quotes indicating this:
"What you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle."
"This company is very straightforward in its defense. It's about one man, his alter ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity! That's it!"
"If you were to about ask Oracle, 'Oracle what are you about? Larry, what are you about? Why Oracle? Tell me about Oracle.' 'Make money.' ' Okay, yeah yeah I get it.' 'Make money. Make money. Make money. That's what we do. Make money.'"
I have to disagree with your interpretation. “Inflict”, for example, is a very loaded word that speaks to intent or at least the mindset.
I think we all feel like we know who movie stars and celebrities really are. When, in reality, not only do we not know their motivation - often we don’t even know our own.
When you own 98% of Lanai, have a net worth equivalent to the annual gross product of a mid-sized American metropolitan area, and still feel the need to lay off thousands of people to increase your net worth at age 80, that's not a very, very tiny bit of information.
That's a person being presented with the knowledge that his choices will have a very clear set of consequences for society and proceeding with them anyways. Know the "if you press the button, you'll become a millionaire, but someone you don't know will die" thought experiment?
Larry has, multiple times, been told that if he presses the button, he'll get millions of dollars at the extreme expense of people he doesn't know, and done it. I think it's fair to say that at least one person has died from it; mass layoffs result in one additional suicide per 4200 male employees and one per 7100 female employees [0]
It would be, but individual businesses (particularly those with the resources of Oracle) don't like paying the taxes necessary to offer that sort of social safety net past a certain point.
Interesting how helpless voters (and those who could vote but don't) are portrayed, especially in the age of instant access to information in everyone's pocket.
> The tapeworm lacks the faculties to care about the colon. It just needs nourishment. Same with Zuck. You can't blame the worm, because it's got no concept of reality beyond the things needed to serve its survival. Zuck, as a human, can only do that by very likely having a serious personality disorder.
Isn't that behavior massively rewarded in the current system of VC-driven capitalism as a general rule? Such founders/companies leach off the society, leave it worse and are given huge valuations and riches. Infact the incentives mean we will see more of such people rise to the top in a ever-worsening feedback cycle until the society puts some checks on them. Which is a extra difficult in this deliberately fragmented environment. Same old loop we can't break out of.
That was intentional. I recall testing this out every time there was a new "oops, we're sorry, we reset your privacy settings to default -- AGAIN".
The privacy settings were carefully designed to have vague wording that how they worked on the surface wasn't how they really worked. Each and every one of them which had a different functionality than what the wording suggested on its surface resulted in you sharing to a much wider audience than you thought you were.
I recall carefully testing it out with a burner account which my main was not friends with, and it consistently taking 2-3 tries to get the privacy settings back to where I wanted them to be.
I would take those days over what Facebook is today - which is to say, useless. The only thing I use it for is groups, which have the good sense to only be about the thing you want to learn about when you look at the group. Still though - it is sad that FB Groups killed off small web forums.
I remember Facebook group - somewhere in the early 2010s, the group feature disappeared. Years later, group appeared again and I had to re-apply to get back into the group. Perhaps group was killed to boost public sharing.
Definitely true, but back in the day that was sort of the fun of it -- similar to putting up an AOL Instant Messenger away message, it was just... a blast of a funny thought to the people that you knew.
Over time, that network got stale and it included "people you sort of used to know", and then it included your grandma and uncle and rest of the world. There are few things that are at the intersection of the Venn diagram of "things I want to share with all of those people", especially as I get older.
> the causal factor here is that people became wary of public oversharing
Instead of chatting shit in a "public" area (rip wall to wall) limited to just my uni friends, there were suddenly home friends, relatives etc reading. And obviously it only got worse with algorithms pushing dross and hiding the zeitgeist from you.
You might manage the same if you’re rich enough to hire top-tier advisors. Let’s not kid ourselves—OG Facebook wasn’t a tech marvel or even particularly original. It just landed in the right place at the right time and snowballed from there.
This makes no sense in Zuckerberg's case: he was never hired by the board and they've never had a chance to fire him. Investors can sell the stock if they don't like what he does, but that is not a "professional advisor" relationship.
It's mostly a cult of personality relationship, and you're deep in it with your belief that Zuckerberg is an unusually capable operator.
Independently on what you think of Zuckerberg as a human being, on the basis of acquisitions alone, he can be judged as an insanely effective CEO. The way Meta managed the shift from Facebook to Instagram is impressive from a strategic point of view.
Heck, Meta literally controls the world most popular chat application. I never liked social media, spent most of the past fifteen years avoiding them as much I could while maintaining just enough presence to stay reachable and a Meta application still remain my most used one.
Let's not forget that Google, for all their billions, utterly failed to significantly attack Meta market.
Meta has been effective at being the owner of Instagram, even though that's because they've smartly mostly been staying hands off on it besides integrating it with Facebook wherever makes most sense. And also even though the platform is also getting long in the tooth, becoming a place dominated by brands rather than the hip kids' club it was in the past. Now it just seems like the default social media profile for people to connect with one another, like how FB was before it.
I wonder what if Facebook's attempts to buy Snapchat had gone through. Would they have been an effective steward of that platform as well, or would it have gone the way of Twitter-acquired Vine? Would Snapchat even have been a good acquisition target? Okay, maybe it's not productive to discuss counterfactuals, but it does make one consider if we're self-selecting for big hits here and ignoring all of the duds that never amounted to anything- and the potential duds that didn't go through because the founders didn't want to just take the money.
WhatsApp I'll grant you, hard to think of any alternate chat app that could've gotten as ubiquitous as it did. Though, again, was that also mostly WhatsApp's own success, amplified by Facebook's ubiquity? Not to mention, Google being as incompetent at chat as it is at social, Apple unwilling to entertain servicing other operating systems, and Blackberry, AOL, MSN Messenger, etc. having disappeared long ago.
Interestingly, Meta hasn't seem interested in trying to compete with "channelized" IRC chatroom-style apps in the vein of Slack or Discord. Maybe there's some enterprise Messenger for Businesses that does that, idk.
I already agreed with the correction - he has voting control.
What is still incorrect is imagining that billions of dollars gets you advisors who know how to run a company - and those people aren't just high level executives already running companies.
> you're deep in it with your belief that Zuckerberg is an unusually capable operator.
The burden is on you to show a successful CEO for over a decade is actually an idiot.
I don’t want Meta to do anything. All I want to do is mock the idea that Zuckerberg has been some sort of exemplary CEO the last few years in the face of the Metaverse project being such a resounding dud- what’s the punchline, billions spent to add feet to the avatars? Not to mention how he’s allowed his actual site to go fallow, between the Feed being inundated with AI slop and Reels being an imitation of Instagram Shorts being an imitation of TikTok and Snapchat shorts and Vine.
The boat is constantly rocking though, and it's actually incredible how he's kept the boat afloat and increasingly profitable. You can despise their impact on society, but he's an incredible example of a very successful CEO.
Political investigations, anti-trust, terrible media and brand image. GDPR. DMA. Etc. A literal genocide associated with their product.
The shift from desktop to mobile, and the continued evolution of the distribution channel - eg. the "Anti-tracking" requirement on apple devices.
The shift from text posts to images, to stories, to short-form video. From broadcast to DMs and groups.
The shift from "social" media to celebrity and influencer followings, to a feed entirely algorithmic.
The shift in advertisement formats, the shift across what gets advertised (eg. apps didn't exist at all when Facebook started, now they track ad-click-to-install rates through ML models).
I suppose I just don’t find any of those things very admirable? The fact that their product is associated with so much bad shit and still alive is a terrible thing for society. I just cannot reasonably call someone that led all that a ‘good CEO’, because they represent nothing that I’d like a CEO to be, regardless of what Wall Street things.
I’d also argue that it just means that Facebook was very successful at following all the trends and purchasing what they couldn’t replicate.
Your definition of "good" is weird, man. He's good at making money, that doesn't make him a good CEO. A good CEO should be able to make money and have some goddamn principles.
It's like staying that Putin is a good leader, because he's managed to stay in power for so long. Like what the fuck?
Each one of these platform empires from IBM to Microsoft to Google to Amazon to Uber has been very successful at foreseeing and executing on trends, until they're not. Meta was so for a long time, but not necessarily in recent years. That will, inevitably, be the fate of TikTok and whatever future empires arise from the current environment.
I am not saying Zuckerberg hasn't achieved much in the past. It's just funny to crow about his "super power" when Facebook reached critical mass over a decade and a half ago and has been able to coast along as a money printer based on network effects. And also as a Xerox copy printer- I always like to bring up the time they cloned HQ Trivia.
It's good for a platform empire to spent some of its lavish riches on R&D, even if it's just to diversify its moat and further entrench itself. But less so when that ends up as a quixotic boondoggle no one asked for (Metaverse) or as a blatant unoriginal copy (Reels, Confetti). At some point it's not really brilliance to be "foreseeing and executing on those trends" when you have the resources to chase after every trend. Then you've just turned your megacorporation into a VC fund, throwing anything and everything at the wall until something sticks. As we can see, there are a ton of initiatives, projects, departments that don't stick, and some quite spectacularly (Metaverse, again).
Eventually you just end up with the unoriginal silliness of LinkedIn Stories or every single platform including FB having its own Clubhouse, even when Clubhouse itself was a fad that faded as quickly as it appeared during the height of the pandemic.
I get your point about what he has accomplished. But at the same time, right after saying he's an incredible example of a very successful CEO, you acknowledge "a literal genocide associated with their product." I really wish we could shift how we define success for these CEOs.
I always see comments like this, but I rarely have this problem myself, though I see it on others' accounts. Even my Facebook feed shows me lots of legitimately useful posts. Sure, updates from friends and family are a much lower fraction than they were, but I'm actually OK with what I see.
I recently bought a new account on Something Awful [1], having not been on there in about seventeen years.
It's almost surreal, because it still feels like 2005 internet, but people will talk about current topics and the community is generally more engaging.
The moderation isn't some soulless ML model designed to optimize marketing revenue, it's a few dedicated people who want to make the community more fun and I've actually really enjoyed re-discovering the community there.
I guess I had simply forgotten about linear web forums as a concept. Places like Reddit (Hacker News, etc.) have a recursive reply model, which is nice in its own right, but there's something sort of captivating about everything being one long giant thread. It's more chaotic, it's less refined, but it's also kind of unpretentious.
[1] I already had one from when I'm a teenager but the name of that account will die with me as I posted too much on FYAD.
My Something Awful account recently turned 20 years old and I signed in on its birthday for the first time in over a decade. I felt the same thing as you. I looked for some new feature or something to show the passage of time, but found nothing. I had to manually click through pages. Forum signatures still exist.
I also posted in FYAD enough to have my own "personality". Some of the posters from my time are still at it, with accounts pushing thirty years old. I wonder if we ever interacted.
I’ve long felt that recursive/threaded replies were the death of intelligent online discourse. It’s just endless debate club: everyone proselytizing stodgy talking points from their individual soapboxes without any genuine back-and-forth happening. If someone loses an argument, they usually just disappear instead of facing the music. No accountability, no reflection, no real sense of community.
On the other hand, threading makes it possible for one group of people to spin off into a subtopic like discussing the relative merits of threaded vs linear boards, in the same general post about what Zuck said, without annoyingly hijacking the main topic. On HN I often find it useful to collapase the child responses and just read the top level, until something like this pulls me into a rabbit hole.
Threading isn’t an intrinsic sin, I think — sorting by upvotes is. The Discourse forum software allows sub-threads while still preserving a linear conversation style. You could also empower mods to spin off discussions into their own, separate threads. Points is what turns it into an inherent pissing match.
The annoying hijacking of a thread was a visible faux pas and helped keep the order of the message board with downward social pressure as opposed to an unbreakable rule (like forcing threaded boards).
I did the same about a year ago. Large enough that the community is extremely diverse with a wide range of life experiences but small enough that you'll start to recognize certain people. Also the completely linear threads means people will actually see what you post and not just ignore any conversation that isn't part of the top 10 most uploaded replies.
Yeah, and the simple $10 one-time-fee actually is surprisingly effective at filtering out spam bots and people who post crap content. People don't just make an account in thirty seconds and create a bunch of spam until they're banned, or at least they don't do that much because it would get relatively expensive fairly quickly.
It started when they introduced the non chronological timeline. Everything from then on was about driving users to use the app more as opposed to being a tool to connect friends.
Thanks to facebook I have met many friends throughout the world, including my now wife, and have managed to keep in touch with them as I travel the world and land in my friends home countries.
It is so sad that the tool I'm describing doesn't really exist anymore.
Fwiw, https://facebook.com/?sk=h_chr still/again works. Recently rediscovered it, and essentially got my old fb experience back. Add a normal adblock, and manually block reels, and you'll only see what friends and followed pages (90% musicians for me) post.
Before they introduced the non-chrono timeline the main complaint about Facebook was "I don't care about seeing what my cousin ate for lunch", and from that perspective it almost makes sense.
Yeah but that was in the earlier days, and I think that stopped happening well before they went non-chrono. Which is also maybe they went non-chrono, they realized the social part was losing steam.
Zuck is learning theres a difference between shallow short term engagement and deeper long term engagement. Who could have seen this coming, except literally everyone?
It's like a tragedy of the commons, except there's only one party destroying all resources for themself
In Zuck's defense, it's not just him, it's the entire American school of business.
They never learn. GM, GE, RCA, you name it. They always want to make more money now now NOW. They don't understand they're taking on a metaphorical loan. They don't understand the interest they have to pay.
It's the ultimate greedy algorithm. Just make the decision that makes the most money right now, every time, over and over and over again. Don't look at anything else.
They know, it's just that most of the people will be gone before the negative effects become apparent. Most senior people are only going to be around for 7.2 years so if they optimize for short/medium term benefits and cash out, the long term consequences won't affect them.
What makes you think “they don’t understand the interest they have to pay”?
They are optimizing for short-medium term profits. The people there in the early days pull the ejection code when the “interest” is due. The company coasts until some private equity runs the numbers and realizes the parts are worth more than the whole.
This is capitalism. You are using “interest” (a finance term) seemingly in a moral / ethical critique. If so, use a moral / ethical term instead.
Corporate valuation isn't about short-term thinking. It's actually all very long-term. Plenty of companies are not paying out all their profits to shareholders, and their valuation is entirely based on expectation that it'll happen in the distant future and the discounted perpetuity value will equal the initial investment, probably after the current investors are dead.
There are still plenty of vulture investors who find a way to trick the market in the short-to-medium term. I'm not convinced Facebook is a case of that, even though I hate what they do.
They need not learn, they do as they’re primed, to go for profit, squeeze and profit, profit and profit some more. Then profit even from the dead husk on the way out. That’s the hyper capitalist lifecycle of a business product.
All I want is nice, non-toxic, non-addictive place to share photos and birthdays and life events with my family and close friends.
I understand that's not going to net hundreds of billions in revenue, but surely a site like that could keep the lights on and the engineers paid at scale.
All those photos and videos cost bandwidth, and that ain't free.
But the number of people willing to pay for their accounts on this stuff is vanishingly small.
So either you run this as a side project and accept that it's losing money, or you start running ads. And the moment you start running ads is the moment your most profitable choice becomes slowly turning your site more and more addictive, so that people spend more and more time on it and see more and more ads.
(Or you can keep the place small and constrained to people who have a high chance of being able to kick some money in for the bills, I'm only paying about half my Mastodon instance's fees because of making this choice.)
Or you can create a huge societal shift where we decide that having non-profit social sites is a good thing, and that they should be funded by the state, even if many of the views on them contradict the views of the giant bags of money pretending to be humans who are currently in control of the country. Ideally this societal shift would make it much harder for these giant bags of money to exist, as well.
Oh also getting people to stick around on a site that's not built to be addictive is surprisingly hard.
Wikipedia runs on donations. Most of FB is a massively bloated interface to maximize engagement, shove as much “content” as they can anywhere and everywhere, track everything you do, and add more “features” to find the next mechanism to get people more addicted.
For over a decade, I used Facebook lite messenger app which was built for countries with spotty, slow internet. It was less than a tenth of the size of the US messenger (of course it was unavailable in the app store and had to be installed via apk), was fast and easy to use (no stories, feeds, money sharing, animations), and was much better at doing the one thing it was supposed to be for, messaging people. It finally stopped working a couple of years ago and the regular app is a bloated mess where chats are an afterthought.
And why? Ads. You need more engagement so you can show people more ads. You need more content, so you have more things to attach ads to. You to autoplay videos to get people to watch more and see more ads. You have to run trackers so you can better target your ads. It’s the ads, not the functions, that make the modern internet too expensive to be funded by individuals.
2000s Facebook was able to run just fine on 2000s internet and storage. It would take a trivial amount of modern data and a fraction of modern storage to run now.
As positive social networking disappears, the market demand for one you can pay for with no ads increases. Pricing would be difficult but every year the average consumer learns more and more about how much "free" costs.
I agree a non-profit approach might be the only option to avoid the same long term problems we've seen time and again.
You're technically correct - you can't force people to give consent for targeted advertising (since it would no longer be consent). But you're absolutely allowed to show people ads if they don't want to pay for ad-free.
Generally, trying to directly convert a free service to a subscription service can be much harder than starting out as a subscription service. Just look at all the resentful conspiracies about Facebook planning to charge money that would go viral back in the day.
Users don't like a contract radically changing from under them, and shifting from free to paid is breaking a contract in an immediately understandable way.
No one was forced to buy the plan nor was the free Facebook going to go away. You just would have had the option to pay to not have targeted ads. And that was vetoed by the EU, the very thing many here claim they'd like to do.
That case was about forcing users to choose between personalized ads or a paid subscription. I can understand why the EU would reject that.
A case like that is outside of the scope of my argument. My proposal is a site that offers subscriptions with no free ad supported option at all, which the EU wouldn't have an issue with.
> forcing users to choose between personalized ads or a paid subscription. I can understand why the EU would reject that.
Why do you understand why that should be rejected? I don't personally understand it at all. How can it be possible for users to get free Facebook and not give up any personal data to it? There would be no money coming in to keep the site running...
If social media were paid, it would effectively be another barrier between people with different means connecting with each other.
From the perspective of the EU and their regulatory environment (vis a vis GDPR) and given Facebook's reach and size, it fits with how they approach big tech and privacy.
| another barrier between people
It's been said enough before that cheap is always better than free. If the costs can be kept low enough, the benefits of removing ads and data-mining from the equation can be worth it. And there's always the option of regional pricing where that makes sense.
I'm still using Facebook for this, which works for the very few of my friends who are on it. It's actually nice if you aggressively report and unfollow everything you don't want to see.
Does anybody here know of an alternative that works like 2010 Facebook?
At this point, why would you trust anything? I certainly don't. Any platform that exists could get bought up by another company that just uses all the content to train AI.
There are structures that are more immune to this such as non-profits or cooperatives, but otherwise that distrust is warranted given the way it's all gone.
Use the "Feeds" tab (you have to go searching for it) but it allows you to just see stuff from your frields, pages you follow, groups, etc, purely in reverse chronological order, like God intended.
Sure. Taking that perspective even begins to explain some things, like a lot of the pointless me-too developments (short form videos?) Facebook has been implementing for years: if they dilute the product by incorporating others' ideas, even if those ideas go nowhere FB can claim everybody is in the same boat.
But it doesn't make it any less ridiculous. This is like the meme of the guy shooting the other dude in the chair.
The argument I would make as the government is the reason Facebook isn’t a social network is because it is a monopoly and didnt need to innovate and compete
It's wild how the narrative gets framed like Zuckerberg just observed this shift from the sidelines, when in reality, Meta steered the ship straight into this model
> [...] as something that happened to Facebook/Meta rather than something driven by Facebook/Meta to satisfy Wall Street. Social media did not naturally evolve into what it is today:
As soon as you have any platform which says "hey you there with an email address, you can put content on here that can be seen by anyone in the world." you will slowly end up with a scene that looks like all these sites we have now. Advertiser's and influencers will be there, at your behest or otherwise. There's only two options to avoid this.
1. Aggressively tune your algorithm against pure engagement and toward proximity.
2. Explicitly dissallow broad reach of content.
And when I say aggressively I really mean it. If people can "follow" others unilaterally, even only showing "followed content" will still lead to most people seeing mostly high engagement posts, rather than their friends.
At what point (degree of intervention) does something go from "natural" to "driven"? It's a hard question, but one things for sure, a Facebook that didn't allow high engagement content would already be dead.
>Social media did not naturally evolve into what it is today...resulted from purposeful business strategic decisions
I disagree about the actual mechanism at play. It is a cart before the horse
situation. Yes, it was driven by business, but that business was being driven by Web 2.0, which was being driven by the natural evolution of communication technology.
I feel like you have that exactly backwards? To me it was a shift in roles in the old field of dreams storyline. I.e. "if you build it, they will come".
In Web 1.0, you posted content and an audience came. In Web 2.0, you tried to open an empty field and commenters came and played with each other.
If anything, what happened next was a sort of halfway reversion, as the platforms tried to stratify and monetize two types of user. A subset who were the Web 2.0 contributors and another tier of more passive consumers. I think a lot of the "likes" stuff was also less about self-moderating channels and more about making passive users feel like they're engaging without actually having to contribute anything substantive.
There was plenty of discussion online prior to XmlHttpRequests, see vBulletin, Fark, Digg, etc. The only thing new about “Web 2.0” was a page refresh not being needed after an http request.
No, metrics and growth always existed and could be measured there wasn’t some technological breakthrough to enable that with Web 2.0. They, Facebook, decided to use it as their guiding principle. They decided to force the feed on their users. They knew their users had no real alternative and the value they had built with getting everyone on the network itself.
If anything, their move was anti-web 2.0. As they moved forum and blogs and news, pretty much all open and accessible content into their walled garden. Even the famous quote “know what’s cooler than being a millionaire? Being a billionaire.” Or however it goes, is a ruthless capitalist telling Zuck he needs to wake up and realized how valuable this thing he’s built really could be.
Carry on if you want but I think you’re very much the one that gets it backwards? Do you remember how it all transpired or are you too young to really understand what it was and what Web 2.0 really was about?
uhh what? Social media has been a thing since the very inception of the internet. What did feel like a massive transition is the massive prevalence of corporatized social media.
I feel like if you asked the a random warez group in 2010 if they would purposely make a "business" friendly version of themselves on a social media site owned by Microsoft they would have laughed in my faces.
No, something can monetize well but only for a small audience. This is what building for a niche does. What works for a niche may not match the macro trends that are at play.
You’re saying that Facebook was somehow helpless to avoid changing from a “friends feed” to an ad-maximizing outrage-inducing misinformation machine because of web2.0 communication technology?
Someone invented XmlHttpRequest and Facebook was like, “well that’s the ballgame, I guess we have to suck now?”
Much like a shot of heroin, yes, this is the take. Facebook got a taste of Web 2.0 and couldn't use it recreationally. It became their entire life. They immediately integrated it into every part of business until it was the only thing that mattered.
Letting unchecked greed guide decision-making is not a new phenomenon that came out of Web 2.0 though. To use your metaphor, the heroin was human attention. Web 2.0 was, at best, the syringe.
What I’m taking issue with is you disagreeing with the GP assertion that Facebook made purposeful business decisions.
I agree that a Facebook had a powerful incentive to act this way.
But they didn’t have to. The fact that they chose to reflects on their moral character.
Internal leaks let us know that Facebook has pretty advanced sentiment analysis internally. They knew that they were (are) making people miserable. They know that outrage causes engagement.
Other internal leaks let us know that Facebook was aware of how much disinformation was (is) being used on their platform to influence elections. To attack democracy.
They didn’t just look the other way, which would be reason enough to condemn them. They helped. When they saw how much money the propagandists were willing to pay, they built improved tools to better help them propagandize.
After the UK was shattered by the Brexit lies, when Facebook were called in front of parliament and congress to explain themselves over the Cambridge Analytica and related misinformation campaigns, they stalled, they lied, they played semantic word games to avoid admitting what is clearly stated in the leaked memos.
These were all choices. People should be held accountable for making awful choices.
Even if those choices result in them making a lot of money.
It sounds kind of crazy to even have to say that, doesn’t it? But that is where we are, partly because of arguments like yours from otherwise well-meaning people.
Don’t absolve them. Hold them accountable.
Zuckerberg wants to own the whole world and thinks you’re an idiot for trusting him. An egocentic sociopath who can’t imagine trusting anyone else because he knows what he will do when you give him your trust.
Even following the $, there was a case for keeping Facebook social. Users are valuable, and networking retains them, otherwise Facebook has nothing over competitors like TikTok.
I'll bet Zuck considered that. Maybe he figured upfront money was more important, especially for acquiring competitors like Instagram and sorta WhatsApp. He might be right, hard to tell.
If you know how to recognize evil people, this doesn't come as a surprise, and there are so many because society has been changed to protect them.
You recognize evil people by their blindness to the consequences of their destructive actions and the resistance to repeat such similar actions.
That kind of blindness is almost always accompanied by false justification, false reasoning, omission, or clever dissembling, or gaslighting to introduce indirection between accountability (reality) and their actions.
There is a short progression from complacency (the banality of evil) to the radical evil. This used to be an important part of history class in public education.
So Meta basically turned Facebook from 'connecting with friends' into 'doom-scrolling random content' and now claims that's what users wanted? That's like a restaurant replacing all their food with candy and then saying 'See? Nobody wants real meals anymore!'
What users want, and what they collectively consume, are two different things. This is very evident in the AAA games industry, which is facing a 10x downturn in funding, abysmally bad (negative) ROI, and exhausted growth engines because it shaped itself around what players would consume for years, ignoring what they actually wanted. And the players got tired[0].
It turns out that demand matters when you sell a product or a service. And it is elastic in ways other than price (such as convenience, value, appeal), but not infinitely so. In plain English, you can force anti-social media onto the market by making it appealing/hooking/addictive/convenient/supposedly valuable for a while, but not indefinitely. People do demand proper socializing, especially recently. Many are realizing they've been sold a total bag of goods just because they consumed it, and it's not good enough to displace real human connection.
> This is very evident in the AAA games industry, which is facing a 10x downturn in funding, abysmally bad (negative) ROI, and exhausted growth engines because it shaped itself around what players would consume for years, ignoring what they actually wanted. And the players got tired[0].
My takeaway from that presentation is more that:
* Games cost more to make but there is resistance from players to pay more
* A number of growth areas (mobile, social gaming, displacing other forms of media, battle royale) are exhausted
* A lot of attention in China is moving to Chinese-made games
* The marketplace is overcrowded with titles
* Gaming is more social now, so a significant number of users are sticking to the same big 5/10 games where there friends are, which leaves even less room for the zillions of new games to gain traction.
I think the industry had a role in this, namely in locking people in to games, and simultaneously overspending on and underpricing games. But I'm not getting the sense (at least from this presentation) that the new games that are coming out aren't what users want.
> Games cost more to make but there is resistance from players to pay more
It's a little bit more involved than that. Games don't have to cost much more to make, they just are due to declining quality of leadership and poor executive decisions. It's more like, "AAA studios are running their budgets up (arbitrarily, usually not driven by any customer request or engagement)" and "players are resistant to paying for that".
"Clair Obscur Expedition 33" literally just came out a few days ago. It's gorgeous high-fidelity AAA-like art, it's super well done, it's incredibly well received, and it's retailing at $50 ($60 for the 'Deluxe Edition') at launch (not including current steam sale). It's doing great, because they made a great product, kept to a reasonable budget, and sold it at a reasonable price. Oblivion also just got a remaster at the same pricing by Virtuos, and it's doing really well. Baldur's Gate 3 is also another example, amazing title, AAA quality graphical fidelity, $60 launch pricing (digitally on Steam & GOG, anyway).
Compare that to something like Ubisoft's "Star Wars Outlaws", which was $70 digital base ($130 Deluxe Edition) at launch. Yes, it's high-fidelity and AAA-like too, but it's very much not well done, it's not well received, and it's arbitrarily super expensive on top of all of that.
Games don't just "cost more to make" automatically, it's mostly not based on inflation or underlying costs. AAA studios are increasingly more mismanaged (or just demanding higher margins) than they did before, and that mismanagement is impacting their cost structures. Instead of fixing those mistakes, companies are expecting players to just forever eat those additional costs.
If the game is really, really good, they might get away with it. (Nintendo, probably). If their games aren't that good, players are going to walk (Ubisoft).
It's not "the market is saturated". It's not "the market is overcrowded". It's "the market is competitive and expects quality", you can't just shove a half-baked only-ok game at high pricing, and expect it to be a success.
> Games don't just "cost more to make" automatically, it's mostly not based on inflation or underlying costs.
That doesn't contradict what I wrote, so much as expand on it. The presentation linked above (which I was attempting to summarize) says there's a push for, for example, more photorealism, that players don't really care about, but balloons various costs. It also mentions recurring costs for online games too unpopular to cover their expenses.
> It's not "the market is saturated". It's not "the market is overcrowded". It's "the market is competitive and expects quality", you can't just shove a half-baked only-ok game at high pricing, and expect it to be a success.
I don't doubt what you're saying about quality of gameplay, but that's really not the focus of the linked presentation. It mentions that too many game studios are chasing dead trends, and unpopular payment models. But it's also making the claim that there might be tons of great new games coming out, but hardly anyone is even trying them.
Honestly I'm out of my depth with this, as I barely game at all, and if you had asked me yesterday, I would have thought the industry was still booming. I clicked caseyy's link and expected something concise about the state of gaming, but ended up reading (most of) a 200-slide presentation.
This. As someone who used to play a lot and doesn’t as much, graphics were only impressive for a minute. Story and gameplay cost roughly the same today as they did 20 years ago and are infinitely more important.
Because it's a good game and the new editions are literally seasons of the same game. World of Warcraft has adopted a model for the last few expansions and players love it. It's literally HN's darling pricing model where it's a subscription but you can stop and keep all the versions you have.
HN just doesn't skew really getting sports people.
I would have no issues with EA and this model if they didn't have the policy of switching off their online servers a few years after the next iteration comes out. Activision has never done this with afaik any Call of Duty (although they do have slightly lower overheads) and it's such a big joy stealer for the sake of costs.
I also wonder if the decline of the middle class and a growing lack of leisure time for the lower/middle class (more people than ever working multiple jobs to make ends meet), also have been having an impact on sales.
There is much to be said about the industry. Most game releases compete for significantly less than 20% of the net bookings each year. Others are black hole games (the multi-year/multi-decade lifespan games that attract players and hardly let go at all), accounting for about 30% of the annual net bookings. The top 20-30 franchises account for about 50%, and the 20,000 other games made annually account for about 20%. Of the 20%, the top 50 releases each year will take 19% of the bookings, with remaining 19k+ sharing the 1%.
Just like Facebook, the first-mover advantage has favored many now-established studios and franchises. They exploded game-development costs because they could, and funneled these costs into marketing and moat features indie developers could not build (such as huge open worlds, amazing sweaty character face wrinkle rendering tech, and SOTA systems). But many of these companies did not respect the player's wishes for well play-tested games with interesting stories and mechanics. Still, they captured the top 20-30 franchise part of the annual net bookings, and strongly compete in the top-50 game part. Some even built some black hole games (GTA Online, Rainbow Six: Siege, Fortnite). For a long time, they avoided much of the pressures felt strongly by smaller companies. They were "above" the 99% of games that have to compete for close to 1% of the revenues. Their marketing was so strong (plus, they strengthened it with access journalism) and features so moated, they could do no wrong.
However, over the last 5 years, things have changed. Many AAA industry legends have left their jobs at major studios to start small studios and create games as a form of interactive art, rather than to make publishers rich. Ultimately, in their view, the greed and blind following of what players would consume (trends) in large numbers led to a sterile industry that could no longer create art.
The growth engines got exhausted because players did not actually demand what they were offering, such as season passes, eSports corporate shooters, microtransactions, padded playtimes, user-generated content, and the other things. The new growth engines (AI, targeting kids, etc) are also what the players don't want very much. The industry understands it, and investors are starting to catch on after facing a decade of poor returns, too. The crucial point I am trying to make is that the industry spent a lot of money on these growth engines that the players didn't truly want, led by market metrics that genuinely showed they were consuming it. But now the gig is up, the writing is on the wall, and everyone inside and out of the industry sees it.
As a contrast, many Eastern companies (Nintendo is an especially prominent example) stuck to classic pricing models, did not inflate the cost of their games with their money for moat (most indie developers can make games to compete with Nintendo outside of the IP), and never used the growth engines used in the West. These companies, along with many people in them whom I know personally, are largely unaffected by the industry crisis. They were always making games their users wanted.
Finally, I have to say, the industry is split in two. 8/10 AAA companies are struggling because they cling to the growth engines (old and new) that the players don't want. About 2/10 game developers and publishers genuinely build games that people want, even in the West. And now that the pressure is up, some AAA executives from the 8/10ths are becoming acutely aware of this. Emphasis on "some". So, yes, the industry in some part was, is, and will continue to make games that players want. But the more interesting part for our discussion is the large part of it that wasn't, isn't, and perhaps won't be.
Of course, there's some probability I'm reading this wrong. I'm making my business bets in the industry based on it, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily right.
And thanks for reading the report before engaging in the discussion. That is appreciated.
games don't cost more to make, just certain out of touch companies keep dumping tons of money into dumb shit gamers don't care about. it has never been easier to make games with a lower entry barrier than it is right now.
I think you've misunderstood some critical aspects of that demo.
The growth numbers don't show what people attribute to them. That timeframe aligns with increases in discretionary spending, and also QE/loose financing requirements. The boom bust cycle can easily be explained as a result of debt financing, and leveraged buyout.
The bust part of the cycle is what you get naturally when you finance poor investment choices.
This is the same Atari story, all over again. Those spends also don't appear to normalize against inflation.
Main console manufacturers also require additional costs which the developer must carry if you want to develop games on those platforms, and the industry has been devoid of anti-trust for decades, and exploitive of its workers (all which increase costs), and regulatory is paying much closer attention to deceptive business practices, with addictive design in some places being comparable to civil battery. The elements for this type of design are scientific, and are based in early last century torture findings.
What you naturally get is overinvestment, shortfall in delivery, stark losses, and a burning down of your supply logistics, where they stop carrying your goods, and won't carry your goods at any price (even on contingency), on top of the rising costs. In other words, you have benefits front-loaded, followed by diminishing returns, followed by outflows exceeding inflows. This is Ponzi, followed by deflation leaving the market chaotic.
Cooporation between large platforms and developer monopoly has shrunk the market over time as well. Extracting revenue in a race to the bottom, with fixed barriers to entry concentrating marketshare.
Open a restaurant masquerading as providing high-quality, locally sourced organic food, discreetly sprinkle the hardest drug on the most popular plates, slowly increase the dosage until people are completely hooked, and voilà, you can legitimately claim "people wanted the drug; it was their choice."
Right, and the things preventing restaurants from doing this:
1. At-scale boycott: would you eat at a McD's where the "Happy Meal" has fentanyl in it? But somehow, this doesn't work for "social" media -- we're all aware what it is, yet we still use it, unironically.
2. Regulation: if a food inspector eats at your restaurant and confirms rumours that your food is actually addictive, your restaurant will get shut down. But somehow, FB/IG/etc. can operate without regulation, and free of any consequences. Sarah Wynn-Williams' book "Careless People" is worth reading.
> Would you eat at a McD's where the "Happy Meal" has fentanyl in it?
This is largely a communication problem. Fentanyl is unacceptable, but a large subset of people would be glad to get food with CBD oil for free. Or caffeine - as last year's Panera charged lemonade scandal [1] revealed. Or alcohol, that's already very normal. Or monosodium glutamate, a personal favorite of mine which was once surrounded by negative press, or high-fructose corn syrup, or trans-saturated fats. Or maybe not an intentional part of the food, but traces of herbicides, pesticides, and antibiotics may end up in food, and microplastics or PFOS from packaging will be eaten as well. And I'm sure you've seen old advertisements for cure-all elixirs that contained cocaine.
Health experts know that certain ingredients are bad, and many others are regularly consumed in quantities far, far exceeding their safe levels, but you don't have to look too deeply at a grocery store shelf or fast food menu to realize that the contents are boycott worthy but normalized to the point of being inescapable.
People know even less about what Meta is doing with their data or what their addictive apps do to their brains, and are equally powerless to learn about it or change it.
People start using/abusing alcohol (and cigarettes, etc.) knowing it is addictive and damaging. This has not affected the business of bars/pubs. With this in mind, it shouldn't be a surprise that people still start using FB, IG, etc.
The fact that Zuck (and Elon) are all buddy buddy with the current admin in Washington shouldn't be lost in the conversation.
> we're all aware what it is, yet we still use it, unironically.
Well, part of that is because people got addicted gradually, starting before it was common knowledge. Another part of it is that people actually do need to use these services (for some reasonable definition of "need") because some friends, family members, government/community services, etc. can only be contacted via these services.
So McDonalds puts quite a bit of sugar into their beef patties. We know sugar is quite addictive to humans. And harmful. Hard drugs are not so acceptable but this is exactly what McDonalds has been doing and yes inspectors confirm this is what’s happening. There is even lots of regulation around food. Yet they find a way.
And we all probably would want it if we tried! It's not that we're in any way better than the folks suffering from opioid addiction. It's all just chance.
One difference that may possibly affect the strength of your argument is that fentanyl is a physically addictive drug. Social media may be "addictive" but they aren't addictive. If you genuinely believe they're equivalent, use social media for a year, and fentanyl for a year, and see which is easier to quit.
Actually, scratch that: make it a thought experiment. But if you can see that they aren't equivalent, you can see that it's not a good comparison.
As someone who has struggled with physical and mental addictions for my entire life: breaking a physical addiction is trivially easy compared to breaking a mental addiction. And breaking a physical addiction is really hard (I'm currently suffering withdrawal effects from a recent decision to quit vaping nicotine and it sucks).
Mileage varies for different people, of course. But dopamine is dopamine and addiction is addiction and it's neither kind nor fair to tell someone else that their addiction isn't real because there's no change in their blood chemistry.
It’s actually what users want “now”. When instagram initially stopped chronological feed users didn’t want it. When they started injecting random posts from people you didn’t follow. Users didn’t want that either. When they launched reels, they also didn’t want that. When they started almost exclusively showing reels like TikTok, users still didn’t want that.
The problem with all of the above is that users eventually got used to the new norm and their brains established the dopamine rewards pathways according to what they were offered. And that’s why they think they “want” it now.
But we’ve seen this happen before. FB did the exact thing and now it’s almost dead, even Zuckerberg acknowledged it. But they somehow think, users won’t eventually get off Instagram because somehow this time it’s different?
Or users eventually get used to it until one day they wake up and realize that the thing they went there for isn't what they get.
I check Facebook less than once a month. I want to see what my distant friends are doing. Instead though I see subversive political memes, and other things (jokes) that are fun once in a while but not worth spending much time on. Because Facebook isn't giving me what I really want I gave up on them. But it took me a while in part because the things I want to see are there - they are just hard to find.
It's just how you define "want." They a-b tested the algo vs chronological feed and the algo one because more people used it. It's just stated vs revealed preference. As a business, who's goal is to make money, does something that makes them more money, are they supposed to stop?
Whether it's good for society is another question but, users definitely didn't show that they "wanted" a chronological feed, they only said it. There was a JUMP in engagement, not a decline.
"want" is different from "will consume if offered". Arguably, the definition of "want" that most people use is one of higher-order desire. E.g. a drug addict wants drugs, but doesn't want to want drugs. People might choose a certain feature if offered and they aren't aware of its negative impact on their mental health. Then they might become cognizant of the negative effects but by then the choice to not use that feature is no longer available so they're stuck with what they have. Alternatively, the choice to not use the feature might still be present, but the neural reward pathways have already been built. The user then wants the feature, but they don't want to want it.
While that’s true of course, I find that a bit of a harsh conclusion. Yes, that’s the end result for any greedy company in a world without regulation.
But you can make that case for most business models. Restaurants? They’ll all eventually turn into fast food chains, because our human lizard brain appreciates fat and sugar more than actually good meals.
Gaming? Let’s just replace it all with casinos already. Loot boxes are just gambling anyways.
There’s absolutely a market for proper social media that’s actually social. It’s just that companies are way too greedy currently.
That is true but you have to be very specific about who your "users" are.
If your "users" are the guys in charge of showing more ads to people, then yes. People, on the other hand absolutely prefer watching their contacts' posts first. Recommendations related with their individual preferences, second. Random dopamine-inducing stuff, only from time to time. If you prioritize the third kind only is like someone said already on the commments here: like a restaurant that only serves candy. They will have customers for a while but eventually they will burn them down (or kill them).
sure, that's "what people want" inasmuch as if you put every button through a statistical microscope, that's what the statistics will tell you, but if you give a rat cocaine-dispensing button and measure how many times it hits the "more cocaine" button you'll also come away with the conclusion "rats want cocaine", a thing they never encounter in nature and would never have encountered without you putting it in front of them, and you'll pat yourself on the back and say "now I understand rats: they are all vicious cocaine fiends", but you haven't really learned about rats' true nature, you'll have only conned yourself into a false narrative that confirms that your own actions are only "giving the rat what it wanted", and after it dies of an overdose, you declare yourself innocent. Anyway that's a/b testing and the tech industry.
Well people really-really "want" many other things too, like free money, sex, etc etc. Does it mean that something that started as a way to connect with friends and family must turn into Only Fans for example? Or cater to all those other wants that have nothing to do with friends and family, just to make a few more bucks?
Users, or me at any rate, want more than one thing. For my family and friends I want to see what they say without junk added and my family has currently moved from facebook to a whatsapp group to achieve that.
I also browse random junk on xitter. It's a different thing.
It’s only what they “want” after the various social media companies to deliberate steps to addict their users to feeds that maximize engagement.
Does an addict really want to be an addict? The Light Phone, screen time features, and various other things exist for a reason. People don’t want this, but feel helpless to break free from their addiction, which entered their life like a trojan horse.
People want slop, they always wanted slop and there is no magical mind controlling powers in a Facebook feed. It was the case in the age of TV, magazines and when nobody had any idea how to even measure what people want.
If Mark Zuckerberg forcibly injected educational material and long form journalism into everyone's feed the average user would uninstall the app. People have been consuming crap since they were able to draw boobs on cave walls with chalk. Do you know why every belief system that claims people are ensnared by some false consciousness fails? Because they aren't, there's no such thing. Mark Zuckerberg is exactly right about one thing, he gave the people what they wanted, and if he's going to lose to a platform like TikTok it's because they're even better at it
I was speaking more to the work of Nir Eyal. His ideas were widely used in the tech industry and he quite literally wrote the book on how to build habit forming products.
Facebook has simply been climbing towards a local maxima that is poorly correlated with what people need to connect. They rely on mountains of data for their optimization but their reward function is just off.
There already is a reasonable alternative for connecting with the people you know. Group chats.
Your implication is correct in that there is no reasonable alternative for distracting oneself. At the same time, I'm not sure that if you were to build an alternative, it would not degrade into "content" scrolling as well.
-under network effects, you can’t spin up a viable indie alternative (like you could for a note taking app) because you need to massively attract users
-the less engaging social platform is the less economically viable social platform
So the natural end point for any social app is content doomscrolling
> Any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.
They will measure you then do everything they can to increase the number of minutes you spend on the site. The media recommendation is a consequence of cost. It's very cheap for them to maximize your time spent using other peoples content.
> It’s our human lizard brain on dopamine.
There are tons of ways to get dopamine flowing into your brain. Which is why it was important for Meta to monopolize and dominate the field. Turns out lizard brains are exceptionally fickle.
Not consciously, no. But our conscious mind is just the tip of the iceberg, half-filled with post-hoc rationalizations for numerous unconscious urges. We don't have to call them "wants", but maybe "desires" works better.
The problem is we know people are capable of seeing through their own ego and witnessing these urges for what they are. This usually leads to them gaining control over them. This is mostly what therapy is supposed to be about.
Taming our internal animal nature is possible. People don't for all kinds of reasons. This leaves them susceptible to simple addictions.
Advertisers are also good at weaponizing psychology to manufacture wants that people didn’t know they had and in many cases don’t want to have after the purchase.
Most users want to scroll through internet TV passively. However there is a big enough minority of users who want authenticity, novelty, and creativity in their online experiences. This group is big enough to sustain, say, a social network.
We've just never solved the Eternal September problem.
You're describing the cozy web. The Eternal September problem is actually solved right now it's just semi-invite-only.
I am a part of more genuine social networks now then when facebook launched. They're all around you, it's just "giant supermassive public square" never really worked even with strong recommendation algorithms to try to ad-hoc connect related people and cut down on the perceived size.
Most of them live on Discord, others on the fediverse, none are large by any metric and highly personal.
I agree. People want to eat well, quit smoking and get in shape, but mostly they eat crap and sit on the sofa in front of the TV (present company included). Which is what they really want?
What they do. There are long-term goals and short-term goals (convenience etc.) Society pressures you into having long-term goals even if you don't do anything about them.
Complete nonsense, they just have a bot that optimizes for engagement, engagement doesn't equal longevity or increased revenue volume over some number of years. Nor does engagement mean that it's what you want. If someone walks up to you on the street, gets in your face and start assaulting you and you engage is a fight does that mean you "wanted" to get into a fight?
This is like an old school forum optimizing for flamebait threads, it's clearly not going to work. The major problem is that while advertisers love engagement they hate toxic content, low quality content, violence, drugs, porn, illegal activity, extremism, bots, trolls, etc
Eventually the media will build some story and the bottom will fall through, this process is just slower than usual because users are siloed into bubbles (like if you report a racist video they will show you much less, but there are still tons of people watching tons of racist videos and getting ads)
I know from a strictly economic standpoint the things I do are the things I want. But is doing an activity are you addicted to what you really want in a human sense?
Young people in Europe and North America do not use Facebook anymore, if they even have an account at all.
It is still popular among older users in North America. This is one of the wealthiest demographics on earth, so Facebook’s advertising model will be ok for the foreseeable future.
Growth is still positive on Instagram and WhatsApp, though Instagram’s engagement levels have begun to decline.
Facebook’s main growth areas for all three apps are in the developing world. They pay carriers to allow Facebook to be accessed without counting against user data limits, so in a lot of these countries Facebook is synonymous with The Internet. Young people in these countries still see Facebook as cool, and they aren’t as likely to seek out platforms to avoid their parents on. The key problem is that these markets are not worth very much to advertisers because they have low levels of discretionary spending. This makes operating in these markets a long play for Meta; they spend some money on subsidies to build a user base in the hope that the users will gain higher levels of discretionary spending in the future, increasing the value of the market for advertisers.
sure, it may have been a majority at the time. but imo chasing that was incredibly short sighted.
many many many people warned them this would be the outcome. in typical fashion for these people, they ignored it, imagining themselves to be smarter in every area than everyone else.
i’ve said it before and i’ll say it so many more times: we need to better at realizing where our intelligence is behind. some people are untouchably genius in social situations but absolutely terrible at stem. and some stem people may be absolute genius at engineering work but entirely lack understanding of social/humanity issues.
far too often only one of those two groups understands their lack of understanding. if you ask the best party planner in the state to engineer an automobile, they’re going to look at you like you’re a crazy person. ask the best engineer in the state to plan the years most important ball, we’re going to fully delude ourselves into thinking we can do it better than the party planner.
>Any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.
This is unironically why I think we need a government funded non profit website for friendship and dating. Any such site subject to the whims of capitalism is doomed to become toxic
High end restaurants work against this trend by cultivating taste. They convince their customers to eat their vegetables, literally. They can do this because there is an ethical value associated with dining which is embedded in our culture. You enjoy a fine restaurant because it is right to enjoy it.
Facebook failed because there is no ethic associated with social media. You can continue to degrade the quality and nobody will say "hey stop, it's not supposed to be like that". FB bootstrapped by co-opting the instinctual value of social connection with your friends, which TikTok and IG also copied but with strangers instead of friends.
HN is a kind of this thing. It's netiquette. We still stay around here because it's the only place with tech discussions and at least some amount of decorum.
> nobody will say "hey stop, it's not supposed to be like that".
Is that not exactly what drew people from Myspace to Facebook in the first place? There was a lack of appetite for the flashiness and gaudiness, and an appeal to how classy FB was.
This is partially true. FB was initially much more classy in its exclusivity, i.e only certain universities had access. That only worked while they were scaling up, and ended in 2006, long before Facebook became dominant.
There is definitely an ethic associated with 'being informed'; I remember being told to read the news as a kid and it felt like vegetables.
Scroll media is fast food, and fine dining is books or long form sub-stack-- which cost more money but also will-power. The question of how scroll media can deliver high quality information is similar to asking how drive through can serve vegetables. I think it comes down to the fact that you can't cultivate taste unless people are paying with will-power.
I would venture to say 95% of people don't enjoy (and/or cannot afford) "fine" restaurants. But mostly don't enjoy. And a restaurant would go bankrupt trying to convince them to eat healthy. The proof is the existing state of the market. Although daily GLP-1 pills might be able to change that.
It is what people wanted though, from Facebook. Most people, including you and I, connect with friends through DMs in various apps, WhatsApp, or an equivalent group chat messenger (iMessage, etc.)
Facebook has become a lot like TikTok because that's what people want from an app that has a feed. We, en masse, don't engage with a feed of just our friends' posts (FB actually has a friend's feed which gets relatively little usage). When we open a feed-based app, we want the long doomscroll. I do think your restaurant analogy is apt. I mean nutritious food is healthier for people, but a miniscule number of restaurants serve such a thing, and none do which aren't trying to fill a small niche in the market
I doubt that. In my entourage, Facebook was always thought as a social hub for internet presence. Like maintaining a web site, but with less tediousness. So you fill it up with personal details, then share happenings with your friends. And just like an hub, it's the entry way for more specific stuff, like messenger for DM, groups for social activities, pages for personal or business activities. The feed was just a way to get updates for stuff that's happening around you.
Facebook used to provide a good experience of staying in loose touch with people I didn't know well enough to have ongoing conversations with. It was nice to know roughly what was going on with people, and if something big happened (like a kid, a new job, a death) I would see it and could reach out with congratulations or condolences.
But some people posted every meal and cup of coffee, and others only posted occasionally, and Facebook decided to bury the occasional posters and promote the high-engagement users instead. That's when Facebook became more bad than good for me, and I left.
If we could go back in time to that point, and prioritize posts in inverse relation to the poster's frequency instead, I'd use that service.
Except the content quality on TikTok wasn't only brain rot, and the algorithm often grew into valuable content. That is, if you actually wanted it. If you want brain rot, it'll give it to you.
Meanwhile, you don't even get the choice on Facebook.
I think it's more like a restaurant offering both candy and burgers.
When candy sales outpace burgers, they're naturally going to invest more in candy. Eventually, they start to compete more with Hershey's than McDonald's.
I guess the problem with this analogy is that it fails to capture the essential nature of Facebook: that its base product ("hamburgers") has a network effect, and the new product ("candy") doesn't.
If Facebook is a social network for seeing my friends, then there's nowhere else for me to go. They're on Facebook and it's unlikely they're all going to join some new network at the same time.
If Facebook is a high engagement content farm designed to shove random engagement-bait in my face, then it's just competing with Reddit, Digg, Twitter, 4chan, TikTok. Folks can get addicted to this in the short term; but they can also get bored and move on to another app. Based on conversations with all the IRL human beings I know, this is what they've all done. (The actual question I have is: who is still heavily using the site? Very old people?)
What I constantly see, are businesses that would be just fine continue doing the same, but die instead because they tried to evolve into something and alienated all their existing customers/users and couldn't attract new ones because what they evolved into made no sense. But no, businesses want to take over the world (or at least have a large slice from the pie) so they "evolve" no matter what.
This isn’t quite true. There are many businesses like Colgate that are steady state with a reasonable amount of growth that do fine in the stock market.
Numbers can naturally go up with the population, unless the product stays the same and newer generations decide they don't want it. Facebook suffered a double hit from both changing the product to scrollslop instead of a way to check on friends, and from becoming "uncool" with young people because it's what their boring parents used.
Infinite growth!!!
How silly we still are as a species. The more of us there are, the stupider we act, and we don't even do anything to prevent it, we just let the consequences of our own stupidity roll over us one day, when they can no longer be stopped.
> There has actually been a friends-only feed on FB for years. Timelines -> Friends filters everything down. The problem? Nobody I care about posts anymore.
Is that really the only problem? How many taps/clicks do you need to get there? Can you make it the default? And how obvious is it that it actually exists?
People in UX research told us constantly they wanted the feed to be about friends, and chronological.
Several times we ran A/B tests with many millions of people to try exactly this. Every time all the usage metrics tanked. Not just virality and doomscroll metrics, but how many likes, messages, comments, re-shares, and app-opens. We never even measured ad-related things on that team.
So people say they want this, like they say they want McDonalds to offer salads.
Nobody orders salads at McDonalds.
I really appreciate the reply, thanks for sharing that.
> Every time all the usage metrics tanked.
What if that's exactly what people want? Less usage of Facebook (horrifying, I know -- it can't be true, right?), with a focus on friends etc. when they do use it? I know you'll dislike the analogy, but isn't all that different from smoking. You think usage metrics tanking implies the outcome is bad... why exactly? Is it that unthinkable that less quantity and more quality is better for people, and what they actually want?
> So people say they want this, like they say they want McDonalds to offer salads. Nobody orders salads at McDonalds.
You seem to be missing that the people who have the means to eat out wherever they want don't eat at McDonald's every few hours. They go in moderation. They actively want to avoid McDonald's most of the time. Once in a while they get a craving, or get super hungry and don't see other options, etc. and they cave in and go there. Of course the get the tasty unhealthy option when they go, but it's foolish to think they prefer to eat McDonald's all the time. (Do you seriously believe that??)
I don't dislike the analogy. I eventually reached a point where I couldn't stomach the TikTok-ification of the product that Zuck forced us to keep marching towards, so I left.
Personally I agree with your point, less social media is better. I personally never go to Facebook anymore and set up app limits on my phone for my health. I won't let my kids use it at all.
But I worked at a company and drew a considerable salary, so I did what I was expected to do to make the product make money.
This seems like such a bizarre thing to put your finger on in the middle of an otherwise seemingly sincere post. Of all the hatred people have had toward Facebook the past > decade, I don't think "it's too much like TikTok" was the cause that has kept them up at night. If anything there are a ton of people who would much rather TikTok could be replaced by Facebook, so that at least the national security implications would be less dire in their eyes.
But yeah:
> But I worked at a company and drew a considerable salary
nice to admit what everybody knew. With the kind of compensation Facebook gave, I doubt many would've behaved differently.
Just take the win. It seems like such a bizarre thing to nitpick like this with a prior employee that has voluntarily opened up to you and agreed with many of your points.
I really wanted to, but that bit wasn't some minor detail. It felt pretty darn central to the whole thing, as it undermined what seemed like the central point.
Imagine this from a tobacco-company ex-salesman: "I don't let my kids smoke, I don't think it's healthy. I eventually left Camel because I couldn't stomach the Marlboro-ification of our product." So what we're being told is... after so many years of people complaining tobacco is harmful, they're saying they knew that all along and would've been totally cool with it while the money was coming in, but the straw that actually broke their (pardon the pun) Camel's back was that... their product suddenly started resembling their competitor's?? Or perhaps they're saying they don't believe it was harmful until the product stopped differentiating itself from their competitor's (but then the salary aspect would've been moot before that point)? And, either way... so we are reading all this after the rest of the world has been (pardon the second pun) fuming for much longer over much more concerning reasons?
It seems pretty darn important to understand what the regret is -- and I don't even mean this for judgment purposes (although it would inevitably impact that); I mean this for the larger purpose of understanding the thought process itself, for dealing with it in the future. i.e. if the reality we're facing is that product differentiation is what keeps people in such positions, rather than a disregard or misunderstanding of the societal or public-health impact, that's... news to me. And so (to me, anyway) this seems like an absolutely crucial detail to unpack, not an unimportant detail to gloss over.
But, yes, I very much appreciate that they shared this, and I'm sure it wasn't easy to in any case.
>Several times we ran A/B tests with many millions of people to try exactly this. Every time all the usage metrics tanked. Not just virality and doomscroll metrics, but how many likes, messages, comments, re-shares, and app-opens. We never even measured ad-related things on that team.
Well, yeah, but this has an implicit "engagement === good" assumption. Exactly the same thing that incentivizes unhealthy McDonald's food: they make more money when they sell food that still leaves you hungry. So, yeah, people probably did want this, and when they got it they started using Facebook in a healthy manner (no point opening it at every available moment to just scroll through 'new' trash), which tanked your metrics. If you're actually worrying about your users you should also consider that them using your product more might not actually be what they want or need.
Ironically enough, I think the same mistake (or rather, it's more of a mistake because there's not quite such a naked financial incentive to make this worse for the affected users) has happened with the youtube analytics dashboard: multiple youtubers have said that it's actively addicting and really bad for their mental health, but any change that feeds that probably looks really good in their metrics because, hey, creators are using it more, that must mean it's good, right?
Trust me, I came in there full of motivation for "do what is good for the actual humans", and most of the rank of file were the same. FB's employees are not evil or exploitative, though I won't say its unfair to describe the leadership in such terms.
Many times in product design meetings I would interject with "but this hurts people!" etc.
We hated that our personal careers were directly tied to increasing the junk-food factor. It didn't feel good at all. But the choice, as crafted by HR and senior directors was clear: Junk food this thing, or lose your jobs.
the problem isn't introducing junk foods into menu, but focusing on the junk foods performance and killing other food categories as the result. I know that companies need revenue to survive and improve, but they're currently focusing too much on revenue and profit that they kill everything else.
it's like introducing unskippable ads and page-wide pop up ads makes user use adblock and killing other simpler banner ads.
I'm sure there's more that could be shared about how "wants" were determined, which would counter my off-the-cusp thought here, but anyways:
Yes... my ideal would be for facebook feed to be a once-a-week addiction (maybe a bit more) where I go, see what's new, and clearly hit an end point where I know I'm seeing things I've seen before. But I'm also part of the "problem" in that I post myself maybe twice/year now.
I'd suspect the current doomscroll-y feed like we have now/you were working on reduces my likelihood of "interacting" with friends' posts. "Do I make the effort of commenting, or lazily keep scrolling to the next-often-good 3rd party content?"
A year or two ago, I copied some greasemonkey type script off reddit, and that nuked all the non-friend content off my feed, but that stopped working a couple months later and I haven't been strongly enough motivated to find an updated approach. I have little enough friend activity that I'd easily notice when I hit old content.
The current doomscrolling feed of algo content sure does manage to hook me, so that's a nice indicator of the current team being successful :P
There's an old saying: you can never get enough of what doesn't fill your need.
For example, when you need sleep, you can't eat enough to make you not tired, but you may well pound a lot of caffeine and sugar.
If true, this would accomodate the simultaneous truths that:
(a) users accurately report their preference chronological friend connection when they come to a social feed
(b) users spend more time engaging with a social feed when the need they come to fill has irregularly payoffs
That you can get more engagement by not giving them what they want/need (or giving them what they need irregularly) wouldn't mean that they are lying to you, it would simply mean that engagement and social payoff curves aren't the same, and the incentives to drive one might not optimize the other.
I still see other content, even there, but it's still somehow manageable. I run out of updates very quickly though whereas I'd like to just start seeing older posts from friends that I've seen already.
Facebook commonly runs A/B testing on their UI. It is almost weekly for me and one of my friends to ask each other “hey do you have the <x> tab at the bottom” for Meta apps. Marketplace, Dating, “All Chats” in messenger which was just the same as the slide out menu I bet people didn’t use much. I also think they change per-user depending on what they use.
edit: I decided to check real quick and I do have the friends tab. Here’s a crop of it, note I edited out the last “Menu” tab for privacy.
Not only was that Friends tab not there for me by default, but it also does not do the aforementioned when I customize the top(? not bottom) tab bar to I include it. What it does is to show me a list: of pending friends, and friend requests. No space to show any posts to begin with. To see my friends' posts, I have to click the hamburger, then Feeds, then Friends, then (sometimes) manually pull down to refresh, because it usually just lies to me that I've already caught up. This is designed to be actively user-hostile, as if they were forced to implement this against their will.
You might be interested in FreeFollow.org [full disclosure, I'm one of the engineers working on it].
It combines the economic model of web hosting (users pay to host spaces, reading is free, and writing in someone else's space is also free), the simple UI of social media (you have a profile and write posts), and the E2EE security model of 1Password (we actually implemented their published security model). It's also a non-profit so there's no pressure from owners to exploit users.
It's aimed primarily at parents of young kids who are annoyed at constantly sharing via text groups, but non-parents are also surprisingly into it.
Independent social media run in a cost-effective way and actually helping their community is the future. I really hope non-American devs learn this because most American devs are too busy trying to get rich.
Thanks for letting us know. Unfortunately we haven't been able to reproduce that with the current version of Firefox, but if you'd like to email us at hello@freefollow.org we'll add you to the list manually.
> There has actually been a friends-only feed on FB for years. Timelines -> Friends filters everything down.
I remember when this was called "Lists", and I carefully gathered acquaintances into lists. When I wanted to check in with particular list, I clicked on the list.
Then the lists sidebar disappeared (but you could still get the functionality if you knew the URL / argument structure).
Then the functionality disappeared.
I'm sure some product/UX staff did career making things on a metric somewhere.
> The problem? Nobody I care about posts anymore. The "flywheel" is broken.
Why post when there's no guarantee who/anyone will see it amongst a firehose of bait-y and often angry stuff?
This is part of the anti-flywheel which draws towards doomscroll.
> group chats
Group chats have the baseline virtue of knowing who your audience is.
They're missing other virtues, but that's probably another conversation.
I think they recently made a big deal about this even? The fact that they would “promote” something that likely reduces time spent scrolling and viewing of ads means that no one is going to use it as an alternative to doom scrolling. They know they got you hooked on the good stuff and are just pretending to not be the bad guys
Discord too. Most of my friends are on Discord, we have group chats and private servers. Many communities use Discord as their primary online hub too.
It is concerning. Discord has been slowly enshittifying for the last couple of years: ads (ex: "quests"), app bugs, etc... There is no export option and even public servers are not accessible to search engines and archives.
I’ve noticed my kid (12) primarily uses group chats over social apps. Some of his chats have several dozen kids in them. It could be social media got so bad that the protocols became the best alternative. An old programmer like me sees a glimmer of hope in a sea of noise.
It's been that way for awhile, though they do use instagram and/or tiktok for consumption.
iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for teens that exclusion.
The kids have been taught the dangers of sharing things on the internet, so the risk is minimized sharing in private chats (though obviously still there).
> iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for teens that exclusion.
Craig Federighi fought against supporting iMessage on Android and RCS for a long time saying, quote, "It would remove obstacles towards iPhone families being able to give their kids Android phones."
Maybe in your neck of the woods, I see no evidence for outside of that. iMessage is completely irrelevant where I live. SMS/MMS full stop is irrelevant.
In the US, people overwhelmingly use SMS/MMS/iMessage by default. It works with every phone, it's the one platform that people won't say "I don't have that" to.
I've no doubt it may be the case in the US, I did not mean to suggest it's not. It simply doesnt have the same sway everywhere.
I don't know literally a single person who uses SMS/MMS/iMessage where I live. And it's been this way for years. It's easily 99% whatsapp/messenger/discord etc. It's pretty openly joked about that the only thing SMS is still for these days is spam/marketing/political messaging.
> I've no doubt it may be the case in the US, I did not mean to suggest it's not. It simply doesnt have the same sway everywhere.
You're correct, of course. WhatsApp was significantly more popular than SMS in the majority of Latin American and European countries before iMessage even really picked up steam in the US. But it doesn't matter, because the US, by revenue share, is the world's largest market, full stop. One of the lessons we can learn from the social media business model is that you can get incredibly large entirely off the US market before it even makes sense to engage in the rest of the world.
The person you're replying to is correct in context of the US market, which if you're Apple is basically the only market that matters other than China, since in the rest of the world most people use Android, usually due to cost differences (flagship Android models sell extremely poor volumes compared to iPhones, even globally).
Its about the extra features iMessage has because of Apple's superset of the underlying SMS/MMS functionality. Its also about having a blue bubble (not-poor) versus a green bubble (poor).
It defies belief how much some demographics care about this stuff, I didn't believe it when I first heard either. Some of it is improving with RCS but its got a ways to go.
Exactly this. Even if RCS does everything iMessage does, you still have a dreaded "green bubble" in iOS messaging which is a huge (anti) social signal to teens.
Does it justify their reason for hating on Android/green bubbles? Of course not, but that's 100% the reality of the situation.
Teens care about silly things like that, but a real thing I care about as an adult is group chats working properly. Like, I was looking for a realtor last year when buying a house. One of them had Android, and I really thought about it, do I want to take a nonzero chance of that somehow screwing the plans up on closing?
That's not the main reason I went with another one, but I still paid attention to how many group iMessages we were in with lenders, seller's realtor, or just me + wife + realtor. Things really did come down to the hour during negotiating and closing, so it might've mattered.
Worrying about whether or not somebody has an Android is going to be very bad for your mental health given that something like 42% of the US cell phone market is Android. Is it possible that you are living in a bubble of people that are significantly more committed to Apple products than the median person?
I don't live in such a bubble, and whether or not somebody has Apple or Android is not something I have ever heard an adult bring up as a serious thing. The most I've ever seen is as an observation about why some sort of thing in a group chat didn't work, but then everyone moves on with their day and the chat continues with the types of text and media that do work.
Apple's implementation of RCS is such hot garbage that I disabled it and revert to regular SMS to text with Android people. I'm sure the shoddy RCS support is just a terrible mistake and not by design...
Would you mind listing a couple issues you’ve seen with it? You’ve got me curious if they affect me and I just don’t notice it what. I don’t have all that many contacts though, so it may be just be a numbers game.
Finally getting around to this... The problem was always that the messages just would not send. "Message failed to send. Try again?" I'd say that happened 3/4 of the times I tried. It simply wasn't worth it to fight with it.
Because people like sharing photos and videos and MMS is hot garbage? My phone can record 4K60 video and take 48 megapixel photos, but MMS can only handle 0.72 megapixel photos under 300KB and 240p video capped at 30 seconds. Why would /anyone/ in 2025 want to use SMS/MMS when they could use iMessage or RCS, or even WhatsApp, Signal, Messenger, Discord, et al?
I see this line of thinking online a lot, with people mentioning kids are excluded because they have green bubbles as if it’s some sort of highly superficial exclusion based on only wanting to talk to Apple users.
The main issue is that including a non-iMessage user changes the protocol of the group chat from iMessage to SMS and SMS can basically make group chats unusable.
I also don’t like that kids who don’t have an iPhone can’t participate in iMessage group chats, but when we make out like it’s just kids being cruel and not an actual functional incentive to not include those kids then we are losing sight of where the pressure should be applied.
The pressure should obviously be applied on the underage children with the Apple products, or better yet on Apple. Perhaps the children should be punished and have their iPhones taken away and replaced with budget android phones or flip phones.
This is good in the long run since the behavior they were engaging in puts them at odds with nearly half the population. Not only is it anti-social behavior, it's mind numbingly stupid and likely to backfire in ways that make their lives worse.
~43% of the cell phones out there in the US are Android phones. To follow their conviction against Android at all convincingly and thoroughly, they would be missing out on a lifetime of opportunities and would live a significantly diminished existence.
iPhone is not even close to being a dominant enough platform to be able to enforce this kind of social pressure against anyone but people significantly under the age of 18. Shame them, make sure they feel bad and spoiled (they should feel spoiled for being a child with an iphone), and watch them grow out up to be pro-social adults.
iOS/iPhones are the majority of phones in Canada and the US (~60%). However, if you take the upper half of household incomes that number skyrockets to 80-90%. Comparatively, in the UK it's 50/50. In the rest of europe android mostly has a 60-75% market share (tends to drift more towards android the more eastern you go - signalling wealth has a lot to do with it).
The reasons why are varied (everything from wealth signalling to switching being a pain and iphone mostly had a first mover advantage for quality and availability for the first several years), but it's only in the last two years that I've seen people start to use multi-platform chat apps here. Most of my peer group with other parents all default to imessage group chats for sharing photos, stories of our kids.
I am also starting to notice a loosening on apple's services. Spotify is used by more people than Apple music even amungst the apple households I know.
Kids are ruthless about anti green bubble discrimination and it’s part of the reason for the rise of incels. The overwhelming majority of incels are android users, and the mainstream cultural media likes to make clear that one of the reason for being incels is them using a “poordroid”
Lmao. Don't pay any attention to the thing about incels, which whether true or not, so obviously does not establish that android was a causative factor. Look at the percentage of US people that have Android. iPhone is not nearly as dominant in the US as spoiled brat teens seem to think. Nearly half the population is Android users. I'm sure we are all incels.
Yeah, 99% of incels (at least the ones I know about, mostly because they hit the news) have an obvious mental health tick or manifestation that turns off potential romantic partners. These people are being excluded (rightly or wrongly) because of that, not because of Android.
The countless myriad number of TikTok’s, reels, etc from women calling out how using an android is a dealer breaker. The community made polls of “incels.us” about this exact question, and the other links I cited showing green bubble social discrimination.
My original post has enough receipts. If you don’t believe me you’re free to remain wrong. But here’s more anyway:
These memes posted on short video sites also have parallel ones of women making fun of guys who try to do the whole “hold on let me pirate this movie and HDMI connect it to the TV thing” instead of having Netflix.
I don't doubt that some women make fun of men for green bubbles, but this doesn't mean the vast majority of incels are Android users. If that were true, wouldn't they just get an iPhone?
Also the HDMI thing is hilarious because it's exactly what my wife would say about me.
> but this doesn't mean the vast majority of incels are Android users
Is there such a thing as incels? I thought it was just a stupid concept to bully people. Not that it doesn't exist, but I wouldn't think that there is a category of people (kids, I guess?) who "are" incels, is there? In some contexts, some kids are "considered" incels by bullies.
In this case, it's guys who want a girlfriend but are constantly rejected, which is a thing, also same in reverse. But if anyone ever says it's because of bubble color, it's probably an excuse for an actual reason.
Sure, but my point is that it is a dumb, irrational concept. And therefore I don't think that there is such a thing as a "description of incels".
I could get with "the vast majority of kids who get bullied have Android phones", maybe. And instead of saying "haha you're poor" (which is already moronic in itself), the bullies say "haha you're an incel". I guess because it hurts more?
But "the vast majority of incels have an Android phone" both implies that "being an incel" is an actual thing (which it is not) and that having an Android phone has an influence on one's ability to find a partner (which it has not).
WhatsApp never caught on in the US since cell phones and SMS were a great deal for keeping in touch. By the time WhatsApp arrived US carriers were not raping their customers for phone calls or SMS messages (in the early days of cell phones they were - be very careful responding as the state of the world has changed many times over the years and so it is quite possible you remember a time where your country was better than the US for reasons that are no longer true!). Note in particular calls and SMS to a different state is included, and typically Canada is included as well. As such we never developed the WhatsApp habbit as it didn't give us anything.
Yes. WhatsApp isn't nearly as popular in the US as in many other countries.
Idk what the stats are on this, but anecdotally, all my friends use FB Messenger if they want cross-platform group chat, but that's slowly changing to some fragmented list of alternatives. And usually it's not for semi-important things like get-together plans.
It literally works seamlessly though? Just converts to MMS and you don't notice outside the "liked BLABLABLA" sort of messages that trickle in without the imessage emoji system.
I don't think seamless integration with MMS is enough to outweigh being different/not having "the real thing" or the full experience in the eyes of a young teenager. This reads as the HN version of the "but we have iMessage at home" meme (I mean this humourously, not as snark).
iMessage chats also include rich media that is either degraded in MMS (photos, videos unless you have RCS support) or just doesn't exist (like multiplayer games, invites, apple cash, etc).
This may not seem like a big deal to you, but if you remember what it's like to be a kid, you should get it. The smallest friction can be a reason to exclude someone socially.
Even that has been fixed by now in my chats with android friends. The only reason to display green bubbles anymore is to indicate lack of E2EE. But that will be coming to RCS interop soon as well.
In theory it's ok. In practice, MMS group chats are broken. It's not even an iPhone thing, as evident in Android-dominated areas still relying on WhatsApp instead.
Group chat has always been the killer social app. 6 years ago I convinced my browser friends group to adopt Telegram and since then we’ve all abandoned FB, Instagram, etc… We have a ton of different threads all with different topics: kids, food, gardening, exercise, pets, memes, and a bunch of serious topic threads as well.
It’s been incredibly effective at keeping us connected and engaged as we’ve all moved across the country and grow in an apart physically.
The take away is; what people want from social media is to be connected with their real friends. However that isn’t as engaging as a random feed, so the companies push people away from that.
I guess group chat would be fine if all your friends are friends of each other. High School and college ages maybe, but as an older adult, I have so many different groups of people that I interact with that it would be obnoxious to deal with. I also find that there are certain people in group chats who are lonely and spam crap.
I do that in Signal, I have group chats with different circles of friends ,and we also regularly create short-lived purpose-built chats for events or other things...
It's a bit more friction perhaps but in the end it works well and we've been doing it for years.
I'm in a similar group but using Discord. It seems that lack of advertising or any kind of algo feed is the common feature. Who runs your Telegram server?
I hate group chats (hate). It's a cliquey childish high-school cafeteria mode of communicating (thus why highschoolers use group chats). It's a clear step backwards and is representative of the covid-era stazi-like mentality people developed where they felt it was unsanity to share their views or life with the world at large (and maybe, given what we've learned about social media and nation-states, that's not without merit -- i.e the UK). Perfect world social media is a means of forming connections and expanding your little room(s).
Is it - hear me out - possible that you are overthinking this? People tend to use group chats for coordination and quick banter with people they already know. Not as an alternative to the phpBB boards of old.
Eh, I think the parent has a point. You underline it yourself when you say “people they already know”.
The internet didn’t always involve a choice between “talk to people I know” vs “bravely/foolishly taking on the vitriol of a wild horde of angry delusional maniacs”, but now we’ve lost almost all of the space in between those extremes. People like hacker news exactly because it’s the rare place that’s still in the middle *(sometimes, on some topics, for now)
There’s a lot of people on hackernews with whom I cannot agree on a great many important things. Happily, none of them appear to be technical, so it works out fine.
There's far too much downside to sharing your genuine thoughts, especially on politics, or things you find funny, etc. with the entire Internet because regular people and nation-state level actors will vilify you and nowadays even have you deported for things you say publicly.
That's why we all use group chats and messaging. There's no safe alternative
>It's a clear step backwards and is representative of the covid-era stazi-like mentality people developed where they felt it was unsanity to share their views or life with the world at large...
... what? I'm in my late 30's and group chats have been a part of life for myself, my friends and my family since the late 90's. I've never wanted to share my views with "the world at large" online, but I have no problem being myself and sharing my views in meatspace, where being open and honest about who I am is far more impactful to those I interact with and the world around me than it ever has been on social media.
Within the world of the pop-web, even on this website to a point, the ability to have a truly nuanced discussion has essentially been eliminated. People would rather throw out hot takes based on disingenuous interpretations of someone's comment/statement rather than try and have an impactful, open conversation.
Sounds like you’d have appreciated 90s era irc, which was good for nuanced and sincere discussion, but also did not require talking to people that you already knew.
There’s a sweet spot between open/closed and known/unknown and somewhat focused but not too niche where it kind of works. Theres a certain size that works too, ideally Lots of users and yet occasionally you recognize someone. But I don’t think that’s what people mean at all by group chat today, which regardless of venue tends to be rather more insular and thus echo’y.
In IRC, and as many do here, you used an alias to have the confidence to speak freely. Products like WhatsApp where people reveal their real identities don't lend themselves to that frankness when membership is open.
I very much appreciated 90s era IRC back in the day. I find community comparable to what you described in still-existing phpBB and phpBB-esque hobby-focused forums that I use regularly.
There is nothing preventing you from expanding your group chat roster. It is just that random strangers can't drop in; you have to add them.
You would have to sacrifice the privacy of your group if you wanted to support serendipitous membership growth. Do you want to be constantly reviewing membership requests? That's what Facebook groups look like. And you have little information to judge the requests by, since the profiles can be fake, especially today. And when complete strangers can join the group, the dynamics change.
I never understood why they became less popular when mobile phones took over. Even in the 00s so many people were already in group chats through MSN, ICQ and so on.
All Microsoft had to do was make the former into a proper mobile app. Instead they wasted billions on Skype to replace their golden opportunity.
>?All Microsoft had to do was make the former into a proper mobile app.
I begged Microsoft to make MSN on Windows Mobile and later on Android or iPhone.
They just dont get it nor do they care. Whatsapp wasn't even a thing on Smartphone. Its dominance came a little later.
And without a smartphone or mobile network, people keep in contact especially those not in close group via Social Media aka MySpace and Facebook or Friendster.
Now smartphone ubiquitous in most places. The contact list has taken over. Social Media became a news feed.
This is actually one of the great entrepreneurship lessons of my career, which I think about a lot.
Around 2009, as smart phones were on their exponential leg up, and when I was still pretty new in the workplace, I remember thinking (and talking with my coworkers) about how messaging and chat rooms were really well suited to the technology landscape. But I lamented "too bad the space is already too crowded with options for anyone to use anything new.
But all of today's major messaging successes became household names after that! What I learned from this is that I have a tendency to think that trends are played out already, when actually I'm early in the adoption curve.
Heh, this reminds me of a vaguely related lesson I learned recently. Sold Nvidia mid-2023. "Surely everyone understands by now just how much money they're going to be making the coming 2 years, and this is already completely priced in, it's so blatantly obvious!". Heh.
Ha, someone who has money to invest asked me about an investment thesis at the end of 2022 related to the release of chatgpt. I said nvidia seemed like the most clearly likely to benefit in terms of public equities, but he said no way, it was already overpriced. :shrug:
Everything hypey overshoots eventually, but nobody knows exactly when!
I think those networks never figured out how to make money off of it. Without the tracking (and piles of VC cash) that modern social media got, the ads were not worth enough. Microsoft and AOL just saw them as cost centers so when the mobile ecosystem didn’t support their legacy persistent-connection-style protocols they saw no value in investing in rewriting everything.
Piles of VC cash were never necessary, FWIW. Tracking, potentially. They may indeed have massively undervalued ads, or even other monetization options - Line makes millions off of emojis and such, and if they'd have been as big as Whatsapp, possibly billions. Meta too is not even tapping 5% of Whatsapp's monetization potential, FWIW. I wonder if it's intentional to prevent anti-trust concerns.
But I don't think monetization matters too much. Ms tried making the botched Skype play, and as a company there's no way they didn't understand the value of hundreds of millions of eyeballs, daily usage market share. They understood that with IE, despite it being a zero-revenue product in and of itself.
> when the mobile ecosystem didn’t support their legacy persistent-connection-style protocols
You may know more about this then I do - what's the main difference? I used them back in the day and as end-user they felt the exact same as modern messaging apps. I send a message, it gets saved on some server, the receiver gets it from there. When I used it, it definitely didn't require both parties to be online to send/receive.
I remember using a lot of very low quality, buggy Skype apps on mobile over the years. I don't think it ever approached desktop quality.
To be honest it didn't even work great on laptops that got turned on and off or went in and out of connectivity. The networking piece seemed designed for an always on desktop.
Feels like it went myspace -> facebook -> snapchat and never went back to such "public profile" ideals and stayed in chat apps. When I was in college in the early '10's, it seemed like everyone was obsessed with the "temporary chat" idea and actually believed that you could guarantee a message or picture could be temporary.
Did they become less popular? I think they are just less visible by nature, they've always been pretty common. I guess some people switched to Facebook Groups for a time, but even that is sort of a form of group chat.
They never worked properly on phones, including images/video and history. Same for SMS chats on top of being hideously expensive because the phone companies thought it was still the 1960s.
Yes, that's why they should have made them work properly.
Simply put the main problem was that those old IMs required a persistent connection to the server when you "just" had to add a new protocol that can do session resumption/polling. Then make a pretty mobile UI and make it possible to find other users by phone number - imo this was the number one reason why WhatsApp and iMessage won. It's an app on your phone, so it uses your phone number, not another artificial number or name or mail address - it's something the most tech illiterate gets. Because then it's just "SMS but with groups and photos". But you could have allowed to merge it with your existing account from desktop times, so all the young hip people would've kept all their contacts.
IIRC one of the reasons WhatsApp has done so well is that they basically supported every platform under the sun, which was a technical challenge back in the day.
These days the field is much narrower but 10+ years ago finding an app that supported everyone's device was a challenge.
> one of the reasons WhatsApp has done so well is that they basically supported every platform under the sun
Not really. There's still no iPad version.
My friend installed Whatsapp from the App Store for their iPad, to find it didn't behave quite as expected, and didn't match their phone and desktop experience.
That turned out to be because it was an app from some random third party with its own features. It used Whatsapp in the name, and had a similar logo.
When my friend realised they were unexpectedly using a third party app, from a provider they'd never heard of, they were worried they'd accidentally given away access to their account full of sensitive messages to someone they didn't trust.
I was surprised my cautious friend would install the wrong app by mistake, as the Apple app store is normally good for well known services.
While scrolling through Whatsapp apps, it took me a while to realise the top search result, which my friend had installed, wasn't actually from Whatsapp (but looked similar). Even though the logo was a little different, I assumed that was just a quirk. It's just so unexpected to find that what you get on iPad isn't the real thing, when searching for Whatsapp gets you the real thing if you're looking from an iPad or Mac.
I think WhatsApp's magic sauce was the effortless onboarding. No need for accounts, passwords, nagging for 2fa, your email, your socials, just get the app and go, by delegating all that to the phone (and phone number as the user id).
Am I misremembering the timeline of real access to SMS and data? I feel like most of the 00s most people had limited of both without spending a lot of money.
Group chats are: free, have no ads, and sharing is with exactly who you intend. When I want to send a photo to direct family and in-laws I don't blast it on social media, I send it to the group chat that has direct family and in-laws in it. That's it, easy-peasy. Even my 70-something mother in-law participates in it.
...but you have to share it specifically with each separate group. When I take a cute photo of my son doing something, I have to share it with the family group for my side, and that of my wife; and none of my friends or random extended family get to see it. If my wife's fam shares a photo of my son that I think my fam wants to see, I have to manually port it over. Back in Facebook's heyday, I could just share it; or if my wife's fam tagged me in the photo, my family & friends would see it as well.
And, of course, in group chat, your different friend groups never interact. One of the coolest thing about Facebook in its heyday was when two of your friends who didn't know each other had a cool conversation on your wall and then became friends themselves.
Unfortunately there really doesn't seem to be a proper replacement -- BlueSky and Mastodon are replacements for Twitter, not Facebook. Group chats aren't as good, but they're the closest thing going.
i actually think it's good that you need to explicitly share the photo with each group. people like getting a message that they know you decided you wanted them (or their little group) to see.
if i see a photo that a friend broadcasts out once on a social feed, i see it and move on.
if a friend puts a photo in a text/group chat, i know that it's something they wanted to share with me
IMO it absolutely is the better way to model it. There's a reason that verbiage already existed in English. The other commenter is right though, there are the rare interaction between social circles that are lost but honestly I remember seeing just as many poor ones on FB back in the day as spontaneous positive ones.
Circles was basically an ACL system, which isn't fun. Even if you do care exactly who you're sharing things with, it's not easy to tell with a Circle who that is.
>...but you have to share it specifically with each separate group
For me personally, this is a feature not a bug. I want things I see to be things that somebody wrote just for that channel. It's why I use group chat over social media.
It’s the same for me (in my thirties). A decade ago, Instagram showed me photos that my friends shared. Today it’s ads, memes and other crap with a small proportion of photos of friends. The noise:signal ratio is so high that I don’t even bother.
Facebook was the same a long time ago.
Social media in the form it had 10-15 years ago has died. But I don’t think it’s an inevitable path: I think Meta has iterated in their services in a way that killed what was previously there.
Really makes you wonder if/when Discord goes IPO, that Meta would buy a controlling stake in it?
Fortunately there are open source alternatives even if they aren't as popular as Discord at the moment, such as Revolt Chat: https://revolt.chat/
I miss the days of self-hosted forums; sadly it seems that algorithms, and the need to satisfy the need for 'instant' connection/information are ruining forums for young newcomers...
Back when we all had pet dinosaurs in our back yards and you only saw what your friends post.
This is a useful function as opposed to what the engagement algorithms push these days. So no wonder everyone moves to other options for group communication.
You mean you don't have a "where do we go out this saturday" chat group with your friends circle?
I see similar too. Both my teenagers got WhatsApp because we as parents had WhatsApp. They have slowly started using Signal in their friends groups. Now as a family we use Signal because the kids started us on it. We are based in Europe and iMessage is almost never used. I’m only on WhatsApp now because other parents are still using it. Sadly my oldest uses Instagram (on a strict daily timer), but apparently “it’s still cool to have an insta” and the killer feature there is that is super easy to network without sharing your phone number (I know signal also has this feature but it’s a bit hidden).
I think you're right, but also groupchats allow you to create cliques which facebook never really offered as a feature. What they did offer was broadcasting lists which is not the same as a clique. Groups didn't really integrate cliques well IMO as they were more "public oriented" but they are probably the closest thing.
Usenet: eternal-september.org - you might find others after a while but there are no other major free text servers. If you pay another company for binary access (these are mostly used for piracy) you can also use it for text though.
I have chats for the parents in the class, parents from kindergarden, all the dads, my family, extended family. The list doesn’t end. It’s far, far better than Facebook though.
I go to sci fi cons and telegram has become the de facto method of coordination for everything. Party, meal, event we all want to attend, any kind of meetup we create a channel for it to be used ephemerally and invite everyone who’s going. It’s a million times better than any event invite functionality of social networks, absolutely frictionless and without all the frankly stupid stuff social networks add.
> Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram
Such a liar. Of course users will watch whatever FB shoves in their eyes. That doesn't make it a preference.
> Meta exhibited a graphic of a boxing ring showing the logos of Instagram, Facebook, and the various companies that Meta argues are competitors, including TikTok, YouTube, and Apple’s iMessage,
So his defense is that Facebook & Insta are just like youtube and tiktok. But Google is already under fire for divesting youtube, and tiktok is banned. Is that a good defense?
It depends on what you mean by "preference". If you show me a pic of a hot guy and the picture that a friend took while hiking, I'll probably look at the hot guy for longer, so one could claim I prefer it. But that doesn't mean I think it's better to spend my time like that.
Someone made the observation that the problems started when things changed from social networking (family/friend) to social media. From actually keeping up with people to 'keeping up' with content.
Turns out most people don’t have a friends and family group that can generate exciting content at a rate that most people want. The platforms oblige this with “reshares” and “you may also like” content, and eventually everyone’s like “who gives a s*t about aunt Millie’s cupcake recipe, check out this dude trying to skateboard off of the Eiffel Tower!”
I'm sure I could (indeed, I do) get pertinent updates from actual friends and family with <10 minutes of checking messages, voicemails, and emails per day. I wouldn't mind increasing that to 15 minutes if it meant I got a few less relevant but still interesting updates about their lives.
But that's way, way under the daily minutes spent by most people on TikTok. And if I wanted/my addiction demanded another hit of that "Oh, neat!" buzz when I'd just put my phone down 10 minutes ago, there's little chance that anyone in my small circle would have posted a single thing in the interval.
I don't spend nearly enough time in my group chats to justify Facebook's valuation. And there are no ads (yet, I'm sure they're working on it) in those chats.
Yes. Social sites had a card blanche to publish anything without consequences because it was user-generated content.
Social sites used that power to publish their own stuff under the same protection.
That has broken the system. Social media sites are 100% responsible for all the misinformation, scams, and hate that they publish or promote. And they should be legally accountable for it.
"We are not accountable because the users are the ones posting the media"... but we post and promote whatever we want is a terrible way for the world to work.
I've been of the opinion for the last 5 years at least, that if Meta and all of it's associated products and platforms suddenly disappear from existence, nothing of actual value will be lost. There are better competitors for everything they do. I don't think I can pinpoint one single unique thing about Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp at this stage in time. Everything they do is done or executed better by a competitor. They had some sort of advantage in the late 2000's and early 2010's, but that's it. I'm not optimistic for their future and relevance.
For better or worst, Fb has become the de facto place for cruising sailors to share information about different regions of the world. Tips, alerts, advice, questions, etc. I sail the world and there is no other place for groups quite as good for finding the information we need. There’s a niche group for every area around the world full of people sharing advice and answering questions. The good groups have great moderation and quality content.
where nothing is searchable, linkable, or otherwise legible. That's a tradeoff. It has some upsides, but downsides as well.
(granted search has been struggling to not suck in general lately, facebook among others has joined the campaign against legible links, so losses are taking place in web environments anyway)
Moving a community is much much harder than you're making it out to be. Especially when there's a long history of content and - most importantly - trust between members.
Asking people to re-learn the new modalities and UIs and where everything is etc.. particularly for a less technical crowd.
I'll reach for it - Meta increases consumer spending and has enabled a lot of small businesses to profit during the previous economic booms. Yeah they were drop shipping products from China using the de minimis exception, or hocking worthless supplements, or promoting influencer products that are no different then the generic but costs twice as much, but a lot of people made a living off an ecosystem that arguably would not exist without Meta.
Further the success of Facebook was arguably the biggest contributor to startup culture ever - I would expect we'd have seen a fraction of the growth in VC if Facebook had never come to pass.
Groups, WhatsApp, etc, would be replaced overnight with, at least initially, a worse version. More hacking, probably worse moderation at scale, worse accessibility, etc.
Meta also gentrified East Palo Alto, and the Zuckerbergs now own a substantial amount of real estate in Redwood City and elsewhere. They've made a big footprint on the peninsula that deserves credit for the now $8 lattes in my hometown.
I would go even further and say the world would be a significantly better place without any Meta products (and most other social media). At this point, they are a considerable net negative on society as a whole.
Sure, but you can say this about every company & product in existence. Either a better version already exists, or will pop up in minutes after the current one disappears. Network effects are strong enough that this simply won't happen. Meta has close to 4 billion active users across all of its apps. That's literally half the planet.
I am keenly aware that virtually every acquaintance of my age is connected to me via Facebook. If it disappears, they all disappear. There is no replacement. There is no backup plan.
That being said, I've already cut Facebook out of my life years ago for sanity. So really, I'm just mourning what's already all but gone in my life.
When social media started out, it was simply a feed of what you followed. FB, Twitter, Reddit, everything — they showed you a chronological list of everything that the people/groups you followed posted.
It was glorious.
But it wasn’t making money. These platforms were all funded by investors in hopes that they would someday make money.
And now they are — through ads and sponsored content that no one asked for or wants, via algorithms designed for one thing: profit.
It’s zero surprise to me that social media platforms have become the garbage that they are now.
I’ve moved on from all but a couple platforms (HN, Board Game Geek, and Bogleheads — arguably not social media platforms in the same vein as the others mentioned, because they aren’t trying to monetize, except BGG which monetizes via traditional banner ads, which I’ll take 10/10 over “content ads”).
But I have zero interest in returning to anything that injects their sponsored content in the middle of feeds.
If social media platforms can’t figure out a way to monetize without injecting this garbage, I’ll stick to these others.
My YouTube account had recommendations for music because that's what I use it for. When they launched YT Shorts (basically their version of TikTok), that section was 75% thirst trap videos, albeit still music-related. Like "cool violin solo" but played by a girl sorta pointing the camera up her skirt in the thumbnail. I never watched those or anything similar, but I guess they knew I was male and wanted to hook me.
So briefly, Zuck is arguing that the social media which was Facebooks main business of 2010s no longer exists and that Facebook has now pivoted to generic content consumption, competing with YouTube, TikTok, Reddit etc.
The article says FTC is in a bind here.
IMO it's veey simple: Yes, FB shifted their focus and are now a content hose. They still have monopoly on some market(s) - not where they are competing with e.g. TikTok. Local events, marketplace, genuine personal social networks.
That doesn't mean that they don't also compete with TikTok elsewhere, where further market consolidation could be a concern.
Anyone who uses instagram should be abundantly aware of this. The default behavior of the app became "Serve you all content we think you would like, in the order we think you would enjoy it". This pretty much means "You may or may not see the content of channels/people you specifically follow".
The app went from just showing you a stream of posts from people you follow, to just showing you a stream of posts it thinks you would like.
What is worse is that the feed is generated on the fly. Switch apps for a second and your os kills instagram in the background, and you might not ever find those posts it showed you a few minutes ago ever again.
I have the opposite problem. Every time Instagram starts in the background (allegedly to check for feed updates but probably to get my geolocation) it uses so much memory it pushes out things like my on-screen keyboard. No doubt Meta has figured out ways to manipulate Android to get priority over the keyboard, and only tested it on the very latest phones.
I use it exclusively for announcements from certain brands with e.g. seasonal rotations or sales (small shops, especially, are often way more consistent about updating one or more social media accounts, often Insta, than their website, if they even have a website) and it's such a pain in the ass for that reason. I don't trust ads or their "algorithm" to promote quality (I reckon they're more likely to promote rip-offs and fly-by-night operations) so I super don't care about anything else they want to show me, even if it's directly related to the kinds of brands I'm following. I deliberately do not do new-stuff discovery in the app, because they have incentives to screw me.
The only thing I want out of it is to see the posts made by the accounts I'm following, since the last time I checked. That's 100% of the functionality I care about, and the app goes out of its way to not deliver it.
They don’t really have a monopoly on local events or marketplace.
Facebook is popular for these things but that’s because Facebook had a big user base, not because they keep competitors from forming.
They have a network effect that smaller competitors don’t. Thus, at the end of the day it’s the user’s choices that keep Facebook a sort of monopoly in those areas.
> They don’t really have a monopoly on local events or marketplace.
Yeah, I'd say from 2004 - 2015 was the heyday for me on local events for small bands, house shows, and punk/DIY venues. Eventually FB Events died out socially by not being able to send invites to mass groups of friends/previous attendees, and attrition, and so on... A real shame for non-major venue events and the DIY scene.
Marketplace is semi-useful still, quasi-better than craigslist, but keeps getting filled with a lot of cruft of drop-shippers and scammers.
I had almost forgotten about the 2004-2015 music scene on Facebook. For me things died down around 2011 when the police started using Facebook to identify and break up unlicensed events.
> They still have monopoly on some market(s) - not where they are competing with e.g. TikTok. Local events, marketplace, genuine personal social networks.
Yes, but none of these are a valid reason to force them to divest from Instagram and WhatsApp.
> The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in “the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.” This under-recognized shift away from interpersonal communication has been measured by the company itself. During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.
There is a Peter Thiel tactic of Monopolies where you deny you are monopolizing a sector by defining your company as "in competition" with a much larger and hazy market. The example in Zero To One is Google disguising its online advertising market by comparing itself to the total global advertising market, both online and offline.
I see the same tactic here, where Facebook is trying to hide its user data monopoly [3] by situating itself to general news, lifestyle discovery, and general communications. However this is counter to the actual internal communications where Facebook would discuss buying or crushing competitors, like Snapchat [0] [1] [2], as a way to maintain their hegemony.
Don't be fooled by what Facebook says about itself. Concentrate on what it values.
Why do you assume he didn't know this? He very knowingly pivoted from friends' content to where the real money was – politics, clickbait, outrage bait, doomscrolling, gambling, scams, illegal ads.
>During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.
I find this very interesting. Yes, there has been a decline, but even before this decline, this data suggests that users "viewing content posted by 'friends'" was only at 22% on FB and 11% on IG. That feels incredibly low to begin with to me, and suggests that it already wasn't about friends. I wonder what the longer trend looks like.
I don't expect them to be honest at all. But if we're operating under the assumption that they can't be trusted to be honest with their data, it makes it even weirder to me that they would start with numbers that already showed such low friend-focused usage when trying to make their point.
This kind of reminds me of when Fox News had to admit (in court) that their news wasn’t really news, it was entertainment. It’s wild how they always say the quiet part out loud when they’re being sued.
Write an algorithm to maximize in app time, so he ended up building a content media platform not a social one. If the goal is to show as many ads as possible, you will always end up with more media than social
I support a small group of elderly people on the side. At least once of week they land on a Facebook video which then leads to the "your phone has 78 viruses" scare ad. I tell them to stop using Facebook and they look at me like I'm crazy. One of them even said, if I turn off my phone when I get that scary ad, does that keep me safe?
Seriously, talk about self fulfilling. "We stopped showing people content from their friends, and people started spending less time viewing content from their friends. It's inexplicable, really."
The unspoken thing really is: We couldn't find a way to make mega-bux on showing people content from their friends, so we stopped being a social network almost entirely so we could make mega-bux showing them garbage ads and disinformation campaigns instead.
IG was a social network that made me feel better after using it. It used to be a peaceful, well presented, personally curated stream of still photos.
It really sucks that every single platform is lured into the brain-attention hack of short form video and the optimization of attention quantity over interaction quality. All cycles repeat though - here’s hoping.
> “It used to be a peaceful, well presented, personally curated stream of still photos.”
Ha! This is the opposite of my experience. I feel Tumblr was superior platform for images and art on small phone for no other reason than you can easily pinch and zoom. I still prefer still images on the Tumblr platform, and my feed is filled with artists, designers, photographers and comic book covers.
I never liked the experience of viewing stills on Instagram and only when my friend started producing small videos and another friend started sending me fishing meme videos, did I start engaging. Now I do spend some time each week in Instagram (same as YouTube shorts). The platform is perfect for sharing small instructional videos. My feed is full of motorcycle mechanics hacks, fly fishing lessons, fitness instructions, and camping knots—all to my recreational interests—I’d rather be fishing.
The last thing I want to see is what random people I don't know are posting. Maybe there's a stream where I can see that, but not in MY news feed. I want to only see what my friends are doing, and maybe what is going on in a group that I belong to. Nothing else. No AI prompts or responses, no suggested friends, videos, groups, etc. To make Facebook even tangentially useful to me I have to use FBuster or other extensions to remove all of that junk.
I'd like to know how much that time spend viewing content posted by "friends" are down since 2012, because I bet it's more than in the past two years, by a lot.
There's also:
> "The F.T.C. is arguing, instead, that Meta’s purported monopoly has led to a lack of innovation and to reduced consumer choice."
Not really, because no one gave a shit about providing a good social media experience, everyone wants to copy Zuckerbergs homework.
If you want to blame Facebook/Meta for anything is it breaking the trust of people to the extend that no other social media can exist for a decade. Meta has burned the would be early adopters to the extend that they will NEVER sign up to a new social media platform ever again. Meta (and Google, Microsoft and so many others) have shown that spying on customers and selling their private data is business and now the tech savvy users that would be the first onboard and advocating are no longer signing up to anything that cannot guarantee absolute privacy.
Facebook also killed of pretty much any other marketplace, but I am interested in seeing how the newer generations are going to affect that, given that many of them doesn't have a Facebook account.
Did FB chose to replace friends' posts with garbage, or was it that less and less people were posting, and FB had to replace the feed with _something_?
Some mid-level manager idiot's a/b test revealed that they could maximize engagement by showing more rage bait and less family. This increased revenue and nobody wants to suggest a change that lowers it.
Those aren’t mutually exclusive options. Facebook wants to always have new things to show people so they stay on the site, but it was absolutely their choice to deprioritize your friends’ posts below advertisers and the “engaging” slop.
Meta is an ad business. You maximize ad revenue by maximizing time spent. You maximize time spent with a slot machine that exploits our psychological weaknesses.
Meta intentionally drives this and don't forget that it's helped by millions of influencers that learned how to maximize engagement.
A good-faith Facebook with exclusively a friends-only timeline might generate 20% of the current ad revenue. And it won't matter much because the bad-faith competitor will do the dopamine approach and users will be attracted to it like flies.
My mom's area in northern Michigan got hit by a huge ice storm last month that took out hundreds of power lines and cable/internet. Facebook was the primary way the community communicated during the 5-15 day power outage. That was extremely valuable. There are a few special topic groups that are still great as well. Other than that rare situation it's been a desert.
Broadcast social media is so odd to me now. It feels like walking to the center of town and shouting about your life to everyone.
I go to Facebook once a week or so, scroll for about a minute, then close it. It was a novel experience reconnecting with people from my past, but in the end, I just found out too much about people, realized it may be best to let people in your past stay there, and that comparison is truly the thief of joy.
Now, I just like watching interesting people talk about interesting things. I get that here, somewhat, reddit but lately only in a very narrow way, tik tok as long as I carefully maintain the algorithm, and youtube. All of them I have to be careful with, otherwise I can get pulled into hellholes of outrage bait. And I'm really, really wary of engaging in dicussions anymore. HN is about the only place, and even then I often regret it.
One time, on reddit, there was a discussion about dishwashers, and how people needed to clean food off dishes, otherwise it would fill up the filters. I posted a link to a user manual showing that it was common to hook up the dishwasher to the garbage disposal to take care of that. I was downvoted into deep negatives, and I think one or more negative replies for just posting something simple and factual.
Even here, half the time I post, I feel I will end up regretting it.
And here, if you post something you later regret, you can't delete it or delete your account, which is pretty questionable on a social network in the modern age. So much for 'the right to be forgotten'.
At least once a day, I type up a comment somewhere, proofread it, think about whether I really want/need to post it, and then hit the back button. I figure that next-to-last step of asking myself whether it's really something I want out there is a good habit, and if the answer is always yes, I probably haven't thought about it enough.
Glad to hear my own experienced echo'd. I've been dialing off of the stuff (even HN) for these very reasons. The staggering one is this:
> I was downvoted into deep negatives, and I think one or more negative replies for just posting something simple and factual.
One of the darker side-effects of social media is that everything now feels very ideological and "team sports." You're either "with us" or "against us," nuance has basically been obliterated. Even more shocking is that in some places, it seems like anything that's truthful/factual or plausibly truthful triggers a visceral negative reaction in people (to the point where, what used to be polite disagreement is now a rage-dump).
Social Media suffered the same fate as all companies. A constant, relentless, unnatural pursuit of growth by stripping all humanity and focusing on numbers.
Social Media has turned into an unhealthy addiction
We still need the 'organization' part. Clubs and social circles moved from blogs etc to Facebook because it was easy.
Room for a startup? A simple club hosting site, that does substantially what you get from a facebook club page. Maybe even a tool to scrape facebook and automatically create your ClubPage entry painlessly?
The key thing that Facebook Groups and Pages solved was the network effect. If you were on Facebook already, you could join a group or a page without signing up users. If a post from a Group or a Page came in, it came in through a common notification platform. It was the place where people already were, and if they weren't there, eventually there was enough pressure to join because "everyone else was already there". And all of this was good for Facebook, because it was at the time when they were trying to capture more users, which brought more eyeballs to ads.
I think any startup trying to solve this problem is going to have a really hard time because it will ultimately be external to the platforms where people already are, and user behavior has shown that they're inherently sticky to platforms. I wish it wasn't this way, because I think it'd be great for folks to be able to do this on their own.
Apple could / should be the one to tackle this by allowing iPhone iOS users the ability to create their own social circles. They dipped their toes into this a little with Invites.
Do we really need a central server to manage our friends and our circles? Decentralize the whole thing and it neuters FB and the ad surveillance universe.
Does anybody know a good alternative to Facebook that doesn't force you to read its feed suggestions?
I only have FB because I'm member of some groups where people post content that I'm interested in. I'm not interested in anything else. I find FB's constant stream of suggestions annoying as hell.
It requires that you curate your connections, and discoverability is a known problem.
But I get to see posts from the people I follow, and "boosts" of posts they think are worth seeing, and there are no ads, and no algorithms deciding what I should be seeing and filling my feed with them.
I'm not saying it's a good alternative, but I'm finding it useful and refreshing.
Is it? Are you sure centralized authorities for "discovery" are a good thing? After all, the "discovery" algorithm is making people move off FB to Mastodon...
You join Mastodon and want to find a specific friend.
Good luck!
People are accustomed to using centralised sites. They search by typing the target's name into a search box and get presented with a collection of options. That's less successful on Mastodon.
I'm trying to point out that people have experience of Facebook and Twitter and other platforms, and they expect when they join a new platform that they can type in their friends' names and get results. They then find that Mastodon doesn't work like that, and complain about the lack of "discoverability".
And they're right ... discoverability on Mastodon is not like on other platforms, and it is harder to find things.
Yes, I know how to do these things, I am, after all, a moderator on an instance with over 20K users. I'm just trying to point out that for some people the fact that "discoverability" doesn't work as it does on other platforms is a huge stumbling block.
If the only thing keeping you on Facebook is sources of specific content, you're looking for a platform that also has sources of that specific content. So it depends on what that content is, doesn't it?
You gotta find those small communities. I'm into 4wheel drives and use facebook groups but I'm often on Ih8mud now. Just a better place to be imo. You got to find where your people are at
I think Facebook app an option to see feed from your friend list and following page/group only . I can't remember, probably long pressing on feed tab will show this option.
I'm surprised most commenters haven't mentioned that the presence of Tiktok as the biggest reason why Facebook was pushed into this direction.
Ben Thompson of Stratechery did a great deep dive into Facebook's Three Eras here (https://stratechery.com/2025/meta-v-ftc-the-three-facebook-e...). Essentially, Meta could afford to prioritize positive well-being when it had a monopoly on social media, but as soon as Tiktok came onto the scene and Meta started bleeding users to it, they had to respond. Now, everyone (Instagram, Youtube Shorts, Twitter, LinkedIn) is copying the model of vertical auto-scrolling short-form videos, because it's a battle for attention.
What _was_ Facebook supposed to do when it saw all of its users leave Instagram/Facebook for Tiktok? Not do anything? Though it's terrible that everything is now a short form addicting video platform, I understand the logic behind why the company did what they did (and why everyone is building this). People say they want real connection, but really, they just want to be entertained.
> What _was_ Facebook supposed to do when it saw all of its users leave Instagram/Facebook for Tiktok? Not do anything? Though it's terrible that everything is now a short form addicting video platform, I understand the logic behind why the company did what they did (and why everyone is building this). People say they want real connection, but really, they just want to be entertained.
Innovate.
It’s not necessary to turn your company into a toxic disaster to compete.
"The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in “the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.” This under-recognized shift away from interpersonal communication has been measured by the company itself. During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram."
So they algorithmically force various other posts into your feed, and then observe that people are spending more time looking at that crap and less time actually connecting with real people and friends.
I'd bet that this is ultimately about people's preferences for consuming content, unfortunately.
People will say they only want content from friends, just as they say they want to eat healthily. But the desire and the reality end up looking very different.
People at large will spend time in whatever surfaces are the most engaging (~addictive), and if a platform like Facebook removed those "other posts", it's likely that people would just spend time on another platform instead -- TikTok, Reddit, YouTube Shorts, etc...
It's like if the #1 grocery chain removed all the addictive stuff. No junk food, no soda, no alcohol. In the short term, people might consume less bad stuff. But in the long run, the #2 chain would take over, and we'd be back where we started.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it's a very tricky problem to tackle at scale.
> It's like if the #1 grocery chain removed all the addictive stuff. No junk food, no soda, no alcohol. In the short term, people might consume less bad stuff. But in the long run, the #2 chain would take over, and we'd be back where we started.
What you are observing is a case where market signals result in obviously undesirable outcomes. The problem cannot be solved from within the market, the market's signaling needs a tweak. In the case of this example, a tweak to bring purchasing behavior inline with what people want to be buying in the long term, what they know is good for them. This could be achieved by mandating some form of friction in buying unhealthy food. Banning outright tends to go poorly, but friction has seen great success, like with smoking.
I'm not sure exactly what this looks like for social media, or if it's even a necessary form of action (would banning surveillance-based advertising kill feed-driven platforms as a side effect?) but as you say, the market will not resolve this even if an industry leader tries to do the right thing.
> People will say they only want content from friends
I actually don't want content from friends, at least not in the way Facebook presented it before becoming another TikTok.
Facebook showed me the worst of my friends: polarizing political opinions, viral marketing, etc... These come from really nice people in real life, but it looks like Facebook is trying its best to make me hate my friends, it almost succeeded at one point. Thankfully, we met some time later, didn't talk about all the crap he posted on Facebook, it and was all fine.
I'd rather hate on public personalities and other "influencers", at least, no friendship is harmed doing that.
The only thing I miss about Facebook is the "event" part. If you want to invite some friends for a party, you could just create an event and because almost everyone was on Facebook, it made knowing who came and who didn't, who brings what, etc...
Exactly. If people weren't liking it, it wouldn't be successful. The point of these apps has become to be the thing you do when you're slightly bored and want to experience that's not the line at the deli counter, subway ride to work or sitting on the toilet.
It almost doesn't matter what the content is as long as it's more engaging than that actual moment of life.
I have neither TikTok nor Instagram nor Facebook (anymore), but I know from when I had Twitter that the endless videos are engaging. I'm not above having my attention captured by them, so I know not to engage with the networks themselves.
It's precisely what you say: I would like to say I just find that stuff horrible. But no, if I had those apps, I'd be using them as distraction too.
> If people weren't liking it, it wouldn't be successful.
When you talk to people, most of them want to do less of those apps, so its not about wanting it. Its the fact that _all_ companies know how to make really addictive stuff and they only lose when more addictive things come out.
Yeah exactly. Nobody's happy with their internet/phone usage these days. But also, I do know quite a few people who genuinely enjoy using TikTok.
Either way, what should we do about it?
We're not going to ban vertical short-form video. Mandate screen time controls? People will get extra devices. And expecting people to just Do The Right Thing has not ever worked.
Social media is genuinely like cigarettes, where it's so ubiquitous and people are so addicted to it that you can't just ban it.
Cigarettes were reduced a ton by banning them in most places indoors, taxing it way higher and making them harder to access (i.e. ask for them behind a counter vs. vending machine)
But cigarettes also have negative externalities like the smell and the effects of breathing in a room full of smoke. Phones don't have that—if someone's scrolling on their phone, it makes zero difference to you, so there's far less of an anti-phone movement than there was in smoking.
It absolutely makes a difference because tv shows are usually 20 mins at least, which means watching 3 minutes in the supermarket line is actually a bad experience, so it requires more deliberation.
I’d also argue that the average TV show is more edifying than the average social media post but that’s another topic.
There's more engagement with consuming content, therefore more ad opportunity and more revenue. But entertainment sources are more fungible than communication platforms. So in turning FB into a media company (effectively) they may have grown faster, but they also made themselves more vulnerable to a disrupter like TikTok.
But is it not observing what grabs your attention, and then serving you more of it? ;-)
I get what you're getting too, also wall-of-texts multi-image posts, often content reposted from reddit, I guess the algorithm thinks "Oh, user is engaged for many seconds with all the images on posts like this, gotta serve them more of them!".
I've programmed Tasker to kill Instagram after a minute of me opening it and I've made another Tasker script that asks me to input a 9-digit random number, makes me wait between 5-45 seconds and then allows me 10 minutes of the app before making me do the whole process again.
Women with few clothes (sadly) always grab my attention, yes. But I think that content is also being pushed despite my attention to other things because it works in general.
But you get the point, the recommendations are just a stream of nonsense-content, screenshots of screenshots of Reddit posts...
I don't get it. Either there's no good, original content available out there or the algorithm just doesn't want to show it.
> But is it not observing what grabs your attention, and then serving you more of it?
I'm reasonably certain clicking into a piece of content to block the account still counts as more engagement for that type of content. They don't seem to have a "clicked, then immediately blocked" sort of signal.
>If you don't look at those posts (and even flag one as "not interested" when it pops up) they go away pretty quickly.
this is broken, I get stupid posts with same image, about body parts and english words for them, I marked it as not interested at least 3 times,
but it appears again and again from other poster . So FB is incapable to now show me the exact same thing over and over again despite me telling them 3 times I am not interested.
Also I doing some math stuff with my son so now I am getting images with math in them, tracking really works
Flagging them will clean it up for a while, but I find eventually it will show you a few more here and there. If you stop scrolling and ogle for a little bit then it starts feeding you more again.
It's all broken because the incentives are all broken. Everything is optimized for maximum profit through maximum screen time and maximum ad impressions.
If anything the online advertisement industry has shown that it cannot be trusted as a means to support businesses while having those businesses provide a healthy, no addictive, worth having product.
Would it truly hurt Facebook, Google or YouTube to make less money. Many companies could provide better solutions, if they where happy with less profit.
Whenever using a Meta product I have to be hyper-aware of what i stop scrolling on or click on, because Meta is all about "revealed preference" instead of what I explicitly tell them I follow and like.
IE: Don't let your eyes linger on eyecandy on Meta's platforms or they will feed you a firehose of horny slop.
you could just delete your accounts. i find that my family and friends still seek out connection and interactions with me, as i do them, even without some sort of computational facilitator like instagram.
Don’t be surprised if your family gets radicalized with some idea they were against just a generation ago. Facebook and social media is so many bad things at the same time: propaganda, surveilance, consumerism, deception, addiction, and complete isolation from one another. I find social media responsible for a lot of modern ills in our society.
Very true and I think is part of their business model. A more lonely/isolated user is more likely to buy stuff to soothe themselves thus clicking in the advertisements they show.
Completely off topic, but I stumbled across a comment you made about commuting from NO in the monthly hiring thread. I checked your profile and you're the only other user in our state who registered on the meet.hn platform.
> I really want to keep hitting on this insight again, that Mark correctly identified of social shifting from the town square to the living room. This is a second order effect of that shift that the company didn’t see coming. Because once you shift social from the town square to the living room, it now becomes possible to divorce media from social. You’re already getting your social now in private, in your digital living room. The town square can become something that is completely not social.
Ok I am going to click on FB for the first time in a month or so. Here we go, not expecting much.
I have two notifications, one is about a birthday today, one is about someone I don't know asking me to like an AirBnB page. Let's go to the feed.
1. Sales thing from some group
2. A Boomer looking "reel" of a classic car (I don't like classic cars and nothing I have done suggests I do)
3. People You May Know (I've seen these same suggestions over the last several years, still don't know any of them and still don't want to connect)
4. Friend post, death in the family
5-9. Also friend posts
10. That exact same Boomer reel again
11-15. Friend posts or people I follow
16. "Memes Daily," which I don't follow so must be an ad
17-20. Friend posts and a group post from a group I follow
Overall, this really isn't bad, surprisingly. At one point, which is when I stopped checking it for months at a time, it was literally post after post after post from people I don't follow of the most garbage AI generated slop, like the sloppiest you can imagine. For example, the AI generated ones with the wounded soldier and a birthday cake with some message like "it's my birthday and no one came" level of slop, or an AI generated lady with an AI generated picture saying something like "this is my first painting but no one liked it," each with tens of thousands of likes and Boomers commenting things like "It's ok I am giving you a like happy birthday," just maddeningly ad infinitum and nausea-inducing.
So, maybe they fixed the above. Still, I can live without Facebook so am not planning on going back.
Or they only show a few friends' posts if you haven't opened Facebook for a while. This makes it appear more social and organic than you last remember, and for good reasons: if you come back, Facebook hopes they can develop your habit over time; also, it makes curious people like you less worried about this addicting app. But then, once they know you're finally coming back regularly, they can turn up the dopamine level gradually, and make social posts harder to find. You'll doomscroll to find them, and they know it.
Every dealer probably knows better than to let people overdose on their first sniff. Especially if they're relapsing.
This is quite an interesting post. I would guess that facebook does actually show you friend content if that's what you engage with. After all their single metric of success is ads viewed on the platform, which is the same as time spent.
So theoretically, everyone here complaining about not seeing friend content should probably try and train the algorithm to show more of it.
Or to be an asshole about it - if you see generic clickbait content on facebook, its your fault. You engage with it...
The problem with algorithms is they tend to be kept secret...
For example if I were trying to get a person hooked to the application I'd ensure they have a good experience. If there is someone like the parent poster that only opens the app at an infrequent basis it's probably not a good idea to scare them away.
But your FB junkie. It doesn't matter if they only click on their friends feed or not, show them ad after ad after ad because they are coming back anyway.
No evidence here on my part, since FB wouldn't really confess either way, but if I were manipulating people that would be one of the screwdrivers in the toolbox.
Ok, let's say you're my friend on Facebook. I care about you (I haven't explicitly unfollowed you) enough that I want you in my feed
Do I now click Like on every post you make? Is that how I get the "privilege" of seeing more of you?
Some people may dislike Likes because it leads to narcissism, and ok, fine, whatever. But nobody knows what it does and how it influences what you see (Liking certain pages has in the past auto subscribed you to them) and I consider that to be broken behavior
Social media has become tribal media, where people form strong tribal structures and stay within those. IMHO that has caused the great division we are seeing in many places. Maybe "cult-media" is a better term even.
Instead of coming together we ignore (or berate) each other, which in turn gives rise to the many extremist and authoritarian movements we are witnessing these days.
I think it just took the world a while to realize that social media is a replacement for cable TV and magazines, not a replacement for communication tools. Looking at old high school classmates' lunch and vacation photos was never good content, never good for business or mental health, and higher quality communication works fine with texting + Discord.
Anyway..
I was listening Acquired podcast on Meta yesterday (yes, the whole 6h30min thing) and what we have today is so far away and different than what he was preaching 15-20 years ago and so distanced to original idea of connecting with people you know and you want to be connected with.
Don't even want to talk about ads..
A lot of people here are arguing there's no use for Facebook anymore, save maybe for Marketplace.
But there's another big reason to use it, and it's how I use it primarily: special interest groups, such as hobbies, communities around games, etc. They used to be hosted in forums and bulletin boards in the olden times, but there was a big migration to Facebook (even though Facebook was objectively worse for keeping track of conversations) and that was that. If you wanted to keep in touch with those communities, you had to be on Facebook.
Now there's another migration going on for hobby/game groups, one I won't follow this time: Discord. Discord stresses me out, real-time chat is all about being constantly connected and FOMO. And, to me, the UX sucks even more than Facebook's, which is saying a lot! Not for me.
I really never understood discord. The last thing on earth that would be healthy for me is yet another real-time chat program. Yet maybe I’m missing out avoiding it.
The irony is that Meta's defense in an antitrust trial is basically "we're not dominant anymore because everything is a chaotic content soup now." And… they're not entirely wrong? But also, who made it that way?
It could also mean that their recommendation algorithms are highly effective and managing to get people to spend more time on social media. And if "friends" aren't publishing enough, then foreign content will fill that void. Probably other content the user is interested in.
> “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years
Which does not mean that the time overall has declined. This could even mean that the time itself spent viewing content posted by "friends" did in fact increase, if the percent of time spent on social media increased enough.
I've just loaded my Facebook home page. 6 'pages' (I know it's infinite scroll but you know what I mean) before I saw an actual friend's post, and it was from 2 weeks ago.
Jeez Zucky, I wonder why social is dying. Is it because there's no bloody social between the ads and random algorithm shite anymore?
E: haha, the rest of the comments say likewise. Redundant comment but +1 anecdata.
Also for what it's worth I've checked a few profiles and yeah friends are still posting, I'm just not seeing it. I guess I scrolled past some post about something too quickly and now Facebook thinks I don't care? Maybe the algorithm is just broken lol.
I was a very early Instagram user and would even defend it over the years as "influencers" became a thing. “I don’t see it as a problem… if you don’t like those people then don’t follow them.”
Nothing about my tastes have changed over the years, but I now find Instagram to be painful to look at. If social media is over, it’s because Meta made the conscious decision to kill it.
I would argue that social media’s positive-feedback engine contributed to its own demise. Anec-data:
After being terminally online on Instagram, I decided to took a two-week break because I was noticed I was mindlessly scrolling through content that I enjoyed. After the two weeks, it was striking to note that almost all videos followed a pattern- a jarring hook in the first two seconds, a provocative question, rapid-fire cuts and a soundtrack. Most videos have to follow this proven formula, but in doing so, they'll be like all the other videos and will then have to take the next step to engage users, so videos become more aggressive and formulaic, which for me, gets in the way of the content.
This is completely omitting the fact that quickly scrolling past accounts you follow will trigger Instagram to suggest clips that are more provocative in an effort to capture one's attention. Even if you're intentional about what you consume, the app is adversarial to your own intentions.
It's MBAs on the eternal quest to juice profits. If a social site ran itself lean like Craigslist they could win the entire prize without the need to manipulate content for the benefit of advertisers.
Sure, but don't mislabel that "positive-feedback engine". Engagement, attention loop, reinforcement, clicks, views, comments, likes, follows, longer average visit time, distraction engine, compulsive behavior, higher advertiser revenue, whatever, but it isn't positive and it isn't really feedback.
If you had a friend who in the middle of interactions habitually pulled out a bag of cocaine and snorted some (or gambled), you wouldn't say they were giving positive feedback to the dealer (/casino). You'd say they were annoying and unable to function.
What happens on Instagram if you vote dislike/ignore attention-bait clips and try to find longer-form (>10 minute) content, and use searches rather than feed?
But it is a positive feedback loop in a technical sense. Think of a microphone providing sound to an amplifier, and that amplifier in turn providing amplified sound into the original microphone. It's self-reinforcing.
> What happens on Instagram if you vote dislike/ignore attention-bait clips and try to find longer-form (>10 minute) content, and use searches rather than feed?
The thing is, I don't want to be on Instagram. It's basically TV for me, and I'd rather not engage with content that way because it's passive and messes up my attention span. I already stare at a screen for eight hours a day for work, and I'd rather not have to spend any more time on screens than I have to.
It's in general very negative; it's only "positive feedback" in the ultra-narrow technical sense wrt reinforcing the compulsive behavior, which is negative to the user, negative to the user's wellbeing, friends, family, negative to society.
My analogy to reinforcing any other compulsive damaging behavior stands. It's not "positive feedback" to the dealer or casino.
Let us not let our words do the thinking for us, as Orwell cautioned.
No, it wasn't conscious, they just incrementally and iteratively optimized the site to maximize page views and ad revenue. Turns out that ends up eventually killing it - without ever having the intention of doing so. But you can rest assured that every decision on that long, slippery slope optimized some metric toward a local maxima.
It's been 8 years since my last post on Facebook and I visit less than 10 mins a year (only because I have one friend who uses FB messenger to communicate with me when he's traveling).
When a fb exec gave a talk at our then small startup about their 'north star' being monthly active users, I thought maybe they had just given up on serving their customers, that was in 2014. He detailed how they measured 'active' etc.
Our CEO immediately adopted a north star of 'revenue', again just shoving end-users into a pile for exploitation. Companies are not making products to solve an end-user issue, or even add value. The VC is the customer, and if your fb feed and IG is toxic, it's because that's working well for the investors.
At some point, Facebook (and Amazon and Google before it) were products that delivered what their users wanted.
The essence of enshittification is product leadership losing the plot on their users' desires and piloting everything off the cliff by solely following growth metrics.
I use SM very seldom. But IG was my fav for a long time. I only had about 50 friends, all real people that I knew, they didn't post daily, it was roughly 1:1 ratio of follower:following, so - I could open it up about once a month, scroll through a dozen or so images and see the "you're all caught up" notice and bounce. At some point, I remember it saying my account wasn't showing me Ads because I had low follower count / low engagement - which I thought was great and it went on that way for a few years. Then at some point it became clear it changed. At first, it wasn't Ads, just posts from random people inserted into my feed. I never engage with anything overtly - no likes, comments, etc. But, I think I do spend more time on things that I "like" and do swipe through if there are multiple images if I find something interesting. So that was all the training that it needed. Soon after that, all I see on IG are half naked women in form fitting attire and construction content. Turns out I'm a hetero male that has a hobby of building stuff/home improvement, but I already knew that. I stopped using it all together.
The funny part is because of my construction hobby & interest in building science; I started seeing Ads in Spanish which I don't speak. I get this on YT too as that's where most my "how to build a ...." stuff ends up.
I feel it's all a side effect of chasing numbers. They show us a bunch of junk, which is addictive for a while but eventually we quit it for good. If they had decided "ok, Facebook is just going to be the place for friend updates" many of us would have stayed.
Well yeah, scrolling through and liking a picture of your friend's vacation and commenting "Adorable!" on a video of your cousin's toddler only gives you, say, 10 minutes to see ads, whereas getting fed an endless stream of progressively more intense and precisely-tuned content to tickle at your inner psyche (be it most susceptible to anger, lust, envy, greed etc) means you might spend hours on there scrolling past ads.
Well, in theory they could have just stuck to being a humble social media site, even if the traffic were to plateau or drop slightly. Something like what Craigslist did, but slightly more modern.
But of course if they'd done that Meta wouldn't be worth a hundred gazillion dollars now.
Meta made the decision to take control of what users see via the feed, and to show them mostly content which is NOT from friends. Content that "performs well".
The testimony is disingenuous, but true. People see less of their friends because they are show less of their friends. Friends post less becuase no one sees it.
I'm no Meta apologist, but I don't know if we can blame them on this one. Unfortunately in the digital age, everything reverts to the mean so quickly. It probably turns out that the most effective way to capture user attention is to give them an algo feed of addictive slop.
Unfortunately capturing user attention is also the best way to sell advertising, so it makes sense that all their products converged on algo feeds.
Facebook is now a birthday-reminder and old-connection-keeper tool loaded with empty content to feel less sad. Instagram and TikTok are also trending towards content consumption. Messaging and group chats are the only real social media now
Facebook groups are like the new Internet forums. There’s tons of stuff that’s moved to Facebook groups like Fishing and Car forums. For a lot of content Facebook groups are much better than forums.
Marketplace seems to be the new Craigslist and much better IMHO.
Posting is probably dead or dying. I haven’t done it in a decade or so.
They could be huge in this, but sadly they'll continue to ruin it because (IMHO) they are rotten at the core. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a question posted on a relevant topic, switched tabs to consult the manual to verify my memory, and then gone back only to see Facebook do its ADHD reload and bury the question.
Once people get sufficiently frustrated and the ad revenue declines below the cost of running the servers, we will immediately lose all of the information shared there. None of it will be archived like the old forums. It's a genuinely sad situation.
> and then gone back only to see Facebook do its ADHD reload and bury the question
Does anyone know why facebook does this? It's the most infuriating thing, like it's assuming the poor user doesn't know how to "refresh" a page so it does it for them, because clearly they got stuck on an old crusty piece of content.
In my experience the Facebook groups always turn to crap, especially if it's a group that attracts more than about 500 users. Abusive posts, scam posts, fake groups with the same name created by bots. I've reverted to old school forums for all my special interests. Marketplace is still the best classifieds product though.
I don't even enjoy FB Groups any more because of the way they filter comments to “most relevant” so I have to click twice to change it to “all comments” on every single post, over and over and over. Tiresome.
It's embarrassingly dumb sometimes, too, like a post can show “3 comments”, I click it, and the “most relevant” will just be two of them with a bunch of empty space left over in the UI. Just show me all of the fucking comments omfg!!!
Only reason I caved and joined Facebook a few years ago was to get access to a group dedicated to Boston Whaler boats. There were two previously-thriving forums that were slowly dying. The forums were great. The Facebook group was not better, just alive.
Probably true with most successful things. Marketplace is just a low barrier to entry for people already using Facebook. I find it generally terrible, but that's where people are selling.
I would rather have ol' good forums. I would rather have years long posts in the frontpage and the ability to bump a long burried post when new info is up, and not missing the opportunity to engage with a topic just because 1-2 days passed without me logging in and thus the post, being more than 1-2 days old, is not in the frontpage anymore.
Ooh speaking of birthday reminders - if Facebook is browsing this thread looking for things to fix: bring back the birthday iCal feed!
You literally had notifications via my calendar bringing me back to your site every few days/weeks to say happy birthday and maybe have a bit of a browse. Now the reminders are in my todo list and I say happy birthday via text or call instead. Path of least pain in the backside.
Absolutely bizarre they ditched the birthdays and events iCal feeds.
Remember when they told us that capitalism would cause people to trip over themselves to give us what we want and need because that would naturally be where most of the profit could be had? Why do you think it didn't do that in this case? The answer of course is that facebook does serve it's customers. It serves the people who can afford to buy ads, and what it serves them is you.
Honestly, everything would be much better if either a.) people just paid for stuff or b.) governments decided ad-tech in its present form should not be a thing, and regulated the retention of personal data as a liability, to make targeted advertising less-personalized/unprofitable.
As a system for discovering price, free markets work really well. The downsides comes from politicians not understanding/caring the limitations of free markets and what kinds of problems they're simply not intended to solve. These are the economic factors beyond price. More broadly, they're our values.
If we outsource the need for philosophy/wisdom to the free markets then there is no reason why the market will not demand child labor, 7 day work weeks, single use everything, and privatized security forces. We failed to take action earlier, and the same kind of stuff has already happened to the environment. Not to mention that gambling and security fraud are making a comeback.
I'm 100% with you on the idea that it's time to start paying for services on the internet instead of the ad-funded model we have today. The problem is that the people who decide when and how to monetize things seem to be moving toward a model where they charge you for the service, sell your data and feed you ads.
If lawmakers regulated data retention to make targeted advertising unprofitable, then businesses would have no choice but to compete for customer’s money directly by providing value.
Same thing with the "private sector is always better" religion - if there's no meaningful competition, you end up no choice coupled with a profit motive, vs. no choice but I can at least nominally vote and be represented
ISPs are usually a good example in the US. My old apartment had one provider, and wouldn't you know it, at my new apartment with multiple providers, I got five times the bandwidth for half the price.
In light of competition being the missing ingredient, the question becomes how does one maintain ongoing competition in a system where the bigger of two competitors tends to win and the winner of two competitors tends to get bigger? That's exactly what happened here: Facebook was bigger than WhatsApp, and FB+WA is bigger than Insta, so FB+WA+Insta is a lot bigger than anyone else.
Back in the day when Microsoft was the one in the DoJ's sights someone compared it to a dog race. Dogs don't have jockeys, so you have to figure out some other way to induce them to run. The way most tracks (probably all, idk much about dog racing but it's a useful metaphor here) do that is by having a mechanical bunny that runs out ahead of the dogs and activates their prey drive. The bunny has to be ahead of the dogs, but not so far ahead that they don't think they can catch it and give up. That means that every once in a while a dog will get the timing just right, go extra hard, and actually catch the bunny. At that point, the race is over for everyone until someone steps in to shake the dog loose from the bunny and give everyone a reason to run again. Our system is like that: we have to encourage everyone to do everything they can to catch the bunny but also ensure that they never actually do. Bill Gates was the first person in my memory to catch the bunny, and needed to be shaken loose. Now it's Zuckerberg, and probably Google, that need to be pried off of their respective bunnies so that everyone else has something to chase.
For a start, and it might even be enough, you strictly enforce anti-trust laws which are already on the books that prevent sufficiently large firms from acquiring their competitors and doing exclusivity deals. These laws have largely been ignored for decades and I don't know what to call that other than blatant corruption of our government, but it's slowly starting to change, in a bipartisan way.
Microsoft escaped the worst of what the government wanted to do to them for their anti-trust violations. It may not go so well for Google as they hold the distinction of being the only company in US history to have been tried and found guilty in three separate cases of possessing three illegal monopolies all at the same time. Two example measures under discussion in the court at the moment are forbidding any renewal of their browser default deal with Apple, and forcing them to sell off Chrome. We will see soon enough what comes next.
Foreign competitors is how you get competition usually. The big 3 auto companies can lobby Congress and discourage competition. When American Cars started installing tailfins (purely cosmetics) instead of competing on fuel performance, maintenance or price, they were opening the door for the Japanese auto industry to eventually take over, with the crisis of the oil shock being the instigating factor for people changing their consumption habits
That only works as long as the companies don't pay Congress to keep foreign competitors out of the market. To continue the automobile example, consider why the market for light trucks in the US is almost exclusively American brands.
The missing ingredient here is that there is a gulf between what people really need, and what they do. Capitalism/market forces/etc. optimize on that "what people really do" and not what they need, and especially not what they say they want. See also, for instance, the layout of your grocery store.
The good news is that capitalism is in fact really good at serving exactly the preferences you reveal through your actions, and there are ways in which that is good. The bad news is that the farther away we get from our "native environment" the farther our needs and revealed preferences are diverging. I can think of no equivalent threat in our ancestral environment to "scrolling away your day on Facebook". Sloth and laziness aren't new, but that enticement to it is very new.
The discipline to sit, think with your brain, and realize with your system 2 brain [1] that you need to harness and control your system 1 urges is moving from "a recipe to live a good life" (e.g., wisdom literature, Marcus Aurelius, Proverbs, Confucious, many many other examples dating back thousands of years), but one a lot of people lived reasonably happily without, to a necessity to thrive in the modern environment. Unfortunately, humans have never, ever been collectively good at that.
And the level of brutality that system 2 must use on system 1 is going up, too. Resisting an indulgent dinner is one thing; carrying around the entire internet in your pocket and resisting darned near every vice simultaneously, continuously, is quite another. In my lifetime this problem has sharpened profoundly from minor issue to major problem everyone faces every hour.
For a much older example, see "drugs". Which is also a new example as the frontier expands there, too.
I have no idea what a solution to this at scale looks like. But I am quite optimistic we will ultimately find one, because we will have to. The systems can't just keep getting better and better at enticement to the short-term with no other social reaction.
We talk about capitalism being really good at serving revealed preferences, but the thing becomes a bit more twisty when you start talking about capitalism and mass media's ability to shape those preferences. From Bernays to Chomsky we have reams of literature about how mass media is used to tell people what they want, then capitalism supplies it to them, then mass media tells them how free and blessed they are to receive just what they want.
Definitely hard agree on the split between slow, deliberative, rationally-focused thinking and quick, subconscious, emotional, pattern-seeking thinking and the way that most people to their own detriment don't ever examine which of those two they're doing. Hell, I still pretty regularly have trouble differentiating between thinking and reacting and I'm the kind of nerd who spends a lot of time thinking about how I think.
Ultimately capitalism "works", but only if externalities are incorporated into the price.
Hence vice taxes on liquor, cigarettes, the short-lived Bloomberg tax on soda. See also - carbon pricing.
What would that look like for social media, I don't know. If we're truly brainstorming, what if Facebook were forced to charge you cash money for usage beyond a half hour per day? Or past a certain amount of posting?
I'm well aware that politically this would die even faster than the soda tax... selling a policy is often more difficult and important than policy itself
> selling a policy is often more difficult and important than policy itself
Policy needs a villain. After all, if everyone were on the same page acting in good faith, you wouldn't need policy. The people could just start living the life they want to see.
Alcohol points to drunks, cigarettes points to those backlogging hospitals, carbon pricing points to "evil" oil companies trying to destroy the environment. Soda has tried pointing to the obese also backlogging hospitals, but, as you point out, not very successfully.
Your sweet grandmother uses social media and it makes her happy being able to see photos of her grandchildren. It is hard for the average person to find a villain in that.
The main problem the vast majority of policy proposals for this sort of problem face is that the proposals almost invariably slip in the idea of some sort of human being, if not an entire population of humans, that is abstractly above the problem and can be trusted to administer the policy. But if that was the case, we often wouldn't have the problem in the first place.
It's really hard to policy-fix something that literally 99% of the population is doing. Who is going to propose it? Who is going to enforce it? Who is going to pay attention to it?
And to be clear, this is commiseration with you, not argument. I have no solution even in principle.
Or, hear me out, what about "competition exists but I also get to vote and be represented." Where I live, there are two ISPs, the local cable conglomerate, and a telecom coop.
The cable company, as you might expect, is completely and utterly awful. They go for all of cable's greatest hits, from low introductory payments that explode after the first year, to service that is constantly down, to sending you to collections for equipment you returned. They do it all. The speeds are slow, and the customer service is non-existent.
The coop, on the other hand, is beyond delightful. The speed always exceeds what I'm paying for, and every couple of years they readjust their packages to give me more speed for the same price. Only three times in almost a decade have I had any problems with them: One was an outage that was caused by a natural disaster, and the other two were problems with my ONT that were fixed next day at no charge. Oh, and since it's a coop, I get a check every year as part of the profit sharing. For me, it only equates to about a free month of service, but it's still pretty nice.
So I guess the tl;dr of it all is that you don't need to get rid of free markets to have social control of things. And since the profits go to the people paying for the service, there's no incentive to extract extra value, so there's no real enshitification.
And, any time some company gets close to "give us what we want and need," the company will be bought by Facebook, or funded by VCs, and new ownership will "correct" the problem.
Haha of course. I was probably just one of a mere few hundred million people using it in a way that brought me back to the algorithm so it got scrapped for underutilisation :(
They already send an email or push notification ... so yeah, there would be very little metric movement to justify this as having enough impact for year end PSC.
iCal feeds don't bring you into the site. The whole point of Facebook is to be a walled garden that discourages you from going elsewhere. You're lucky they are not like X and deprioritize external links. Or maybe they do, I have not tested it myself.
The popular wisdom is that FB has deprioritized external links -- some accounts on FB are now posting an image with a blurb and then saying "link in comments." I don't know if they're doing it on rumor, official communication, or having tested clickthru rates themselves, but several of these have large enough media operations that all of those sources are plausible.
Interesting idea and kinda really makes sense.. I guess at the time I just chucked them into todos as I have plenty of friction free ways to get tasks into Todoist haha.
It isn't even good at that. I'll often see “it was [whoever]'s birthday yesterday” when I did login on the last couple of days, and it didn't bother to mention the fact then. Too many ads and pointless reals to show me on those days, to have space to insert the now/upcoming birthday reminder, presumably.
"mbasic.facebook.com" was a vastly simpler UI, and had notably less noise content.
Sometimes "back" navigation even worked properly. They killed that last year :/
Were it not for distant family using it, I would almost certainly download my content and nuke my account.
I was thrilled to find out that I can block facebook.com in my etc/hosts and still have access to messenger. Hard limiting the time I spend being "social" with robots and hostile outsiders has gone from being a good idea to being a survival strategy as we got further into the industrialization of the attention economy.
Sadly for me, there's another use case for Facebook: special interest groups (as in niche groups for hobbies).
When the Great Migration away from phpbb forums and bulletin boards happened, lots of these groups moved to Facebook. I loathed it, but joining the migration was the only way of keeping up with stuff that interested me.
Now there's another Great Migration to Discord, which I won't follow. Real-time chat simply triggers my FOMO and is stressful to me. So any community that moves primarily to Discord will lose me as a member. I suppose nobody will miss me though.
I guess he meant content produced by "professional" content creators with the only goal of earning money instead of interesting pictures from your friends' life.
At least that's how I experience Instagram these days. It's a chat app where people send each other content made by others in the DMs.
Very few of the people I know personally have posted in the last few years, but most of them seem to casually use the app to explore whatever the algorithm shows them.
Discord are where the kids are at. But with them going public it's going to enshittify quickly and it's only a matter of time before they move onto something new.
I don't know if their newsfeed algorithm is broken, or just grasping at straws, but whenever I log in (fairly often simply for FB marketplace) my feed is full of posts and recommendations for things that don't even make sense for me. For example hiking groups that are in a random mid-size city 2,000mi from me. Or student housing groups in a random international city.
I've tried to even provide feedback on them not being relevant, but they still always appear. I don't know, it really does seem that their newsfeed relevancy is fundamentally broken
The thing that always surprised me about this when I still used FB was that they clearly had the expertise available in Meta to do it right because my Instagram ads/recommended content was almost stunningly well-tailored: events I actually wanted to buy tickets to, products that actually interested me, even down to reels from new comedians I find genuinely funny...
My FB feed, by comparison, was almost exactly like yours - not just irrelevant interests, but geographically crazy irrelevant interests.
I think the main Facebook product is basically running on autopilot now- the folks who wrote the pipelines got promoted and went to work on other stuff.
(note that if you click Friends or Feeds you will see somewhat more personal content, but basically, the main stream is just a list of irrelevant garbage)
My girlfriend also gets the same stuff over and over, most of it AI-generated garbage she's absolutely not interested in. No matter how often she selects "not interested", they always come back. Strangely, this started only recently on her account and mine is still comparatively okay. From what I've heard, it's much worse for US users.
One thing that amazes me is that Facebook thinks I'm interested in content I was interested in more than 25 years ago before Facebook even existed. It's mysterious.
Once I looked at the comments for a disgusting AI-generated tiny house picture to see if anyone else knew it was AI-generated and then all it showed me were more disgusting AI-generated tiny house pictures no matter how many times I tried to block it.
I spent over one year being served sponsored content advertising sales of firearms, cloned credit cards and drugs. Last time I logged in, I’ve noticed that I was being served content based on interests of my close friends. For example, a close friend got really into rock climbing, so I got tons of rock climbing meme accounts.
I have now grown tired of all of that and, when I realised that it had been ages since I had seen someone I actually know post anything, I deactivated it all.
I haven’t had a Facebook account in about a decade at this point, and I recall continually discussing already how useless it was without chronological sorting and recommending you random crap (and I’m not just talking about the ads).
I thought it was being insulting for a while but I guess I did pause on it to screenshot and make a witty post but I'm constantly getting Dull Men's Club, and more recently the knockoff versions haha
Facebook, I'm not into these, and I've told you so! It was just that "Suggested for you: Dull Men's Club" was funny the first time!
Facebook is probably the worst social media company at combating AI bot spam, although it is a tight race with Twitter/X. Even with aggressive pruning of AI generated "content" it's impossible to get ahead. No matter how many bots you block there are 10 more to take their place. I had to abandon the platform.
Facebook doesn't even seem to care that their platform is being strangled with fake posts. At least Twitter/X has the excuse that Elon fired the people who were trying to combat the spam. I don't know what Facebook's excuse is.
Not only that, but people have discovered that comments shown to you on YouTube videos are also subject to "algorithmic scoring", based on your preferences, just like video recommendations.
About a year ago a video went viral where someone in a romantic relationship demonstrated that the opinions expressed in comments on videos shown to her differ radically from the opinions expressed in comments on the exact same video when viewed by her significant other using his account.
My wife and I then immediately verified that this was true for us as well.
The current trend is, relevant-looking top-upvoted comment followed by a thread where an innocent-looking account will ask an innocent question/request for recommendations, and get a helpful reply from multiple concerned kind "people" recommending the same resource... All AI bots from top to bottom
Oh yes I used to have this problem. Then I encountered the wonderful Mary Georgina on the internet and her website helped me lots, and I get such great returns! Have you heard of her?
I used to count how many non-friend items there were between friend posts. If I recall correctly, my max count was 20. And similarly to you, when I do see something it's from 3 days ago and feels no relevant to comment or interact with. I know so many people hate Facebook, but I used to really enjoy those small moments with friends where we could interact over small life updates and photos. Now they feed me garbage to groups I've never subscribed to based on some "guess" around my interests.
I've also done this and my record count was 120. 120 sponsored or suggested posts about things I don't care about in between the posts from people I'm actually interested in.
I'll echo what others have said - if social media is dead, it's because they killed it themselves.
I use the Social Fixer browser extension to hide suggested content and my facebook home page is almost entirely:
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' IT Humor and Memes (UNCENSORED / Sanju L
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / 90's Nostalgia
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Xzo
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Tacofficial
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / The Mother of All Nerds
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' Photoshop That / Fatih Trk
Suggested: click to show/hide 'Reels' /
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / JaredHalley
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Quinn Alexander on air
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Sarah SilvermanVerified account
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / History of Music
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Minor League BaseballVerified account
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Posts which will make you come
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / How About that!
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / The Other 98%
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' Christians who enjoy good clea / Rachel Ballard
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Graeson Mcgaha
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' Ancient history / Jesse Velosa
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Cincinnati Symphony OrchestraVerified ac
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Awesome Science
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Seinfeldism
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Jimlapbap
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / TromboneTimoVerified account
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' Handbell People / Deb Grundman
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Action News 5
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' Harry Potter Memes / PotterzWorld
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Tom Scott
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / The Student Music Organizer
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / PY6CJ - João Grisi Online
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Memes so literal they aren't even memes
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Pittsburgh Symphony OrchestraVerified ac
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' Back To The Future Real Fans!! / Lawrence Neville
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Edson Xhhak
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Raging Mustache
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Tom Papa
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' Historic Film Locations / Mark E. Phillips
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / TromboneTimoVerified account
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Thanks Chipper
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Dog Bless You
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' Christians who enjoy good clea / Catherine Lee Rodriguez
Fun game. I just had 7, then 3, then I gave up after 30. And those 2 friend “posts” were 1. someone sharing a page’s post, and 2. a friend posting what appears to be an automated happy birthday on someone else’s wall. I did not see any actual content from friends at all.
Most stuff on FB seems to be
1. pages I don’t follow
2. ads
3. posts from groups I no longer care about
4. random people who are not my friends but somehow I still get to see their posts in my feed (not even popular posts)
5. sometimes, some uninteresting activity by an actual friend (commented on something, shared something)
6. occasionally a friend’s IG story pops up (I guess these are automatically cross-posted to FB or something)
I've been on Instagram for less than a year for a photography and now my feed regularly includes what people are now calling "rage bait". which I found are people purposefully posting things to get people to engage with their content and are rewarded when more people comment on that content.
I 100% agree that I cannot see a future where people think this is healthy and can continue.
> I cannot see a future where people think this is healthy and can continue.
The first is not a prerequisite for the second. See: fast-food, car-optimized cities, Electron apps, microplastics, AI-controlled drone warfare, trap music, etc.
On my feed I get AI-generated pictures of castles and houses in the woods. There are enough real places where we don't need to make stuff up. Makes me feel bad, actually.
Yes. I also got fake airplanes and way too long Wikipedia summaries of random things. It seems to me that there are really only a handful of outfits that really have the Facebook algorithm over their knee. It seems like the sort of thing that content moderators should be able to combat, but Facebook has just sort of given up.
I'm British living in Berlin, and it's almost that dead to me. 1/3rd irrelevant ads, 1/3rd irrelevant suggested content, 1/6th one single poster who mostly shares political messages that other people created, 1/6th everyone else combined.
There are limits to this--at some point it reaches a tipping point, and the people leave.
We've broadly seen this on FB with American Millenials (the "core" original FB demographic, there's only so much people can take or so much "value" they get from sinking their time there.
It's shit even with an ad blocker. The problem is that there's just very little organic content anymore, because the fad of posting all the time on social media passed. A social media site can't subsist on birthdays, wedding and babies, but that's all people post about these days. The interesting stuff has moved (back) to topic-based groups or pseudonymous forums (like this one).
Not sure when they will take it away, but for now, there is a cleaner option - go to Feeds on the left (I use it on the computer), and then Friends (as opposed to All or Groups). That gets you the latest posts from friends in reverse chronological order.
I used to have a bookmark that took me directly to the friends feed but it would seem it just redirects to the homepage now, and the navigating to the feeds fresh just loads within the page rather than via URL (at least on mobile web, m.facebook.com, not checked desktop)
Like some engineer in the company begged Mark like, "Please, people are going to drop your product completely unless you give them some control" (remember Top Stories vs Most Recent?)
And Mark's like "yeah, ok, cool" (it'll be removed in 2 years when said engineer quits/is fired)
It's because everyone moved over to using Whatsapp groups instead, for the actual social stuff, and TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube for the gratuitous lusting after other people's perfect lives stuff. It used to be that we looked at the perfect shared moments from our friends lives, but this didn't make us feel bad enough so we outsourced it to models backed by teams of experts so that we can compare ourselves to impossible highs and thusly feel only the most exquisite of lows when comparing our own real and therefore often shitty lives.
This is the right answer, and it's something I believe Meta has also said publicly, that messaging apps have become the family and friends connection machine as people shifted to using mobile phones and messaging became free and able to handle multimedia.
Yes this is the key point, and I really don't think Zuckerberg is to blame for this. It's just how the market moved. Before tiktok Zuck did actually try and move facebook back to friend territory, but tiktok became such a threat to time spent online they had to shift to "engaging content"
And everyone is in whatsapp groups anyway for personal content...
When Elon bought twitter he bought back the "following" tab on twitter, and frankly, I used it a few times then stopped. It was just boring. Shifting through pages and pages of random content from people I follow is just too much energy.
The fact is, personalised feeds do just work. We hate this, but it works.
It's a bit like sugar, I know it has zero benefit in 2025 eating sugar, but I just do it, because its nice and it works, and it feels good. My brain knows its bad for me, but I just can't resist.
Now you can blame restaurants and ice cream shops for this, but the fact is, if the particular ice cream shop I buy ice cream at closed, or offered less sugar alternatives, it would in fact lose market share. And of course, there are sugar free ice cream shops, but their market share will never be that big.
If facebook wanted to actually stay on top, they were forced into this.
It’s not universal though - they don’t work for me, I don’t want or care about any of the “value add” in a feed. I don’t want reels, I’m not there for suggestions.
Clearly I’m a minority as I’m sure they have research saying it does drive engagement for large
Numbers of people, but Facebook appears to be worse for all that other stuff and as a result is failing everyone.
Long term will show whether it was the right decision by FB. If he now claims social media dead, then maybe already signs are showing, that the decisions were not as smart as he originally thought. Short term thinking kills many businesses.
And that's fine except people have missed seriously important life updates because of selective post non-showing
Facebook already had people up in arms when the feed was first introduced (probably because Zuckerberg seemingly doesn't believe in privacy as a concept, at all) and now they want to ruin it (especially now but it's been like this for years) by defeating the point of it?
Facebook and instagram: less and less posts by real people.
Reddit and other discussion sites: Controlled by "basement dwellers"(i.e. doomers w/ too much free time), trolls and, soon, AI bots. Dominated by groupthink and devoid of friendly discussion.
I think the only exception is my local community page on Facebook. People do seem to be civil(real names and close physical proximity help) and it's all real content.
> Reddit and other discussion sites: Controlled by "basement dwellers"(i.e. doomers w/ too much free time), trolls and, soon, AI bots. Dominated by groupthink and devoid of friendly discussion.
I sometimes have the feeling that most HN commenters are also unemployed or in academia and most non-commenting readers are employed.
Fundamental problem with moderation sites like reddit and HN: discussion is controlled by those with the time to moderate. These are also the least likely people you want controlling the discussion.
If only there was a reputation based site where, idk, people with more accomplishments got more weight...
Twitter is, in a way, like that. I can follow, say, John Carmack, and get things he says or has reposted and ignore content from people I don't care about. I think that's why I still find myself there. It's a high signal-to-noise site where I can still participate(and actually have discussions with high achievers and ignore basement dwellers. Vs say reddit where I'm constantly dragged down into debates with the basement dwellers).
> If only there was a reputation based site where, idk, people with more accomplishments got more weight...
Very good point. I personally find Reddit or HN fairer since it doesn’t depend so much on reputation (actually: popularity). But you are right there is a benefit to weighing certain people more. I sometimes wonder whether people like Dijkstra or Feynman would have bubbled up on Twitter too. I guess so. Both were pretty outspoken so the algorithm would pick up on that like people would pick up on Feyman lectures or Dijkstra letters. They had some virality about them.
The moment they started broadcasting any comment I made on any news story to everybody in my network was when it stopped being useful for me. It's one thing for it to be discoverable if people looked, it's another thing to feature every thought I have prominently in the feed of every person I'm connected to. This was probably a decade ago, and I haven't used it much since then.
Likewise, Facebook has become spectacularly useless for me. I've missed important moments in friend's lives for several days because Facebook has decided that shoving random fan pages and adverts are what I actually want to see.
A friend's dad died and I didn't know for 5 days. He was busy dealing with everything that comes with such a major life event, posted it to facebook assuming that would be an effective way to communicate it.
I just did a quick tally. Of the first 26 posts in my feed:
* 11 friends/page/groups
* 15 groups/pages that I haven't followed or interacted with.
Of those, the first post was a friend, the next 5 posts were groups or pages I haven't interacted with. It also shoved reels at me 3 times, further delaying me seeing the content I actually want to see.
Of those 11 posts from people I did specifically try to follow on FB, only 2 were from today (not sure if folks just haven't posted).
One of the posts from a friend was from 6 days ago that has never popped up in my feed before. What's notable to me about that delay is that I saw and interacted with a more recent post of theirs this morning. So I guess they've jumped up in priority in "the algorithm", so now it finally decides to show me it.
Of course, continuing in the grand tradition of "Facebook WTF", I went to scroll back up the feed to look for other signal and it's all gone. It doesn't even reliably show me my wife's feeds. (plus it does have that amazing feature where it'll give me a notification that she just posted/commented on something on facebook, and even lies about the time/date of posting until you refresh the page, while she's literally fast asleep beside me.)
I pretty much never use their algorithmic feed. I've switched to going in, selecting `feeds` and then `friends`. There's usually at most a half dozen posts per day. I also belong to some groups, but I'll go to them directly when I want to see what's going on there.
Zuck did announce rather recently the Friends feed is more prominent on the app. It’s always been well hidden, but I think they know people are getting sick of the mindless scrolling.
I’ve basically stopped using the site for all the same reasons. I think it is because their engagement by real human users is near zero. In order to keep it freshfor whoever is left, like seniors hoping for an occasional pic of their grandkids, they fill it with the garbage
This is the primary reason that I'm closer than I've ever been to deleting my Facebook account. I stopped using it in any meaningful way over a decade ago. I think I've posted about six times in the past decade. But I did still check at least a few times a week to see what my friends posted. Now I can scroll for 15 minutes and see only a tiny handful of friend posts, with about six ads and garbage meme posts (not shared by friends, just pure noise injected by Facebook) for each real friend post. I think the ratio is probably even worse than that.
The other day something popped up in the Facebook Android app advertising a new feature to "just see your friends' posts" and when I clicked on that, it really did only show me friend posts and a couple actual ads. I can't find it in the app anymore, though. It's what should be the default view. It's the only thing I will ever care about.
I'm willing to accept a reasonable amount of advertisement as a necessary evil to support the service. What I can't understand is why I'm seeing an endless stream of garbage memes from random accounts that I do not follow and couldn't care less about. Stop "suggesting" things to me. I don't want to "Follow" these morons. I never intentionally interact with any of them, yet I'm flooded with them.
There's little chance of me making it to the end of this year without deleting Facebook entirely. It does nothing to keep me connected to friends anymore, because it hides 99% of their posts unless I view their profiles one at a time, and the few things it does put in my feed are lost in the noise.
Facebook has a Friends feed[1] which only shows posts from friends (and ads, but that's a whole other discussion). Even so, like 80% of the posts from my friends are just them re-sharing news articles or random memes; I wish there was a way to block reshares from pages or something like that.
Also, personal pet peeve: Instagram has a way to turn off "suggested posts" in the feed... for 30 days, then the setting gets automatically turned back on. This is such a blatantly user hostile anti-pattern it's almost as bad as if they didn't have the setting at all.
About couple years ago I logged onto Facebook for the first time in nearly a decade to sell something on marketplace. I took a peek at my feed and the set up was:
Post from some guy I barely knew in high school talking about giving all at his job with zero comments or likes followed by Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad endlessly. I just kept scrolling and scrolling and hitting more pages of ads.
I refreshed and got a different single post followed by more ads. I took a short video of the feed to show my friend who worked at Facebook at the time and he said “oh it might do that when it doesn’t know what to show you, if you use it more it will get better”
I asked how it would learn what I liked when it was just showing me ads and he didn’t have a good answer. I guess nobody cares there.
And why would some one continue to use it if all it does is show ads? You have to put some cheese on a rattrap if you want the rat to stick his head in it.
I actually find Facebook's feed much better than LinkedIn's for example. Meta seems to be pretty good at showing me posts from groups I often visit and even the "random" stuff is pretty relevant (although mostly a waste of time reels).
LinkedIn "random" stuff is always the same stupid content that for some reason has 1000+ likes. Twitter is not much better, the push stupid videos, but at least they have the "following" feed that is much more relevant and I usually don't even bother with the "for you" feed.
> Jeez Zucky, I wonder why social is dying. Is it because there's no bloody social between the ads and random algorithm shite anymore?
Well, there is a 'tab' (at least on mobile) that is eventually marked 'Friends' buried inside 'Feeds'. The irony is lost on Zuck I suppose, as that used to be the front 'page' and KSP of Facebook.
All of my friends and family just have big whatsapp groups instead.
Guess what will be the next target of randomly inserted ads?
Pretty sure the next target IS gonna be WhatsApp. Ads inserted at random intervals into groups. Give that whole cycle enough shit iterations and we are back to mailing lists and IRC channels.
On desktop - left sidebar, Feeds > Friends (not Friends at the top level). On mobile (or at least iOS, which I have) the bottom sidebar, second left button Friends are not perfect for me but cut out 90% of the garbage.
Make FB responsible for the information from automatic feeds. No need to regulate fake news and stuff. Just make them liable for offences like scams and defamation.
FB defence would be that they are like a telecom company and aren't responsible what is said over the phone. But if they are pushing scammer to call you, then they should be co-liable.
For me social is now family, extended family, siblings, school, high school and university friend groups on whatsapp with just people sharing big news wishing birthdays etc. All the info in the groups is in silo from each group. Where you actually behave in the groups like you would in real life ie differently with different groups.
I never load the homepage. Feeds>friends in a firefox container with FBPurity is the only way I’ll touch that abomination.
I also find that I have to mute a lot of over sharers. I feel for those people because I know they are like rats pushing the social lever for some imaginary sense of connection.
The FB feed has been completely useless for a few years now. I stopped posting a while ago because it didn't really make sense anymore. Meta sucking up to the MAGA crowd broke the last straw for me and I've finally deactivated my account.
I don't see a lot of friends posts, but I see some groups which are pretty active, and sometimes even useful. For instance, local hiking group, people post pictures, organize hike. I thought facebook was dead, but there's still a lot of activity.
> 6 'pages' ... before I saw an actual friend's post
I opened mine, and the first post was from a friend, as were about 75% of the remainder of the posts. The other 25% were from Facegroup groups I joined.
Yeah, this experience could really vary from person to person. I wonder if this person has anyone in their "friends" actually regularly posting? If nobody in their network is posting anything, there's not posts from their network to appear.
I tried the same a while back. I am now pretty sure it's part of the algorithm. If you stay away long enough, it reels you back in to scrolling by showing you some important updates first and before you know it, it draws you back into the abyss of AI generated content and ads and influencers.
Everyone relax - this moron Zuck still has Whastapp left to shittify and it's already begun with businesses spamming people en mass
Old firms that did sms spam as a service now all do whatsapp spam as a service - just one example of the process already inevitably started
I can't wait until people are communicating entirely via algorithms/OS clients with donations running server temp storage.
Then this 21st centure nicotine dealership that has created riches by extracting untold value from people's lives will finally be in history's dustbin where it belongs.
Mark owns 3 of the most popular apps in existence. Hard to call him a one hit wonder even if his other hits were just recognizing which companies to buy
The other hits came from breaking laws against anti-competitive behavior by his company, which is the exact subject of the trial this article is based on.
It was a defensive acquisition most likely and the app has pretty much not changed functionally one bit from when he acquired it. He had no vision for it clearly.
I'm getting a bit of reddit vibes in that you only took part of what I said out of context, and ignored the rest.
But also yes it was very much a defensive acquisition, and my point about them not (yet) ruining it shows that there was no plan.
Buying another company from the spoils of your first hit doesn't make you not a one hit wonder. Especially since most of your bidding competitors would have been blocked by antitrust.
I don't know if the same is true for Instagram. I've never used it.
“Recognizing which companies to buy” is your argument? That’s how low the bar is: money = smart. Buying your competitor for crazy high prices while paying even more to avoid antitrust laws is kinda the tech bro playbook.
LinkedIn is the only social whatever that I still use, and that's only bearable with a LOT of filtering courtesy of uBlock Origin. Even after that, it's 95% corporate advertising and 5% humans I know.
I hope so, and things might go back to having nice platforms for niche verticals, im making one of my own, for wildlife photography now that insta hates us :D
> Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.
But Meta controls what people get to see, so this is pretty dubious data, right?
Yea, well. Facebook will eventually disallow you to even search marketplace without a face picture. Punishment for not feeding their databases I guess. It doesn't matter if you have 100 friends. It doesn't matter if you post 1,000 pictures of your farm. That's some dystopian ish right there. People have definitively noticed and many in my circles have refused to engage because of it. Good riddance.
I agree that the days of posting "this is what I had for dinner" are over. Facebook is a cesspool of your weird uncle posting conspiracy theories. IG isn't a friends network anymore. It's for following influencers.
Tiktok has a following tab but anecdotally I don't know anyone who uses it regularly and as a significant portion of time on the app. It's all about the FYP. And Tiktok's algorithm is far superior to any other in this one way: how quickly it updates. You watch a video about ducklings and within 2-3 videos you'll be seeing more videos about ducklings.
Compare this to FB, IG and Youtube: it seems like the process of learning what you like is far less responsive, almost like there's a daily job that processes your activity and updates the recommendation engine to your new interest levels.
Also, Tiktok is very good at localizing your interests. By this I mean, the other platforms will push big creators on you. On Tiktok it's a common occurrence to stumble on a video from someone I've never heard of who has 20M+ followers and this is the first video I've seen in 2+ years from them. On FB or IG, if someone has a massive following, you'll almost have to block them to avoid seeing them if it's something you have zero interest in.
These companies like the whole friends connection because it's a network effect, keeping users on the platform. Without that, it's so incredibly easy to switch when the new thing comes along.
I would say that the rise of group chats instead is evidence of how social media is failing users. People do want to communicate with a closed group. It's like they say: any organization app has to compete with emailing yourself. Any social media has to compete with a group chat.
I think you're right (though YT is crazy good and finding what you like imo).
> I would say that the rise of group chats instead is evidence of how social media is failing users. People do want to communicate with a closed group. It's like they say: any organization app has to compete with emailing yourself. Any social media has to compete with a group chat.
This is true, but the truth is that you spend maybe 1 hour (if that) in group chats, while many people spend 4-5 hours a day on Tiktok/IGReels. So the revealed preference is that yes, they want to be connected to their friends via group chats, but they want mindless entertainment a lot more.
So I hate Medicare Advantage (and conversely rather like Traditional Medicare) because private companies have perverse incentives when managing public goods. I think social media is a public good and what we’ve seen is a result of Facebook’s perverse incentives. A friend asked what do we do about the perverse incentives? That’s kind of difficult when Citizens United represents regulatory capture by corporations.
The relevant fact here is contained in this article's subheadline, which starts with: "During testimony at Meta’s antitrust trial..."
He's saying "social media is over" because if it is then his company, which dominates social media, does not have market power and thus is not a monopolist.
The statement should be evaluated for what it actually is, the statement of an accused lawbreaker during a prosecution by the government.
I actually think he's correct and the gov's case doesn't really correspond to reality.
It's actually true that social media as it was in the 2010s (when the Instagram and WA acq's happened) is basically over.
They're no longer social, they're mostly just media: apps designed to be portals into consuming as much content as possible, by whomever (so you watch more ads).
I'm not saying Meta is a great company or Zuck is a great person, but the idea that Instagram & Facebook compete with TikTok and YouTube is 100% true.
It does because if Facebook didn't monopolize the social media space maybe we would see innovation instead of blatant feature copying. Instead we have 3(4 if you consider Threads as one) platforms owned by the same company that push the same content - posts, reels, stories and actively try to unify and cannibalize each other. Breaking them down to individual companies will absolutely improve the market.
But how will it improve the market? By making a less addictive (read: less engaging) app that does social media "the old fashioned way" where you connect with friends an not much else?
I love that intention, but it wouldn't be competitively viable. That's why yes, social media in that form is over. The reason Instagram and Facebook are valuable is because billions of people have accounts there and are habituated to go there in every spare second and look at whatever the screen serves them, whether that's Johnny from 7th grade math getting married or a snake being friends with a cat in rural Egypt.
Not necessarily. Breaking the companies up will foster innovation via competition. Who knows what will come out of it? Will it be better than Facebook burning stacks of cash on Zuck's latest fancy(XR/AI/?)? How long will the market be confident in his dollar pyromania? I will short that company like there's no tomorrow if I was in any position to do so.
This is more my opinion than time and market-backed statement but I don't believe addictive design is good for the long-term market positions of those companies because they may be addictive now but a lot of people loathe them* and are looking to escape from their design. They will jump on whatever comes next and not look back. What's good for the company long-term is to provide value to the user - local groups, FB marketplace, etc and become embedded in the culture and society.
* needs citation but it looks like the article supports this view
Sure, I also hate what all of this is doing to society and people more generally! But it's also fair to say he is actually correct in saying that social media as we know it is over and it's now about generic content consumption.
Ack, I'm getting the sense that the author of this article is getting caught up in the argumentation prepared for use in the trial. Of course the Meta people are going to do everything they can to get everyone feeling it's like this to shake at the logical foundations of the case.
The F.T.C. is not chasing an old problem. A case like this may serve as precedent.
This is kind of bad, because it makes it very hard to reach people for social events. I run a fan group for a European soccer team and it's very hard to do outreach because no one is really checking social media for that type of thing. Even meet-ups in general are difficult. There is of course meetup.com but it's niche and expensive.
I recall having Facebook and always had that feeling the algorithm was messing with me and my posts…
Come to find out a few years later it was exposed that Facebook was conducting mass social experiments to users and their comments and posts. Shadow banning and I just never liked the feed…it was not organic.
It’s been over for years. At least Facebook has for me. I got rid of it several several years ago - didn’t delete it, just never logged in again and deleted Facebook from my phone.
Never looked back. One of the few online actions I can honestly say made my life better.
Oh my god it was an antitrust trial? Of course he's going to say it's "over" to reduce it's perceived relevancy and hopefully avoid having the legislators break it up
Social media predates the term social media by decades. It isn't dead and won't ever die because humans love to socialize and we will continue to use tech to facilitate that.
Commercial social media on the other hand may well be dying.
He's a bit late to this conclusion. For a while, Facebook supposedly didn't see TikTok as competition because it isn't social, but Facebook and Instagram have been entertainment feeds for a decade, now.
Shouldn't be too hard to rewrite 2010 Facebook from scratch, and keep it like that. Follow what your friends are doing, and when you post yourself be certain that your friends will actually see your update.
>Meta’s counter-argument is, in a sense, that social media per se doesn’t exist now in the way that it did in the twenty-tens, and that what the company’s platforms are now known for—the digital consumption of all kinds of content—has become so widespread that no single company or platform can be said to monopolize it.
Sure, and as long as people are making things Ford can't monopolize the auto industry. As long as people talk to each other Bell can't monopolize telephones.
This thing where people just generalize the conversation into meaninglessness is so frustrating. Everyone knows what social media is and does until it's time to do something about it then all of a sudden like a Roman salute no one actually has any idea what this is and really telephones are also social media but also social media doesn't exist anymore at all and also some social media is an existential threat to democracy and human rights but not the one that I own which, again, doesn't exist but still somehow makes me enough money that I can put the president on layaway.
I generally trend away from authoritarianism but I can see the appeal in just saying "Jesus Christ shut up we all know what's actually going on here" and just doing something
I've always wished an owner of a journal of record like Condé Nast opened a mastadon instance or the like. I know they already have Reddit but that's not personal media
What I wonder is did everyone stop posting because there was too much content spam or did they fill the newsfeed with content because everyone stopped posting?
reading this in the light that openai is testing ideas for a new gen of sns; it might be where ai lives as “natives” along with human users connecting “friends” leveraging their superhuman information processing
I'm surprised about the amount of comments here berating FB & social media companies. You have the option to deactivate your account and stop using it, to "vote with your feet". Meta is a company and will maximise revenue & engagement - what's actually more worrying is that people still use these sites and doom scroll their nights away (generally speaking of course).
The writing was on the wall a decade ago when everyone and their cat was posting junk content. Zuck's original idea was outstanding. He slowly cannibalized the massive success into outright gross platform:
Get to know girls at Harvard!
---
Get to know girls at select universities!
---
Get to know anyone we've invited! We're so popular, we've got profiles of people at every major university! Write them messages, organize parties, etc! Upload pictures of parties or anything interesting!
---
And now you can play addicting games on Facebook!
---
And you can make a profile if you don't have a school!
And be fed ads and clickbait!
---
while we quietly dump-sell all your info to anyone!
---
Now meet 20% more criminals and scammers! Sell your car on our marketplace! You'll regret every message!
META creates $70 billion per year in NET profit. Mark Zuckerberg is the best business person in the history of business. He's an angel to investors and advertisers. Vanguard has 43 million shares of TSLA. They lost $10 billion in stock depreciation since peak in December 2024. Vanguard has 191 million shares of META valued at $101 billion. No one is losing money on META.
Conflating luck and timing to skill and intent is a hell of a way to lionize someone. One man's wealth is not a measure of skill, it's a measure of greed.
I think I know why TikTok made it to the top of social media. They did not coerce weird corporate rules and let the users have what they wanted. Simple as that. Grown organically. That does not mean it isn't bad for the users in the long run but at least they get what they want.
Is it a diversionary ploy, perhaps the DOJ is looking at breaking up megacorps or something? I think you have to subscribe to read the full story either that or it was really short. Either way, I didn't see a mention of the DOJ on the page.
We're just scrolling random content now and not using "social media". Basically like watching tailored made, but really really shit quality TV. Instagram is massive for this.
Interpersonal social media is dead thanks to Zuck and his companies, sacrificed on the altar of endless growth. His objective now is to profit from keeping people addicted to slop.
I wonder if he ever had a moment of self-reflection to understand how far he veered off the path he'd started on. If he ever considered himself a hacker, then I doubt that all he wanted to build was slop machines.
Hey, it's my day to be the Mastodon Guy! But for real, small, federated social media is so freaking pleasant compared to Facebook and friends. No, the kid from my 8th grade soccer team isn't on it, nor is my next door neighbor, or my kid's nanny from 3 moves ago, but that's fine. Sure, I wish more of the authors I like to follow were on there, and it's not a great way to call out megacorp support teams when something breaks horribly, but I'm completely OK with that tradeoff.
What I get instead is a collection of small, resilient servers where the feed algorithm is FIFO, there's no advertising, and moderation is local.[0] It's my favorite parts of the old Internet before things got centralized and enshittificated.
I hope megasocial media is over. I doubt it, but a guy can wish. That doesn't mean all social media is dead.
[0]Mastodon doesn't have moderation. Individual servers do. That's the way it should be.
I have seen some journalists and orgs move to Mastodon but the culture being what it is, people will be hostile to anything that looks like an attempt by corporate entities or propaganda outlets to capture and commoditize the platform.
And honestly, I'm fine with it. Corporate media is a cesspool. It can all choke on its own fetid stench and die for all I care.
right, but save for.. threads federation... there's been trepidation in my more normal friends to use anything other than the shibboleth. I'd rather an incompetent like Nast manage the platform than a company like Facebook that knows all too well how to leverage their scale. Anyways they're one of the better ones.. from what I've been told.
Why bother reinventing it? The only social apps that have ever been needed are basic chat apps (group or private) and tools for meeting up in real life (such as group chats).
I think this will be the case, part of the charm of early social media was everyone was authentically oversharing. That got people in trouble or they embarrassed themselves. That's why snapchat with automatically deleted posts got a foothold, there wasn't a permanent record of your embarrassing fuck ups.
That will not happen again, we won't be so collectively naive and any new social media will be taken over by PR + brand advertisers almost immediately. Just look at how threads started.
You mean make them as they originally were? Sure, but better learn lessons about how FB ended up such a shithole while still massively used, or you will just repeat that lesson (while massively less successful due to initial momentum)
Zuckerberg is one of the architects responsible for its demise, so he'd be well-placed to declare its death. Early facebook really was an amazing product; all you saw was content from your friends, no one shared links, it was just a way to communicate with each other. Importantly, very few people were on facebook, which helped people be much, much more candid on the platform. Zuckerberg killed both of these features -- pushing garbage and ads, pushing the feed, and populating facebook as thoroughly as possible. I looked at my early feed (~2008?) years ago, and it was actually just friends catching up and girls flirting with me. I wasn't even that popular. To them, it was just another chat venue. They'd never consider the same these days. The platform is a cesspool.
Obligatory Eric Andre meme of "Who killed social media?"
I think a lot of folks are correctly pointing out that new social media is probably much closer to something like Discord, where individuals can define their own communities and make sure they're only getting the content from their family in that community.
It means they're much more responsible for policing their own content and don't have to worry about agreeing with the central policing platform. Seems like a much healthier direction for Social Networks... At least... healthier than whatever is happening at Facebook.
How can social media be dying when people like Elon Musk have like, 6,000 profiles?
/sarcasm
Seriously though, if Facebook put in even a modicum of effort to block the traffic from like, a dozen cities or usernames the platform could regain some semblance of what it used to be.
Failing that, they could provide users with bulk blocking based on geolocation or regex username match and let users take some control over what they get spammed with. The tools provided are completely inadequate.
> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet).
> At one point, Wynn-Williams gets Zuck a chance to address the UN General Assembly. As is his wont, Zuck refuses to be briefed before he takes the dais (he's repeatedly described as unwilling to consider any briefing note longer than a single text message). When he gets to the mic, he spontaneously promises that Facebook will provide internet access to refugees all over the world.
[...]
> Meanwhile, Zuck is relentlessly pursuing Facebook's largest conceivable growth market: China. The only problem: China doesn't want Facebook. Zuck repeatedly tries to engineer meetings with Xi Jinping so he can plead his case in person. Xi is monumentally hostile to this idea. Zuck learns Mandarin. He studies Xi's book, conspicuously displays a copy of it on his desk. Eventually, he manages to sit next to Xi at a dinner where he begs Xi to name his next child. Xi turns him down.
> After years of persistent nagging, lobbying, and groveling, Facebook's China execs start to make progress with a state apparatchik who dangles the possibility of Facebook entering China. Facebook promises this factotum the world – all the surveillance and censorship the Chinese state wants and more.
[...]
> According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook actually built an extensive censorship and surveillance system for the Chinese state – spies, cops and military – to use against Chinese Facebook users, and FB users globally. They promise to set up caches of global FB content in China that the Chinese state can use to monitor all Facebook activity, everywhere, with the implication that they'll be able to spy on private communications, and censor content for non-Chinese users.
[...]
> Despite all of this, Facebook is never given access to China. However, the Chinese state is able to use the tools Facebook built for it to attack independence movements, the free press and dissident uprisings in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
I consider all Meta employees culpable for enabling this company and I will blacklist you all when I am reviewing your resumes. You are wealthy and educated enough to know better but you chose to make money at the expense of the world around you.
Someone who is willing to sell their life, including naming their literal child, and all of their morals that might exist, for cash, is gross. Zuck is gross and should be embarrassed.
I suppose for a few billion dollars (or even a smaller sum), I'd let a lot of things happen to me.
Well OK, the difference would be, would it be just affecting me, or my daughter (already quite gross), or affecting the lives and freedom of millions of exiled Uyghurs, Tibetans and other dissidents around the world by creating a spying apparatus against them.
There's also the difference that the few billion dollars being a sum of money I don't already have, compared to Zuck already having dozens, and wanting another few...
Every time I open my FB I get hammered with dozens of random ads. Also, a randomly generated lists of posts from my network where things pop up, and are then completely lost in the aether, because that is how FB thinks it is going to increase engagement.
Facebook, and Instagram, is a frustrating, infuriating, alarming experience that really does not "bring joy" to my life.
At this point he's just saying what he thinks is expedient in order to avoid the government breaking up his companies.
It's why the whole Meta thing exists - they wanted to be seen as a VR company who has a side hustle in social media to avoid being classified as a monopoly. That argument has failed so now he's asserting that social media doesn't matter.
when was the last time you were social on Facebook?
and maybe threads would count if it weren't 95% filled with bots and mentally ill weirdos pretending to know quantum physics (and how dare you judge them for doing so; whether or not they know quantum mechanics is like totally subjective and your frequency is clearly too low).
Says the person running a social network website where I see one of my friend's posts amid eight "suggestions" that bear no interest to me.
I have kept my FB account open just to contact some members of the family that live far away. Or to check someone I know in my circle that I haven't heard from a while.
But scrolling? Nah. I don't have the app and only open it once a month.
There's a word for it: enshitification. Blame yourself for making it a crap experience, Mark.
Many many reasons. There are incredibly smart people on X who are writing and sharing their thoughts on things. There's nothing comparable to that on the internet.
It may be ok for you if you live in an area with highly concentrated talent but for me I'm pretty isolated so it makes a tremendous difference.
The fact that the old system would ban people for completely absurd reasons (including covid "misinformation" that all turned out to be true, but not exclusively that) and one thing Musk did do is put a stop to some of that
I'm fully willing to listen to all the arguments that he's actually a horrible person but I don't see how people feel that part of it wasn't necessary to fix
https://archive.is/UnNjh
It's astonishing to read this and see not only Zuckerberg but also the article itself present this as something that happened to Facebook/Meta rather than something driven by Facebook/Meta to satisfy Wall Street. Social media did not naturally evolve into what it is today: engagement bait, consumption of content creator and advertiser content, etc. resulted from purposeful business strategic decisions to pivot from a place to learn your first cousin remarried to a place where advertisers and monetization rule. Towards the end of my time on Facebook, I never, ever saw content from family, including from my own sister documenting her terminal disease. But I sure did see lots of car dealerships from states I don't live in, news stories about people with two heads, and nubile young women surely-SURELY-attractive to a middle aged man like me.
Mark Zuckerburg's superpower is being like Jack Sparrow at the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean: he steps off one boat just as it's sinking onto another, and he has the humility to not really give a damn which ship he's on. (I say "humility" even as someone frustrated by his net impact on society.)
I think on the How I Built This Instagram episode the Instagram founder said that Zuck was basically reading the data from Facebook's interactions and saw that the demographics and sharing tendencies of Facebook users meant that it was in a death spiral: people were moving interactions to private channels, reducing the available "friend" content. IMO, the causal factor here is that people became wary of public oversharing and the result was FB pivoting away from "social network" (OG Facebook) to "social media" (2010-2015 FB) and eventually just "media" (Instagram, Reels).
Looking back at what I posted on FB in 2008-2012 is like observing an alien from another planet: it was a completely different platform.
> people were moving interactions to private channels, reducing the available "friend" content. IMO, the causal factor here is that people became wary of public oversharing and the result was FB pivoting away from "social network" (OG Facebook) to "social media" (2010-2015 FB) and eventually just "media" (Instagram, Reels).
Adding to that, the people who kept posting as if nothing changed typically were extremely low-value posters. Political ranters, zero-commentary meme reposts, etc…
Like a large room full of people talking until an event starts, and that moment when half the crowd has realized that someone has gone on stage while the other half has gotten sucked into an argument/discussion and forgotten why we were all here in the first place.
I never thought of it this way before, but that's a brilliant analogy. Now, if only we knew what the analog for the keynote speaker is.
Hilariously, this is kind of how I felt reading the comments here. I thought every commet would start of by saying this is such a pathetic superficial ploy for the trial in question that it's idiotic to respond to it in earnest outside of a courtroom. But then obviously the comment would go on to explain why that's the case.
Whatever sort of business Facebook, Insta, TikTok and Twitter are called now, it's pretty clear they co-evolved into it near identically by watching the others' product. If fb isn't social media, then neither are the rest. If fb is a purple cow then so are the others. The point is they were called "social media" at the time FB purchased Insta.
If Zuck is going to show a graph illustrating how force fed cows in a cage were unable to walk by themselves as time progressed, then someone should put up a graph tracking the number of Whatsapp groups that were created as time went by. If that number was going up, what is left to talk about for fuck's sake.
>> people who kept posting as if nothing changed typically were extremely low-value posters
absolutely not, ... these were (and are) always there. instead it was Facebook management decisions choosing to amplify exactly this. Let's not blame a minority of (misguided) content creators for the shortcomings of Zuck and his sycophant senior managers.
As anti-Zuck as I am, I argue this is simply human nature. I've seen the same effect all across internet interactions, from Gamefaqs to 4 chan to Tumblr to Tiktok. controversial content will simply draw in more discussion (i.e. flamewars) than any other kind of contnet. sad content, happy content, funny content; it all falls to rage bait.
The only blame on Facebook's end is a failure to moderate and mitigate it. But at that point you ask if that would have simply pointed the controversy to the moderators (something also commonly seen).
> The only blame on Facebook's end is a failure to moderate and mitigate it.
Facebook actively amplified ragebait content, for the engagement it drove. That is utterly their fault.
They actively amplified any content that got high engagement, not ragebait specifically. That's why you see this trend across nearly all social media, not just Facebook. There's a strong financial incentive to get people to engage with your service, and amplifying the content that is already getting the most engagement is a simple way to do that.
You could blame this on advertising, but I think even if Facebook were a paid service (ignoring for a minute that that would have killed any chance it had of being successful in the first place) there'd still be an incentive to prioritize content that people's revealed preferences indicate they want to see more of.
Countering this natural human tendency requires a significant, thoughtful, concerted effort on the part of everyone involved.
It was on fox news but I think he really said those things.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/ex-facebook-honcho-says-big-te...
> Encourage online tribalism that exacerbates the societal division....creating exploitative products that drive conflict over conversation, division over unity, and misinformation over truth
Highest engagement and ragebait are apparently the same thing.
I see no disagreement here. Due to human nature, ragebait is a subset of content that gets high engagement, so it gets amplified the same as any other high-engagement content.
Sadly true. I saw the same thing happen in real-time as Imgur transitioned from being image hosting for Reddit to an independent network.
It went from people posting silly memes and cute dogs to angry political stuff dominating the front page every day.
I think you under estimate how much of the angry political stuff is driven by paid for content by people with an agenda - and companies like Meta have just taken the money.
Sure in the end it sweeps up indviduals but money and professional narrative shapers are often behind these things.
There are a cadre of highly competance professionals in the advertising/PR area that were massively enabled by the tools that Meta et al provided ( for money ) - suddenly you could run campaigns that were highly effective, relatively cheap, and almost invisible.
This has been ruthlessly exploited by people and organisations with more money that morals.
Goverments have in part been asleep at the wheel, but also too keen to use such tools for their own ends.
In Imgurs case it's all left leaning. Lots of scaremongering about what project 2025 and how close we are to dictatorship and lots of alarmist ragebait.
I saw a post just over a week ago from a user who predicted that Trump would declare martial law on April 20th because that was the day such and such report would advise him to do so.
It made the front page with hundreds of upvotes and comments agreeing. it's an extreme example but the site is full of this kind of stuff, most often bringing your attention to some obscure ruling or decision, some new political depth plumbed that will mean x,y, and z will now happen.
The aspect of real people posting worthwhile stuff stopped regardless of Zuck's decision to amplify engagement bait. IMO, it was because many of them had their life stage progress beyond college and had better things to do than post to social media.
I think you got cause and effect mixed up. One would normally move on in life and tune down college life rather than shut it down entirely.
I've made a fb account very early on and a new one periodically. Each time I add few friends who have few friends. I post some content daily for two weeks, content these friends would always respond to. The feed had nothing they posted and my posts never got any engagement.
I didn't simply move on, they actively disqualified themselves.
Users are much better of making a whatsapp group. You don't have to leave the college group (you could ofc) but you can mute and archive it or add a few contacts from it (before leaving)
> Mark Zuckerburg's superpower is being like Jack Sparrow at the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean: he steps off one boat just as it's sinking onto another, and he has the humility to not really give a damn which ship he's on. (I say "humility" even as someone frustrated by his net impact on society.)
That's like saying a tapeworm is humble because it doesn't care which colon it's sitting in.
The tapeworm lacks the faculties to care about the colon. It just needs nourishment. Same with Zuck. You can't blame the worm, because it's got no concept of reality beyond the things needed to serve its survival. Zuck, as a human, can only do that by very likely having a serious personality disorder.
A reference to Larry Ellison as a lawnmower, perhaps? [0]
> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle. — Brian Cantrill (https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728
Generally this is relevant advice for thinking about important people. We know little about them, almost all of it is projection that reflects more of my perspective than any reality of the object’s psychology.
Humans love to think we know why someone behaves the way they do. We love to diagnose disorders in strangers based on a very very tiny bit of information.
It is best to treat the decisions as black boxes, or else we are just projecting. I think it’s called the fundamental attribution bias?
No, the takeaway from that talk isn't that we shouldn't judge Ellison's intentions. Quite the opposite, actually. Bryan Cantrill states that Ellison's motives are simple. It's only about money and no other human emotions are involved.
There are so many quotes indicating this:
"What you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle."
"This company is very straightforward in its defense. It's about one man, his alter ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity! That's it!"
"If you were to about ask Oracle, 'Oracle what are you about? Larry, what are you about? Why Oracle? Tell me about Oracle.' 'Make money.' ' Okay, yeah yeah I get it.' 'Make money. Make money. Make money. That's what we do. Make money.'"
"The lawn mower can't have empathy!"
I have to disagree with your interpretation. “Inflict”, for example, is a very loaded word that speaks to intent or at least the mindset.
I think we all feel like we know who movie stars and celebrities really are. When, in reality, not only do we not know their motivation - often we don’t even know our own.
Idk.
When you own 98% of Lanai, have a net worth equivalent to the annual gross product of a mid-sized American metropolitan area, and still feel the need to lay off thousands of people to increase your net worth at age 80, that's not a very, very tiny bit of information.
That's a person being presented with the knowledge that his choices will have a very clear set of consequences for society and proceeding with them anyways. Know the "if you press the button, you'll become a millionaire, but someone you don't know will die" thought experiment?
Larry has, multiple times, been told that if he presses the button, he'll get millions of dollars at the extreme expense of people he doesn't know, and done it. I think it's fair to say that at least one person has died from it; mass layoffs result in one additional suicide per 4200 male employees and one per 7100 female employees [0]
[0]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2...
Protecting people from sudden loss of income is the responsibility of government, not individual businesses.
It would be, but individual businesses (particularly those with the resources of Oracle) don't like paying the taxes necessary to offer that sort of social safety net past a certain point.
In a democracy, that is a voter issue.
Interesting how the buck always ends up getting passed to those with the least amount of power.
Interesting how helpless voters (and those who could vote but don't) are portrayed, especially in the age of instant access to information in everyone's pocket.
Especially considering elections in recent years.
You get a choice of not one but two horrible candidates! In a dictatorship you'd only have one. Be happy!
That must be how democracies all over the world prevailed over dictatorships (at least for a couple hundred years).
Or a campaign donation issue.
Humans feel better “knowing” something than not knowing something (might be called ego or something).
> That's like saying a tapeworm is humble because it doesn't care which colon it's sitting in.
A more VC speak of this is
"Strong ideas loosely held"
> The tapeworm lacks the faculties to care about the colon. It just needs nourishment. Same with Zuck. You can't blame the worm, because it's got no concept of reality beyond the things needed to serve its survival. Zuck, as a human, can only do that by very likely having a serious personality disorder.
Isn't that behavior massively rewarded in the current system of VC-driven capitalism as a general rule? Such founders/companies leach off the society, leave it worse and are given huge valuations and riches. Infact the incentives mean we will see more of such people rise to the top in a ever-worsening feedback cycle until the society puts some checks on them. Which is a extra difficult in this deliberately fragmented environment. Same old loop we can't break out of.
It was just never clear who I was sharing with. At least on a private chat there's a list of users and that's it.
That was intentional. I recall testing this out every time there was a new "oops, we're sorry, we reset your privacy settings to default -- AGAIN".
The privacy settings were carefully designed to have vague wording that how they worked on the surface wasn't how they really worked. Each and every one of them which had a different functionality than what the wording suggested on its surface resulted in you sharing to a much wider audience than you thought you were.
I recall carefully testing it out with a burner account which my main was not friends with, and it consistently taking 2-3 tries to get the privacy settings back to where I wanted them to be.
I would take those days over what Facebook is today - which is to say, useless. The only thing I use it for is groups, which have the good sense to only be about the thing you want to learn about when you look at the group. Still though - it is sad that FB Groups killed off small web forums.
To be fair, the demise of the major BBS hosts / platforms + Reddit and then Discord was what killed off small web fora.
All decisions based on numbers and vibes.
I remember Facebook group - somewhere in the early 2010s, the group feature disappeared. Years later, group appeared again and I had to re-apply to get back into the group. Perhaps group was killed to boost public sharing.
Definitely true, but back in the day that was sort of the fun of it -- similar to putting up an AOL Instant Messenger away message, it was just... a blast of a funny thought to the people that you knew.
Over time, that network got stale and it included "people you sort of used to know", and then it included your grandma and uncle and rest of the world. There are few things that are at the intersection of the Venn diagram of "things I want to share with all of those people", especially as I get older.
Looking at old FB posts feels like reading an internet time capsule from a version of myself that barely exists
Fading spectre of person you once were.
Archived images barely remembered.
Time stands long frozen.
Dust of memories.
A museum of former self.
> the causal factor here is that people became wary of public oversharing
Growth and monetisation drove that shift imoZuckerbeg’s super power is actually operating a giant tech company successfully, executing on multi-year visions, and just barely turning 40.
You might manage the same if you’re rich enough to hire top-tier advisors. Let’s not kid ourselves—OG Facebook wasn’t a tech marvel or even particularly original. It just landed in the right place at the right time and snowballed from there.
I know too many rich people to know this isn’t true.
> hire top-tier advisors
The circle of top-tier leaders who know how to manage giant tech companies is a tiny circle with Zuck being one of them.
In fact that’s what the board of directors did - they used their money to hire Zuck to run their company.
"In fact that’s what the board of directors did - they used their money to hire Zuck to run their company."
doesn't he still have voting control of the stock?
You’re right - but the example stands. The CEO is a professional advisor hired to make the rich people money.
This makes no sense in Zuckerberg's case: he was never hired by the board and they've never had a chance to fire him. Investors can sell the stock if they don't like what he does, but that is not a "professional advisor" relationship.
It's mostly a cult of personality relationship, and you're deep in it with your belief that Zuckerberg is an unusually capable operator.
Independently on what you think of Zuckerberg as a human being, on the basis of acquisitions alone, he can be judged as an insanely effective CEO. The way Meta managed the shift from Facebook to Instagram is impressive from a strategic point of view.
Heck, Meta literally controls the world most popular chat application. I never liked social media, spent most of the past fifteen years avoiding them as much I could while maintaining just enough presence to stay reachable and a Meta application still remain my most used one.
Let's not forget that Google, for all their billions, utterly failed to significantly attack Meta market.
Meta has been effective at being the owner of Instagram, even though that's because they've smartly mostly been staying hands off on it besides integrating it with Facebook wherever makes most sense. And also even though the platform is also getting long in the tooth, becoming a place dominated by brands rather than the hip kids' club it was in the past. Now it just seems like the default social media profile for people to connect with one another, like how FB was before it.
I wonder what if Facebook's attempts to buy Snapchat had gone through. Would they have been an effective steward of that platform as well, or would it have gone the way of Twitter-acquired Vine? Would Snapchat even have been a good acquisition target? Okay, maybe it's not productive to discuss counterfactuals, but it does make one consider if we're self-selecting for big hits here and ignoring all of the duds that never amounted to anything- and the potential duds that didn't go through because the founders didn't want to just take the money.
WhatsApp I'll grant you, hard to think of any alternate chat app that could've gotten as ubiquitous as it did. Though, again, was that also mostly WhatsApp's own success, amplified by Facebook's ubiquity? Not to mention, Google being as incompetent at chat as it is at social, Apple unwilling to entertain servicing other operating systems, and Blackberry, AOL, MSN Messenger, etc. having disappeared long ago.
Interestingly, Meta hasn't seem interested in trying to compete with "channelized" IRC chatroom-style apps in the vein of Slack or Discord. Maybe there's some enterprise Messenger for Businesses that does that, idk.
> This makes no sense in Zuckerberg's case:
I already agreed with the correction - he has voting control.
What is still incorrect is imagining that billions of dollars gets you advisors who know how to run a company - and those people aren't just high level executives already running companies.
> you're deep in it with your belief that Zuckerberg is an unusually capable operator.
The burden is on you to show a successful CEO for over a decade is actually an idiot.
People like him exist a turtles nest full, but there is only one social network effect to rodeo .
In recent years, operating it successfully despite burning through billions for their metaverse boondoggle, sure
Should they be holding cash instead?
Works for Apple. And other companies seem to be able to do R&D, even at a loss, without burning through billions.
Did you forget that apple also has an AR/VR product and doesn’t report that portion of their R&D separately so we don’t know how much it costs?
Cool so even if they burned through $45 billion as Meta did with VR, they still have $53.77 billion on hand as of December
So you just want Meta to carry more cash - the concern wasn't actually about metaverse?
I don’t want Meta to do anything. All I want to do is mock the idea that Zuckerberg has been some sort of exemplary CEO the last few years in the face of the Metaverse project being such a resounding dud- what’s the punchline, billions spent to add feet to the avatars? Not to mention how he’s allowed his actual site to go fallow, between the Feed being inundated with AI slop and Reels being an imitation of Instagram Shorts being an imitation of TikTok and Snapchat shorts and Vine.
> what’s the punchline, billions spent to add feet to the avatars?
I think the metaverse imagery you are referring to was about 10 years ago.
Less than two years ago
https://www.pcmag.com/news/avatars-in-meta-horizons-finally-...
Maybe he’s just good at not rocking the boat too much? I’m fairly certain these things mostly keep moving without any input.
The boat is constantly rocking though, and it's actually incredible how he's kept the boat afloat and increasingly profitable. You can despise their impact on society, but he's an incredible example of a very successful CEO.
Political investigations, anti-trust, terrible media and brand image. GDPR. DMA. Etc. A literal genocide associated with their product.
The shift from desktop to mobile, and the continued evolution of the distribution channel - eg. the "Anti-tracking" requirement on apple devices.
The shift from text posts to images, to stories, to short-form video. From broadcast to DMs and groups.
The shift from "social" media to celebrity and influencer followings, to a feed entirely algorithmic.
The shift in advertisement formats, the shift across what gets advertised (eg. apps didn't exist at all when Facebook started, now they track ad-click-to-install rates through ML models).
I suppose I just don’t find any of those things very admirable? The fact that their product is associated with so much bad shit and still alive is a terrible thing for society. I just cannot reasonably call someone that led all that a ‘good CEO’, because they represent nothing that I’d like a CEO to be, regardless of what Wall Street things.
I’d also argue that it just means that Facebook was very successful at following all the trends and purchasing what they couldn’t replicate.
The CEO is captain of their ship.
Saying ‘I hate their ship, and that it hasn’t sunk’ doesn’t mean they are a bad CEO.
If anything, it means they might be an even better CEO because it’s still doing well, running around rampaging, despite all the hate.
After all - who is the better pirate? The one who is hated and infamous (and still alive pirating), or the one no one has ever heard of?
Your definition of "good" is weird, man. He's good at making money, that doesn't make him a good CEO. A good CEO should be able to make money and have some goddamn principles.
It's like staying that Putin is a good leader, because he's managed to stay in power for so long. Like what the fuck?
should == I wish, eh?
> associated with so much bad shit
Reputation vs harm ethics.
> I’d also argue that it just means that Facebook was very successful at following all the trends
Yeah foreseeing and executing on those trends is the hard part.
Each one of these platform empires from IBM to Microsoft to Google to Amazon to Uber has been very successful at foreseeing and executing on trends, until they're not. Meta was so for a long time, but not necessarily in recent years. That will, inevitably, be the fate of TikTok and whatever future empires arise from the current environment.
I am not saying Zuckerberg hasn't achieved much in the past. It's just funny to crow about his "super power" when Facebook reached critical mass over a decade and a half ago and has been able to coast along as a money printer based on network effects. And also as a Xerox copy printer- I always like to bring up the time they cloned HQ Trivia.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31691294
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27933874
It's good for a platform empire to spent some of its lavish riches on R&D, even if it's just to diversify its moat and further entrench itself. But less so when that ends up as a quixotic boondoggle no one asked for (Metaverse) or as a blatant unoriginal copy (Reels, Confetti). At some point it's not really brilliance to be "foreseeing and executing on those trends" when you have the resources to chase after every trend. Then you've just turned your megacorporation into a VC fund, throwing anything and everything at the wall until something sticks. As we can see, there are a ton of initiatives, projects, departments that don't stick, and some quite spectacularly (Metaverse, again).
Eventually you just end up with the unoriginal silliness of LinkedIn Stories or every single platform including FB having its own Clubhouse, even when Clubhouse itself was a fad that faded as quickly as it appeared during the height of the pandemic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27580241
What I'm saying is, what has Zuckerberg done lately?
I get your point about what he has accomplished. But at the same time, right after saying he's an incredible example of a very successful CEO, you acknowledge "a literal genocide associated with their product." I really wish we could shift how we define success for these CEOs.
Superpower is one way to phrase it.
Another is illegally using Facebook’s monopoly and data to crush or buy potential competitors. I think the olds used to call that anti-trust.
The word you’re looking for is sociopathy
Now it's 99% AI generated click bate.
I always see comments like this, but I rarely have this problem myself, though I see it on others' accounts. Even my Facebook feed shows me lots of legitimately useful posts. Sure, updates from friends and family are a much lower fraction than they were, but I'm actually OK with what I see.
I recently bought a new account on Something Awful [1], having not been on there in about seventeen years.
It's almost surreal, because it still feels like 2005 internet, but people will talk about current topics and the community is generally more engaging.
The moderation isn't some soulless ML model designed to optimize marketing revenue, it's a few dedicated people who want to make the community more fun and I've actually really enjoyed re-discovering the community there.
I guess I had simply forgotten about linear web forums as a concept. Places like Reddit (Hacker News, etc.) have a recursive reply model, which is nice in its own right, but there's something sort of captivating about everything being one long giant thread. It's more chaotic, it's less refined, but it's also kind of unpretentious.
[1] I already had one from when I'm a teenager but the name of that account will die with me as I posted too much on FYAD.
My Something Awful account recently turned 20 years old and I signed in on its birthday for the first time in over a decade. I felt the same thing as you. I looked for some new feature or something to show the passage of time, but found nothing. I had to manually click through pages. Forum signatures still exist.
I also posted in FYAD enough to have my own "personality". Some of the posters from my time are still at it, with accounts pushing thirty years old. I wonder if we ever interacted.
Time to dust off my Fark account.
I’ve long felt that recursive/threaded replies were the death of intelligent online discourse. It’s just endless debate club: everyone proselytizing stodgy talking points from their individual soapboxes without any genuine back-and-forth happening. If someone loses an argument, they usually just disappear instead of facing the music. No accountability, no reflection, no real sense of community.
Quite good at being addictive, though.
On the other hand, threading makes it possible for one group of people to spin off into a subtopic like discussing the relative merits of threaded vs linear boards, in the same general post about what Zuck said, without annoyingly hijacking the main topic. On HN I often find it useful to collapase the child responses and just read the top level, until something like this pulls me into a rabbit hole.
Threading isn’t an intrinsic sin, I think — sorting by upvotes is. The Discourse forum software allows sub-threads while still preserving a linear conversation style. You could also empower mods to spin off discussions into their own, separate threads. Points is what turns it into an inherent pissing match.
The annoying hijacking of a thread was a visible faux pas and helped keep the order of the message board with downward social pressure as opposed to an unbreakable rule (like forcing threaded boards).
Meritocracy vs. benevolent dictatorship
It goes all the way back to Usenet, if not earlier.
When did Usenet really fail? I left by 2007 but it was in bad shape before that.
Spam killed it
I agree. It also means you likely need some way of sorting replies. And that means upvoting, which is a horrid system.
Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other ones.
In my experience, well-moderated forums like Metafilter tend to have much more intelligent discussions than anything you’d find on HN or Reddit.
I did the same about a year ago. Large enough that the community is extremely diverse with a wide range of life experiences but small enough that you'll start to recognize certain people. Also the completely linear threads means people will actually see what you post and not just ignore any conversation that isn't part of the top 10 most uploaded replies.
Yeah, and the simple $10 one-time-fee actually is surprisingly effective at filtering out spam bots and people who post crap content. People don't just make an account in thirty seconds and create a bunch of spam until they're banned, or at least they don't do that much because it would get relatively expensive fairly quickly.
At the very least the few weirdos that seem to create daily accounts just to get banned after 2-3 posts are funding forum by doing so.
I spend much more time on three old school web forums related to poker and the KC Chiefs than I do on social media.
> [1] I already had one from when I'm a teenager but the name of that account will die with me as I posted too much on FYAD.
Did you get teased by the San Jose Shark when you tried to make smash mouth eat the egg?
It started when they introduced the non chronological timeline. Everything from then on was about driving users to use the app more as opposed to being a tool to connect friends.
Thanks to facebook I have met many friends throughout the world, including my now wife, and have managed to keep in touch with them as I travel the world and land in my friends home countries.
It is so sad that the tool I'm describing doesn't really exist anymore.
Fwiw, https://facebook.com/?sk=h_chr still/again works. Recently rediscovered it, and essentially got my old fb experience back. Add a normal adblock, and manually block reels, and you'll only see what friends and followed pages (90% musicians for me) post.
And the non-chrono timeline was said to be necessary because friends are posting too much to keep up with.
Before they introduced the non-chrono timeline the main complaint about Facebook was "I don't care about seeing what my cousin ate for lunch", and from that perspective it almost makes sense.
Yeah but that was in the earlier days, and I think that stopped happening well before they went non-chrono. Which is also maybe they went non-chrono, they realized the social part was losing steam.
Zuck is learning theres a difference between shallow short term engagement and deeper long term engagement. Who could have seen this coming, except literally everyone?
It's like a tragedy of the commons, except there's only one party destroying all resources for themself
In Zuck's defense, it's not just him, it's the entire American school of business.
They never learn. GM, GE, RCA, you name it. They always want to make more money now now NOW. They don't understand they're taking on a metaphorical loan. They don't understand the interest they have to pay.
It's the ultimate greedy algorithm. Just make the decision that makes the most money right now, every time, over and over and over again. Don't look at anything else.
They know, it's just that most of the people will be gone before the negative effects become apparent. Most senior people are only going to be around for 7.2 years so if they optimize for short/medium term benefits and cash out, the long term consequences won't affect them.
What makes you think “they don’t understand the interest they have to pay”?
They are optimizing for short-medium term profits. The people there in the early days pull the ejection code when the “interest” is due. The company coasts until some private equity runs the numbers and realizes the parts are worth more than the whole.
This is capitalism. You are using “interest” (a finance term) seemingly in a moral / ethical critique. If so, use a moral / ethical term instead.
Corporate valuation isn't about short-term thinking. It's actually all very long-term. Plenty of companies are not paying out all their profits to shareholders, and their valuation is entirely based on expectation that it'll happen in the distant future and the discounted perpetuity value will equal the initial investment, probably after the current investors are dead.
There are still plenty of vulture investors who find a way to trick the market in the short-to-medium term. I'm not convinced Facebook is a case of that, even though I hate what they do.
It really about interest rates. Higher interest rates means more immediate revenue needed.
Social media was fueled by a decade of low interest.
The interest rate "right now" is only relevant if you are playing a short-term game.
They need not learn, they do as they’re primed, to go for profit, squeeze and profit, profit and profit some more. Then profit even from the dead husk on the way out. That’s the hyper capitalist lifecycle of a business product.
All I want is nice, non-toxic, non-addictive place to share photos and birthdays and life events with my family and close friends.
I understand that's not going to net hundreds of billions in revenue, but surely a site like that could keep the lights on and the engineers paid at scale.
All those photos and videos cost bandwidth, and that ain't free.
But the number of people willing to pay for their accounts on this stuff is vanishingly small.
So either you run this as a side project and accept that it's losing money, or you start running ads. And the moment you start running ads is the moment your most profitable choice becomes slowly turning your site more and more addictive, so that people spend more and more time on it and see more and more ads.
(Or you can keep the place small and constrained to people who have a high chance of being able to kick some money in for the bills, I'm only paying about half my Mastodon instance's fees because of making this choice.)
Or you can create a huge societal shift where we decide that having non-profit social sites is a good thing, and that they should be funded by the state, even if many of the views on them contradict the views of the giant bags of money pretending to be humans who are currently in control of the country. Ideally this societal shift would make it much harder for these giant bags of money to exist, as well.
Oh also getting people to stick around on a site that's not built to be addictive is surprisingly hard.
Wikipedia runs on donations. Most of FB is a massively bloated interface to maximize engagement, shove as much “content” as they can anywhere and everywhere, track everything you do, and add more “features” to find the next mechanism to get people more addicted.
For over a decade, I used Facebook lite messenger app which was built for countries with spotty, slow internet. It was less than a tenth of the size of the US messenger (of course it was unavailable in the app store and had to be installed via apk), was fast and easy to use (no stories, feeds, money sharing, animations), and was much better at doing the one thing it was supposed to be for, messaging people. It finally stopped working a couple of years ago and the regular app is a bloated mess where chats are an afterthought.
And why? Ads. You need more engagement so you can show people more ads. You need more content, so you have more things to attach ads to. You to autoplay videos to get people to watch more and see more ads. You have to run trackers so you can better target your ads. It’s the ads, not the functions, that make the modern internet too expensive to be funded by individuals.
2000s Facebook was able to run just fine on 2000s internet and storage. It would take a trivial amount of modern data and a fraction of modern storage to run now.
> All those photos and videos cost bandwidth, and that ain't free.
Facebook made $160bn last year, and profits were about $70bn, an almost 50% profit margin, and that's considering they're investing in a lot of crap.
There should be a middle ground between "minting gold coins" (Facebook) and "no money to pay the image hosting bills" somewhere in there.
As positive social networking disappears, the market demand for one you can pay for with no ads increases. Pricing would be difficult but every year the average consumer learns more and more about how much "free" costs.
I agree a non-profit approach might be the only option to avoid the same long term problems we've seen time and again.
> the market demand for one you can pay for with no ads increases
Didn't Meta try to offer this in the EU and they said no you have to let people use the free one without targeting any ads to them
You're technically correct - you can't force people to give consent for targeted advertising (since it would no longer be consent). But you're absolutely allowed to show people ads if they don't want to pay for ad-free.
Generally, trying to directly convert a free service to a subscription service can be much harder than starting out as a subscription service. Just look at all the resentful conspiracies about Facebook planning to charge money that would go viral back in the day.
Users don't like a contract radically changing from under them, and shifting from free to paid is breaking a contract in an immediately understandable way.
No one was forced to buy the plan nor was the free Facebook going to go away. You just would have had the option to pay to not have targeted ads. And that was vetoed by the EU, the very thing many here claim they'd like to do.
I misunderstood your comment.
That case was about forcing users to choose between personalized ads or a paid subscription. I can understand why the EU would reject that.
A case like that is outside of the scope of my argument. My proposal is a site that offers subscriptions with no free ad supported option at all, which the EU wouldn't have an issue with.
> forcing users to choose between personalized ads or a paid subscription. I can understand why the EU would reject that.
Why do you understand why that should be rejected? I don't personally understand it at all. How can it be possible for users to get free Facebook and not give up any personal data to it? There would be no money coming in to keep the site running...
If social media were paid, it would effectively be another barrier between people with different means connecting with each other.
| Why do you understand
From the perspective of the EU and their regulatory environment (vis a vis GDPR) and given Facebook's reach and size, it fits with how they approach big tech and privacy.
| another barrier between people
It's been said enough before that cheap is always better than free. If the costs can be kept low enough, the benefits of removing ads and data-mining from the equation can be worth it. And there's always the option of regional pricing where that makes sense.
It can. The problem is getting users there, and it being built by someone who isn't interested in swallowing the world.
I'm still using Facebook for this, which works for the very few of my friends who are on it. It's actually nice if you aggressively report and unfollow everything you don't want to see.
Does anybody here know of an alternative that works like 2010 Facebook?
At this point, why would you trust anything? I certainly don't. Any platform that exists could get bought up by another company that just uses all the content to train AI.
There are structures that are more immune to this such as non-profits or cooperatives, but otherwise that distrust is warranted given the way it's all gone.
Even then, they can be scraped and fed into a neural net by any actor.
Never said anything about solving all problems.
And the least we can do is make it costly and difficult for them.
Google photos and e-mail?
> It's like a tragedy of the commons, except there's only one party destroying all resources for themself
So basically, what literally happened after the enclosure of the commons, lol
I only use Facebook on desktop, and I use Fluff Busting Purity. I still see enough family and friends content to make it worthwhile.
Every now and then I browse FB on my phone and it's an endless hellscape of ads and promoted content.
Use the "Feeds" tab (you have to go searching for it) but it allows you to just see stuff from your frields, pages you follow, groups, etc, purely in reverse chronological order, like God intended.
Same here. So weird to me that the tech crowd on Hackernews don't all use FBP or use the Facebook API to build their own front end.
Remarkably, despite caring about this kind of thing, I had never heard of FB Purity until today!
I am paranoid enough to wonder if I should be suspicious, but I am hopeful enough to wonder what other amazing stuff is out there to learn about.
You don't think he's saying it so he can say "... so there's no point breaking us up"?
Sure. Taking that perspective even begins to explain some things, like a lot of the pointless me-too developments (short form videos?) Facebook has been implementing for years: if they dilute the product by incorporating others' ideas, even if those ideas go nowhere FB can claim everybody is in the same boat.
But it doesn't make it any less ridiculous. This is like the meme of the guy shooting the other dude in the chair.
The argument I would make as the government is the reason Facebook isn’t a social network is because it is a monopoly and didnt need to innovate and compete
It's wild how the narrative gets framed like Zuckerberg just observed this shift from the sidelines, when in reality, Meta steered the ship straight into this model
> [...] as something that happened to Facebook/Meta rather than something driven by Facebook/Meta to satisfy Wall Street. Social media did not naturally evolve into what it is today:
As soon as you have any platform which says "hey you there with an email address, you can put content on here that can be seen by anyone in the world." you will slowly end up with a scene that looks like all these sites we have now. Advertiser's and influencers will be there, at your behest or otherwise. There's only two options to avoid this. 1. Aggressively tune your algorithm against pure engagement and toward proximity. 2. Explicitly dissallow broad reach of content. And when I say aggressively I really mean it. If people can "follow" others unilaterally, even only showing "followed content" will still lead to most people seeing mostly high engagement posts, rather than their friends. At what point (degree of intervention) does something go from "natural" to "driven"? It's a hard question, but one things for sure, a Facebook that didn't allow high engagement content would already be dead.
Exclusively chronological timelines improve this situation immensely.
As soon as you're using "algorithmic" timelines the battle is lost.
>Social media did not naturally evolve into what it is today...resulted from purposeful business strategic decisions
I disagree about the actual mechanism at play. It is a cart before the horse situation. Yes, it was driven by business, but that business was being driven by Web 2.0, which was being driven by the natural evolution of communication technology.
No. You have it backwards. It came out of a web 2.0 phase but everything it became was driven by a focus on metrics & growth.
And metrics and growth was driven by the new ability to make discussions out of posted content (i.e. Web 2.0)
I feel like you have that exactly backwards? To me it was a shift in roles in the old field of dreams storyline. I.e. "if you build it, they will come".
In Web 1.0, you posted content and an audience came. In Web 2.0, you tried to open an empty field and commenters came and played with each other.
If anything, what happened next was a sort of halfway reversion, as the platforms tried to stratify and monetize two types of user. A subset who were the Web 2.0 contributors and another tier of more passive consumers. I think a lot of the "likes" stuff was also less about self-moderating channels and more about making passive users feel like they're engaging without actually having to contribute anything substantive.
There was plenty of discussion online prior to XmlHttpRequests, see vBulletin, Fark, Digg, etc. The only thing new about “Web 2.0” was a page refresh not being needed after an http request.
Digg doesn't predate Ajax
No, metrics and growth always existed and could be measured there wasn’t some technological breakthrough to enable that with Web 2.0. They, Facebook, decided to use it as their guiding principle. They decided to force the feed on their users. They knew their users had no real alternative and the value they had built with getting everyone on the network itself.
If anything, their move was anti-web 2.0. As they moved forum and blogs and news, pretty much all open and accessible content into their walled garden. Even the famous quote “know what’s cooler than being a millionaire? Being a billionaire.” Or however it goes, is a ruthless capitalist telling Zuck he needs to wake up and realized how valuable this thing he’s built really could be.
Carry on if you want but I think you’re very much the one that gets it backwards? Do you remember how it all transpired or are you too young to really understand what it was and what Web 2.0 really was about?
uhh what? Social media has been a thing since the very inception of the internet. What did feel like a massive transition is the massive prevalence of corporatized social media.
I feel like if you asked the a random warez group in 2010 if they would purposely make a "business" friendly version of themselves on a social media site owned by Microsoft they would have laughed in my faces.
Let's follow this train of thought.
What are the selective pressures on the "natural evolution of communications technology?"
Consumers willing to engage in any specific tech, enough to trigger network effects.
So you think consumer engagement ultimately drives what types of tech that companies invest in building? I can see that argument.
Why do companies want consumer engagement to start with?
Engagement is a proxy for user value. Things that User value can be monetized.
So it's fair to say that effectiveness at monetization is an extremely strong evolutionary pressure on how technology evolves?
No, something can monetize well but only for a small audience. This is what building for a niche does. What works for a niche may not match the macro trends that are at play.
the thing about evolutionary pressure is, it works on all niches, all at the same time
But the pressure doesn't follow monetization efficiency.
Some communication technology isn't paid for by behavioral advertising. I think that's probably the most relevant distinction here.
This is crazy.
You’re saying that Facebook was somehow helpless to avoid changing from a “friends feed” to an ad-maximizing outrage-inducing misinformation machine because of web2.0 communication technology?
Someone invented XmlHttpRequest and Facebook was like, “well that’s the ballgame, I guess we have to suck now?”
Much like a shot of heroin, yes, this is the take. Facebook got a taste of Web 2.0 and couldn't use it recreationally. It became their entire life. They immediately integrated it into every part of business until it was the only thing that mattered.
Letting unchecked greed guide decision-making is not a new phenomenon that came out of Web 2.0 though. To use your metaphor, the heroin was human attention. Web 2.0 was, at best, the syringe.
Yes, this is why I disagreed with the mechanism, and not the phenomenon.
What I’m taking issue with is you disagreeing with the GP assertion that Facebook made purposeful business decisions.
I agree that a Facebook had a powerful incentive to act this way. But they didn’t have to. The fact that they chose to reflects on their moral character.
Internal leaks let us know that Facebook has pretty advanced sentiment analysis internally. They knew that they were (are) making people miserable. They know that outrage causes engagement.
Other internal leaks let us know that Facebook was aware of how much disinformation was (is) being used on their platform to influence elections. To attack democracy.
They didn’t just look the other way, which would be reason enough to condemn them. They helped. When they saw how much money the propagandists were willing to pay, they built improved tools to better help them propagandize.
After the UK was shattered by the Brexit lies, when Facebook were called in front of parliament and congress to explain themselves over the Cambridge Analytica and related misinformation campaigns, they stalled, they lied, they played semantic word games to avoid admitting what is clearly stated in the leaked memos.
These were all choices. People should be held accountable for making awful choices.
Even if those choices result in them making a lot of money.
It sounds kind of crazy to even have to say that, doesn’t it? But that is where we are, partly because of arguments like yours from otherwise well-meaning people.
Don’t absolve them. Hold them accountable.
Zuckerberg wants to own the whole world and thinks you’re an idiot for trusting him. An egocentic sociopath who can’t imagine trusting anyone else because he knows what he will do when you give him your trust.
That had to happen. People didn’t pay for Facebook and it was expensive to run.
Even following the $, there was a case for keeping Facebook social. Users are valuable, and networking retains them, otherwise Facebook has nothing over competitors like TikTok.
I'll bet Zuck considered that. Maybe he figured upfront money was more important, especially for acquiring competitors like Instagram and sorta WhatsApp. He might be right, hard to tell.
Exactly. That.
Is it really a surprise that evil people lie?
If you know how to recognize evil people, this doesn't come as a surprise, and there are so many because society has been changed to protect them.
You recognize evil people by their blindness to the consequences of their destructive actions and the resistance to repeat such similar actions.
That kind of blindness is almost always accompanied by false justification, false reasoning, omission, or clever dissembling, or gaslighting to introduce indirection between accountability (reality) and their actions.
There is a short progression from complacency (the banality of evil) to the radical evil. This used to be an important part of history class in public education.
Nailed it
This is why non software people think developers are generally autistic. Zuckerberg is a super obvious sociopath. There is no mystery to any of this.
So Meta basically turned Facebook from 'connecting with friends' into 'doom-scrolling random content' and now claims that's what users wanted? That's like a restaurant replacing all their food with candy and then saying 'See? Nobody wants real meals anymore!'
Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want".
Any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.
It’s our human lizard brain on dopamine.
What users want, and what they collectively consume, are two different things. This is very evident in the AAA games industry, which is facing a 10x downturn in funding, abysmally bad (negative) ROI, and exhausted growth engines because it shaped itself around what players would consume for years, ignoring what they actually wanted. And the players got tired[0].
It turns out that demand matters when you sell a product or a service. And it is elastic in ways other than price (such as convenience, value, appeal), but not infinitely so. In plain English, you can force anti-social media onto the market by making it appealing/hooking/addictive/convenient/supposedly valuable for a while, but not indefinitely. People do demand proper socializing, especially recently. Many are realizing they've been sold a total bag of goods just because they consumed it, and it's not good enough to displace real human connection.
[0] https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025
> This is very evident in the AAA games industry, which is facing a 10x downturn in funding, abysmally bad (negative) ROI, and exhausted growth engines because it shaped itself around what players would consume for years, ignoring what they actually wanted. And the players got tired[0].
My takeaway from that presentation is more that:
* Games cost more to make but there is resistance from players to pay more
* A number of growth areas (mobile, social gaming, displacing other forms of media, battle royale) are exhausted
* A lot of attention in China is moving to Chinese-made games
* The marketplace is overcrowded with titles
* Gaming is more social now, so a significant number of users are sticking to the same big 5/10 games where there friends are, which leaves even less room for the zillions of new games to gain traction.
I think the industry had a role in this, namely in locking people in to games, and simultaneously overspending on and underpricing games. But I'm not getting the sense (at least from this presentation) that the new games that are coming out aren't what users want.
> Games cost more to make but there is resistance from players to pay more
It's a little bit more involved than that. Games don't have to cost much more to make, they just are due to declining quality of leadership and poor executive decisions. It's more like, "AAA studios are running their budgets up (arbitrarily, usually not driven by any customer request or engagement)" and "players are resistant to paying for that".
"Clair Obscur Expedition 33" literally just came out a few days ago. It's gorgeous high-fidelity AAA-like art, it's super well done, it's incredibly well received, and it's retailing at $50 ($60 for the 'Deluxe Edition') at launch (not including current steam sale). It's doing great, because they made a great product, kept to a reasonable budget, and sold it at a reasonable price. Oblivion also just got a remaster at the same pricing by Virtuos, and it's doing really well. Baldur's Gate 3 is also another example, amazing title, AAA quality graphical fidelity, $60 launch pricing (digitally on Steam & GOG, anyway).
Compare that to something like Ubisoft's "Star Wars Outlaws", which was $70 digital base ($130 Deluxe Edition) at launch. Yes, it's high-fidelity and AAA-like too, but it's very much not well done, it's not well received, and it's arbitrarily super expensive on top of all of that.
Games don't just "cost more to make" automatically, it's mostly not based on inflation or underlying costs. AAA studios are increasingly more mismanaged (or just demanding higher margins) than they did before, and that mismanagement is impacting their cost structures. Instead of fixing those mistakes, companies are expecting players to just forever eat those additional costs.
If the game is really, really good, they might get away with it. (Nintendo, probably). If their games aren't that good, players are going to walk (Ubisoft).
It's not "the market is saturated". It's not "the market is overcrowded". It's "the market is competitive and expects quality", you can't just shove a half-baked only-ok game at high pricing, and expect it to be a success.
> Games don't just "cost more to make" automatically, it's mostly not based on inflation or underlying costs.
That doesn't contradict what I wrote, so much as expand on it. The presentation linked above (which I was attempting to summarize) says there's a push for, for example, more photorealism, that players don't really care about, but balloons various costs. It also mentions recurring costs for online games too unpopular to cover their expenses.
> It's not "the market is saturated". It's not "the market is overcrowded". It's "the market is competitive and expects quality", you can't just shove a half-baked only-ok game at high pricing, and expect it to be a success.
I don't doubt what you're saying about quality of gameplay, but that's really not the focus of the linked presentation. It mentions that too many game studios are chasing dead trends, and unpopular payment models. But it's also making the claim that there might be tons of great new games coming out, but hardly anyone is even trying them.
Honestly I'm out of my depth with this, as I barely game at all, and if you had asked me yesterday, I would have thought the industry was still booming. I clicked caseyy's link and expected something concise about the state of gaming, but ended up reading (most of) a 200-slide presentation.
This. As someone who used to play a lot and doesn’t as much, graphics were only impressive for a minute. Story and gameplay cost roughly the same today as they did 20 years ago and are infinitely more important.
I remember people saying all this same stuff 10-15 years ago, and Ubisoft and EA are still going. Will they ever go too far with it I wonder
Similar thoughts by Jason Schreier: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-01-10/why-so...
https://archive.is/oLwbP
> It's "the market is competitive and expects quality"
This just can’t be anything but nonsense when EA can release the same game literally decades in a row and have people eat it up anyway.
Because it's a good game and the new editions are literally seasons of the same game. World of Warcraft has adopted a model for the last few expansions and players love it. It's literally HN's darling pricing model where it's a subscription but you can stop and keep all the versions you have.
HN just doesn't skew really getting sports people.
I would have no issues with EA and this model if they didn't have the policy of switching off their online servers a few years after the next iteration comes out. Activision has never done this with afaik any Call of Duty (although they do have slightly lower overheads) and it's such a big joy stealer for the sake of costs.
I also wonder if the decline of the middle class and a growing lack of leisure time for the lower/middle class (more people than ever working multiple jobs to make ends meet), also have been having an impact on sales.
No. People have endless hours to waste on numbing themselves. The worse their life is going the more they do that.
There is much to be said about the industry. Most game releases compete for significantly less than 20% of the net bookings each year. Others are black hole games (the multi-year/multi-decade lifespan games that attract players and hardly let go at all), accounting for about 30% of the annual net bookings. The top 20-30 franchises account for about 50%, and the 20,000 other games made annually account for about 20%. Of the 20%, the top 50 releases each year will take 19% of the bookings, with remaining 19k+ sharing the 1%.
Just like Facebook, the first-mover advantage has favored many now-established studios and franchises. They exploded game-development costs because they could, and funneled these costs into marketing and moat features indie developers could not build (such as huge open worlds, amazing sweaty character face wrinkle rendering tech, and SOTA systems). But many of these companies did not respect the player's wishes for well play-tested games with interesting stories and mechanics. Still, they captured the top 20-30 franchise part of the annual net bookings, and strongly compete in the top-50 game part. Some even built some black hole games (GTA Online, Rainbow Six: Siege, Fortnite). For a long time, they avoided much of the pressures felt strongly by smaller companies. They were "above" the 99% of games that have to compete for close to 1% of the revenues. Their marketing was so strong (plus, they strengthened it with access journalism) and features so moated, they could do no wrong.
However, over the last 5 years, things have changed. Many AAA industry legends have left their jobs at major studios to start small studios and create games as a form of interactive art, rather than to make publishers rich. Ultimately, in their view, the greed and blind following of what players would consume (trends) in large numbers led to a sterile industry that could no longer create art.
The growth engines got exhausted because players did not actually demand what they were offering, such as season passes, eSports corporate shooters, microtransactions, padded playtimes, user-generated content, and the other things. The new growth engines (AI, targeting kids, etc) are also what the players don't want very much. The industry understands it, and investors are starting to catch on after facing a decade of poor returns, too. The crucial point I am trying to make is that the industry spent a lot of money on these growth engines that the players didn't truly want, led by market metrics that genuinely showed they were consuming it. But now the gig is up, the writing is on the wall, and everyone inside and out of the industry sees it.
As a contrast, many Eastern companies (Nintendo is an especially prominent example) stuck to classic pricing models, did not inflate the cost of their games with their money for moat (most indie developers can make games to compete with Nintendo outside of the IP), and never used the growth engines used in the West. These companies, along with many people in them whom I know personally, are largely unaffected by the industry crisis. They were always making games their users wanted.
Finally, I have to say, the industry is split in two. 8/10 AAA companies are struggling because they cling to the growth engines (old and new) that the players don't want. About 2/10 game developers and publishers genuinely build games that people want, even in the West. And now that the pressure is up, some AAA executives from the 8/10ths are becoming acutely aware of this. Emphasis on "some". So, yes, the industry in some part was, is, and will continue to make games that players want. But the more interesting part for our discussion is the large part of it that wasn't, isn't, and perhaps won't be.
Of course, there's some probability I'm reading this wrong. I'm making my business bets in the industry based on it, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily right.
And thanks for reading the report before engaging in the discussion. That is appreciated.
games don't cost more to make, just certain out of touch companies keep dumping tons of money into dumb shit gamers don't care about. it has never been easier to make games with a lower entry barrier than it is right now.
I think you've misunderstood some critical aspects of that demo.
The growth numbers don't show what people attribute to them. That timeframe aligns with increases in discretionary spending, and also QE/loose financing requirements. The boom bust cycle can easily be explained as a result of debt financing, and leveraged buyout.
The bust part of the cycle is what you get naturally when you finance poor investment choices.
This is the same Atari story, all over again. Those spends also don't appear to normalize against inflation.
Main console manufacturers also require additional costs which the developer must carry if you want to develop games on those platforms, and the industry has been devoid of anti-trust for decades, and exploitive of its workers (all which increase costs), and regulatory is paying much closer attention to deceptive business practices, with addictive design in some places being comparable to civil battery. The elements for this type of design are scientific, and are based in early last century torture findings.
What you naturally get is overinvestment, shortfall in delivery, stark losses, and a burning down of your supply logistics, where they stop carrying your goods, and won't carry your goods at any price (even on contingency), on top of the rising costs. In other words, you have benefits front-loaded, followed by diminishing returns, followed by outflows exceeding inflows. This is Ponzi, followed by deflation leaving the market chaotic.
Cooporation between large platforms and developer monopoly has shrunk the market over time as well. Extracting revenue in a race to the bottom, with fixed barriers to entry concentrating marketshare.
>Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want".
With this approach, everybody wants fentanyl.
Open a restaurant masquerading as providing high-quality, locally sourced organic food, discreetly sprinkle the hardest drug on the most popular plates, slowly increase the dosage until people are completely hooked, and voilà, you can legitimately claim "people wanted the drug; it was their choice."
Right, and the things preventing restaurants from doing this:
1. At-scale boycott: would you eat at a McD's where the "Happy Meal" has fentanyl in it? But somehow, this doesn't work for "social" media -- we're all aware what it is, yet we still use it, unironically.
2. Regulation: if a food inspector eats at your restaurant and confirms rumours that your food is actually addictive, your restaurant will get shut down. But somehow, FB/IG/etc. can operate without regulation, and free of any consequences. Sarah Wynn-Williams' book "Careless People" is worth reading.
> Would you eat at a McD's where the "Happy Meal" has fentanyl in it?
This is largely a communication problem. Fentanyl is unacceptable, but a large subset of people would be glad to get food with CBD oil for free. Or caffeine - as last year's Panera charged lemonade scandal [1] revealed. Or alcohol, that's already very normal. Or monosodium glutamate, a personal favorite of mine which was once surrounded by negative press, or high-fructose corn syrup, or trans-saturated fats. Or maybe not an intentional part of the food, but traces of herbicides, pesticides, and antibiotics may end up in food, and microplastics or PFOS from packaging will be eaten as well. And I'm sure you've seen old advertisements for cure-all elixirs that contained cocaine.
Health experts know that certain ingredients are bad, and many others are regularly consumed in quantities far, far exceeding their safe levels, but you don't have to look too deeply at a grocery store shelf or fast food menu to realize that the contents are boycott worthy but normalized to the point of being inescapable.
People know even less about what Meta is doing with their data or what their addictive apps do to their brains, and are equally powerless to learn about it or change it.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/panera-charged-lemonade-drinks-ca...
People start using/abusing alcohol (and cigarettes, etc.) knowing it is addictive and damaging. This has not affected the business of bars/pubs. With this in mind, it shouldn't be a surprise that people still start using FB, IG, etc.
The fact that Zuck (and Elon) are all buddy buddy with the current admin in Washington shouldn't be lost in the conversation.
> we're all aware what it is, yet we still use it, unironically.
Well, part of that is because people got addicted gradually, starting before it was common knowledge. Another part of it is that people actually do need to use these services (for some reasonable definition of "need") because some friends, family members, government/community services, etc. can only be contacted via these services.
So McDonalds puts quite a bit of sugar into their beef patties. We know sugar is quite addictive to humans. And harmful. Hard drugs are not so acceptable but this is exactly what McDonalds has been doing and yes inspectors confirm this is what’s happening. There is even lots of regulation around food. Yet they find a way.
> With this approach, everybody wants fentanyl.
And we all probably would want it if we tried! It's not that we're in any way better than the folks suffering from opioid addiction. It's all just chance.
It think the second paragraph sort of agrees with you.
> With this approach, everybody wants fentanyl.
One difference that may possibly affect the strength of your argument is that fentanyl is a physically addictive drug. Social media may be "addictive" but they aren't addictive. If you genuinely believe they're equivalent, use social media for a year, and fentanyl for a year, and see which is easier to quit.
Actually, scratch that: make it a thought experiment. But if you can see that they aren't equivalent, you can see that it's not a good comparison.
As someone who has struggled with physical and mental addictions for my entire life: breaking a physical addiction is trivially easy compared to breaking a mental addiction. And breaking a physical addiction is really hard (I'm currently suffering withdrawal effects from a recent decision to quit vaping nicotine and it sucks).
Mileage varies for different people, of course. But dopamine is dopamine and addiction is addiction and it's neither kind nor fair to tell someone else that their addiction isn't real because there's no change in their blood chemistry.
What do you think Starbucks is?
Sure there are nice small restaurants. But look at all the big chains.
You just described Starbucks
It started as small roaster of coffee but now it’s a Sugar+Caffeine drink system for addicts.
> it is exactly what users “want”
It’s actually what users want “now”. When instagram initially stopped chronological feed users didn’t want it. When they started injecting random posts from people you didn’t follow. Users didn’t want that either. When they launched reels, they also didn’t want that. When they started almost exclusively showing reels like TikTok, users still didn’t want that.
The problem with all of the above is that users eventually got used to the new norm and their brains established the dopamine rewards pathways according to what they were offered. And that’s why they think they “want” it now.
But we’ve seen this happen before. FB did the exact thing and now it’s almost dead, even Zuckerberg acknowledged it. But they somehow think, users won’t eventually get off Instagram because somehow this time it’s different?
Or users eventually get used to it until one day they wake up and realize that the thing they went there for isn't what they get.
I check Facebook less than once a month. I want to see what my distant friends are doing. Instead though I see subversive political memes, and other things (jokes) that are fun once in a while but not worth spending much time on. Because Facebook isn't giving me what I really want I gave up on them. But it took me a while in part because the things I want to see are there - they are just hard to find.
It's just how you define "want." They a-b tested the algo vs chronological feed and the algo one because more people used it. It's just stated vs revealed preference. As a business, who's goal is to make money, does something that makes them more money, are they supposed to stop?
Whether it's good for society is another question but, users definitely didn't show that they "wanted" a chronological feed, they only said it. There was a JUMP in engagement, not a decline.
"want" is different from "will consume if offered". Arguably, the definition of "want" that most people use is one of higher-order desire. E.g. a drug addict wants drugs, but doesn't want to want drugs. People might choose a certain feature if offered and they aren't aware of its negative impact on their mental health. Then they might become cognizant of the negative effects but by then the choice to not use that feature is no longer available so they're stuck with what they have. Alternatively, the choice to not use the feature might still be present, but the neural reward pathways have already been built. The user then wants the feature, but they don't want to want it.
Well articulated :). I can get on board with that
While that’s true of course, I find that a bit of a harsh conclusion. Yes, that’s the end result for any greedy company in a world without regulation.
But you can make that case for most business models. Restaurants? They’ll all eventually turn into fast food chains, because our human lizard brain appreciates fat and sugar more than actually good meals.
Gaming? Let’s just replace it all with casinos already. Loot boxes are just gambling anyways.
There’s absolutely a market for proper social media that’s actually social. It’s just that companies are way too greedy currently.
That is true but you have to be very specific about who your "users" are.
If your "users" are the guys in charge of showing more ads to people, then yes. People, on the other hand absolutely prefer watching their contacts' posts first. Recommendations related with their individual preferences, second. Random dopamine-inducing stuff, only from time to time. If you prioritize the third kind only is like someone said already on the commments here: like a restaurant that only serves candy. They will have customers for a while but eventually they will burn them down (or kill them).
sure, that's "what people want" inasmuch as if you put every button through a statistical microscope, that's what the statistics will tell you, but if you give a rat cocaine-dispensing button and measure how many times it hits the "more cocaine" button you'll also come away with the conclusion "rats want cocaine", a thing they never encounter in nature and would never have encountered without you putting it in front of them, and you'll pat yourself on the back and say "now I understand rats: they are all vicious cocaine fiends", but you haven't really learned about rats' true nature, you'll have only conned yourself into a false narrative that confirms that your own actions are only "giving the rat what it wanted", and after it dies of an overdose, you declare yourself innocent. Anyway that's a/b testing and the tech industry.
Well people really-really "want" many other things too, like free money, sex, etc etc. Does it mean that something that started as a way to connect with friends and family must turn into Only Fans for example? Or cater to all those other wants that have nothing to do with friends and family, just to make a few more bucks?
Users, or me at any rate, want more than one thing. For my family and friends I want to see what they say without junk added and my family has currently moved from facebook to a whatsapp group to achieve that.
I also browse random junk on xitter. It's a different thing.
It makes one wonder whether "what I want" is really the best thing to optimize for.
It’s only what they “want” after the various social media companies to deliberate steps to addict their users to feeds that maximize engagement.
Does an addict really want to be an addict? The Light Phone, screen time features, and various other things exist for a reason. People don’t want this, but feel helpless to break free from their addiction, which entered their life like a trojan horse.
People want slop, they always wanted slop and there is no magical mind controlling powers in a Facebook feed. It was the case in the age of TV, magazines and when nobody had any idea how to even measure what people want.
If Mark Zuckerberg forcibly injected educational material and long form journalism into everyone's feed the average user would uninstall the app. People have been consuming crap since they were able to draw boobs on cave walls with chalk. Do you know why every belief system that claims people are ensnared by some false consciousness fails? Because they aren't, there's no such thing. Mark Zuckerberg is exactly right about one thing, he gave the people what they wanted, and if he's going to lose to a platform like TikTok it's because they're even better at it
I was speaking more to the work of Nir Eyal. His ideas were widely used in the tech industry and he quite literally wrote the book on how to build habit forming products.
> Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want"
I might fine tune this to "users most likely to click ads"
Yeah that’s the problem. Ultimately, people want to distract themselves more than they want to connect with people.
And with both in the same platform… I know where I’m going.
I think another problem are network effects. They make it much harder to build a reasonable alternative
Facebook has simply been climbing towards a local maxima that is poorly correlated with what people need to connect. They rely on mountains of data for their optimization but their reward function is just off.
There already is a reasonable alternative for connecting with the people you know. Group chats.
Your implication is correct in that there is no reasonable alternative for distracting oneself. At the same time, I'm not sure that if you were to build an alternative, it would not degrade into "content" scrolling as well.
That’s the problem:
-under network effects, you can’t spin up a viable indie alternative (like you could for a note taking app) because you need to massively attract users
-the less engaging social platform is the less economically viable social platform
So the natural end point for any social app is content doomscrolling
> Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want".
No it isn't. No one "wants" to be addicted.
> Any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.
They will measure you then do everything they can to increase the number of minutes you spend on the site. The media recommendation is a consequence of cost. It's very cheap for them to maximize your time spent using other peoples content.
> It’s our human lizard brain on dopamine.
There are tons of ways to get dopamine flowing into your brain. Which is why it was important for Meta to monopolize and dominate the field. Turns out lizard brains are exceptionally fickle.
>No one "wants" to be addicted
Not consciously, no. But our conscious mind is just the tip of the iceberg, half-filled with post-hoc rationalizations for numerous unconscious urges. We don't have to call them "wants", but maybe "desires" works better.
The problem is we know people are capable of seeing through their own ego and witnessing these urges for what they are. This usually leads to them gaining control over them. This is mostly what therapy is supposed to be about.
Taming our internal animal nature is possible. People don't for all kinds of reasons. This leaves them susceptible to simple addictions.
Advertisers are also good at weaponizing psychology to manufacture wants that people didn’t know they had and in many cases don’t want to have after the purchase.
It's what most users want.
Most users want to scroll through internet TV passively. However there is a big enough minority of users who want authenticity, novelty, and creativity in their online experiences. This group is big enough to sustain, say, a social network.
We've just never solved the Eternal September problem.
You're describing the cozy web. The Eternal September problem is actually solved right now it's just semi-invite-only.
I am a part of more genuine social networks now then when facebook launched. They're all around you, it's just "giant supermassive public square" never really worked even with strong recommendation algorithms to try to ad-hoc connect related people and cut down on the perceived size.
Most of them live on Discord, others on the fediverse, none are large by any metric and highly personal.
I agree. People want to eat well, quit smoking and get in shape, but mostly they eat crap and sit on the sofa in front of the TV (present company included). Which is what they really want?
What they do. There are long-term goals and short-term goals (convenience etc.) Society pressures you into having long-term goals even if you don't do anything about them.
Complete nonsense, they just have a bot that optimizes for engagement, engagement doesn't equal longevity or increased revenue volume over some number of years. Nor does engagement mean that it's what you want. If someone walks up to you on the street, gets in your face and start assaulting you and you engage is a fight does that mean you "wanted" to get into a fight?
This is like an old school forum optimizing for flamebait threads, it's clearly not going to work. The major problem is that while advertisers love engagement they hate toxic content, low quality content, violence, drugs, porn, illegal activity, extremism, bots, trolls, etc
Eventually the media will build some story and the bottom will fall through, this process is just slower than usual because users are siloed into bubbles (like if you report a racist video they will show you much less, but there are still tons of people watching tons of racist videos and getting ads)
I know from a strictly economic standpoint the things I do are the things I want. But is doing an activity are you addicted to what you really want in a human sense?
It's what "remaining users" want after the many users who didn't want that left
We don’t know it’s what we don’t want because of the addictive nature
Except that facebook is slowly failing into obsolence. Or fast.
Are they? I know that many of us have got off. The question is are we minor outliers or a wave? I don't know.
There’s a few trends at play:
Young people in Europe and North America do not use Facebook anymore, if they even have an account at all.
It is still popular among older users in North America. This is one of the wealthiest demographics on earth, so Facebook’s advertising model will be ok for the foreseeable future.
Growth is still positive on Instagram and WhatsApp, though Instagram’s engagement levels have begun to decline.
Facebook’s main growth areas for all three apps are in the developing world. They pay carriers to allow Facebook to be accessed without counting against user data limits, so in a lot of these countries Facebook is synonymous with The Internet. Young people in these countries still see Facebook as cool, and they aren’t as likely to seek out platforms to avoid their parents on. The key problem is that these markets are not worth very much to advertisers because they have low levels of discretionary spending. This makes operating in these markets a long play for Meta; they spend some money on subsidies to build a user base in the hope that the users will gain higher levels of discretionary spending in the future, increasing the value of the market for advertisers.
> … what users “want”.
what *some* users want.
sure, it may have been a majority at the time. but imo chasing that was incredibly short sighted.
many many many people warned them this would be the outcome. in typical fashion for these people, they ignored it, imagining themselves to be smarter in every area than everyone else.
i’ve said it before and i’ll say it so many more times: we need to better at realizing where our intelligence is behind. some people are untouchably genius in social situations but absolutely terrible at stem. and some stem people may be absolute genius at engineering work but entirely lack understanding of social/humanity issues.
far too often only one of those two groups understands their lack of understanding. if you ask the best party planner in the state to engineer an automobile, they’re going to look at you like you’re a crazy person. ask the best engineer in the state to plan the years most important ball, we’re going to fully delude ourselves into thinking we can do it better than the party planner.
>Any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.
This is unironically why I think we need a government funded non profit website for friendship and dating. Any such site subject to the whims of capitalism is doomed to become toxic
Missing ingredient: endless greed.
Social media is just fine. Trillion dollar ad conglomerate staffing menlo park software engineers making 500k/yr? That requires enshittification.
You do realize that by applying quotation marks you've basically nullified your argument, right? :-(
High end restaurants work against this trend by cultivating taste. They convince their customers to eat their vegetables, literally. They can do this because there is an ethical value associated with dining which is embedded in our culture. You enjoy a fine restaurant because it is right to enjoy it.
Facebook failed because there is no ethic associated with social media. You can continue to degrade the quality and nobody will say "hey stop, it's not supposed to be like that". FB bootstrapped by co-opting the instinctual value of social connection with your friends, which TikTok and IG also copied but with strangers instead of friends.
HN is a kind of this thing. It's netiquette. We still stay around here because it's the only place with tech discussions and at least some amount of decorum.
Probably because it looks so boring and dry that anyone motivated by blinking lights and fast cuts is immediately turned away.
The prospect of having to read is a large turnoff for many people.
> nobody will say "hey stop, it's not supposed to be like that".
Is that not exactly what drew people from Myspace to Facebook in the first place? There was a lack of appetite for the flashiness and gaudiness, and an appeal to how classy FB was.
This is partially true. FB was initially much more classy in its exclusivity, i.e only certain universities had access. That only worked while they were scaling up, and ended in 2006, long before Facebook became dominant.
There is definitely an ethic associated with 'being informed'; I remember being told to read the news as a kid and it felt like vegetables.
Scroll media is fast food, and fine dining is books or long form sub-stack-- which cost more money but also will-power. The question of how scroll media can deliver high quality information is similar to asking how drive through can serve vegetables. I think it comes down to the fact that you can't cultivate taste unless people are paying with will-power.
I would venture to say 95% of people don't enjoy (and/or cannot afford) "fine" restaurants. But mostly don't enjoy. And a restaurant would go bankrupt trying to convince them to eat healthy. The proof is the existing state of the market. Although daily GLP-1 pills might be able to change that.
This is very true, and pairs well with the other comment about netiquette.
95% of people would not enjoy polite technical discussion forums, but the 5% that do are enough traffic for a site to survive.
I don't really get your comparison with restaurants. Could you elaborate?
That was parent comment:
> That's like a restaurant replacing all their food with candy
Casinos say gambling is what people want. Tobacco companies say cigarettes is what people want. Drug dealers say fent is what people want.
at least until it kills them!
It is what people wanted though, from Facebook. Most people, including you and I, connect with friends through DMs in various apps, WhatsApp, or an equivalent group chat messenger (iMessage, etc.)
Facebook has become a lot like TikTok because that's what people want from an app that has a feed. We, en masse, don't engage with a feed of just our friends' posts (FB actually has a friend's feed which gets relatively little usage). When we open a feed-based app, we want the long doomscroll. I do think your restaurant analogy is apt. I mean nutritious food is healthier for people, but a miniscule number of restaurants serve such a thing, and none do which aren't trying to fill a small niche in the market
> FB actually has a friend's feed which gets relatively little usage
I've never seen this, despite frequently being irritated with Facebook mainly showing me random shit I don't care about.
Companies always squirrel away the "works correctly" button and then are like whelp nobody is using the thing we hid! Nothing we can do!
> it is what people wanted though, from Facebook.
I doubt that. In my entourage, Facebook was always thought as a social hub for internet presence. Like maintaining a web site, but with less tediousness. So you fill it up with personal details, then share happenings with your friends. And just like an hub, it's the entry way for more specific stuff, like messenger for DM, groups for social activities, pages for personal or business activities. The feed was just a way to get updates for stuff that's happening around you.
> FB actually has a friend's feed which gets relatively little usage
Because everything about the Facebook user interface discourages its use.
What if, and I know this is craaaaazy, the friend feed was just the feed? Facebook was growing fine with that.
> It is what people wanted though, from Facebook
Facebook used to provide a good experience of staying in loose touch with people I didn't know well enough to have ongoing conversations with. It was nice to know roughly what was going on with people, and if something big happened (like a kid, a new job, a death) I would see it and could reach out with congratulations or condolences.
But some people posted every meal and cup of coffee, and others only posted occasionally, and Facebook decided to bury the occasional posters and promote the high-engagement users instead. That's when Facebook became more bad than good for me, and I left.
If we could go back in time to that point, and prioritize posts in inverse relation to the poster's frequency instead, I'd use that service.
There are icecream stores, where you can seat and take icecream and most of the time also cofee or cake.
I've seen candy stores, but they don't have chairs and tables.
This is such a good analogy. Awereness about social media shluld be like awereness about junk food you consume.
Meta was losing to TikTok so they had to adapt by promoting brain rot[1]
[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/brain-rot
Except the content quality on TikTok wasn't only brain rot, and the algorithm often grew into valuable content. That is, if you actually wanted it. If you want brain rot, it'll give it to you.
Meanwhile, you don't even get the choice on Facebook.
> doom-scrolling
Just wait 'til you find out about imageboard doom-scrolling.
On the flip side, there hasn't been enough worthwhile posts from friends in years.
I think it's more like a restaurant offering both candy and burgers.
When candy sales outpace burgers, they're naturally going to invest more in candy. Eventually, they start to compete more with Hershey's than McDonald's.
Businesses evolve or die, no?
I guess the problem with this analogy is that it fails to capture the essential nature of Facebook: that its base product ("hamburgers") has a network effect, and the new product ("candy") doesn't.
If Facebook is a social network for seeing my friends, then there's nowhere else for me to go. They're on Facebook and it's unlikely they're all going to join some new network at the same time.
If Facebook is a high engagement content farm designed to shove random engagement-bait in my face, then it's just competing with Reddit, Digg, Twitter, 4chan, TikTok. Folks can get addicted to this in the short term; but they can also get bored and move on to another app. Based on conversations with all the IRL human beings I know, this is what they've all done. (The actual question I have is: who is still heavily using the site? Very old people?)
> Businesses evolve or die, no?
What I constantly see, are businesses that would be just fine continue doing the same, but die instead because they tried to evolve into something and alienated all their existing customers/users and couldn't attract new ones because what they evolved into made no sense. But no, businesses want to take over the world (or at least have a large slice from the pie) so they "evolve" no matter what.
Case in point: Facebook.
Numbers must go up. In the stock market anything steady state is dead.
This isn’t quite true. There are many businesses like Colgate that are steady state with a reasonable amount of growth that do fine in the stock market.
But that doesn't conform to the internet's stereotype of mustache-twirling capitalists in top hats and monocles, so obviously it can't be true . . .
</SARCASM>
Numbers can naturally go up with the population, unless the product stays the same and newer generations decide they don't want it. Facebook suffered a double hit from both changing the product to scrollslop instead of a way to check on friends, and from becoming "uncool" with young people because it's what their boring parents used.
Infinite growth!!! How silly we still are as a species. The more of us there are, the stupider we act, and we don't even do anything to prevent it, we just let the consequences of our own stupidity roll over us one day, when they can no longer be stopped.
There has actually been a friends-only feed on FB for years. Timelines -> Friends filters everything down.
The problem? Nobody I care about posts anymore. The "flywheel" is broken.
Social Media hasn't died - it just moved to group chats. Everything I care about gets posted there.
Honestly, I would love a running Feed of my group chats. Scan my inbox, predict what's most engaging, and give me a way to respond directly.
> There has actually been a friends-only feed on FB for years. Timelines -> Friends filters everything down. The problem? Nobody I care about posts anymore.
Is that really the only problem? How many taps/clicks do you need to get there? Can you make it the default? And how obvious is it that it actually exists?
I used to be TL of the Facebook News Feed.
People in UX research told us constantly they wanted the feed to be about friends, and chronological.
Several times we ran A/B tests with many millions of people to try exactly this. Every time all the usage metrics tanked. Not just virality and doomscroll metrics, but how many likes, messages, comments, re-shares, and app-opens. We never even measured ad-related things on that team.
So people say they want this, like they say they want McDonalds to offer salads. Nobody orders salads at McDonalds.
I really appreciate the reply, thanks for sharing that.
> Every time all the usage metrics tanked.
What if that's exactly what people want? Less usage of Facebook (horrifying, I know -- it can't be true, right?), with a focus on friends etc. when they do use it? I know you'll dislike the analogy, but isn't all that different from smoking. You think usage metrics tanking implies the outcome is bad... why exactly? Is it that unthinkable that less quantity and more quality is better for people, and what they actually want?
> So people say they want this, like they say they want McDonalds to offer salads. Nobody orders salads at McDonalds.
You seem to be missing that the people who have the means to eat out wherever they want don't eat at McDonald's every few hours. They go in moderation. They actively want to avoid McDonald's most of the time. Once in a while they get a craving, or get super hungry and don't see other options, etc. and they cave in and go there. Of course the get the tasty unhealthy option when they go, but it's foolish to think they prefer to eat McDonald's all the time. (Do you seriously believe that??)
I don't dislike the analogy. I eventually reached a point where I couldn't stomach the TikTok-ification of the product that Zuck forced us to keep marching towards, so I left.
Personally I agree with your point, less social media is better. I personally never go to Facebook anymore and set up app limits on my phone for my health. I won't let my kids use it at all.
But I worked at a company and drew a considerable salary, so I did what I was expected to do to make the product make money.
> But I worked at a company and drew a considerable salary, so I did what I was expected to do to make the product make money.
I appreciate the honesty here.
And this is exactly why we need regulations.
> I couldn't stomach the TikTok-ification
This seems like such a bizarre thing to put your finger on in the middle of an otherwise seemingly sincere post. Of all the hatred people have had toward Facebook the past > decade, I don't think "it's too much like TikTok" was the cause that has kept them up at night. If anything there are a ton of people who would much rather TikTok could be replaced by Facebook, so that at least the national security implications would be less dire in their eyes.
But yeah:
> But I worked at a company and drew a considerable salary
nice to admit what everybody knew. With the kind of compensation Facebook gave, I doubt many would've behaved differently.
Just take the win. It seems like such a bizarre thing to nitpick like this with a prior employee that has voluntarily opened up to you and agreed with many of your points.
I really wanted to, but that bit wasn't some minor detail. It felt pretty darn central to the whole thing, as it undermined what seemed like the central point.
Imagine this from a tobacco-company ex-salesman: "I don't let my kids smoke, I don't think it's healthy. I eventually left Camel because I couldn't stomach the Marlboro-ification of our product." So what we're being told is... after so many years of people complaining tobacco is harmful, they're saying they knew that all along and would've been totally cool with it while the money was coming in, but the straw that actually broke their (pardon the pun) Camel's back was that... their product suddenly started resembling their competitor's?? Or perhaps they're saying they don't believe it was harmful until the product stopped differentiating itself from their competitor's (but then the salary aspect would've been moot before that point)? And, either way... so we are reading all this after the rest of the world has been (pardon the second pun) fuming for much longer over much more concerning reasons?
It seems pretty darn important to understand what the regret is -- and I don't even mean this for judgment purposes (although it would inevitably impact that); I mean this for the larger purpose of understanding the thought process itself, for dealing with it in the future. i.e. if the reality we're facing is that product differentiation is what keeps people in such positions, rather than a disregard or misunderstanding of the societal or public-health impact, that's... news to me. And so (to me, anyway) this seems like an absolutely crucial detail to unpack, not an unimportant detail to gloss over.
But, yes, I very much appreciate that they shared this, and I'm sure it wasn't easy to in any case.
>Several times we ran A/B tests with many millions of people to try exactly this. Every time all the usage metrics tanked. Not just virality and doomscroll metrics, but how many likes, messages, comments, re-shares, and app-opens. We never even measured ad-related things on that team.
Well, yeah, but this has an implicit "engagement === good" assumption. Exactly the same thing that incentivizes unhealthy McDonald's food: they make more money when they sell food that still leaves you hungry. So, yeah, people probably did want this, and when they got it they started using Facebook in a healthy manner (no point opening it at every available moment to just scroll through 'new' trash), which tanked your metrics. If you're actually worrying about your users you should also consider that them using your product more might not actually be what they want or need.
Ironically enough, I think the same mistake (or rather, it's more of a mistake because there's not quite such a naked financial incentive to make this worse for the affected users) has happened with the youtube analytics dashboard: multiple youtubers have said that it's actively addicting and really bad for their mental health, but any change that feeds that probably looks really good in their metrics because, hey, creators are using it more, that must mean it's good, right?
Trust me, I came in there full of motivation for "do what is good for the actual humans", and most of the rank of file were the same. FB's employees are not evil or exploitative, though I won't say its unfair to describe the leadership in such terms.
Many times in product design meetings I would interject with "but this hurts people!" etc.
We hated that our personal careers were directly tied to increasing the junk-food factor. It didn't feel good at all. But the choice, as crafted by HR and senior directors was clear: Junk food this thing, or lose your jobs.
the problem isn't introducing junk foods into menu, but focusing on the junk foods performance and killing other food categories as the result. I know that companies need revenue to survive and improve, but they're currently focusing too much on revenue and profit that they kill everything else.
it's like introducing unskippable ads and page-wide pop up ads makes user use adblock and killing other simpler banner ads.
I'm sure there's more that could be shared about how "wants" were determined, which would counter my off-the-cusp thought here, but anyways:
Yes... my ideal would be for facebook feed to be a once-a-week addiction (maybe a bit more) where I go, see what's new, and clearly hit an end point where I know I'm seeing things I've seen before. But I'm also part of the "problem" in that I post myself maybe twice/year now.
I'd suspect the current doomscroll-y feed like we have now/you were working on reduces my likelihood of "interacting" with friends' posts. "Do I make the effort of commenting, or lazily keep scrolling to the next-often-good 3rd party content?"
A year or two ago, I copied some greasemonkey type script off reddit, and that nuked all the non-friend content off my feed, but that stopped working a couple months later and I haven't been strongly enough motivated to find an updated approach. I have little enough friend activity that I'd easily notice when I hit old content.
The current doomscrolling feed of algo content sure does manage to hook me, so that's a nice indicator of the current team being successful :P
Did you consider that you are gaming your own setup rules of measurement?
It's like "look nobody is ragebaited anymore, that's very bad for clicks"
Guess what, you should not have used that as a means of measurement before, but it was the cheapest way to sell it to advertisers.
If you have incentive to create a shithole of engagement, it's what you will get in return.
Yeah, it’s weird reading their reply. Like a drug dealer being upset that the less effective drug is less effective.
There's an old saying: you can never get enough of what doesn't fill your need.
For example, when you need sleep, you can't eat enough to make you not tired, but you may well pound a lot of caffeine and sugar.
If true, this would accomodate the simultaneous truths that:
(a) users accurately report their preference chronological friend connection when they come to a social feed
(b) users spend more time engaging with a social feed when the need they come to fill has irregularly payoffs
That you can get more engagement by not giving them what they want/need (or giving them what they need irregularly) wouldn't mean that they are lying to you, it would simply mean that engagement and social payoff curves aren't the same, and the incentives to drive one might not optimize the other.
You're saying that users weren't using the app enough like it's a bad thing. Users saw the tool as useful and used it.
My facebook bookmark takes me to https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
I still see other content, even there, but it's still somehow manageable. I run out of updates very quickly though whereas I'd like to just start seeing older posts from friends that I've seen already.
This just opens the app for me on mobile. I guess on desktop it might do something.
It takes 2 clicks and you can just bookmark it. https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
For fb app users (most) I think bookmarks are irrelevant.
Open in browser and add to homescreen. What's more, FB can't track you if you use the browser instead of the app.
> What's more, FB can't track you if you use the browser instead of the app.
For the numerous people who use Messenger or WhatsApp or other products this seems false and irrelevant.
I don't use those either, but you're correct, though I believe that in the EU, data of these cannot be mixed with FB data.
I've bookmarked the friends feed and the groups feed ( https://www.facebook.com/?filter=groups&sk=h_chr ) which saves me a LOT of aggravation.
They actually made it even easier to find recently on mobile. Right there at the bottom.
I literally have no idea what you're referring to, and I just updated the app. Could you share a link or screenshot or something?
Facebook commonly runs A/B testing on their UI. It is almost weekly for me and one of my friends to ask each other “hey do you have the <x> tab at the bottom” for Meta apps. Marketplace, Dating, “All Chats” in messenger which was just the same as the slide out menu I bet people didn’t use much. I also think they change per-user depending on what they use.
edit: I decided to check real quick and I do have the friends tab. Here’s a crop of it, note I edited out the last “Menu” tab for privacy.
https://imgur.com/a/6pFa1XF
Tabs are: Home, Friends, Marketplace, Dating, Notifications, Menu.
Not only was that Friends tab not there for me by default, but it also does not do the aforementioned when I customize the top(? not bottom) tab bar to I include it. What it does is to show me a list: of pending friends, and friend requests. No space to show any posts to begin with. To see my friends' posts, I have to click the hamburger, then Feeds, then Friends, then (sometimes) manually pull down to refresh, because it usually just lies to me that I've already caught up. This is designed to be actively user-hostile, as if they were forced to implement this against their will.
The Friends tab for me brings me to the actual friend feed you mentioned last but also includes pending requests and some other top matter.
Mine has Home, Friends, Video, Marketplace, Notifications, Menu. They adjust whether to show dating based on relationship status...
You might be interested in FreeFollow.org [full disclosure, I'm one of the engineers working on it].
It combines the economic model of web hosting (users pay to host spaces, reading is free, and writing in someone else's space is also free), the simple UI of social media (you have a profile and write posts), and the E2EE security model of 1Password (we actually implemented their published security model). It's also a non-profit so there's no pressure from owners to exploit users.
It's aimed primarily at parents of young kids who are annoyed at constantly sharing via text groups, but non-parents are also surprisingly into it.
You have some similar ideas to the encrypted social network in the Peergos protocol. We'd love to chat and see if there is scope for collaboration.
Independent social media run in a cost-effective way and actually helping their community is the future. I really hope non-American devs learn this because most American devs are too busy trying to get rich.
When I click "Join the waitlist" on Firefox I see an empty beige box on an otherwise blank page.
Thanks for letting us know. Unfortunately we haven't been able to reproduce that with the current version of Firefox, but if you'd like to email us at hello@freefollow.org we'll add you to the list manually.
In Edge I get a big red screen yapping about the site being unsafe.
Since it's E2EE, do you have a limit on the number of members in a group/friends?
Nope.
> There has actually been a friends-only feed on FB for years. Timelines -> Friends filters everything down.
I remember when this was called "Lists", and I carefully gathered acquaintances into lists. When I wanted to check in with particular list, I clicked on the list.
Then the lists sidebar disappeared (but you could still get the functionality if you knew the URL / argument structure).
Then the functionality disappeared.
I'm sure some product/UX staff did career making things on a metric somewhere.
> The problem? Nobody I care about posts anymore. The "flywheel" is broken.
Why post when there's no guarantee who/anyone will see it amongst a firehose of bait-y and often angry stuff?
This is part of the anti-flywheel which draws towards doomscroll.
> group chats
Group chats have the baseline virtue of knowing who your audience is.
They're missing other virtues, but that's probably another conversation.
I think they recently made a big deal about this even? The fact that they would “promote” something that likely reduces time spent scrolling and viewing of ads means that no one is going to use it as an alternative to doom scrolling. They know they got you hooked on the good stuff and are just pretending to not be the bad guys
It's called Feeds in the version of the interface I see in the browser.
If that friends tab is not the default tab its not going to work. Period.
I'm looking for it on the mobile app and I can't find it.
Discord too. Most of my friends are on Discord, we have group chats and private servers. Many communities use Discord as their primary online hub too.
It is concerning. Discord has been slowly enshittifying for the last couple of years: ads (ex: "quests"), app bugs, etc... There is no export option and even public servers are not accessible to search engines and archives.
I’ve noticed my kid (12) primarily uses group chats over social apps. Some of his chats have several dozen kids in them. It could be social media got so bad that the protocols became the best alternative. An old programmer like me sees a glimmer of hope in a sea of noise.
It's been that way for awhile, though they do use instagram and/or tiktok for consumption.
iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for teens that exclusion.
The kids have been taught the dangers of sharing things on the internet, so the risk is minimized sharing in private chats (though obviously still there).
> iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for teens that exclusion.
Craig Federighi fought against supporting iMessage on Android and RCS for a long time saying, quote, "It would remove obstacles towards iPhone families being able to give their kids Android phones."
> iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for teens that exclusion.
Are kids really that simplistically divided?
100%.
iMessage is THE number one thing selling iphones these days, and has been for a long time.
Maybe in your neck of the woods, I see no evidence for outside of that. iMessage is completely irrelevant where I live. SMS/MMS full stop is irrelevant.
In the US, people overwhelmingly use SMS/MMS/iMessage by default. It works with every phone, it's the one platform that people won't say "I don't have that" to.
I've no doubt it may be the case in the US, I did not mean to suggest it's not. It simply doesnt have the same sway everywhere.
I don't know literally a single person who uses SMS/MMS/iMessage where I live. And it's been this way for years. It's easily 99% whatsapp/messenger/discord etc. It's pretty openly joked about that the only thing SMS is still for these days is spam/marketing/political messaging.
> I've no doubt it may be the case in the US, I did not mean to suggest it's not. It simply doesnt have the same sway everywhere.
You're correct, of course. WhatsApp was significantly more popular than SMS in the majority of Latin American and European countries before iMessage even really picked up steam in the US. But it doesn't matter, because the US, by revenue share, is the world's largest market, full stop. One of the lessons we can learn from the social media business model is that you can get incredibly large entirely off the US market before it even makes sense to engage in the rest of the world.
The person you're replying to is correct in context of the US market, which if you're Apple is basically the only market that matters other than China, since in the rest of the world most people use Android, usually due to cost differences (flagship Android models sell extremely poor volumes compared to iPhones, even globally).
Yep, and I like it this way.
But why does it matter if the majority of cellular plans provide unlimited texting?
Its about the extra features iMessage has because of Apple's superset of the underlying SMS/MMS functionality. Its also about having a blue bubble (not-poor) versus a green bubble (poor).
It defies belief how much some demographics care about this stuff, I didn't believe it when I first heard either. Some of it is improving with RCS but its got a ways to go.
Exactly this. Even if RCS does everything iMessage does, you still have a dreaded "green bubble" in iOS messaging which is a huge (anti) social signal to teens.
Does it justify their reason for hating on Android/green bubbles? Of course not, but that's 100% the reality of the situation.
Teens care about silly things like that, but a real thing I care about as an adult is group chats working properly. Like, I was looking for a realtor last year when buying a house. One of them had Android, and I really thought about it, do I want to take a nonzero chance of that somehow screwing the plans up on closing?
That's not the main reason I went with another one, but I still paid attention to how many group iMessages we were in with lenders, seller's realtor, or just me + wife + realtor. Things really did come down to the hour during negotiating and closing, so it might've mattered.
Worrying about whether or not somebody has an Android is going to be very bad for your mental health given that something like 42% of the US cell phone market is Android. Is it possible that you are living in a bubble of people that are significantly more committed to Apple products than the median person?
I don't live in such a bubble, and whether or not somebody has Apple or Android is not something I have ever heard an adult bring up as a serious thing. The most I've ever seen is as an observation about why some sort of thing in a group chat didn't work, but then everyone moves on with their day and the chat continues with the types of text and media that do work.
Apple's implementation of RCS is such hot garbage that I disabled it and revert to regular SMS to text with Android people. I'm sure the shoddy RCS support is just a terrible mistake and not by design...
Would you mind listing a couple issues you’ve seen with it? You’ve got me curious if they affect me and I just don’t notice it what. I don’t have all that many contacts though, so it may be just be a numbers game.
Finally getting around to this... The problem was always that the messages just would not send. "Message failed to send. Try again?" I'd say that happened 3/4 of the times I tried. It simply wasn't worth it to fight with it.
It doesn't matter so much for 1:1, but SMS group chat is a mess (or MMS? RCS? idk).
Because people like sharing photos and videos and MMS is hot garbage? My phone can record 4K60 video and take 48 megapixel photos, but MMS can only handle 0.72 megapixel photos under 300KB and 240p video capped at 30 seconds. Why would /anyone/ in 2025 want to use SMS/MMS when they could use iMessage or RCS, or even WhatsApp, Signal, Messenger, Discord, et al?
Only in the US, the rest of us aren’t that petty and just use WhatsApp or signal
I see this line of thinking online a lot, with people mentioning kids are excluded because they have green bubbles as if it’s some sort of highly superficial exclusion based on only wanting to talk to Apple users.
The main issue is that including a non-iMessage user changes the protocol of the group chat from iMessage to SMS and SMS can basically make group chats unusable.
I also don’t like that kids who don’t have an iPhone can’t participate in iMessage group chats, but when we make out like it’s just kids being cruel and not an actual functional incentive to not include those kids then we are losing sight of where the pressure should be applied.
The pressure should obviously be applied on the underage children with the Apple products, or better yet on Apple. Perhaps the children should be punished and have their iPhones taken away and replaced with budget android phones or flip phones.
This is good in the long run since the behavior they were engaging in puts them at odds with nearly half the population. Not only is it anti-social behavior, it's mind numbingly stupid and likely to backfire in ways that make their lives worse.
~43% of the cell phones out there in the US are Android phones. To follow their conviction against Android at all convincingly and thoroughly, they would be missing out on a lifetime of opportunities and would live a significantly diminished existence.
iPhone is not even close to being a dominant enough platform to be able to enforce this kind of social pressure against anyone but people significantly under the age of 18. Shame them, make sure they feel bad and spoiled (they should feel spoiled for being a child with an iphone), and watch them grow out up to be pro-social adults.
it's just a new version of "preps don't hang out with goths"
Adults too
Whenever I hear this iMessage thing I’m surprised. Is that a US / Canada thing?
Here in Europe, everybody uses WhatsApp and/or similar products for chat and they are all multi platform.
iOS/iPhones are the majority of phones in Canada and the US (~60%). However, if you take the upper half of household incomes that number skyrockets to 80-90%. Comparatively, in the UK it's 50/50. In the rest of europe android mostly has a 60-75% market share (tends to drift more towards android the more eastern you go - signalling wealth has a lot to do with it).
The reasons why are varied (everything from wealth signalling to switching being a pain and iphone mostly had a first mover advantage for quality and availability for the first several years), but it's only in the last two years that I've seen people start to use multi-platform chat apps here. Most of my peer group with other parents all default to imessage group chats for sharing photos, stories of our kids.
I am also starting to notice a loosening on apple's services. Spotify is used by more people than Apple music even amungst the apple households I know.
Kids are ruthless about anti green bubble discrimination and it’s part of the reason for the rise of incels. The overwhelming majority of incels are android users, and the mainstream cultural media likes to make clear that one of the reason for being incels is them using a “poordroid”
https://leafandcore.com/2019/08/24/green-bubbles-are-a-turn-...
https://outsidethebeltway.com/the-dreaded-green-bubble/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...
https://gizmodo.com/im-buying-an-iphone-because-im-ashamed-o...
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/28/1241473453/why-green-text-bub...
https://www.fastcompany.com/90391587/why-we-dont-want-you-an...
> The overwhelming majority of incels are android users
Seriously ?
I have read your links, it shows that some kids are stupid and discriminate over what phone brand one is using.
First of all, that’s purely a USA issue.
Secondly, it says nothing about incels.
A phone brand doesn’t make you more charismatic, in fact in my experience I have seen more iPhone user being insecure than Android user.
Especially the one who invest heavily into Apple « ecosystem », they are more often than not (in Europe) nerds.
Just to be honest, I write that from my iPhone. Really got no bias.
If I remember my teenage years, perception feels a lot like reality.
Lmao. Don't pay any attention to the thing about incels, which whether true or not, so obviously does not establish that android was a causative factor. Look at the percentage of US people that have Android. iPhone is not nearly as dominant in the US as spoiled brat teens seem to think. Nearly half the population is Android users. I'm sure we are all incels.
Yeah, 99% of incels (at least the ones I know about, mostly because they hit the news) have an obvious mental health tick or manifestation that turns off potential romantic partners. These people are being excluded (rightly or wrongly) because of that, not because of Android.
Whoa hold on. I was with you until “the overwhelming majority of incels are android users.” How did you draw that conclusion?
The countless myriad number of TikTok’s, reels, etc from women calling out how using an android is a dealer breaker. The community made polls of “incels.us” about this exact question, and the other links I cited showing green bubble social discrimination.
My original post has enough receipts. If you don’t believe me you’re free to remain wrong. But here’s more anyway:
https://www.joe.co.uk/life/sex/owning-an-android-is-official...
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/android-relationship-iphone/
https://www.studentbeans.com/blog/uk/the-biggest-student-dat...
https://archive.thetab.com/uk/2020/10/16/girls-are-sharing-w...
These memes posted on short video sites also have parallel ones of women making fun of guys who try to do the whole “hold on let me pirate this movie and HDMI connect it to the TV thing” instead of having Netflix.
I don't doubt that some women make fun of men for green bubbles, but this doesn't mean the vast majority of incels are Android users. If that were true, wouldn't they just get an iPhone?
Also the HDMI thing is hilarious because it's exactly what my wife would say about me.
> but this doesn't mean the vast majority of incels are Android users
Is there such a thing as incels? I thought it was just a stupid concept to bully people. Not that it doesn't exist, but I wouldn't think that there is a category of people (kids, I guess?) who "are" incels, is there? In some contexts, some kids are "considered" incels by bullies.
Or do I get it wrong?
In this case, it's guys who want a girlfriend but are constantly rejected, which is a thing, also same in reverse. But if anyone ever says it's because of bubble color, it's probably an excuse for an actual reason.
Sure, but my point is that it is a dumb, irrational concept. And therefore I don't think that there is such a thing as a "description of incels".
I could get with "the vast majority of kids who get bullied have Android phones", maybe. And instead of saying "haha you're poor" (which is already moronic in itself), the bullies say "haha you're an incel". I guess because it hurts more?
But "the vast majority of incels have an Android phone" both implies that "being an incel" is an actual thing (which it is not) and that having an Android phone has an influence on one's ability to find a partner (which it has not).
WhatsApp never caught on in the US since cell phones and SMS were a great deal for keeping in touch. By the time WhatsApp arrived US carriers were not raping their customers for phone calls or SMS messages (in the early days of cell phones they were - be very careful responding as the state of the world has changed many times over the years and so it is quite possible you remember a time where your country was better than the US for reasons that are no longer true!). Note in particular calls and SMS to a different state is included, and typically Canada is included as well. As such we never developed the WhatsApp habbit as it didn't give us anything.
Yes. WhatsApp isn't nearly as popular in the US as in many other countries.
Idk what the stats are on this, but anecdotally, all my friends use FB Messenger if they want cross-platform group chat, but that's slowly changing to some fragmented list of alternatives. And usually it's not for semi-important things like get-together plans.
This. In 98% of all cases I get away with only having telegram (no phone number even) most people have one or multiple IMs
It literally works seamlessly though? Just converts to MMS and you don't notice outside the "liked BLABLABLA" sort of messages that trickle in without the imessage emoji system.
I don't think seamless integration with MMS is enough to outweigh being different/not having "the real thing" or the full experience in the eyes of a young teenager. This reads as the HN version of the "but we have iMessage at home" meme (I mean this humourously, not as snark).
We are past peak iphone. The actual cool phones of this era like the folding screen phones are all android.
iMessage chats also include rich media that is either degraded in MMS (photos, videos unless you have RCS support) or just doesn't exist (like multiplayer games, invites, apple cash, etc).
This may not seem like a big deal to you, but if you remember what it's like to be a kid, you should get it. The smallest friction can be a reason to exclude someone socially.
Imessage already compresses it to hell enough. You need another protocol for fidelity.
Even that has been fixed by now in my chats with android friends. The only reason to display green bubbles anymore is to indicate lack of E2EE. But that will be coming to RCS interop soon as well.
In theory it's ok. In practice, MMS group chats are broken. It's not even an iPhone thing, as evident in Android-dominated areas still relying on WhatsApp instead.
That's not why WhatsApp took over. WhatsApp rose to popularity back when texting (especially internationally) was not unlimited and free.
Internationally maybe, but if someone in the US is using WhatsApp, it's because of the group texting problem. My family included.
Non-iMessage chats are also segregated by color, a visual affordance that identifies you as a member of the non-Apple outgroup. The other.
God forbid
Group chat has always been the killer social app. 6 years ago I convinced my browser friends group to adopt Telegram and since then we’ve all abandoned FB, Instagram, etc… We have a ton of different threads all with different topics: kids, food, gardening, exercise, pets, memes, and a bunch of serious topic threads as well.
It’s been incredibly effective at keeping us connected and engaged as we’ve all moved across the country and grow in an apart physically.
The take away is; what people want from social media is to be connected with their real friends. However that isn’t as engaging as a random feed, so the companies push people away from that.
I guess group chat would be fine if all your friends are friends of each other. High School and college ages maybe, but as an older adult, I have so many different groups of people that I interact with that it would be obnoxious to deal with. I also find that there are certain people in group chats who are lonely and spam crap.
You can have many group chats though?
I do that in Signal, I have group chats with different circles of friends ,and we also regularly create short-lived purpose-built chats for events or other things...
It's a bit more friction perhaps but in the end it works well and we've been doing it for years.
I'm in a similar group but using Discord. It seems that lack of advertising or any kind of algo feed is the common feature. Who runs your Telegram server?
Do you mean 'run' as in run the community in some sort of administration sense? Telegram cannot be self-hosted (unless I am misinformed..).
Neither can Discord; its usage of "server" in particular is a weaponized misappropriation.
I mean, their internal terminology is still guild. I’m not sure they intended to call it server until their userbase did?
Muddling the meaning of the term "server" either way.
>Who runs your Telegram server?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Security_Service
I hate group chats (hate). It's a cliquey childish high-school cafeteria mode of communicating (thus why highschoolers use group chats). It's a clear step backwards and is representative of the covid-era stazi-like mentality people developed where they felt it was unsanity to share their views or life with the world at large (and maybe, given what we've learned about social media and nation-states, that's not without merit -- i.e the UK). Perfect world social media is a means of forming connections and expanding your little room(s).
Is it - hear me out - possible that you are overthinking this? People tend to use group chats for coordination and quick banter with people they already know. Not as an alternative to the phpBB boards of old.
Eh, I think the parent has a point. You underline it yourself when you say “people they already know”.
The internet didn’t always involve a choice between “talk to people I know” vs “bravely/foolishly taking on the vitriol of a wild horde of angry delusional maniacs”, but now we’ve lost almost all of the space in between those extremes. People like hacker news exactly because it’s the rare place that’s still in the middle *(sometimes, on some topics, for now)
There’s a lot of people on hackernews with whom I cannot agree on a great many important things. Happily, none of them appear to be technical, so it works out fine.
There's far too much downside to sharing your genuine thoughts, especially on politics, or things you find funny, etc. with the entire Internet because regular people and nation-state level actors will vilify you and nowadays even have you deported for things you say publicly.
That's why we all use group chats and messaging. There's no safe alternative
>It's a clear step backwards and is representative of the covid-era stazi-like mentality people developed where they felt it was unsanity to share their views or life with the world at large...
... what? I'm in my late 30's and group chats have been a part of life for myself, my friends and my family since the late 90's. I've never wanted to share my views with "the world at large" online, but I have no problem being myself and sharing my views in meatspace, where being open and honest about who I am is far more impactful to those I interact with and the world around me than it ever has been on social media.
Within the world of the pop-web, even on this website to a point, the ability to have a truly nuanced discussion has essentially been eliminated. People would rather throw out hot takes based on disingenuous interpretations of someone's comment/statement rather than try and have an impactful, open conversation.
Sounds like you’d have appreciated 90s era irc, which was good for nuanced and sincere discussion, but also did not require talking to people that you already knew.
There’s a sweet spot between open/closed and known/unknown and somewhat focused but not too niche where it kind of works. Theres a certain size that works too, ideally Lots of users and yet occasionally you recognize someone. But I don’t think that’s what people mean at all by group chat today, which regardless of venue tends to be rather more insular and thus echo’y.
In IRC, and as many do here, you used an alias to have the confidence to speak freely. Products like WhatsApp where people reveal their real identities don't lend themselves to that frankness when membership is open.
I very much appreciated 90s era IRC back in the day. I find community comparable to what you described in still-existing phpBB and phpBB-esque hobby-focused forums that I use regularly.
There is nothing preventing you from expanding your group chat roster. It is just that random strangers can't drop in; you have to add them.
You would have to sacrifice the privacy of your group if you wanted to support serendipitous membership growth. Do you want to be constantly reviewing membership requests? That's what Facebook groups look like. And you have little information to judge the requests by, since the profiles can be fake, especially today. And when complete strangers can join the group, the dynamics change.
"Perfect world social media is a means of forming connections"
What stops people from being part of X group chats? All a connection on their own?
I never understood why they became less popular when mobile phones took over. Even in the 00s so many people were already in group chats through MSN, ICQ and so on.
All Microsoft had to do was make the former into a proper mobile app. Instead they wasted billions on Skype to replace their golden opportunity.
>?All Microsoft had to do was make the former into a proper mobile app.
I begged Microsoft to make MSN on Windows Mobile and later on Android or iPhone.
They just dont get it nor do they care. Whatsapp wasn't even a thing on Smartphone. Its dominance came a little later.
And without a smartphone or mobile network, people keep in contact especially those not in close group via Social Media aka MySpace and Facebook or Friendster.
Now smartphone ubiquitous in most places. The contact list has taken over. Social Media became a news feed.
This is actually one of the great entrepreneurship lessons of my career, which I think about a lot.
Around 2009, as smart phones were on their exponential leg up, and when I was still pretty new in the workplace, I remember thinking (and talking with my coworkers) about how messaging and chat rooms were really well suited to the technology landscape. But I lamented "too bad the space is already too crowded with options for anyone to use anything new.
But all of today's major messaging successes became household names after that! What I learned from this is that I have a tendency to think that trends are played out already, when actually I'm early in the adoption curve.
And markets are growing.
Heh, this reminds me of a vaguely related lesson I learned recently. Sold Nvidia mid-2023. "Surely everyone understands by now just how much money they're going to be making the coming 2 years, and this is already completely priced in, it's so blatantly obvious!". Heh.
Ha, someone who has money to invest asked me about an investment thesis at the end of 2022 related to the release of chatgpt. I said nvidia seemed like the most clearly likely to benefit in terms of public equities, but he said no way, it was already overpriced. :shrug:
Everything hypey overshoots eventually, but nobody knows exactly when!
I think those networks never figured out how to make money off of it. Without the tracking (and piles of VC cash) that modern social media got, the ads were not worth enough. Microsoft and AOL just saw them as cost centers so when the mobile ecosystem didn’t support their legacy persistent-connection-style protocols they saw no value in investing in rewriting everything.
Piles of VC cash were never necessary, FWIW. Tracking, potentially. They may indeed have massively undervalued ads, or even other monetization options - Line makes millions off of emojis and such, and if they'd have been as big as Whatsapp, possibly billions. Meta too is not even tapping 5% of Whatsapp's monetization potential, FWIW. I wonder if it's intentional to prevent anti-trust concerns.
But I don't think monetization matters too much. Ms tried making the botched Skype play, and as a company there's no way they didn't understand the value of hundreds of millions of eyeballs, daily usage market share. They understood that with IE, despite it being a zero-revenue product in and of itself.
> when the mobile ecosystem didn’t support their legacy persistent-connection-style protocols
You may know more about this then I do - what's the main difference? I used them back in the day and as end-user they felt the exact same as modern messaging apps. I send a message, it gets saved on some server, the receiver gets it from there. When I used it, it definitely didn't require both parties to be online to send/receive.
Or is it about the notifications?
Wasn't Skype a proper mobile app decently early ?
The core issue was of course being a second class citizen on iOS, using a Skype phone number purely on mobile was real PITA for instance.
Personally I put a lot more blame on Google for everything they did on the messaging front.
I remember using a lot of very low quality, buggy Skype apps on mobile over the years. I don't think it ever approached desktop quality.
To be honest it didn't even work great on laptops that got turned on and off or went in and out of connectivity. The networking piece seemed designed for an always on desktop.
And let's be honest here, Skype on desktop was also quite shitty.
Feels like it went myspace -> facebook -> snapchat and never went back to such "public profile" ideals and stayed in chat apps. When I was in college in the early '10's, it seemed like everyone was obsessed with the "temporary chat" idea and actually believed that you could guarantee a message or picture could be temporary.
Did they become less popular? I think they are just less visible by nature, they've always been pretty common. I guess some people switched to Facebook Groups for a time, but even that is sort of a form of group chat.
They never worked properly on phones, including images/video and history. Same for SMS chats on top of being hideously expensive because the phone companies thought it was still the 1960s.
Yes, that's why they should have made them work properly.
Simply put the main problem was that those old IMs required a persistent connection to the server when you "just" had to add a new protocol that can do session resumption/polling. Then make a pretty mobile UI and make it possible to find other users by phone number - imo this was the number one reason why WhatsApp and iMessage won. It's an app on your phone, so it uses your phone number, not another artificial number or name or mail address - it's something the most tech illiterate gets. Because then it's just "SMS but with groups and photos". But you could have allowed to merge it with your existing account from desktop times, so all the young hip people would've kept all their contacts.
IIRC one of the reasons WhatsApp has done so well is that they basically supported every platform under the sun, which was a technical challenge back in the day.
These days the field is much narrower but 10+ years ago finding an app that supported everyone's device was a challenge.
> one of the reasons WhatsApp has done so well is that they basically supported every platform under the sun
Not really. There's still no iPad version.
My friend installed Whatsapp from the App Store for their iPad, to find it didn't behave quite as expected, and didn't match their phone and desktop experience.
That turned out to be because it was an app from some random third party with its own features. It used Whatsapp in the name, and had a similar logo.
When my friend realised they were unexpectedly using a third party app, from a provider they'd never heard of, they were worried they'd accidentally given away access to their account full of sensitive messages to someone they didn't trust.
I was surprised my cautious friend would install the wrong app by mistake, as the Apple app store is normally good for well known services.
While scrolling through Whatsapp apps, it took me a while to realise the top search result, which my friend had installed, wasn't actually from Whatsapp (but looked similar). Even though the logo was a little different, I assumed that was just a quirk. It's just so unexpected to find that what you get on iPad isn't the real thing, when searching for Whatsapp gets you the real thing if you're looking from an iPad or Mac.
I think WhatsApp's magic sauce was the effortless onboarding. No need for accounts, passwords, nagging for 2fa, your email, your socials, just get the app and go, by delegating all that to the phone (and phone number as the user id).
Data? SMS limits?
Am I misremembering the timeline of real access to SMS and data? I feel like most of the 00s most people had limited of both without spending a lot of money.
Group chats are: free, have no ads, and sharing is with exactly who you intend. When I want to send a photo to direct family and in-laws I don't blast it on social media, I send it to the group chat that has direct family and in-laws in it. That's it, easy-peasy. Even my 70-something mother in-law participates in it.
...but you have to share it specifically with each separate group. When I take a cute photo of my son doing something, I have to share it with the family group for my side, and that of my wife; and none of my friends or random extended family get to see it. If my wife's fam shares a photo of my son that I think my fam wants to see, I have to manually port it over. Back in Facebook's heyday, I could just share it; or if my wife's fam tagged me in the photo, my family & friends would see it as well.
And, of course, in group chat, your different friend groups never interact. One of the coolest thing about Facebook in its heyday was when two of your friends who didn't know each other had a cool conversation on your wall and then became friends themselves.
Unfortunately there really doesn't seem to be a proper replacement -- BlueSky and Mastodon are replacements for Twitter, not Facebook. Group chats aren't as good, but they're the closest thing going.
i actually think it's good that you need to explicitly share the photo with each group. people like getting a message that they know you decided you wanted them (or their little group) to see.
if i see a photo that a friend broadcasts out once on a social feed, i see it and move on.
if a friend puts a photo in a text/group chat, i know that it's something they wanted to share with me
I think this was what Google Plus was going for.
Instead of friend graphs (mutual) or follower graphs (directed edges), they had Circles.
Circles sound a lot like group chats.
I guess "social circles" may be a better way to model social relationships than follower graphs.
IMO it absolutely is the better way to model it. There's a reason that verbiage already existed in English. The other commenter is right though, there are the rare interaction between social circles that are lost but honestly I remember seeing just as many poor ones on FB back in the day as spontaneous positive ones.
Circles was basically an ACL system, which isn't fun. Even if you do care exactly who you're sharing things with, it's not easy to tell with a Circle who that is.
>...but you have to share it specifically with each separate group
For me personally, this is a feature not a bug. I want things I see to be things that somebody wrote just for that channel. It's why I use group chat over social media.
Facebook had and still has visibility options, but as it grew in features people forgot about it. A lesson in discoverability and product complexity.
https://www.facebook.com/help/233739099984085/
Isn't it pretty common for the "share" function to allow selecting multiple recipients, including multiple groups?
Yes, but who remembers that? There are so many features.
I'd like to see the usage history of that feature. I bet my bottom dollar it's decreased over time.
It’s the same for me (in my thirties). A decade ago, Instagram showed me photos that my friends shared. Today it’s ads, memes and other crap with a small proportion of photos of friends. The noise:signal ratio is so high that I don’t even bother.
Facebook was the same a long time ago.
Social media in the form it had 10-15 years ago has died. But I don’t think it’s an inevitable path: I think Meta has iterated in their services in a way that killed what was previously there.
Really makes you wonder if/when Discord goes IPO, that Meta would buy a controlling stake in it?
Fortunately there are open source alternatives even if they aren't as popular as Discord at the moment, such as Revolt Chat: https://revolt.chat/
I miss the days of self-hosted forums; sadly it seems that algorithms, and the need to satisfy the need for 'instant' connection/information are ruining forums for young newcomers...
Revolt looks neat thanks for sharing.
Even facebook basically started as a group chat.
Back when we all had pet dinosaurs in our back yards and you only saw what your friends post.
This is a useful function as opposed to what the engagement algorithms push these days. So no wonder everyone moves to other options for group communication.
You mean you don't have a "where do we go out this saturday" chat group with your friends circle?
I see similar too. Both my teenagers got WhatsApp because we as parents had WhatsApp. They have slowly started using Signal in their friends groups. Now as a family we use Signal because the kids started us on it. We are based in Europe and iMessage is almost never used. I’m only on WhatsApp now because other parents are still using it. Sadly my oldest uses Instagram (on a strict daily timer), but apparently “it’s still cool to have an insta” and the killer feature there is that is super easy to network without sharing your phone number (I know signal also has this feature but it’s a bit hidden).
The kids are alright. They are going back to IRC.
I think you're right, but also groupchats allow you to create cliques which facebook never really offered as a feature. What they did offer was broadcasting lists which is not the same as a clique. Groups didn't really integrate cliques well IMO as they were more "public oriented" but they are probably the closest thing.
I would totally welcome IRC back and USENET.
They're both still alive.
IRC: irc.libera.chat, irc.efnet.org, something rizon something; there's technically ircnet but don't bother
Usenet: eternal-september.org - you might find others after a while but there are no other major free text servers. If you pay another company for binary access (these are mostly used for piracy) you can also use it for text though.
I have chats for the parents in the class, parents from kindergarden, all the dads, my family, extended family. The list doesn’t end. It’s far, far better than Facebook though.
I go to sci fi cons and telegram has become the de facto method of coordination for everything. Party, meal, event we all want to attend, any kind of meetup we create a channel for it to be used ephemerally and invite everyone who’s going. It’s a million times better than any event invite functionality of social networks, absolutely frictionless and without all the frankly stupid stuff social networks add.
Kids shifting to group chats feels like a quiet rebellion against the algorithm-driven chaos of traditional social media
My "social media" in the '90s consisted largely of hanging out in IRC channels. Everything old is new again!
It's kind of obvious, right? Most of us grew up on AOL Instant Messenger (or, heaven forbid, MSN Messenger).
I've seen the exact same and immediately my mind thinks of IRC :)
I bet kids these days don't even know how to do a hostile channel takeover with a bunch of eggdrops.
*** Ja mata!
Say hello to iRC
> Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram
Such a liar. Of course users will watch whatever FB shoves in their eyes. That doesn't make it a preference.
> Meta exhibited a graphic of a boxing ring showing the logos of Instagram, Facebook, and the various companies that Meta argues are competitors, including TikTok, YouTube, and Apple’s iMessage,
So his defense is that Facebook & Insta are just like youtube and tiktok. But Google is already under fire for divesting youtube, and tiktok is banned. Is that a good defense?
It depends on what you mean by "preference". If you show me a pic of a hot guy and the picture that a friend took while hiking, I'll probably look at the hot guy for longer, so one could claim I prefer it. But that doesn't mean I think it's better to spend my time like that.
But … insta is owned by meta
Someone made the observation that the problems started when things changed from social networking (family/friend) to social media. From actually keeping up with people to 'keeping up' with content.
Turns out most people don’t have a friends and family group that can generate exciting content at a rate that most people want. The platforms oblige this with “reshares” and “you may also like” content, and eventually everyone’s like “who gives a s*t about aunt Millie’s cupcake recipe, check out this dude trying to skateboard off of the Eiffel Tower!”
A rate people want, or advertisers?
I'm sure I could (indeed, I do) get pertinent updates from actual friends and family with <10 minutes of checking messages, voicemails, and emails per day. I wouldn't mind increasing that to 15 minutes if it meant I got a few less relevant but still interesting updates about their lives.
But that's way, way under the daily minutes spent by most people on TikTok. And if I wanted/my addiction demanded another hit of that "Oh, neat!" buzz when I'd just put my phone down 10 minutes ago, there's little chance that anyone in my small circle would have posted a single thing in the interval.
I don't spend nearly enough time in my group chats to justify Facebook's valuation. And there are no ads (yet, I'm sure they're working on it) in those chats.
They probably could. If all your friends and family posted 10 times a day. But people prefer to consume I guess.
Do your friends and family each have 10 things that happen to them every single day that is worth posting to a social network feed?
Not to a public feed but certainly to a friends feed. Are there 10 things worth saying a day?
Yes. Social sites had a card blanche to publish anything without consequences because it was user-generated content.
Social sites used that power to publish their own stuff under the same protection.
That has broken the system. Social media sites are 100% responsible for all the misinformation, scams, and hate that they publish or promote. And they should be legally accountable for it.
"We are not accountable because the users are the ones posting the media"... but we post and promote whatever we want is a terrible way for the world to work.
We went from sharing with people we knew to performing for people we don't
I've been of the opinion for the last 5 years at least, that if Meta and all of it's associated products and platforms suddenly disappear from existence, nothing of actual value will be lost. There are better competitors for everything they do. I don't think I can pinpoint one single unique thing about Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp at this stage in time. Everything they do is done or executed better by a competitor. They had some sort of advantage in the late 2000's and early 2010's, but that's it. I'm not optimistic for their future and relevance.
For better or worst, Fb has become the de facto place for cruising sailors to share information about different regions of the world. Tips, alerts, advice, questions, etc. I sail the world and there is no other place for groups quite as good for finding the information we need. There’s a niche group for every area around the world full of people sharing advice and answering questions. The good groups have great moderation and quality content.
They can move to Discord, Whatsapp (huh!), Signal, Reddit or some sailor forum.
If FB disappeared they could reroute.
Bigger things are disappearing and we are going to be fine*. E.g. much world trade with the US.
> Discord, Whatsapp (huh!), Signal
where nothing is searchable, linkable, or otherwise legible. That's a tradeoff. It has some upsides, but downsides as well.
(granted search has been struggling to not suck in general lately, facebook among others has joined the campaign against legible links, so losses are taking place in web environments anyway)
Discord is searchable
Moving a community is much much harder than you're making it out to be. Especially when there's a long history of content and - most importantly - trust between members.
Asking people to re-learn the new modalities and UIs and where everything is etc.. particularly for a less technical crowd.
It is easy when you are forced to do it. It's also hard to wear a face mask all day and stay indoors.
Network lock-in: successful
looking at this feels like the best case for fediverse-based socmed like mastodon or lemmy. Though maybe too complex for regular users.
I'll reach for it - Meta increases consumer spending and has enabled a lot of small businesses to profit during the previous economic booms. Yeah they were drop shipping products from China using the de minimis exception, or hocking worthless supplements, or promoting influencer products that are no different then the generic but costs twice as much, but a lot of people made a living off an ecosystem that arguably would not exist without Meta.
Further the success of Facebook was arguably the biggest contributor to startup culture ever - I would expect we'd have seen a fraction of the growth in VC if Facebook had never come to pass.
Groups, WhatsApp, etc, would be replaced overnight with, at least initially, a worse version. More hacking, probably worse moderation at scale, worse accessibility, etc.
Meta also gentrified East Palo Alto, and the Zuckerbergs now own a substantial amount of real estate in Redwood City and elsewhere. They've made a big footprint on the peninsula that deserves credit for the now $8 lattes in my hometown.
I would go even further and say the world would be a significantly better place without any Meta products (and most other social media). At this point, they are a considerable net negative on society as a whole.
Sure, but you can say this about every company & product in existence. Either a better version already exists, or will pop up in minutes after the current one disappears. Network effects are strong enough that this simply won't happen. Meta has close to 4 billion active users across all of its apps. That's literally half the planet.
I am keenly aware that virtually every acquaintance of my age is connected to me via Facebook. If it disappears, they all disappear. There is no replacement. There is no backup plan.
That being said, I've already cut Facebook out of my life years ago for sanity. So really, I'm just mourning what's already all but gone in my life.
It annoys me when people who have no friends say this like this applies to everyone else
Facebook marketplace has effectively taken over craigslist for local item sales, and the non-anonymous nature of it makes it better.
That's about all I got.
What's a good event planner/organizer?
It should be pretty obvious, but…
When social media started out, it was simply a feed of what you followed. FB, Twitter, Reddit, everything — they showed you a chronological list of everything that the people/groups you followed posted.
It was glorious.
But it wasn’t making money. These platforms were all funded by investors in hopes that they would someday make money.
And now they are — through ads and sponsored content that no one asked for or wants, via algorithms designed for one thing: profit.
It’s zero surprise to me that social media platforms have become the garbage that they are now.
I’ve moved on from all but a couple platforms (HN, Board Game Geek, and Bogleheads — arguably not social media platforms in the same vein as the others mentioned, because they aren’t trying to monetize, except BGG which monetizes via traditional banner ads, which I’ll take 10/10 over “content ads”).
But I have zero interest in returning to anything that injects their sponsored content in the middle of feeds.
If social media platforms can’t figure out a way to monetize without injecting this garbage, I’ll stick to these others.
I login to Instagram and I see:
- Ad promoting "investment" platform with deep fakes of personalities
- Ad from radicalized politician promoting hate speech
- Semi-naked girl promoting their "other" social media (OnlyFans)
- Ad disguised as content of some dude promoting a random restaurant
I agree with Zuckerberg, it's not social media anymore. I don't see content from any friend, only scams.
I've noticed that every single website that I enjoy on the internet is non-profit. Did we optimize for the wrong metric since the beginning?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Loved reading this. Thanks for sharing.
My YouTube account had recommendations for music because that's what I use it for. When they launched YT Shorts (basically their version of TikTok), that section was 75% thirst trap videos, albeit still music-related. Like "cool violin solo" but played by a girl sorta pointing the camera up her skirt in the thumbnail. I never watched those or anything similar, but I guess they knew I was male and wanted to hook me.
I dislike Shorts with a passion.
If you use Firefox, try https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
Works great.
So briefly, Zuck is arguing that the social media which was Facebooks main business of 2010s no longer exists and that Facebook has now pivoted to generic content consumption, competing with YouTube, TikTok, Reddit etc.
The article says FTC is in a bind here.
IMO it's veey simple: Yes, FB shifted their focus and are now a content hose. They still have monopoly on some market(s) - not where they are competing with e.g. TikTok. Local events, marketplace, genuine personal social networks.
That doesn't mean that they don't also compete with TikTok elsewhere, where further market consolidation could be a concern.
Anyone who uses instagram should be abundantly aware of this. The default behavior of the app became "Serve you all content we think you would like, in the order we think you would enjoy it". This pretty much means "You may or may not see the content of channels/people you specifically follow".
The app went from just showing you a stream of posts from people you follow, to just showing you a stream of posts it thinks you would like.
What is worse is that the feed is generated on the fly. Switch apps for a second and your os kills instagram in the background, and you might not ever find those posts it showed you a few minutes ago ever again.
I have the opposite problem. Every time Instagram starts in the background (allegedly to check for feed updates but probably to get my geolocation) it uses so much memory it pushes out things like my on-screen keyboard. No doubt Meta has figured out ways to manipulate Android to get priority over the keyboard, and only tested it on the very latest phones.
I've singed up to Instagram first time about 2 weeks ago and it is literaly TikTok clone, including no history what I have watched.
I use it exclusively for announcements from certain brands with e.g. seasonal rotations or sales (small shops, especially, are often way more consistent about updating one or more social media accounts, often Insta, than their website, if they even have a website) and it's such a pain in the ass for that reason. I don't trust ads or their "algorithm" to promote quality (I reckon they're more likely to promote rip-offs and fly-by-night operations) so I super don't care about anything else they want to show me, even if it's directly related to the kinds of brands I'm following. I deliberately do not do new-stuff discovery in the app, because they have incentives to screw me.
The only thing I want out of it is to see the posts made by the accounts I'm following, since the last time I checked. That's 100% of the functionality I care about, and the app goes out of its way to not deliver it.
And the shops are on FB/Insta/WhatsApp only because that's where users are. Classic entrenchment of network effects is a two-sided matketplace.
They don’t really have a monopoly on local events or marketplace.
Facebook is popular for these things but that’s because Facebook had a big user base, not because they keep competitors from forming.
They have a network effect that smaller competitors don’t. Thus, at the end of the day it’s the user’s choices that keep Facebook a sort of monopoly in those areas.
> They don’t really have a monopoly on local events or marketplace.
Yeah, I'd say from 2004 - 2015 was the heyday for me on local events for small bands, house shows, and punk/DIY venues. Eventually FB Events died out socially by not being able to send invites to mass groups of friends/previous attendees, and attrition, and so on... A real shame for non-major venue events and the DIY scene.
Marketplace is semi-useful still, quasi-better than craigslist, but keeps getting filled with a lot of cruft of drop-shippers and scammers.
I had almost forgotten about the 2004-2015 music scene on Facebook. For me things died down around 2011 when the police started using Facebook to identify and break up unlicensed events.
> Facebook is popular for these things but that’s because Facebook had a big user base, not because they keep competitors from forming.
That's a separate legal argument and as I understand it not necessary to qualify a as monopoly.
> They still have monopoly on some market(s) - not where they are competing with e.g. TikTok. Local events, marketplace, genuine personal social networks.
Yes, but none of these are a valid reason to force them to divest from Instagram and WhatsApp.
> The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in “the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.” This under-recognized shift away from interpersonal communication has been measured by the company itself. During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.
There is a Peter Thiel tactic of Monopolies where you deny you are monopolizing a sector by defining your company as "in competition" with a much larger and hazy market. The example in Zero To One is Google disguising its online advertising market by comparing itself to the total global advertising market, both online and offline.
I see the same tactic here, where Facebook is trying to hide its user data monopoly [3] by situating itself to general news, lifestyle discovery, and general communications. However this is counter to the actual internal communications where Facebook would discuss buying or crushing competitors, like Snapchat [0] [1] [2], as a way to maintain their hegemony.
Don't be fooled by what Facebook says about itself. Concentrate on what it values.
[0]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/facebook-developers-help-us-destr...
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/facebook-secretl...
[2]: https://www.wired.com/story/copycat-how-facebook-tried-to-sq...
[3]: https://www.vox.com/business-and-finance/2018/12/6/18127980/...
In other words, "We can't be a monopoly, we haven't even taken over the government yet"
This has been called "pulling a Myspace", back from when Myspace lost to Facebook. The sequence:
- Competition appears, usage decreases, revenue declines somewhat.
- Ad density is increased to increase revenue.
- Usage decreases further as users are annoyed by excessive ads.
- Ad density is increased even further.
- Death spiral.
How could Zuckerberg not know this? He was on the other side of it last time around.
Why do you assume he didn't know this? He very knowingly pivoted from friends' content to where the real money was – politics, clickbait, outrage bait, doomscrolling, gambling, scams, illegal ads.
>During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.
I find this very interesting. Yes, there has been a decline, but even before this decline, this data suggests that users "viewing content posted by 'friends'" was only at 22% on FB and 11% on IG. That feels incredibly low to begin with to me, and suggests that it already wasn't about friends. I wonder what the longer trend looks like.
How can they honestly present a chart like that when they are the ones serving the content on the feeds?
I don't expect them to be honest at all. But if we're operating under the assumption that they can't be trusted to be honest with their data, it makes it even weirder to me that they would start with numbers that already showed such low friend-focused usage when trying to make their point.
We can assume the data is both made up and honest – they tuned feed algos to show more non-friend content and these results reflect that exactly.
This kind of reminds me of when Fox News had to admit (in court) that their news wasn’t really news, it was entertainment. It’s wild how they always say the quiet part out loud when they’re being sued.
I only have facebook for messenger, but lets look at my feed now.
1 sentence question from a page i dont follow.
Funny joke from a page i dont follow.
3dmakerpro ad
swimsuit picture of sister in law.
3d ai studio ad
anti trans post from page i dont follow
polymaker ad
Reels?
polymaker ad
picture from highschool friend
science/astronomy post from page i dont follow
planetarium ad
Less than 20% are anything I might even be interested in; the rest are pushed. I havent 3d printed in quite awhile. Astronomy is cool i guess.
SOCIAL media is over if you're on facebook.
Write an algorithm to maximize in app time, so he ended up building a content media platform not a social one. If the goal is to show as many ads as possible, you will always end up with more media than social
Not if they think long-term they should focus on retaining users so they can be shown ads forever.
I support a small group of elderly people on the side. At least once of week they land on a Facebook video which then leads to the "your phone has 78 viruses" scare ad. I tell them to stop using Facebook and they look at me like I'm crazy. One of them even said, if I turn off my phone when I get that scary ad, does that keep me safe?
> Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years,
Yeah, because you filled the feed with garbage so obviously they don't get to see as much.
Has 'percentage of time viewing content' declined?
Seriously, talk about self fulfilling. "We stopped showing people content from their friends, and people started spending less time viewing content from their friends. It's inexplicable, really."
The unspoken thing really is: We couldn't find a way to make mega-bux on showing people content from their friends, so we stopped being a social network almost entirely so we could make mega-bux showing them garbage ads and disinformation campaigns instead.
Instagram actually used to be quite nice when it was pics of friends. Now I find it scary.
IG was a social network that made me feel better after using it. It used to be a peaceful, well presented, personally curated stream of still photos.
It really sucks that every single platform is lured into the brain-attention hack of short form video and the optimization of attention quantity over interaction quality. All cycles repeat though - here’s hoping.
> “It used to be a peaceful, well presented, personally curated stream of still photos.”
Ha! This is the opposite of my experience. I feel Tumblr was superior platform for images and art on small phone for no other reason than you can easily pinch and zoom. I still prefer still images on the Tumblr platform, and my feed is filled with artists, designers, photographers and comic book covers.
I never liked the experience of viewing stills on Instagram and only when my friend started producing small videos and another friend started sending me fishing meme videos, did I start engaging. Now I do spend some time each week in Instagram (same as YouTube shorts). The platform is perfect for sharing small instructional videos. My feed is full of motorcycle mechanics hacks, fly fishing lessons, fitness instructions, and camping knots—all to my recreational interests—I’d rather be fishing.
It seems to largely be a mirror for tik-tok these days.
The last thing I want to see is what random people I don't know are posting. Maybe there's a stream where I can see that, but not in MY news feed. I want to only see what my friends are doing, and maybe what is going on in a group that I belong to. Nothing else. No AI prompts or responses, no suggested friends, videos, groups, etc. To make Facebook even tangentially useful to me I have to use FBuster or other extensions to remove all of that junk.
> The last thing I want to see is what random people I don't know are posting
Most of us right here?
I'd like to know how much that time spend viewing content posted by "friends" are down since 2012, because I bet it's more than in the past two years, by a lot.
There's also:
> "The F.T.C. is arguing, instead, that Meta’s purported monopoly has led to a lack of innovation and to reduced consumer choice."
Not really, because no one gave a shit about providing a good social media experience, everyone wants to copy Zuckerbergs homework.
If you want to blame Facebook/Meta for anything is it breaking the trust of people to the extend that no other social media can exist for a decade. Meta has burned the would be early adopters to the extend that they will NEVER sign up to a new social media platform ever again. Meta (and Google, Microsoft and so many others) have shown that spying on customers and selling their private data is business and now the tech savvy users that would be the first onboard and advocating are no longer signing up to anything that cannot guarantee absolute privacy.
Facebook also killed of pretty much any other marketplace, but I am interested in seeing how the newer generations are going to affect that, given that many of them doesn't have a Facebook account.
Yeah, how about improving Facebook (which has been neglected for years) instead of building out Threads (which nobody needs)?
Did FB chose to replace friends' posts with garbage, or was it that less and less people were posting, and FB had to replace the feed with _something_?
Visiting friends' profiles, they still seem to be posting but I rarely see them on my feed.
No I haven't got them muted or anything haha, and I can't speak for why the algorithm thinks I don't want to see the content. Maybe it's broken.
Some mid-level manager idiot's a/b test revealed that they could maximize engagement by showing more rage bait and less family. This increased revenue and nobody wants to suggest a change that lowers it.
They have relevance guardrails but they keep eroding.
Looking for cause and effect in a feedback loop is a fool's errand
Those aren’t mutually exclusive options. Facebook wants to always have new things to show people so they stay on the site, but it was absolutely their choice to deprioritize your friends’ posts below advertisers and the “engaging” slop.
This is why I left Facebook and I'm sure it drove away many others.
Meta is an ad business. You maximize ad revenue by maximizing time spent. You maximize time spent with a slot machine that exploits our psychological weaknesses.
Meta intentionally drives this and don't forget that it's helped by millions of influencers that learned how to maximize engagement.
A good-faith Facebook with exclusively a friends-only timeline might generate 20% of the current ad revenue. And it won't matter much because the bad-faith competitor will do the dopamine approach and users will be attracted to it like flies.
My mom's area in northern Michigan got hit by a huge ice storm last month that took out hundreds of power lines and cable/internet. Facebook was the primary way the community communicated during the 5-15 day power outage. That was extremely valuable. There are a few special topic groups that are still great as well. Other than that rare situation it's been a desert.
Broadcast social media is so odd to me now. It feels like walking to the center of town and shouting about your life to everyone.
I go to Facebook once a week or so, scroll for about a minute, then close it. It was a novel experience reconnecting with people from my past, but in the end, I just found out too much about people, realized it may be best to let people in your past stay there, and that comparison is truly the thief of joy.
Now, I just like watching interesting people talk about interesting things. I get that here, somewhat, reddit but lately only in a very narrow way, tik tok as long as I carefully maintain the algorithm, and youtube. All of them I have to be careful with, otherwise I can get pulled into hellholes of outrage bait. And I'm really, really wary of engaging in dicussions anymore. HN is about the only place, and even then I often regret it.
One time, on reddit, there was a discussion about dishwashers, and how people needed to clean food off dishes, otherwise it would fill up the filters. I posted a link to a user manual showing that it was common to hook up the dishwasher to the garbage disposal to take care of that. I was downvoted into deep negatives, and I think one or more negative replies for just posting something simple and factual.
Even here, half the time I post, I feel I will end up regretting it.
I've had the same mental model as you (shouting in a town square) and that's why Twitter always seemed weird to me.
Lately, I've found that another mental model fits that sort of medium even better:
Hot takes scrawled on the bathroom walls of pubs.
And here, if you post something you later regret, you can't delete it or delete your account, which is pretty questionable on a social network in the modern age. So much for 'the right to be forgotten'.
At least once a day, I type up a comment somewhere, proofread it, think about whether I really want/need to post it, and then hit the back button. I figure that next-to-last step of asking myself whether it's really something I want out there is a good habit, and if the answer is always yes, I probably haven't thought about it enough.
I definitely do the same thing and in fact did exactly that with my original post! It's a good instinct to build up.
Glad to hear my own experienced echo'd. I've been dialing off of the stuff (even HN) for these very reasons. The staggering one is this:
> I was downvoted into deep negatives, and I think one or more negative replies for just posting something simple and factual.
One of the darker side-effects of social media is that everything now feels very ideological and "team sports." You're either "with us" or "against us," nuance has basically been obliterated. Even more shocking is that in some places, it seems like anything that's truthful/factual or plausibly truthful triggers a visceral negative reaction in people (to the point where, what used to be polite disagreement is now a rage-dump).
Social Media suffered the same fate as all companies. A constant, relentless, unnatural pursuit of growth by stripping all humanity and focusing on numbers.
Social Media has turned into an unhealthy addiction
We still need the 'organization' part. Clubs and social circles moved from blogs etc to Facebook because it was easy.
Room for a startup? A simple club hosting site, that does substantially what you get from a facebook club page. Maybe even a tool to scrape facebook and automatically create your ClubPage entry painlessly?
The key thing that Facebook Groups and Pages solved was the network effect. If you were on Facebook already, you could join a group or a page without signing up users. If a post from a Group or a Page came in, it came in through a common notification platform. It was the place where people already were, and if they weren't there, eventually there was enough pressure to join because "everyone else was already there". And all of this was good for Facebook, because it was at the time when they were trying to capture more users, which brought more eyeballs to ads.
I think any startup trying to solve this problem is going to have a really hard time because it will ultimately be external to the platforms where people already are, and user behavior has shown that they're inherently sticky to platforms. I wish it wasn't this way, because I think it'd be great for folks to be able to do this on their own.
Aren't we positing that Facebook is no longer sticky? What solution is there now.
Apple could / should be the one to tackle this by allowing iPhone iOS users the ability to create their own social circles. They dipped their toes into this a little with Invites.
Do we really need a central server to manage our friends and our circles? Decentralize the whole thing and it neuters FB and the ad surveillance universe.
https://mobilizon.org/ ?
Does anybody know a good alternative to Facebook that doesn't force you to read its feed suggestions? I only have FB because I'm member of some groups where people post content that I'm interested in. I'm not interested in anything else. I find FB's constant stream of suggestions annoying as hell.
I use Mastodon almost exclusively.
It requires that you curate your connections, and discoverability is a known problem.
But I get to see posts from the people I follow, and "boosts" of posts they think are worth seeing, and there are no ads, and no algorithms deciding what I should be seeing and filling my feed with them.
I'm not saying it's a good alternative, but I'm finding it useful and refreshing.
> discoverability is a known problem
Is it? Are you sure centralized authorities for "discovery" are a good thing? After all, the "discovery" algorithm is making people move off FB to Mastodon...
The challenge is:
You join Mastodon and want to find a specific friend.
Good luck!
People are accustomed to using centralised sites. They search by typing the target's name into a search box and get presented with a collection of options. That's less successful on Mastodon.
> You join Mastodon and want to find a specific friend.
Ask for their username? How do you think people found each others email addresses?
I'm trying to point out that people have experience of Facebook and Twitter and other platforms, and they expect when they join a new platform that they can type in their friends' names and get results. They then find that Mastodon doesn't work like that, and complain about the lack of "discoverability".
And they're right ... discoverability on Mastodon is not like on other platforms, and it is harder to find things.
Yes, I know how to do these things, I am, after all, a moderator on an instance with over 20K users. I'm just trying to point out that for some people the fact that "discoverability" doesn't work as it does on other platforms is a huge stumbling block.
If the only thing keeping you on Facebook is sources of specific content, you're looking for a platform that also has sources of that specific content. So it depends on what that content is, doesn't it?
You gotta find those small communities. I'm into 4wheel drives and use facebook groups but I'm often on Ih8mud now. Just a better place to be imo. You got to find where your people are at
The Something Awful forums.
I think Facebook app an option to see feed from your friend list and following page/group only . I can't remember, probably long pressing on feed tab will show this option.
Maybe there are subreddits or discord servers about your topics
Can operator be used to extract my social network data from fb?
I'm surprised most commenters haven't mentioned that the presence of Tiktok as the biggest reason why Facebook was pushed into this direction.
Ben Thompson of Stratechery did a great deep dive into Facebook's Three Eras here (https://stratechery.com/2025/meta-v-ftc-the-three-facebook-e...). Essentially, Meta could afford to prioritize positive well-being when it had a monopoly on social media, but as soon as Tiktok came onto the scene and Meta started bleeding users to it, they had to respond. Now, everyone (Instagram, Youtube Shorts, Twitter, LinkedIn) is copying the model of vertical auto-scrolling short-form videos, because it's a battle for attention.
What _was_ Facebook supposed to do when it saw all of its users leave Instagram/Facebook for Tiktok? Not do anything? Though it's terrible that everything is now a short form addicting video platform, I understand the logic behind why the company did what they did (and why everyone is building this). People say they want real connection, but really, they just want to be entertained.
> What _was_ Facebook supposed to do when it saw all of its users leave Instagram/Facebook for Tiktok? Not do anything? Though it's terrible that everything is now a short form addicting video platform, I understand the logic behind why the company did what they did (and why everyone is building this). People say they want real connection, but really, they just want to be entertained.
Innovate.
It’s not necessary to turn your company into a toxic disaster to compete.
People want connection too and Facebook won't give it to them
Maybe the reason people were leaving for TT is they were doing this kind of thing for years already https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719
Reminds me of that Netflix documentary. The Social Dilemma.
“Race to the bottom of the brain stem”
From the article:
"The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in “the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.” This under-recognized shift away from interpersonal communication has been measured by the company itself. During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram."
So they algorithmically force various other posts into your feed, and then observe that people are spending more time looking at that crap and less time actually connecting with real people and friends.
Colour me unsurprised.
I'd bet that this is ultimately about people's preferences for consuming content, unfortunately.
People will say they only want content from friends, just as they say they want to eat healthily. But the desire and the reality end up looking very different.
People at large will spend time in whatever surfaces are the most engaging (~addictive), and if a platform like Facebook removed those "other posts", it's likely that people would just spend time on another platform instead -- TikTok, Reddit, YouTube Shorts, etc...
It's like if the #1 grocery chain removed all the addictive stuff. No junk food, no soda, no alcohol. In the short term, people might consume less bad stuff. But in the long run, the #2 chain would take over, and we'd be back where we started.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it's a very tricky problem to tackle at scale.
> It's like if the #1 grocery chain removed all the addictive stuff. No junk food, no soda, no alcohol. In the short term, people might consume less bad stuff. But in the long run, the #2 chain would take over, and we'd be back where we started.
What you are observing is a case where market signals result in obviously undesirable outcomes. The problem cannot be solved from within the market, the market's signaling needs a tweak. In the case of this example, a tweak to bring purchasing behavior inline with what people want to be buying in the long term, what they know is good for them. This could be achieved by mandating some form of friction in buying unhealthy food. Banning outright tends to go poorly, but friction has seen great success, like with smoking.
I'm not sure exactly what this looks like for social media, or if it's even a necessary form of action (would banning surveillance-based advertising kill feed-driven platforms as a side effect?) but as you say, the market will not resolve this even if an industry leader tries to do the right thing.
> People will say they only want content from friends
I actually don't want content from friends, at least not in the way Facebook presented it before becoming another TikTok.
Facebook showed me the worst of my friends: polarizing political opinions, viral marketing, etc... These come from really nice people in real life, but it looks like Facebook is trying its best to make me hate my friends, it almost succeeded at one point. Thankfully, we met some time later, didn't talk about all the crap he posted on Facebook, it and was all fine.
I'd rather hate on public personalities and other "influencers", at least, no friendship is harmed doing that.
The only thing I miss about Facebook is the "event" part. If you want to invite some friends for a party, you could just create an event and because almost everyone was on Facebook, it made knowing who came and who didn't, who brings what, etc...
Exactly. If people weren't liking it, it wouldn't be successful. The point of these apps has become to be the thing you do when you're slightly bored and want to experience that's not the line at the deli counter, subway ride to work or sitting on the toilet.
It almost doesn't matter what the content is as long as it's more engaging than that actual moment of life.
I have neither TikTok nor Instagram nor Facebook (anymore), but I know from when I had Twitter that the endless videos are engaging. I'm not above having my attention captured by them, so I know not to engage with the networks themselves.
It's precisely what you say: I would like to say I just find that stuff horrible. But no, if I had those apps, I'd be using them as distraction too.
> If people weren't liking it, it wouldn't be successful.
When you talk to people, most of them want to do less of those apps, so its not about wanting it. Its the fact that _all_ companies know how to make really addictive stuff and they only lose when more addictive things come out.
Yeah exactly. Nobody's happy with their internet/phone usage these days. But also, I do know quite a few people who genuinely enjoy using TikTok.
Either way, what should we do about it?
We're not going to ban vertical short-form video. Mandate screen time controls? People will get extra devices. And expecting people to just Do The Right Thing has not ever worked.
Social media is genuinely like cigarettes, where it's so ubiquitous and people are so addicted to it that you can't just ban it.
Cigarettes were reduced a ton by banning them in most places indoors, taxing it way higher and making them harder to access (i.e. ask for them behind a counter vs. vending machine)
But cigarettes also have negative externalities like the smell and the effects of breathing in a room full of smoke. Phones don't have that—if someone's scrolling on their phone, it makes zero difference to you, so there's far less of an anti-phone movement than there was in smoking.
So how is this different from people sitting in front of a TV and watching endless samey series?
Only that it's portable.
If we didn't have "social media" we'd be all watching samey tv series on our phones.
It absolutely makes a difference because tv shows are usually 20 mins at least, which means watching 3 minutes in the supermarket line is actually a bad experience, so it requires more deliberation.
I’d also argue that the average TV show is more edifying than the average social media post but that’s another topic.
> I’d also argue that the average TV show is more edifying than the average social media post but that’s another topic.
Nope. In my experience most modern series can be remade as 1 hour movies ... per season.
There's more engagement with consuming content, therefore more ad opportunity and more revenue. But entertainment sources are more fungible than communication platforms. So in turning FB into a media company (effectively) they may have grown faster, but they also made themselves more vulnerable to a disrupter like TikTok.
There is a good reason I don't stock my freezer with microwave pizza.
Yes, I read that quote in befuddlement.
The only things I _want_ to see are my family and friends, but Zuck keeps shoving softcore porn into my feed.
IG has slowly become a gateway to OF hasn't it?
My recommendations are _full_ of girls with very few clothes on doing sports, showcasing outfits and whatnot. IG is just broken at this point.
But is it not observing what grabs your attention, and then serving you more of it? ;-)
I get what you're getting too, also wall-of-texts multi-image posts, often content reposted from reddit, I guess the algorithm thinks "Oh, user is engaged for many seconds with all the images on posts like this, gotta serve them more of them!".
I've programmed Tasker to kill Instagram after a minute of me opening it and I've made another Tasker script that asks me to input a 9-digit random number, makes me wait between 5-45 seconds and then allows me 10 minutes of the app before making me do the whole process again.
Women with few clothes (sadly) always grab my attention, yes. But I think that content is also being pushed despite my attention to other things because it works in general.
But you get the point, the recommendations are just a stream of nonsense-content, screenshots of screenshots of Reddit posts...
I don't get it. Either there's no good, original content available out there or the algorithm just doesn't want to show it.
> But is it not observing what grabs your attention, and then serving you more of it?
I'm reasonably certain clicking into a piece of content to block the account still counts as more engagement for that type of content. They don't seem to have a "clicked, then immediately blocked" sort of signal.
If you don't look at those posts (and even flag one as "not interested" when it pops up) they go away pretty quickly.
>If you don't look at those posts (and even flag one as "not interested" when it pops up) they go away pretty quickly.
this is broken, I get stupid posts with same image, about body parts and english words for them, I marked it as not interested at least 3 times, but it appears again and again from other poster . So FB is incapable to now show me the exact same thing over and over again despite me telling them 3 times I am not interested.
Also I doing some math stuff with my son so now I am getting images with math in them, tracking really works
Flagging them will clean it up for a while, but I find eventually it will show you a few more here and there. If you stop scrolling and ogle for a little bit then it starts feeding you more again.
> IG is just broken at this point.
It's all broken because the incentives are all broken. Everything is optimized for maximum profit through maximum screen time and maximum ad impressions.
If anything the online advertisement industry has shown that it cannot be trusted as a means to support businesses while having those businesses provide a healthy, no addictive, worth having product.
Would it truly hurt Facebook, Google or YouTube to make less money. Many companies could provide better solutions, if they where happy with less profit.
There is a workaround to clean up IG: I only use the browser to view it, even on mobile, and I use Firefox + uBlock Origin and the following filter:
www.instagram.com##article:has-text(Suggested for you):style(visibility: hidden !important; height: 300px !important; overflow: hidden !important)
Whenever using a Meta product I have to be hyper-aware of what i stop scrolling on or click on, because Meta is all about "revealed preference" instead of what I explicitly tell them I follow and like.
IE: Don't let your eyes linger on eyecandy on Meta's platforms or they will feed you a firehose of horny slop.
you could just delete your accounts. i find that my family and friends still seek out connection and interactions with me, as i do them, even without some sort of computational facilitator like instagram.
Easy Asian countries still appear to be heavy FB users even among Millennials. Most of my family is there so it is how I keep tabs on them.
Don’t be surprised if your family gets radicalized with some idea they were against just a generation ago. Facebook and social media is so many bad things at the same time: propaganda, surveilance, consumerism, deception, addiction, and complete isolation from one another. I find social media responsible for a lot of modern ills in our society.
Net neutrality is not a thing there and telcos usually offer free GBs of FB/TikTok access.
Very true and I think is part of their business model. A more lonely/isolated user is more likely to buy stuff to soothe themselves thus clicking in the advertisements they show.
Not just theirs.
The recent Switch 2 ad with Paul Rudd replaced friends coming to join him with tiny images on screen, leaving him utterly alone.
Or the Apple "Intelligence" ads that insist on never having any human-to-human communication (let an AI send that letter to mom) etc.
Yes, they themselves are making more and more efforts to isolate each individual user. Facebook or VK - but the essence is the same
All we ever really wanted was to watch nasty but injury-free car crash videos all day. Even Linked-in is getting into the game these days.
Maybe JG Ballard’s rotating corpse can power a data center
Completely off topic, but I stumbled across a comment you made about commuting from NO in the monthly hiring thread. I checked your profile and you're the only other user in our state who registered on the meet.hn platform.
So, hello HN neighbor!
There are at least three others on here that I know of who live in NOLA and one in BR.
In my country (CZ) Facebook is now only used by people 40+ for Russian/Anti-government propaganda (and it works sadly)
Same in the US for the most part
To quote David from the Acquired episode on Meta:
> I really want to keep hitting on this insight again, that Mark correctly identified of social shifting from the town square to the living room. This is a second order effect of that shift that the company didn’t see coming. Because once you shift social from the town square to the living room, it now becomes possible to divorce media from social. You’re already getting your social now in private, in your digital living room. The town square can become something that is completely not social.
Ok I am going to click on FB for the first time in a month or so. Here we go, not expecting much.
I have two notifications, one is about a birthday today, one is about someone I don't know asking me to like an AirBnB page. Let's go to the feed.
1. Sales thing from some group
2. A Boomer looking "reel" of a classic car (I don't like classic cars and nothing I have done suggests I do)
3. People You May Know (I've seen these same suggestions over the last several years, still don't know any of them and still don't want to connect)
4. Friend post, death in the family
5-9. Also friend posts
10. That exact same Boomer reel again
11-15. Friend posts or people I follow
16. "Memes Daily," which I don't follow so must be an ad
17-20. Friend posts and a group post from a group I follow
Overall, this really isn't bad, surprisingly. At one point, which is when I stopped checking it for months at a time, it was literally post after post after post from people I don't follow of the most garbage AI generated slop, like the sloppiest you can imagine. For example, the AI generated ones with the wounded soldier and a birthday cake with some message like "it's my birthday and no one came" level of slop, or an AI generated lady with an AI generated picture saying something like "this is my first painting but no one liked it," each with tens of thousands of likes and Boomers commenting things like "It's ok I am giving you a like happy birthday," just maddeningly ad infinitum and nausea-inducing.
So, maybe they fixed the above. Still, I can live without Facebook so am not planning on going back.
Or they only show a few friends' posts if you haven't opened Facebook for a while. This makes it appear more social and organic than you last remember, and for good reasons: if you come back, Facebook hopes they can develop your habit over time; also, it makes curious people like you less worried about this addicting app. But then, once they know you're finally coming back regularly, they can turn up the dopamine level gradually, and make social posts harder to find. You'll doomscroll to find them, and they know it.
Every dealer probably knows better than to let people overdose on their first sniff. Especially if they're relapsing.
This is quite an interesting post. I would guess that facebook does actually show you friend content if that's what you engage with. After all their single metric of success is ads viewed on the platform, which is the same as time spent.
So theoretically, everyone here complaining about not seeing friend content should probably try and train the algorithm to show more of it.
Or to be an asshole about it - if you see generic clickbait content on facebook, its your fault. You engage with it...
The problem with algorithms is they tend to be kept secret...
For example if I were trying to get a person hooked to the application I'd ensure they have a good experience. If there is someone like the parent poster that only opens the app at an infrequent basis it's probably not a good idea to scare them away.
But your FB junkie. It doesn't matter if they only click on their friends feed or not, show them ad after ad after ad because they are coming back anyway.
No evidence here on my part, since FB wouldn't really confess either way, but if I were manipulating people that would be one of the screwdrivers in the toolbox.
Which is a horrible way to do it
Ok, let's say you're my friend on Facebook. I care about you (I haven't explicitly unfollowed you) enough that I want you in my feed
Do I now click Like on every post you make? Is that how I get the "privilege" of seeing more of you?
Some people may dislike Likes because it leads to narcissism, and ok, fine, whatever. But nobody knows what it does and how it influences what you see (Liking certain pages has in the past auto subscribed you to them) and I consider that to be broken behavior
Social media has become tribal media, where people form strong tribal structures and stay within those. IMHO that has caused the great division we are seeing in many places. Maybe "cult-media" is a better term even.
Instead of coming together we ignore (or berate) each other, which in turn gives rise to the many extremist and authoritarian movements we are witnessing these days.
So there is now a new possbility to create a new social network, retro style in a sense.
Kind of on that subject: https://directing.attention.to/p/why-is-no-one-making-a-new-...
I think it just took the world a while to realize that social media is a replacement for cable TV and magazines, not a replacement for communication tools. Looking at old high school classmates' lunch and vacation photos was never good content, never good for business or mental health, and higher quality communication works fine with texting + Discord.
If social media is over, why isn't Zuckerberg laying off staff in social media? Instead he's laying off Reality Labs staff[1].
[1] https://www.theverge.com/meta/655835/meta-layoffs-reality-la...
He tells it like its bad thing.
Anyway.. I was listening Acquired podcast on Meta yesterday (yes, the whole 6h30min thing) and what we have today is so far away and different than what he was preaching 15-20 years ago and so distanced to original idea of connecting with people you know and you want to be connected with. Don't even want to talk about ads..
Not once in the article does Mark say social media is over.
And to think that he thinks that is even more folly.
A lot of people here are arguing there's no use for Facebook anymore, save maybe for Marketplace.
But there's another big reason to use it, and it's how I use it primarily: special interest groups, such as hobbies, communities around games, etc. They used to be hosted in forums and bulletin boards in the olden times, but there was a big migration to Facebook (even though Facebook was objectively worse for keeping track of conversations) and that was that. If you wanted to keep in touch with those communities, you had to be on Facebook.
Now there's another migration going on for hobby/game groups, one I won't follow this time: Discord. Discord stresses me out, real-time chat is all about being constantly connected and FOMO. And, to me, the UX sucks even more than Facebook's, which is saying a lot! Not for me.
I really never understood discord. The last thing on earth that would be healthy for me is yet another real-time chat program. Yet maybe I’m missing out avoiding it.
The irony is that Meta's defense in an antitrust trial is basically "we're not dominant anymore because everything is a chaotic content soup now." And… they're not entirely wrong? But also, who made it that way?
It could also mean that their recommendation algorithms are highly effective and managing to get people to spend more time on social media. And if "friends" aren't publishing enough, then foreign content will fill that void. Probably other content the user is interested in.
> “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years
Which does not mean that the time overall has declined. This could even mean that the time itself spent viewing content posted by "friends" did in fact increase, if the percent of time spent on social media increased enough.
I've just loaded my Facebook home page. 6 'pages' (I know it's infinite scroll but you know what I mean) before I saw an actual friend's post, and it was from 2 weeks ago.
Jeez Zucky, I wonder why social is dying. Is it because there's no bloody social between the ads and random algorithm shite anymore?
E: haha, the rest of the comments say likewise. Redundant comment but +1 anecdata.
Also for what it's worth I've checked a few profiles and yeah friends are still posting, I'm just not seeing it. I guess I scrolled past some post about something too quickly and now Facebook thinks I don't care? Maybe the algorithm is just broken lol.
I was a very early Instagram user and would even defend it over the years as "influencers" became a thing. “I don’t see it as a problem… if you don’t like those people then don’t follow them.”
Nothing about my tastes have changed over the years, but I now find Instagram to be painful to look at. If social media is over, it’s because Meta made the conscious decision to kill it.
I would argue that social media’s positive-feedback engine contributed to its own demise. Anec-data:
After being terminally online on Instagram, I decided to took a two-week break because I was noticed I was mindlessly scrolling through content that I enjoyed. After the two weeks, it was striking to note that almost all videos followed a pattern- a jarring hook in the first two seconds, a provocative question, rapid-fire cuts and a soundtrack. Most videos have to follow this proven formula, but in doing so, they'll be like all the other videos and will then have to take the next step to engage users, so videos become more aggressive and formulaic, which for me, gets in the way of the content.
This is completely omitting the fact that quickly scrolling past accounts you follow will trigger Instagram to suggest clips that are more provocative in an effort to capture one's attention. Even if you're intentional about what you consume, the app is adversarial to your own intentions.
It's MBAs on the eternal quest to juice profits. If a social site ran itself lean like Craigslist they could win the entire prize without the need to manipulate content for the benefit of advertisers.
That's an eloquently stated view. I'm not on FB or Instagram, but everything you said somehow resonated with me as a YT user.
Sure, but don't mislabel that "positive-feedback engine". Engagement, attention loop, reinforcement, clicks, views, comments, likes, follows, longer average visit time, distraction engine, compulsive behavior, higher advertiser revenue, whatever, but it isn't positive and it isn't really feedback.
If you had a friend who in the middle of interactions habitually pulled out a bag of cocaine and snorted some (or gambled), you wouldn't say they were giving positive feedback to the dealer (/casino). You'd say they were annoying and unable to function.
What happens on Instagram if you vote dislike/ignore attention-bait clips and try to find longer-form (>10 minute) content, and use searches rather than feed?
> don't mislabel that "positive-feedback engine".
But it is a positive feedback loop in a technical sense. Think of a microphone providing sound to an amplifier, and that amplifier in turn providing amplified sound into the original microphone. It's self-reinforcing.
> What happens on Instagram if you vote dislike/ignore attention-bait clips and try to find longer-form (>10 minute) content, and use searches rather than feed?
The thing is, I don't want to be on Instagram. It's basically TV for me, and I'd rather not engage with content that way because it's passive and messes up my attention span. I already stare at a screen for eight hours a day for work, and I'd rather not have to spend any more time on screens than I have to.
It's in general very negative; it's only "positive feedback" in the ultra-narrow technical sense wrt reinforcing the compulsive behavior, which is negative to the user, negative to the user's wellbeing, friends, family, negative to society.
My analogy to reinforcing any other compulsive damaging behavior stands. It's not "positive feedback" to the dealer or casino.
Let us not let our words do the thinking for us, as Orwell cautioned.
> Meta made the conscious decision to kill it.
No, it wasn't conscious, they just incrementally and iteratively optimized the site to maximize page views and ad revenue. Turns out that ends up eventually killing it - without ever having the intention of doing so. But you can rest assured that every decision on that long, slippery slope optimized some metric toward a local maxima.
It's been 8 years since my last post on Facebook and I visit less than 10 mins a year (only because I have one friend who uses FB messenger to communicate with me when he's traveling).
When a fb exec gave a talk at our then small startup about their 'north star' being monthly active users, I thought maybe they had just given up on serving their customers, that was in 2014. He detailed how they measured 'active' etc.
Our CEO immediately adopted a north star of 'revenue', again just shoving end-users into a pile for exploitation. Companies are not making products to solve an end-user issue, or even add value. The VC is the customer, and if your fb feed and IG is toxic, it's because that's working well for the investors.
It begs the question of how much time Zuckerberg and Meta's leadership spend actually using their own products, nowadays.
The first rule of dealing is "don't get high on your own supply".
At some point, Facebook (and Amazon and Google before it) were products that delivered what their users wanted.
The essence of enshittification is product leadership losing the plot on their users' desires and piloting everything off the cliff by solely following growth metrics.
Why would they? They're not dumb.
I use SM very seldom. But IG was my fav for a long time. I only had about 50 friends, all real people that I knew, they didn't post daily, it was roughly 1:1 ratio of follower:following, so - I could open it up about once a month, scroll through a dozen or so images and see the "you're all caught up" notice and bounce. At some point, I remember it saying my account wasn't showing me Ads because I had low follower count / low engagement - which I thought was great and it went on that way for a few years. Then at some point it became clear it changed. At first, it wasn't Ads, just posts from random people inserted into my feed. I never engage with anything overtly - no likes, comments, etc. But, I think I do spend more time on things that I "like" and do swipe through if there are multiple images if I find something interesting. So that was all the training that it needed. Soon after that, all I see on IG are half naked women in form fitting attire and construction content. Turns out I'm a hetero male that has a hobby of building stuff/home improvement, but I already knew that. I stopped using it all together.
The funny part is because of my construction hobby & interest in building science; I started seeing Ads in Spanish which I don't speak. I get this on YT too as that's where most my "how to build a ...." stuff ends up.
I feel it's all a side effect of chasing numbers. They show us a bunch of junk, which is addictive for a while but eventually we quit it for good. If they had decided "ok, Facebook is just going to be the place for friend updates" many of us would have stayed.
It all started because they needed to fill it up after the content shared by your friends is finished.
Well yeah, scrolling through and liking a picture of your friend's vacation and commenting "Adorable!" on a video of your cousin's toddler only gives you, say, 10 minutes to see ads, whereas getting fed an endless stream of progressively more intense and precisely-tuned content to tickle at your inner psyche (be it most susceptible to anger, lust, envy, greed etc) means you might spend hours on there scrolling past ads.
Well, in theory they could have just stuck to being a humble social media site, even if the traffic were to plateau or drop slightly. Something like what Craigslist did, but slightly more modern.
But of course if they'd done that Meta wouldn't be worth a hundred gazillion dollars now.
Meta made the decision to take control of what users see via the feed, and to show them mostly content which is NOT from friends. Content that "performs well".
The testimony is disingenuous, but true. People see less of their friends because they are show less of their friends. Friends post less becuase no one sees it.
Yeah with my friends we moved to a matrix group.
It's not so much dead as resembling a mangy, depressed tiger stuck in a cage at a discount-tier circus
I'm no Meta apologist, but I don't know if we can blame them on this one. Unfortunately in the digital age, everything reverts to the mean so quickly. It probably turns out that the most effective way to capture user attention is to give them an algo feed of addictive slop.
Unfortunately capturing user attention is also the best way to sell advertising, so it makes sense that all their products converged on algo feeds.
Facebook is now a birthday-reminder and old-connection-keeper tool loaded with empty content to feel less sad. Instagram and TikTok are also trending towards content consumption. Messaging and group chats are the only real social media now
Facebook groups are like the new Internet forums. There’s tons of stuff that’s moved to Facebook groups like Fishing and Car forums. For a lot of content Facebook groups are much better than forums.
Marketplace seems to be the new Craigslist and much better IMHO.
Posting is probably dead or dying. I haven’t done it in a decade or so.
They could be huge in this, but sadly they'll continue to ruin it because (IMHO) they are rotten at the core. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a question posted on a relevant topic, switched tabs to consult the manual to verify my memory, and then gone back only to see Facebook do its ADHD reload and bury the question.
Once people get sufficiently frustrated and the ad revenue declines below the cost of running the servers, we will immediately lose all of the information shared there. None of it will be archived like the old forums. It's a genuinely sad situation.
> and then gone back only to see Facebook do its ADHD reload and bury the question
Does anyone know why facebook does this? It's the most infuriating thing, like it's assuming the poor user doesn't know how to "refresh" a page so it does it for them, because clearly they got stuck on an old crusty piece of content.
You know exactly why they do it. To generate “engagement”.
>For a lot of content Facebook groups are much better than forums
Facebook groups are very disjointed and the algo does a bad job and keeping the good bits floating to the top.
In my experience the Facebook groups always turn to crap, especially if it's a group that attracts more than about 500 users. Abusive posts, scam posts, fake groups with the same name created by bots. I've reverted to old school forums for all my special interests. Marketplace is still the best classifieds product though.
It depends on the mods and the specific communities the groups are about. I have seen what you describe in some, but not at all in others.
> For a lot of content Facebook groups are much better than forums.
How so? I find FB groups strictly worse than old-school forums.
I don't even enjoy FB Groups any more because of the way they filter comments to “most relevant” so I have to click twice to change it to “all comments” on every single post, over and over and over. Tiresome.
It's embarrassingly dumb sometimes, too, like a post can show “3 comments”, I click it, and the “most relevant” will just be two of them with a bunch of empty space left over in the UI. Just show me all of the fucking comments omfg!!!
Only reason I caved and joined Facebook a few years ago was to get access to a group dedicated to Boston Whaler boats. There were two previously-thriving forums that were slowly dying. The forums were great. The Facebook group was not better, just alive.
Also events, it's probably the platform affecting discoverability of events the most.
The ways fb is (still) the most useful to users are the ones meta cares the least about.
That's interesting. In what sense would you say FB groups are much better than forums?
But yeah I agree, groups and marketplace are the only things keeping FB alive.
They’re better in the sense that people actually use them
Probably true with most successful things. Marketplace is just a low barrier to entry for people already using Facebook. I find it generally terrible, but that's where people are selling.
would rather use reddit for foruming than facebook groups
I would rather have ol' good forums. I would rather have years long posts in the frontpage and the ability to bump a long burried post when new info is up, and not missing the opportunity to engage with a topic just because 1-2 days passed without me logging in and thus the post, being more than 1-2 days old, is not in the frontpage anymore.
Ooh speaking of birthday reminders - if Facebook is browsing this thread looking for things to fix: bring back the birthday iCal feed!
You literally had notifications via my calendar bringing me back to your site every few days/weeks to say happy birthday and maybe have a bit of a browse. Now the reminders are in my todo list and I say happy birthday via text or call instead. Path of least pain in the backside.
Absolutely bizarre they ditched the birthdays and events iCal feeds.
Funny that you think they’d prioritize something that’d be useful, good for you.
Boss: "you're only allowed to work on things that serve more ad views"
Remember when they told us that capitalism would cause people to trip over themselves to give us what we want and need because that would naturally be where most of the profit could be had? Why do you think it didn't do that in this case? The answer of course is that facebook does serve it's customers. It serves the people who can afford to buy ads, and what it serves them is you.
Honestly, everything would be much better if either a.) people just paid for stuff or b.) governments decided ad-tech in its present form should not be a thing, and regulated the retention of personal data as a liability, to make targeted advertising less-personalized/unprofitable.
As a system for discovering price, free markets work really well. The downsides comes from politicians not understanding/caring the limitations of free markets and what kinds of problems they're simply not intended to solve. These are the economic factors beyond price. More broadly, they're our values.
If we outsource the need for philosophy/wisdom to the free markets then there is no reason why the market will not demand child labor, 7 day work weeks, single use everything, and privatized security forces. We failed to take action earlier, and the same kind of stuff has already happened to the environment. Not to mention that gambling and security fraud are making a comeback.
I'm 100% with you on the idea that it's time to start paying for services on the internet instead of the ad-funded model we have today. The problem is that the people who decide when and how to monetize things seem to be moving toward a model where they charge you for the service, sell your data and feed you ads.
100% this… everything you pay for is already selling your data and will eventually feed you ads.
If lawmakers regulated data retention to make targeted advertising unprofitable, then businesses would have no choice but to compete for customer’s money directly by providing value.
The missing ingredient is usually "competition"
Same thing with the "private sector is always better" religion - if there's no meaningful competition, you end up no choice coupled with a profit motive, vs. no choice but I can at least nominally vote and be represented
ISPs are usually a good example in the US. My old apartment had one provider, and wouldn't you know it, at my new apartment with multiple providers, I got five times the bandwidth for half the price.
See also: enshittification
In light of competition being the missing ingredient, the question becomes how does one maintain ongoing competition in a system where the bigger of two competitors tends to win and the winner of two competitors tends to get bigger? That's exactly what happened here: Facebook was bigger than WhatsApp, and FB+WA is bigger than Insta, so FB+WA+Insta is a lot bigger than anyone else.
Back in the day when Microsoft was the one in the DoJ's sights someone compared it to a dog race. Dogs don't have jockeys, so you have to figure out some other way to induce them to run. The way most tracks (probably all, idk much about dog racing but it's a useful metaphor here) do that is by having a mechanical bunny that runs out ahead of the dogs and activates their prey drive. The bunny has to be ahead of the dogs, but not so far ahead that they don't think they can catch it and give up. That means that every once in a while a dog will get the timing just right, go extra hard, and actually catch the bunny. At that point, the race is over for everyone until someone steps in to shake the dog loose from the bunny and give everyone a reason to run again. Our system is like that: we have to encourage everyone to do everything they can to catch the bunny but also ensure that they never actually do. Bill Gates was the first person in my memory to catch the bunny, and needed to be shaken loose. Now it's Zuckerberg, and probably Google, that need to be pried off of their respective bunnies so that everyone else has something to chase.
For a start, and it might even be enough, you strictly enforce anti-trust laws which are already on the books that prevent sufficiently large firms from acquiring their competitors and doing exclusivity deals. These laws have largely been ignored for decades and I don't know what to call that other than blatant corruption of our government, but it's slowly starting to change, in a bipartisan way.
Microsoft escaped the worst of what the government wanted to do to them for their anti-trust violations. It may not go so well for Google as they hold the distinction of being the only company in US history to have been tried and found guilty in three separate cases of possessing three illegal monopolies all at the same time. Two example measures under discussion in the court at the moment are forbidding any renewal of their browser default deal with Apple, and forcing them to sell off Chrome. We will see soon enough what comes next.
Foreign competitors is how you get competition usually. The big 3 auto companies can lobby Congress and discourage competition. When American Cars started installing tailfins (purely cosmetics) instead of competing on fuel performance, maintenance or price, they were opening the door for the Japanese auto industry to eventually take over, with the crisis of the oil shock being the instigating factor for people changing their consumption habits
That only works as long as the companies don't pay Congress to keep foreign competitors out of the market. To continue the automobile example, consider why the market for light trucks in the US is almost exclusively American brands.
The missing ingredient here is that there is a gulf between what people really need, and what they do. Capitalism/market forces/etc. optimize on that "what people really do" and not what they need, and especially not what they say they want. See also, for instance, the layout of your grocery store.
The good news is that capitalism is in fact really good at serving exactly the preferences you reveal through your actions, and there are ways in which that is good. The bad news is that the farther away we get from our "native environment" the farther our needs and revealed preferences are diverging. I can think of no equivalent threat in our ancestral environment to "scrolling away your day on Facebook". Sloth and laziness aren't new, but that enticement to it is very new.
The discipline to sit, think with your brain, and realize with your system 2 brain [1] that you need to harness and control your system 1 urges is moving from "a recipe to live a good life" (e.g., wisdom literature, Marcus Aurelius, Proverbs, Confucious, many many other examples dating back thousands of years), but one a lot of people lived reasonably happily without, to a necessity to thrive in the modern environment. Unfortunately, humans have never, ever been collectively good at that.
And the level of brutality that system 2 must use on system 1 is going up, too. Resisting an indulgent dinner is one thing; carrying around the entire internet in your pocket and resisting darned near every vice simultaneously, continuously, is quite another. In my lifetime this problem has sharpened profoundly from minor issue to major problem everyone faces every hour.
For a much older example, see "drugs". Which is also a new example as the frontier expands there, too.
I have no idea what a solution to this at scale looks like. But I am quite optimistic we will ultimately find one, because we will have to. The systems can't just keep getting better and better at enticement to the short-term with no other social reaction.
[1]: https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/philosophy/system...
We talk about capitalism being really good at serving revealed preferences, but the thing becomes a bit more twisty when you start talking about capitalism and mass media's ability to shape those preferences. From Bernays to Chomsky we have reams of literature about how mass media is used to tell people what they want, then capitalism supplies it to them, then mass media tells them how free and blessed they are to receive just what they want.
Definitely hard agree on the split between slow, deliberative, rationally-focused thinking and quick, subconscious, emotional, pattern-seeking thinking and the way that most people to their own detriment don't ever examine which of those two they're doing. Hell, I still pretty regularly have trouble differentiating between thinking and reacting and I'm the kind of nerd who spends a lot of time thinking about how I think.
Ultimately capitalism "works", but only if externalities are incorporated into the price.
Hence vice taxes on liquor, cigarettes, the short-lived Bloomberg tax on soda. See also - carbon pricing.
What would that look like for social media, I don't know. If we're truly brainstorming, what if Facebook were forced to charge you cash money for usage beyond a half hour per day? Or past a certain amount of posting?
I'm well aware that politically this would die even faster than the soda tax... selling a policy is often more difficult and important than policy itself
> selling a policy is often more difficult and important than policy itself
Policy needs a villain. After all, if everyone were on the same page acting in good faith, you wouldn't need policy. The people could just start living the life they want to see.
Alcohol points to drunks, cigarettes points to those backlogging hospitals, carbon pricing points to "evil" oil companies trying to destroy the environment. Soda has tried pointing to the obese also backlogging hospitals, but, as you point out, not very successfully.
Your sweet grandmother uses social media and it makes her happy being able to see photos of her grandchildren. It is hard for the average person to find a villain in that.
The main problem the vast majority of policy proposals for this sort of problem face is that the proposals almost invariably slip in the idea of some sort of human being, if not an entire population of humans, that is abstractly above the problem and can be trusted to administer the policy. But if that was the case, we often wouldn't have the problem in the first place.
It's really hard to policy-fix something that literally 99% of the population is doing. Who is going to propose it? Who is going to enforce it? Who is going to pay attention to it?
And to be clear, this is commiseration with you, not argument. I have no solution even in principle.
Or, hear me out, what about "competition exists but I also get to vote and be represented." Where I live, there are two ISPs, the local cable conglomerate, and a telecom coop.
The cable company, as you might expect, is completely and utterly awful. They go for all of cable's greatest hits, from low introductory payments that explode after the first year, to service that is constantly down, to sending you to collections for equipment you returned. They do it all. The speeds are slow, and the customer service is non-existent.
The coop, on the other hand, is beyond delightful. The speed always exceeds what I'm paying for, and every couple of years they readjust their packages to give me more speed for the same price. Only three times in almost a decade have I had any problems with them: One was an outage that was caused by a natural disaster, and the other two were problems with my ONT that were fixed next day at no charge. Oh, and since it's a coop, I get a check every year as part of the profit sharing. For me, it only equates to about a free month of service, but it's still pretty nice.
So I guess the tl;dr of it all is that you don't need to get rid of free markets to have social control of things. And since the profits go to the people paying for the service, there's no incentive to extract extra value, so there's no real enshitification.
And, any time some company gets close to "give us what we want and need," the company will be bought by Facebook, or funded by VCs, and new ownership will "correct" the problem.
Haha of course. I was probably just one of a mere few hundred million people using it in a way that brought me back to the algorithm so it got scrapped for underutilisation :(
They already send an email or push notification ... so yeah, there would be very little metric movement to justify this as having enough impact for year end PSC.
We don't pay them, so really why would they? I don't do work for people who don't pay me either.
iCal feeds don't bring you into the site. The whole point of Facebook is to be a walled garden that discourages you from going elsewhere. You're lucky they are not like X and deprioritize external links. Or maybe they do, I have not tested it myself.
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people
The popular wisdom is that FB has deprioritized external links -- some accounts on FB are now posting an image with a blurb and then saying "link in comments." I don't know if they're doing it on rumor, official communication, or having tested clickthru rates themselves, but several of these have large enough media operations that all of those sources are plausible.
I would click the link in the event to go say happy birthday to the person! I guess I wasn't the norm though aye, it's big numbers that matter
Sounds like you use iOS? Add the birthday to the friend’s contact and it’ll appear in your calendar automatically. You’re welcome in advance.
Interesting idea and kinda really makes sense.. I guess at the time I just chucked them into todos as I have plenty of friction free ways to get tasks into Todoist haha.
I'll give it a go, nice one
> Facebook is now a birthday-reminder
It isn't even good at that. I'll often see “it was [whoever]'s birthday yesterday” when I did login on the last couple of days, and it didn't bother to mention the fact then. Too many ads and pointless reals to show me on those days, to have space to insert the now/upcoming birthday reminder, presumably.
"mbasic.facebook.com" was a vastly simpler UI, and had notably less noise content. Sometimes "back" navigation even worked properly. They killed that last year :/
Were it not for distant family using it, I would almost certainly download my content and nuke my account.
> Messaging and group chats are the only real social media now
This is accurate as far as I'm concerned. Interacting directly with actual friends; no ads or clickbait content injected.
I was thrilled to find out that I can block facebook.com in my etc/hosts and still have access to messenger. Hard limiting the time I spend being "social" with robots and hostile outsiders has gone from being a good idea to being a survival strategy as we got further into the industrialization of the attention economy.
Anybody worth keeping in contact with, I have their phone number.
The only use for Facebook is for the marketplace.
Sadly for me, there's another use case for Facebook: special interest groups (as in niche groups for hobbies).
When the Great Migration away from phpbb forums and bulletin boards happened, lots of these groups moved to Facebook. I loathed it, but joining the migration was the only way of keeping up with stuff that interested me.
Now there's another Great Migration to Discord, which I won't follow. Real-time chat simply triggers my FOMO and is stressful to me. So any community that moves primarily to Discord will lose me as a member. I suppose nobody will miss me though.
> Instagram and TikTok are also trending towards content consumption
Huh? They were explicitly built for that purpose, not "trending towards". Without content consumption, those platforms are nothing.
I guess he meant content produced by "professional" content creators with the only goal of earning money instead of interesting pictures from your friends' life.
At least that's how I experience Instagram these days. It's a chat app where people send each other content made by others in the DMs.
Very few of the people I know personally have posted in the last few years, but most of them seem to casually use the app to explore whatever the algorithm shows them.
Actually it's biggest value is marketplace though the scammers know that too.
Marketplace is the absolute worst UX I could imagine.
highly overpaid Facebook engineers must be forced to use Marketplace to try to buy their cars, instead of buying from a dealer.
maybe that way they would improve things a bit
(now as in 10 years ago)
Discord are where the kids are at. But with them going public it's going to enshittify quickly and it's only a matter of time before they move onto something new.
I don't know if their newsfeed algorithm is broken, or just grasping at straws, but whenever I log in (fairly often simply for FB marketplace) my feed is full of posts and recommendations for things that don't even make sense for me. For example hiking groups that are in a random mid-size city 2,000mi from me. Or student housing groups in a random international city.
I've tried to even provide feedback on them not being relevant, but they still always appear. I don't know, it really does seem that their newsfeed relevancy is fundamentally broken
The thing that always surprised me about this when I still used FB was that they clearly had the expertise available in Meta to do it right because my Instagram ads/recommended content was almost stunningly well-tailored: events I actually wanted to buy tickets to, products that actually interested me, even down to reels from new comedians I find genuinely funny...
My FB feed, by comparison, was almost exactly like yours - not just irrelevant interests, but geographically crazy irrelevant interests.
It's almost like once you lose Systrom/Krieger it all goes to shit
(The same people Zuckerberg was accused of bullying out of the company)
I think the main Facebook product is basically running on autopilot now- the folks who wrote the pipelines got promoted and went to work on other stuff.
(note that if you click Friends or Feeds you will see somewhat more personal content, but basically, the main stream is just a list of irrelevant garbage)
My girlfriend also gets the same stuff over and over, most of it AI-generated garbage she's absolutely not interested in. No matter how often she selects "not interested", they always come back. Strangely, this started only recently on her account and mine is still comparatively okay. From what I've heard, it's much worse for US users.
One thing that amazes me is that Facebook thinks I'm interested in content I was interested in more than 25 years ago before Facebook even existed. It's mysterious.
Once I looked at the comments for a disgusting AI-generated tiny house picture to see if anyone else knew it was AI-generated and then all it showed me were more disgusting AI-generated tiny house pictures no matter how many times I tried to block it.
I spent over one year being served sponsored content advertising sales of firearms, cloned credit cards and drugs. Last time I logged in, I’ve noticed that I was being served content based on interests of my close friends. For example, a close friend got really into rock climbing, so I got tons of rock climbing meme accounts.
I have now grown tired of all of that and, when I realised that it had been ages since I had seen someone I actually know post anything, I deactivated it all.
I haven’t had a Facebook account in about a decade at this point, and I recall continually discussing already how useless it was without chronological sorting and recommending you random crap (and I’m not just talking about the ads).
I thought it was being insulting for a while but I guess I did pause on it to screenshot and make a witty post but I'm constantly getting Dull Men's Club, and more recently the knockoff versions haha
Facebook, I'm not into these, and I've told you so! It was just that "Suggested for you: Dull Men's Club" was funny the first time!
Facebook is probably the worst social media company at combating AI bot spam, although it is a tight race with Twitter/X. Even with aggressive pruning of AI generated "content" it's impossible to get ahead. No matter how many bots you block there are 10 more to take their place. I had to abandon the platform.
Facebook doesn't even seem to care that their platform is being strangled with fake posts. At least Twitter/X has the excuse that Elon fired the people who were trying to combat the spam. I don't know what Facebook's excuse is.
YouTube has lots and lots of bot comments as well.
Not only that, but people have discovered that comments shown to you on YouTube videos are also subject to "algorithmic scoring", based on your preferences, just like video recommendations.
About a year ago a video went viral where someone in a romantic relationship demonstrated that the opinions expressed in comments on videos shown to her differ radically from the opinions expressed in comments on the exact same video when viewed by her significant other using his account.
My wife and I then immediately verified that this was true for us as well.
The current trend is, relevant-looking top-upvoted comment followed by a thread where an innocent-looking account will ask an innocent question/request for recommendations, and get a helpful reply from multiple concerned kind "people" recommending the same resource... All AI bots from top to bottom
Oh yes I used to have this problem. Then I encountered the wonderful Mary Georgina on the internet and her website helped me lots, and I get such great returns! Have you heard of her?
Yeah, but who gives a shit about YouTube comments? They've always been useless at best.
I don't really understand this perspective.
Even worse, YouTube is presently being over taken with AI slop content.
Haha those "how it's made" thumbnails of a fully formed cake shaped like a car plopping out of a spigot or other nonsense.
can we really measure whether they're bad at something they don't actually earnestly try to do?
I used to count how many non-friend items there were between friend posts. If I recall correctly, my max count was 20. And similarly to you, when I do see something it's from 3 days ago and feels no relevant to comment or interact with. I know so many people hate Facebook, but I used to really enjoy those small moments with friends where we could interact over small life updates and photos. Now they feed me garbage to groups I've never subscribed to based on some "guess" around my interests.
I've also done this and my record count was 120. 120 sponsored or suggested posts about things I don't care about in between the posts from people I'm actually interested in.
I'll echo what others have said - if social media is dead, it's because they killed it themselves.
I use the Social Fixer browser extension to hide suggested content and my facebook home page is almost entirely:
Fun game. I just had 7, then 3, then I gave up after 30. And those 2 friend “posts” were 1. someone sharing a page’s post, and 2. a friend posting what appears to be an automated happy birthday on someone else’s wall. I did not see any actual content from friends at all.
Most stuff on FB seems to be 1. pages I don’t follow 2. ads 3. posts from groups I no longer care about 4. random people who are not my friends but somehow I still get to see their posts in my feed (not even popular posts) 5. sometimes, some uninteresting activity by an actual friend (commented on something, shared something) 6. occasionally a friend’s IG story pops up (I guess these are automatically cross-posted to FB or something)
Facebook has devolved to the realm of the unreal now.
I signed-in a few weeks back and the whole thing was just bizarre clickbait, ads, and bizarre clickbait generated image spam.
I really don't see how there's a future for this.
Is this (the abandonment and subsequent mass-sloppification) an American thing?
Is there a user base in other countries? It seems like a relic of a previous era.
I've been on Instagram for less than a year for a photography and now my feed regularly includes what people are now calling "rage bait". which I found are people purposefully posting things to get people to engage with their content and are rewarded when more people comment on that content.
I 100% agree that I cannot see a future where people think this is healthy and can continue.
> I cannot see a future where people think this is healthy and can continue.
The first is not a prerequisite for the second. See: fast-food, car-optimized cities, Electron apps, microplastics, AI-controlled drone warfare, trap music, etc.
On my feed I get AI-generated pictures of castles and houses in the woods. There are enough real places where we don't need to make stuff up. Makes me feel bad, actually.
Yes. I also got fake airplanes and way too long Wikipedia summaries of random things. It seems to me that there are really only a handful of outfits that really have the Facebook algorithm over their knee. It seems like the sort of thing that content moderators should be able to combat, but Facebook has just sort of given up.
I'm British living in Berlin, and it's almost that dead to me. 1/3rd irrelevant ads, 1/3rd irrelevant suggested content, 1/6th one single poster who mostly shares political messages that other people created, 1/6th everyone else combined.
I have that “one single poster” guy as well. It is annoying as hell—I even agree with all his politics but, man, it is just overwhelming.
> In the course of the past decade, though, social media has come to resemble something more like regular media.
That seems accurate to me, and it makes me think of the old-media saying, "If it bleeds, it leads." In other words, anything to get eyeballs/clicks.
Meet the new-media. Same as the old-media.
Enshitification. Investors want their ever increasing return on their investment, even if it means plastering the product with ads
There are limits to this--at some point it reaches a tipping point, and the people leave.
We've broadly seen this on FB with American Millenials (the "core" original FB demographic, there's only so much people can take or so much "value" they get from sinking their time there.
It's shit even with an ad blocker. The problem is that there's just very little organic content anymore, because the fad of posting all the time on social media passed. A social media site can't subsist on birthdays, wedding and babies, but that's all people post about these days. The interesting stuff has moved (back) to topic-based groups or pseudonymous forums (like this one).
Not sure when they will take it away, but for now, there is a cleaner option - go to Feeds on the left (I use it on the computer), and then Friends (as opposed to All or Groups). That gets you the latest posts from friends in reverse chronological order.
Oh wow I actually forgot about this.
I used to have a bookmark that took me directly to the friends feed but it would seem it just redirects to the homepage now, and the navigating to the feeds fresh just loads within the page rather than via URL (at least on mobile web, m.facebook.com, not checked desktop)
Honestly it feels like a hostage situation
Like some engineer in the company begged Mark like, "Please, people are going to drop your product completely unless you give them some control" (remember Top Stories vs Most Recent?)
And Mark's like "yeah, ok, cool" (it'll be removed in 2 years when said engineer quits/is fired)
It's because everyone moved over to using Whatsapp groups instead, for the actual social stuff, and TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube for the gratuitous lusting after other people's perfect lives stuff. It used to be that we looked at the perfect shared moments from our friends lives, but this didn't make us feel bad enough so we outsourced it to models backed by teams of experts so that we can compare ourselves to impossible highs and thusly feel only the most exquisite of lows when comparing our own real and therefore often shitty lives.
This is the right answer, and it's something I believe Meta has also said publicly, that messaging apps have become the family and friends connection machine as people shifted to using mobile phones and messaging became free and able to handle multimedia.
Yes this is the key point, and I really don't think Zuckerberg is to blame for this. It's just how the market moved. Before tiktok Zuck did actually try and move facebook back to friend territory, but tiktok became such a threat to time spent online they had to shift to "engaging content"
And everyone is in whatsapp groups anyway for personal content...
When Elon bought twitter he bought back the "following" tab on twitter, and frankly, I used it a few times then stopped. It was just boring. Shifting through pages and pages of random content from people I follow is just too much energy.
The fact is, personalised feeds do just work. We hate this, but it works.
It's a bit like sugar, I know it has zero benefit in 2025 eating sugar, but I just do it, because its nice and it works, and it feels good. My brain knows its bad for me, but I just can't resist.
Now you can blame restaurants and ice cream shops for this, but the fact is, if the particular ice cream shop I buy ice cream at closed, or offered less sugar alternatives, it would in fact lose market share. And of course, there are sugar free ice cream shops, but their market share will never be that big.
If facebook wanted to actually stay on top, they were forced into this.
It’s not universal though - they don’t work for me, I don’t want or care about any of the “value add” in a feed. I don’t want reels, I’m not there for suggestions.
Clearly I’m a minority as I’m sure they have research saying it does drive engagement for large Numbers of people, but Facebook appears to be worse for all that other stuff and as a result is failing everyone.
Long term will show whether it was the right decision by FB. If he now claims social media dead, then maybe already signs are showing, that the decisions were not as smart as he originally thought. Short term thinking kills many businesses.
And that's fine except people have missed seriously important life updates because of selective post non-showing
Facebook already had people up in arms when the feed was first introduced (probably because Zuckerberg seemingly doesn't believe in privacy as a concept, at all) and now they want to ruin it (especially now but it's been like this for years) by defeating the point of it?
And I do blame him, anyway https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
Missing things is another one I noticed yeah. In my case it's gigs from local places I actually follow.
Why show an event that happened last Friday? They even know it's time sensitive because it's an event with a date and time attached!
Facebook and instagram: less and less posts by real people.
Reddit and other discussion sites: Controlled by "basement dwellers"(i.e. doomers w/ too much free time), trolls and, soon, AI bots. Dominated by groupthink and devoid of friendly discussion.
I think the only exception is my local community page on Facebook. People do seem to be civil(real names and close physical proximity help) and it's all real content.
> Reddit and other discussion sites: Controlled by "basement dwellers"(i.e. doomers w/ too much free time), trolls and, soon, AI bots. Dominated by groupthink and devoid of friendly discussion.
I sometimes have the feeling that most HN commenters are also unemployed or in academia and most non-commenting readers are employed.
Fundamental problem with moderation sites like reddit and HN: discussion is controlled by those with the time to moderate. These are also the least likely people you want controlling the discussion.
If only there was a reputation based site where, idk, people with more accomplishments got more weight...
Twitter is, in a way, like that. I can follow, say, John Carmack, and get things he says or has reposted and ignore content from people I don't care about. I think that's why I still find myself there. It's a high signal-to-noise site where I can still participate(and actually have discussions with high achievers and ignore basement dwellers. Vs say reddit where I'm constantly dragged down into debates with the basement dwellers).
> If only there was a reputation based site where, idk, people with more accomplishments got more weight...
Very good point. I personally find Reddit or HN fairer since it doesn’t depend so much on reputation (actually: popularity). But you are right there is a benefit to weighing certain people more. I sometimes wonder whether people like Dijkstra or Feynman would have bubbled up on Twitter too. I guess so. Both were pretty outspoken so the algorithm would pick up on that like people would pick up on Feyman lectures or Dijkstra letters. They had some virality about them.
The moment they started broadcasting any comment I made on any news story to everybody in my network was when it stopped being useful for me. It's one thing for it to be discoverable if people looked, it's another thing to feature every thought I have prominently in the feed of every person I'm connected to. This was probably a decade ago, and I haven't used it much since then.
That creeps me out, and probably everyone who realizes it. But, and it's not a tongue in cheek question, why not try to use it to your advantage ?
There are people who live for every ounce of attention, us introverted tech folk probably aren’t the majority of users.
Likewise, Facebook has become spectacularly useless for me. I've missed important moments in friend's lives for several days because Facebook has decided that shoving random fan pages and adverts are what I actually want to see.
A friend's dad died and I didn't know for 5 days. He was busy dealing with everything that comes with such a major life event, posted it to facebook assuming that would be an effective way to communicate it.
I see posts from my friends all the time. Most of the post in my feed are from friends or groups I follow.
I just did a quick tally. Of the first 26 posts in my feed:
* 11 friends/page/groups
* 15 groups/pages that I haven't followed or interacted with.
Of those, the first post was a friend, the next 5 posts were groups or pages I haven't interacted with. It also shoved reels at me 3 times, further delaying me seeing the content I actually want to see.
Of those 11 posts from people I did specifically try to follow on FB, only 2 were from today (not sure if folks just haven't posted).
One of the posts from a friend was from 6 days ago that has never popped up in my feed before. What's notable to me about that delay is that I saw and interacted with a more recent post of theirs this morning. So I guess they've jumped up in priority in "the algorithm", so now it finally decides to show me it.
Of course, continuing in the grand tradition of "Facebook WTF", I went to scroll back up the feed to look for other signal and it's all gone. It doesn't even reliably show me my wife's feeds. (plus it does have that amazing feature where it'll give me a notification that she just posted/commented on something on facebook, and even lies about the time/date of posting until you refresh the page, while she's literally fast asleep beside me.)
I pretty much never use their algorithmic feed. I've switched to going in, selecting `feeds` and then `friends`. There's usually at most a half dozen posts per day. I also belong to some groups, but I'll go to them directly when I want to see what's going on there.
Zuck did announce rather recently the Friends feed is more prominent on the app. It’s always been well hidden, but I think they know people are getting sick of the mindless scrolling.
https://www.theverge.com/news/637668/facebook-friends-only-f...
I’ve basically stopped using the site for all the same reasons. I think it is because their engagement by real human users is near zero. In order to keep it freshfor whoever is left, like seniors hoping for an occasional pic of their grandkids, they fill it with the garbage
This is the primary reason that I'm closer than I've ever been to deleting my Facebook account. I stopped using it in any meaningful way over a decade ago. I think I've posted about six times in the past decade. But I did still check at least a few times a week to see what my friends posted. Now I can scroll for 15 minutes and see only a tiny handful of friend posts, with about six ads and garbage meme posts (not shared by friends, just pure noise injected by Facebook) for each real friend post. I think the ratio is probably even worse than that.
The other day something popped up in the Facebook Android app advertising a new feature to "just see your friends' posts" and when I clicked on that, it really did only show me friend posts and a couple actual ads. I can't find it in the app anymore, though. It's what should be the default view. It's the only thing I will ever care about.
I'm willing to accept a reasonable amount of advertisement as a necessary evil to support the service. What I can't understand is why I'm seeing an endless stream of garbage memes from random accounts that I do not follow and couldn't care less about. Stop "suggesting" things to me. I don't want to "Follow" these morons. I never intentionally interact with any of them, yet I'm flooded with them.
There's little chance of me making it to the end of this year without deleting Facebook entirely. It does nothing to keep me connected to friends anymore, because it hides 99% of their posts unless I view their profiles one at a time, and the few things it does put in my feed are lost in the noise.
Facebook has a Friends feed[1] which only shows posts from friends (and ads, but that's a whole other discussion). Even so, like 80% of the posts from my friends are just them re-sharing news articles or random memes; I wish there was a way to block reshares from pages or something like that.
Also, personal pet peeve: Instagram has a way to turn off "suggested posts" in the feed... for 30 days, then the setting gets automatically turned back on. This is such a blatantly user hostile anti-pattern it's almost as bad as if they didn't have the setting at all.
[1]: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
It’s odd that in the iPad version, the friends button at the bottom doesn’t take you to the same feed, but rather lists of people to add.
About couple years ago I logged onto Facebook for the first time in nearly a decade to sell something on marketplace. I took a peek at my feed and the set up was:
Post from some guy I barely knew in high school talking about giving all at his job with zero comments or likes followed by Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad endlessly. I just kept scrolling and scrolling and hitting more pages of ads.
I refreshed and got a different single post followed by more ads. I took a short video of the feed to show my friend who worked at Facebook at the time and he said “oh it might do that when it doesn’t know what to show you, if you use it more it will get better”
I asked how it would learn what I liked when it was just showing me ads and he didn’t have a good answer. I guess nobody cares there.
And why would some one continue to use it if all it does is show ads? You have to put some cheese on a rattrap if you want the rat to stick his head in it.
Sad seeing so many people here addicted to drugs.
This. My facebook feed is 10% posts from friends, and 90% ads or weird content posts.
I actually find Facebook's feed much better than LinkedIn's for example. Meta seems to be pretty good at showing me posts from groups I often visit and even the "random" stuff is pretty relevant (although mostly a waste of time reels). LinkedIn "random" stuff is always the same stupid content that for some reason has 1000+ likes. Twitter is not much better, the push stupid videos, but at least they have the "following" feed that is much more relevant and I usually don't even bother with the "for you" feed.
> Jeez Zucky, I wonder why social is dying. Is it because there's no bloody social between the ads and random algorithm shite anymore?
Well, there is a 'tab' (at least on mobile) that is eventually marked 'Friends' buried inside 'Feeds'. The irony is lost on Zuck I suppose, as that used to be the front 'page' and KSP of Facebook.
All of my friends and family just have big whatsapp groups instead.
Guess what will be the next target of randomly inserted ads?
Pretty sure the next target IS gonna be WhatsApp. Ads inserted at random intervals into groups. Give that whole cycle enough shit iterations and we are back to mailing lists and IRC channels.
Your friend feed is here:
https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr
Unfortunately not on mobile web, just takes me to the homepage (even if I replace the www with m to rule out a blanket redirect to mobile)
I guess I could restrict my Facebooking to desktop if it still works there but then I'll visit even less haha
There used to be a hidden "only friends" feed - it got removed, or is hidden even better. Also you couldnt default to it.
On desktop - left sidebar, Feeds > Friends (not Friends at the top level). On mobile (or at least iOS, which I have) the bottom sidebar, second left button Friends are not perfect for me but cut out 90% of the garbage.
Make FB responsible for the information from automatic feeds. No need to regulate fake news and stuff. Just make them liable for offences like scams and defamation.
FB defence would be that they are like a telecom company and aren't responsible what is said over the phone. But if they are pushing scammer to call you, then they should be co-liable.
For me social is now family, extended family, siblings, school, high school and university friend groups on whatsapp with just people sharing big news wishing birthdays etc. All the info in the groups is in silo from each group. Where you actually behave in the groups like you would in real life ie differently with different groups.
The only ways FB are tolerable to me:
Desktop - left sidebar, Feeds > Friends.
Mobile - Friends button on the bottom menu.
Not perfect, but cuts out 90% of the garbage.
Maybe I'm in a test group, but my interface recently got a "friends only" feed. It's great.
FWIW this is the only way I use Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
(That plus having FBP installed.)
Still feels like my friends never post any more, except for like 1% of them?
I never load the homepage. Feeds>friends in a firefox container with FBPurity is the only way I’ll touch that abomination.
I also find that I have to mute a lot of over sharers. I feel for those people because I know they are like rats pushing the social lever for some imaginary sense of connection.
The FB feed has been completely useless for a few years now. I stopped posting a while ago because it didn't really make sense anymore. Meta sucking up to the MAGA crowd broke the last straw for me and I've finally deactivated my account.
I don't see a lot of friends posts, but I see some groups which are pretty active, and sometimes even useful. For instance, local hiking group, people post pictures, organize hike. I thought facebook was dead, but there's still a lot of activity.
> 6 'pages' ... before I saw an actual friend's post
I opened mine, and the first post was from a friend, as were about 75% of the remainder of the posts. The other 25% were from Facegroup groups I joined.
There were zero news stories, and zero AI stuff.
Yeah, this experience could really vary from person to person. I wonder if this person has anyone in their "friends" actually regularly posting? If nobody in their network is posting anything, there's not posts from their network to appear.
I highly recommend the FB purity extension to remove all that crap: https://www.fbpurity.com/
I just opened Facebook (for the first time in months) and 3 of the top 5 stories are from friends. Not sure why you have such a different experience.
I tried the same a while back. I am now pretty sure it's part of the algorithm. If you stay away long enough, it reels you back in to scrolling by showing you some important updates first and before you know it, it draws you back into the abyss of AI generated content and ads and influencers.
edit: s/tells/reels
Just filter everything out that's not an actual post by a friend. Filter out news, shares, ads, etc - all that nonsense.
you can't. they don't give you a filter to show just friends. you have to slog through all the "recommended" posts
I didn't say to use a filter that they provide. It's your "user agent" - have it do your bidding.
I use FBP: https://www.fbpurity.com/faq.htm
Is there a setting to only show content from friends? Last used FB 13 years ago.
On web site - https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
Can't see that - requires a login. So, there is a setting. Believe you.
They have a friends feed which will also include some adds
correction: my Social Media site Is Over.
Everyone relax - this moron Zuck still has Whastapp left to shittify and it's already begun with businesses spamming people en mass
Old firms that did sms spam as a service now all do whatsapp spam as a service - just one example of the process already inevitably started
I can't wait until people are communicating entirely via algorithms/OS clients with donations running server temp storage.
Then this 21st centure nicotine dealership that has created riches by extracting untold value from people's lives will finally be in history's dustbin where it belongs.
The disproportionate amount of impact this one hit wonder had on civilization is astonishing.
Mark owns 3 of the most popular apps in existence. Hard to call him a one hit wonder even if his other hits were just recognizing which companies to buy
The other hits came from breaking laws against anti-competitive behavior by his company, which is the exact subject of the trial this article is based on.
Buying WhatsApp was about having the money and not being obviously blocked by courts.
Not exactly galaxy brain to decide to buy a lottery ticket that's already declared the winning one.
And not like they ruined it, I mean integrated/synergized it.
lots of people had money. Only mark bought whatsapp
It was a defensive acquisition most likely and the app has pretty much not changed functionally one bit from when he acquired it. He had no vision for it clearly.
I'm getting a bit of reddit vibes in that you only took part of what I said out of context, and ignored the rest.
But also yes it was very much a defensive acquisition, and my point about them not (yet) ruining it shows that there was no plan.
Buying another company from the spoils of your first hit doesn't make you not a one hit wonder. Especially since most of your bidding competitors would have been blocked by antitrust.
I don't know if the same is true for Instagram. I've never used it.
> recognizing which companies to buy
I bet it's really simple from the vantage point of being the owner of the biggest social app with billions to spare.
“Recognizing which companies to buy” is your argument? That’s how low the bar is: money = smart. Buying your competitor for crazy high prices while paying even more to avoid antitrust laws is kinda the tech bro playbook.
True. He hasn't actually built anything since the very first days.
LinkedIn is the only social whatever that I still use, and that's only bearable with a LOT of filtering courtesy of uBlock Origin. Even after that, it's 95% corporate advertising and 5% humans I know.
I hope so, and things might go back to having nice platforms for niche verticals, im making one of my own, for wildlife photography now that insta hates us :D
https://toggr.io
Social Media is over because the quest for infinite growth killed it.
> Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.
But Meta controls what people get to see, so this is pretty dubious data, right?
Yea, well. Facebook will eventually disallow you to even search marketplace without a face picture. Punishment for not feeding their databases I guess. It doesn't matter if you have 100 friends. It doesn't matter if you post 1,000 pictures of your farm. That's some dystopian ish right there. People have definitively noticed and many in my circles have refused to engage because of it. Good riddance.
Another way to put this: Tiktok won.
I agree that the days of posting "this is what I had for dinner" are over. Facebook is a cesspool of your weird uncle posting conspiracy theories. IG isn't a friends network anymore. It's for following influencers.
Tiktok has a following tab but anecdotally I don't know anyone who uses it regularly and as a significant portion of time on the app. It's all about the FYP. And Tiktok's algorithm is far superior to any other in this one way: how quickly it updates. You watch a video about ducklings and within 2-3 videos you'll be seeing more videos about ducklings.
Compare this to FB, IG and Youtube: it seems like the process of learning what you like is far less responsive, almost like there's a daily job that processes your activity and updates the recommendation engine to your new interest levels.
Also, Tiktok is very good at localizing your interests. By this I mean, the other platforms will push big creators on you. On Tiktok it's a common occurrence to stumble on a video from someone I've never heard of who has 20M+ followers and this is the first video I've seen in 2+ years from them. On FB or IG, if someone has a massive following, you'll almost have to block them to avoid seeing them if it's something you have zero interest in.
These companies like the whole friends connection because it's a network effect, keeping users on the platform. Without that, it's so incredibly easy to switch when the new thing comes along.
I would say that the rise of group chats instead is evidence of how social media is failing users. People do want to communicate with a closed group. It's like they say: any organization app has to compete with emailing yourself. Any social media has to compete with a group chat.
I think you're right (though YT is crazy good and finding what you like imo).
> I would say that the rise of group chats instead is evidence of how social media is failing users. People do want to communicate with a closed group. It's like they say: any organization app has to compete with emailing yourself. Any social media has to compete with a group chat.
This is true, but the truth is that you spend maybe 1 hour (if that) in group chats, while many people spend 4-5 hours a day on Tiktok/IGReels. So the revealed preference is that yes, they want to be connected to their friends via group chats, but they want mindless entertainment a lot more.
So I hate Medicare Advantage (and conversely rather like Traditional Medicare) because private companies have perverse incentives when managing public goods. I think social media is a public good and what we’ve seen is a result of Facebook’s perverse incentives. A friend asked what do we do about the perverse incentives? That’s kind of difficult when Citizens United represents regulatory capture by corporations.
The title of this article is misleading. Nowhere in the article does Zuckerberg say "social media is over" or anything close to it.
Does this confirm at least part of the dead internet theory?
The internet's not dead. The web maybe.
The relevant fact here is contained in this article's subheadline, which starts with: "During testimony at Meta’s antitrust trial..."
He's saying "social media is over" because if it is then his company, which dominates social media, does not have market power and thus is not a monopolist.
The statement should be evaluated for what it actually is, the statement of an accused lawbreaker during a prosecution by the government.
I actually think he's correct and the gov's case doesn't really correspond to reality.
It's actually true that social media as it was in the 2010s (when the Instagram and WA acq's happened) is basically over.
They're no longer social, they're mostly just media: apps designed to be portals into consuming as much content as possible, by whomever (so you watch more ads).
I'm not saying Meta is a great company or Zuck is a great person, but the idea that Instagram & Facebook compete with TikTok and YouTube is 100% true.
> gov's case doesn't really correspond to reality
It does because if Facebook didn't monopolize the social media space maybe we would see innovation instead of blatant feature copying. Instead we have 3(4 if you consider Threads as one) platforms owned by the same company that push the same content - posts, reels, stories and actively try to unify and cannibalize each other. Breaking them down to individual companies will absolutely improve the market.
But how will it improve the market? By making a less addictive (read: less engaging) app that does social media "the old fashioned way" where you connect with friends an not much else?
I love that intention, but it wouldn't be competitively viable. That's why yes, social media in that form is over. The reason Instagram and Facebook are valuable is because billions of people have accounts there and are habituated to go there in every spare second and look at whatever the screen serves them, whether that's Johnny from 7th grade math getting married or a snake being friends with a cat in rural Egypt.
> connect with friends an not much else
Not necessarily. Breaking the companies up will foster innovation via competition. Who knows what will come out of it? Will it be better than Facebook burning stacks of cash on Zuck's latest fancy(XR/AI/?)? How long will the market be confident in his dollar pyromania? I will short that company like there's no tomorrow if I was in any position to do so.
This is more my opinion than time and market-backed statement but I don't believe addictive design is good for the long-term market positions of those companies because they may be addictive now but a lot of people loathe them* and are looking to escape from their design. They will jump on whatever comes next and not look back. What's good for the company long-term is to provide value to the user - local groups, FB marketplace, etc and become embedded in the culture and society.
* needs citation but it looks like the article supports this view
Sure, I also hate what all of this is doing to society and people more generally! But it's also fair to say he is actually correct in saying that social media as we know it is over and it's now about generic content consumption.
Ack, I'm getting the sense that the author of this article is getting caught up in the argumentation prepared for use in the trial. Of course the Meta people are going to do everything they can to get everyone feeling it's like this to shake at the logical foundations of the case.
The F.T.C. is not chasing an old problem. A case like this may serve as precedent.
This is kind of bad, because it makes it very hard to reach people for social events. I run a fan group for a European soccer team and it's very hard to do outreach because no one is really checking social media for that type of thing. Even meet-ups in general are difficult. There is of course meetup.com but it's niche and expensive.
I recall having Facebook and always had that feeling the algorithm was messing with me and my posts… Come to find out a few years later it was exposed that Facebook was conducting mass social experiments to users and their comments and posts. Shadow banning and I just never liked the feed…it was not organic.
It’s been over for years. At least Facebook has for me. I got rid of it several several years ago - didn’t delete it, just never logged in again and deleted Facebook from my phone.
Never looked back. One of the few online actions I can honestly say made my life better.
Oh my god it was an antitrust trial? Of course he's going to say it's "over" to reduce it's perceived relevancy and hopefully avoid having the legislators break it up
$ URL="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/mark-zucke..."
$ lynx -dump $URL | less
Social media predates the term social media by decades. It isn't dead and won't ever die because humans love to socialize and we will continue to use tech to facilitate that.
Commercial social media on the other hand may well be dying.
Teens Migrating From Facebook To Comments Section Of Slow-Motion Deer Video. March 20, 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4mMY2Kl3GY
He's a bit late to this conclusion. For a while, Facebook supposedly didn't see TikTok as competition because it isn't social, but Facebook and Instagram have been entertainment feeds for a decade, now.
So it Twitter now, breaking news only bubble up after 6 hours after all the engagement slop has been served.
Shouldn't be too hard to rewrite 2010 Facebook from scratch, and keep it like that. Follow what your friends are doing, and when you post yourself be certain that your friends will actually see your update.
fb has a tab that works like this now.
Can you elaborate? Where do I find this? (Using desktop version.)
isn't that the same guy who said the metaverse is the next big thing?
>Meta’s counter-argument is, in a sense, that social media per se doesn’t exist now in the way that it did in the twenty-tens, and that what the company’s platforms are now known for—the digital consumption of all kinds of content—has become so widespread that no single company or platform can be said to monopolize it.
Sure, and as long as people are making things Ford can't monopolize the auto industry. As long as people talk to each other Bell can't monopolize telephones.
This thing where people just generalize the conversation into meaninglessness is so frustrating. Everyone knows what social media is and does until it's time to do something about it then all of a sudden like a Roman salute no one actually has any idea what this is and really telephones are also social media but also social media doesn't exist anymore at all and also some social media is an existential threat to democracy and human rights but not the one that I own which, again, doesn't exist but still somehow makes me enough money that I can put the president on layaway.
I generally trend away from authoritarianism but I can see the appeal in just saying "Jesus Christ shut up we all know what's actually going on here" and just doing something
Zuckerberg saying this is more or less perfectly analogous to Jared Leto's character killing the nascent replicant in the Blade Runner sequel.
The more you consider this assertion, the more true it will appear.
I've always wished an owner of a journal of record like Condé Nast opened a mastadon instance or the like. I know they already have Reddit but that's not personal media
Them grapes are mighty sour, eh?
Social media is just fine.
Yes, paying people to post content has created a wider divide between content-creators and social follows, but social follows still exist.
It's just Facebook that is over.
>“the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.”
What a unique way of saying algorithmically maximizing addiction to doomscrolling!
What I wonder is did everyone stop posting because there was too much content spam or did they fill the newsfeed with content because everyone stopped posting?
Someone tell him Amazon now sells more than books and Netflix doesn't send DVD's in the post anymore they beam it directly into your home.
//What, exactly, does a social network do?//
<i>It's as if no one had ever thought of any of it before</i>
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry
Go on...
//Facebook was where you might find out that your friend was dating someone new, or that someone had thrown a party without inviting you.//
There you have it, straight from the horse's mouth. And from such an auspicious start, an empire was born.
I checked Facebook the other day. Every post is a vertical video. I'm on desktop. If I wanted to see vertical videos, I'd go to TikTok.
How much is the algorithm swayed by the behaviour of stealth bots trying to act human in order to gain the cred to be a more effective bot?
Zucchini my boy, it's over because you killed it
Maybe should have not done 2016 Facebook elections?
Ads all the way, almost no posts from my network, and bunch of unmoderated, Onlyfans promoting reels. Thanks.
GitHub and X are the only social media I respect :-)
Kind of hilarious to juxtapose with recent news of OpenAI (contemplating) starting its own social network to mine training data
reading this in the light that openai is testing ideas for a new gen of sns; it might be where ai lives as “natives” along with human users connecting “friends” leveraging their superhuman information processing
Mark Zuckerberg Says Social Media Are* Over
I'm surprised about the amount of comments here berating FB & social media companies. You have the option to deactivate your account and stop using it, to "vote with your feet". Meta is a company and will maximise revenue & engagement - what's actually more worrying is that people still use these sites and doom scroll their nights away (generally speaking of course).
The writing was on the wall a decade ago when everyone and their cat was posting junk content. Zuck's original idea was outstanding. He slowly cannibalized the massive success into outright gross platform:
Get to know girls at Harvard!
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Get to know girls at select universities!
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Get to know anyone we've invited! We're so popular, we've got profiles of people at every major university! Write them messages, organize parties, etc! Upload pictures of parties or anything interesting!
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And now you can play addicting games on Facebook!
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And you can make a profile if you don't have a school!
And be fed ads and clickbait!
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while we quietly dump-sell all your info to anyone!
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Now meet 20% more criminals and scammers! Sell your car on our marketplace! You'll regret every message!
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Now with international crime!
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Now with more bots than humans!
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Why is everyone not respecting us? Oh, its over!
As someone said, given a long time and every webpage becomes a porn fetish page
Don't remember the last time I saw a post from a friend in Instagram. It is just random shit and ads
You can turn off suggested posts in settings, but Instragram flagrantly turns them back on after 30 days.
That is somewhat new, I don't remember ever seeing that before. Thanks
Haven't seen that one, I'll try it. Thanks
META creates $70 billion per year in NET profit. Mark Zuckerberg is the best business person in the history of business. He's an angel to investors and advertisers. Vanguard has 43 million shares of TSLA. They lost $10 billion in stock depreciation since peak in December 2024. Vanguard has 191 million shares of META valued at $101 billion. No one is losing money on META.
Conflating luck and timing to skill and intent is a hell of a way to lionize someone. One man's wealth is not a measure of skill, it's a measure of greed.
Both META and TSLA are magic stocks, completely unaffected by reality.
Zuckerberg says social media is over... so why isn't his stock tanking? Meta is a social media company!
Tesla reports huge dips in sales, nothing... sure it's down since December, but it's still up year to year.
this is a baffling and terrifying worldview/basis of principle.
Pretty sure Zuck never looked at Telegram Group's and Channels if he concludes that
By "over" he means it isn't going to make him billions of more dollars.
Offtopic, but I wonder why they have the umlaut in "reëvaluating".
this is a somewhat unique new yorker style habit https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...
Umlaut is a separate concept from diaeresis but shares the symbol
Social media has died many years ago. What we are left with is corporate media.
I think I know why TikTok made it to the top of social media. They did not coerce weird corporate rules and let the users have what they wanted. Simple as that. Grown organically. That does not mean it isn't bad for the users in the long run but at least they get what they want.
actually its alive and well on bluesky...my profile:
https://bsky.app/profile/fredgrott.bsky.social
join me on on bluesky
Social Media was around before Zuck, and it will be around after.
Social media has now reached a state of equilibrium with normal society.
Is it a diversionary ploy, perhaps the DOJ is looking at breaking up megacorps or something? I think you have to subscribe to read the full story either that or it was really short. Either way, I didn't see a mention of the DOJ on the page.
So he's going to do the right thing, and shut down?
Interesting how quickly social media started resembling mass media.
If social media is over, how does Meta's revenues keep climbing?
We're just scrolling random content now and not using "social media". Basically like watching tailored made, but really really shit quality TV. Instagram is massive for this.
Interpersonal social media is dead thanks to Zuck and his companies, sacrificed on the altar of endless growth. His objective now is to profit from keeping people addicted to slop.
I wonder if he ever had a moment of self-reflection to understand how far he veered off the path he'd started on. If he ever considered himself a hacker, then I doubt that all he wanted to build was slop machines.
Hey, it's my day to be the Mastodon Guy! But for real, small, federated social media is so freaking pleasant compared to Facebook and friends. No, the kid from my 8th grade soccer team isn't on it, nor is my next door neighbor, or my kid's nanny from 3 moves ago, but that's fine. Sure, I wish more of the authors I like to follow were on there, and it's not a great way to call out megacorp support teams when something breaks horribly, but I'm completely OK with that tradeoff.
What I get instead is a collection of small, resilient servers where the feed algorithm is FIFO, there's no advertising, and moderation is local.[0] It's my favorite parts of the old Internet before things got centralized and enshittificated.
I hope megasocial media is over. I doubt it, but a guy can wish. That doesn't mean all social media is dead.
[0]Mastodon doesn't have moderation. Individual servers do. That's the way it should be.
I just wish an owner of a journal of record like Condé Nast would "adopt" a Mastadon instance, they already have Reddit but that's so impersonal.
I have seen some journalists and orgs move to Mastodon but the culture being what it is, people will be hostile to anything that looks like an attempt by corporate entities or propaganda outlets to capture and commoditize the platform.
And honestly, I'm fine with it. Corporate media is a cesspool. It can all choke on its own fetid stench and die for all I care.
right, but save for.. threads federation... there's been trepidation in my more normal friends to use anything other than the shibboleth. I'd rather an incompetent like Nast manage the platform than a company like Facebook that knows all too well how to leverage their scale. Anyways they're one of the better ones.. from what I've been told.
I agree. There's probably money to be made running an enterprise Mastodon hosting service.
Same for me. No algo, no ads. I follow who i want. No surprises in my feed.
Just like RSS, I get exactly what I want.
Didn’t he also say the metaverse was the next big thing?
This also means it is now the time to reinvent Social Media.
Why bother reinventing it? The only social apps that have ever been needed are basic chat apps (group or private) and tools for meeting up in real life (such as group chats).
Everything else has always only ever been fluff.
Or we can let it become a relic.
I think this will be the case, part of the charm of early social media was everyone was authentically oversharing. That got people in trouble or they embarrassed themselves. That's why snapchat with automatically deleted posts got a foothold, there wasn't a permanent record of your embarrassing fuck ups.
That will not happen again, we won't be so collectively naive and any new social media will be taken over by PR + brand advertisers almost immediately. Just look at how threads started.
You mean make them as they originally were? Sure, but better learn lessons about how FB ended up such a shithole while still massively used, or you will just repeat that lesson (while massively less successful due to initial momentum)
In my life this has been replaced by group chats on WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal etc
And then says... "you're welcome"
if social media is over why is anyone still on facebook? to watch ads? (asking for a friend, I got off Facebook long time ago...) :)
Zuckerberg is one of the architects responsible for its demise, so he'd be well-placed to declare its death. Early facebook really was an amazing product; all you saw was content from your friends, no one shared links, it was just a way to communicate with each other. Importantly, very few people were on facebook, which helped people be much, much more candid on the platform. Zuckerberg killed both of these features -- pushing garbage and ads, pushing the feed, and populating facebook as thoroughly as possible. I looked at my early feed (~2008?) years ago, and it was actually just friends catching up and girls flirting with me. I wasn't even that popular. To them, it was just another chat venue. They'd never consider the same these days. The platform is a cesspool.
So Facebook is the new MySpace? Damn.
sudo nano /etc/hosts page down, add 0.0.0.0 facebook.com 0.0.0.0 linkedin.com 0.0.0.0 adobe.com Ctrl z
Life is so much better now.
No longer works if you use Safari on macOS.
Perhaps use Little Snitch or Lulu
Why adobe?
and the new thing is the metaverse, right?
Grim Reaper proclaims he’s done his job?
Obligatory Eric Andre meme of "Who killed social media?"
I think a lot of folks are correctly pointing out that new social media is probably much closer to something like Discord, where individuals can define their own communities and make sure they're only getting the content from their family in that community.
It means they're much more responsible for policing their own content and don't have to worry about agreeing with the central policing platform. Seems like a much healthier direction for Social Networks... At least... healthier than whatever is happening at Facebook.
it's over for me 10 years ago, I spent 10 minutes annually on facebook, life is good without it.
Same. I closed my FB account 16 years ago and I've never once missed it.
How can social media be dying when people like Elon Musk have like, 6,000 profiles?
/sarcasm
Seriously though, if Facebook put in even a modicum of effort to block the traffic from like, a dozen cities or usernames the platform could regain some semblance of what it used to be.
Failing that, they could provide users with bulk blocking based on geolocation or regex username match and let users take some control over what they get spammed with. The tools provided are completely inadequate.
I read this yesterday about Zuck. God, Zuck, what a cunt. It's a review of Sarah Wynn-Williams' book, which Meta tried to kill.
It also mentions Zuck's motivation for learning Mandarin.
Yes it's off-topic, but I think it's important to know when discussing Zuck/Meta:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf
> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet).
> At one point, Wynn-Williams gets Zuck a chance to address the UN General Assembly. As is his wont, Zuck refuses to be briefed before he takes the dais (he's repeatedly described as unwilling to consider any briefing note longer than a single text message). When he gets to the mic, he spontaneously promises that Facebook will provide internet access to refugees all over the world.
[...]
> Meanwhile, Zuck is relentlessly pursuing Facebook's largest conceivable growth market: China. The only problem: China doesn't want Facebook. Zuck repeatedly tries to engineer meetings with Xi Jinping so he can plead his case in person. Xi is monumentally hostile to this idea. Zuck learns Mandarin. He studies Xi's book, conspicuously displays a copy of it on his desk. Eventually, he manages to sit next to Xi at a dinner where he begs Xi to name his next child. Xi turns him down.
> After years of persistent nagging, lobbying, and groveling, Facebook's China execs start to make progress with a state apparatchik who dangles the possibility of Facebook entering China. Facebook promises this factotum the world – all the surveillance and censorship the Chinese state wants and more.
[...]
> According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook actually built an extensive censorship and surveillance system for the Chinese state – spies, cops and military – to use against Chinese Facebook users, and FB users globally. They promise to set up caches of global FB content in China that the Chinese state can use to monitor all Facebook activity, everywhere, with the implication that they'll be able to spy on private communications, and censor content for non-Chinese users.
[...]
> Despite all of this, Facebook is never given access to China. However, the Chinese state is able to use the tools Facebook built for it to attack independence movements, the free press and dissident uprisings in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Mark sounds like he negotiates as well as his "Art of the Deal" buddy Donald.
I consider all Meta employees culpable for enabling this company and I will blacklist you all when I am reviewing your resumes. You are wealthy and educated enough to know better but you chose to make money at the expense of the world around you.
i feel the same way about former Raytheon/Lockhead/Palantir types as well.
Comments for this article - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43780363
That's really fucking gross.
Someone who is willing to sell their life, including naming their literal child, and all of their morals that might exist, for cash, is gross. Zuck is gross and should be embarrassed.
He's winning at money but losing at human.
I suppose for a few billion dollars (or even a smaller sum), I'd let a lot of things happen to me.
Well OK, the difference would be, would it be just affecting me, or my daughter (already quite gross), or affecting the lives and freedom of millions of exiled Uyghurs, Tibetans and other dissidents around the world by creating a spying apparatus against them.
There's also the difference that the few billion dollars being a sum of money I don't already have, compared to Zuck already having dozens, and wanting another few...
Thank God!!!
thanks mark, you ruined myspace and orphaned us from fun
Long live the Fediverse!
Every time I open my FB I get hammered with dozens of random ads. Also, a randomly generated lists of posts from my network where things pop up, and are then completely lost in the aether, because that is how FB thinks it is going to increase engagement.
Facebook, and Instagram, is a frustrating, infuriating, alarming experience that really does not "bring joy" to my life.
At this point he's just saying what he thinks is expedient in order to avoid the government breaking up his companies.
It's why the whole Meta thing exists - they wanted to be seen as a VR company who has a side hustle in social media to avoid being classified as a monopoly. That argument has failed so now he's asserting that social media doesn't matter.
Says the man who killed it. Has he even used his own product in recent years?
Sure Zuckerberg et al turned social media into unsocial/psychopathic media.
However isn't this simply a blatent attempt to pretend the monopoly he is accused of having doesn't exist by using semantics?
And we killed it
Good riddance.
So he'll be shitting down Facebook, then?
Can't wait for Zucker to be over.
social media just got started.
Yeah I wish
some say it never started
“We added cocaine to our menu and now nobody’s buying our healthier food options. Also our customers are acting increasingly deranged.”
yeah - he killed it
when was the last time you were social on Facebook?
and maybe threads would count if it weren't 95% filled with bots and mentally ill weirdos pretending to know quantum physics (and how dare you judge them for doing so; whether or not they know quantum mechanics is like totally subjective and your frequency is clearly too low).
so either social is not dead or he killed it
Says the person running a social network website where I see one of my friend's posts amid eight "suggestions" that bear no interest to me.
I have kept my FB account open just to contact some members of the family that live far away. Or to check someone I know in my circle that I haven't heard from a while.
But scrolling? Nah. I don't have the app and only open it once a month.
There's a word for it: enshitification. Blame yourself for making it a crap experience, Mark.
tiktok is thriving
Well, thank god for that.
you know what this means
he has plans to start injecting "feed content" (eg shrimp jesus) into whatsapp group chats
Did they finally dogfood their own shit and realize what a dumpster fire it is? :)
"We brought you into this world, and we can take you out!"
Mandatory "enshittification" comment.
Good fucking riddance. Now do smartphones.
Yeah, let's do metaverse lol
ofc they aren't, they show ads and they are focused on damaging the mental health of their users.
Facebook is all slop nowadays. X is amazing thoughj.
X is full of bots and forcefeed content.
You don't have to follow the bots.
My feed is amazing tech content and people attempting to do crazy things. It's pretty awesome.
Name one amazing thing on X.
Many many reasons. There are incredibly smart people on X who are writing and sharing their thoughts on things. There's nothing comparable to that on the internet.
It may be ok for you if you live in an area with highly concentrated talent but for me I'm pretty isolated so it makes a tremendous difference.
No there are not. There are a bunch of moronic VCs saying incredibly stupid things and paying for blue checkmarks.
Literally all the Deep learning and systems whizs are on X.
The fact that the old system would ban people for completely absurd reasons (including covid "misinformation" that all turned out to be true, but not exclusively that) and one thing Musk did do is put a stop to some of that
I'm fully willing to listen to all the arguments that he's actually a horrible person but I don't see how people feel that part of it wasn't necessary to fix
Musk bans people all the time. Remember the jet tracker?
Virtue signaling political incorrectness is the only reason I can imagine people promoting Twitter right now.
dril
Also on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/dril.bsky.social
just buy the book, it's enough dril for a lifetime